Ben's Blog

November ’25

Everyone talks about balancing development and environment.
This is a furphy. There is no balance. The scales are so lopsided they are almost vertical. There will be no balance until vast tracts of environment have been restored to their original state. To stop the imbalance from getting even worse, every environmentally destructive project must be counter-balanced by an environmentally creative project, recreating the same amount of environment that has been destroyed. This doesn’t  just mean planting a shit load of trees, though that is a good start. It means recreating a flourishing ecosystem, complete with creatures large and small. It means off-setting the co2 emissions and cutting the toxic pollution and the plastic waste that is clogging the oceans and our blood streams.
But we all know that is not going to happen don’t we?
Because any new project has to compete in a global market against projects with no such obligations, and any new project must not only make enough to pay its costs, it must also pay its creditors and its investors a hefty cut.
To survive in business you must keep growing lest your competitor grows faster and swallows you up, like a hungry turtle swallows a squid. (or a plastic bag) So industry just keeps growing, and nature keeps shrinking, inexorably, until there is no more nature, just industry.
This is the nature of our economic system. It is not stable, it is not balanced, it just grows and grows and devours all in its path, like a cancer!
Every square inch of this country belongs to the blackfullas, whether you like it or not. So every tree you clear and every building you build is taking more of their country away from them, and their land is part of them, so every parcel of land you destroy diminishes them. Death by a thousand cuts. The genocide continues unabated.
The blackfullas of this country created a balanced way of life, no creed was, No new development that damged the environment.(us)

They were able to do this because their ‘economic system’ did not demand continual growth. In fact it was designed to limit growth to match the available resources, not just on a daily basis, or a yearly basis, but on a millennial basis.

The number of humans extracting resources from the environment was kept to a level that could be maintained throughout a long drought. Not just a hundred year drought, a thousand year drought. That is not a drought that comes every thousand years, that is a drought that last a thousand years. in fact they survived the longest drought in human history during the ice age. I think a little respect is due here.
So we have a lot to learn from the blackfullas about sustainability.
In a nutshell, do not increase your population beyond what your environment can sustain, and if you do, then you must reduce your demands,per head, on the environment, to match the increase in your population. To sustain more people, everyone must reduce their standard of living.

Here in Australia, we demand the highest standard of living on earth, a much higher standard of living than our parents enjoyed. We claim it as our birthright. We demand bigger cars, bigger boats, bigger houses, bigger stakes, bigger weddings, bigger everything! More trips overseas, more dinning at fancy restaurants, more comfort, more extravagance, more indulgence,  more waste, more of everything, and we want it now!
According to the ABS, here in Australia an average household spends 40% of their income on ‘discretionary items.’ -things we don’t need.
That is the root cause of environmental destruction, us!