I was just watching a bit of a show on the ABC ( Australia ), in which they were talking about the recent fish kill in the Murray-Darling river system, and in which they were interviewing a guy from the environmental office of The Department of Primary Industries NSW ( www.dpi.nsw.gov.au ).
Now, think about that for a minute: here’s a guy whose role is supposed to be ecological concerns, but he works in a department which has an economically based prime directive. If that doesn’t scream incongruence to you, then you understand neither economics nor ecology.
Similarly at the federal level, we have The Department of Environment and Energy, which has the URL www.environment.gov.au to cover up the fact that ecological concerns have been intentionally embedded into a department governed by the interests of the mining and energy sectors, to which concerns they take a back seat. This is a department of environment in name only, because the energy sector is worth billions, and has completely incongruent and contradictory objectives.
The claim on the website is that:
“The Department designs and implements the Australian Government’s policies and programmes to protect and conserve the environment, water and heritage and promote climate action”
— but given their total failure to do so, I’m pretty sure we all know that is a bunch of bullshit; recent examples of such failures include ( but are in no way limited to ) the aforementioned fish kill.
The reality is that you cannot have a stable biosphere without globally abundant and robust biodiverse ecosystems, and this is something we are rapidly running out of, so that the ecological pressures on a global scale are borne by fewer ecological systems, thus they endure increasingly unsustainable stress, and have less capacity to deal with extreme events and the associated ( and increasingly extreme ) conditions.
It should be a matter of course that the ‘Department of Environment, Parks, and Wildlife’ be an entire separate entity from ALL other concerns, because it’s ecological, environmental, and social objectives are incongruent with commercial and industrial objectives, and they always will be.
It is a sign of the foolishness and shortsightedness of Australian ‘leadership’ ( to use that term way too loosely ), that our present arrangements of ecological governance have been allowed, and I urge Australians to pressure the government to create a distinctly separate department for all ecological and environmental concerns, which answers to no commercial or industrial pressures or agendas.