soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

HOW GREEN IS MY MALLEE:
ATTITUDES TO T
AUSTRALIAN
Dr Brian Roberts, DDIAE
Background to Today's Ecological ~ealities
If you visit the Botanic Gardens in Sydney you will see a very
small monument with a plaque stating that agriculture
commenced in Australia on that site. It was from there that
our land-based industries grew, from the 10 acres at Farm Cove
to the impressive export industry of today. From those
original battlers grew the unique independent cockie of today.
To put our farmers in today's perspective we must slcetch the
global situation in which we find our Australian landholder
and his relationship to his land.
Only 11% of the earth's surface is arable land suitable for
crop production and from this we must feed 5 billion people.
Asia, Africa and South America have population doubling times
of 38, 24 and 30 years respectively. This year 11 million
Chinese and 14 million Indians will be born, while world land
resources are lost through erosion and salination at the rate
of 7% per decade. China, with 23% of the world's population
was able to reduce its population growth from 3.4% to 2.0
after introducing the one child family policy in 1979 (Davis &
Wilsher, 1986) . India's advantage gained from the green
revolution in grain production, has been lost through the
failure of its birth control programmes. In Bangladesh, Kenya
and Ghana, birth control is used by only 8%, 7% and 4% of
couples respectively (Anon, 1981).
The good news is that while the world population was
increasing at over 2% during the 1960s, it has declined to
1.63%-today. The bad news is that two thirds of the world
rema.in hungry while the gains made by improved food production
technology are cancelled out by land degradation in many
countries including Australia.
Fifteen years ago the writer (Roberts, 1974) described our
predicament as follows: Despite numerous warnings over the
years, Man has recently been somewhat bewildered by the fact
that Nature has slapped him in the face for insulting her
ecosystem. The animal which inhabits the urban habitat has
become aware of uncomfortable changes in his immediate
environment. Nature has answered back and Man has stumbled
into an ecological trap. Civilizations have been living on
promisory notes for generations and now they're falling due
all over the world. The wilderness is no longer an
environment to be conquered by Man, but a shrinking source of