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

growth would be encouraged? It is scarcely necessary to
remark that a stationary condition of capital and population
implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would
be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture and
moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art
of Living and much more likelihood of its being improved.
(Perhaps the reader would be surprised to learn that this
statement was made by John Stuart Mill in 1857.) In a steady
state all kinds of things can and must grow, mostly those
pursuits that many would list as highly desirable and
pleasurable - art, music, education for living instead of how
to make a living, athletics, philosophy esthetics, religion,
creating and promoting diversity rather than sameness,
scientific research, and cooperative rather than competitive
interactions with other humans. Any activity that does not
require a large flow of nonrenewable resources or produce
serious environmental degradation could grow indefinitely.
Leisure rather than work would be emphasized, since full
employment for a forty-hour week would be neither possible nor
necessary. We would trade the freedom to have unlimited
children and to consume uncontrolled amounts of resources for
increased leisure, education, creative opportunities, and
freedom from hunger, poverty, and hopefully war.
The kinds of economic institutions required follow directly
from the definition of a steady-state economy. We need an
institution for maintaining a constant population (such as
Kenneth Boulding's marketable license to have children): an
institution for maintaining a constant stock of physical
wealth and limiting thoughput (such as transferrable depletion
quotas auctioned periodically by government to resource
users) ; an institution for limiting inequalities in the
distribution of constant physical wealth among the constant
population (such as minimum and maximum limits on personal
income and maximum limits on personal wealth)." All these
fundament-a1 issues have a direct bearing on the Australian
sense of value and the way we see ourselves and our natural
resources.
Lessons from 200 Years of Land Use
If Australiansf attitude to their land during the past 200
years, is repeated in the next 200 years, the nation's future
as one of the world's leading food producers will be in
serious jeopardy. An incisive evaluation of Australian
attitudes toward their land must recognise the complex
interfaces between ecology, economics and human nature. In
his book on farming in Australia and social attitudes in the
1940s, Hugh Roberton makes the following statement: In
Australian conditions there are no difficulties except custom
and the idea that, because we bought the land, we can do what
we like with it ... We don't buy the land. We buy the