The political ecology of biogeography

The Senate of the Commonwealth of Australia occasionally sets up select committees that are charged\udto investigate matters it perceives to be of moment for the nation. Occasionally I have been requested\udto present evidence on nature conservation planning and resource development/conservation conflicts.\udSenators in Australia expect to have six years in their plush seats in the half-buried parliamentary\udbuilding in Canberra, a relatively long secure tenure for politicians in a democracy. Although accustomed\udto think in relatively long time lines for politicians, most of the senators listening to me speak appeared\udslightly bewildered when I talked about the desirability of planning reserve networks that could help\udcarry our biodiversity through the next glacial (Kirkpatrick & Fowler, 1998), once they realized the\udnumber of years involved. When Chris Harwood and I suggested to another select committee that an\udappropriate solution to the running sore of the forest/development debate might lie on the demand side\udthrough regulated reduction of the use of wood to produce advertisements and unnecessary packaging,\udthe senators obviously thought that we were away with the fairies - as indeed we were, in contrast to\udthe senators, who were living in the non-alternative fantasy land of the growthist paradigm, in which\udconsumption is an undisputed virtue.\udIf people survive on this planet during the commencement of the next interglacial period, only\ud120,000 or so years in the future, and the memory of our ultimately brief growthist society persists, I\udprefer to believe that they will think of our time as one of hubric darkness, the great lesson in how not\udto live on a planet. On the other hand history suggests that they might just be jealous of our free access to\udan abundance of fossil fuels, minerals, biodiversity and productive soil and see the return of warmth and\udrain as an opportunity for the return of economic growth based on newly-bared, glacially rejuvenated\udsoils and reinvading forests (Diamond, 1997).\udWhile a career in science does not tend to induce certainty in anything, most, if not all, biogeographers\udare moderately certain that it is not possible to use irreplaceable material resources at an\udexponentially increasing rate on a finite planet for any protracted time period. Yet, the political, economic,\udsocial and cultural constructs within which biogeographers work and play seem to be be based on an\udassumption that never-ending growth is both possible and desirable. There can also be little doubt that\udthe natural world, a world that biogeographers tend to value highly, is receding at a substantial rate as\uda result of the operationalization of the growthist assumption. In Tasmania, an island of 6.7 million ha\udwhere I live, the last quarter century has seen approximately 0.25 million ha of native vegetation\uddestroyed (Kirkpatrick & Dickinson, 1982; Kirkpatrick, 1991, unpublished data), and Tasmania is a\udrelatively green backwater of the globally anastomosing growthist society. How do biogeographers\udcope with the dissonance between the prevailing growthism and their knowledge and values? I advance\uda tentative classification of response types below, unfortunately based on general observation over\udthirty years of biogeographic practice, rather than rigorous, repeatable research