Editorial
06 June 2001
More Than Time for a Sea Change
Harry
Robinson comments on the potential for the birth of an Eco-Superpower
Australians
don't know the half of it. We think
of our national real estate as a big, dry, dusty island with a green strip round
the edges. The island has been as much a hard task master as it has been a home.
It has called for hard toil and it needs plenty more toil (with a
sprinkling of science) to keep us in precarious comfort.
We
don't know or recognise half of the nation's real estate.
Australia
is, says Sydney Morning Herald writer Paul Sheehan, an
"Eco-Superpower."
Sheehan's
name is mud to many apparatchiks of the multi-national establishment. He has
drawn hot fire. He sticks to his
arguments, though, until better cases are made. In his 1998
book, "Among the Barbarians", Sheehan wrote:
"On
16 November 1994 a whole new set of lines came quietly into force around the
world when the United Nations Convention on
the Law of the Sea redrew the world's sovereign boundaries. No nation
gained more under this law than Australia, which now has legal stewardship and
exclusive economic rights over a prodigious expanse of land,
coastal sea and continental
shelf....When Australia's historic though dormant territorial claim and legal
responsibilities under the Antarctic Treaty are included, the total amount of
Australian Territory is 28.4 million square kilometers, including 16.1
million square kilometers of ocean
territory."
On
his calculations, only Russia and
the USA hold stewardship over larger areas.
This
astonishing slice of the globe comes with strings attached.
It will attract disputes, jostles
and pirates. It demands defence and expensive care.
Much of it is, so far, unpromising.
And the implications are both sweeping and manifold.
They require a zoom-out of our national self image,
a reassessment and realignment
of national efforts and international relationships.
All
that granted, the promises can be greater than the challenges.
Provided
that we face one hard fact: nothing
will happen without a scientifically loaded workforce.
To begin exploiting a fraction of the ocean territory under Australian
stewardship will require scientific surveys and assessments,
scientific calculation of costs and benefits, sceintific designs for ways
and means, the application of high technologies based on
science. (Our Antarctic bases and territorial claims owe their legitimacy
to our scientific work in the area. That work, splendid as it has been,
begins to look like an overture.)
It
wasn't merely kind fate that delivered so much ocean territory to us.
It was our long, long coastline which, when projected offshore to the
edge of the continental shelf, accounts for the enormous areas of exclusive
economic rights. Who knows what
treasures of sea life, minerals, gas and heaven only knows other forms of wealth
lie in our EE zones? And who are the only people who can find them? Scientists.
Of
course, we could hire scientists from elsewhere, we could form joint scientific
ventures with competitors, we could water down our equity in a dozen ways.
But we shouldn't. We should keep control of our assets through the imprints of
our scientists.
Nothing
worth a damn will happen without science.
Lack
of science in exploiting our landmass has done enormous damage.
Of course there was precious little science when squatters began
spreading cloven hoofed animals across the inland. There was no soil science, no
pastoral science, no hydro science, no fund of knowledge to protect the cedar
timber of the coastal strip and so on. There's
no need to gild the lily: the pioneers did the best they could.
And, while they produced a
lot of animal products and grains, they also produced salinity, erosion, bare
earth. Some scientists are now trying to repair the damage.
They are too few and too poorly funded.
Australians
go into the 21st century virtually
unaware that they are citizens of an Eco-Superpower. Or rather, a potential Eco-Superpower. Only a corps of scientists can turn the potential into
reality. Preferably scientists
educated in this country for this country...sorry, for this Eco-Superpower.
(Among
the Barbarians was published by Random House Australia.
The references to the Eco-Superpower were taken from an article titled
"Australia Superpower" published in the Sydney Morning Herald 12
August 1995.)
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Harry
Robinson is a free lance feature writer who has contributed to many of
Australia's major publications over the past 35 years. "You could call me a
tramp...I have tramped across media and from place to place so wantonly that my
reward is a media swag." He can be reached at Harob@Internet.net.au.