After the latest U.N. environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro this week the fingers will be pointed at the usual culprits - Brazil and Indonesia for permitting deforestation to continue, India and China for industrializing - and Africa for just being poor. The conference will confirm, just as the first Rio Earth summit did 20 years ago, everyone's prejudices - and the real environmental culprits will walk away.

::::::::

Will animals like this Australian Spotted Quoll still be around for the next biodiversity conference? by SeanMcClean (Wikipedia Commons)

Although expectations for the latest U.N. environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro this week are being carefully damped down, likely the developed economies, such as the U.S., France and the U.K, will offer grand visions of how - in an ideal world - they would like to save the planet from one or other environmental threats. The fingers will be pointed at the usual culprits - Brazil and Indonesia for permitting deforestation to continue, India and China for industrializing - and Africa for just being poor. The conference will confirm, just as the first Rio Earth summit did 20 years ago, everyone's prejudices - and the real environmental culprits will walk away.

Take the case of Australia, for example. Always the 'good boy' at these conventions, and backed by impressive public ignorance of the true state of the land 'down under', Australia has managed to long be the world's worst environmental offender, responsible on its own for more than half of all the world's extinctions.

Australia is a crucial link in the world's biodiversity, a kind of vast 'sanctuary island' home to more than twice the number of species in the whole of Europe and North America combined.  Even now, in the remnants of Australia's  forests there are  more species than in the whole of Europe.  Yet only about 10% of the forests remain, and each year Australian farmers are clearing an area the size of Wales (that is, about 2000 square kilometers).

These crops are grown in areas cleared of native forest, often unsustainably, and at great cost to native animals. The first study of this cost, back in 2001 by researchers at the James Cook University in Queensland, estimated that each year Queensland alone destroys nearly half a million hectares of forest and kills:

20 000 koalas;

233 000 kangaroos and wallabies;

342 000 possums and gliders;

30 000 bandicoots;

7500 echidnas.

Part of the clearing process involves death to the wildlife, but Australian practice is to systematically poison all animals once the trees have been cleared, using helicopters to drop baits into remote areas. Wildlife that flees to other areas  will either starve, fall victim to predators, or survive only at the expense of other fragile ecosystems.

When Captain Cook landed in Botany Bay in 1770 he was so amazed by the natural diversity that he christened the area 'Botany Bay'. But since the arrival of the colonists, an ecocide more rapid even than the destruction in the Amazon rainforest has been taking place. In total, 126 species of plants and animals are now extinct.

But then agriculture is a key market for Australia,  a vital component of the economy,  accounting for nearly half (45 per cent) of total retailing turnover in Australia. The Top Ten export destinations for Australian processed food and beverages in 1998-99 (the last year for which figures are available) show Japan and the United States as the biggest consumers, and the UK and New Zealand as the third and fourth largest markets.

To remold its ancient land (actually, in large part a dried up sea) into something resembling a European farm, the European settlers had to be ruthless.

Already eighteen species of mammal have become extinct. That is not locally extinct, that is world-wide, gone forever. Another seventeen are expected to disappear soon.  These are unique and irreplaceable species like:

* the large carnivore the critically endangered spotted tailed Quoll, 

* the Golden shouldered and the Double-eyed Fig Parrots, 

* frogs and reptiles like the Torrent Tree  frog, Boyd's Forest Dragon and the Pygmy Spiny-tailed Skink, as well as mammals like 

* the Bandicoot, the Mulgara and the Bilby.

All of these face imminent extinction as a direct consequence of an unsustainable and destructive agribusiness drive for food exports. They are the hidden cost of harmless sounding products like wheat, rice, barley, maize, oats, sunflowers, chick peas and cotton seed. The exports of these are worth over A$5 billion annually. Wheat  alone is  worth A$3.5 billion each year  -  accounting for 17 per cent of the world's export market.

Australia also exports a wide variety of fruit, vegetables, nuts, cut flowers, sugar and wine. Supermarkets stock a range of Australian products like wine and sultanas grown in areas recently cleared of temperate rainforest, indeed the UK is the major market for Australian wine growers. Fruit growers utilise mass electrocution of rare bats and flying foxes in the production of export teas, coffees and soft fruits.

Sugar exports are dwindling in value, but the consequences of years of irresponsible pollution of the waterways are only now beginning to be noted. The Great Barrier Reef is beginning to die as coral leaching, from cane field run off  but also from cattle production resulted in increased algae while weakening the coral itself.  

But above all it is beef, as in the Amazon rainforest, that is the main culprit. Australia is the world's largest exporter of beef.  Some of it is sold raw through supermarket chains, the rest processed into other foodstuffs.  The end result of all this is that Australia has the worst record on the planet for animal extinctions, and a list of species on the brink of extinction second to none. 

Even having said that, there's worse. The land clearing is historically linked to the violent colonisation of the continent, a process in which the indigenous people, forest cover and animals alike were seen as hostile. Until recently land was leased to farmers only on condition that they actively cleared it. Many indigenous communities used to be forest ones, not 'desert people' as they are sometimes portrayed. The human cost of the land clearance has been written out of history. 

The unsavory fact is that the ongoing ecocide that has resulted in the planet suffering what scientists call the 'sixth great extinction' is  due to the rapacious appetite of the peoples and corporations of the rich world, not the ignorance and backwardness of the poor.

The original Rio Summit had two landmark outcomes - the Kyoto protocol, which essentially put up the price of energy for developing economies (and tried to create a multi $trillion carbon trading scheme) and  a global treaty on biodiversity that was so-worded that no country, however outrageous their policies, had any trouble signing up for. Australia, of course, was one of them. And so were most of its greedy customers.

Authors Website: http://www.philosophical-investigations.org

Authors Bio:

Martin Cohen is a well-established author specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics. His most recent projects include the UK edition of Philosophy for Dummies (Wiley June 2010); How to Live: Wise and not-so-wise Advice from the Great Philosophers (MSU, 2014); Mind Games: 31 days to rediscover your Brain (Blackwell, July 2010) and The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World's Most Dangerous Fuel.

He recently left Op-Ed News in protest at what he saw as the increasingly ILLIBERAL style of the site, and in particular an editorial line in support of the Russian annexation of Ukraine.

One post (not printed) argued that the views of RTV (Russia TV), featured on the site, were illiberal, especially since RTV was now firmly under the control of the Russian state news agency, led by Dmitry Kiselev, a talk show host notorious for his suggestion that "gays' hearts should be incinerated in ovens." He was also unhappy to be associated with a site that ran a series of 'headlined' articles in praise of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. One such, by former Reagan staffer, Paul Craig Roberts's, for example, praised "Putin's calm leadership, the absence of provocative statements and threats, and his insistence on legality".

He wrote another post about the Energy and economics issues (see the Philosophical-investigations blog) behind the conflict that was likewise rejected twice on 'technical grounds (like 'not enough references') and then finally like this:

"You submitted an article titled:
Putin's other Cronies?

This article was submitted with category OpEdNews_Op_Eds and tags Energy, Investors, Markets, Oil, Oil, Pipeline, Putin, Russia

Thank you but this article doesn't meet our writing standards. You may NOT resubmit this or post it, even with modifications, as a diary, poll or comment. See our writers guidelines and FAQ for more info."

This clearly confirmed to Martin that the site is indeed not a suitable place for progressive writers and thinkers.