Twenty years ago in Australia when I was studying agriculture many people who wouldn’t then, and probably still wouldn’t, describe themselves as environmentalists understood that farming on “the oldest continent” (a reference to the age of the soils) was fundamentally unsustainable.

Articles I wrote that stick in my mind include one interview with a university lecturer who was proposing getting rid of the hard-hooved European animals and simply “farming” free-range kangaroos – since their soft feet cause almost no erosion. And with Tim Flannery, Australia’s foremost public intellectual, who suggested the sustainable human carrying capacity was a few million (population now 20 million).

And there was a great deal of concern about the Murray-Darling basin – then primarily about salinity – for the salt of millennia that had been washed deep into the ground was being brought back to the surface by irrigation water, but some were also questioning whether the level of irrigation licences bore any reality to the water available.

Now, it is clear, they didn’t:

The Prime Minister said yesterday that unless there is substantial rain within a month, there would be no water allocations for irrigation or environmental flows from July 1. “We should all pray for rain,” he said.
The looming catastrophe will directly affect the 50,000 farmers who depend on the river system for their livelihoods as well as the millions in Adelaide and the numerous towns along the basin, which stretches from southern Queensland to South Australia.

Quite simply, there are too many people in Australia for the environment to support. I’ve seen many estimates from pre-colonial times of the Aboriginal population, but it was probably around Flannery’s estimate. How it can get back there is, however, an interesting question…

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