Parched

I have been following John Quiggin's excellent blog lately. He was recently on a radio national program about the politics of water in Australia and the world. You can listen to the discussion here. Once again however, there was a gigantic elephant in the room called overpopulation that nobody wanted to talk about.

Only one of the speakers touched on it, and then only very briefly. In a closed economy (like planet Earth), demand for water -and indeed every natural resource- is driven by two things: per capita demand, and population. The bigger our population, the more we must constrain our lifestyles in the long term.

In discussions like these we often treat population levels as a given, but here in Australia we are doing everything we can to increase our population as fast as possible. At the same time, we seem completely unable to talk about the consequences for the environment and our enjoyment of life. Until we face up to this, and start including population as one half of the argument in any discussion about natural resources, we cannot hope to truly deal with the problem.