Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie: Australia, America, and the Environment - Softcover

Bradshaw, Corey J. A.; Ehrlich, Paul R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022631698X ISBN 13: 9780226316987

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Though separated by thousands of miles, the United States and Australia have much in common. Geographically both countries are expansive—the United States is the fourth largest in land mass and Australia the sixth—and both possess a vast amount of natural biodiversity. At the same time, both nations are on a crash course toward environmental destruction. Highly developed super consumers with enormous energy footprints and high rates of greenhouse-gas emissions, they are two of the biggest drivers of climate change per capita. As renowned ecologists Corey J. A. Bradshaw and Paul R. Ehrlich make clear in Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie, both of these countries must confront the urgent question of how to stem this devastation and turn back from the brink.

In this book, Bradshaw and Ehrlich provide a spirited exploration of the ways in which the United States and Australia can learn from their shared problems and combine their most successful solutions in order to find and develop new resources, lower energy consumption and waste, and grapple with the dynamic effects of climate change. Peppering the book with humor, irreverence, and extensive scientific knowledge, the authors examine how residents of both countries have irrevocably altered their natural environments, detailing the most pressing ecological issues of our time, including the continuing resource depletion caused by overpopulation. They then turn their discussion to the politics behind the failures of environmental policies in both nations and offer a blueprint for what must be dramatically changed to prevent worsening the environmental crisis.

Although focused on two nations, Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie clearly has global implications—the problems facing the United States and Australia are not theirs alone, and the solutions to come will benefit by being crafted in coalition. This book provides a vital opportunity to learn from both countries’ leading environmental thinkers and to heed their call for a way forward together.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Corey J. A. Bradshaw is the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change in the Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. Paul R. Ehrlich lives in California, where he is the Bing Professor of Population Studies and the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University.  He is the author or coauthor of many books, including, most recently, Hope on Earth: A Conversation, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie

Australia, America, and the Environment

By Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Paul R. Ehrlich

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 Corey J. A. Bradshaw and Paul R. Ehrlich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-31698-7

Contents

(With hints on what to expect in each chapter.), 
Preface, 
Prologue, 
1 AUSMERICA, 
2 ENTER THE NAKED APE, 
3 REMORSE, 
4 BIOWEALTH, 
5 LIQUIDATED ASSETS, 
6 SICK PLANET, SICK PEOPLE, 
7 THE BOMB IS STILL TICKING, 
8 IGNORANCE AND GREED, 
9 THEOCRACY, 
10 CIRCLING THE DRAIN, 
11 SAVE THIS HOUSE, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Ausmerica

Americans can do anything.

JULIA GILLARD, former Prime Minister of Australia, addressing the US Congress in 2011

Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

RONALD REAGAN (1981), former President of the United States

Man and the environment are meant for each other.

TONY ABBOTT (2014), Prime Minister of Australia

I know the human being and fish can co-exist peacefully.

GEORGE W. BUSH (2000), former President of the United States

Paul, you've been tackling the plutocrats, science denialists, and evidence-free ideologists for longer than anyone I know. Does it make you angry or frustrated (or both) that it seems to be getting worse and not better?

I (Corey Bradshaw, henceforth C.J.A.B.) remember asking Paul that question in 2009 as we ate lunch on the Stanford University campus near San Francisco, California. We had just met after being introduced by a mutual colleague, Professor Gretchen Daily, also of Stanford University. I was visiting the university for the first time and had been invited by Gretchen to give a presentation of my research to her lab group. Paul and I had hit it off immediately.

There are few scientists more famous in my field than Paul Ehrlich — he has a long and celebrated career of top-notch science, has written dozens of popular books, and is, of course, most famous for his first book, The Population Bomb (1968), which triggered decades of debate about human overpopulation. I was understandably both nervous and elated to be in the presence of such scientific royalty. I cannot recall the specifics of his response to my question — it had something to do with keeping your sense of humor and maintaining your internal environment with good wine — but the man's vibrant, cutting intellect, sense of humor, and emotively filled diatribe (this book will give you a comprehensive overview of that subject) impressed me immediately. This was a scientist nearly two generations my senior who could fire off passionate and erudite arguments with military precision. I had to get to know him better.

I (Paul Ehrlich, henceforth P.R.E) rarely run into youths who have the good sense to agree with me on virtually everything. How could such a young man have figured out how the world works with relatively so little experience with it? I'm part of a gang of old farts who are desperately trying to change the world that our grandchildren are facing, and here was a brilliant ecologist barely out of his academic diapers concerned about the fate of his beautiful three-year-old daughter.

Several dinners, bottles of wine, and deep conversations later in the presence of our families, we decided to write this book. We took it in turn to visit each other's country, so the subject material grew as we identified more and more reasons why Australians and Americans have a lot to learn from each other's mistakes. There is an almost spooky similarity in the environmental and political problems both of our countries are experiencing, even though the origins of them are often utterly divergent.

Yes, there are many similarities between Australia and the United States. Just think about the rough dimensions of our two countries: both nations are large, with Australia just slightly smaller than the forty-eight contiguous states of the United States. In fact, Australia is the world's sixth-largest country, covering 7.69 million square kilometers (2.97 million square miles). The entire United States, with its fifty states, is the world's fourth-largest country (or third, depending on what China is currently claiming), covering 9.83 million square kilometers (3.79 million square miles). Both cultures are derived originally and principally from what is now the United Kingdom, despite being today a mix of hundreds of other cultures. English, or what approximates for English in each, is the dominant language, but with rapidly rising language minorities, such as Spanish in the United States and Mandarin Chinese in Australia. Both are examples of super-consuming, overdeveloped, rich, literate countries, but with two Americans consuming the same amount of resources as three Australians. But both have footprints more than threefold that of Costa Rica or Chile. Australia and the United States each spend roughly the same portion of their gross domestic product on education, and both have (by standard definition only) highly educated populations. They are among the leaders in environmental sciences, along with the United Kingdom and some European (especially Scandinavian) nations and Japan, with China moving up fast. Both are top greenhouse gas emitters, with each country producing today about fifteen times as much per person as does India.

We think Aussies and Yanks (to use Australian parlance) generally get along well for a number of reasons. Both countries have a frontier spirit; both threw off the British yoke (although Australia keeps some of the royal regalia around for obscure and sentimental reasons); people in both nations tend to be direct and enjoy the out-of-doors and off-color jokes. Today there are over 60,000 US-born people living in Australia, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne, and about 90,000 Australians in the United States. In 2011, 460,000 Americans visited Australia, and 1.2 million Australians visited the United States. These affinities and our strangely convergent personalities are probably why we two hit it off immediately. But above all, we do not like pussyfooting around.

Of course, there are some big differences between Australia and the United States too — many of environmental significance that we discuss in detail in this book. We are not just talking about their wildly different floras and faunas. Although comparable in size, the United States is about ten times as densely populated as Australia. The United States might be ahead in income per person, but the continuing of Ronald Reagan's "Hood Robin" program of redistributing wealth from poor to rich has put the United States well behind Australia in fairness of wealth distribution. Australia's more fragile environment is indicated in many ways, such as Australia having the highest number of recently extinct mammals compared to every other country in the world. Both nations had large indigenous populations and treated them (and still largely treat them) very badly, but the US record was probably worse — although ask Australian Aborigines, and they might have cause to disagree with that assessment. Both countries are nations of immigrants, although the timing and composition of immigrant waves were radically different. Many early European immigrants to both countries were convicts, but both are now very efficient at growing their own. Indeed, there are twice as many people in prisons than living on farms in the United States. In Australia there are closer to nine times as many...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 022631698X
• ISBN 13: 9780226316987
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar