Australia

'The lucky country'

Environmentalist Ted Trainer forgoes modern conveniences and generates his own electricity.

One of the richest nations in the Pacific, Australia is often called "the lucky country." In recent years, however, its luck has led to criticism for consuming more than its share of the region's resources and for failing to adopt environmentally sensitive policies.

In 1788 the British navy's 1st Fleet passed through the famous Sydney Heads into the finest natural harbor in the world. The ships were full of British convicts, a sad cargo of men and women banished to this remote island.

Aboriginal people gathered along the shore in astonishment. Their descendants now call that day the most tragic in the long history of their people. For at least 40,000 years, maybe longer, the native peoples were hunter-gatherers. They did not farm. They harvested from nature -- and left the land largely untouched.

All that changed over the next two centuries as migrants, mainly from Europe, poured into the cities that arose along the coast. Aboriginal ways were pushed aside in the quest for prosperity and comfort. The countryside yielded abundant minerals such as coal, zinc and silver. Plentiful fertile lands became productive farms that filled stores with high-quality food and cargo ships with wool, wheat and beef.

Not all of this bounty was available to everyone, however. Neighbors in Asia and the Pacific were left out. The so-called "white Australia" policy continued into the 1970s.

Today, almost one in four of Australia's 19.2 million people were born overseas. Trade with Asia makes up for more than half of Australia's imports and exports. The country has become a magnet for people seeking the good life.

But for university professor Ted Trainer, one of Australia's foremost environmental campaigners, the good life is bad for the Earth. Trainer is trying to convince his fellow Australians that the standard of living they enjoy is at someone else's expense.

The grounds near Trainer's house are littered with homemade contraptions and inventions -- machines that generate power or pump water. Trainer made them to show how anyone with a little ingenuity can harness the wind or the tides to run machines cleaner and more efficient than engines that burn fossil fuels.

Trainer said we must confront at least two major changes. One is to live much more simply and to consume less in our personal lifestyles. The other and more important one, he said, "is a radical change in the sort of economy we have. We have an economy which must maximize the amount of production and consumption and trade and export and throughput. Not only that, we have to grow -- we're a growth economy; we're constantly looking to increase the amount we produce and consume all the time. And it's just totally ridiculous to think you can reconcile that with sustainability."

Solar panels generate so much electricity on sunny days their owners sell the surplus power to the electric company.

Trainer, who teaches at the University of New South Wales, has called for a new movement toward "eco-villages" as a way to teach the public about sustainable alternatives. Not far from the center of Sydney, Australia's largest city, another environmentalist would feel right at home in an eco-village.

The house resembles all the others on the street. The difference is inside -- Michael Mobbs has made it self-sustaining.

"We use our sewage to wash our clothes, to flush the toilet, and to hose the garden," Mobbs said. "We have an ordinary flush toilet upstairs in the terrace. When we flush our waste, or anything inside the house, all the sewage comes down and inside a box just over here, a concrete box, [where] we have millions and millions of worms which turn that waste product into reusable water. It's sterile, so it's safe for the kids, if they happen to be playing with the garden hose, and it's safe to wash the clothes with."

Mobbs continued: "When it's sunny, we make our electricity from the sun. We're making more than we need. That surplus clean-cell electricity is fed into the grid during the day, and at night we pull electricity back into the house from the main electricity grid."

According to Mobbs, if most of Sydney's houses were to adopt these self-sustaining measures, then the number of coal-burning power plants could be cut by at least half. That would greatly reduce emissions into the upper atmosphere.

After years of being accused of ignoring the environmental issue, Australian politicians are addressing the problem. One of them is Bob Carr, premier of the state of New South Wales, whose capital is Sydney.

"I think the growth in world population, the loss of the natural world, puts [us] in a position that we've never been in before," Carr said. "Only 40 years ago there was no talk about global warming, there was no realization of the impact of loss of rain forests."

Carr continued: "We have a very lucky country, and like much of the Western world we enjoy our living standards because we incinerate carbon, and we send it sky high into the upper atmosphere, and the impact of that is heating our planetary home.

"It is that simple," Carr said. "And certainly in history I can think of no example of a country voluntarily winding back living standards. It's unprecedented. It's very difficult. I don't think it's going to be done until it's forced on us. I tend to think that there's going to have to be dramatic climate change, or a speeding up in the melting of the polar ice caps in a way that threatens Northern Europe, for example, before the world will say: This is now an emergency."