The weekly interviews resume! A couple of weeks ago I met a wonderful person at a very good public meeting. She kindly agreed to answer some questions…
a) Who are you? Where were you born, where did you grow up and when did you first start to think that there were serious environmental problems ahead? Was it a book, a TV show, a friend?
I am a baby boomer, born in 1947 in Adelaide.
b) When did you first become aware of the climate element of the environmental problems, and how.
I had assumed that one day I might have a child or two, but when a colleague introduced me to books he was using as resources to teach geography in 1971, I started reading them: The Club of Rome’s ‘The Limits to Growth’ and ‘The Population Bomb’ amongst them. Paul Erlich visited South Australia around that time and has been several times since on speaking tours and, each time, I have been to hear him. He is utterly inspiring, and he was absolutely correct in his predictions in the late 1960s, for which he was derided at the time.
c) You mentioned that you chose not to have children because of the population crisis. That must have struck a lot of people as crazy, back then. What sorts of responses did you get. Given that you were only a woman, in an intensely patriarchal society, presumably a lot of the responses involved telling you you’d change your mind, that you were being hysterical etc etc?
I subsequently married the above mentioned colleague and we decided that, knowing what we knew, it would be irresponsible of us to make more people. At that time the ZPG movement was quite strong in South Australia, and we hoped that it might result in some sensible population policies from our government. It didn’t!. It fizzled. And since then I have been gob-smacked to go to environmental rallies where I see youngish couples trailing a swarm of children behind them. Don’t they understand that you can’t have a small footprint if you make more feet?! Several of our friends also realised, in the 70s and 80s, that population was a serious issue, but all of them eventually bred, leaving us on our own to bear the comments and criticism, such as being labelled selfish!!!!! Personally, I can’t think of an unselfish reason for having children. In fact, we both joined a short course being run by a woman doing research for her PhD on ‘voluntary child-free couples’. Most of the participants said they would probably have children, many of them saying they wanted to have someone to look after them in their old age!!!! They deserve to have their children migrate to the moon!
d) We don’t seem to have made a lot of progress, as a species, on these problems. What do you think are the reasons for that, and what is there that we could/should still do differently?
No. We haven’t made a lot of progress on population. I have had people say things like: ‘What difference can one person make?’ I saw a wonderful little cartoon a few years ago, showing a large crowd of people, each with an individual thought bubble above their head with the words ‘what can one person do?’
Movements like GetUp have started to shift awareness in certain sections of the population and created a movement in which we can pool our energy and resources to make a difference (so much so that Murdoch’s media have run relentless campaigns to bad-mouth us). I have also tried to explain to my friends, when asked where I’m going for my next holiday, that I haven’t had a passport for over 20 years and I don’t fly because it’s not good for the environment, to which some have replied: ‘I’m not giving up my OS holidays!’ However, they are all keen to look at my newly acquired Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV, and that is a great introduction to the whole subject of trying to save the planet.
e) anything else you’d like to say.
It seems to me that the problem is so big that people can’t relate to it personally, or understand that a small change in their habits could make a contribution. When the east coast of Australia burned so fiercely in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and then flooded devastatingly, it woke up a lot of people. We’re going to see a lot more of those events. The most recent federal election was really encouraging in that so many ‘safe’ Liberal seats were lost to independent candidates standing for the environment. So it’s not all doom and gloom, although I’m glad that I’m not likely to be around for more than another 20 years, but I fear for future generations.