In Queensland today the topic of Dams is heating up. The Queensland government wants to build a new dam north of Brisbane, the Traveston dam. They want to do this not because they like dams but because the human population in southeast Queensland has out grown its water supply. Every now and then, when we don’t get more than the average rainfall, the dams get low and water restrictions are encouraged. So the solution is build a dam and increase the water supply.

Seems sensible enough? Of course it’s not it’s incredibly short sighted and selfish. Why?

Well it all comes down to fixing the problem or delaying it.

The problem is that too many people are moving to southeast Queensland. Now, if human population growth in southeast Queensland stopped, then building a dam might be the solution, southeast Queensland might store enough water for the current population. But the reality is that population growth is planned to continue. Stopping population growth in southeast Queensland is the last thing the government wants. Imagine what would happen to all the economic benefits of ‘growth’. So building a dam does not fix the problem it just pushes it off into the not too distant future when it will be a bigger problem because there will be even more people wanting water and one less place to build a dam!

Sound familiar, here’s another, bigger, scarier example.

The other day the ‘father of the green revolution’, Norman Borlaug died. Not the ‘green revolution’ you might associate with Greenpeace and WWF but the agricultural green revolution of the early 1960’s and 1970’s. Norman and others worked together in science and government as part of this green revolution. They increased the yield of global agriculture and ‘prevented’ starvation of millions of people in places like India, Pakistan and Africa. But did it really prevent it or delay and displace it?

This year, for the first time ever, the number of chronically hungry people exceeded 1,000,000,000 (a billion) as published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. That’s the most ever and it’s predicted to continue to rise. The problem is not poor agricultural productivity but excessive population growth. Every day there are more mouths to feed. Stop the growth and the problem starts to go away. This is the classic case of not fixing the problem but pushing it off into the future when it will be a bigger problem because of the population growth.

So you ask, if population growth is causing the Queensland government to build a dam and population growth is the reason that over a billion people are chronically hungry, why don’t people focus on the problem instead of pushing it into the future so it becomes a bigger problem for future generations?

And then there’s carbon sequestration and nuclear waste…


Links

FAO

Traveston Dam

Premier Bligh's Announcement

Every now and then I have a ‘philosophical’ moment and think about things.

When you think about where you spend most of your waking hours youbeing to realise that your time is rarely your own. For example, Iwake at 6am. Breakfast and everything else before leaving home isabout ‘getting ready for work’. Work consumes me until I return homeand shed my work clothes, normally around 6pm. If I sleep for 8 hoursthen I have just 4 hours to spend in a place I want to be, doingthings I want to do with people I choose to be with. 4 hours. Just 4out of 16 waking hours: 25%...25% for me and 75% for work. True, Icould be more efficient, reduce my commute, but I think most people incities have similar stats. I’m lucky I like my work…imagine if Ididn’t…what a waste. But I do get paid. And that’s the reason we doit, isn’t it, to get paid.

Money buys things.

Things. Houses close to work, cars, petrol, things from Harvey Norman,fashions, baby clothes and toys, beer and cigarettes, holidays awayfrom work, phones and of course debt. All of these things in exchangefor 75%. Marketing tries to perpetuate this, enticing you into buyingthings you don’t need…’stimulating’ consumption…for 75%…The conceptnags at a thinkers mind others carry on, oblivious.

Of course there are some who have realised that there are other things to do…