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7 - Nowhere to Hide? Australia in the Global Environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 May 2010

John Wiseman
Affiliation:
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
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Summary

Globalisation is quite clearly the biggest environmental problem. Globalisation requires that we start to export things that we've never exported before, and start to import things we've never imported before. For instance exporting our biodiversity, our livestock wealth, products of our coastal ecosystem like shrimp, flowers produced through intensive irrigation in low rainfall zones (so that we're exporting our water). Importing things like toxic wastes …

Indian environmental activist, Dr Vandanna Shiva, 1997

To call [Australia's position on Greenhouse Gas emissions] irresponsible is too mild. To call it moronic would be to compliment it. Australia could be taking a major role by demonstrating large scale solar power and selling it to China and India. Instead it's behaving like a dumb European country of 1860.

Professor Paul Ehrlich, 1997

On 20 October 1997 a team of Greenpeace activists scaled the walls surrounding Kirribilli House, the Sydney residence of Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. Solar panels were rushed past the security guards and lifted up on to the roof as a ‘gift’ to the Prime Minister. From the roof the protesters used mobile phones to inform the Australian and international media about their opposition to the Australian Government's refusal to support common and binding greenhouse-gas emission targets.

The Prime Minister's response was that ‘noisy groups such as Greenpeace will … have absolutely no impact at all on the direction of government policy’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Global Nation?
Australia and the Politics of Globalisation
, pp. 86 - 100
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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