I feel a pain in my heart when I travel into the rural hinterland around the city I live in. It feels like a new section of bushland has been turned into housing developments every time. I feel sad for the plants that were bulldozed and the increase of CO2 but also the animals. The kangaroos and wombats can run away from the clearing but where to? Animals inhabit a landscape based on the land’s capacity to support them. Carrying capacity does not suddenly increase in the left over bits of land just because there are more animals that are refugees to it.

I don’t want to say people can’t have a house to live in so the answer I end up with is population control which has it’s own ethical quagmires. Should we (in Australia it’s usually the government representing the interests of the collective) not allow people from other countries to come? What if they are stateless or fleeing persecution – can we say those people are allowed to come but economic immigrants (like skilled migrants) should not be allowed? Should the collective be able to tell the individual they can’t have more than one child? How do we choose between a species and the rights of an individual human being. For example Should indigenous people be able to continue the tradition of killing sea turtles when the turtles are endangered. It isn’t indigenous practices in and of themselves that put the turtles in this state, but collisions with motor boats, having their eggs raided by feral pigs and dogs, climate change and dynamite fishing distroying the turtles’ habitat.
I don’t think there are any easy answers to these sorts of questions but it would be good to have a proper discussion that goes beyond flip statements like ‘technology will solve it’ or denial like our government is doing.

Kind regards

Sylvia Ramsay