Tasmanian fires, climate change, and reflections on petitions

The catastrophe of fires and climate change in Tasmania

Richard Flanagan is probably the most famous living Tasmanian, known for his 2014 Booker Prize  and his many essays critical of the abuse of power. He was once called “a traitor to Tasmania” in the Tasmanian parliament, and later told by the then premier that he and his writing were “not welcome in the New Tasmania” after he published an essay critical of the culture of the state Labor government of the day. 

Yesterday (Feb 5, 2019), Richard published a typically eloquent essay; this time about climate change, government apathy (his sub-title was "those in power laugh at us", referring especially to the current Australian prime minister's highly visible support for coal) and, the terrifying, health-damaging fires in Tasmania, which for the third time in six years (2013, 2016, 2019)  are devastating parts of the state. The current one seems the worst, and its health impact will be greatly magnified by smoke inhalation, in an island which already has a high rate of asthma, especially in indigenous children.

My petition and its complications (updated Feb 7)

A few days before Richard's essay was published I started a petition. This calls for the Tasmanian government, led by Liberal premier Will Hodgman, to play a more active role in educating the Tasmanian people about climate change. Although it is now clear, including in Tasmania, that the climate has changed (mainly due to greenhouse gas forcing), there is still time to reduce even worse consequences. In the three decades I have been researching climate change, mainstream politicians, whether socially conservative or left wing, have largely missed the point. Overwhelmingly, they have been indifferent to the arguments made by the environmental movement that adequate environmental resources are necessary for human well-being. We are steadily eroding our environmental buffer, in a process I call "environmental brinkmanship".

I have signed petitions before, but never initiated one. I used a web platform called "Change.org". According to their FAQs I was supposed to be notified via email once my petition became "promotable", presumably when it reached a threshold (as far as I can tell, the number is not stated on their website, but an email received Feb 7 advised that the number was 500 - however, when I discovered they were using my petition as a vehicle to raise money for themselves and their allies the number who signed was less than 300). Even now, (i.e. Feb 7) I have not received such notification, and the number who have signed exceeds 500.

When I accidentally discovered that people who signed this petition were being asked for money I felt deeply embarrassed. I now realise, after reading the fine print, that I could have asked for this fund raising option to be disabled, but not by ticking a box (which would have alerted me to its possibility) but instead by writing to their help section. I believe the box option would be more ethical.

I asked Change.org if they could contact the donors to offer a refund, but they declined, though they stated that they will make a refund if donors contact them. They suggested that I do this by posting an update. I will also try to contact some of the people who gave money; I think I have identified some by capturing their names, and in some cases facebook pics, as they flash past. I hope this update might reach some of them.

Change.org is a profit-seeking company, and they provided a service to me for which I did not pay. But if they made this donation feature more transparent many would still agree; Change.org would still make money.

I am trying to find out what happens to these funds if the donated sum cannot be returned. At the moment, it seems that the funds raised can only be spent on advertising the petition (i.e. all the donated funds go to the company and its allies with whom ads can be placed). If this is correct then I am in a "lose lose" position. That is, I either spend the money on advertising, or the money is lost (and presumably goes to Change.org - I have written to ask them, and will update this blog if I learn more). Either way, I feel the donors have been ripped off and I sincerely apologise.

Conclusion

I have long felt ambivalent about petitions, now I feel distinctly uncomfortable, at least for those on Change.org. This article also expresses concern, while this one sheds more light on their tactics and profitability. Change.org presents itself as an ethical business, and I don't mind if they make a profit. But I don't like the way they currently operate. 

If you have read this far, thank you. Please consider signing the petition, but please do not make a donation unless you want to give money to Change.org. If you want to use your hard earned money to bring about change in Tasmania (and don't have time to directly contact a politician or use another method that takes time) then you might consider donating to an independent climate change lobby group such as the Climate Council. Or, you could donate to a charity such as the Red Cross that helps people harmed by fires and other emergencies (including in Tasmania), and which is also aware of how climate change is increasing the risks of disasters.

You might also reflect on this plea by firefighters for us all to take climate change far more seriously. It says, in part: “Having just spent a majority of January supporting firefighting operations in Tasmania and New South Wales, I have seen the exhaustion that firefighters power through to battle increasingly uncontrollable fires, and the fear, anxiety and loss that communities suffer,” he said.

Thank you.

An appeal to the Tasmanian government to better recognise the links between fire and climate change

Tasmania is experiencing terrifying, health-damaging fires for the third time in six years (2013, 2016, 2019). The nature and risk of fires has changed in many countries, due to climate change; in Australia's island state the climate is hotter, drier and there is more dry lightning. The Tasmanian Fire Service website is excellent, yet climate change is barely mentioned. It needs to be a major subject heading, to help educate an uncertain public. The absence of climate change as a prominent theme on this site may reflect ambivalence or even attempted suppression of this issue by the Tasmanian government. This is not good enough. Please help us convince the the Tasmanian government to be part of the solution, not add to the problem.

Some politicians claim that making the link between climate change and tragedy is insensitive, but keeping silent on this issue would be like a doctor ignoring the smoking behaviour of a patient who just had a heart attack.

Climate change also threatens to greatly harm the summer tourism industry in Tasmania. Tasmania, which is already a world leader on carbon neutral electricity, must awaken to the many risks caused by climate change and, led by its democratically elected government, do what it can to reduce those risks.

Please sign and circulate the petition, and also write directly to Premier Will Hodgman at will.hodgman@parliament.tas.gov.au

Footnote

It was my experience of being awoken by the smell of smoke, in the Tasmanian forest, in the heatwave of January 2103, which made me decide to be arrested for civil disobedience about the collective failure of Australians to do enough to slow climate change. In 2014 I became the first (and so far only) Australian contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to have been arrested for civil disobedience on this issue, and the first (and, also, so far only) contributor to the health chapter of the IPCC.

Unfortunately, mainstream media almost completely ignored this at the time, with one exception.

The nutrition and sustainability of farmed fish

In 2005 the late Professor Tony McMichael and I published, in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, an invited commentary called "Fish, health and sustainability"

In it, we wrote: "The widespread practice of feeding wild-caught fish to farmed piscivorous (fish eating) fish increases production of some high-value species, but decreases the availability of fish for direct human consumption, on a per capita basis. To meet consumer demand for such fish, and at the same time to reduce the pressure on wild fish stocks, aquaculturalists are increasingly turning to land-based plants, such as grain, soybeans, lupins, and blended vegetable oils as staple fish food. However, because several of these crops are comparatively low in desirable long-chain fatty acids (especially n-3 PUFAs), the n-3 PUFA concentration of fish raised this way is likely to be lower than in their wild-caught cousins. Consequently, the n-3/n-6 PUFA ratio is also lower than what is thought to be optimum."

In other words, feeding fish foods which is derived from the land rather than a marine or riverine ecosystem is likely to change their nutritional quality, probably adversely. But we did not then speculate that fishfeed would soon include land based animal foods. 

However, in 2016 the leading Australian television investigative programme Four Corners presented "Big Fish", an investigation into the sustainability of aquaculture in Tasmania. It mentioned (as a comparatively minor point) that fishfeed used in Tasmania now includes "ruminant protein" (ie from sheep, cattle, goats or other digastric mammals). There is a theoretical risk that the feeding of ruminant protein to fish could increase the risk of transmissable encephalopathy (especially if such ruminant material is imported to Australia), but a larger risk that this practice will reduce the nutritional value of farmed fish which consume such protein. Additionally, artificially coloured fish (eg salmon) may also have reduced nutrition, compared to wild fish. This is plausible even if the dyes that are used to artificially colour farmed fish such as salmon are entirely benign. This is because the natural process that leads to a pink colour in salmon are not being reproduced in farmed fish that are dyed - if they were, then the artificial colour would not be needed.

As far as I know, the studies which have shown health benefits of ingesting fish do not discriminate between whether the food ingested is farmed or wild. They should.

An open letter to Hydro Tasmania

Dear Hydro-Tasmania management,

You are far more aware than I of the energy crisis in Tasmania, compounded by flooding in June 2016, aggravated by unusually warm water in the Tasman Sea, and possibly worsened by cloud seeding (which was undertake by Hydro despite the flood warning).

I am concerned that there might have been other mismanagement, not only concerning the selling of power to the mainland and possible risk to the integrity of Basslink (see below) but also the selection of reservoirs to disproportionately drain. 

Basslink integrity and turbine safety

In an article in the Saturday paper, called "Tasmania's power crisis" Luke Crowley, spokesman for the union representing high-level hydro workers in Tasmania, Professionals Australia, is reported to have said: "the problem, .. has been coming for a long time and is not just due to lack of rain or the cable break. .. He says switching from such high levels of export back to import put more stress on the cable and, he says, may have contributed to the breakage. He says such profligacy with the hydroelectric resource not only has “fried” the cable but led to levels in the dams that are so low – and have been compounded by the lowest recorded annual rainfall in the past year – that the actual physical infrastructure of the dams themselves is being threatened."

Luke Crowley also warns of "a whirlpool effect where air gets into the turbines due to the low water levels and then gets compressed and expands and explodes. He says engineers are telling him that, with no rain, many of the turbines would be unsafe to operate within two months."

The pattern of reservoir drainage

Despite the recent flooding, some of the biggest reservoirs are still very low. For example, today (June 18, 2016) Great Lake is still 16m below the dam wall, and Lake Gordon is an incredible 40m below its dam. Yet, the levels for the 5 dams on the Mersey Forth are either spilling or almost spilling. In the recent floods water not only spilled over the spillway of the Cethana dam, but I am told, was so high for a while that it almost spilled over the Cethana dam wall.

Since the 5 dams on the Mersey Forth system were all spilling simultaneously should these reservoirs have been drawn down far more than Lake Gordon etc? Flooding of this system significantly harmed the towns of Latrobe and Forth, as you know.

The case for much more prudence in supplying the Australian mainland with hydro power

Of even more significance, my opinion is that Tasmania should be far more frugal exporting its power to the mainland than it has been, even if there was a carbon tax and even if no El Niño is forecast. Instead, it should be using its carbon friendly power to attract skilled job-intensive enterprises to the state, similar but more biased to people than to big business, than your old policy of "hydro-industrialisation". 

There is an obvious exception to being frugal with the export of hydro-power. Such power can be safely exported not only if the dams are spilling, but also also if the dams are near full with rain forecast; especially if towns vulnerable to flooding lie downstream.

About the author
 

I am Australia's first IPCC contributor to have been arrested for civil disobedience concerning climate change (2014). I was also arrested for civil disobedience in 1983 protesting the policies of Hydro Tas, concerning its proposed dam on the Franklin River, following the loss of Lake Pedder. The flaws in your policies were clearly apparent, at that time, on economic grounds apart from anything else.

I have lived in Tasmania, intermittently, since 1974, and I have owned land in the catchment to Lake Cethana since 1978; I still own this.

Canaries struggling to improve environmental health: Earth Poisoning diary month 3

In 1989 I was a junior doctor in a sparsely populated part of north western Tasmania, Australia’s island state. One day, I discovered the journal Archives of Environmental Health. In it I found the proceedings of the first meeting of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE). This was tremendously encouraging, for reasons I will explain. The article with the greatest impression was by John Goldsmith, keynote speaker. He wrote:


"We, the environmental epidemiologists of the world, are the canaries, capable of giving warning of impending environmental disaster in time for remedial steps to be taken. Fortunately, our fate is not to have to die as the unfortunate canaries of the coal miners did, but to sing, to call out in clear tones the nature and type of impending health danger that threatens. It is the methods and criteria of scientific detection, analysis, and interpretation that give us our lifesaving potential."
 

Tasmania is Australia’s poorest state financially and is far from markets and population centres. Its name dates only to the 1850s, a marketing exercise as its European predecessor (Van Diemen’s Land) was so tainted by brutality, both to its indigenous people and its white convicts, transported from Britain until the 1850s. The state still has the lowest levels of education and the highest rates of chronic disease found in Australia, other than among its indigenous people. Its isolation, low population density and poverty have helped preserved unusually rich environmental qualities. But it retains a frontier mentality in which the natural environment has been repeatedly assaulted in attempts to wrest a living, whether by logging, hunting, fishing, mining, or farming. Its high rainfall and numerous rivers have also stimulated an intensive hydro-electricity industry, so successful that in most years, the entire state’s electricity supply does not rely at all on coal or other fossil fuels.

Three steps towards environmental epidemiology

1. The Wesley Vale pulp mill and its link to ecological integrity

In early 1989, three events were crucial to my evolving understanding of environmental epidemiology and environmental health. First was my involvement with the campaign to stop the expansion of a pulp mill on the north west coast. A tactic was to raise community concern about the possible adverse health effects of persistent organic pollutants (chemicals) (acronym POPs) called organochlorines, which the mill was to discharge into Bass Strait, and which would accumulate in the marine food chain. Though I was concerned about that, I was even more concerned with the proposed massive expansion of the paper industry, which would in turn lead to a huge increase in log truck traffic and harm to biodiversity and what is now conceptualised as “ecological integrity”. This term, allied to “land sickness”, “ecosystem health”, “ecosystem services” and, more recently, “ecohealth” links human well-being and health to ecological conditions.

Humans have operated as “patch disturbers” for millennia (well before the development of agriculture), altering both landscapes and biodiversity on continental scales. However our collective capacity to change nature has expanded enormously, to include the intrusion of synthetic chemicals. But much damage to ecological integrity is old-fashioned; physical means aided by technology and a bonanza of cheap fossil fuels. 

In Tasmania, there have been numerous attacks on ecological integrity, including harm to water quality, not only from the clearing of forests (e.g. increasing water run-off, cloudier water and the drying up of creeks in dry periods), but also from the use of chemical involved in forest “regeneration”. These include the herbicide atrazine and the poison “1080” (sodium fluoroacetate) widely used to kill fauna (especially wallabies) which  might otherwise feast on young tree seedlings, planted to replace the old-growth forests. Bio-accumulation of poisons, with consequent immuno-supression, has been speculated as linked to the transmissible facial tumor disease of the Tasmanian devil, the state’s top non-human predator. This disease emerged about the time of large-scale forestry and its extensive use of poisons.
  

I was intrigued by the concept of bio-accumulation, and increasingly motivated by my daily work with patients, some of whom developed cancer or other severe illnesses at young ages, while others lived to be octogenarians. A very common question for an ill person was “why?” Apart from smoking, there were few clues. High exposures, or unusual sensitivity to pesticides and other POPs seemed a worthwhile hypothesis to explore. We now know that the organochlorine dieldrin, the use of which is declining, has been convincingly linked to breast cancer.

2. The lack of co-operation between industry and science

I developed an ambition to conduct a study of the long-term health of the pulp mill workers, and visited the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney to explore this idea as a research thesis. I received mild encouragement. But it was clear that I would need the co-operation of the mill management. Later that year I asked a senior manager at the mill about this. I envisioned a careful scientific study, seeking to explore whether the mill workers, presumably exposed to higher OCL levels than the community, might have unusual patterns of illness. (I did not then fully understand the Healthy Worker Effect.)

It was obvious that my own career depended crucially on a fair interpretation of the evidence. But his answer was violent: “anyone but f***ing you, Butler”. He clearly assumed I would be biased, yet I knew that no-one without a strong pre-existing interest would have the motivation to conduct such a study. His opposition meant that any such study was impossible.

3. Herbicides, two mysterious deaths, and a tepid government report 

The last key preparatory event was an encounter with a patient who told me an odd story of a healthy young woman riding a horse across the bridge at Forth, a nearby village, in the centre of a rich farming area. While crossing the bridge, a crop-dusting plane had flown overhead, discharging herbicides. My patient told me that within a year, both the woman and her horse had died.

I retrieved a short report about this event, prepared by the Tasmanian Health Department. No author was listed. Inexperienced as I was, it was clear that the report was hopelessly inadequate from a scientific perspective (I can’t recall if the fate of the horse was mentioned). Its conclusion that the two events (the spray and the death) were unrelated was completely unconvincing. Pesticide overspraying still occurs.

Conclusion

At that time, health interest in climate change was just starting. The Brundtland Report ("Our Common Future") had recently popularised the term “sustainable development” and the Montreal Protocol was recent. The Green movement was taking root, not only in Tasmania but also in parts of Europe. 

Environmental transformation is necessary to provide goods and services for humans, but doing so too hastily and on too large a scale was obviously dangerous. It seemed to me that environmental epidemiologists might be able to sound an effective warning.

Twenty four years later it is hard to be as optimistic. The strain of neo-liberalism that existed then seems almost civilised compared to today's. The Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s generated numerous prosecutions. So far, the much bigger scale of fraud that precipitated the 2008 global financial crisis has not led to a single high-level prosecution. Poorly regulated, poorly understood chemicals continue to pollute the biosphere. While human numbers and average life expectancy continue to rise, numerous danger signs are evident, from declining bee populations (whose health is linked to chemicals) to an almost inevitable rise in global temperature of four degrees, with consequent profound, adverse health effects. Limits to growth, including of human size and health,  are on the horizon, perhaps just over the next hill. 

We do need to continue to transform nature in ways that will benefit humans, but the process is not infinite. We also have to protect nature so that humans can continue to benefit. We have to wean ourselves from earth poisons. We have to slow population growth, by spreading female education and human rights. Many of us need to learn to live with less.

"Accredited” authorities remain optimistic about humanity’s future, though histories of the near future report our collapse as a civilisation. The scope of environmental epidemiology is growing, and now includes limits to growth. But not enough people are paying attention to we canaries. The noösphere - planetary consciousness - is evolving, but those who sound warnings need to tweet much louder.