1.

Diagnosing the Disease

Affluenza is that strange desire we feel to spend money we don’t have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know.

Affluenza has not only transformed the size of our shopping malls and the contents of our garbage dumps, it has also transformed our culture, environment and economy. And despite the large wealth gap between developed and developing countries, this disease of affluence is ‘trickling down’ to less well-off countries far more rapidly than the affluence itself. And nothing keeps people poorer than a bad case of affluenza.

Can affluenza be stopped? Like all pandemics, it is easily spread and mutates frequently, so it will be hard to cure. But hard doesn’t mean impossible. Surely curing affluenza can’t be as hard as wiping out polio with worldwide vaccination, or landing a man on the moon in a rocket that took a decade to build?

But just say we did abandon the idea that wasting resources is good for the economy. Wouldn’t the global economic system grind to a halt? Put another way, isn’t speeding up the rate at which middle-class people throw away perfectly functional furniture and appliances a good way to create jobs and reduce world poverty?

This book sets out to show several things: that affluenza is economically inefficient, that it is the root cause of environmental destruction, and that it worsens global inequality. If – and this is a big if – we are interested in avoiding climate change, distributing resources more equally and improving the wellbeing of billions of people (rich and poor), then it is essential to wipe out the plague of affluenza.

Many of the world’s biggest problems are symptoms of this plague. Rather than treat the symptoms, it is time we tackled the underlying disease.

IT’S THE CULTURE, STUPID

In recent decades, the need for cultural change has taken a back seat to debates about evidence-based policy solutions and new technologies. It seems nearly every environmentalist knows that we need a carbon price to fix climate change, for instance, and every social justice campaigner knows that we need more aid money to fix global inequality. But could our focus on such partial measures, worthy as they are, have distracted us from addressing the root cause of these problems? That is, what if it is the brand-new culture of wasteful materialism – which has only emerged in recent decades – that is the major cause of our large social, economic and environmental woes? And what if that same culture is the major barrier to solving them?

This book is not seeking to add a new problem to our global to-do list. Rather, it argues that if we are to fix many of the problems on that list, we need to go up a level in our analysis, examine the cause of multiple problems and solve them simultaneously. In other words, rather than arguing among ourselves about whether global poverty or climate change is the more urgent problem, we need to unite and change the cultural settings that cause both.

Culture doesn’t just drive consumer preferences, it also drives our ideas about what is ‘politically realistic’, ‘affordable given current budget realities’ and ‘economically responsible’. The United States’ exit from NAFTA, the United Kingdom’s Brexit, and Australia’s plans to subsidise construction of the world’s largest export coalmine – all of these have nothing to do with shifts in economic theory or changes in technology. They reflect changes in culture and society. This is not to suggest that debates about individual policy ideas aren’t useful or important, but it is to say that, by themselves, policy debates are not nearly enough.

Take cars, for example. When the automobile was invented, the law in both the United States and the United Kingdom required cars to be preceded by someone on foot who had to wave a red flag to alert pedestrians on crowded streets to the oncoming danger. Without public willingness to turn over roads to the drivers of cars, our cities would not look anything like they do today. While technological change made the mass production of cars possible, it was cultural change that made it profitable.

While technological change offers new ways to address old problems, it also offers new ways to cause new problems. It was not scientists or engineers who convinced hundreds of millions of people that driving a two-tonne SUV is the best way to move around a city. Similarly, whether genetic modification is used to cure disease or to clone human beings is a cultural question, not a scientific or economic one.

How we value things is cultural too. Economics textbooks often discuss the paradox that while humans can’t live without water, water is cheap, and while we can easily live without diamonds, diamonds are expensive. The answer – for the authors of first-year economics textbooks, at least – lies in the notion of scarcity. While water is essential, it is also abundant, and while diamonds are rarely useful (unless you want to make drill bits or saw blades), they are scarce. Price reflects the interaction of usefulness (demand) and scarcity (supply).

But, as so often, the first-year economics textbooks ignore the more interesting question: what makes a thing seem scarce in the first place? Far from being abundant and cheap, bottled water is more expensive than petrol. Indeed, despite the obvious economic inefficiency, cultural norms have made it profitable to ship bottled water from Fiji to the United States, and from France to Australia. That’s a paradox worthy of closer examination. Unfortunately for economics students and the wider community, the fundamental role of advertising and marketing in shaping culture and inventing the absurd notion of ‘luxury water’, and then making it seem scarce, is typically ignored. But if we can get people to spend so much on bottled water, it is surely not impossible to convince them to pay for stylish solar panels or cool electric cars.

The simplest version of economics teaches students – and politicians – that rational people only care about money, and that, when offered a choice between two similar products, the rational consumer will nearly always buy the cheaper one. By contrast, the simplest version of marketing teaches that there is nothing rational about consumers, and that – because most people would prefer to have more status, not less – when offered a choice between two similar products, the real-life human nearly always buys the more prestigious one.

I know, I know, dear reader – you would never be so crass. But imagine your brother-in-law and sister-in-law in the following situations ...

Your brother-in-law has just moved house and is hosting a birthday party for his thirteen-year-old son, with all his new classmates and their parents invited. While out buying supplies, your brother-in-law is standing in the soft-drink section, choosing between Coke, Pepsi and budget ‘no-name’ cola. Realising that no-name cola is a tenth of the price of Coke or Pepsi, he does the rational thing and buys it. Doesn’t he?

Your sister-in-law has just got a new job and is invited to dinner by her new boss. She thinks she should take a bottle of wine, and, not being much of a wine drinker herself, chooses the cheapest wine in the liquor store. Doesn’t she?

The fact that some people sometimes shop on price for some products has been turned by the authors of economics textbooks into the ‘law of demand’, which says that whenever the price of something falls, if all other things remain equal, people will buy more of it. But in the real world, cultural changes have far more impact than price on the demand for most goods and services.

Take beer, for example. An economics textbook might teach students that demand for beer is set by price. A good economics teacher might emphasise that the belief that price is the main determinant of beer consumption depends on the assumption of ceteris paribus – Latin for ‘all else remaining equal’. But it is a rare economics student (or politician) who picks up that ‘all else remaining equal’ is code for ‘let’s assume that social norms, regulation, the distribution of income and the availability of other products won’t ever change’.

In reality, because culture and the pursuit of status matter to many people, they may actually prefer to buy expensive imported beer rather than cheap beer, even if the only thing about it that is actually imported is the sticker on the bottle. And even if that beer has been shunned in its home country in favour of imported beer from somewhere else.

For many people in many cultures, the consumption of beer is a sign of either high status (possibly signalling masculinity, especially while watching sport) or low status (possibly signalling poor education, when ordered in a fancy restaurant). And then there is regulation. In most countries the demand for beer is heavily influenced by restrictions on where alcohol can be sold, where it can be consumed, to whom it can be sold, how it can be advertised and what sanctions are imposed on drunken behaviour or drink-driving. The idea that markets are all about price, and that changing the price of something is the best way to change the consumption of that thing, is so partial as to be seriously misleading. Culture matters.

CULTURAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC CHANGE ARE COMPLEMENTS, NOT SUBSTITUTES

Most people think chips taste better with salt. But if they had to choose between a bowl of unsalted chips and a bowl of salt, plenty would probably opt to eat neither. When they are combined, however, we can’t stop eating them! Like many things, salt and potato chips complement each other. Even though economists understand complementary goods, economic analysis is much better suited to understanding substitution. In turn, economists often imply that the price of salt, not the availability of chips, is the major determinant of how much salt we eat.

Those who want to change the world are right to be appalled by the way government subsidies and permission to freely dump billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere keeps the price of coal-fired electricity artificially low. But the conclusion that the best way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is to introduce a carbon tax and then ‘let the market fix the problem’ reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of culture in shaping what the market does, and why different people in different countries use vastly different amounts of electricity to perform the same tasks. It also ignores the cultural – and political – question of why so many governments are so keen to spend so much of taxpayers’ money subsidising coalmining, oil exploration and the construction of coal-fired power stations in the first place.

The wasteful production and consumption of stuff that is barely or never used causes enormous environmental harm and is a major driver of greenhouse-gas emissions. In turn, tackling global problems such as climate change must, in part at least, involve cultural change to transform the inefficient and environmentally harmful patterns of behaviour that we have come to take for granted.

Just as it was the cultural change of women entering the labour market that drove the growth of commercial childcare, it is the cultural change in favour of wasteful consumption that has driven the enormous growth in the production and disposal of stuff.

This book is not a plea for self-sacrifice. Nor is it an attack on the morality or rationality of the billions of people who spend little (if any) time thinking about how to prevent climate change or reduce global inequality. Consumers around the world have not consciously set out to harm the environment; they have merely made decisions that seem sensible to them in the culture they have inherited, based on the information they have been given. Just as people who have been exposed to the influenza virus can’t be blamed for catching it, people who have been brought up in a culture that encourages wasteful consumption cannot be blamed for their eagerness to replace last year’s coolest gadget with this year’s. Anyone who wants to change the behaviour of billions of people must focus on reshaping the context in which individual decisions are made. Luckily, such a task is likely easier, and the answers often much closer to home, than many people imagine.

Cultural and consumer change is not rare: it is a permanent feature of our society. Everyone knows someone who, although they once said they would never buy a mobile phone or shop online, now can’t stop shopping for things on their smartphone. Everyone knows someone who once said they would never go on a cruise ship or a group holiday, and who swore they would never abandon the daily newspaper for its online equivalent, who has now done so. While there is no doubt that in the past few decades technology and advertising have been the driving force of rapid cultural change, there is also no doubt that communities, churches and governments play a significant role as well.

Culture has an enormous effect on what we do and how we do it. The fact that hundreds of millions of Catholics eat fish on Friday has nothing to do with the price of fish. After the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster, the Japanese government persuaded commercial office buildings to use less energy for air conditioning, by such measures as encouraging men to take off their jackets in the workplace.

While it is possible to ban smoking in schools, the eating of whale meat, opening shopping centres on a Sunday and using cars in the inner city, most cultural change is incremental and voluntary, not rapid and regulated. Those who want to stop the spread of affluenza need to focus on creating smarter, more attractive patterns of behaviour, rather than chiding people for their current conduct and consumption patterns.

There need be no trade-off between the health of the environment, a more equal distribution of wealth, and the strength of the economy. On the contrary, the pursuit of ‘a strong retail sector’ based on the premature disposal of perfectly functional goods harms not just the environment, but the economy too.

Consider the following: if everyone disposed of their refrigerator and bought a new one each year, there is no doubt that measured economic activity would increase. But the notion that this surge in refrigerator production and consumption equals a strong economy is absurd.

A culture that encourages rapid increases in the production and consumption of appliances wastes the time and money of its citizens, and drives the cost of living up and the quality of family life down – all while wasting scarce natural resources. Such a culture might boost the profits of those who sell whitegoods, but this sort of churning, like the rapid heartbeat of a sick patient, is an indicator of a stressed system, not a strong one.

THERE ARE MANY ALTERNATIVES

We are surrounded by alternative ways to organise our communities and economies. The 195 countries of the world present a vast array of choices about how to structure a society and shape an economy. Within countries, different states and cities make vastly different decisions about the kinds of services to provide, the amount of these services to provide and the way in which those services will be developed. In 7000 years of recorded history, communities have tried anarchy, communism and everything in between.

Margaret Thatcher once declared that There Is No Alternative to free-market capitalism, but her own Conservative Party recently backed Brexit, the UK’s withdrawal from Europe’s free exchange of people and products. While those with ulterior motives might like to pretend otherwise, history, geography and economics make clear that we are surrounded by alternatives. It’s not finding alternatives that is hard, it is agreeing on them.

Choosing national goals is a cultural question with significant economic consequences. The claim that there is no alternative to Thatcher’s vision is tantamount to saying that there is no alternative to Thatcher’s preferred cultural norms and goals. Modern and ancient history show how wrong she was. The pyramids and the Great Wall of China were built long before anyone knew how to measure gross domestic product (GDP). The Roman Empire was built without reference to GDP. The Industrial Revolution, the invention of the aeroplane and the electrification of cities all predate the ability of national statistical offices to tell us how fast an economy is growing. The mass mobilisation of economic resources during World War I and World War II was achieved without quarterly data on economic growth.

So the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to our current obsession with maximising the dollar value of stuff that is bought and sold (that is, maximising the rate of GDP growth) is as ridiculous historically as it is absurd economically. For all but seventy of the 7000 years of recorded history, kings, emperors, prime ministers and presidents have had to manage their countries’ affairs without recourse to regular economic statistics. In fact, those who governed before we came up with the idea of GDP found it easier to make big investments in their country’s future than the current generation of politicians, who seem obsessed by this one statistic.

None of this is to say that the limitations of GDP are the cause of the world’s problems. On the contrary, the fault lies not with the statistic but with its misuse by those who should know better. One of the fathers of GDP, Simon Kuznets, once observed that ‘the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income’. More poetically, the former US senator Robert F. Kennedy said four decades ago:

The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Although those who invented GDP were adamant it should not be used as a measure of progress, many national leaders do exactly that. And just as building big pyramids had major consequences for the shape of the Egyptian economy and the wellbeing of Egypt’s people, the goal of maximising GDP has had major consequences for our society, economy and natural environment. But there is nothing economic about the selection of these goals. The choice to pursue GDP growth, pyramid construction, the building of a Great Wall or colonial expansion is a cultural choice, not an economic one. While cultural choices have economic consequences, it is important to realise that they are not economic choices with cultural consequences.

As the refrigerator example shows, there is also no evidence to suggest that the pursuit of GDP growth and the pursuit of economic efficiency are one and the same thing. There are many reasons that a community, a country or a planet might want to be cured of affluenza. For instance, if we abandon the idea that the more stuff we produce and dispose of, the richer we will be, this could significantly reduce human pressure on the natural environment. But that does not necessarily follow. Perhaps future generations will seek to stop wasting resources pursuing consumerism in order to free up resources to build more pyramids, enormous armies or fleets of spaceships to take us to the stars.

Whatever goals a culture settles on, to insist that ‘there is no alternative’ is absurd from the point of view of both history and economics. New norms, new cultures and new ways to buy and sell things will always develop. And as the re-emergence of vinyl records reminds us, old norms are only ever a cultural change away.

SO WHAT SHOULD WE DO?

There is nothing in any economics textbook to tell us what our national goals should be. While talk of maximising growth, balancing the budget, increasing exports and improving national security all sound like answers to the question ‘What should we do?’, they aren’t. They tell us nothing about what we think we need more of, what we think we can do with less of, and how the benefits of production should be distributed.

One of the many problems with the recent obsession with the size of GDP is that it has silenced debate about the shape of GDP. Do we want our economy to build homes for the homeless, or holiday homes for the holiday-homeless? Do we want our economy to produce more fresh food, or more junk food? Do we want to see more investment in renewable energy, or more in coal-fired power stations? Do we want more cars on our streets, or more trains running under them?

These important questions about the shape of our economy have been framed as somehow secondary to the question of how big we want our economy to be. Following this logic, we should ask people how much food they would like for dinner before we ask them what kind of food they would like.

Ironically, economics actually has many useful tools for a debate about what shape economy we would like to build in the coming decades. Indeed, a foundational principle of economics is that every time scarce resources are used to produce one thing, we give up the opportunity to produce something else. This is the concept of the ‘opportunity cost’.

Just as the resources dedicated to the construction of Egypt’s pyramids could have been dedicated to the construction of roads, dams, houses or fortifications, so too the resources dedicated to kitchen renovations and unused exercise equipment could have been dedicated to public transport or increased leisure time. Former US president Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8000 people.

Do we prefer tax cuts, or more spending on education? Do we want to give more funds to defence, or to public transport? Do we subsidise fossil fuels, or invest in renewable energy? Such collective decisions have enormous consequences – not just for the rate of economic growth, but for its shape, distribution and environmental impact – and, most importantly, for how our culture and society will evolve.

Cultural change is not just important, it is inevitable. Like technological change, cultural change makes the society and economy of 2117 as impossible for us to predict, or even to imagine, as it was for someone in 1917 to foresee middle-class life in 2017.

But while cultural, technological and economic change is inevitable, the direction of that change is not. Will people in 2117 work more hours than people today, or fewer? Will income equality within and between countries grow, or shrink? Will countries spend more money on defence, or diplomacy? Will they spend more on prisons, or on crime prevention? Will robots be provided by governments to help support disabled people with low incomes? Or will robots create a new army of impoverished and unemployed people?

It is up to individuals, communities and countries to answer the question: ‘What shape should our economy be?’ While there is no right answer, every answer has clear consequences. The existence of scarce resources means that everybody cannot have everything, especially if everybody wants to have more stuff than everybody else. But the fact that everybody can’t have everything doesn’t mean that everyone can’t have the material wellbeing necessary to pursue their personal, cultural, intellectual, spiritual, sporting or other passions.

My purpose in this book is not to announce what the right choices are, but to broaden the menu from which choices can be made – by individuals, communities and countries. In essence, I am arguing three things:

1. Consumerism – or the love of buying new things – is incredibly economically inefficient, and can be criticised with the same tools of orthodox economics that are usually used to defend it. Wasting resources is not a good way to ‘create wealth’ or anything except piles of waste.

2. The path to prosperity cannot be paved with discarded appliances that were never used – even if they have been recycled. Rather than shun materialism – or the love of things – as a form of personal or spiritual weakness that must be overcome, materialism must be encouraged and rewarded. Only when billions of people aspire to cling to the material things they deem necessary for a comfortable life – to cherish them, repair them and hand them on to their friends or children in better condition than they acquired them– will a population of 7.5 billion people be able to tread lightly on the planet.

3. Once we shift the debate from the size of economy we want to the shape of economy we want, then the link between wasteful consumerism and job creation can be severed once and for all. While spending money on things we don’t really need is one way to create jobs, spending the same amount of money on infrastructure or services that we actually value will likely create even more jobs. Technology to allow drones to deliver imported products, purchased online, direct to our homes might boost the profits of some retailers, but it will do little to create local jobs. And while the cultural willingness to rapidly dispose of all that home-delivered stuff might make for a ‘strong retail sector’, the belief that the economic, democratic or military strength of a society is proportionate to the frequency with which its citizens update their mobile phones and toasters is absurd. Curing affluenza will not just strengthen our relationships and our community – avoiding enormous amounts of waste will also reshape, and strengthen, our economy.

IT’S NOT (ALL) ABOUT YOU

‘How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences.’

Adam Smith

Like many environmentalists today, Adam Smith, the father of what Margaret Thatcher thought of as free-market economics, bemoaned the way so many people spent so much of their money on trinkets and baubles. But while mocking other people’s consumption choices has a long history, such mockery has done little to change consumer behaviour or the wider culture.

Focusing solely on becoming a conscious consumer and minimising your individual ecological footprint will do nothing to stop the construction of the coalmines or coal-fired power stations that cause climate change, or to ensure that new investment is made in renewable energy or public transport. Just as proponents of the status quo like to create false dilemmas to make change harder, those who seek change often create false dilemmas for themselves. Asking ourselves whether it is individual action or political action that is more important is as unhelpful as asking whether we should first tackle world poverty or climate change. Good strategies achieve more than one thing at a time.

The following chapters argue that rapid cultural change requires not just personal and political action, but also personal actions that make political action easier, and political actions that make personal actions easier. Just as culture affects the economy and the economy affects culture, actions at an individual and political level can either reinforce each other or impede each other. Good strategies ensure action at one level makes action at other levels easier.

Most obviously, when individuals opt out of community and democratic campaigns and take themselves ‘off-grid’, they rob those campaigns of their time and energy. More fundamentally, if those who have chosen to minimise their footprint lose sight of the cultural or financial reasons why most other people are apathetic about or even hostile to change, this can do more to entrench cultural division than to persuade the vast majority that curing affluenza will improve their lives.

Affluenza is a public-health problem that cannot be solved through individual piety. While the behaviour of individuals has a significant role to play, individualistic conceptions of the problem – and of solutions to it – can do more harm than good.

The best way to protect yourself from cholera is to ensure your city invests in well-maintained sewers. The best way to protect yourself from polio is to ensure you live in a country that vaccinates all children against it. The best way to prevent the spread of malaria is to prevent the climate change that will allow the mosquitoes that carry the disease to thrive in cities that are currently too cool to sustain them. Similarly, the best way to protect yourself from the consequences of affluenza is not to take yourself off-grid and start prepping for the apocalypse, but to work effectively, and at multiple levels, to shift the shape of our economy in as many ways as possible.

Blaming those who fell victim to the plague, cholera or AIDS for contracting a contagious disease may have made some people feel morally superior, but it did nothing to prevent the spread of disease. Curing affluenza requires not only a careful diagnosis and the confidence to believe it can be stamped out, but also a willingness among those who can see the problem to work constructively with those who are yet to perceive the threat. When it comes to curing affluenza, it is more important to be effective than to be lauded for being right.

Bob Brown

At the end of the nineteenth century, Tasmania, which began the century powered by convicts, was Australia’s poorest colony. However, it had mountains, rivers and lots of rain. In 1895, shortly after a portion of Niagara’s waters was captured to light up the night in the US, the waters of Tasmania’s Cataract Gorge were turning turbines to light up the city of Launceston.

In 1916 Tasmania’s Great Lake outlet was dammed to send electricity to a zinc-processing factory on the northern outskirts of Hobart and to the capital itself. The air was electric. Hydro-electricity’s promise seemed to have no bounds. Reputable pundits were predicting that excess electricity sent charging through farm paddocks would produce bumper crops.

The Hydro-Electric Commission (HEC) began measuring up every river and watercourse in Tasmania for dams. By the 1950s the supply of hydro-electricity exceeded the need, threatening the Commission’s engineering elite’s raison d’être, so the search was on to attract more heavy industries with the lure of super-cheap electricity. The power was so cheap that the sixteen biggest factories won secret contracts to keep locally owned small businesses and households from wanting similar rates. The price was so secret that no member of parliament even knew what it was. Popular Labor premier ‘Electric’ Eric Reece espoused turning Launceston’s idyllic Tamar Valley into ‘the Ruhr of the south’.

Despite a public outcry, the stunningly beautiful Lake Pedder National Park was flooded in 1972 in order to produce a mere 80 megawatts of electricity, when a single coal-fired station from that time could produce ten or twenty times as much. The new dam was to help supply Comalco’s aluminium smelter, which consumed one-third of all the HEC’s power at less than the cost of production. The pro-HEC mantra was ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’.

Premier Reece scoffed at the increasing number of visitors bushwalking in Tasmania as ‘mainlanders’ who came with one five-pound note and one shirt and went home ‘having changed neither’.

However, the decade after the destruction of Lake Pedder, with the introduction of colour television, saw a national awakening of concern for Australia’s natural environment, at least in wild and scenic Tasmania. The community campaign to save the Franklin River from the HEC’s ongoing dam-building program ultimately succeeded, but it required an immense effort. As Machiavelli had warned four centuries earlier, if you want to change the world, get ready to be crushed by those who already have the power and the money.

Citizens who saw Tasmania’s future wellbeing built upon its ‘clean, green’ assets, including wilderness, wildlife, the world’s cleanest air and fresh food and wine (preferably organic), were dismissed as ‘sandal-footed do-gooders’ back then. At the peaceful blockade of the Franklin dam works, 1500 people were arrested and 500 jailed, myself among them. Amidst HEC warnings of power shortages, economic downturn and job losses (none of these eventuated), it took a national furore, a change of federal government and a High Court verdict to save the wild river in 1983.

In the middle of this pivotal debate over Tasmania’s future, the chief of the HEC declared that if the future was to be determined by public opinion ‘we are doomed in Tasmania and we are doomed around the world’. HEC supporters had bumper stickers advocating ‘Fertilise the southwest (wilderness), doze in a greenie’.

Far from being doomed, the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, with the Franklin River flowing free in its heartland, is now internationally renowned as a place of inestimable value. It is the biggest attraction for Tasmania’s burgeoning tourism and hospitality industries, which now support many more jobs than the declining mining, logging and dam-building industries combined.

An American outdoors publication recently judged the Franklin number one on its list of the world’s ten most desirable whitewater rafting adventures. It was nearly a dam.

Tasmania’s mindset has changed almost unimaginably from the dam-building era. The state now markets not just its tourism, but its food, beer, wine and quality of life in terms of its pristine natural environment. Eco-labelling is everywhere. Beer and cheese have Tasmanian tigers and free-flowing mountain rivers on their labels. Fine wines and walking adventures have replaced tailraces and turbines in the island’s core imagery. The more than one million annual visitors, rather than being scoffed at, are now welcomed as the generators of a new age of Tasmanian wellbeing.

The HEC has taken to building wind turbines. There are no more dams on its horizon. It now proudly labels itself as ‘green’.

These cultural changes, which have driven enormous economic transformation and wealth creation, did not ‘just happen’. The market didn’t stop the destruction of our natural assets; the community did. Driving such change was neither easy nor quick, and even today it is challenged by a shrinking, and ageing, minority. But Tasmania’s wild rivers, booming tourism industry and whisky judged to be the best in the world are proof that people can take control of the shape of their community and their economy.

Dr Bob Brown helped lead the community campaign against the Franklin River Dam and went on to stand for the world’s first green political party, the United Tasmania Group, which evolved into the Australian Greens, which he represented in the Senate from 1996 to 2012. In 1990 he was awarded the US Goldman Environmental Prize.