The death of a million fish

On or around the 6th January 2019, a tragic combination of circumstances led to a massive fishkill, estimated to be in excess of 1 million native species, in the Menindee Lakes region on the Darling River.

While the immediate cause for the massive #fishkill was the sudden die-off of a massive bloom of blue-green algae (and the resulting collapse in oxygen levels in the water), the obvious question is: how was the ecosystem allowed to reach this parlous state of extreme vulnerability? Industry bodies such as the NSW Irrigators Council immediately went into damage control mode, blaming the drought, while Cotton Australia sought to deflect attention by claiming that cotton irrigators were ‘sick of being the whipping boys’ for environmental disasters.

Yet, as Fran Sheldon wrote in the Conversation on 16th January, the impacts of excessive irrigation are incontrovertible:

Ecological evidence shows the Barwon-Darling River is not meant to dry out to disconnected pools – even during drought conditions. Water diversions have disrupted the natural balance of wetlands that support massive ecosystems.

Politicians from the governing parties – the Coalition in both NSW and Federally – signally failed to take responsibility. The NSW Primary Industries Minister, Niall Blair, was afraid of meeting meet with locals having received death threats on social media, while it wasn’t until Jan 23rd that the Federal Government  mandated the conduct of an independent study to determine the cause of the fishkill.  To their credit, NSW Labor promptly issued a statement calling for a special commission of inquiry into what it termed the ‘ecological catastrophe‘, while Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten called for the establishment of an emergency ‘taskforce’ that could lead to a ‘possible judicial inquiry’.

A ecological disaster foretold

An excellent investigation by the ABC Four Corners team that aired in 2017 – Pumped: Who’s benefitting from the billions spent on the Murray-Darling? raised questions of, at best, grossly negligent mismanagement of the river system; and at worst, very serious allegations of political corruption and water theft with the most contemptuous disregard for the health of the river ecosystem.  As a so-called ‘advanced capitalist nation’, Australia prides itself on its rule of law. In theory, this means that laws are enforced equally and properly and that ‘justice is blind’; in other words, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you will be treated the same way in the eyes of the law. In reality, law in capitalist countries has always favoured the interests of employers over workers and landowners over the rights of indigenous peoples and the environment.

What the Four Corners episode revealed, amongst much else, was that once the NSW Department of Primary Industries Special Investigations Unit actually start to make progress and discovery that irrigators were rorting the system (e.g. by not having meters to track how much water they were extracting from the river, or by tampering with the meters so they didn’t work), and when the Manager requested a major investigation, the Unit was then mysteriously shut down and the staff sacked. The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn is that there was collusion between the irrigators and the Department, and an accommodation reached in which no investigation would proceed.

The consequences are now plain for all to see.

A disaster baked into the logic of the system

The logic of endless extraction, heedless of environmental consequences, has its inevitable outcome. We need only look to the experience of Uzbekistan with the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest body of fresh water. When the USSR commenced large-scale cotton production in the 1960s by diverting flows from the Amu Darya river that had replenished it for millennia, the levels of the Aral Sea began to fall. By 2014, as the image from Wikipedia shows, it was a tiny fraction of its former size.  Ecological vandalism on a grand scale has a price.

The fragility of ecosystems resulting from over-exploitation and over-extraction is now intersecting with the impacts of non-linear anthropogenic climate change, as recent research published in Nature Climate Change demonstrated:

The beginning of this century has seen an unprecedented number of widespread, catastrophic biological transformations in response to extreme weather events. This constellation of unpredictable and sudden biological responses suggests that many seemingly healthy and undisturbed [Australian] ecosystems are at a tipping point.

Reviewing various measures of the destructive impacts of the global industrialised capitalist food system on human and ecological health, I argued in a recent article submitted to the Australian Journal Of Environmental Education that

While these losses and costs are regarded as ‘externalities’ by agri-food corporations, such an accounting sleight of hand will merely delay the day of ecological reckoning. We contend, first, that the current industrial food system is not only undermining the health and wellbeing of large and growing numbers of people and the integrity of local, regional and global ecosystems and climatic stability. Secondly, we argue that by severely diminishing public and ecological health, the industrial food system is at the same time encountering its own biophysical contradictions: it is undermining the conditions of its own reproduction (Weis, 2010). It is thus not only destructive, it is self destructive, and thus unsustainable by definition. The case for transformative change is therefore overwhelming and urgent. How do we get from here to there? Following the pedagogical oeuvre of Paolo Freire (1970), we begin with the premise that critical consciousness-raising amongst large numbers of people is an essential pre-requisite to transformative change.

Building critical consciousness

So how do we build critical consciousness? There are no shortcuts. It will require the sustained and committed efforts of tens of thousands of activists in this country and all over the world.

As the crisis of the system intensifies, the contradictions and absurdities of the current political economy will become increasingly clear to more and more people. We know that is already happening in many, many ways – and the fishkill on the Darling is the latest of a growing ecological cacophony that is calling us to awake from our long decades of consumer apathy and begin to recover our power as political beings.

Rebellions are on the rise. Witness the Gilet Jaunes / Yellow Vests movement in France. The Extinction Rebellion in the UK. The mass strike of maquiladora workers in Matamoros, northern Mexico. These are expressions, both of the advancing distintegration of the hegemony of neoliberalism, as well as the growing levels of critical consciousness around the world as people come together to enter into struggle with the logic of the endless growth and exploitation of the system.

What happens next is up to us.

Selected articles published / linked on the #fishkill catastrophe, January 2019

 

Cry me a river: Mismanagement and Corruption have left the Darling dry, Helen Vivian, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 March 2018

Cubbie Station and Water Allocation Abuse, Tim Alderman, personal blog, 9 January 2019 (tweeted – original article 2 March 2017)

The fishkill is a tragedy, but it is no surprise,  Quentin Grafton, Emma Carmody, Matthew Colloff and John Williams, The Guardian, 14 January 2019

The other Murray-Darling wildlife disaster – it’s what you don’t see, Michael Pascoe, The New Daily,  15 January 2019

The Darling River is simply not supposed to dry out, even in drought,  Fran Sheldon, The Conversation, 16 January 2019

Fishkill highlights mismanagement of Australian waterways, Martin Scott, 25 January 2019, World Socialist Web Site