Were we wrong to save the Franklin ...

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald:

Were we wrong to save the Franklin?

18 December 2007

Greenies are not the only group in society who revel in the mistakes of the past - those follies committed or intended by past governments, departments and companies in the names of greed or even honest misapprehension. But they do love it and, in their line of work, looking back in anger and confusion and frustration comes easier than it does for other people.

"Imagine that," they remark wistfully as they shake their heads. Loggers were just about to take down the blue gum forest in the 1930s when the chance passage of a group of bushwalkers led to a campaign that saved one of the wonders of the Blue Mountains.

Swim out into the azure brilliance of Jervis Bay and imagine how the nuclear reactor John Gorton wanted to build in 1969 might have improved the experience.

Until at least the 1970s a farmer in NSW could still be forced off a lease if he failed to clear it of all those inconvenient - and totally unproductive - trees, while bitou bush, an appalling weed blighting the coastline, was planted for more than 20 years by the Soil Conservation Service of NSW.

And that's just for starters.

What about Lake Pedder, the jewel of south-western Tasmania? The unique glacial lake with a beach of pink quartz was buried beneath the Upper Gordon River hydro-electric generation scheme in 1972, despite a campaign that was the genesis for the political wing of the environmental movement.

"The day will come when our children will undo what we so foolishly have done," postulated Edward St John.

Then came the Franklin Dam, the campaign that made Bob Brown, a campaign so successfully prosecuted it remains the shining jewel in every environmentalists' crown.

I remember 1983 vividly. It was the first election for which I bothered to enrol, specifically to save the Franklin. Bob Hawke's ascension was my first intense experience of the politics of the warm inner glow.

The dam was a curse, the case open and shut. Shane Howard's protest anthem captured the mood perfectly:

"The hardest heart could understand

"Just to feel your wilderness

"Your silence sings to me."

But with the world looking to Bali as the Arctic ice cap melts and as Pacific nations measure their future in decades rather than centuries, I wonder whether the perspective of passing time will smile as kindly on Brown as it currently does. Might, just might, the former Tasmanian premier Robin Gray - perhaps for all of the wrong reasons - have been right? Might Brown have been the environmental vandal?

Heresy, I know. There was no heart harder than Gray's, none more caring than Brown's and we - the royal we, those who campaigned and those who voted - saved the Franklin as a glorious piece of wilderness. Valuable in its own right, it would be doubly valuable because of the tourists who would raft its waters and marvel at it from the comfort of a motorised launch. Save forests and wild rivers and "rent" them to people who want to watch and walk and take photo of them, was the economic argument of the time. The further away those people came from, the more they were likely to spend, the better they were.

But, in a greenhouse world, it might be time to junk all that. Flying to Tasmania from London produces 3.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide for every traveller. Flying from NSW, or anywhere else in Australia, shrinks the carbon footprint, but only by degrees.

It makes no greenhouse sense to fly around the world and look at nature if, by the act of getting there, you're serving to hasten its destruction.

On the other side of the ledger, hydro-electricity would seem to make a whole lot more sense in a greenhouse world than, say, burning coal. Even deep green activists appreciate a light bulb - long-life, of course - or two and love to stay vigilant on the laptop. How many solar panels would we need to produce the power that would have come from the Franklin? How many will you put up in your backyard?

So, on one side we have an industry, tourism, that actually produces nothing, that lives off the fat of a wealthy society and which, for dollars earned, comes at a massive cost in carbon. And, on the other, a power plant that might have helped secure a cleaner energy future.

I wonder when it will be time to do the sums?

See - Were we wrong to save the Franklin?