Since we first evolved between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, humans have altered the land on which we live. Our capacity to labour—to consciously shape our environment to better suit our needs—is our defining characteristic. There is nothing inherently destructive about this. For most of human history, our societies have developed without significantly damaging the ecosystems on which our survival depends.
Since the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, however, human activities have destroyed and degraded the world’s forests, grasslands, wetlands and other important ecosystems at an accelerating pace. Today, 75 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land has been significantly altered, and only 25 percent can still be considered wilderness.
As habitats have been degraded, disrupted and destroyed, biodiversity (the variety and number of living things) has been dramatically affected. The United Nations’ 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services estimated that one million animal and plant species are now at risk of extinction. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, which monitors more than 4,000 vertebrate species, population sizes have declined by an average of two-thirds in the last 50 years.
The impact on insects is less clear, but one of the most far-reaching studies to date, undertaken by a team of scientists from around the world and published in the journal Biological Conservation in January 2019, drew some alarming conclusions. The authors estimate that 40 percent of insect species face extinction “unless we change our ways of producing food”. Without insects, all life on Earth would be threatened.
Forests are particularly crucial to biodiversity. The world’s forests contain more than 60,000 tree species, 80 percent of amphibian species, 75 percent of bird species and 68 percent of mammal species. They are also crucial for soaking up carbon that would otherwise contribute to global warming.
Yet, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of the World’s Forests report, 420 million hectares of forest have been lost since 1990. Of this, 80 million hectares were primary forest—wilderness with no clearly visible indications of prior human activity.
About 80 percent of the deforestation is a result of clearing by agribusiness; 25 percent of the world’s ice-free land is used for cattle grazing alone. Brazil provides an example. While deforestation slowed in the 2000s, the rate is increasing again. In 2019, deforestation in the Amazon reached its highest level in a decade: almost a million hectares, primarily burned by cattle and soy farmers. In 2020, 336,700 hectares were lost in the first half of the year—a 20 percent increase from the same period in 2019.
It’s not only in Brazil that the rate of deforestation is climbing. Africa had the highest net loss of forest area in the last decade, an average of 3.94 million hectares disappearing every year. Clearing is particularly intense in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where an estimated 815 species of flowering plants are at risk and 26 species of mammals are classified as endangered or critically endangered. The country is home to 20 percent of the world’s remaining rainforest, including the Cuvette Centrale peat land in the Congo basin, which is the largest continuous tropical peat land complex in the world, covering 14.5 million hectares.
The increased deforestation is pushing us closer to tipping points that would result in large areas of global rainforests being transformed into savanna. This would result in significant and irreversible changes to weather and rainfall pattern across many areas of the globe.
Overpopulation isn’t the problem. Current agricultural production is sufficient to feed the world’s population one and a half times. The problem is the immense waste associated with producing food for the capitalist market, rather than planning production to meet human need. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2011 that a third of food produced is wasted or lost—a massive 1.3 billion tonnes every year.
Food waste is a major contributor to climate change too. According to scientists Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek, whose research was published in the journal Science in 2018, food waste produces around 6 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s three times the total emissions from the airline industry.
The issues with capitalist agriculture don’t end there. Replacing pristine forests with a small number of cash crops and grazing land for livestock may bring short-term profits to global agribusiness giants, but it undermines agricultural productivity in the long term. Biodiversity is crucial to food production. It assists with pollination (by maintaining insect numbers) and helps to preserve the purity of water required for irrigation and the fertility of the soil.
The organisation of capitalist agriculture is highly monocultural, nine plant species accounting for two-thirds of all global crops. This makes food production more susceptible to damage from extreme weather conditions, disease and other events likely to occur with increasingly regularity due to climate change. The natural diversity of staple crops provides some insurance against the possibility that mass-produced varieties may be wiped out by disease. The “wild cousins” of crops like potatoes, however, are themselves threatened by the advance of industrial agriculture.
The removal of carbon sinks via deforestation intensifies these threats to food production. The trade-off here is not between food security and climate change mitigation. Deforestation is bad both for the climate and for our long-term food security. The only winners here are those who profit in the short term. Continuing to organise the agriculture industry on this basis undermines the ability of the planet to produce sufficient quantities of food in a stable and ongoing way.
The COVID-19 pandemic can also be traced to capitalism’s destructive relationship with the land. Scientists have long known that the destruction of habitats, which pushes wild animals into closer contact with humans, risks unleashing new and deadly pathogens. The initial spread, in recent decades, of HIV, Ebola and Zika virus into human populations can be attributed, in different ways, to land use change associated with the expansion of capitalist agriculture. Scientists have identified this as a likely factor in the emergence of COVID-19 too.
Desertification is another threat. By reducing vegetation, it adds to global carbon emissions, thus contributing to further warming and the further expansion of deserts over previously vegetated land. There is still time to intervene and put human society back onto a more stable and sustainable footing. But brief reductions in the rate of deforestation and small-scale experiments in alternative methods of agricultural production won’t be enough.

Clare Francis

The dying lands

The Liberals' “job-ready” education bill has passed the Senate. It represents one of the biggest attacks on access to higher education in decades. University fees will more than double for law, commerce and humanities courses. Struggling students who fail half of their units will lose their access to the HECS system and pay even higher fees.
This brutal attack from the government is only the latest assault on higher education. Students and staff are facing attacks from the government and the universities themselves as the industry goes into crisis and is increasingly dominated by the market. But even with the pandemic badly affecting campus life, students and staff are resisting. Appealing to the conscience of university management or crossbench senators won’t work. These latest attacks need to be met with a wave of protests.
The new bill’s punitive approach to university education is only the beginning. The bill also pushes Australian universities further along the process of privatised funding. Government contribution to university funding was already in steep decline: from more than 85 per cent of funding in 1990, the government now supplies only 30 per cent. This bill cuts government funding by 11 per cent per Commonwealth-supported place.
In the past few decades, universities have made up for these cuts by ripping off international students, who pay up-front fees at three times the price paid by domestic students. International student fees accounted for 23.5% of university revenue in 2017. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed this free-market funding mode: the decline of international student enrolment has created an estimated $4.6 billion gap in revenue.
The government could respond by abandoning its free-market approach and properly funding the sector. Instead, it’s doubling down on the private model. Even the limited funding the government is handing over to universities comes with strings attached. The government is spending money to universities to work more closely with private education companies, or face their competition, in the roll-out of “micro-credential” short courses, for which the government is funding 20,000 places. The $1.2 billion in government funding towards university research announced as part of the 2020 budget is tied up in grants and schemes structured to reward “greater engagement with industry” and improving “commercialisation of applied research”.
The universities’ vice chancellors have been thoroughly complicit in this process. Universities Australia, the peak industry group for universities, supported the bill. The dominance of corporations at universities cannot be missed by any student or researcher: corporate logos are all over buildings and lecture slides. Universities promote their degrees as “industry-ready”; major corporations co-write curriculum content. University boards are stacked out with corporate heads. At my own university, the University of Western Australia, this comes with some bitter ironies. A new building sponsored by Woodside and BHP is used to promote the sustainable design of UWA. Rio Tinto sponsors significant sections of the archaeology department, to help whitewash its practice of destroying Indigenous land, including the 46,000 year old sacred site at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara.
Vice chancellors have run the universities themselves like profit-seeking private corporations, with significant “restructures” hitting staff and courses, using the justification of the COVID crisis. An estimated one in ten full time equivalent of staff in the sector are going to lose their jobs. Given the notoriously high rates of casualisation in the university sector, to the numbers of individual jobs lost will be far higher than one in ten.
Campus by campus, the university managements are announcing hundreds of job cuts: 818 at Melbourne, 945 at Monash, 941 at RMIT, 500 at UNSW. But these numbers still represent just a fraction of the overall job cuts: thousands of casual and contract staff, which make up just under 70% of university staff in Victoria, are no longer receiving work. Sydney University online has cut $93 million from its casual staffing budget since March.
These massive cuts are taking place alongside course restructures and cuts to units. As early as March, the University of Tasmania announced it was cutting 394 courses. At Macquarie university in Sydney 48 courses and 203 units are being cut. Monash university is slashing 103 subjects.
Restructures were already part of a new normal of Australian universities. Hundreds of staff sackings, including at the rate of almost 10% of the workforce, took place pre-COVID. Even the campuses least affected by COVID are pushing cuts. UWA claims it has a long-term budget deficit unrelated to COVID. The University of Southern Queensland has decided that now is a good time to spend money on investments. Curtin wants to ensure a budget surplus. When it comes to cutting courses and sacking staff, no university management will want to let a good crisis go to waste.
Students and staff are resisting on multiple fronts. Students have been protesting the federal fee hikes and funding cuts, and demanding the sector be fully government funded. The passing of the bill has only served to galvanise opposition, with a national day of action going ahead for October 14. Campus demonstrations have repeatedly targeted university managements to oppose staff and course cuts.
Students at the University of Sydney have also had to contend with the police. Cops have been sent university security camera footage of protests and invited onto campus by campus security, where they have shut down rallies, used horses to pursue protesters around campus, and hit student activists with $1,000 fines.
University workers are facing government underfunding, university administrations and in some cases, their own union. University managements have taken different approaches to the crisis: some have collaborated with NTEU’s officials to push through pay cuts of up to 10%, with the union leaderships’ support at nine universities: Monash, Adelaide, La Trobe, ANU, UWA, Queensland University of Technology, Wollongong, Western Sydney, and Tasmania. Others have attempted to push through contract variations without union support, or just skipped directly to mass sackings.
In all circumstances, a rank and file union strategy is necessary to defend staff jobs, wages and conditions. NTEU Fightback has been a crucial example of fighting rank and file leadership necessary to counter the national union strategy of concession and the acceptance of job cuts.
At RMIT, the NTEU Fightback group has pushed for large-scale systematic organising required to lay the basis for a strike campaign. This has included a raft of area meetings, developing a union stronghold based around the library, and putting together multiple online rallies of over 300 attendees.
At the University of Sydney, hundreds of staff attended workplace meetings over the last two weeks. 340 staff then voted to support a firm statement against job cuts, including the current proposal for round of voluntary redundancies, which leave the remaining staff overworked.
There will be no easy wins in this fight. Union strongholds with recent memories of successful strikes, like the University of Sydney, will have to engage the most number of workers and use all the limited enterprise agreement rights at their disposal to create a public opposition to university management and lay the basis for an industrial campaign involving strike action. Other campus staff will have to fight for any degree of opposition, hindered by union leaderships whose favoured strategy is concession–which only builds a culture of resigned acceptance of cuts.
The rampant casualisation of the sector aims to undermine resistance, with staff fearing for their jobs and not wanting to undermine their chances of getting work for the following semester. The experience of recent universities restructures is often humiliating and degrading, with staff of decades being forced to reapply for their old job at a lower pay rate, or told that they have to compete with close co-workers for half the numbers of staff positions.
Begging for concessions from vice chancellors who’ve overseen these restructures, or hoping that they’ll contest the corporatisation of higher education is a mistaken strategy that only adds to the submission of staff. A militant rank and file union strategy is necessary to resist these historic campus restructures. Just as bosses refuse to let a crisis go to waste, neither should our side. The COVID period has seen rank and file networks form on campuses without any previous structures, a necessary starting point for rebuilding a militant union strategy. For stronger campuses, the urgency of organising against campus cuts is crucial in organising the workplace for a substantial strike campaign.
But to fight the government and vice chancellors, universities across Australia will need militant student protest campaign. Mass student protest has pushed back Liberal governments in the past, preventing fee deregulation in 2014.
Some student politicians and NTEU email campaigns have focused on lobbying crossbenchers. That has proven to be a futile strategy: senators from the Centre Alliance are more interested in making deals with the government than with some pleading students. We need a militant student and staff fightback, with demonstrations and disruptive actions, to resist the restructures, privatisations and cuts to higher education.
 
Join the National day of Action on October 14:
National event: <a href="https://fb.me/e/1Ns06BwqI">https://fb.me/e/1Ns06BwqI</a> 
Sydney: 14 October, University of Sydney Quad Lawns "teach in" 
<a href="https://fb.me/e/3Mr9qjnHG">https://fb.me/e/3Mr9qjnHG</a> 
Melbourne: 14 October organising meeting for an in person protest which will take place on the 20th 
<a href="https://fb.me/e/4mSVDE0F5">https://fb.me/e/4mSVDE0F5</a>
Melbourne: 20 October, undisclosed locations 
<a href="https://fb.me/e/2UIezj0aJ">https://fb.me/e/2UIezj0aJ</a>
Canberra: 14 October, 1pm, Kambri at ANU 
<a href="https://fb.me/e/4CJjxWPwT">https://fb.me/e/4CJjxWPwT</a> 
Adelaide: 14 October, 1pm, Parliament Steps 
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/336400870929206/">https://www.facebook.com/events/336400870929206/</a> 
Perth:14 October, 12pm Reid Lawn, UWA 
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1090504564700426">https://www.facebook.com/events/1090504564700426</a>

Universities are facing an extraordinary attack. Students have to resist

Socialist Alternative’s Socialism 2020 conference in Perth over the weekend of 26-27 September, attracted more than 160 participants. The conference grappled with the overlapping political, social, economic and climate crises.
Capitalist classes around the world are willing to sacrifice workers and the oppressed to COVID-19 to keep profits flowing. The climate crisis is wreaking havoc, as historic wildfires, orange skies and smoke become a part of the new normal. While healthcare workers fight the pandemic in underfunded hospitals, militarised police brutalise protesters, murder people of colour and defend the far right. These issues were introduced in our opening panel—featuring Perth-based socialists Lian Jenvey, Nick Brown and Erin Russell—and continued across sessions on the rise of authoritarianism, police abolition, and pandemics and capitalism.
These conditions are producing death and destruction. But they’re also creating mass resistance, from Lebanon and Belarus to the centre of global capitalism, the United States.
We heard from radicals on the frontlines of this resistance. At the closing panel on Sunday, Khury Petersen-Smith, a Boston-based socialist, discussed heroic resistance across the US to racist police violence. Petersen-Smith celebrated the mass defiance, and highlighted the transformative process happening in every neighbourhood in which people are organising resistance and discussing the police, racism and capitalism.
Activists from the last major upsurge in global struggle, the 1960s and 1970s, addressed the conference. Gumbainggir radical Gary Foley spoke about the electrifying Black Power movement in Australia, which he was central to. US socialist Joel Geier—who was part of the Freedom rides and Berkeley Free Speech movement—spoke about the wave of struggled during the “long sixties” (1960-75). He gave an insider’s account of how the process of mass struggle radicalised a generation and far-left organisations mushroomed in size.
The discussions about resistance around the world today and throughout history aimed to guide our approach to organising in Australia today. Police racism, state repression, inequality and exploitation are central to Australian capitalism. These injustices need to be opposed here, and radicals need to be organised. As Geier concluded: “Our job is to build something now to prepare for the ongoing radicalisations. You've got to decide for your whole life, what side are you on?”

Turning rebellion into revolution: Socialism 2020 conference in Perth

“At the end of the day, is university about the profits you make or is it about the quality of education you deliver to the students?” Curtin University Business School pro-vice chancellor Tony Travaglione was given an examination on 21 March. He failed.
Travaglione was confronted by hundreds of business students whose lecturer has been sacked – a casualty of a wave of cuts that are sweeping Curtin University.
Education vice president of the Curtin Student Guild, Miranda Wood, led the students from their lecture to the business school foyer. When management refused to see them, students chanted “Stairs!” and proceeded to the fifth floor administrative offices for a sit-in.
Students demanded that the economics lecturer keep her job.
Answers were hard to come by from Travaglione, who continually deflected yes or no questions – prompting a student to heckle “You could be Tony Abbott, you never answer!”
The pro-vice chancellor ultimately blamed the mid-semester sacking on the NTEU, stating, “The reason that we’re in this position is that the union asked for further consultation.”
Clearly university management had wanted to push the redundancies through over the summer break when no one is around – a favoured move of universities around the country.
According to the NTEU, about 70 academic staff and 60 administrative staff have been made redundant across the university this year.
Student solidarity with staff and more protest actions against university management – and the federal government’s higher education cuts – are needed.

The dying lands

Universities are facing an extraordinary attack. Students have to resist

Turning rebellion into revolution: Socialism 2020 conference in Perth

Curtin Business School gets an “F”

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