Our planet’s primal cry is to address the mess

IN the moments after he was born, my son gave a primal scream that shook me to the core.

There was something about his shout, and not just the tone and timbre, that was unmistakably me.

Clearly, he was not me. His birth and his fragile little body in my hands were clear proof of that, but there was something deep in the genesis of his first loud bellow that was unnervingly mine.

His voice was my voice or came from the same place. I felt it overwhelmingly.

An Indian doctor attending my son and his mum in the days after the birth said in some cultures a loud cry was a sign of a strong baby who would survive.

This was comforting, but confirmed, as I had suspected, my son was much louder than the other newborns in the Hobart hospital ward.

With his first cry, my son joined six billion voices on this planet.

When the British arrived to colonise this island in 1803, the world’s population stood at a mere one billion.

By the time the locals changed the island’s name from Van Diemens Land to Tasmania in 1856, a further 200 million had been added to the global tally.

However, it is in the past two decades that the global population has really taken off.

In the time my teenage son has been alive, it has grown by more than a billion to beyond seven billion and counting.

Most of these people want and have a right to expect the level of comfort to which we in the West have grown accustomed.

They want digital TVs, smartphones, computers, Alfa Romeos, leather jackets, luxurious homes, jobs, lounge suites, takeaway food, nights out on the town, overseas travel, gleaming whitegoods, and on and on.

A couple of months ago, I bought the computer I am using to write this column. The cardboard box it came in was recyclable but not the plentiful polystyrene packaging.

As the lady at the local tip told me: “There’s talk about plastic bags and bottles, but nothing about polystyrene. The amount that comes here is incredible, and doesn’t break down.”

Millions of Chinese and Indians have joined the world’s middle-classes in recent years and have bought new computers. Where is all that polystyrene?

Some will have been drawn into a vortex of plastic debris in the ocean northeast of Hawaii.

Often called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this is where currents drag our rubbish. The patch has been estimated to be bigger than Australia, but it is difficult to measure because it keeps moving, clumping together, spreading out.

Growing demand for com- in it fort and affluence is driving unprecedented industrialisation and economic growth, especially in China, India and South-East Asia. The resultant greenhouse gas emissions feed global warming.

The sea off Tasmania’s East Coast is among the world’s 20 fastest warming. Regularly recorded at 2.5C above average, this water was 4.5C above average during a recent 130-day marine heatwave.

Our state’s oyster, salmon, rock lobster and abalone industries are affected, and the giant kelp forests off Tasmania’s shores are all but gone because of it.

The rising level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic.

Since the West’s industrialisation, there has been a 30 per cent increase in acidity.

This has ramifications for things as enormous as coral reefs and as minuscule as the shell formation of krill.

Estimates based on current emissions indicate that by the end of this century, the ocean surface could approach 150 per cent more acidic, resulting in the highest pH level in 20 million years.

It is not just the surface of the planet under stress from our population explosion and our rapid industrialisation.

We are literally surrounded by rubbish.

Since 1957, more than 5250 space launches have left more than 23,000 tracked pieces of debris in orbit. About 1200 are working satellites, the rest is junk.

Most space junk, however, is not tracked. There are more than 750,000 pieces of dangerous debris orbiting Earth faster than a bullet fired from a gun.

They threaten satellites for telecommunications, weather, navigation, broadcast and climate monitoring, and are an increasing danger for any spacecraft trying to leave or return to the planet.

A conference in Germany last week called for a global response to space junk, but the plea was swamped by news of American President Donald Trump’s latest provocative tweets, the nuclear threats from North Korean President Kim Jong-un, and the tragic mayhem unfolding in Syria.

About 1000 babies will have been born into the world in the three or four minutes it took to read this column and, by the end of the day, 353,000 new babes will have bellowed their first primal scream.

Whether boisterous or meek, strong or weak, the survival of future newborns will depend not just on their own genetic constitution but also on our combined, cumulative effort to address the mess that is created by our industrious, populous species and which is suffocating the planet.

Perhaps if we all cry out together? On the count of three: one, two ...