It is a slow return to work after the week long holiday in the wilderness around Mallacoota Inlet. The holiday was a leaving or escaping from a stressful urban life to replenish my health. It is the emotion that all the 4 wheel drive adverts appeal to as they sell their latest airconditioning bushbashing model for jaded middle class consumers. It is sad to see romanticism trashed.
The Croajingolong wilderness on the eastern coast of Australia near the Victorian and New South Wales border was such a contrast to the standard view that nature is an enemyand that it has to be tamed and reconstructed into an agricultural and industrial machine. Despite the inroads of industrial tourism and a history of local commercial fishing that had depleted fish stocks, there was recognition that wilderness had intrinsic value.
The latter view was embodied in the landscape we drove through as we travelled from Adelaide to the Great Dividing Range. The landscape had been shaped by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme. It assumed that technology can change for the better, that the power of science can solve all the nation's problems, that scientific practice is apolitical and that technology + science can provide the knowledge to harness natural resources for the benefit of the nation's population.
The Snowy Mountains Scheme embodied the view that modernizing country through science and techology was the role of the liberal state. Under this modernist ethos the broad development of the natural resources of the nation required a partnership between science and the state to undertake research and promote industrialization. The Snowy Mountains Scheme is a twentieth century icon of Australian modernity.
So the history of the landscape is one of rivers are transformed into organic machines and old growth forests become wood factories through the use of brute force technology. Tomorrow's bounty in the form of economc growth will be the result of todays technology (agriculture+electricity+dams) is the justification. This utilitarianism favours short-term economic considerations over long-term environmental ones.
Technology and science are then linked to the bureaucracies, universities and financial institutions by the political machinery to create a brute force politics that pushes aside all opposition to development.
That was the history of the landscape I drove through on the way to spend a week in the wilderness. That history is being reworked or transformed in the knowledge economy with biotechnology and genetic modification under a neo-liberal mode of governance under the guise of excellence. The shift is from creating the wealth of nations from physical assets (natural resources) to creating wealth from the nation's intellectual resources through the development of science-based industries. It is the commercial importance of science and technology that is stressed as the way to shape the nation state's future.
In the knowledge economy the loose linkages between the bureaucracies, universities, industry and financial institutions are tightened by the state to shape and structure the exploitation of intellectual capital for the sake of wealth creation.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 8, 2003 08:11 AM | TrackBackThe Croajingolong wilderness on the eastern coast of Australia near the Victorian and New South Wales border was such a contrast to the standard view that nature is an enemyand that it has to be tamed and reconstructed into an agricultural and industrial machine. Despite the inroads of industrial tourism and a history of local commercial fishing that had depleted fish stocks, there was recognition that wilderness had intrinsic value.
Posted by: on January 10, 2004 03:46 AM