It’s a paradox that the very factor that has allowed
widespread, stable liberal democracy has had massive, negative ecological effects. This being
agricultural development in Australia, which before the Industrial Revolution had soils much too infertile for any sort of food production due to their extreme age and low levels of phosphorus, sulfur and micronutrients. However, once these problems can be partially overcome, Australia – with 30 percent or so of the world’s non-cryospheric land under 11˚ slope and before the Industrial Revolution less than 0.1 percent of its human population – has a huge comparative advantage in agriculture even with yields one-seventh those common in the rest of the world.
The result or widespread clearing of Australia is that powerful large landowning classes, which in most of Europe and the Americas and all of Asia had prevented or destabilized democracies before the “Green Revolution” of the 1950s, are rendered powerless, and that despite severe and growing problems with salinization, drying of rivers, loss of species almost unchanged from over 30,000,000 years ago, and runaway poleward climate shifts, the free market does nothing to encourage Australia’s landowners to manage their land more carefully because land is just so dirt-cheap. The 1950s and 1960s “Green Revolution” was the time when the large landowners who kept European authoritarians in power could no longer remain wealthy enough to influence politics, and consequently democracy would remain permanent across the whole continent wherever Stalinism had not taken control.
With no agricultural development in Australia and reduced development in the more infertile parts of Africa – the least dissimilar extralimital landmass to Australia – large landowners in Europe, Asia and the Americas would retain sufficient political power to thwart the development of democracy. As Dietrich Rüschemeyer showed in his 1992 book
Capitalist Development and Democracy, a powerful large landowning class has only once – in the United Kingdom – coexisted with democracy for more than a decade. Although Rüschemeyer does not go into this detail, it is clear to me that only in
cold, humid nations (or subnational entities) dependent upon forestry and fishing – like Scandinavia, New Zealand and the cold coastal parts of the Americas – would liberal democracy have developed with Australia remaining under native flora. As shown by Carlos Botero and his associates in
‘The Ecology of Religious Beliefs’ even primitive societies dependent on forestry and fishing tend to be atheistic and egalitarian in a manner completely opposed to either farming or herding societies. Thus, those societies with large-scale dependence on those industries would have remained
islands of liberal democracy (or of some other form).
To prevent large-scale democracy, one would have needed to prevent the large-scale clearing of Australia for agriculture, but I do know know how this would have happened. For one thing, how radically different in age and chemical and physical properties Australian soils are from those of other present-day continents was not known until the
1990s, a full twenty years after severe impacts had began. For another, even if they were known it is not likely entrepreneurs would accept even the severest warnings.