Schweitzer saw it – why can’t we?

December 8, 2025

Our ever-growing population puts pressures on our housing industry to provide ever more accommodation. Calls to increase housing density – particularly in the major cities – are met with howls of protest from those whose amenity would be compromised by being overlooked by neighbours. This leads to urban expansion – in small towns as well as cities – as farmland or woodland is absorbed into the urban dream. The result is continued loss of the natural environment that our wildlife needs, to support the growing urban environment of taxpayers and ratepayers, with little consideration of the impact this continuing degradation will have on our children’s and grandchildren’s ultimate well-being.

What we are seeing is the normalisation of environmental decline. The natural environment is being destroyed, our natural ecology is shrinking, every day. Australia has the highest mammal extinction rate in the world. And most act as if none of this matters; that we can ignore our destruction of that which sustains us, and it will all somehow be OK for our children and our grandchildren.

As Albert Schweitzer observed in the 1950s: ‘Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.’