We would now welcome questions from the audience to any member of the panel. Would anyone like to start? Reflections, views on Ecology how it may relate to Science and Art with specifics to some of the talks. It's really up to you now.

In thinking about art and science, I've been working on a project myself to do with the ecology from a visual arts perspective and what struck me as I was researching it, was to discover that only 9% of Australians ranked the environment as an important social concern. I was particularly shocked by that and when you look at the fact that only 9% are interested, combined with the fact that there are only a small number of people that are interested in the visual arts, I guess it makes it very problematic in terms of educating people about what's happening in the environment. I suspect that most people are unaware of what it means to use electrical power to heat their houses and the like. I was wondering if anyone wants to comment on that. I think that what both the arts and science face is the sort of lack of interest I guess, in the broader population.

Can I start? I think the basic problem is that as we've moved from being a largely rural society to being an almost totally urbanised society, most people are simply not aware of the ecological foundations of their lifestyle. You turn the switch and electricity comes. You go to the supermarket and food is there. You turn on the tap and water comes. So people aren't aware of the extent that they are totally dependent on natural systems. In a sense I think it's a failure of our education in general and schools science in particular which is a campaign I've been running for most of my adult life. Most school science deals with abstractions that have no conceivable relevance to people in their everyday life. People leave school having had a science education but not being aware of the extent to which we are totally dependent upon natural systems to survive.

There are also many different surveys of peoples interest in environmental issues compared to say issues of economy. There have been survey's in South Australia for instance, that show between 86% and 93% of South Australians reject nuclear waste dumps depending on the class of question that they're asked - whether you ask about low level waste or high level waste. The answers from such surveys are very dependent on who has put them together and what their motivations were and how they've compared people's interest in perhaps employment or some of the other economic indicators. I don't think it actually reflects a lack of interest and desire on the part of the population in environmental sustainability.

I am very interested about the point you make on the underground waters in Sydney. I've been in Australia since 1989 and I tried to read and talk to people and hear about what is going on. It was only last year when I heard the story about the Artesian Basin, that the Western Mining Company got the rights to pump 42 million litres of water a day. Then they contaminate it with uranium in the process then they dump the same water back into the Basin. And I asked if there has been any ecological or geological study. I say to people - you know that they pump 42 million litres of water and they say 'But we don't drink that water'. But we don't know where that contaminated water is going. So that's one point about the ground water in this country.

This is a slide from the First National State of the Environment Award which illustrates the problem with ground water. The blue curve is the discharge from the all flowing bores in the Artesian Basin. The red curve is the number of bores drilled. And the time line starts in 1890 and ends at 1990. The point is that we have been drilling bores continuously more and more over the last 120 years. Production from the Artesian Basin peaked in about 1920 and has been declining ever since and is now about a third of the peak level. There's this concept that we don't have to worry about water because there's this huge Great Artesian Basin, which is one of the worlds great ground water reserves and we can just keep pumping it out. In fact we've been running down that resource for nearly 100 years. And the fundamental reason is that we extract water from it at about a million times the rate in which it's replenished by natural systems. And even an economist ought to be able to work out that you can't keep doing that forever. It's part of a whole range of general problems where historically we've behaved as if resources were unlimited. And it's the capacity of the Earth to absorb our waste is unlimited. And we're just now in this generation I think learning the lesson that resources are finite and the capacity of the Earth to absorb our waste is finite. But that needs to be permanently part of our consciousness so that instead of just environmental impact statements we also have resource impact statements and social impact statements so that rather than just approving everything that makes money we think about the long term implications of the choices.

As you've said, there is in this case a continuum between an environmental issue and human rights. The water that Western Mining withdraws from the Great Artesian Basin is the source of the natural flows to unique and fragile ecosystems in South Australian mountain springs. Those mountain springs are of significant spiritual importance to the local people who are the traditional owners of that area. So the issues to Western Mining of simply taking the resource, and it is true they do take, they have a license to take for a period of 40 years 42 million litres a day free of charge from a public water resource, and they can take that water effectively with protection under an indenture, a particular piece of South Australian legislation that means that they are exempt from the Environmental Protection Authority for instance in South Australia. And they have been taking that water over time and causing what some believe to be significant ecological implications on the mountain streams, which in that case are a human rights issue because of their cultural and spiritual significance to the local Indigenous people.

I'm what you might call a recycled scientist and I am now an artist and I strongly agree with Ian Lowe, but how do you get the education of kids in suburban areas to think globally and act locally when you show them a plant and say what sort of plant is it and they can't even recognise a tomato or a strawberry. That's a big problem. How do you change that? How do we as beginners here, starting locally try to think globally and act locally?

I'm not sure that scientists in Government is the answer. The only person with professional qualifications in science that has been a senior elected leader in my lifetime is Margaret Thatcher and I'm not sure that that example inspires me to think that you'll get more rational decision making if you have scientists in charge. What is clear though is that decision making should be informed by science. I think it's probably more important for scientists to be advising Governments than to be sitting there trying to simulate interest in boring speeches about the trade weighted index or the balance of payments. In terms of getting kids aware of our dependence on natural systems, a young women was telling me just last week that her primary school in a Brisbane suburbs had a scheme where by every year the year six kids spent two weeks living on farms in rural Queensland. And she said that to almost all of them it was almost a religious experience to milk cows and pick beans and see fruit being harvested. To get some sense of their dependence on the food production system because historically they had just seen milk as magically appearing in bottles in the supermarket. So I think the easiest ways to start is exchanges which can be at the school to school or area to area level. In this case it was one teacher with a bit of initiative who arranged an exchange so that for two weeks the kids from 'whoop whoop' came and lived in suburban Brisbane and the kids from Brisbane lived in 'whoop whoop', and they both walked a mile in someone else's shoes. I think just simple things like that can make a big difference.

I've got a question for the three artists here. I keep going back Fiona to your issue of what that sense of responsibility the Artist has. And I was thinking about Martin's project in Tasmania and wondering Martin, if you saw yourself as an interventionist in that project, because it seemed to me that you were interested in both sides of the story and in telling a human side of that story but at the same time you are a very strong ecological spokesperson. So I am kind of curious about this dilemma that Fiona raises. So it is a very broad question or is it more to do with the artists' sense of responsibility and how you see your role as spokesperson in relation to artists as spokespeople, because clearly there is a message there that needs to be told. How do you think you can tell the story in a different way to the way that an artist tells the story?

I think that from my personal experience it's been quite a steep learning curve in terms of believing in my own voice and also in being able to slip into a situation whether it's a mixture of politics or social issues, you have to get in at a low profile. You have to be, speak when you're spoken to and you play it that way to start with. If you go in with an obvious agenda you're viewed with suspicion straight away. The other aspect of my own development is that it's only through the responses to my work and my deepening involvement that I have had the sense of my own voice to be able to start to make statements about that kind of thing. And that's still a learning situation for me. In regards to the exhibition at the moment, I'm going to actually put together a little hundred word text that describes a little more about what's going on in the images because a lot of the time I play a game where here's something beautiful but it's toxic. And that's not really coming through, I think, in the context that it's in at the moment. It's quite a nice mechanism to draw someone in with an aesthetic appreciation and then throw it back in their face and tell them that it's acid. And so I've got to be a little bit, metaphorically, I'm still kind of developing the process by which I make that explicit without people saying, 'He's an Environmental Artist. He's a one issue kind of worker'. I guess that's where I've come from.

I think for myself, the problem was, I mean I didn't think I was going to change Eventist's outlook on anything whether I did anything there or not. So it was more a matter of what I could do that was perhaps worked on a very more subtle terms if I did anything that was making some comment about the length of time for everything in our natural world to evolve until now and how quickly we are suddenly wanting to change all of that. But I think another problem for me, people pointed this out to me with varying degrees of horror, was well what do you feel about sleeping with the enemy and tarnishing your own reputation particularly for going with a dirty company like Eventist Crop Science. Yeh, that was a big issue for me on a personal level really. And I had decided that if it had gone ahead that I would have given the money, which wasn't going to be very much I don't think, that we Artists would have been paid for our designs and so on, I was going to give that to some environmental organisation. I hadn't decided what, but this is me obviously, you know it's a bit like putting coins in the collection box at church. It doesn't make very much difference but it was like easing my conscience a bit and I was sort of beginning to think I'd made good friends in Sri Lanka which are trying to set up, this might sound really odd to us, like a plant nursery that would grow indigenous plants for sale because you go to a plant nursery in Sri Lanka and they're all tropical things but they're form South America or wherever. And getting indigenous plants, getting people there to put in indigenous plants in their garden is just the same as here. So I was thinking that on a very small, in a very small way, the way that I could make some kind of a difference and ease my conscience would be to turn that profit that I would have got from working on the project, giving that to something small but where it would have great use. So I don't know if that answers your question but in that particular case, yeh.

The moral dilemma about what you say and what you do and what you present is pretty easy for a farmer because people can come and look. They can make their own judgments and they can see your management. And I tell you that if you have the eyes of the farmer it is a wonderful thing all round the world, anywhere, to see who manages pickles best on a Greek island, who's the best goat farmer. It gives a extraordinary amount of interest and it does bring the acute moral dilemmas of help of the environment versus all the other things that society requires, brings that into very sharp focus. So credibility of what I say and in my, comes from my credibility as a farmer in my community but I also like to take on environmental landscape art projects in terrain that other people consider totally impossible and particularly when it's infused with salt. So to take on the northern entrance to the industrial town of Port Pirie through the largest sand fly tidal salt swamp in the Southern Hemisphere and through the rubbish and litter and through the disregard of the years, was exactly the sort of environmental project that I was interested in. It involves community. It involved the different attitude to land and land management. It involves some sense of ownership by the community after the planting stages but during the growing and nurturing and looking after. And to me it will be, if it's successful, a small revolution in land management in that area.

Do we have one final question perhaps?

Firstly Fiona, fantastic work which seems to me to be an antidote to what I've longed for the drop lease' syndrome in corporate environmental reporting. It's what happens when as the designer is doing the final version of the cover of the company's environmental report and they've got the smoke stacks and the chemical plants all very nicely and the name of the company, the company executive comes through and says, 'Wouldn't it be nice to have this on it.' And they drop a leaf on it and they're literally reports like this. Have a look at the Oracle report, ICI report from a couple of years ago. That's exactly how it was produced I guess. But I raise this as a comment really about the problem of green wash. The possibility that Artists are easily coopted into the world of corporate environmentalism. Which has its benefits in some ways but is also now notorious for producing a green wash. For saying that we're green when we're not. And it raises the question that I wanted to put to the panel which is about the institutionalisation of the Artist in this domain that we are talking about, environmental management. Ian Lowe has mapped out the roles of Artists and Scientists in doing this kind of work. But the question is where will they be located and how would it be structured? So for example, do any of you see a future in which some of the technical decision making, committees which the Federal Government is fond of setting up, and not only made up of Scientists but there are also Artists at the table on a regular basis. Or Ian would you see the State of the Environment Report process opened up to have panels which, or standing committees which do include Artists. Any comments on that? I think we've seen some projects, The Sunrise Twenty One Project is an interesting one which brought Artists together with decision makers. But where's this headed? What price that kind of management structure? And there's a final sort of comment on that, inside the Australia Council there's a move to implement a new program, we call it Arts and Well Being, which is about trying to fund culture workers to more adequately partner up with decision makers that might be making decisions across health and environmental areas. And we are not sure how to do it. So how do we do it? What are the structures , the institutions of the future in which Artists and Scientists would work together on environmental management?

I'll start off on. You're absolutely right about the cover of the corporate brochure. I was flicking through stuff last night and Eventist Crops' got like a sunflower or something on the cover of theirs. It's just a happy yellow flower with bright green leaves; very innocuous. Personally I would love to be on a, some sort of committee, government committee, science committee or whatever that actually could give some sort of a voice to these environmental issues. I'd like to think I've earnt my place as an Artist, but in lots of ways I also think that art practice is a bit of a soft indulgence. And I would like to think that on that committee I could go beyond the point of just self indulgence of making the work and make, earn the right coming from the part of culture that is the Arts to have a voice in that way. But often I find that just working by myself on my projects that it does seem self indulgent and it would be a great way to be there and have a voice and perhaps make some kind of contribution in ways that I frustrated by, I can't particularly at present.

A very good question. From my experience working with the mining company, it's a bit like being on a special operation. You have to go in in camouflage to start with or they don't take you seriously. And I mean that literally in a mining town. If you wear the King Gees and the work shirt, it doesn't matter if you're an Artist. They'll interact with you quite differently. So gaining the credibility within the organisation but at the same time you have to maintain your own drives and the ability to make calls that are against, or controversial to what the organisation might think. There's some discussions yesterday about some Artists just being employed to window dress corporate, the drive for corporate success. I think that's a really tricky one because Artists traditionally, unless there's a really strong Artist workers union to protect your rights in a working situation like that, it's very difficult for you to have very much of a force and you may well just be a marginalised unit who gets asked how do you feel about the cover of our science report rather than the potential, for example at the mine I worked at, landscaping and revegetation; how best to deal with some of those issues. There's been some great ideas put forward by some people I work with to do with ecological bombs. Setting up a machine that had seeds and hummus etc in a container that you could fire off into the landscape to regenerate them. Now that would work quite nicely in Queenstown but the mining company's very touchy about it. I guess in terms of how you would then incorporate the views of an Artist into a wider, whether it's a government or a state government situation. Again I haven't seen many examples where Artists are really valued as spokespeople for the cultural sector really. I think that's probably a minority that actually get that kind of voice. So we need to kind of work that out.

If I might just say that when I'm on a committee I'm there to do something in particular. I don't actually like being on committees. I take it as a vocational thing to deal with salt. I take it as a vocational thing to deal with land and land management and altering peoples attitude to land and management, to looking beyond their boundary fence, to understanding landscapes beyond catchments, beyond regions into large areas. And we've got to be able to do that. But people actually have to understand it, understand the landscape processes that form those landscapes. When I say that Australia needs to understand how our continent evolved to deal with salt because salt exists everywhere. Even in the richest land that they think had no salt in the Western District, there is salt. There is salt everywhere. It is a component of the Australian landscape. It must be taken into account. So my Art things, lets say on my Reserve Planning Committee I say, 'Go to Greenaway Art Gallery. I've built two Mallee Root Installations. They've both very relevant. They're both to do with conservation and management issues, fire issues, major issues that cover Australia.' Do you think they're interested, no. So the Art audience is a different audience unless you can change it. I can change it when I'm building a Mallee Foul nest outside somewhere like Mildura Art Gallery and the buses arrive and the women go into the gallery and the men come and kick the roots and talk about them. And talk about barbeques and all this sort of thing. It's an entr??It's a way that I am allowed to then tell a little bit of a story. But there are limits to that. And although the Artist works without limits, there are still limits to what it can achieve and limits to the audience, and limits to the scale of your reach. But according to me there are things that I am passionate about and that if I am then I can't avoid it and I've got to do it.

Well from the session on the insights of Science and Arts to Ecology, we very much see that Ecology is how we see our lives. And that we've all best looked to how we participate in Society's decision making to bring about an ecological sustainable future that we would prefer. If you would all like to thank our panel again.

Can we all thank David for doing such a fantastic job of chairing today. Thank you David. I actually think that the questions you raised Paul will feed directly into what we discuss at the plenary session which is the kind of 'where to from here' issues that we should be addressing. Not only from this session but from the other sessions we've listened to over the last couple of days. We're running a little bit over time but perhaps if people want to stretch their legs and go to the loo or grab a glass of water or have a cup of tea downstairs, then we'll assemble back here in about ten minutes for the final plenary session. Thank you for all of the speakers and David.