His new book, Here on Earth, proposes a rethink of the way we view our and the Earth’s histories. He talks to Olivia Edward about how Darwin dented our self-esteem and what we need to do to create real democracies here in the West

I grew up in Melbourne in a suburb called Sandringham on Port Phillip Bay. When I was very young, Sandringham was the edge of Melbourne’s suburbs and there was a lot of bushland nearby. By the time I was ten, most of that had been transformed into suburbs and the bay had been very grossly polluted. I think my sense of aggravation at seeing this terrible destruction of the natural world was the beginnings of my environmentalism.

I always wanted to be a scientist, but I did so poorly at maths and languages in high school that I wasn’t able to study science at degree level. I decided to be a high school teacher instead and took a degree in English and history. I absolutely loved it, but I knew that teaching wasn’t really for me. Luckily, there was a minerals boom in Australia at the time, so after graduation, I applied to do a Master’s in geology, and they accepted me because they were so desperate for geologists.

Here on Earth is a double history of human beings and the planet on which we live. I hope it allows readers to understand a little better the processes that made them and their world. In the past, we’ve been very focused on Darwin’s way of looking at evolution, but nothing survives in a world where survival of the fittest prevails. I think it’s time we re-evaluate the work of Alfred Wallace [the 19th-century naturalist who came up with his own theory of evolution by natural selection]. Charles Darwin was a consummate reductionist scientist who looked at the mechanism of evolution in great detail, whereas Wallace went on to look at what evolution had produced and saw this extraordinarily interwoven and cooperative world. How we perceive evolutionary science informs our thoughts about ourselves and our society. Darwin’s work made us think we were an ugly species, but just because the mechanism that created us is amoral and cruel and ruthless, that doesn’t mean we are. When you look at the world around you, what you see is cooperation. We’re in the middle of a great civilisation here and it’s based on cooperation between people.

Co-evolution is the reason megafauna largely only remain in Africa. They had half a million years to co-evolve alongside human beings and learnt to escape hunters. But when we finally got out of Africa, we met a whole fauna that didn’t even know what a carnivorous ape was, so was much easier to catch. We had escaped co-evolution, and it resulted in huge amounts of destruction and the extinction of many species. But you can only escape co-evolution for so long. Now we’re living in a globalised world where the last frontiers have been exploited and we’re going to have to co-evolve with our environment again and develop a more sustainable way of living.

It’s fantastic to see what’s happening in North Africa, the fall of these dictatorships and the first glimmerings of democratic processes in place. I think, in time, this will have an influence in sub-Saharan Africa. But the whole world needs to develop much deeper levels of democracy. No perfect democracies exist currently. In the West, our votes are degraded by the influence of business or wealthy individuals. Every time the government gives something away or receives a gift, your vote is degraded. We have a long way to go, but I think the North African revolution will eventually come to Europe and people will demand reforms.

In order to protect the planet, we need to change the technologies that generate our energy; we need to change our agricultural systems to a more ecologically based productive ecosystem; and we need to stabilise our numbers at the lowest possible level, which is probably about eight billion. In order to do that, we need to create a more equitable world. We need to help those who are in poverty, particularly women, to start limiting their family size. All this is happening, but too slowly. We’re genuinely in a race against time. My biggest fear is that we’ll get to mid-century, there’ll be a very large number of people on the planet, a shortage of materials, and still enough of the old power blocs left to start squabbling over the resource base. If that happens, then I think ‘Project Humanity’ is essentially finished, at least for the foreseeable future. There’s hope, but no room for complacency. This is the deciding century.

Curriculum vitae

1956 Born in Melbourne, Australia
1967-–72 Attended St Bede’s College, Mentone, Victoria, Australia
1977 BA (Hons) in English, La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia
1981 MSc in earth science, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
1984 PhD in palaeontology, University of New South Wales, Australia
1994 Published The Future Eaters
1998–99 Visiting professor, Department of Biology, Harvard
1999–2006 Director, South Australian Museum
2005 Published The Weather Makers
2007 Named Australian of the Year
2011–present Chief commissioner of the independent Climate Change Commission

May 2011