WORLDWMCH
MAY e JUNE 1993 VOL. 6, NO. 3
CAN'TLIVE
WITHOUT
IT
FORTHE LOVE
OF GOLD
ROADTO
NOWHERE
BY ALAN THElN DURNING
BY JOHN E. YOUNG
BY MARCIA D. LOWE
1s advertising-with its urgings t o
improve our looks, our homes, our
status-at odds with the demands of a
sustainable society?
e
19 There's a worldwide gold rush going on,
and modern-day prospectors are literally
moving mountains to get at the precious
metal.
covEu lLLusTiiATloN BY JoHN CEBALLos
2 EDITORIAL
CLINTON'S TRADE-OFF
DEARREADER
NON-COMMERCIAL MESSAGE
4 LETTERS
PROMlSlNG INITIATIVES
OBSOLESCENT INCANDESCENT
Energy-saving compact fluorescent
lights are finally retiring Thomas
Edison's trusty light bulb.
IS DRY CLEANING ALL WET?
Standard dry cleaning "percs" up
your clothing-and the air and
groundwater. From out of the past
comes a chemical-fiee alternative.
VITAL SIGNS
Junk-free in America...new work for
the Khmer Rouge...chlorine-fiee at
the copier...priceless scarves.
CITINGS
g
9 WRONG TURNS
PLUNDER BEHIND THE
BAMBOO CURTAIN
China is ransacking Tibet's natural riches
and sending in so many settlers that
Tibetans have become strangers in their
own land.
37 TRENDS
OFF THE SCALE
Scarcity and rising prices are pushing
once inexpensive fish beyond the reach of
many of the world's poor.
"PUT IT ON MY CARBON TAB"
For every $200 you spend-no matter the
item or service-your weight in carbon
goes skyward. Herewith some budget tips.
39 WORTH READING
FLICKERING FIRE
Fierce Green Fire's history of American
environmentalism suggests-more than
the author intended-that success is
spoiling the green movement.
World Watch is printed on recycled paper
"Smart" car advocates promise trafficfree commuting via a computerized
highway system that wiil cost billions in
tax dollars. Don't buy it.
pounds of carbon a year, says National
Audubon. Recycling paper or glass
cuts emissions associated with their
manufacture.by 30 percent; recycling
eight aluminum cans cuts emissions
by a pound of carbon.
But the costs of emitting carbon
are delayed. The bill won't have to be
~aid
until well into the future-and
when it is paid, today's user of light
bulbs, paper? and aluminum cans will
not necessarily be among the people
who pay the most. The harm that may
come to a tropical beach or low-lying
country like Bangladesh originated
with carbon released far from there.
So it's easy for those invisible grams of
carbon t o slip t o the back of one's
Ultimately, reducing carbon emisficiently. The challenge now is to further encourage such changes, some- sions will depend on whether we intimes by using the same market forces. corporate their costs into the way we
By incorporating the costs of pollu- think about economics and the way
tion into the price for fuels, instead of we think about our lifestyles. By failjust the costs of extraction, decisions ing to do so, emissions will continue
over how carefully to use energy can to rise as if the atmosphere could absorb them for free.
reflect its real consequences.
Indeed, not only are carbon emissions unpaid for-they are unreported
and, hence, unconsidered. Every day,
newspapers recount retail sales and
BY VIKRAM AKULA
housing starts-but not the ernissions
associated with those trends. Journals
report the prices of a barre1 of oil, or
a ton of coal, but not the carbon con- A Pierce Green gire: The American American environmentalism.
Those new to the movement will
tent of either fuel. Energy analysts Environmental Movement, by Philip
pore carefully over up-to-the-rninute Shabecoff Hill and Wang, New Tork, find the book a useful history. Those
tallies of supplies of Middle Eastern or New York. 1993. 295 pudes. $25.00 more familiar with environmentalism
will enjoy the novel-like descriptions
North Sea crude oil, but they ignore hardcover.
and behind-the-scenes details that
the atmospheric effects of producing
only a seasoned journalist could proand burning their commodity.
nvironmentalism has come of vide. Those concerned about how the
The first step toward solving the
problem is gathering information and
age. What was launched more movement will handle its newfound
trying to understand it. Changes in than a century ago by a handful of success, though, may be troubledcarbon emissions may have a far preservation-minded naturalists, and not so much by what is in this book as
greater effect o n o u r lives than what swept across America as activists by what is left out.
Shabecoff divides environmentalchanges in indicators like the Dow rallied on Earth Day 1970, is today a
Jones stock index, so they should be powerful, professional mainstream ism into three waves. The account of
the first wave, which takes the reader
tracked carefully. Even though they movement.
But success is a double-edged from the emergence of the movement
are measured in kilograms instead of
dollars, carbon emissions are never- sword. When a movement becomes in the early 19th century to the middle
theless an economic indicator and a institutionalized, it risks losing the of the 20th, is somewhat slow going.
measure of society's prospects for the very ideals that inspired its creation. But Shabecoff's engaging portraits of
Philip Shabecoff's A Fierce Green Fire, the movement's founders pul1 the
Fortunately, more efficient new The American Environmental Move- reader through. He gives us, for in-
FLICKERING
FIRE
the higher cost of energy forced industry to find ways to use it more ef-
gives us a thorough, readable, and, at
times, interesting description of
39
-
which are reflected in today's policy
battles. Muir's preservationist ideals,
WORLD e WATCH
WORTH READING e Contd.
for instance. conflicted with the
emerging conservation ethic of
Gifford Pinchot, the chief forester under President Theodore Roosevelt.
Conservation. which seeks efficient
and sustainablé use ofpublic lands, ultimately won the day, and has guided
government policy ever since.
Shabecoff also brings us inspiring
excerpts from first-wave philosophers
such as Henry David Thoreau and fascinating accounts of conversations between the likes of mountain man
Daniel Boone and naturalist and renowned bird artist John James
Audubon. One of the best passages in
the book is Aldo Leopold's description (in his own words) of hunting
and killing an old wolf. In watching
the wolf die, Leopold comes to realize
the irn~actof human interferencewith
nature. This experience leads to his
"land ethic," in which he posits humans as but one part of nature.
The second wave had eauallv inspiring figures. Its heroes and heroines, though, were more diverse than
early environmentalists, and they drew
attention to a wider range of concerns.
There was the eloquent scientist
Rachel Carson and her Silent Spring of
1962, a clarion cail of alarm to the ravages of the insecticide DDT on bird
populations.
Meanwhile, activists such as David
Brower, "'the archdruid' of the conservation movement," and legendary
photographer Ansel Adams infused
new life into old-line environmental
groups like the Sierra Club. Even politicians-such as Senator Edmund
Muskie-entered the fold.
Al1 of these luminaries were important precursors to the true start of the
second wave: Earth Dav 1970. That's
when environmentalism emerged as a
mass social movement. "Some 20 million Americans, many of them young,
massed in the streets, on campuses, on
riverbanks, in parks, and in front of
government and corporate buildings
to demonstrate their distress and anxietv over the state of the
environment.. .A revolution, of sorts,
had begun," Shabecoff writes.
Shabecoff's account of the second
L
MAY JUNE 1993
J
wave is more engaging than the first
because he is more involved. He adds,
for instance, personal testimony such
as a moving account of the Exxon
Valdez oil spill. "Of al1 the damage 1
observed there," he writes, "none saddened and angered me and millions of
television viewers more than seeing
seabirds, otters, seals, and other anim a l ~coated with viscous oil and struggling-hopelessly in most cases-to
stay alive."
He also draws on first-hand knowledge to provide vivid sketches of the
players in the second wave. He describes Richard Ayres, founder of the
Natural Resources Defense Council, as the "boyish-looking and
deceptively mild mannered crusader," while
James
Ronald Reagan's
Secretary of the
Interior, garners a more villainous sketch. "Tall, gaunt, and
dressed in funeral black, with
glittering eyes and a wolfish
smile beneath a shiny bald
pate, Watt descended o n
Washington like an Old
5
Testament prophet
bearing sword and
scripture," writes
Shabecoff.
The third - '
wave begins
with the gush
administration. By this time, 1970
Earth Day activists had shed their beli
bottoms and tie-dyed shirts and had
become "more pragmatic and professional." The movement, explains
Shabecoff, abandoned the direct action and youthful idealism of the first
and second waves and relied instead
on skilled advertising campaigns and
mass marketing, experimented with
economic incentives and cooperation
with industries, and explored technological solutions.
Although Shabecoff at times calls
for a bolder program, he generally endorses the more recent approach.
"The idea is not to abandon our economic system but to strip it of those
parts that threaten not only the
long-term health of the environment
but the long-term health of the
'
economy as well," he states.
But are Shabecoff and the contemporary environmentalists preaching a
false prophecy? Such faith in reforming an ecologically destructive
economy, after all, is reminiscent of
the fate of farmers in the American
Southern Plains states in the 1940s.
After suffering through the drought
and erosion of the Dust Bowl a few
years earlier-one of the most severe
of America's environmental tragedies
and an event that merits just one paragraph in Shabecoff's book-these
farmers went back t o the
profit-maximizing commercial farm-
-
ing that caused the original catastrophe. And Dust Bowl-type conditions
returned in the 1950s.
Environmental historian Donald
Worster explains in D ~ s Bowl,
t
the
Southern Plains in the 1930s that reformers had "offered farmers a technological panacea for ecological destructiveness,when the root issue was
motivation and values-a deeply entrenched economic ethos." Today's
mainstream environmentalists seem to
be offering the same, although the
technological panaceas-pollution
credits, full-cost accounting, and corporate environmentalism-are more
sophisticated. Perhaps the descendants
of Muir, Thoreau, and Leopold could
learn a lesson or two from the Dust
Bowl. Unfortunately, they won't find
those lessons in Shabecoff's boolc.