Seeing Through the Apocalypse

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutatory at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame and confined in terms of things natural, wild and free.

ALDO LEOPOLD wrote his impassioned plea for a land ethic more than 30 years ago, three years after the holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But little has changed in America, (or anywhere else, for that matter.) Man is still intoxicated with his own technology, and through his creations he feels he must tinker with the forces of nature to accommodate his limitless whims and needs.

Our civilization rests on the dangerous assumption that man is master of the land and other animals, and lives as if he were totally independent from trivial things like ecosystems and food chains. But the simple truth is that man is an animal--albeit a very complex and highly developed one--who is, like all other animals, a mere citizen--not master--of the environment.

Every once in a while our existential dependency on the environment asserts itself. Even Harvard had to cancel its classes in the wake of the most massive snowstorm in Massachusetts' recorded history last winter. And more tragically, families living in New York's Love Canal have had to abandon their homes when chemicals dumped there 16 years ago came bubbling up through the ground, destroying trees and wildlife and unborn lives.

Since the onset of the Industrial Age and mass production, technology has been used to create an independent man-made community which exploits the environment for its own material profit. These tools--railroads to transport us, toilets to dispose of our waste, electrical power plants to provide fuel--are totally self-serving and often usurp the natural resources on which all life depends.

This use of technology has led to a society which thinks its heat comes from the furnace, or that its food comes from the grocery store. It is a society out of touch with the real forces beyond its control. "Constructive use of technology" has been misinterpreted in away that excludes nature from our existence. The managers of technology have used their tools to improve a material economy and a "human condition"--but not to support the environment which directly controls the human condition.

Ten years ago, no one in New York City thought about the stuff they flushed down the toilet. They didn't know--and probably wouldn't have cared--that the waste was collected and carried out on a barge and dumped in the ocean. However, when all the garbage began to gather in the middle of the ocean some people began to care. It was a thick, black, foul-smelling mass of sludge--described as "black mayonnaise"--perhaps 100 square miles in area. No one knew how deep. It came drifting back to the New York shoreline with a number of noxious odors and bacteria. Fortunately, disease and severe hardship was avoided because the threat was detected early. We may not be so lucky again.

THE ADVENT OF fission technology has vastly increased man's self-destructive potential, and has emphasized the imminence of holocaust. In addition to all the problems of industrial waste management and disposal, we are now faced with a more powerful threat--that of radiation poisoning.

The industrial engineers tell us that we can use nuclear power constructively--to aid our economy and keep it growing. The key assumption here is that the best medicine for our nation--and our world--is economic growth. As capitalism has become more firmly rooted in our way of life, the only object of our economy is continued and unlimited economic growth. This inevitably means more use of natural resources (ergo more waste), and better technology to exploit those resources.

It would be quite another issue if our technology as it is interpreted today made use of natural resources, restoring them to the environment in a way which would not disturb existing ecocycles, food chains, and land. But it does not. The only environmental compromise made by nuclear power advocates (as well as industrialists in general) is that they will do their job with "minimal damage to the environment", as Gov. William Milliken of Michigan recently put it. This half-hearted promise is simply not enough of a commitment, for two reasons.

Slow poison is poison nonetheless, and "minimal damage" amounts to gross environmental disturbance.

Secondly, the use of nuclear power necessitates our complete and perfect control of this resource to avoid massive and perhaps final disaster. Nuclear power advocates will admit that the chance of nuclear meltdown exists, though it is a very, very slim possibility. Are nuclear power plants as safe as Hooker Chemical Company believed its disposal methods at the Love Canal were in 1962? No one can know. In this sense, man's ignorance may seal a fate he has shaped.

The proponents of nuclear power compound their irresponsibility with the cavalier attitude they take toward the issue of nuclear disposal. They do not foresee any problems with their methods of nuclear waste disposal. Neither did the managers of the West German power plant which recently released radiation into the atmosphere from a truck accident with one of their disposal vehicles. Anyone who has driven a car knows it is impossible to anticipate a drunk driver, or a bad storm. Those who do not recognize the untimely risks of nuclear power, especially in the light of their dire consequences, have blinded their common sense with zeal.

Unfortunately, most of us must bear the consequences of decisions of the few men who control the direction of technology. These few--politicians, industrialists--must make their decision with broader vision, with eyes that see past jobs and Gross National Product. They do not.

Thus, it is no surprise to see Gov. Meldrim Thomson of New Hampshire react with riot police, mass arrests and full-page ads in The New York. Times which decry anti-nuclear protesters as soldiers for an un-American way of life--neo-Communist purveyors of revolution. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he is right.

THE anti-nuclear movement, along with the entire environmental movement, is nothing less than a revolution. It is un-American in that it rejects America's credo since the Industrial Revolution--unlimited economic growth. In this way, the environmental movement threatens the very foundations of American capitalism. It proposes alternative values for America. And so, the environmentalists--once shunned and ridiculed by Americans--find themselves embroiled in a deadly serious political argument.

But no one has the time to argue about politics. New values, rather than political argument, will avert environmental disaster. In order to assure our survival, we need first to re-establish our proper place in the cycles of the environment. We must restore and replenish the environment which restores and replenishes us.

The commitment to the land ethic which Leopold, Rachel Carson and modern environmentalists recognized asks that we recognize ourselves as part of the land, not as master of it.

Whatever a man's politics, whatever a man's job, his existence is contingent on the same elements. The dying condition of the environment of which he is a part behooves him to take whatever steps he may to save that environment and thereby save himself.

It makes no sense to advocate economic progress if, in the same breath, we enact our own destruction.