Conservation
and National Security
David Brower
Berkeley, California November 11, 1981
Prelude
First a perspective, with prejudice, and Les Pengelly's warning
that you cannot reason prejudice out of a person because it didn't
get in that way:
If you compress the earth to the size of an egg, all the water
on earth is but a drop, the air liquefied for comparison but a droplet,
and the soil a speck barely visible to the naked eye. Drop, droplet,
and speck make the earth unique in the universe, and we rush to
obliterate the difference. We should not.
Compress the earth's time to the Six Day of Creation, with Sunday
midnight marking the beginning, and you find that life begins Tuesday
noon, oil formation Saturday morning, dinosaurs on stage at four
that afternoon and off stage by nine that evening, something like
man five minutes before midnight but still Neanderthal eleven seconds
before midnight. Not until one and a half seconds before midnight
did we take up agriculture, a quarter of a second Christianity,
a fortieth of a second the Industrial Revolution, and two-thousands
of a second the strange addiction to exponential growth in our attack
on resources that are not renewable. It is midnight, and we find
ourselves almost incorrigibly enchanted by the illusion that what
worked so briefly can go on and on. It cannot.
Second, a conservation credo that could lead to national security,
to be accompanied by whatever scenes flash through your mind and
whatever music pleases you:
There is but one ocean though its coves have many names;
a single sea of atmosphere, with no coves at all;
the miracle of soil, alive and giving life, lying thin
on the only earth, for which there is no spare.
We seek a renewed stirring of love for the earth.
We plead that what we are capable of doing to it
is often what we ought not to do.
We urge that all people now determine
that an untrammeled wildness shall remain here
to testify that this generation had love for the next
and hope for a greater wisdom than we have yet known.
We would celebrate a new renaissance.
The old one found a new world to exploit.
The new one has discovered the earth's limits.
Knowing them, we may learn anew
what compassion and beauty are,
and pause to listen to the earth's music.
We may see that progress is not the accelerating speed
with which we multiply and subdue the earth,
nor the growing number of things we possess and cling to.
It is a way along which to search for truth,
to find serenity and love and reverence for life,
to be part of an enduring harmony.
Lecture
Let the twenty second Albright Lecture begin with words from a
book published two years before Horace Albright graduated from this
campus (and two years before I was born a few blocks from it).
In 1910 Charles Richard Van Hise wrote in The Conservation of Natural
Resources in the United States, "...the period in which individualism
was patriotism in this country has passed by; and the time has come
when individualism must become subordinate to responsibility to
the many." He realized that "we cannot hope that we shall
be able to reverse the great law that energy is run down in transformation,
or that we can reuse indefinitely the resources of nature without
loss." He wondered what changes in social structure would result
"when people begin to feel pinched by meager soil and the lack
of coal." (He had already concluded that the greatest use for
petroleum would be as a lubricant, and had not contemplated that
automobiles would use any.) He concluded that "the paramount
duty remains to us to transmit to our descendants the resources
which nature has bequeathed to us as nearly undiminished in amount
as possible, consistent with living a rational and frugal life."
He concluded: "In a few thousand years man has risen from the
level of the savage to the height of the great creations of science,
literature, and art... It is in order that humanity itself may be
given an opportunity to develop through millions of years to come
under the most advantageous conditions that we should conserve our
natural resources, and thus make possible to billions of future
human beings a godlike destiny."
And his text ended with a familiar line: "Conservation means
'the greatest good to the greatest number - and that for the longest
time.'"
Even as he was writing, people were forgetting a critical part
of that definition - for the longest time." They were already
eroding and ignoring the Declaration of Governors adopted May 15,
1908, at the White House conference for conservation of natural
resources called by President Theodore Roosevelt. Van Hise himself
had not begun to appreciate the devastating forces about to be unleashed
by the addiction to exponential growth. He foresaw, for example,
that the burning of coal could cause trouble, and cited a physicist
who had identified the greenhouse effect by 1896 and had predicted
that if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 2.5 to
3 times its 1896 value the temperature in the arctic regions must
rise 8 to 9 degrees Centigrade and produce a climate as mild as
that of the Eocene period (abundant vegetation existed in Greenland
then). Van Hise suggested that "the coal consumption may become
so rapid as to accomplish this in 1000 years or less."
How quickly have we reduced that thousand to 200 or less! And how
firmly have we refused to take individualism out of our patriotism,
or extend patriotism to include an ardent love for an entire earth!
But it is not too late. And we can still care about the millenia
yet to spin out, and be concerned about the largest population of
all. That consists of the billions of people to come, and all the
billions of children they will wish to have and see grow up with
hope in all those millenia. Their genes are now in our custody.
Quite a responsibility, that one!
We have work to do. Today "the longest time" is being
given the shortest shrift in history. There is no greater threat
to national security or to the global security to which our own
is inextricably tied, than the present rampant discounting, Of the
future - the economists' greatest sin. It fuels the insane contest
now being exacerbated by the superpowers. That contest can, in a
moment's confusion, bring the nuclear exchange that would end forever
the dream of a "godlike destiny" for humanity. It would
also extinguish the biological diversity any benign successors would
need. As President Carter said in his farewell address, World War
III would be brief.
Ray Dasmann, who gave the Albright Lecture in 1976, says: "We
are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to say we are
winning it. It is the war against the earth." We were warned
of this a decade ago in Blueprint for Survival, by Robert Allen,
Teddy Goldsmith, and the team from Britain's The Ecologist. More
warning came in the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth and Mankind
at the Turning Point. The alarm was sounded in Stockholm in 1972
at the first major international conservation conference. In spring
1980 the International Union for Conservation of Nature urged, after
a long study joined by many nations and scientists, that a world
conservation strategy was essential, and they published How to Save
the Earth, by Robert Allen, but not widely enough. The Brandt Commission
increased global anxieties in its study of the North versus South
conflict. The Global 2000 Report to the President was issued in
July 1980 after three years' preparation, to bring the warnings
splendidly up to date. The Global Tomorrow Coalition of more than
fifty U.S. organizations is trying to keep the warning system operable.
Meanwhile, Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, and David Stockman try to
dismantle the system; signs saying "Bridge Out" annoy
them.
Not to let earlier prophets be forgotten, be it known that all
these warnings were anticipated in an extraordinary book published
in 1960, drawn from an exhibit assembled by the Sierra Club in 1956,
both under the title, "This Is the American Earth." Both
were instigated by the 1975 Albright lecturer, Ansel Adams. The
text and design were by Nancy Newhall. All in all, I have known
fourteen of the Albright lecturers, but worked with Ansel Adams
more than with all the rest combined. Most of that work was on the
exhibit, the book, and the many good things they led to.
For one thing, This Is the American Earth led to nineteen other
Sierra Club books in the same format and to ten more published by
Friends of the Earth. For another, it led to Justice William 0.
Douglas. He called the book "one of the great statements in
the history of conservation." He was soon thereafter to serve
on the club's Board of Directors. This in turn led to a letter from
him to me that is one of the high points of my life. He had attended
a Ford Foundation dinner, had there been told that they wanted his
recommendations about how to reorganize their conservation program,
and he ended his letter with "What shall I say?"
Robert Golden and I (he was on the club staff) put our heads together.
With coaching from Dr. Dan Loren, well known in natural-resources
circles on this campus and many others, we devised a five-point
program. justice Douglas put it in his own words and presented it
to the Foundation, where most of it seems to have been ignored.
He asked me to follow up and I tried, first presenting it to the
public at the Sierra Club's 1963 Wilderness Conference in San Francisco.
(It was also published in the 1964 annual Sierra Club Bulletin and
in Friends of the Earth's Not Man Apart shortly after Justice Douglas
died.)
Let me present those five points to you now, briefly and in reverse
order. Four of them are as essential as they ever were, and the
last is the most important task there is, I submit, for all of us.
We called first for a program to build careers in preservation.
We noted the need to balance the "wise use" graduates
with guardians of reserves, and to give status to both kinds of
careers, not just wise users. We wanted to inculcate ecological
literacy in all fields, and still want to. We need guardians of
reserves in a broader sense - genetic reserves, places where the
biological diversity of the earth can keep diversifying. Zoos and
seed banks are fine for those who like them, but aren't even a down
payment on survival.
Next we asked for a crash program for reserving the irreplaceables.
Private philanthropy must be relied upon, we thought, for revolving
funds with which to buy and hold certain key areas, particularly
those in which wilderness and biological diversity are paramount
and threatened. The funds would revolve whenever it was politically
possible for the government - the commonwealth - to exercise its
responsibility for the commons. The Ford Foundation liked the idea
and provided a six-million-dollar line of credit to the Nature Conservancy
to help carry it out. In our present situation the need is greater
than it was then. We need a thousand times that much now, across
the whole foundation front.
Third was a plan for the reinterpretation of nature - a conservation
education program. The objective would be to inform the public as
promptly and thoroughly as possible about ecosystems and peaceful
stability - more about which in a moment. The reinterpreters would
need to avoid economic and natural-resource cliches and would be
prohibited from saying interface, elitist, input, output, parameter,
paradigm, prioritize, or holistic - the latter, as Les Pengelly
observes, being used as a noun, an adjective, and a substitute for
thought.
Fourth, we wanted a center for the advanced study of ecosystems.
This was the brainchild of the late Edward H. Graham, of the Soil
Conservation Service, who proposed it in 196 1, the year of the
first Albright lecture. The center would seek out some Einsteins
of biology and given them a chance to speak out freely after some
reasonable periods of unharassed thought. Such a center could explain
the Law of the Minimum to us (e.g., it doesn't help to have more
water than you need if you run out of air), or help produce such
people as Robert MacNamara wanted around to help him invest World
Bank funds in ways that would be ecologically sound. He wanted a
thousand trained ecologists then and couldn't find them. In keeping
with Dr. Graham's dream, the center might lead us toward ecologically
sound agriculture instead of present agricultural mining methods
now being followed that could drive society into the ground.
Most important, we wanted the Ford Foundation to make a major effort
toward developing a blueprint for the economics of peaceful stability.
If the Ford Foundation had listened, I would not have felt the need
to give this lecture. And you would not be burdened with my using,
as preface to the meat of the lecture, what we said in 1962 about
the blueprint for peaceful stability, extracts from which follow,
slightly edited:
The "vigorous growing economy" all our leaders keep exhorting
us to produce is not possible on an earth of fixed size, and continuing
attempts to produce it are the basic threat to peace.
The momentum of this phrase is so great that it will take a major
effort to offset it and prove we can live without it. The UN is
already showing concern about the question, Can the economy withstand
peace? The concomitant question is, Can limited resources withstand
a constantly expanding expenditure? The answer to the first question
is and must be yes, and to the second question, no. Both answers
are painfully obvious but universally avoided. There is no better
cause than to face them, squarely and learn to live with them.
It doesn't take much imagination to demonstrate that unending growth
will do our children and theirs out of the heritage they deserve
- and that we can survive without that unending growth and only
without it. Do you know any conservation group that is giving this
serious consideration? I don't think you do. It is one of the taboos.
I do not think you can find an agency in government yet willing
to question growth. But some growth is bad - for instance, malignant
growth. One way to combat malignancy is to examine for it periodically.
I believe there is malignancy in our economy, and that all conservation
will fail unless it is checked. We need to get the checking started.
We ought not be lulled by the euphoric statement, 11 man's power
to mold the world to his liking is almost unlimited.
We would do better to remember Loren Eiseley's warning about "the
wounded outcry of the human ego as...it learns that the world supposedly
made for its enjoyment has existed for untold eons entirely indifferent
to its coming."
"The need is not really for more brains", Eiseley said,
"the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than
those who won for us against the ice, the tiger, and the bear. The
hand that hefted the axe, out of some old blind allegiance to the
past, fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will
have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep."
Elsewhere Eiseley spoke of the machine gun's monstrous successor.
"He holds the heat of suns within his hands and threatens with
it both the lives and happiness of his unborn descendants...caught
in a physiological trap and faced with the problem of escaping from
his own ingenuity."
Paul Sears has told us this: "As we lengthen and elaborate
the chain of technology that intervenes between us and the natural
world, we forget that we become steadily more vulnerable to even
the slightest failure in that chain."
Joseph Wood Krutch agreed: "It is not a sentimental but a
grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe
with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live
on it for long."
Lewis Mumford adds: "To put all our hope in the improvement
of machines is the characteristic inversion and perversion of the
present age; and that is the reason that our machines threaten us
with extinction, since they are now in the hands of deplorably unimproved
men."
So we need a blueprint for an economy that will endure in peaceful
stability, that will not require the war with the environment that
leads to war with fellow man. The blueprint will not be easily prepared,
nor can we keep all our bad habits and live with it. Neither can
we keep our bad habits too long and live at all. If man learns the
importance of living at peace with his environment, wilderness will
be safe. So will he.
Which brings us to Henry David Thoreau: "What's the use of
a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?"
I have mellowed enough since 1962 to put the question a different
way: What kinds of growth must we have and which kinds can we no
longer afford? As the first of two assignments, would you please
make your own list of what growth to add and what to subtract? By
combining your list and others in some impressive way, we may be
able to persuade people with capital on hand to invest it or deny
it more usefully, with their goal being the building of a sustainable
society, as proposed by Lester Brown, of Worldwatch. Investors can
make changes faster than governments can. They are rapidly putting
nuclear power out of business. Their investment in oil conservation
instead of in oil squandering could speedily cool our temptation
to risk the society in order to preempt Middle East oil. Alternate
investment could encourage our and Soviet disarming, and help diffuse
the population bomb.
In the brief period since the ink dried on the proposal to the
Ford Foundation, the earth's population has grown by a billion.
When the echo had died on these words and nineteen more years have
passed, our present habits will put another two billion people on
earth (if we can find enough firewood to cook their food), double
the present acreage of the earth's deserts, extinguish a million
or two species of plants and animals, and otherwise multiply ecological
insults and deplenish the earth. By then it bristles with missiles
- if they have not already been sent on their mission to extinguish
us all. If Armageddon had not yet arrived the superpowers would
by then have spent some 25 trillion dollars on armament - and the
opportunity to build a sustainable society on the earth would have
been deprived of that much capital, resources, human effort, and
human freedom.
Is there a better direction for our society to choose? A way to
find friends, not lose them? A sensitivity to what is leading the
separate superpowers to join in panic? Can we find an antidote to
all this? A rededication to the idea that led us to become a nation,
updated with our knowing now that the world flows together or blows
apart? A willingness to share resources with the people who are
here now, and share also with so many more yet to arrive here, with
needs as real as ours, including their need to know that we were
capable of thinking of them? More immediately, can we protect our
children's right to have a chance to grow up, and our own right
to love watching them grow up?
There is a better direction, and the President of the most powerful
nation on earth - one which once had a dream doesn't know it. Nor
does the team he selected. He and they are leading us into unprecedented
disarray, with malice toward all but a favored few. Call it The
Disarrayed Society of Ronald Reagan. The threat of the final war
is so huge and so imminent that we can forgive ourselves for not
wanting to think about it, but we dare not fail to think about it.
People who bury heads in sand these days may all too soon find that
sand fused.
In short, President Reagan has sidelined outstanding Republican
conservationists, irritated Wall Street, alarmed our friends abroad,
frightened the Third World nations by deepening the inequity of
our relations with them, and could be driving our supposed adversary,
with whom we have never fought, to desperation. He has said it is
none of our business who has the bomb and denied having said so.
He has said "It is not the business of other nations to make
American foreign policy" and then said that he "was misinterpreted."
He has crippled energy-saving and oil-substituting programs and
has massively increased nuclear subsidies. He supports the Clinch
River Breeder Reactor boondoggle and has supported reprocessing
of spent nuclear fuel. This could lead to one of the most horrendous
of domestic threats.* It would also make a mockery of the Nonproliferation
Treaty which, weak though it is, is the best the world has achieved
so far in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons. He has said that
he believes limited nuclear war is possible. He has rescued the
neutron bomb and pushed forward the MX Missile and other moves by
President Carter giving the U.S. a first-strike capability. When
Secretaries Haig and Weinberger contradict each other about firing
a nuclear warning shot, he lets it be said that both are right.
He has ground the improvement of the national park system to a halt
when every delay adds enormously to cost. Let it be added that he
has issued a splendid statement in favor of saving whales. For that
act we are grateful. Not for the others. We would favor the President's
consistent support for corporations if corporations were not so
often a device for separating enterprise from conscience - and the
hiring of a pride of lawyers to keep the gap intact.
The President's attitude toward the Third World resembles Senator
Hayakawa's toward the poor. Stopped in a Senate Building corridor,
the Senator suggested a heavy gasoline tax to ease the energy crisis.
What would that do to the poor? He replied, "The poor aren't
working. They don't need gas." In jest, we hope. We would support
such a tax. The poor can be helped by better means than making gas
cheap for Cadillacs.
I would urge the President to replace what is becoming known as
the Reagan wrecking crew with competent Republicans. There are many:
they brought about environmental achievements by President Nixon
that most people have forgotten. It would not hurt to add a Democrat
or two. Bipartisan moves have worked well in the past. Thoughtful
analysis of conservation matters would improve national security
by leading away from the Strength Through Exhaustion syndrome that
recent presidents, including Mr. Reagan, suffer from. Mr. Reagan
is extraordinarily in need of environmental homework; otherwise
we could justifiably publish a Ronald Reagan Environmental Handbook,
consisting of a three-by-five card file, empty.
We are hoping that the Republicans who carried Mr. Reagan to the
presidency will see the immediate importance of persuading the president
to make conservation moves in the interest of national security.
The alternative, it seems to me, is that his farewell address be
expedited.
These words are harsh, harsher I am sure than were ever spoken
in an Albright lecture, harsher than Horace Albright himself has
used, far harsher than I like to use or have ever used, but use
now because I must. The war that no one wants is inevitable, unless
we say no. A chorus of voices in both political parties is saying
no and needs to be joined. So do the voices with vast military experience,
including words President Eisenhower spoke and President Reagan
should memorize. So do the voices of the scientists and engineers
working other fields than preparation for war, fields that need
the skills of the other half of the professions who are coopted
for war. So do the voices of those who think self-interest has driven
us too long, that technology has become too rampant, that serenity
and faith and love are all but lost and must not be. The appendix
contains relevant excerpts from W. Averill Harriman, General Maxwell
Taylor, George Kerman, John B. Oakes, and Senator Charles Percy.
I could list things that these and other people think our change
of direction should consist of and that I agree with, but it is
far better for you to come up with the list. Perhaps in this way:
You are President. You have a trillion dollars to spend in the
next five years to enhance national security, which itself cannot
be enhanced without a context of global security. You know how much
more important conservation is than did the governors President
Theodore Roosevelt summoned to the White House. You know, as you
look about you in your own neighborhood, your state and nation and
planet, what things need to be done and what seem most important
to you. So with this trillion dollars at your disposal-and when
did anyone ever offer you that much before, with only one string
on it-what would you spend it on between now and the end of December
1986 to increase the earth's security and hence our own? The string?
You may not spend it on weapons. You realize, of course, that a
nuclear Maginot Line would be far worse than useless. You realize,
too, that if you do not spend it on weapons, the Soviet leadership
will not need to do so either. So that makes two trillion dollars
or equivalent available for healing the earth instead of wounding
it further.
While you are thinking of items for your list, I'll reveal that
the first item that came to my mind was reforesting the earth -
not all the original forest land, of course, but that which should
no longer remain derelict. Alfred Heller would spend his trillion
dollars on exactly what is being started on the Santa Cruz A campus,
expanded to global scale - agri-ecology. Combined with Mr. Fukuoka's
One Straw Revolution and Wes Jackson's New Roots For Agriculture,
agri-ecology could bring about a sustainable food supply for an
otherwise sustainable population.
One alternative Dan Loren suggested long ago was to ship Detroit's
guzzling inventory to the U.S.S.R. free of charge and let the Soviets
worry about fuel, maintenance, highways, and deteriorating railroads.
We would order Detroit and the Army Corps of Engineers to get our
own railroads back on the track, so as to provide sustainable mass
transportation while we still had enough affordable energy left
to power the recovery. But all those cars would be cruel and inhuman
punishment to an ally that helped us immensely in World War II.
I wish I could show you two maps and stop talking for a while.
One is a computer map of the U.S. population in 1776, 1876, and
1976, prepared at M.I.T. On the 1876 segment Los Angeles is barely
perceptible. It had not even become one of the largest 25 U.S. cities
by the 1900 census. The M.I.T. map is enough to assure even a Herman
Kahn that we can't go on in the next century the way we carried
on in the first two. It should assure the space colonizers that
they couldn't dissect asteroids fast enough to build colonies for
our fertility excess, or find fuel enough to ship it any farther
than India, where it is hardly needed.
The other map exists only in my mind - a demographic-drain map
to show what resources were required to sustain our new population
peaks, a map in which the area of countries is the product of their
population multiplied by their resource drain. Newsweek published
a map on October 26 that comes close, but not close enough. Something
better than gross national product is needed to measure the drain
of resources. (For example, the U.S., with five per cent of the
world's population, uses one third of the resources; the remaining
ninety-five per cent use the other two thirds - a ratio of about
ten to one. Our 225 million, multiplied by ten, equals 2.25 billion,
half the earth's population. On the global map, then, the U.S. would
occupy half the entire land area, and in the Newsweek map it doesn't
begin to. Africa would be tiny.) I think that if we looked long
and hard at such a map, we would realize why it has been said that
a lot of nations are thinking they can't afford the U.S. anymore.
When I first heard that comment, scenes from Italy flashed through
my mind, abandoned castles on hills, castles once comfortably occupied
by the affluent who thought that if they kept their supporting peasants
ill-clothed and ill-housed and ill-fed enough, the peasants couldn't
muster enough strength to cause trouble. You could simply tell them
to lift themselves by their own bootstraps, mind the magic of the
market place, and buy a do-it-yourself covered wagon and go west,
as President Reagan has in effect told the Third World.
We have better ideas, and I am sure you do. For the full Friends
of the Earth list of things to spend a trillion on, I refer you
to Progress As If Survival Mattered: A Handbook for a Conserver
Society.
But while you are waiting to see it, and before I give you your
next assignment, let me try another idea out on you.
One of the nicest angles of all is the 180° angle. It enables
one to change direction completely and still go straight. It is
the face-saving angle and I suggest that it is time to use it. The
superpowers, instead of standing toe to toe, ought to stand back
to back and see not what they can do to each other, but what they
can do for the rest of the world. Contemplate a U.S.-Soviet Marshall
Plan. Let it invest not in resource depletion, but in resource recovery,
in finding ways to avoid fatal battles over what is in the bottom
of the barrel, to get our own numbers down, with deliberate speed,
to what the bounties of a limited earth can sustain. If this means
an orderly retreat from the Land of Self-Interest and Avarice, perhaps
we have been there too long anyway. If all this sounds utopian,
the alternative is oblivion. Easy choice.
The most important investment toward global security that the North
could make, as it looks more at the South's needs instead of so
much at its own, is investment in recovery of renewable-resource
potential. How can the lesser developed countries use sun and soil
better for their own advantage, even if that means we are deprived
of some surfeit? There are various ways of going about this. A first
requirement is to change our mindset. Studies help.
Back in the mid-fifties we came up with the idea of a Scenic Resources
Review. It was suggested by the periodic Timber Resources Review,
and I thought we ought to look at intangibles as systematically.
Renamed the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review, it was carried
out by a commission that mixed private individuals with Members
of Congress. The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and a few other improvements
came out of it all. But it was too limited, and it is time to try
again.
Perhaps a global Renewable Resources Review and Intangible Resources
Review could carry on where The Global 2000 Report to the President
left off, and give the present administration something to do besides
dismantle the century's conservation gains in order to find money
for missiles. Instead of threatening to withdraw support from the
United Nations Environment Program, the U.S. could increase support
in order to celebrate, in 1982, the tenth anniversary of the Stockholm
Conference on the Human Environment. Preparation for that could
assist groundwork for still another anniversary - the seventy-fifth
(diamond jubilee) anniversary of the Governor's Conference on Natural
Resources that Theodore Roosevelt convened at the White House. John
F. Kennedy called one, as one would expect; his interest in conservation
was obvious in his appointments. In the Roosevelt conference only
one voice, that of J. Horace McFarland, spoke in behalf of scenic
resources. In the Kennedy conference it was the other way around,
and only one voice spoke for utilitarian conservation - Congressman
Wayne Aspinall at Colorado. Gifford Pinchot won the first round,
John Muir the Second.
Ronald Reagan now has a chance to make use of that 180' angle.
He could call for the seventy-fifth anniversary, in mid-May 1983,
a White House Conference on Conservation and Global Security. There
is just enough time for sound preparation. He should welcome bipartisan
support. Richard Nixon's chief environmental advisor, Russell Train,
currently cochairman of the Year 2000 Committee, knows how to use
such support. He has also worked with Soviet conservationists. The
conference could have no more important goal than developing means
by which a bipartisan world could develop and apply conservation
plans for the longest period of peaceful co-existence in the earth's
history.
We could remind President Reagan that physicians, who are not notorious
for their radical attitudes, have set an example by organizing Physicians
for Social Responsibility. They are having an enormous influence,
for which we can be most grateful, in awakening the world to the
nuclear menace. Perhaps it is time to organize Politicians for Social
Responsibility - responsible for seeking a sustainable society on
a global scale.
If this is a dream, buy it. Unless you are hooked on nightmares.
We are back to you and your trillion dollars. Assuming that you
would not take the easy out - sparing the taxpayers of that burden
in the first place - what else would you do? What ten programs would
you have the United States design, with your help, to improve the
human condition and the life-support system most humans depend upon?
What programs now being starved, or not yet thought of, because
of our preoccupation with weapons, Trident, MX, cruise missile,
throwweight, ground zeroes, missile fratricide, electromagnetic
pulse, assorted euphemisms for megadeath, and the needless acceleration
of mutations, few of them desirable? Ten is a good enough number
to start with. Take your time in making out the list and the allocation
of funds to each item. Your papers will not be due until Christmas,
a day on which quite a few people on earth remember to celebrate
a Prince of Peace who said the meek would inherit the earth and
who presumably did not think it would have been subdued and incinerated
before they received title to it.
Send your list to me, if you will, at Friends of the Earth, in
San Francisco. Perhaps we can get the Gallop or Harris people to
tabulate the data for us. Above all, send a copy to Presidents Reagan
and Brezhnev. You may wish also to send President Reagan a copy
of President Eisenhower's farewell address, urging that his own
be as thoughtful, his intervening performance better. Remind him,
if you will, that the ten per cent of the American populace who
voted for him (plus the votes he received that were against Jimmy
Carter) do not constitute a mandate for him, much less for Mr. Watt,
Messrs. Edwards, Haig, and Weinberger, or Senator Lexalt, Joseph
Coors, and Mrs. Gorsuch. Or for Mr. Meese - who supported the philosophy
of the Governor Reagan who a few years ago was willing to have a
blood bath on this campus.
Harsh words again, yes. Derived from fright, and the wish, however
poorly put, to motivate you into seeing that this planet does not
perish from the Universe because you had part in letting it.
Your list of ten steps toward survival need not be harshly presented.
Let your prelude be the words of the man who lost to General Eisenhower:
UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, in his last speech, given in Geneva
in July 1965, left us this wisdom, in the finest conservation message
I know:
"We travel together, passengers on a little space craft, dependent
upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for
our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation
only by the work, the care and, I will say, the love we give our
fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half comfortable, half miserable;
half confident, half despairing; half slave to the ancient enemies
of mankind, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of
until this day. No craft, no crew, can travel safely with such vast
contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."
These words should be in all the places that celebrate the 1945
agreement that war must no longer be the route to resolution. It
should be carved in stone at the United Nations centers, translated
as necessary, in as grand a manner as can be afforded. It should
be ten feet high in the Oval Office, printed somewhere on every
calendar. And remembered in every heart, especially the line in
which we are spared by "the work, the care and, I will say,
the love we give our fragile craft" - love given the earth,
ourselves, and our fellow creatures, remember (as we so often do
not) that love is the one resource that will be exhausted only if
we forget to use it.
The Window of Opportunity
W. Averell Harriman, former ambassador to Moscow & Undersec.
of State, Washington Post Op Ed, Nov. 4, 1981
We are in danger of ceding our destiny to the whims of nuclear
weapons, trusting to good fortune to see us through the nuclear
arms race when we should be trusting to ourselves.
The strategic forces of the United States and the Soviet Union
carry explosive power more than 100,000 times greater than the Hiroshima
bomb. Far from saying "enough," both nations are increasing
these forces...
America must take advantage of the window of opportunity it now
has to limit nuclear arms...
Negotiations to limit nuclear arms and reduce the risk of war are
hardheaded exercises to improve our national security. They signal
no approval of other Soviet actions, such as Afghanistan - no more
than do sales of American grain to the Soviet Union. They seek,
despite the irreconcilable ideologies of our two nations, the common
goal that nuclear weapons have made a necessity - the prevention
of nuclear war.
In our short time on Earth, we have a choice about the kind of
world we leave behind. With nuclear weapons in our custody, our
generation carries a heavy obligation. There will be no historian
to record one day that we failed on our watch.
Reagan's Military Policy Is in Trouble
General Maxwell D. Taylor, Army chief of staff under Eisenhower,
and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Kennedy and Johnson.
Washington Post op ed, Nov. 2, 1981
With the Reagan economic policy in trouble, his military policy
cannot be far behind. Like the voice of the turtle, a swelling chorus
of critics and skeptics is rising to question the validity of the
goals and programs that constitute a seemingly disjointed military
policy. The critics stress the estimated cost of over a trillion
dollars in five years and the likely effect on government deficits
and social programs...
Implicit in both the criticism and the skepticism is a feeling
that the administration does not have a military policy worthy of
the name... The administration seems committed to preparing for
the least probable threats to the neglect of the most probable.
If the Reagan policy is as deficient as these criticisms (Taylor's)
imply, can anything be done to retrieve the situation at this late
hour? It would require fundamental changes of policy involving a
broadened recognition of the threat, a restatement of policy goals
and a new set of guidelines for the structuring of the armed forces...
New stress placed upon the role of the armed forces in securing
our national power base in the Western Hemisphere and in protecting
the national economy should appeal to the average citizen who wants
to see the relation between increased military expenditures and
his own way of life. A modified policy would offer him a reasonable
chance to remain safe without going broke in the process.
Perils of Arms Race
George Kennan, former ambassador to Moscow and architect of the
containment doctrine, basis of American policy toward the Soviets
for decades. In SF Chron Nov. 9, 1981, from The New Yorker.
[after paragraphs on what his opponents see in the Kremlin] What
I see is something quite different.
I see a group of troubled men - elderly men, for the most part
- whose choices and possibilities are severely constrained. I see
these men as prisoners of many circumstances: prisoners of the antiquated
ideology to which their extreme sense of orthodoxy binds them; prisoners
of the rigid system of power that has given them their authority;
but prisoners, too, of certain ingrained peculiarities of the Russian
statesmanship of earlier ages - the congenital sense of insecurity,
the lack of inner self-confidence, the distrust of the foreigner
and the foreigner's world, the passion for secrecy, the neurotic
fear of penetration by other powers into areas close to their borders,
and a persistent tendency, resulting from all these other factors,
to overdo the creation of military strength. I see her men deeply
preoccupied, as were their Czarist Russian predecessors, with questions
of prestige - preoccupied more, in many instances, with the appearances
than with the realities.
I do not see them as men anxious to expand their power by the direct
use of their armed forces, although they could be easily frightened
into taking actions that would seem to have this aim.
* * *
I believe, too, that internal developments in the Soviet Union
present a heavy claim on the attention and priorities of the Soviet
leaders. They are deeply committed to the completion of their existing
programs for the economic and social development of the Soviet peoples,
and I am sure that they are very seriously concerned over the numerous
problems that have recently been impeding that completion: the perennial
agricultural failures; the many signs of public apathy, demoralization,
drunkenness, and labor absenteeism; the imbalance in the population
growth between the Russian center and the non-Russian periphery;
the increasing shortage of skilled labor, and the widespread economic
corruption and indiscipline.
They differ among themselves as to how these problems should be
approached, but I doubt whether there are any of them who think
that the problems could be solved by the unleashing of another world
war.
* * *
I believe that until we consent to recognize that the nuclear weapons
we hold in our hands are as much a danger to us as those that repose
in the hands of our supposed adversaries there will be no escape
from the confusions and dilemmas to which such weapons have now
brought us, and must bring us increasingly as time goes on.
For this reason, I see no solution to the problem other than the
complete elimination of these and all other weapons of mass destruction
from national arsenals; and the sooner we move toward that solution,
and the greater courage we show in doing so, the safer we will be,
The Reagan Hoax
John B. Oakes, (Former editorial page editor; former senior
editor, New York Times) NYT Op Ed, November 1, 1981
While a bemused public and a leaderless Congress look on, foreign
and domestic policies that are classic throwbacks to Hoover, Harding,
and McKinley are now being locked into place - with a dash of secretive,
imperious Nixonism tossed in.
President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign
policy, rattling arms from El Salvador to West Germany, . . . an
openended arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal
and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever
emanated from Moscow.
Already, the cost of Reagan policies is devastating to our country
in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security,
in moral statute...
The President's unspoken animus against the environment operates
not only via the budget. It takes on immediate life in internal
orders, administrative regulations, appointments and firings already
executed by such "fronts" as Secretary of the Interior
James Watt and Environmental Protection Administrator Anne M. Gorsuch.
Mr. Watt has been busily torpedoing his department's environmental-program
function, such as strip-mining control, with Mr. Reagan's "full
approval." Mrs. Gorsuch is in effect dismantling the E.P.A.,
making it impossible to administer the antipollution and tox-substance-control
laws it was designed to oversee. Her proposals for a cut-rate Clean
Air Act are a guarantee of dirtier air.
Senator Robert T. Stafford, Republican of Vermont, remarked a few
days ago: "To make these laws unenforceable because of the
de facto repeal achieved through cuts in money and personnel would
be to perpetrate a cruel hoax on the American people."
That is precisely what "good guy" Reagan is doing, right
across the board. The question is: How long will the American people
continue to be hoaxed?
"The world is waiting,
and not for us just to
arm, arm, arm."
Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois to the Committee
For National Security, Oct. '81.
*Nuclear weapons expert Theodore Taylor has said
that the destruction of a reprocessing plant that had been operating
for ten years could release more Strontium-90 and Cesium- 137 than
would the detonation of all the nuclear weapons now on earth, Were
this to happen in Western Europe, the region would be rendered uninhabitable
for many years.
Introducing:
David Brower
David Brower, the 22nd Albright Lecturer, is a lifelong conservationist,
friend of the earth, and publicist who has done much to increase
the appreciation of people for the beauty of the natural environments.
His career in conservation is marked by nearly forty years of leadership
in national conservation organizations, notably the Sierra Club
and Friends of the Earth, and involvement in numerous battles over
parks and wilderness.
Reared in Berkeley, where he was born in 1912, Mr. Brower enrolled
at the University of California as a freshman in 1929. Two years
later he withdrew to try to earn a living. He worked for three years
(1935-38) as an accountant and publicist for the Yosemite Park and
Curry Company, and then became a leader of Sierra Club high mountain
trips. He also climbed mountains, including a first ascent of Shiprock
in New Mexico and many others in the Sierra Nevada.
In 1941 Mr. Brower joined the UC Press as an editor. He left in
1942 for wartime service in the 10th Mountain Division Infantry,
U.S. Army. In 1945 he returned to UC Press, where he worked until
1952, when he became Executive Director of the Sierra Club, headquartered
in San Francisco. For the next 17 years he helped guide the Sierra
Club through a major transition from a local organization primarily
concerned with the high mountain country of the Sierra to a national
organization whose activities were directed to establishment of
new parks, wilderness, environmental quality, and land use. He was
instrumental in the establishment of the Kings Canyon, North Cascade
and Redwood National Parks, the National Outdoor Recreation Resources
Review, and the Wilderness Act of 1964, and led the effort to keep
dams out of the Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon.
He also initiated the highly successful Sierra Club Exhibit Format
Series, contributing as the designer and editor to the publication
of 20 volumes during the period 1960-68.
Mr. Brower left the Sierra Club in 1969. He immediately founded
Friends of the Earth, which he now heads as Chairman. For two years,
1969-7 1, he also served as Director of the John Muir Institute
of Environmental Studies. In 1972 he founded Friends of the Earth
Foundation and in 1973, Friends of the Earth International. These
activities have involved him in global as well as national issues.
Mr. Brower's achievements in conservation are recognized by numerous
awards. These include the Carey-Thomas Award, Paul Bartsch Award,
John Muir Award, and other awards from the National Park Association,
California Conservation Council, and Audubon Naturalist Society
of Central Atlantic States. He has received honorary doctors degrees
from Hobart and
William Smith College; Claremont College, Graduate School; University
of Maryland; University of San Francisco; Colorado College; and
Starr King School of Ministry,
His own view of this notable record of effort in conservation causes
is best summed up in this quotation from Who's Who in America (1978-79
edition):
"It is true that some major resources of wildlife and
wilderness, and all they mean to people, are still intact thanks
to conservation battles I have shared. For this I can only be
grateful - for the help, and the hope that future battles for
these irreplaceable things will be as successful. They will be
if enough people realize that this generation is not required
to race through all the resources it can find, if humanity comprehends
that this is the only earth, and there is no spare."
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