The Earth Remains Forever: Generations at a Crossroads 9781477307953

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The Earth Remains Forever

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The Earth Remains Forever Generations at a Crossroads

Rob Jackson FOREWORD BY JOHN GRAVES

University of Texas Press

Austin

Publication of this book has been assisted by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2.002. by the University of Texas Press Foreword copyright © 2002. John Graves All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second paperback printing, 2003 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. This book is printed on New Age TCP paper which is produced with totally chlorine-free pulp (TCF) to prevent harmful toxic byproducts from entering the environment. New Age is also produced from well- managed forests ensuring that no old-growth trees are utilized in the pulp. To ensure fewer trees are used to produce New Age, high-yield pulping technology ensures an environmentally friendly product. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jackson, Robert Bradley, 1961The earth remains forever : generations at a crossroads / Rob Jackson ; foreword by John Graves. — Ist ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-292-74054-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-292-74055-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Environmental degradation. 2. Consumption (Economics)—Environmental aspects. 3. Population—Environmental aspects. I. Title. GEI40.J32

333.7

2002

—dc21

2002001874

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever. ECCLESIASTES 1:4

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Contents

Foreword by John Graves ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction xv

Living with Success i The Richness of Life

15 Ozone Awareness

63 The Changing Earth 89 Epilogue 127

References 133 Index 165

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Foreword

Rob Jackson is my son-in-law, the father of our three grandsons and a bright and decent man. Hence when I learned he was writing a book, I wanted to like it. But books have been a major part of my life, and I know from experience that I truly care for only about half or fewer of the ones I read, regardless of their subjects, who has written them, who has recommended them, or the publicity they have received. So I waited for this one with hope and a good bit of suspense, and in the end was especially delighted to see how fine The Earth Remains Forever had turned out to be. Rob's concerns in this book are among the main concerns that have been with me during most of my life, ever since I graduated from a standard hunting-and-fishing youth to a general affectionate awareness of nature and its complexities, and finally to a perception of the great damage our times and our ways of life have been wreaking on the natural framework. Persons of my dwindling generation have watched during their lives an increasingly rapid decline in the wholeness of that framework, though I might note, from an oldster's dour perspective, that the decline had been in progress, more slowly, for many centuries before our time. The great forests of Europe nearly vanished long ago; places like the Balkans that were once breadbaskets for Rome were farmed down into rocky sterility; and creatures like mammoths and great cave bears were wiped out by people so early that only a few Stone Age paintings, kill sites, and other remains give evidence that they existed at all. Etcetera. . .

The Earth Remains Forever The fact that destruction has speeded up in more recent years has two main causes besides the (in my view) innate and formerly useful rapacity of the human race. One is a voluminous new array of technology that enables people to do to the natural world pretty much all that they think they want to do, with a good many large, unforeseen, and disruptive side effects. The other cause, itself in large part a result of medical technology, is a swift, huge surge in the world's population and its demands upon earth's bounty and integrity. I am not going to dwell on these matters here, because Rob dwells on them thoroughly and interestingly in his chapters. His thoughts and observations are those of a first-rate scientist, a botanist whose interests have not been restricted to plants, though the fact that the plant world has been suffering great recent vanishings and shrinkings among its species is a firm basis for his view of the plight of the whole spectrum of living things, including people. He recognizes the enormity of the problems—the wealthy nations' prodigal consumption of goods and resources along with their discharge of pollutants; the flourishing extinction of species through excessive harvest, habitat destruction, and competition from introduced non-native forms of life; the impending crisis of water supply; the loss of wetlands; ozone depletion; global warming—and also recognizes the grounds for pessimism. But, characteristically and admirably, he sees these things as a challenge to humanity to seek solutions and carry them out while it is still perhaps feasible to do so, for the benefit or even the survival of those who will come after us on this planet. I have read a great deal on these subjects, but I have not previously seen a treatment of them that combines warm understanding, wide and detailed documented knowledge, and a clear accessible language in the way Rob's book does. It gets off into technical matters on occasion; it has to do so because technology is so much a part of the whole mess and of the possible cures. But it never loses an attentive lay reader of the sort that he obviously has in mind, and is sprinkled with passages that X

Foreword

bring his points and discussions to life—convincing examples as well as personal anecdotes and memories. It adds up to a full and eloquent statement of our current environmental dilemma, with some plausible reasons for hope. I am proud to be his kinsman. JOHN GRAVES January 2002.

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Acknowledgments

To hazard writing a book, you have to be naive enough to believe that you have something to say and, more importantly, that someone might actually listen. What "I" have to say here stands squarely on the shoulders of a host of scientists and authors whose work I gratefully acknowledge in the references. Their work made this project possible. Various quotes, political cartoons, and limericks are sprinkled throughout the book. I selected the quotations to illustrate aspects of the text and because the books they came from mean something to me. Good writing is a gift (with "good" being the difficult part), and I thank the authors for the pleasure their words provide. The cartoonists deserve similar thanks for expressing so much information so concisely. The limericks are original. A number of people helped bring this book to fruition. My sincerest thanks go to Bill Bishel and Lynne Chapman at the University of Texas Press and to a number of reviewers for their suggestions, including Martyn Caldwell, John Firor, Camille Parmesan, Amy Austin, and Laura Turcotte. Various family members also read parts of the manuscript, especially Sally Jackson (my better half), John Graves (my better half's father), and Ken Jackson (my uncle). To them and to my parents, brothers, and extended family—thank you. As for my sons, this book would never have been written, but might have been finished more quickly, without your daily presence in my life. Any mistakes that remain are mine. ROB JACKSON Stanford, CA August 2001

A warming of several degrees Melted ice and raised oceans and seas. The Army was finished, The Air Force diminished. But the Navy was quietly pleased.

Introduction

Young Man to Middle-Aged Man: "You had content but no force." Middle-Aged Man to Young Man: "And you have force but no content." IVAN TURGENEV, FROM THE ORIGINAL EPIGRAPH TO Fathers and Sons (1862)

My father always told us to turn off the lights when we left a room. My brothers and I rolled our eyes at his collective wisdom, environmental and otherwise, attributing it to a depression-era mentality and middle age. We knew that the world would be different by the time we grew up.

We are living in an unusual time. It isn't unusual for the reasons one might think—the millennium, the internet, the economy— it's unusual because of us. Every generation believes that its time is somehow special, with pronouncements about "change" and "the future" so common that we tend to ignore them. But today is unusual nonetheless, and the goal of this book is to show why, to examine how these changes came to pass and what they mean for us and for our descendants. The earth is being quietly transformed in ways and at a pace never seen before, with more people using more resources than at any time in history. This isn't alarmist sentiment; it's simply an observation. At about the same time as the passing of the

The Earth Remains Forever recent millennium, India quietly became the second nation in the world with a billion people. That so little fuss was made of this milestone shows how quickly we lose interest in extraordinary events. When China became the first giganation in 1980, the news coverage was immense. Why was either event unusual? Until the iSoos, there weren't a billion people on earth, and my grandparents lived much of their lives in a world without two billion. In contrast, we added more than three billion people to the earth in the last generation of the twentieth century, a billion people per decade. That is truly unusual. We in the industrialized world tend to see environmental problems through the filter of overpopulation. If we could just slow the growth of tropical nations, then the earth would be safer and the environment more stable. Today's population growth is indeed unprecedented, but this worldview conveniently absolves us of any responsibility, and improving the environment becomes someone else's job. The times are unusual in developed nations as well, and we in the United States are the most unusual, the most "developed," of all. Whether driving our cars, heating our homes, or casually leaving the lights on, we generate a quarter of the world's fossil fuel emissions with less than five percent of its population. As a nation, we spend fifty billion dollars a year on weight loss, about two hundred dollars apiece, roughly equivalent to the annual incomes of a billion of the earth's people. That we spend as much money to lose weight as a sixth of the world spends to survive is something we rarely consider because most of us have never known anything else. Without realizing it, we have become the greatest consumers in the history of the planet. Like population growth, growing consumption affects the earth in many unusual ways, some of which we will see in this book: the ozone hole, habitat loss, global warming, and, in consequence, rising sea level, to name a few. In fact, more people on earth probably see consumption as a threat to their livelihood than overpopulation. The Maldives is a nation of more than a thousand islands in the Indian Ocean, most of it less than three feet above sea level. In the coming century, global warming is xvi

Introduction expected to raise the oceans by two feet, give or take a bit. I doubt that Maldivians see overpopulation as their greatest threat. The changing earth—the consequences of rising population and consumption—is the subject of this book, including some evidence for why things like biodiversity loss, the ozone hole, and global warming are unusual. The list looks suspiciously depressing, but it needn't. Repairing the ozone hole is a remarkable success story that we can learn from and apply to other more difficult problems. We need to act quickly though to provide the quality of life our descendants deserve and to preserve as much of our natural heritage as possible. This urgency to act now isn't apocalyptic. Calls for the earth's demise have come and gone throughout history, especially in recent decades. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth sold thirty million copies in the 19705, and its dire predictions not-

xvii

The Earth Remains Forever withstanding, the seventies came and went quietly, as did the eighties, the nineties, and the millennium, and we're still here. It is entirely possible, of course, that this decade will be our last, but Pm betting that it won't be, that we and the earth will still be here in a hundred years and in a thousand. The stewardship and vision that we show today will therefore help determine the type of world that our descendants inherit. This book isn't about the end of the world, it's about the middle of it, the mundane middle of our daily lives and the choices that we consciously and unconsciously make. Finally, this book is also about kinship. Who will be excluded from the circle of "haves"!5 How do we best provide for the needs of our descendants and for the other species on earth? How do we balance the lifestyle that we have with the needs of people in poorer regions of the world, in poorer corners of wealthy nations like our own, and in future generations? Inequities in wealth are inevitable, but they have never been larger than today. Perhaps no generation before us has had to consider so seriously that what we use, how we live, and the choices that we make might reduce our descendants' opportunities. That thought is both frightening and empowering: frightening because it's such a dramatic departure from the way we are used to thinking, empowering because it provides the ultimate motivation for change. That change is my hope for this book.

My father was right about the lights. I can admit that now, decades later, though a small part of me begrudges him knowing it. Once you've lived long enough to do things you swore you never would, admitting your mistakes comes easier. My father also drove a four-door, 455-cubic-inch v8, babyblue Buick Electra 2.2,5, one of the biggest gas-guzzlers ever made. No one gets off that easy in this book.

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The Earth Remains Forever

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Living with Success

A moving target Where lies the Land to which yon Ship must go> Fresh as a lark mounting at break of day, Festively she puts forth in trim array; Is she for tropic suns, or polar snow? WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1807)

More than three thousand years ago a group of Polynesians loaded their families and possessions into outrigger canoes and sailed east, seven thousand miles east, if you extend their journey over two millennia and countless generations. The Lapita lacked compasses or sextants, navigating instead by stars, prevailing currents, and chance. They reached Fiji first and then Tonga, extending their network to such remote islands as Hawaii and, for a time, Easter Island, at about the time that Attila the Hun roamed Europe. Easter Island, also called Rapa Nui, is one of the most isolated places on earth. Its closest neighbor is Pitcairn Island, thirteen hundred miles away, and it is more than two thousand miles from Tahiti to the west and Chile to the east. Slightly larger than Manhattan, the island's modern name commemorates the Easter date of "discovery" by Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen in 172.2. Its true discoverers called it Te Pito 'o Te Henua, the "navel of the world." The first Lapita to arrive looked out from their canoes and saw a lush island of jagged cliffs and sharp black lava, the wooded

The Earth Remains Forever landscape dominated by three large volcanoes. Landing on the only large beach, the white sands of Anakena, the seafarers undoubtedly said a prayer—of thanks for reaching the isolated paradise and of appeasement for intruding upon it. Over the next thousand years the Lapita created a striking civilization. Their most famous legacy was the Moai, a set of peerless statues sculpted from the tuff of the volcano Rano Raraku. The Lapita moved each finished statue miles across the rocky landscape, rolling the thirty-foot figures on a jostling treadmill of logs that they cut along the way. Anthropologist Jo Anne van Tilburg estimates that it took seventy men about five days to move a typical figure to its resting place. Once there, they raised each image on a platform, its gaze fixed invariably inward, its back turned to the ocean and to the world beyond. More than six hundred sentinels eventually guarded the island. In addition to creating statues and petroglyphs, the Lapita also devised the only form of writing in Oceania. Known as Rongo-rongo, the hieroglyphic script is preserved today on about twenty wooden tablets. It forms a rich series of glyphs approximately half an inch tall that were carved into the tablets using obsidian or sharks' teeth. To read the script, you start at the lower left corner of the tablet and read across the bottom line. At the end of the line, you rotate the tablet 180 degrees and read back in the other direction, turning the tablet once again when you finish that line: course, "upside down" and "backwards" are in the eye of the beholder. JO 'sp-reAupuq puB UAvop ^pisdn jBsddB pjnoAv amj jaipo Ai9A3 Imagine turning this book every time you reached the end of a line;

The language has never been successfully translated, although one tablet clearly bears a lunar calendar. When the Lapita first arrived on Easter Island, there was little food. Besides bats, there were no native mammals east of the Solomon Islands and no large lizards beyond Tonga. What was plentiful, though, was the bird life, birds that had evolved in the absence of people and had no fear of them. At least thirty species 2.

Living with Success nested on Easter Island, mostly seabirds like petrels, boobies, terns, and albatrosses, more seabirds in fact than on any other Polynesian island. There were also at least six land birds found nowhere else on earth: one heron species, two rails, an owl, and two parrots. Although the Lapita planted gardens, ate fish, and raised the chickens they brought with them, they also hunted native birds— if bending over and picking up a bird can be considered hunting. The birds were plentiful but didn't last. Of the thirty or more species that lived on Easter Island, only one, a tropicbird, remained to greet the Dutch explorers in the 17008. All six of the endemic land birds went extinct. Other life also disappeared. Easter Island originally had a dense mosaic of giant palms and trees, including the sacred Toromiro that the Lapita used for wood carving. Over the thousand years of colonization, all of the trees were cut to make room for agriculture, to provide firewood, and to transport the Moai. Easter Island was almost completely deforested by the time Columbus reached the Americas, a transformation so complete that the first Europeans to arrive couldn't understand how such a wasteland ever supported a once-great civilization. One account from 1770 records that "not a single tree is to be found capable of furnishing a plank so much as six inches in width." Ultimately, along with the plants and animals, the Lapita suffered too. Their population grew to more than ten thousand people, an unsustainable number, and the slash-and-burn agriculture upon which they relied eroded and deforested the landscape. The loss of trees was so complete that they eventually lacked the wood they needed to build sea canoes to leave. As food became scarce, their complex society collapsed, and a century of warfare ensued; the victors enslaved their neighbors and toppled their Moai. This bleak portrait of destruction was what greeted the Europeans (who, it might be pointed out, brought their own plagues of smallpox and slave raids) in the 17005. By 1877 only in Lapita survived. The triumph and tragedy of Easter Island were repeated on countless islands across the Pacific. In Hawaii, over sixty endemic land birds went extinct after the Lapita reached the archi3

The Earth Remains Forever pelago, before Europeans arrived. Another twenty-five or so species vanished after James Cook's appearance in 1770. More than a dozen land birds disappeared from 'Eua, just one of the many Tongan islands. Parrots disappeared, as did flightless rails and pigeons—birds that buried their eggs in decaying soil to warm and protect them, as crocodiles do today. Chronicling these extinctions is the work of biological detective David Steadman. For more than a decade, Steadman has excavated the floors of caves across the Pacific, digging down into the dirt and back in time to uncover how people lived. His work records the arrival of humans—with chickens and rats in tow—and the disappearance of birds. Steadman can chronicle a bird's first use by man, when the bird became scarce, and the timing of its eventual demise. When he digs deep enough into the soil and far enough back in time, all evidence of people disappears. The bones that remain reveal the diets of owls and other predators that lived on the islands before us, a history of life that Steadman extends a hundred thousand years. He estimates that more than two thousand species of birds went extinct in the colonization of the Pacific, about a fifth of all bird life on earth. The story of Easter Island illustrates a recurring theme in human history, a cycle of colonization and conquest that turns on the balance of population and resource use. The Lapita were tough, resilient, and smart. They were blessed with abundant natural resources. They succeeded admirably for a thousand years. Ultimately, however, they failed. Understanding why they failed—what the histories of the world's Easter Islands tell us— will help us succeed today and tomorrow. The collapse of a society five hundred years ago on an island slightly larger than Manhattan may seem inconsequential for us today, but it isn't. The same laws and processes that humbled the Lapita still operate, only today the earth is one large island and the Lapita are six billion strong. We have no idea how far along our "thousand-year journey" we really are, as the earth is resilient and so are we. But so were the Lapita, and the choices that they made a thousand years ago are the same choices that we face today. Our challenge is to be smarter than they were. 4

Living with Success

Today, in a handful of gardens and private collections around the world, the last Toromiro trees on earth cling to a tenuous existence. The species, an example of what some scientists call "the living dead," went extinct in the wild in 1960 when the last remaining tree was cut for wood carving. The Toromiro was sacred to the Lapita and it grew only on Easter Island. Today we balance the costs of saving the Toromiro, with no guarantee of success, against the alternative of watching the last scattered individuals slowly disappear. Saving the Toromiro will be expensive. The few trees that survive need to be managed assiduously, their genetic diversity carefully maintained by choosing pairs with the greatest chance of healthy offspring. Ultimately, for any chance of survival, the Toromiro must return to the wild. So far, all Toromiro reintroductions have failed. Keeping the tree from disappearing in the first place might have been simpler than trying to play God with the few individuals that remain. Another plant unique to Easter Island, an endemic palm tree, followed the native birds down the path to extinction.

Safety in numbers? "Mildred, what in the world is that?" "Nothing but a baby," she said and smiled and shut her coat. "Whose baby?" "Well, several have asked me not to say..." "Won't nobody marry you?" "Some of them say they studying it. Ain't no hurry. Just so he come with a name..." "Well, are you glad?" "Don't look like glad got nothing to do with it. He coming whether I glad or not." REYNOLDS PRICE, A Long and Happy Life (1960)

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The Earth Remains Forever The earth's burgeoning population is a touchy subject. The world has eighty million more mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, minds to empower, and lives to enrich each and every year. These eighty million people need a place to live, space to grow food, and the opportunity for at least a trace of dignity. They also need to make room for the eighty million more people coming next year. The subject of human population is touchy because it is biological, theological, sociological, historical, cultural, and emotional. It is Darwinian and quotidian, pontifical and physical. Population is, of course, life itself, which makes it wondrous and fiendishly complex all at the same time. Because of that complexity, we are often unwilling as a society to discuss it. Of all the political quagmires—poverty, war, property, taxes, health—there is perhaps no issue more politically charged than population control. Examining that list again—poverty, war, property, taxes, health—can we really tackle these issues globally without discussing population? The twentieth-century rise in the number of people on earth was meteoric. It took almost all of human history for the earth's population to reach a quarter billion people, around the time of Christ. It wasn't until about 1600 A.D. that the planet held half a billion of us. Less than two centuries ago, we topped a billion people, and it took only another century to reach two billion— around 1930, about the time my parents were born. Today we have six billion people on earth, and we add a billion more every dozen or so years. Considered differently, the movie Star Wars was first released to theaters in 1977, with considerable commercial success, and was re-released twenty years later. During that time the earth's population grew by almost two billion people. No wonder reissued movies are so successful. What led to this unprecedented population increase? Its exponential rise was a combination of many factors, most of them good. Death rates fell precipitously through better treatment and prevention of diseases and improved supplies of food and clean water. More people lived to adulthood, had children as a result, and then lived to old age. A century ago, the average 6

Living with Success American lived fewer than fifty years; today the average is more than seventy. The typical life span in poorer countries is now better than sixty years. Africa's current average is greater than fifty, up from thirty at the end of World War II and better than the life expectancy of the most economically privileged people a century ago. (And while not yet good enough, that's a marked improvement.) Birth rates also played an important role, but not in the way you might expect. It's not that they increased, it's that they never really decreased. People kept having children at the same high rate as when they, and their children, were more likely to die. These two factors, lower death rates in developing nations and relatively high birth rates, led to the current population explosion. Since 1930 the population of developing countries has increased from one and a quarter billion to more than four and a half billion people. The population of India in the last half century alone grew from about three hundred and fifty million to a billion. In fifty years, one country grew by more people than were alive when Shakespeare was writing. Something truly unusual is happening, and we're in the midst of it. It's true that the actual rate of population growth has slowed somewhat. Growth rates were higher in the 19605, at slightly more than two percent per year compared to 1.3 percent today. Although the rate of growth has slowed slightly, the number of new mouths to feed is still growing faster today than it was back then. In the 19605 there were 3.5 billion people on earth, while today there are 6 billion; then the earth's population increased by seventy million people a year, while today the increase is eighty million. (Two percent is a better return on investment than 1.3 percent, but z percent of 3.5 billion is still less than 1.3 percent of 6 billion.) That birth rates have slowed does not mean that the issue has disappeared. At first glance the current growth of 1.3 percent a year may seem small. Through the 19908 American investors grew used to returns ten times as large, ten or even twenty percent a year. Even lowly bank accounts sometimes return three or four per7

The Earth Remains Forever cent yields. A growth rate of "only" 1.3 percent may seem tiny, but it builds, slowly at first, then gradually, inexorably, to an exponential crescendo. Three hundred and fifty years ago, Archbishop James Ussher, Primate of Ireland, added up the age of everyone in the Bible and pronounced that the earth began on Sunday, October 2,3, 4004 B.C. (Today, a better estimate is four or five billion years ago, though the day of the week is now uncertain.) Adam and Eve's arrival came five or six days later in the Genesis chronology. If Adam and Eve and their descendants grew at the current rate of 1.3 percent per year for the 6,000 years of Ussher's chronology, the number of people on earth today would be about nine million billion billion billion (about io34). This implausible number would have us living at the density of sixty million million people to the square millimeter, the tip of a pencil's worth. What is most unrealistic about these scenarios isn't Ussher's chronology, it is the sustainability of a growth rate approaching anything like the current one. In fact, at today's rates, Adam and Eve would only have appeared about seventeen hundred years ago, around A.D. 3 io, to create the six billion people alive

Tm off now to reproduce—but Til be back!"

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Living with Success today. To the best of our knowledge, the growth rate never exceeded one percent for all of human history until 1930. If you say this can't go on forever, you're right. Just fifty more years at today's growth rate and there will be twelve billion people on earth in 2050. A century of such growth would give us more than twenty billion people. This powerful combination of high growth rates and large population size means that what we do—or don't do—right now makes a tremendous difference for the future. If we can cut the rate of population growth even in half to 0.6 or 0.7 percent, there will be three or four billion fewer people to feed and clothe fifty years from now. It would also mean a higher quality of life for the eight or nine billion people alive then, and less pressure and more space for the millions of other species sharing the planet. Now that is something worth talking about. A consuming passion "I want it, I want it, I want it, I want it. . . . " PETE TOWNSHEND AND THE WHO, Magic Bus (1968)

Rapid population growth in developing countries is both a cause of many environmental problems and a source of great conflict and misunderstanding. By focusing solely on population, we in industrialized nations tend to overlook the environmental consequences of our own actions, an oversight that makes our poorer neighbors positively livid. In today's world, population is only part of the environmental story. Our effect on the environment depends not just on how many people there are but also on how each of us lives. To illustrate this effect, we could multiply the number of people on earth by the average per capita use of a given resource. Global energy use in 1860 was about three hundred million tons of oil equivalents. With about one and a quarter billion people alive then, each person used around a quarter ton of uoil" apiece, five hundred pounds per year. By 1990 total energy use was 8,730 million tons of oil equivalents, thirty times larger. Was it population 9

The Earth Remains Forever or consumption that dominated the increase? There were five billion people on earth in 1990, four times as many as in 1860, but energy use went up thirty times as the average person used seven times more energy than in 1860 (about 3,500 pounds of "oil" compared to 500). The dominant factor in the rise of energy use during that period was increased consumption, not population growth. And we in the United States are the consummate consumers. We generate one fourth of all greenhouse gas emissions with less than a twentieth of the world's population. We use more fossil fuels than any nation on earth, more than most other continents. On average, a typical American consumes twenty-five times more than someone in Africa or India does, ten times more than someone in China or Latin America. We are, in fact, the greatest consumers in the history of the planet. That is why it infuriates our developing neighbors when we blame the earth's problems solely on overpopulation. We can debate whether six billion people is a sustainable number for the earth, but there is little doubt that the earth can't sustain six billion people living as we Americans do. There isn't enough

IO

Living with Success food, water, or raw materials. There aren't enough places to hide our pollution or store our waste. And there certainly isn't enough room for the other millions of species on earth. The continued analogy of fossil fuel emissions illustrates the point. Increased carbon dioxide is the dominant cause of global warming today. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are now a third higher than at the beginning of the industrial revolution a few hundred years ago and are rising at half a percent per year (about one and a half parts per million annually). If everyone on earth used oil, coal, and natural gas at the rate that we do, CO2 concentrations would rise about ten times faster, a situation that within a few centuries would likely be catastrophic (one of the few times I'll use that word in this book). The earth can't sustain an ever-increasing population, but it also can't sustain its current population living in the manner to which we in the world's richest nations are comfortably accustomed. If the earth can't sustain six billion people living an American lifestyle, we have three choices to consider: i) We can be content as a nation to lock others into poverty, a solution that is neither ethical nor practical. What will happen to our descendants when America is no longer the dominant economic power? 2,) We can reduce the earth's population and improve the quality of life for everyone. (Perfectly logical, but it's that nagging transition...) 3) We can consume less. It is as simple and as complex as that.

Coal, and energy in general, provides the generational backdrop to our family. My grandfather Major Kenneth Jackson was born in a coal-mining town in the midlands of England. His birthplace, aptly named Blackheath, was just west of Birmingham in Britain's industrial heartland. He was the eighth of nine children. Major's first paying job was to carry hot breakfasts down into II

The Earth Remains Forever the mines near his home. This theme, and coal mining in general, played prominently in his "When I was a boy" reminiscences as he spoke of the noise, the dust, and the hardworking men he saw underground. One of the miners he brought food to was his father, my great-grandfather Teddy. When Major was twenty he emigrated to Canada. We never knew exactly why he left England. His brother Harry had gone a decade earlier, first to work in the copper mines of upper Michigan, then to spend most of his life working open hearth on the floor of a U.S. Steel plant. When Major's family asked if he would follow Harry to America, he replied, "No, I'm for Canada, me." Perhaps wanderlust made him leave. Perhaps it was an aversion to following in his father's dark footsteps, and the coal mines were closing anyway. Perhaps it was his hobbies. I remember as a boy listening to the late-night stories of relatives around the kitchen table, their furtive whisperings of gambling debts unpaid and an overseas escape made possible by a payoff at the racetrack. Although Major left the mining country of England, he never escaped coal entirely (or gambling for that matter; he used to take my brothers and me to the horse races, fronting each of us a single two-dollar bet). Settling in a tiny fishing village on Lake Erie, he checked shipments of coal that arrived on Great Lakes freighters. The kids in town, his sons included, would pick up the coal that dropped off the railcars to sell for pocket change or to heat their homes. Major found my father, then 14, his first real job, working a sweltering summer as a coal passer in the belly of the Alexander Leslie, a Great Lakes freighter. There, his older shipmates took a paternal shine to him. One in particular would hold him over the side of the ship by a leg, dangling him first with one hand and then the other, catching him as he dropped briefly between hands. Water rushed by the ship's hull far below. That summer my father decided to go to college, the first in our family to do so. As an engineer he landed a job at a Caribbean oil refinery, and he never worked coal again. Perhaps that was my grandfather's plan all along. 12

I'm green with much more reservation. But as to my car,

I abhor Amazon deforestation,

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The Richness of Life

New discoveries "I just meant I'd seen things I'd as soon not of." "I know it. There's hard lessons in this world." "What's the hardest?" "I don't know. Maybe it's just that when things are gone they're gone. They aint comin back." "Yessir." CORMAC MCCARTHY, Cities of the Plain (1998) We share the planet with at least a million and a half other species, each genetically distinct yet linked by the passage of life. If our genealogies were sufficient, all of us could claim direct descent from some Aristotle or Abraham, Cleopatra or Confucius. We might converge in the loins of a distant Eve and merge with our forebears in the oceans of the distant past. Our genealogy reveals direct descent or, as life's progression is often viewed, common ascent. Our relationship to other species includes much more than science, but science does tell us which species most resemble us genetically. Our closest living relatives are the "Great Apes": the gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee, and pigmy chimpanzee. The Great Apes and man comprise two percent of the two hundred and fifty primates known on earth. Primates make up about six percent of the world's four thousand mammals. There are nine thousand bird species, ten thousand reptiles and amphibians, and fifty thousand mollusks. Seventy thousand fungi recycle the chaff of life, and a quarter million plants regenerate

The Earth Remains Forever the oxygen we breathe. At the base of the pyramid, numerically at least, are more than a million species of insects. If you ask an astronomer the speed of light, she'll answer 186,000 miles per second. Ask a geologist the circumference of the earth, and he'll say 24,870 miles (almost identical to an estimate made two thousand years ago by Eratosthenes, geographer and librarian of Alexandria). Ask a biologist how many species there are on earth, and pick a number. Then pick another biologist. The values in the previous paragraph are for described species, those that scientists have cataloged and named. In reality, there are probably at least ten million species on earth. Most biologists believe the actual number to be nearer thirty million, and some estimate it as high as a hundred million. In the most optimistic scenario, we know about one-sixth of all life on earth. We may know less than one-fiftieth. Ponder the price of such ignorance. If we knew just a tenth of the million and a half species named thus far, what foods and medicines might be missing from our lives? Doctors might have cyclosporine, but not penicillin. Farmers might grow wheat, but not corn. We might have beer, but not aspirin (for the morning after). Over forty percent of all pharmaceuticals currently dispensed in the United States were derived originally from plants, animals, and microbes. What products await the discovery of twenty million more species? Many of the species remaining to be discovered are undoubtedly small in size. The bulk of them will be insects, fungi, and microbes, creatures less than an inch long. One species described a few years ago was about the width of a human hair. It wasn't discovered in Antarctica or in remote tropical rainforests but hitchhiking in the mouths of Norwegian lobsters. For part of its life cycle Symbion pandora resembles a plump saguaro cactus, with a bud on top as its mouth and another lump on its side, a male hanging on for food and sex. Such a bizarre creature might be just a systematist's footnote, except for one remarkable attribute: Symbion represents a new phylum, one of only thirtyfive or so fundamental body plans that characterize all animals 16

The Richness of Life on earth. Biologist Simon Conway Morris called it "the zoological highlight of the decade." Although the balance of undiscovered creatures is undoubtedly skewed to the small, the great are still found with regularity. In a typical year, two new bird species and a hundred new fish are described. Startling discoveries are made in remote corners of the world and in our own backyards. In 1988 researchers discovered a new Colombian tree 2.50 feet tall and hundreds of years old. The species is a dipterocarp, a member of a diverse and commercially important family common in the tropics of Southeast Asia. What made the find so exciting was that dipterocarps were unknown in the Americas. "This discovery is the equivalent of finding a population of gorillas living in the Colombian rainforest," said Brian Boom of the New York Botanical Garden. The species is apparently at least eighty million years old and arrived before America and Africa drifted apart in the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs still roamed the planet. In 1991 scientists in Vietnam discovered a new mammal in the same group as cattle and goats, the first such find in fifty years. Originally "discovered" from hunters' pelts, the Vu Quang ox weighs more than two hundred pounds, with long tapered horns and a striking black and white facial pattern. Its known range is now less than fifteen hundred square miles of the last pristine forest of northern Vietnam. Several hundred may survive. In 1991 shark hunters off the coast of Peru caught a new whale in their nets. Mesoplodon peruvianus, the Pygmy Beaked Whale, is small by whale standards, a mere ten feet long. Prior to its discovery, ten new whales had already been found in the twentieth century. One of them, known only from its bones, has never been seen alive. Of the 2.50 primate species worldwide, six were found in the last two decades in Brazil alone. A striking new lion-tamarin was discovered at Guaraquecaba in Brazil's coastal forests, less than 150 miles from Sao Paulo. That's like finding a new monkey on Long Island, only a few hours from New York City, except that Sao Paulo is bigger than New York. In the words of biologist 17

The Earth Remains Forever E. O. Wilson, "One hunter could have extinguished the species in a matter of days." Across the Atlantic, two new primates were discovered around the same time, a new lemur in Madagascar (TattersalPs sifaka) and a new monkey from Central Africa (the sun-tailed guenon). One of our closest living relatives, the pygmy chimpanzee, was unknown seventy-five years ago.

Throughout history, people have been intrigued by life's diversity, seeking to identify the plants and animals they found around them. In part, this knowledge was useful, allowing them to distinguish between important or dangerous species and less useful ones. "Usefulness" doesn't capture the depth of people's knowledge, however. All over the world people sought to understand life around them in a systematic, even a cultural, way. Ornithologist Ernst Mayr spent decades gathering a wealth of ecological data on birds in the East Indies. On Papua New Guinea, he and his colleagues cataloged and "discovered" 137 bird species. The native people might have saved him some time, however, because they had 136 names for the same birds. The urge to seek life near and far has continued in recent centuries. In 1768 a twenty-five-year-old Englishman named Joseph Banks left a landed, aristocratic life to sail with James Cook aboard the Endeavour. Cook's goal was to establish an observatory in Tahiti and to explore the uncharted waters of the South Pacific (uncharted to Europeans, that is, not to the Lapita). Banks's goal was to describe the diversity of life along the way. He cataloged so many new plants in Australia that the site where the ship landed was named "Botany Bay." Overall, almost a quarter of all plants known at the time—fourteen hundred new species—came from his collection. He not only brought plants home, he took some with him, leaving oranges and watermelons in Tahiti, limes and carrots in Australia, and Chinese tea in India. Later he moved people, too, establishing the first British colony in Australia with convicts who would have gone to America if the Revolutionary War hadn't changed their final destination.

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The Richness of Life A century and a half later (and the day World War I started), another ship—this one known as the Endurance—sailed from London on a journey of discovery. Renowned explorer Ernest Shackleton, knighted previously for journeying to within a hundred miles of the South Pole, led an expedition of twenty-eight men trying to cross Antarctica by land. In January the Endurance became stuck in the ice of the Weddell Sea for nine months. Despite the endless polar winter and an uncertain fate, biologist Robert Clark lowered a sampling dredge through the ice each day to bolster his collection of sea life. Irreverent shipmates rewarded his obsession by placing cooked spaghetti into a particularly deep sample, watching Clark marvel at his newly discovered "worms" until he recognized them from a previous meal. Ignoring his shipmates, he continued to catalog life throughout their remarkable journey, including months drifting on an ice floe and ending with an eight-hundred-mile trip across the southern ocean in a twenty-foot boat. Remarkably, every man with Shackleton survived. The Hintons of Mexico provide a modern example of the ongoing search for life. They celebrate four consecutive generations as "rabid plant collectors," their own moniker, beginning with George B. Hinton a century ago and continuing through teenager Boole Hinton today. Born in 1881, George Hinton was a mining engineer who sought his fortune in Mexico at the turn of the century. He lost his prosperous ranch in the Mexican revolution and was forced to start over. The Hintons were as successful the second time as the first. The current patriarch of the group is George's son Jaime. About 5' 10" and more than 80 years old, Jaime still scampers upslope when he catches sight of an unexpected plant. The most recent addition to his impressive collection is the bluebonnet (Lupinus jaime hintonia) he discovered in the remote mountains of Oaxaca. Unlike its famous bluebonnet relative, the state flower of Texas, Hinton's is a striking 3O-foot tree. Jaime roamed the Oaxacan hills for decades in search of botanical treasures. More than sixty years ago, he traveled thousands of miles through the Sierra Madre del Sur to collect plants

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The Earth Remains Forever in an area known as the Region Inexplorada. Jaime rode a trusted jet-black mule named Lenina who had served his father before him. One night, Lenina was stolen. In such remote country, the theft of a mule could mean death for the owner, or the thief, depending on the outcome. Jaime and his friend Domingo Corona tracked thief and mule three days and nights, barely stopping to rest. When it seemed they had lost Lenina forever in the surrounding mountains, they finally stumbled across her in the company of a shepherd. Since the thief was hiding and the shepherd was innocent, Jaime and Domingo took a single goat for their trouble. Their solace for the trip was discovering a giant flowering rhododendron on the journey home, a plant known today as Eejaria hintonii. During his lifelong career, Jaime Hinton discovered some twenty-five new Salvia species, plants in the same family as basil and oregano. He suggested that one of them be named Salvia leninae in devotion to the mule. Lenina's tale ends happily for everyone except the unsuccessful thief and, temporarily, for the American who formally named Lenina's Salvia. Shortly after World War II, and years after naming the plant, the scientist came under suspicion for communist sympathies. How could his accusers know that the Salvia was named for Lenina the mule and not for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin?

Life in transition "Build an ark," the Lord ordered Noah, "Two of everything, bison and boa." Noah gazed at the sky, "Even birds? They can fly. I'm excluding the dodo and moa." A challenge today is the range of life that remains undiscovered. The million and a half species currently described may represent less than a tenth of all life on earth. Finding and identifying the

The Richness of Life other ninety percent is the Herculean task of modern taxonomists and bio-explorers like the Hintons, their task a daunting one because of the sheer number of species involved and the speed with which life known and unknown is vanishing. In the last four centuries, the earth has lost species at a rate seen only five times in its history. The most recent of these events wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, to the disappointment of children everywhere, and eliminated up to threequarters of all plant species. A meteor and the climate change that followed it probably caused the dinosaurs' demise. Even more catastrophic was the Permian extinction a quarter billion years ago, when more than ninety percent of animals disappeared. New evidence suggests a similar meteoric link to the devastating Permian losses; life took a hundred million years to recover. Detailed studies of the fossil record anchor such extinctions in their historical context. Using this record as a guide, the average species lives about four million years, placing humans less than a quarter of the way through our allotted time (when, for once, being slower than average would be nice). Given this rate of extinction, if there are ten million species on earth, then two or three might be become extinct in a typical year. For the four thousand or so mammals, a typical rate would be a species every thousand years; for birds, one every five hundred or so. In the last four centuries, however, more than eighty mammals have disappeared, two percent of the earth's total. One species every five years is hundreds of times faster than average for the fossil record. A hundred and fifteen birds also vanished during the same period, about a species every three and a half years, and more than a hundred times faster than predicted. In the twentieth century, 113 fish and other freshwater species disappeared from North America alone. These estimates of extinctions are considered conservative for many reasons. First, it's hard to know when many species are gone, especially those that live in the oceans or in other hidden or remote places. Only through the accumulated evidence of looking for and not finding a species can we be confident that it is actually gone. (And, fortunately, once in a while we're wrong.) 21

'The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen....The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut." Usually an animal isn't called extinct until it has been searched for and not found for at least fifty years. That delay in confirming extinctions is one reason that the numbers above are conservative. Another reason is that many species remain undescribed. When an unknown species disappears, it passes unnoticed. In addition to those species already gone, many others are today on the brink of extinction. A hundred and eighty mammal species, including a tenth of primates, and almost two hun2.2.

The Richness of Life dred birds are critically endangered. A study by Bird Life International in 1994 put the estimate even higher—eleven percent or almost a thousand critically endangered birds. That same year the World Conservation Union, whose purpose is to monitor the earth's biodiversity, estimated that approximately 750 mammals were threatened with extinction, almost one of every six on the planet. Its conclusion for birds was similar to the result from Bird Life International. The picture is both better and worse for plants. As compiled in a recent report by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC), 976 plants currently face extinction. That number needs to be placed in the context of plant diversity overall, however—a hundred thousand or so described species—so although there are many plants in danger, the proportion is smaller than for mammals, "only" one or two percent. On the other hand, there are many more undescribed plants than unknown birds or mammals. That plants may be in somewhat better shape than other taxonomic groups is small consolation for those plants already in danger. In Tanzania a lone Holmskioldiagigas tree stands in the Ngarama Forest Reserve, its last potential mate logged in the 19808. The sole Carpinusputoensis tree in the wild today waits behind a protective fence at the edge of a forest on a Chinese archipelago. On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, four Hibiscus clayi comprise the last natural population on earth. The WCMC estimates that the survival of approximately ten thousand tree species is threatened by habitat destruction. Attributing a cause to every recent extinction is impossible, but, where it is possible, three factors stand out singly or in concert: overharvesting, exotic invaders, and habitat destruction. Introduced species and habitat destruction cause three-quarters of all known extinctions when cause can be determined. Hunting and overharvesting cause another fifth. In Greek mythology, Cerberus, the three-headed beast, guarded the entrance to Hades. He had the body of a dog, the tail of a dragon, and a mane of thick, writhing snakes, the mixed legacy of a mother who was half serpent. Dante's protagonist in The In2-3

The Earth Remains Forever ferno faced this animal that "howls through his triple throats." Like the three heads of Cerberus threatening anyone who tried to escape, the triumvirate of overharvesting, invading species, and habitat loss threaten many species on earth. How we will tame them as Hercules tamed Cerberus remains a mystery.

Overharvesting: on bounty and banking In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed; there—pointing to the sea—is a green pasture where our children's grandchildren will go for bread. OBED MACY, History ofNantucket (1835)

Vitus Jonassen Bering led two of the largest and most famous explorations in history. During the five-year Kamchatka expedition of the 17208, he and his crew traveled across Siberia, built their own ships on reaching the Pacific Ocean, and then sailed around the northeast corner of Russia, proving that Asia and North America were distinct continents. In honor of his discovery, the strait and the sea between them today bear his name. The goal of Bering's second expedition was to map the west coast of Alaska. This second journey was larger and longer still, and it took them eight years to reach their destination in 1741. Tragically, on the return voyage, Bering and his crew shipwrecked on a remote island, where, forced to endure the severe winter in driftwood huts, he and many of his crew members perished. The crew members who did survive, however, reported the discovery of a remarkable new animal—the Steller's sea cow. Georg Wilhelm Steller, Bering's chief naturalist on the expedition, described the sea cow posthumously in De Bestiis Marinis. It was twenty-five-feet long and weighed fifteen thousand pounds, with a heart that weighed almost forty pounds. The enormous animals had no teeth and instead used a pair of flat bones to "chew" or abrade seaweed. As Steller described them: 2.4

The Richness of Life These animals, like cattle, live in herds at sea, males and females going together and driving the young before them about the shore. They are occupied with nothing else but their food. The back and half the body are always seen out of the water. . . . During the eating they move the head and neck like an ox, and after the lapse of a few minutes they lift the head out of the water and draw fresh air with a rasping and snorting sound after the manner of horses. A fondness for seaweed near shore and a docile nature led to the sea cow's demise. The first one killed by Bering's crew took forty men just to pull it ashore. While the sailors fought the captive, other sea cows tried to rescue it by bumping the sailor's boat and knocking their ropes, but failed. (And if shipwrecked on a frozen island, I doubt I'd be pulling for the sea cows.) The meat was "exceedingly savory," its fat even more prized. Surviving members of the expedition brought home news of the easy prey, and twenty-five years later in 1768 explorer Martin Sauer documented the killing of the last Steller's sea cow on earth. Reading about the sea cow didn't prepare me for actually seeing it, or at least seeing what remains of it today. The skeleton that hangs in the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C., is immense, so big that you could pitch a tent in its rib cage. Looking at it, my children were dumbstruck, and I was too, but I also felt strangely cheated at having missed something that wonderful alive. The "stellar" sea cow was probably never abundant, but overharvesting has eliminated common species as well. Two modern examples are the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Parakeet. The Passenger Pigeon is believed by some scientists to have been the most numerous bird that ever lived. As many as five billion roamed North America each year, and people described tree limbs breaking under their collective weight when they landed. In 1844 James J. Audubon wrote: The Multitudes of wild pigeons in our woods are astonishing. Indeed, after having viewed them so often, and under so *5

The Earth Remains Forever many circumstances, I even now feel inclined to pause, and assure myself that what I am going to relate is fact. Yet I have seen it all, and that too in the company of persons who, like myself, were struck in amazement. . . . Before sunset I reached Louisville, distant from Hardensburgh fifty-five miles, the pigeons were still passing in undiminished number, and continued to do so for three days in succession. The people were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the pilgrims, which there flew lower as they passed the river. Multitudes were thus destroyed. For a week or more, the population fed on no other flesh than that of pigeons, and talked of nothing but pigeons. The pigeon was plentiful, but several factors led to its downfall. It had special breeding requirements and nested in large groups, making it vulnerable to hunters. It was good to eat and easy to shoot. People also viewed it as a crop pest. On September i, 1914, only seventy years after Audubon wrote the passage above, the last known Passenger Pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo. The Carolina Parakeet is an equally sobering example. As the only native parrot common in the United States, it was perhaps the most beautiful American bird that ever lived. Its head was a splash of luminescent yellow surrounding an outcrop of crimson, its body and long tail feathers a bright emerald green. Alexander Wilson, Audubon's predecessor in painting America's birds, loved the parakeet so much that he kept one as a pet in his pocket as he trudged a thousand miles across the American wilderness. He described a flock of the birds in this way: When they alighted on the ground, it appeared at a distance as if covered with a carpet of the richest green, orange, and yellow: they afterwards settled, in one body, on a neighboring tree, which stood detached from any other, covering almost every twig of it, and the sun, shining strongly on their gay and glossy plumage, produced a very beautiful and splen-

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The Richness of Life did appearance. Here I had an opportunity of observing some very particular traits of their character: Having shot down a number, some of which were only wounded, the whole flock swept repeatedly around their prostrate companions, and again settled on a low tree, within twenty yards of the spot where I stood. At each successive discharge, though showers of them fell, yet the affection of the survivors seemed rather to increase; for, after a few circuits around the place, they again alighted near me, looking down on their slaughtered companions with such manifest symptoms of sympathy and concern, as entirely disarmed me. Like the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet was killed for taking fruits and grains. It, too, disappeared in hunters' volleys and shrinking habitats early in the twentieth century. A small flock made its last stand in southern Florida. Today, in a small, dark basement room in Durham, North Carolina, the G. M. Gray collection of bird specimens fills a set of nondescript metal cabinets. It wasn't until after writing about the Carolina Parakeet and the Passenger Pigeon that I learned you could still see them first hand. One recent afternoon I found myself opening cabinet doors and pulling out a long gray tray. At the back, side by side, lay single specimens of the pigeon and parakeet. The Passenger Pigeon was much larger than I imagined, more than twice the size of the Mourning Doves near it, with an iridescent purple collar. Around its neck was a handwritten tag that read "Extinct." The rainbow of colors next to the pigeon was the exquisite parakeet. I held it in my hands, turning it over and over, its jeweled feathers still bright and soft. Barring a miracle of molecular biology, that look is as close as anyone will ever come to seeing either bird alive. We all lost that chance a century ago.

THE COMPLEAT ANGLER

The species in danger today aren't limited to exquisite birds like the Carolina Parakeet. Important food species are also at risk in 2-7

The Earth Remains Forever the oceans. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, thirteen of the earth's seventeen major fisheries are currently in a state of commercial depletion or serious decline. Historically, some of the first major fisheries to collapse were found off the coasts of North America: the New England redfish and the Pacific anchovy (the latter the backdrop to John Steinbeck's Cannery Row). Redfish were caught at a rate of 13 o million pounds per year in the Gulf of Maine during the 19308 and 408. Not surprisingly, they disappeared and have yet to recover. One of the most flagrant cases of overharvesting occurred in New England and Newfoundland waters. Jean Cabot, who discovered Newfoundland in 1497, returned to Italy with stories of its prodigious bounty. As related by his companion, Raimondo de Soncito, "... the sea is covered with fishes, which are caught not only with nets but with baskets, a stone being tied to them in order that the baskets may sink in the water." More recently, twenty thousand Canadian fisherman and coworkers lost their jobs in 1991 when the government closed harvests in Newfoundland's Grand Banks. The New England Fishery Management Council followed suit in 1994, prohibiting fishing for cod, haddock, and yellowtail on the Georges Banks. What brought about this sorry state of affairs!1 Part of the answer, at least in the United States, was successful lobbying in 1976 to exclude foreign boats from American waters. Congress passed the Magnuson Act, giving the United States exclusive rights to manage fishing within two hundred miles of its shores. When the foreign boats left, a surge of American fishermen overharvested the windfall. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," said philosopher George Santayana. The first rush on the Georges Bank was over a century and a half ago. At that time halibut was considered a trash fish, but in the 18 308 American consumers had a change of heart, and single boats were catching twenty thousand pounds of halibut a day. After a precipitous decline, the fish is still almost completely absent from the region. In the words of writer Deborah Cramer, "Today

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The Richness of Life catches of Georges Bank halibut are so rare that regulators don't even keep statistics on them; it is as if this enormous fish, surpassed in size only by swordfish, certain sharks, and tuna, no longer existed in the northwest Atlantic." Such problems aren't unique to North America. North Sea fisheries face similar pressure and a potentially similar fate. China, Peru, and Chile netted almost forty percent of the more than one hundred million tons offish harvested globally in 1994. Overall, fish now provide people with more food worldwide than cattle, pigs, sheep, or poultry. In fact, around a billion people now rely on fish as their main source of animal protein. It is the fifth largest agricultural commodity in the world. The solution for many of these problems isn't to ban fishing but instead to use resources sustainably so that our grandchildren have the same opportunities that we had. Investments provide a good example. If we use a savings account responsibly, the interest can be "harvested" forever. If we draw down the principal, however, a downward spiral occurs and we receive less interest each year, forcing us to dip further and further into the principal until we're left with nothing at all. The illustration isn't perfect because we can add principal back into a savings account. In the case of overharvesting, we often can't. Draw down the natural balance offish for jobs today, and we lose jobs for future generations. By one estimate, if we had maintained spawning stocks offish in the Georges Bank, fishermen could be catching over 2.00 million pounds of cod, yellowtail, and haddock per year sustainably. The total for 1993-1995 was less than 70 million pounds per year. Blaming the fishermen is overly simplistic. They work as efficiently as possible under prevailing rules and market conditions. Instead, governments should help set sustainable harvest limits that safeguard the fish and the interests of current and future fishermen. If we are uncertain about what a sustainable catch should be, erring on the side of conservation makes sense; it is far easier to increase harvests in the future than to replenish a depleted fishery. Recovery often takes decades when it occurs at all. Extinctions in the oceans are notoriously hard to document.

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The barndoor skate, a relative of sharks and rays, measures more than a yard across and is the largest skate in the northwest Atlantic. Like many big creatures, it reproduces slowly, typically living a decade before bearing young. This combination of large size and slow life cycle has been its downfall. The skate is inadvertently caught in fishermen's trawls and has become increasingly rare as fishing pressure has increased. Forty-five years ago research vessels off Newfoundland's coast caught the skate in every tenth trawl, but in recent decades none has been caught in the region. (A skate small enough to pass through fishermen's nets didn't decline during the same period.) As scientists who study the barndoor skate noted, "If such a large, easily identified species has been allowed to disappear in an area that is well surveyed, the fate of little known species is likely to be worse." In 1994 a fishery specifically targeting skates was opened off the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, further contributing to the decline.

A PASSION FOR LIFE

Collecting examples of life's diversity is a passion for many people. Collectors tend to seek animals and plants that are attractive or 3°

The Richness of Life

unusual, such as butterflies, orchids, and cacti. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov, for example, was a lifelong butterfly and moth collector. In his memoir, Speak, Memory^ he devotes an entire chapter to this "other" passion: "I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts." He discovered several species new to science, including the Nabokov's Pug (Eupithecia, nabokovi) that he found on the picture window of the scenic Aha Lodge in Utah. Amateur collectors like Nabokov have played an important role in cataloging life's diversity, but uncontrolled collecting can also weaken vulnerable species. Butterfly collectors hunted the Mitchell's Satyr to extinction locally in New Jersey, and a similar fate met the beautiful Large Copper in the United Kingdom. In the latter case, local schoolboys got into the act when they found they could make large sums of money by collecting the caterpillars and selling them. More recently, federal agents seized more than two thousand butterfly specimens at a California home in 1992.. The controversial raid netted fourteen of the twenty butterflies listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, including specimens from the Grand Canyon and Florida Everglades. Their total estimated value was more than $300,000. In contrast, most collectors are scrupulous, and many are passionate conservationists. Collecting common species is also a natural way to introduce children to the diversity of life around them. One fine spring morning a few years ago, my family and I were hiking in a North Carolina nature preserve. The trees were just getting their leaves, and migrating warblers were singing their way northward around us. We were hiking with friends and new colleagues, including several conservation biologists and their families. The hike that day was fairly long, and climbing over the many fallen trees left by Hurricane Fran was a challenge for our thenfour-year-old son, David. Finding a clear stream edged with uncommon irises, lilies, and trillium, we stopped for conversation and for lunch. 3i

The Earth Remains Forever In the middle of this lull, David stood up from the group, walked over to the streambank, and did the most natural thing in the world—he picked some of the rare flowers to show us. His action raised a few eyebrows. We were, after all, in a sensitive part of a nature preserve. I didn't scold him. I did try to give him a spontaneous ethics lesson about the environment. "David, in general we don't pick wildflowers. Once in a while is OK, but it's best to leave them for other people to see." All eyes were on us. David contemplated this advice for a minute, and then calmly replied, "It's OK, Daddy. It's not general today. This isn't general. We're not in general right now."

Invasions: the mixing of life An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. VICTOR HUGO (1852) Standing on the shore of Lake Victoria, your eyes scan the largest body of water in Africa. Fishing boats large and small dot the horizon. The land surrounding the lake is a mosaic of grassland, savanna, and tropical forest, though only fragments of forest remain. Clearing and burning along the north shore in Uganda and Kenya have created a sea of pasture grasses, sometimes 10feet-tall, and overgrazing further converts grassland to a dense, intractable bush. The tsetse fly disrupts this cycle temporarily, carrying deadly sleeping sickness to livestock and people. One outbreak in the early 19005 caused the northern shores of the lake to be abandoned almost completely. Temporarily, the forest crept back. Watching the waves ripple toward shore, you might never guess that the lake harbors one of the most amazing assemblages of life in the world. Over three hundred unique cichlid fish evolved here, as changes in their jaws and teeth over time allowed them to eat different foods. With large, flat teeth, much 3*

The Richness of Life like those of cattle, some of them graze on algae. Others have strong jaws and sharp teeth for eating fish. Still others have small mouths and broad teeth for crushing snails. Scientists marveled for years at the fish, trying to understand how such variation arose so quickly in one place. Wonder turned to awe when newer molecular data suggested that all of this diversity occurred in less than two hundred thousand years. There was less genetic variation among Lake Victoria cichlids than within many individual species, including humans. The story was remarkable even before limnologist Thomas Johnson and others reconstructed the lake's history and showed that the new cichlids arose within the last twelve thousand years. Their seismic data and lakebed cores revealed a clear transition from lake sediment to cattail pollen to grasses as one went deeper into the sediments and farther back in time. Interpreting the sequence was straightforward: lake to marsh to grassland as the region dried up in the past. Plant roots, grass pollen, and dry, cracked soils were clearly visible, with the plants dated to 12,500 years ago. Lake Victoria was apparently dry for five thousand years—not partly dry, but completely so—refilling at the end of the last ice age. When it did, three hundred cichlids evolved in the blink of an eye. If twelve thousand years is the blink of an eye, what is forty years? In 1960 government officials decided to "improve" commercial fishing in Lake Victoria by introducing the Nile Perch. More than six feet long and two hundred pounds, the perch is Africa's largest freshwater fish and a ravenous predator. Not surprisingly, its preferred meal in the lake was the endemic cichlids. More than two hundred species are now extinct and many of those that remain are in danger. One species, Haplochromis pyrrhocephalus, survives only in a London museum. It's not just the native fish that have suffered; the human costs have been high as well. Fishing around the lake supported two hundred thousand people. The endemic cichlids once made up more than eighty percent offish biomass in the lake and provided a dependable food source for local people, particularly since the cichlids could be dried in the sun. Instead of cichlids, which now 33

The Earth Remains Forever make up less than one percent of the catch, locals are forced to eat the perch, a much oilier meat that must be cooked or smoked. Cooking takes firewood, forty-five tons of wood a month for just one of countless villages that surround the lake, further fueling deforestation. The loss of algae-eating cichlids also leads to algal blooms that choke the lake for long periods. What was once a thriving, sustainable fishery has been transformed into a capitalintensive one with profound ecological costs. Commercial harvests of Nile Perch have already begun to decline, as they have in other lakes where the fish was introduced.

The world is becoming an increasingly homogenous place. A fashionable street in Berlin has many of the same stores and a similar look as one in Buenos Aires, Chicago, or Johannesburg. As shopping malls, discount stores, and grocery chains replace independent store owners, fast-food restaurants flourish; almost every large city in the world now has a McDonald's, twenty-five thousand and counting. This homogenization extends from commerce to culture as well. Global television and entertainment shape our young people in dress, style, and expression, their habits and wants derived as much from MTV as from their local culture. Such homogenization may be inevitable, but it is also new, and with its benefits come some costs. Crafts, traditional music, languages, and dialects are all vanishing. As the last speaker of the Chamicuro tongue from the Peruvian Amazon, grandmother Natalia Sangama expressed her feelings this way: "I dream in Chamicuro, but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone." According to linguists, about half of the world's six thousand languages will likely disappear in the coming century. Losing cultural diversity isn't a concern just in remote corners of the Amazon it is also happening in the United States. For decades, American Indians were discouraged or forbidden to speak their own languages in schools and other public places. Not surprisingly, many of these languages withered. In general, we often don't value such cultural diversity until something un34

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usual happens. In World War II we needed the Navajo tongue at a time when the number of speakers had dwindled to fewer than 50,000. A small group of Navajos developed a secret radio code that U.S. marines used to control troop movements in the Pacific. It was based on the complex guttural tones of their language that also lacked a written alphabet. One of the marines who helped develop it, Carl Gorman, recalls being chained to a pipe for a week as a schoolchild because he refused to stop speaking his native tongue. Unlike army, navy, and air force codes, the marine code was never cracked, and its existence was secret for decades. Thirty or so Navajo marines and one disappearing language helped change the course of a war, a fact acknowledged publicly in the summer of 2001 when they received the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal. Today, the earth's homogenization includes the biological world as well. Wherever we travel, we bring hitchhikers with us and take home the novelties we find. Some transplants are intentional: horses to the New World, potatoes to the Old, and game fish like the Nile Perch described above. Many other transplants are accidental: European rats, the smallpox virus, and zebra mussels, to name a few. The process is faster and easier today because there are six billion people contributing to a global economy. We routinely ship objects across continents and around the world. In industry and agriculture we choose species for their function rather than for their geographic history. The number of species that become problems in their new homes is small compared to the number introduced. Many never breed in their new surroundings, and most never become pests. The trouble isn't that all introduced species are villains—modern agriculture is based on such introductions—it is predicting those that will be. Because we don't know which species will become problems, the extinctions and economic losses that result are hard to combat. Of a thousand or so threatened or endangered species in the United States, almost a fifth have invasive species to blame, and another quarter are threatened by invaders acting together with other factors like habitat loss. Invaders currently threaten more than four hundred American species. 35

The Earth Remains Forever Many problem species in the United States and elsewhere were originally released intentionally. The notorious kudzu vine was brought to the southeastern United States to control erosion. So was the Eurasian tamarisk that today crowds out willows, poplars, and other riparian trees in the western United States, guzzling water over millions of acres. The Chinese tallow tree was released because of its attractive foliage and its potential for use in soap making. The soap industry never panned out, but the tree thrived nonetheless, converting coastal prairies and other habitats to Chinese tallow groves that choked out native plants and animals. These and many other problem species were all selected with good intentions but outgrew their original purpose. The Foreign Plant Introduction Division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) actively promoted Chinese tallow planting early this century. Today, of course, we know better, except that commercial nurseries still stock the tree, and consumers still buy and plant it. Accidental introductions are equally insidious and even harder to combat. No one knows how the deadly West Nile virus first reached America in 1999, but someone infected with the disease probably stepped off a plane in New York and was bitten by a mosquito, setting in motion a chain of events that killed seven people that summer. The disease spread rapidly, reaching Florida only two years later. Today, as it continues to march across the eastern United States, there is still no treatment for it. As another example, an ocean tanker sails across the Atlantic with dozens of species clinging to its hull. Arriving in port, workers unload the ship's cargo and fill its ballast tanks with seawater for the trip home, emptying that water thousands of miles away. Such was the path of the most notorious recent invader to the United States—the zebra mussel. The zebra mussel first reached America from Russia sometime around 1985. People first noticed it in Lake St. Clair three years later, and it spread so quickly that within five years Congress allocated $150 million to control it. It moved through the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, and into the Tennessee, Illinois, and Hudson Rivers. Its local growth

36

The Richness of Life was equally astounding. When police pulled a red Camaro from Lake Erie after only eight months underwater, the car was covered with a clammy two-inch layer of the creatures (leading to self-righteous editorials on the perils of "mussel cars"). In the winter of 1989, workers at Detroit Edison found a thousand zebra mussels to the square yard in their canals; six months later the densities were half a million. The city of Monroe, Michigan, shut down water to 45,000 people that year because zebra mussels had clogged the intake pipes. The estimated costs of the mussel in North America now top five billion dollars. The ecological costs of zebra mussels may be even more extensive than the immediate economic costs. North America has the most diverse assemblage of freshwater mussels in the world. According to The Nature Conservancy, three-quarters of them are now rare or imperiled. In Lake St. Glair, where the zebra mussel first established a foothold, eighteen species of native clams have effectively disappeared. Halting the spread of invaders once they become established is difficult. Scientist James Carlton summarized twenty-three ways in which the zebra mussel spread through U.S. waters. Twenty of them were from simple human acts like moving trailered boats from one watershed to another or emptying bait buckets into lakes and streams. Waterways such as the Welland Canal in the Great Lakes and the locks linking Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River are important for travel and commerce, but they also provide invaders with pathways that didn't exist a century ago. Simple, everyday acts also release species unintentionally. Florida spent more than fifty million dollars in the 19805 trying to wipe out the tiny but prolific Hydrilla choking its waterways. A favorite of the global aquarium trade, the plant now ranges over much of the United States because people dump it into local streams or ponds when they clean their aquariums. According to the Department of Agriculture, exotic species cost U.S. farmers $7.5 billion each year, with growers elsewhere affected similarly. France and Italy are the largest winemakers in the world, but their cherished industry almost disappeared in the i8oos because of an invader. In the 18508 European grow37

The Earth Remains Forever ers imported a new grapestock from America to combat a disease afflicting their vines. Hitchhiking on the imports was a root aphid, Phylloxera, which attacked the roots of European vines. In consequence, more than six million acres of French vineyards were destroyed in the next two decades, roughly three-quarters of the total. Once the Phylloxera aphid became established, there was no way to eliminate it. The only solution growers could find was to graft French vines onto other imported American vines that had evolved with the pest, the practice that got them in trouble in the first place. A hundred and fifty years later, the world's wine is still produced this way—the continuing legacy of a mislaid species. (And, aphoristically, what goes around, comes around; the aphid eventually invaded California, costing winemakers there more than a billion dollars in the last decade.) An even more devastating accidental invader caused the Irish Potato Famine a century and a half ago. Potatoes were brought from the New World to Britain in the 15008, and by the early nineteenth century many Irish farmers grew nothing else. How soon the fungus Phytophthom infestans reached Ireland isn't known, but the famine to which it contributed killed a million people, one of every eight people in the country, between 1844 and 1849. A contemporaneous account captured the horrors: "'Death by starvation' has ceased to be an article of news, and day by day multitudes of our population are swept down into the pit—literally the pit—in which the victims of the famine are interred." It was common for two or even three sons in the same family to be named for their father because so many of them died. A century later, in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, another stowaway, a dark, nondescript snake, rode a military shipment to the island of Guam. Although the brown tree snake did not appear there until the early 19508, by 1980 there were as many as forty snakes per acre on the island. In the mid-1980s, biologist Julie Savidge compared the birds on Guam with those on nearby Cocos Island where the snake hadn't yet established. What she documented was an ecological disaster. Nine bird species had disappeared, including the Guam flycatcher and Guam rail, species found nowhere else in the world.

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Baiting hundreds of traps, she showed that the brown tree snake was the undeniable culprit. The snake wasn't choosy about its diet. It ate birds in the trees and birds on the ground, and if the birds were too big, it ate their eggs. After wiping out the birds, the snake switched to bats and lizards, eliminating several of these species locally as well. Along with the loss of birds, the snake caused economic and human losses. Power failures were an early sign of the snake's success as it slithered across, and shorted, power lines. (Perhaps fried snake should be a delicacy on Guam.) Between 1978 and 1982,, power outages were so common that snake guards had to be installed on the lines. Closer to home, about a hundred people were treated for snake bites in Guam hospitals from 1989 to 1991, all of them bitten by the brown tree snake. Four-fifths of the people were bitten while sleeping, including twenty children less than three months old, some of whom were found with the snake wrapped around their neck, arms, or head. Well established on Guam, the brown tree snake will almost inevitably reach Hawaii. Hawaiian birds have already suffered from habitat destruction and introduced pests, including avian malaria, rats, pigs, and the mongoose (released intentionally to eat the rats). Seven brown tree snakes have already been killed on Oahu. To combat the snake's establishment, the Hawaii Department of Agriculture recently formed the "Brown Tree Snake Canine Unit," with teams of dogs and inspectors checking all cargo shipments from Guam and Australasia. Their goal is lofty but their efforts may prove futile. The problems associated with invasive species are daunting. In the United States, approximately four thousand exotic plant and twenty-three hundred animal species are now well established. The eighty or so worst invaders cost Americans a hundred billion dollars in the twentieth century. The number and proportion of invaders are even higher in other parts of the world. New Zealand has eighteen hundred native plants and almost sixteen hundred invaders. About a tenth of Australia's twenty thousand plants are exotic. Fortunately, our awareness of the problem is growing. Where 39

The Earth Remains Forever federal agencies used to introduce "valuable" new species (witness the Foreign Plant Introduction Division of the USDA mentioned above), many now work to correct introductions. A new Federal Interagency Committee for managing noxious and exotic plants estimates that the United States spends five billion dollars a year trying to control such weeds. They calculate that an area the size of California is already infested in the United States and that three million new acres succumb each year. We now have a national strategy for managing invasive plants that includes preventing new invasions, detecting problem species early, complying with existing laws and regulations, and using native species wherever possible. The plan also outlines possible ways to control existing invaders and to restore the ecosystems they have damaged. But, in truth, no one really knows how to do this; we just do the best that we can. The struggle with invaders illustrates a recurring lesson of global change—that individual acts and everyday choices matter for the environment. A global economy transplants species faster and farther than ever before, but simple careless acts mix life in new combinations. The next problem species could be released by you or me.

E. Leopold Trouvelot, artist, astronomer, and entomologist, was born in 1817 in Aisne, France. Fleeing France twenty-five years later as Napoleon III became Emperor, he crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in a quiet Boston suburb. For more than fifteen years Trouvelot painted portraits and nurtured an interest in insects. On a trip to France in 1869, he brought back the eggs of a nondescript moth that he hoped would provide a new source of commercial silk, and raised the caterpillars in colonies in his backyard. Inevitably, a few escaped. The moth that Trouvelot transported and accidentally freed is the European gypsy moth, one of most devastating forest pests in North America. It feeds on the leaves of hundreds of different tree species. The first moth outbreak—on Trouvelot's own street—occurred in 1882, endearing him to friends and neigh 40

The Richness of Life bors (and coinciding with his permanent return to France). The first attempt to wipe out the moth came in 1890. Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture sprays pesticides on a million forest acres each year to reduce the worst gypsy moth outbreaks. Damages have been as high as $760 million in a single year. Soon after his failed gypsy moth experiment, Trouvelot turned his interests to the stars. He became well known for his illustrations and research in astronomy and was eventually awarded the Valz Prize from the French Academy. His drawings were displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and published in Astronomical Engravings From the Observatory of Harvard College. There is even an eponymous Trouvelot Crater on Mars; a hundred miles in diameter, it was the back-up landing site for the historic Mars Pathfinder mission. Trouvelot's legacies are diverse, but the gypsy moth may be his most enduring.

Altered horizons In the short, disastrous, backwater history of its use by men of your race, its swift decline from primal richness, you come to see that there is a summary of the relationship between men and land on all parts of this planet, in the ages succeeding a golden time of harmony between men and the natural order that may or may not have ever been, anywhere. JOHN GRAVES, Hard Scrabble (1974) HABITAT LOSS ON LAND

In the year 1700, Louis XIV began his seventh decade as king of France, and Peter the Great towered over Russia. The first true stock exchange had just been formed in London, Newton's theory of gravitation was a decade old, and Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederick Handel were teenagers. Suggesting that the environment was pristine three centuries ago would be a mistake. The earth's population was already more than half a billion people, and farmers needed a million square miles of land to feed them. 4i

The Earth Remains Forever Nonetheless, the changes the earth faced in 1700 were small compared to what the next three centuries would bring. Our population skyrocketed to six billion by the year zooo, as did the number of cities holding a million people—from a handful to more than four hundred. More people are only part of the story, however, as consumption also increased dramatically. Today in the United States we have a car for every two people, almost a vehicle per person if you include trucks, and our houses are bigger and better. The average new home is now more than two thousand square feet, bigger by half than in 1970, and the number of Americans living in each dwelling dropped from five a century ago to around three today. To feed everyone in the world, the tradition of the earth as man's garden has in many places literally come to pass. The area planted in crops is now larger than the South American continent, more than six million square miles. As farmland has increased, so has the intensity of farming. Irrigated croplands cover more than twenty-five times the area they did three centuries ago, and fertilizer and pesticide use have also grown dramatically. We now apply 175 billion pounds of nitrogen every year to fields around the world, fifty pounds for every acre farmed and thirty pounds for each man, woman, and child on earth. More than a billion tons of pesticides are also applied annually, four times more than were produced in 1962 when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. The benefits and growth of agriculture have come at the expense of the earth's natural forests and grasslands. In America, one of the fastest transformations was in the Great Plains. The settlers who first moved there in large numbers in the 186os were called "sodbusters" because they plowed up the rich horizons of soil for the first time. At the time of the dust bowl in the 19308, farms covered almost half of the region, with the transformation continuing after the dust settled. Today, more than two-thirds of the Great Plains is farmed and over ninety percent is cropped or ranched. Of the tens of millions of bison that roamed the plains before European settlement, fewer than fifteen hundred remained in 1900. (Today they have, fortunately, started to recover.) 4*

The Richness of Life Many wetlands have also been lost. Wetlands reduce flooding, filter pollutants, and provide habitat for wildlife, but their typical fate is captured by their names, such as the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. More than half of America's wetlands have been drained, dredged, filled, or planted. Ninety percent of Iowa's and California's once-vast wetlands are now farmed, and habitats like the rich tule marshes of California's Central Valley have disappeared. Such changes began a long time ago. "People are bent only on their own present advantage, utterly regardless of posterity. By these means many swamps are already quite destitute. . . . " Swedish naturalist Peter Kalm wrote these words after seeing wetlands destroyed near Philadelphia in 1750. As profound as changes in the last three centuries have been, recent changes are even more striking. From 1960 to 1990 a million and a half square miles of forest were lost around the world, an area similar in size to North America's forests today. A burgeoning population and habitat loss place increasing demands on what forests remain. When John Kennedy was elected President in 1960 there were about three acres of forest for every person on earth. In 1990 there was half that, and there will likely be only half an acre per person within twenty years. Three centuries ago there were fifteen. Recent changes have been especially fast in the tropics, which contain some of the most diverse systems on earth. Tropical rainforests cover less than a tenth of the earth's lands but hold roughly half of its species. Costa Rica, a country the size of West Virginia, has more bird species than the United States and Canada combined. Peru is equally diverse, with almost half as many tree species in a two-acre plot as in all of North America. At 1.5 million square miles, the Amazon is by far the largest tropical rainforest on earth. Current rates of deforestation in the Amazon are about five thousand square miles per year, and the cumulative loss rose sixfold in the last few decades to an area about the size of California. Such estimates capture only part of the story, however. A recent study concluded that for every acre deforested in the region, another acre is severely damaged by logging crews and fires. In 1997 alone the Amazon had almost 43

The Earth Remains Forever fifty thousand fires, over three-quarters of them set by people to clear land. "This was the year the world caught fire," said JeanPaul Jeanrenaud of the forest-monitoring program of the World Wide Fund for Wildlife. Because the Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world, it acts as a lightning rod for protests against deforestation. In the 19808 deforestation there raced ahead at more than a half a percent per year, meaning that the entire forest could be cut within two centuries. (We might acknowledge that deforestation rates in the United States are twice as high, about one percent annually.) Nonetheless, only a tenth of the Amazon has been cleared to date and the opportunity to preserve it still exists, should Brazil and other nearby countries have the inclination and the economic incentives to do so. Other tropical forests receive much less attention, but their losses have been more severe. The drier forests of eastern Brazil and the species in them are far more endangered than their Amazonian counterparts. When Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral first sighted land in the year 1500, Brazil had at least 350,000 square miles of Atlantic forest. These rich woods were home to the Brazil tree, Caesealpinia echinata, for which the country was named. Today only a few percent of virgin Atlantic forests remain, and while no one knows exactly how many species have been lost, we do know some that are the most threatened. The endemic wooly spider monkey ("muriqui") is South America's largest primate. Before European settlement, it numbered in the hundreds of thousands; today it numbers in the hundreds. Like the changes in Brazil's coastal forests, changes in Central America have also outpaced those in the Amazon. In 1983 only about fifty thousand square miles of undegraded rainforest remained there, and remnants were being cut at a staggering rate of three percent per year. Countries such as El Salvador have essentially no virgin rainforest left. The cattle ranches that have sprung up fuel an acrimonious debate about fast-food hamburgers and disappearing forests. The issues are more complex than trading habitat for hamburgers, but the link between tropical deforestation and consumption in developed nations is real. 44

"And see this ring right here, Jimmy?... That's another time when the old fellow miraculously survived some big forest fire." Emphasizing tropical deforestation also ignores the tremendous changes that have occurred in temperate nations. In Britain, for example, officials from the iron-making industry commissioned a deforestation study 450 years ago because they were afraid that England's southern forests wouldn't be able to supply enough fuel for their industry. On the other side of the Atlantic, about 150,000 square miles of American forests, an amount equal to cumulative deforestation in the Amazon today, were cut between the founding of the United States and the Civil War. Settlers cleared most of this land for farms, but after the Civil War steam-powered equipment allowed wood to be processed faster than ever before. Whole forested regions of Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states disappeared in a few decades. Alexis de Tocqueville observed these changes firsthand. He came to the United States as a young man in 1831 to experience 45

The Earth Remains Forever the growth of a nascent democracy (though ostensibly to study its penal system). In his own words: "I sought the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or hope from its progress." During his travels, he viewed America through the eyes of Americans—our likes and dislikes, our fears and dreams, and our views of science, religion, politics, and the environment. Of our relationship to nature he wrote: In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon another sight: the American people views its own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. We've learned much about ourselves since 1831, but I wonder what de Tocqueville would write today.

HABITAT LOSS UNDER THE SEA

Deforestation, the need for more farmland, urban sprawl—these and other changes on land are increasingly evident. Less evident is an unseen disturbance that rivals or even surpasses them, a hidden and dangerously efficient harvest of the sea floor. Trawling the ocean floor is like plowing a field. Instead of preparing a field for planting, though, ocean trawls scrape and scour life on the sea floor and in its sediments. On a typical day, fifty thousand boats drag their nets across the ocean floor in swaths up to a hundred feet wide. Fifty thousand boats running at three or four miles per hour, hour after hour, day after day, act like an army of rototillers harvesting the sea's bounty. In a typical year, the ships plow six million square miles, an area about the size of South America. There are important differences with farming. Farmers typi-

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The Richness of Life cally plant crops after plowing; no "planting" or reseeding is done to the ocean floor. In industrialized countries, farmland is usually private; much of the sea floor is public. More and more boats tow larger and larger nets over areas unable to repair themselves completely before the next boat arrives. The closest analogy to our harvest of the sea floor might be clear-cutting. Imagine if logging companies were free to cut forests as often as they wished, anywhere they wanted, paying no fees, and leaving the damage to repair itself. The trawlers aren't to blame, but we could change a system that provides life in the oceans so little protection. Our out-of-sight, out-of-mind perspective on sea life is apparent when we compare preservation on land and in the oceans. A fifth of U.S. lands are under federal jurisdiction, and the National Wilderness Preservation System prohibits harvesting on twenty percent of them (approximately 150,000 square miles, or four and a half per cent of the United States). In contrast, America controls an ocean area eight times larger than its public lands, but in 1998 less than half a percent was federally protected, and only one sanctuary, a hundred-square-mile preserve in the Florida Keys, prohibited all harvesting. Based on size, if we shrank Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and all national parks to a preserve the size of Disney World, that would be the same relative protection that we provide to life in the oceans.

THE EARTH S WATER: GROWING DEMAND AND FIXED SUPPLY

Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that people its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness (1902)

Perhaps no other resource is so clearly linked to human health 47

The Earth Remains Forever and well-being as the availability of fresh water. Currently, more than a billion people are without safe drinking water and five to ten million people die from poor sanitation each year. (This tragedy notwithstanding, seven hundred million fewer people were without safe drinking water in 1994 than in 1980, something worth celebrating.) As the number of people on earth has grown, so have our water needs. Three-quarters of the water that we consume is used for irrigation and agriculture. We eat the animals that live in our rivers and streams: fish, birds, and shellfish. We use our waterways for transportation, waste disposal, recreation, and hydroelectric power. Many of our current water needs are met by capturing and storing water behind dams. There are now forty thousand dams at least fifty feet tall around the world and close to a million smaller ones. Amazingly, the artificial reservoirs they create cover an area the size of California. Dams are a mixed blessing. They provide water and generate clean power while helping us to control floods and navigate rivers. But more than a century of dam building has also revealed some of their costs. The reservoirs behind them displace neighborhoods and natural communities, keep fish from migrating up and down rivers, and eliminate habitats like riparian zones, wetlands, and free-flowing water. Dams and other changes to our waterways have left aquatic species some of the most vulnerable on earth. Twenty percent of freshwater fish around the world are threatened or extinct, with an even higher fraction in the United States, where a third of freshwater fish and two-thirds of crayfish are rare or endangered. The Mobile River Basin, which drains about forty thousand square miles of the southeastern United States, illustrates the pressures that aquatic species face. More than thirty dams and locks for navigation and power-generation currently block the river and its tributaries. In consequence, almost half of the "river" is a now reservoir. It historically contained about two hundred species of fish, forty found nowhere else in the world, and another thirty endemic mussels. Today, fish like striped bass and Atlantic stur-

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The Richness of Life geon that once migrated to the ocean are gone from many parts of the basin, and another ten species are imperiled from habitat loss and fragmentation. Such animals come under additional pressure from introduced gamefish like smallmouth bass and from accidental invaders like the zebra mussel. As a result of all of the changes, at least sixteen endemic mussels and twenty-five endemic snails and gastropods found nowhere else in the world are extinct—more than forty species from a single river basin. Changes to other rivers and lakes have been even more dramatic. Fifty years ago the Aral Sea in central Asia was the fourth largest lake in the world; today it is one of the earth's greatest environmental disasters. So much river water has been diverted to cotton farms in the region that the Aral Sea has dropped fifty feet and lost four-fifths of its volume, about as much water as Lakes Erie and Ontario contain. Its shoreline has retreated seventy-five miles in places, with the former harbor town of AraPsk now a landlocked community twenty miles inland. A commercial fishery of forty-five thousand tons a year and sixty thousand jobs has also disappeared. While the human costs of the disaster are enormous, we can only guess at the costs for other life in the region, as what little water remains is now saltier than the oceans. Another sobering example is the Colorado River, the lifeblood of fifteen million people and millions of acres of farmland in the southwestern United States and Mexico. The river that sculpted the Grand Canyon, the same river whose flow once ran at a hundred thousand cubic feet per second, now routinely disappears in the desert. Irrigation takes over half of its water, and another third evaporates from behind the thirty or so dams whose artificial reservoirs glisten in the desert sun. By the early 19608 the salinity of the river had tripled from historic levels, prompting the United States to start building a desalinization plant to provide Mexico with usable water. The dwindling flow of the Colorado River and its tributaries has also affected the plants and animals that depend on them. A number of endemic fish are endangered, including the humpback chub and the razorback sucker. Prior to 1930, the river delivered fifteen million tons of suspended sediment to the Gulf

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The Earth Remains Forever of California each year, feeding the Colorado delta and the organisms that thrived there. Today the river often carries neither water nor life to the sea. A similar plight faces the Yellow River, the second longest in China. It first ran dry in 1972. and now does so every year. In 1997 it was dry an unbelievable 226 days, disappearing completely the previous year before it could reach Shandong Province, the region that produces a fifth of China's wheat and corn. (Imagine the uproar if Arizona drained the Colorado River before it reached California.) The economic costs are enormous, but so are the environmental costs as wetlands, lakes, and streams disappear along with the species that live in them. When China's population grows to a billion and a half people in a few decades, what kind of river will be left?

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. c. s. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man (1943)

The conflicts that arise from a growing need for water defy geographic and political boundaries. Five centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci and Machiavelli teamed up in a dispute between the Italian cities of Florence and Pisa, attempting to divert the Arno River and deprive Pisa of water. They failed. (And if those two couldn't succeed, who could?) In 1990 a pro-apartheid council for Wesselton, South Africa, cut off water to fifty thousand people for daring to protest poor sanitation and living conditions. In the same year, Turkey interrupted the flow of the Euphrates River for a month while finishing the Ataturk Dam, an act protested by Syria and Iraq downstream. Turkish President Turgut Ozal then threatened to curtail flow indefinitely unless Syria withdrew support for Kurdish rebels fighting in southern Turkey. Here in the United States, we've had a few water skirmishes of our own. In the early 19308 California began building Parker

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The Richness of Life

Dam across from Arizona along the Colorado River. The purpose of the dam was to supply southern California with water, but Congress had never authorized it, and the citizens of Arizona were still smarting from the Colorado Compact of 192.2. that gave "their" water to California. Deciding that his state needed to prove a point, Arizona's charismatic governor Benjamin Moeur dispatched troops in 1934 to halt construction of the dam on the Arizona side of the river. As he described his actions officially in a cable to President Roosevelt, "I have therefore today found it necessary to issue a proclamation establishing martial law on the Arizona side of the river at that point and directing the National Guard to use such means as may be necessary to prevent an invasion of the sovereignty and territory of the state of Arizona. . . . " Moeur's forces, including twenty machine gunners from the Arizona National Guard, defended their state for six months, spending much of their time trying to keep their vehicles from getting stuck in the sand. Arizona's memorable "army" teamed up with the only "navy" the landlocked state has ever floated, a pair of flat-bottomed ferryboats captained by a feisty state legislator named Nellie Bush. As river captain, she brandished a gun and shouted challenges (and epithets) at her neighbors across the river. The press had a field day with the war, and the small-town locals were equally entertained, finding amusement and opportunity in the dispute. A local paint distributor generously offered to sell Governor Moeur the supplies his navy would undoubtedly need: Naturally, you'll think it rather unusual that we would carry a stock of marine paints for sale here in the middle of the desert. But just think back a few years and you'll remember our Federal Government decided the Colorado River was a navigable stream. Right then we knew some day war vessels would be cruising those waters and we set in a nice stock of paint for them. Our organization is proud of our foresight. 5i

The Earth Remains Forever Although Moeur stationed his troops near Parker Dam for half a year, the military resolution came quickly. Major Franklin Pomeroy, commander of Arizona's troops, gave the following account of the conflict: The pile driver who was working on the bridge was moved back to the California side and a delegation came to Parker to see me. They wanted to know what I intended to do. I told them I was going to prevent any more work from being done on the Arizona side of the river. How was I going to do it? Well, I pointed to a stack of ammunition, some ammunition boxes, a couple of machine guns, and some other arms. They took a good look and said they would stop work. Fortunately, no shots were fired and no lives were lost. In fact, the Arizona army reputedly saved two lives during their stay, one a drunken dam worker who they plucked from the river, and the other a rancher with appendicitis who they carried to a hospital. Arizona may have won the battle on the Colorado, but they lost the war the following year when the federal government formally approved Parker Dam. Today Los Angeles receives a billion gallons of water a day from the Colorado Aqueduct. A decade after the Arizona Water War ended, President Harry Truman acknowledged the importance of water conflicts around the world and suggested the proper way to deal with them. He gave this sage advice in a speech to the international community: When Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas River they don't call out the National Guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring a suit in the Supreme Court of the United States and abide by the decision. There isn't a reason in the world why we cannot do that internationally. Now perhaps we really had learned something in the two decades since the Arizona Water War, but maybe, just maybe, President Truman missed the irony in his quote. 5*

The Richness of Life

Nature as the mother of invention Maintaining life's diversity in the face of overharvesting, species invasions, and habitat loss presents a challenge for the future, a challenge fueled by increased population and consumption. In fact, the job is so demanding that many people may wonder if it's worth the effort. There are many arguments put forth for preserving biodiversity. Perhaps the most controversial is a moral one, that species should be preserved for their own sake. Each of us, consciously or not, holds a philosophical hierarchy of life. For most people, man rests at the top of a pyramid, with other life arrayed below us: humans, perhaps monkeys, mammals, vertebrates, plants, arthropods, and microbes—just one of an infinite number of hierarchies. This view, man as life's apotheosis, mirrors our former view of the universe. People once placed Earth at the center of the heavens, with the Sun, planets, and stars revolving around it. This view of the world was reasonable, even intuitive, because we couldn't feel the earth move under us and because there was nothing obvious to keep us from being thrown into space if it did. (Gravity was still unknown at the time.) There was even a biblical pretext: "The earth shall not be moved." The geocentric model held for millennia, through Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, until Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs. He proposed that the Sun, not Earth, stood at the center of the solar system, and that Earth was the third-closest planet revolving around the Sun. (The Greek astronomer Aristarchus held a similar view almost two thousand years earlier, but his peers rejected his idea for the philosophical and physical reasons given above.) The Copernican revolution also laid the foundation for other physical and philosophical changes. Johannes Kepler first realized that planets moved in ellipses, not in perfect circles. Galileo learned to grind lenses so flawlessly that he could see the moons 53

The Earth Remains Forever of Jupiter, a startling confirmation of the Copernican world. For believing his eyes, he was forced to recant before the Inquisition and spend the rest of his life under house arrest. A half-century after Copernicus, philosopher Giordano Bruno proposed that the universe was infinite, that it had many stars with planets, and that the planets might be inhabited. For holding this early Star Trek view of the universe, he was burned at the stake. Astronomers recently confirmed at least part of Bruno's theory by discovering the first planets around distant suns. Their inhabitants, at least, remain speculative. As Earth once stood at the center of the universe, so man still stands at the center of the biological universe (or at least most of us see it this way). A much rarer view holds all life equal and, in consequence, argues for preserving life on equal terms. Philosophical differences like this may seem academic, but they shape our view of the world and the value we place on conservation. How many people would trade a human life to preserve a microbe? Who would fault a hunter for choosing his family over an endangered monkey? We can help avoid such melodramatic choices through planning, but the pressures forcing them will become more extreme as habitats shrink and population grows. The first justification for preserving biodiversity is thus a moral one—that all life is, if not equal, then at least sacred. While many people believe this in one form or another, moral arguments falter when people hold differing sets of beliefs. A second, more pragmatic, argument combines common sense with prudence. Plants, animals, and microbes are immensely useful to us—we are here because they are. They provide the oxygen that we breathe and the food that we eat. They clothe us and shade us. Maintaining life's diversity therefore has many advantages for us, some more obvious than others. When ecosystems lose species (and groups of species that function similarly), they tend to be less stable and undergo other key changes. Plant production often declines in less diverse systems. Ecosystems are better able to resist disturbances such as drought when biodiversity is maintained—we can depend on them more fully year in and year out.

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The Richness of Life

Furthermore, the boom-and-bust cycles of pests and diseases are much more common in less diverse systems. Nature's diversity provides us with many valuable and important services; preserving that diversity is an important step in maintaining the benefits that we receive. From an anthropocentric view, nature is a toolshed and each species is a slightly different tool. For some jobs, almost any tool will do. You can turn soil in your garden with a pitchfork or a shovel. Similarly, almost any plant will recycle carbon from the atmosphere to the soil. For other jobs there may be only a single species, even a race within that species, which will do. For studying leprosy, that one species is the armadillo. Armadillos catch a similar but uncontagious form of leprosy and give birth to identical quadruplets, so doctors can treat the "same" animal differently and see which medicine works best. The analogy of nature's toolshed is useful because every species is unique and because nature is the oldest hardware store in town. As tools, some species are already useful, some may never be, and some aren't now but will be in the future. There is also no easy way to know which species we'll need or why we'll need them. A century ago, who would have preserved an archaic microbe from the hot springs of Yellowstone? But because Thermus aquaticus grows at temperatures close to the boiling point of water, its biochemical machinery withstands high temperatures without breaking down. The DNA polymerase derived from it is the foundation for modern molecular biology—sequencing, cloning, and engineering DNA; analyzing forensic samples; assaying infections; and diagnosing genetic diseases. Human ingenuity and nature's toolbox join forces to make our lives profoundly different. In fact it is easy to forget what nature has already provided. Here are just a few of the medicines and products that we use, and the creatures they came from: • Rosy Periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus} is a small, pinkflowered plant native to Madagascar. Two important anticancer drugs, the alkaloids vinblastine and vincristine, are 55

The Earth Remains Forever derived from it and now cure more than two-thirds of the victims of Hodgkin's disease, most of them young adults. The drugs also cure ninety-five percent of children who suffer from leukemia; a few decades ago less than one in five would have survived. As habitat destruction proceeds rapidly in Madagascar, a sister species (Catharanthus coriaceus) is almost extinct in the wild. • The horseshoe crab (Limuluspolyphemus) looks much the same today as it did three hundred million years ago. A clotting agent discovered in its blood, Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL), now makes it possible to detect the pathogens that cause spinal meningitis, gonorrhea, and other bacterial diseases in people and in drugs. In fact, virtually every batch of drugs made by pharmaceutical firms today is screened for contamination using LAL. • Aspirin is the most commonly used medicine in the world, for everything from treating headaches to preventing heart attacks and strokes. It was originally derived from salicylic acid discovered in plants—white willow (Salix alba) and meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria). • Indian Rice (Oryza nivara): More people around the world eat rice than any other crop. Farmers typically grow only two rice species, Oryzasativa (native to Asia) and Oryzaglaberrima (from West Africa). Responding to a virus that was devastating fields in the 19708, the International Rice Institute screened 7,000 populations of various rice species for resistance to the disease. Only one population resisted the disease—a new rice species discovered just a decade earlier. Today, farmers still plant the resistant hybrids of Indian Rice on millions of acres around the world. The original population has apparently disappeared from the wild. • Pacific Yew (Taxus brevifolia) is the original source for one of the most potent anticancer drugs ever found. Now synthesized chemically, but first derived from the tree's bark, taxol fights cancer cells by keeping them from multiplying. The drug is used most often to treat breast and ovarian cancer. • Quinine, an antimalarial drug, is made by boiling the bark 56

The Richness of Life of Bolivian Cinchona trees. The British created the tropical happy-hour tradition of serving tonic (quinine) mixed with gin to hide quinine's bitter taste and to protect people from malaria. Although synthetic sources of quinine have been available for years, natural quinine is again in demand for fighting drug-resistant strains of the disease. Malaria still kills more than two million people a year, including one child every thirty seconds. • Snakeroot: As recorded in the Vedas of India, the medicinal benefits of Rauwolfia serpentine were recognized more than two thousand years ago. The alkaloid reserpine that scientists isolated from the plant in 1952. revolutionized the treatment of mental illness. Before that time, electric shocks were the treatment of choice for schizophrenia. • Penicillin, the first natural antibiotic ever discovered, is the foundation of a medical revolution. Originally derived from the fungus Penicillium chrysqgenum, its benefits were first recognized by Scottish physician Alexander Fleming in 192,8 as he sought a cure for infections. • Cyclosporine, another microbial miracle drug, revolutionized organ transplants in the 19805, giving doctors their first effective tool for battling organ rejection. Today, thousands of people owe their lives to the diminutive soil fungus that provided it. Such medicines save lives and they make us money. About a quarter of all drugs prescribed in the United States are derived from plants, and their economic value in 1985 was eighteen billion dollars (fifty-four billion globally). The proportion jumps to forty percent when drugs from animals and microbes are included. Human ingenuity mines nature's bounty as a tool for innovation. Today, innovative partnerships around the world are reaping the benefits of preservation. As just one example, Merck, the world's second-largest drug company, is currently paying the government of Costa Rica to preserve rainforest habitat. In return, Merck has exclusive rights to "bioprospect" in the forests, 57

The Earth Remains Forever paying Costa Rica further royalties on any products it develops from the species found there. Such partnerships give both country and company a financial stake in preserving biodiversity. Maintaining as many species as possible makes economic sense when new discoveries are being made every day. In January 1998 doctors announced a new painkiller that, despite its sudden fame, originated years ago with a small, brightly striped frog in the rainforests of Ecuador. Chemist John Daly collected the frog as a possible source of new drugs, preparing an extract of its skin in his laboratory and injecting it into mice. Their response was immediate. "I still remember looking at those mice and getting so excited," Daly said recently. What Daly discovered was a painkiller two hundred times more powerful than morphine. Morphine is an opiate, a family of painkillers derived from the poppy Papaver somniferum that includes such medically important drugs as codeine and heroin. (The name "heroin" was originally a trademark of pharmaceutical giant Bayer.) Like other opiates, morphine is dangerously addictive, and an overdose can stop a person's breathing. Opiates also don't work well for the chronic pain that afflicts more than twenty-five million Americans. What doctors need is a painkiller with morphine's punch but without its side effects. During the years that Daly worked on his unidentified painkiller, the frog started disappearing in the wild, eventually landing on the threatened species list. Daly tried raising the frog in his laboratory, but it didn't make the chemical in an artificial environment. Something from its native habitat was missing. After a decade of struggling to isolate the painkiller, Daly finally identified a chemical he christened "epibatidine" after th scientific name of the rainforest frog. Epibatidine activates the same receptors in the central nervous system that bind to nicotine. Once scientists identified epibatidine's structure, they could make it synthetically in their labs and, just as importantly, could also test hundreds of variants. Scientists at Abbott Labs eventually found one they called ABT-594. Although the name lacks poetry, the painkiller looks like a wonder drug. It doesn't depress the respiratory system like morphine, it isn't a sedative, 58

The Richness of Life and, best of all, it doesn't appear to be addictive. Medical trials are already under way. Medical science played a vital role in identifying and producing the new family of painkillers. Nonetheless, the drugs would never have been discovered without a diminutive rainforest frog living in its native habitat. The creative union of science and nature is the foundation for many of the products that we use today. As species and their habitats disappear, what opportunities will we and our descendants lose forever?

Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end? TOM STOPPARD, Rosencmntz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) We take many of nature's benefits for granted; the drugs based on natural products are so common that many of us have been touched by them without knowing it. In the spring of 1997 my father was diagnosed with throat cancer. He had found a lump on his neck months before and had gone to see his doctor, who gave him a cursory examination and, for reasons we'll never understand, said, "This is not cancer." The antibiotics my father received for his "abscess" had no effect, and a month later he received more. His dentist finally noticed the danger during a routine visit. "You should see a specialist," the dentist told him. "Today." He called that night after a barrage of tests. My wife answered the telephone with the sense of foreboding reserved for an unusually late call. "How are you, Dave?" she asked. "I'm fine," he said, "except I have cancer." The largest tumor was an inch and a half in size, starting below his ear; a second jeopardized his voice box. I took the call and listened, asking questions where it seemed appropriate and trying to comfort him. After hanging up, I snapped the telephone in two. Two days later I was pulling into his Arizona driveway, the comet Hale-Bopp hurtling downward, motionless in the northwest sky. I made my way through the basement door and found 59

The Earth Remains Forever him talking on the phone, mom seated next to him. Neither saw me for one brief, calm moment. That night my father's emotions flowed like the braided channels of a river: happiness, love, fear, anger, despair. He opened his diaries and gave me the picture of his first solo flight as an eighteen-year-old boy. We talked before dinner, sharing dreams of owning land and my secret of a book that might never come to pass. The next day we flew to Chicago to begin a long and painful odyssey of exams, chemotherapy, and radiation. The tests were endless, the hunger for information palpable, and the fear deep and lingering. Mom and I found an apartment to rent, and my father settled in to a routine of chemotherapy and intense radiation that would slowly kill him if it didn't vanquish the disease first. Months passed. With those months came countless visits and the disease's inexorable march. In September I brought our eldest son, then five, with me and wondered if it would be the last time. Dad's teeth were gone, as were his taste buds and much of his hair. Six months earlier he had routinely hiked ten miles through the Arizona mountains; now he could barely walk across the room. On the final night of the trip we shared a last supper, his the milky contents of a bag unceremoniously dripped into his stomach. I wondered if my sons would remember him.

Last fall we returned to the Arizona mountains, retracing a hike we took with my father. Sally and I watched the boys scamper upslope. Just ahead of them, picking a path and encouraging them, was my dad, his recovery the legacy of modern medicine and, some say, a miracle. I can't say why he survived when most don't, but two of the drugs he received were derived from plants and animals.

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In maintaining a watch or machine, All parts play a role, some unseen. If we throw away pieces In careless caprices, We may find out too late what they mean.

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Ozone Awareness

"Nonsense!" said Flora. "Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy." STELLA GIBBONS, Cold Comfort Farm (1932.)

Like awareness of the benefits of life's diversity, concern for the ozone shield is relatively new. It wasn't part of the first Earth Day demonstrations thirty years ago, when our atmosphere still seemed infinite or imperturbable. For centuries people had seen that the air near cities and factories could be polluted, but fresh winds or a weather front cleansed and replenished the air that we breathed. Changing the atmosphere miles above us simply wasn't something that we worried about. Today we know differently, and we know that some of the problems we create can take lifetimes to recover. The carbon dioxide currently building up in our air from the burning of fossil fuels typically takes a century or two to disappear, warming the earth for the same century or two, and there is little that we can do once it reaches the atmosphere. Similarly, many of the chlorine chemicals that reduce the ozone shield also vanish slowly. Problems like ozone depletion and global warming will thus continue for decades, even centuries, afterwe eliminate the pollution that causes them; if they become severe in the meantime then they will remain that way for generations. That our grandchildren—and theirs—will be dealing with the problems that we create is a questionable environmental legacy. Recognizing that the earth has limits and that future generations will inherit our problems is a strong motivation for change.

The Earth Remains Forever The best example of how quickly we can respond to an environmental challenge is the history of ozone depletion in the thirty years since ozone began to make the news. The story involves space-age technology, including satellites and space shuttles, as well as such earth-bound conveniences as deodorants, egg cartons, and air conditioners. By understanding this history, we can apply its lessons to today's other environmental problems, gaining a blueprint for environmental success.

The O-zone Life on earth first arose in the oceans almost four billion years ago. These early microbes survived by turning carbon dioxide into sugars in a process called photosynthesis, releasing oxygen as a by-product just as plants do today. Free oxygen is the signature of life. The rise of free oxygen that began in the oceans eventually made life on land possible. With each breath we take, we oxidize sugars in our bodies and exhale carbon dioxide, the process of photosynthesis run backward. The form that we breathe is diatomic oxygen, the union of two atoms in a stable double bond: O=O. This common, monogamous form isn't the only one needed for life on land, however. Oxygen also exists in an atmospheric menage a trois, the temporary union of three atoms as ozone:

This rarer, ephemeral form shields us from the Sun's ionizing rays, and only when the ozone shield formed could life on land begin. What matters most for the protection that ozone provides isn't its concentration at any one place in our air but the total amount that sunlight passes through. A single photon of sunlight plays the ozone lottery, passing deeper and deeper into the atmosphere 64

Ozone Awareness until it's either absorbed by an ozone molecule or reaches the earth's surface. Decreasing the total number of ozone molecules increases the chance that the photon will reach the earth. The difference between total ozone in the atmosphere and the concentration at a single place can be confusing. A newspaper reporting the ozone hole over Antarctica may also feature a story on ozone pollution—too much ozone—in the air near Mexico City or Los Angeles. The difference is that while ozone breaks down and re-forms continuously with the Sun's energy, ninety percent of it is high above the earth in the stratosphere. In contrast, smog places ozone directly in the air that we breathe, causing respiratory damage in people and hindering the ability of plants and animals to grow. We can thus face a shortage in total ozone at the same time that the air near us is polluted by automobiles and smokestacks. The total ozone column is what protects us from the sun's uv rays. We need some uv radiation to make vitamin D in our skin, but more than a little can cause skin cancer. Of the three common forms of skin cancer today, the two non-melanomas are most prevalent—basal cell and squamous cell carcinomas. Squamous cancer is most clearly linked to uv exposure and occurs mostly on the hands, face, and neck of people with fair skin. Although either form of non-melanoma can be fatal, good medical care in the United States cuts the death rate to less than one in a hundred victims, "only" about two thousand deaths a year. In contrast, cutaneous melanoma, the most deadly of the three, transforms pigment-producing cells into cancer cells and kills seven thousand people annually, one victim in six. Such factors as long-term exposure to uv rays, sunburn during childhood, and fair skin all increase the risk of skin cancer, as does living at a high altitude (where there is less atmosphere) or nearer the tropics (where there is more light). In fact, some of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world are found in places like Queensland, Australia, where fair-skinned people have moved to the uv-rich tropics. The relationship between skin cancer and uv rays is complicated but discernible. For each percent increase in uv radiation, 65

The Earth Remains Forever squamous cell carcinomas increase by about 2.5 percent and basal cell carcinomas by about 1.5 percent during a person's lifetime. Furthermore, about 1.3 percent more carcinogenic uv rays reach the earth for each percent decrease in atmospheric ozone. Thus, a one percent decline in total ozone increases rates of squamous cell cancer by about three percent and basal cell cancer by 1.7 percent, about 11,500 more cases of non-melanoma skin cancer in the United States each year for each percent decrease in ozone. Much of this discussion of ozone and human health would be academic if ozone depletion was limited to the South Pole. In fact, increases in uv have been shown over much of the earth, though not nearly as dramatically as over Antarctica. Total atmospheric ozone decreased by about seven percent from 1979 to 1994 in the middle latitudes that contain most of the United States and Europe, especially in winter. Although seven percent may not sound like much, this translates to a potential for eighty thousand more cases of skin cancer a year in the United States. The U.N. Environment Program estimated in 1992 that a ten percent drop in total world ozone would cause at least twentyfive percent more non-melanoma skin cancers worldwide. If ozone reductions increase uv radiation reaching the earth, then you would predict an increase in skin cancer in result. From 1974 to 1986 the occurrence of cutaneous melanomas in the United States increased three to four percent per year. However, before attributing that increase to ozone depletion, we have to acknowledge that other factors are also important. Millions of people moved from rust belt cities in the northern United States to southern states where natural uv radiation is higher, and sunbathing also became fashionable—behavioral changes rather than environmental ones. Rates of skin cancer have indeed increased, but we don't know how much of this increase was caused by environmental factors. In addition to skin cancer, there are other health effects from uv radiation, uv rays damage the cornea and lens of the eye and produce cataracts in one in ten Americans. There is good evidence that they can suppress the human immune system, limiting the body's ability to repair damage. There is also proof that 66

Ozone Awareness

uv radiation can activate viruses like herpes simplex when they are already present in human cells. Finally, it can and does damage DNA, in rare cases hurting the "daughter cells" that hold the template for our children. These examples illustrate some of the links between human health and ozone depletion, but by focusing just on people, we ignore the consequences for other life on earth. Laboratory studies have shown that cows, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, rabbits, mice, and fish all suffer damage from increased uv radiation. Despite such findings, predicting the consequences for animals in nature is often difficult. For example, animals in a forest may not receive more uv rays even when leaves at the top of the forest canopy do, since the leaves shield the animals from direct sunlight. Certain animals are especially vulnerable, and there is already compelling evidence that increased uv rays have affected some of them. Anchovy larvae off the Pacific Coast of North America live almost exclusively in the upper foot and a half of seawater. One recent study estimated that a sixteen percent reduction in ozone would kill almost all the anchovy larvae by the time they were twelve days old. Trout larvae are equally susceptible. Scientists have also shown that phytoplankton, which form the base of the marine food chain, grew five to twenty-five percent less underneath the ozone hole, revealing a direct link from human actions in the north (the release of ozone-destroying chemicals) to the biology of the southern oceans. Clear links have also been found for life on land. More than a decade ago, ecologist Andrew Blaustein first noticed a drastic drop in the numbers of some amphibians in the Cascade Mountains, including the Cascades frog and the western toad, whose eggs seemed to be dying. Unable to link the decline to changes in water chemistry and pollution, he wondered if the amphibians were being hurt by uv radiation. They tend to live at high elevations (more than three thousand feet) and typically lay their eggs in open, shallow water, behaviors that might make them vulnerable to ozone depletion. Blaustein first examined the ability often frog and salamander species from the region to repair uv damage. In laboratory stud67

The Earth Remains Forever ies, the ten species differed a hundredfold in the activity of an enzyme called photolyase, with vulnerable species having much poorer repair mechanisms. Blaustein then set up careful experiments to reduce the amount of uv radiation in the wild by using plastic filters. The eggs of susceptible frogs died more than twice as often when they were exposed to natural uv radiation than when the rays were removed with filters. Eggs of a declining salamander were similarly vulnerable, but species that hadn't declined showed no effects of the radiation on their eggs. The effects of uv rays on plants can be equally dramatic, since plants also differ in their protection from uv and in their ability to repair damage. Many studies have shown that uv radiation can reduce plant growth, including the number of leaves and flowers they produce. Pragmatically, an important question is whether increased uv rays will hurt crop plants. One of the longest field experiments to look at this question simulated the effect of a twenty-five percent ozone reduction on soybeans. After six years of exposure, the yield of a uv-sensitive cultivar decreased by about one-sixth compared to the same cultivar grown without added uv-B radiation. A uv-tolerant cultivar showed no negative effects. Selective breeding could probably generate uv-resistant cultivars for most of our crops, but we can't selectively breed the quarter million plant species on earth today. It is also cavalier to expect evolution to do the job for us, particularly in only a few decades. Annual plants might have enough time to change, but hundredyear-old trees certainly wouldn't, and neither would the coral reefs that may be bleached by increased uv rays. The truth is that no one really knows what extra uv radiation means for plants and animals in nature. At a minimum it adds one more stress to the list of shrinking habitats, overharvesting, and pollution.

The rise ofCFCs The ozone shield first entered our collective consciousness in the early 19705 when two space-age technologies were proposed:

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Ozone Awareness supersonic transports (SSTS) and space shuttles. Both were to fly much higher than normal airplanes and would release their exhaust directly into the stratosphere, something new in our arsenal of environmental change. Berkeley scientist Harold Johnston was one of the first people to consider what pollution from the SST might do to the atmo sphere, especially nitrogen oxides in its exhaust. Fellow chemist Paul Crutzen had already shown how nitrogen oxides occurring naturally could catalyze ozone destruction, and Johnston reasoned that an artificial source in the stratosphere would do the same thing. Using NASA'S projections that five hundred SSTS would be flying by the year 1985—at that time a reasonable scenario—his staggering calculations suggested that stratospheric ozone might be cut in half. At the same time that doubts about the SST were aired, other scientists became concerned about space-shuttle exhaust and another family of chemicals—chlorine oxides. Crutzen had also shown that chlorine destroyed ozone even more efficiently than nitrogen oxides did; but with the exception of some minor emissions from volcanoes, natural sources of stratospheric chlorine were unknown. Newspaper headlines and people's fears faded quickly when it became clear that only a few space shuttles and SSTS would be built, for reasons more economic than environmental. At the very time these fears were fading, however, a new source of chlorine was entering our homes, our cars, and our air. It would soon become the dominant source of stratospheric chlorine in the world, although no one realized it yet. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCS) were first created in 1928 by DuPont chemist Thomas Midgley, Jr., who also invented the gasoline additive tetra-ethyl lead. CFCS were quickly hailed as "wonder chemicals" because they were nonflammable, nontoxic, and incredibly stable. Designed originally as refrigerants, they were soon used in many other products, especially as a propellant in hair sprays, deodorants, and hygiene products in which stability and fire resistance were crucial. Although inert, CFCS were usually the major ingredient in aerosol sprays—ninety per-

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The Earth Remains Forever cent by weight in a typical deodorant, with the active ingredients typically weighing less than one percent. CFCS proved so successful that by 1973 almost three billion aerosol cans were being produced each year in the United States alone. Resourceful designers used CFCS in cleaning products for circuit boards and as foaming agents and insulators for pillows, mattresses, and egg cartons. By the mid-1970s, almost a billion pounds of CFCS were produced each year in America, with the market growing by ten percent a year. DuPont's Freon products captured half of the domestic CFC market worth a quarter billion dollars annually. Their two biggest sellers were Freon-n and Freon-12,, the latter with proportionally less chlorine and more fluorine. The very thing that made CFCS so successful—their stability— also led to their eventual buildup in the atmosphere. James Lovelock, known today for his Gaia hypothesis of the earth, was the first person to measure CFCS directly in the air, studying them as an indicator of pollution. In 1970 he set up a phenomenally sensitive gas chromatograph near his home in southwestern Ireland. Surprisingly, he found CFCS not just when the wind blew from Europe, as he expected (his conjecture about air pollution was correct), but also when it blew from the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles from any industrial activity. Wondering if CFCS were present everywhere, he then boarded the RRS Shackleton on a trip to Antarctica and found CFCS in the remotest corners of the earth. Most intriguingly, he estimated that almost all of the two and a half billion pounds of CFC- 11 that had ever been made were now bobbing around in the air. Nothing appeared to destroy it. At first no one recognized the connection between Lovelock's work and ozone depletion. In 1973 Lovelock himself wrote, "The presence of these compounds constitutes no conceivable hazard; indeed the interest lies in their potential usefulness as inert tracers for the study of mass transfer processes in the atmosphere and oceans." CFC-II had many advantages for this research: "There are no natural sources; it is chemically and physically inert; it does not disturb the environment, and can be measured accurately to one part in io12- by volume." Lovelock 70

Ozone Awareness

was right about the usefulness of CFCS as tracers, but their stability was illusory. The discoverer of that illusion was Sherwood Rowland. As a result of a chance encounter on a train, Rowland attended an international meeting in 1972. sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission. He learned of Lovelock's measurements during a coffee break and became intrigued by the fate of CFCS in air. How long would they stay in the atmosphere, and would they ever reach the stratosphere where the sun's ionizing rays might break them apart? Rowland began working on such questions with postdoctoral associate Mario Molina, the son of Mexico's ambassador to the Philippines. Although many scientific discoveries are fueled by technology, others are made as much by thought as by experimentation. Watson's and Crick's hypothesis for the structure of DNA is one example, and Rowland's and Molina's work is another. They spent months pondering the possible fate of CFCS in air, considering chlorine chemistry, uv radiation, and the growing use of CFCS. They first considered the ways in which CFCS might be destroyed in the lower atmosphere. CFCS are inert and don't typically react with other gases. Unlike chlorine from volcanoes, sea spray, and swimming pools, they're insoluble in water and aren't washed out of the air by rain. CFCS are also transparent to rays from the Sun that are longer than 230 nanometers, including uv rays and visible light. Consequently, they rarely break apart in the lower atmosphere. Rowland and Molina confirmed what Lovelock's measurements quietly suggested—that most of the CFCS ever produced were floating around in the atmosphere. Because CFCS are heavier than most other air molecules, they tend to sink when the air is still, but Rowland and Molina knew that winds were powerful enough to mix CFCS to the top of the stratosphere. The more they studied the issue, the more convinced they became that most of the CFCS in air would eventually reach the upper atmosphere. Once in the stratosphere, everything is bombarded with highenergy rays from the sun. Rowland and Molina estimated that CFCS would be protected by stratospheric ozone until fifteen or 71

The Earth Remains Forever

so miles above the earth, where the Sun's rays would at last break the chemicals apart and release free chlorine into the stratosphere. This release was what concerned Rowland the most because chlorine catalyzes the destruction of ozone. Chlorine isn't consumed in the process. It's free to begin its destructive work again once the ozone molecule splits apart, with every chlorine atom typically destroying a hundred thousand molecules of ozone in the stratosphere. When asked how the work was progressing, Rowland later recalled, "There was no moment when I yelled 'Eureka!' I just came home one night and told my wife, 'The work is going very well, but it looks like the end of the world.'" The final piece of the puzzle fell (or rose) into place when Molina and Rowland looked at global CFG production. Companies were producing almost a million tons of CFCS 11 and 12, annually, with rates growing at nine or ten percent a year. Bas ing their theories only on 1972, production, and ignoring growth, Rowland and Molina estimated that CFG concentrations would eventually be twenty times more than what Lovelock measured, a hundred million tons of CFCS in the atmosphere and almost half a million tons of free chlorine in the stratosphere. Forty percent of global ozone could be destroyed. Rowland and Molina published their work to little fanfare in the summer of 1974. They acknowledged the many uncertainties in their calculations but kept repeating the potential enormity of the problem. They also noted that since the average lifetime of CFCS in air ranged from 40 to 150 years, it would take decades or centuries to fix any problems that CFCS caused. Molina's and Rowland's analysis was quickly confirmed by other scientists, including a Harvard team who estimated that global ozone depletion could reach sixteen percent by the year 2.000 if reasonable rates of growth for CFCS were considered. Their study concluded: "If the decision to eliminate Freon were postponed until 1995, the reduction in ozone could ex7*

Ozone Awareness ceed 10 percent, and would be significant for as long as zoo years after termination of Freon use." The New York Times first publicized the issue with a cover story on September 2,6,1974, and Time magazine followed two weeks later. When Walter Cronkite of CBS news picked up the story, a controversy flared.

Ozone depletion: personal responsibility and public trust The ozone hole prompted a plan, To extinguish the aerosol can. Our movers and shakers Led deodorant makers To be Sure, do Right Guard, and Ban. The idea that small, individual acts could lead to a global environmental crisis was difficult for many people to accept. It was in a sense a coming-of-age, a forced enlightenment that has continued through the decades since. Russell Peterson, who was chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, expressed this common sentiment: "It is difficult to perceive that when you are spraying an antiperspirant in your bathroom, you are endangering the health of everyone in the world." A headline in the Minneapolis Star captured the incongruities: CAN DRY ARMPITS MEAN WORLD CRISIS? In a step that was controversial for many reasons, Rowland and Molina called for a ban on CFC emissions at a press conference of the American Chemical Society. Some scientists believe that their role is to give policy makers the data for making decisions, not to recommend specific decisions themselves, and felt that Rowland and Molina had crossed the line from "objective" 73

The Earth Remains Forever scientists to citizen-advocates when calling for a ban so quickly. Francis Johnson, the atmospheric physicist intimately involved with the SST controversy, stated, "It's always a political decision in the end. It shouldn't be up to the Academy or individual scientists to decide on a course of action. We can only compile the data and whatever the government decides from that is something else again." Another reason the call for a ban was unusual was that Rowland's and Molina's hypothesis could have been wrong. Scientists generate and test ideas publicly, and an idea can be wrong and still be useful if it highlights gaps in our knowledge and helps us converge on the truth. Governments, though, aren't interested in curbing billion-dollar industries for the sake of the scientific process; they need good information quickly, and this need sometimes conflicts with the give-and-take of testing scientific ideas. Rowland's and Molina's hypothesis wasn't wrong, but no one knew that in 1974. Other scientists who reviewed and supported the ideas were more cautious and felt that the call for a ban was premature. None other than James Lovelock, the first person to measure CFCS in the atmosphere, said, uThe Americans tend to get in a wonderful state of panic over things like this.... I respect Professor Rowland as a chemist, but I wish he wouldn't act like a missionary." Lovelock illustrated his point by discussing a recent controversy about mercury in fish: "The Americans banned tuna fish and they blamed industry until someone went to a museum and found a tuna fish from the last century with the same amount of methyl mercury in it." Unbeknownst to Lovelock, that "someone" was Sherwood Rowland. While scientists debated the importance of CFCS for the ozone layer, the press vied for attention. In January 1975, Science Digest published a story titled "Earth's Sunscreen Is Rotting Away" while other magazines warned of "doomsday sprays." Hollywood exploited the controversy with "Day of the Animals" starring a serious Leslie Nielsen (predating his less serious "Airplane" and "Police Squad" roles), depicting hikers attacked by animals crazed from ozone depletion and uv rays. Movie critic Leonard Maltin saves us from watching to the end: "Final score: beasts 7, cast o." 74

Ozone Awareness

In 1975 the CFC controversy also hit the highest rated television show in America, Norman Lear's "All in the Family." In the episode, Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers, the family's young liberal wing, debated whether or not to add another child to the earth when even hair spray contributed to the world's problems. Almost overnight, CFC makers were barraged with negative publicity at a time when companies and the economy in general were still recovering from the oil embargo of 1973. The stakes of banning the chemicals were high, since CFCS were a billiondollar-a-year business. Compounding the publicity troubles for DuPont were several articles that incorrectly used the trade name "Freon" for CFCS in general. Dupont was in the middle of building the largest CFC plant in the world—at a cost of a hundred million dollars—and the uncertainty of what would happen to the market and to DuPont's employees was galling. A. B. Rhode, manager for employee relations at the new plant, was asked what would happen if CFCS were in fact dangerous. He replied, "I guess we'll just be out of business.... These days the public figures we're guilty until proven innocent." In a fatalistic but quietly perceptive moment, he held up an imaginary spray can: "And all this is happening just because people would rather do this (he pumps once) than this (he pumps twice)" fortune magazine also covered some of the issues surrounding ozone and the atmosphere. One article in particular discussed the scientific and industrial controversies still unresolved in 1975 ancl argued for prudence before banning CFCS in aerosol cans and other applications. It ended with the following prediction: In dealing with the ozone question, it appears that we are lucky: thanks to scientific alertness, we have the grace of time. For the moment, it should be enough to have served notice upon the industries involved that there is good reason for concern. If we avoid hasty legislation, nature or the marketplace may continue to solve the ozone problem without the usual havoc from clumsy government legislation. After three to five years, the whole matter can be reexamined once more. Who knows, it might even turn out by then 75

The Earth Remains Forever that there's too much ozone up there and that everybody will have to get busy with his aerosol cans again. Two years later the ozone hole first appeared over Antarctica.

Cool science at the South Pole The presentation of scientists as a priest caste of semi-infallible beings is a disservice to the public and to scientists. It's the root of much misunderstanding and resentment—especially in Antarctica. Let's go in. I'm cold. SARA WHEELER, Terra Incognita (1996)

Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey began their year-round ozone measurements at Halley Bay in 1957 as part of a collaborative program called the International Geophysical Year. The program included researchers from sixty-seven nations who studied the earth's climate, magnetic field, and atmosphere at various places around the world. (Russia and the United States both launched their first satellites as part of the same program.) Hugh Odishaw, who helped organize America's efforts, characterized it as "the single most significant peaceful activity of mankind since the Renaissance and the Copernican Revolution." Even scientists get carried away sometimes. For twenty years after the first spectrophotometer was installed at Halley Bay, total ozone measurements in the Antarctic spring were stable at around three hundred Dobson Units (the standard currency for estimating total ozone in the atmosphere). A small springtime decrease in ozone is typical over Antarctica, but in 1977 something unusual began to happen. The readings dropped below 2,60 Dobson Units for the first time and continued dropping each spring, plummeting below zoo by the spring of 1984—so low that the scientists first thought their spectrophotometer must be broken and replaced it. Only when the strange readings continued with the new instruments did Joseph Farman and colleagues drop their envi76

Ozone Awareness ronmental bombshell, publicizing the unprecedented drop in ozone and suggesting that CFCS might be the culprit. They based their conclusions on the work of Rowland and Molina and on dozens of other follow-up studies, noting that atmospheric chlorine had doubled from 1965 to 1980. NASA scientists quickly examined archived satellite data from the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) that measured total ozone over the earth each day. The TOMS record extended the measurements from Halley Bay to Antarctica as a whole, confirming an ozone hole over a whopping one-tenth of the Southern Hemisphere. Direct evidence of ozone depletion was shocking. Even doomsayers hadn't predicted any problems until the twenty-first century at the earliest, and public concern over CFCS had calmed in the United States with the ban on aerosol cans in the late 19708. Nonetheless, CFCS had quietly outgrown the ban, working so well as refrigerants that more than a billion and a half pounds of CFCS ii and 12. were made in 1985—almost as much as before the ban in 1978—and total CFC production was now twenty percent greater. The distressing news of the ozone hole led to immediate calls for action. U.S. Senator John Chafee, who headed the Environmental Pollution Subcommittee, captured the essence of people's fears: "There is a very real possibility that man—through ignorance or indifference or both—is irreversibly altering the ability of our atmosphere to support life." Despite these calls to regulate CFCS, the cause of the ozone hole wasn't completely certain. Scientists documenting the hole's severity in 1986 tempered their judgments: "Any conclusions concerning the implications of the observed Antarctic decreases in total ozone for predictions of the effects of chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons must await a proven mechanism and continued observations to verify the persistence of the phenomenon. Only then will we be able to evaluate clearly the relative roles of chemistry, radiation, and dynamics in contributing to the observed decreases." Time magazine was more succinct: "What Is Destroying the Ozone?" 77

The Earth Remains Forever Although CFCS were the likely culprit, other factors could have played a role. Some scientists wondered if the eleven-year sunspot cycle might be to blame, but soon dismissed the idea because the long-term record at Halley Bay included several complete solar cycles without a drop in ozone. Another theory was that some kind of unusual weather might be the cause, yet there was nothing noticeably different about recent Antarctic weather and air patterns, and the steady worsening of the ozone hole year after year pointed to a more deliberate cause. To help establish a cause-and-effect link between CFCS and ozone depletion, scientists had to show that CFCS supplied most of the stratospheric chlorine that destroyed ozone. Measurements from balloons, aircraft, and satellites showed that concentrations of stratospheric chlorine were in fact many times higher than before CFC production began. As part of the National Ozone Expedition, Susan Solomon and other scientists combined atmospheric measurements with computer simulations to show that reactions with chlorine were important for destroying ozone. Simulating the conditions of the atmosphere with their computer model recreated the ozone hole easily (albeit with the benefit of hindsight). Evidence from reconnaissance flights in 1987 showed that as much as three-quarters of all ozone disappeared at some heights as chlorine oxide concentrations grew five hundredfold. In the words of the scientists involved: "When these facts are considered together with observations showing that both Antarctic and Arctic chemical ozone depletion is caused by elevated chlorine in the atmosphere, the inescapable conclusion is that the depletion is cause by continued use of the CFCS." Mounting evidence that CFCS were causing the ozone hole created more and more pressure for governments to act. About the time the hole was discovered, delegates from forty-three nations met in Vienna to consider regulating CFCS. The United States, Canada, and Scandinavia lobbied to limit CFC produc tion, while some other nations opposed binding controls. The Vienna Convention that came out of the meeting was a first step in protecting the atmosphere, but it only called for the exchange 7«

Ozone Awareness

of scientific data and imposed no obligations on anyone. It merely recommended that they meet again. Politics played a role in weakening the Vienna Convention, and countries that had already banned CFCS in aerosol sprays lobbied for stronger cuts but disagreed on how to make them. Some in the United States believed that other countries should have to ban CFCS in aerosol sprays and similar products before any multilateral cuts were made. Otherwise, they argued, a "twenty percent reduction" in CFCS would be easier for those countries than it would be for the United States and other nations that had acted earlier. Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel weighed in: "We need to be sure that enough countries, covering enough of the production and consumption of CFCS, agree to sign the agreement. ... We shouldn't unilaterally do this, because that won't solve the CFC problem. It will only cause an economic hit to the United States." Hodel had recently advocated "personal protection" as one solution for increased uv radiation, including a widely ridiculed (and possibly apocryphal) remark that hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen lotions would be cheaper than banning CFCS. We might wonder why the Secretary of the Interior should speak for or against an international CFC agreement, but Hodel's views reflected the complexities of the situation. Some officials in the Commerce Department and in the Office of Manage-

"Geez—you used all the sunscreen ?"

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The Earth Remains Forever ment and Budget questioned the need to act at all, calling for more time and more data, while officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and the State Department were generally in favor of cuts. Eventually, Secretary of State George Schultz and others convinced President Reagan that reversing America's proactive stance was unthinkable, and the negotiations went forward. Interestingly, Reagan had several basal-cell skin cancers removed from his nose shortly before he made his decision, emphasizing the dangers of ozone depletion and reminding him of the thousands of deaths attributable to skin cancer each year. While the Vienna Convention hadn't solved the ozone problem, it did lay the groundwork for a more binding agreement. As scientists were documenting chlorine growth and ozone destruction over Antarctica in September 1987, representatives of twenty-seven nations met in Montreal, Canada, to negotiate a new treaty. What emerged from the meeting was the historic Montreal Protocol (more precisely the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Stratospheric Ozone Layer) signed by twenty-four nations. Although twenty-four may not seem like a lot, those countries included most of the major producers and users of CFCS including the United States, Japan, West Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Chief negotiator and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the United States, Ambassador Richard Benedick, voiced this sentiment before the historic meeting in Montreal: When we build a bridge, we build it to withstand much stronger pressures than it is ever likely to confront. And yet, when it comes to protecting the global atmosphere. . . the attitude seems to be equivalent to demanding certainty that the bridge will collapse as a justification for strengthening it. If we are to err in designing measures to protect the ozone layer, then let us, conscious of our responsibility to future generations, err on the side of caution. After the meeting, he was diplomatically exuberant: "For the first time, the nations of the world agreed to cooperate on an

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Ozone Awareness environmental problem before there were widespread harmful effects."

Banning CFCs: Think locally, act globally The Montreal Protocol was a revolutionary step in the march to solve ozone depletion. Its timeline was aggressive: based on consumption in 1986, the use of CFCS was to be frozen by 1989, reduced a fifth by 1993, and halved by 1999. The protocol also acknowledged the special needs of developing nations, countries using less than two-thirds of a pound of CFCS per person. They had an extra decade to comply and could also increase CFC use during the phaseout period. Developing countries were quick to point out that they were dealing with a crisis of the industrialized world's making. CFC substitutes also made the Protocol a reality. Chemical companies had dabbled with substitutes in the 19708, especially chlorine-free hydrofluorocarbons (MFCS) and reduced-chlorine hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCS), but most companies canceled their research after bans on aerosol cans made further legislation unlikely. One particularly promising substitute, HFC-i34a, was kept out of the marketplace by its price; who wanted to pay $2.50 a pound when a typical CFC was sixty cents? HFC-i34a would stay much more expensive than traditional CFCS until a global market for it was created. Discovering the ozone hole in 1985 brought renewed urgency and economic rewards in the search for substitutes. Sweden became the first country to ban CFCS completely in 1988, phasing them out over six years and guaranteeing a market for replacements. In the same year, DuPont, to its credit, became the first CFC maker to call for a complete ban. Chemical companies opened facilities to make HFC-i34a and other CFC substitutes soon after. Along with its strengths, the Montreal Protocol also had some weaknesses, as it didn't address such other ozone-depleting chemicals as carbon tetrachloride, methyl chloride, and methyl bromide. Bromine is about fifty times more powerful than chlo-

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The Earth Remains Forever rine at destroying ozone but is heavier and leaves the atmosphere sooner. At a follow-up meeting in London in 1990, many countries agreed to restrict the use of some bromine-based chemicals (in fire extinguishers, for example) and other chlorine compounds, with developing nations again receiving extra time to comply. Most importantly, new evidence linking CFCS with ozone depletion and the availability of new CFC substitutes led the countries to ban CFCS outright by the year 2,000—the first international agreement ever to eliminate a family of chemicals for the sake of the environment. The sense of urgency for action grew two years after the London agreement when scientists discovered ozone loss at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. (Like the prodigal son, the problem finally came home to the United States and Europe.) A meeting that year in Copenhagen strengthened the Protocol even further, moving the phaseout date for CFCS up to 1996 and pledging half a billion dollars to help developing countries begin to use the new substitutes. Despite a growing international consensus and clear evidence of the role that CFCS play in ozone depletion, considerable misinformation about ozone persists today. Although the United States banned CFCS in aerosol sprays more than twenty years ago, the decade of the 19905 saw GI Joe, Johnny Carson, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles admonish kids that to protect the earth we have to stop "using stuff that hurts it, like aerosol sprays." Surveys indicate that over half of American adults still believe aerosol sprays are dangerous. Other types of misinformation are more harmful, particularly when scientific evidence is selectively chosen or ignored. A 1994 editorial in Business Week, "What's Flying out the Ozone Hole? Billions of Dollars?", summarized the ozone story this way: The evidence suggests that CFCS aren't harmful. But the propaganda of the Chicken Littles has prevailed over science— and the cost of needlessly replacing cooling equipment will be staggering. . . H. L. Mencken said that "the whole aim of 82

Ozone Awareness

practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Ozone depletion seems to be such a hobgoblin. . . . Other scientists believe the ozone hole is a natural and transitory phenomenon related to sea temperatures, volcanic eruptions, tropical wind patterns, and sunspot cycles. Despite its superficially reasonable tone, the editorial resurrects just about every discarded theory of ozone depletion ever proposed. A good summary of the scientific data can be found in a joint report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, the U.N. Environment Program, and the World Meteorological Organization. Two hundred atmospheric scientists contributed to the "Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion: 1998" whose executive summary lays out the case for CFCS and ozone depletion in common language. Don't believe editorials like the one above, and don't take my word for it, either; read the documents for yourself. An increasing number of nations around the world now agree and support the framework of the Montreal Protocol. What started with commitments from twenty-four nations a decade ago has grown to at least 175 nations today, with more than 140 also ratifying the London amendments. The fact that the Protocol includes mechanisms for monitoring CFC production around the world and for penalizing cheaters has assuaged the fears of many countries that were initially reluctant to sign it. Most importantly, new evidence suggests that the Protocol is working. Chlorine concentrations in the lower atmosphere had decreased three percent in 1999 from their peak in the mid1990s. Before the Protocol they were increasing at a rate of several percent a year. Stories in the popular press during the 19905 were increasingly optimistic about the future of the ozone layer. A Washington Post cover article in April 1993 summarized the view after the Copenhagen agreements: "After 2000, Outlook for the Ozone Layer Looks Good." The Roanoke Times in May 1996 83

The Earth Remains Forever summed up the economic benefits of the CFC replacements: "Alternatives to Freon Just as Cool—And Cost Less." In the fall of 1995, Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Paul Crutzen and praised the unprecedented response of the international community: If we had been asked then—which we were not—for the probable global response to these predictions, it is unlikely that worldwide control of CFC production within 13 years, and a total international ban within 18 years, would have been our conclusion. The existence of the Montreal protocol and the agreement among industrial, governmental, and university scientists on its wisdom offers considerable promise for the handling of future global environmental problems.

Learning from success There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURAL ADDRESS (1905)

The global phaseout of CFCS and efforts at ozone recovery provide a template for solving other environmental problems. Why was this effort so successful, and what was it about the ozone hole that led to such rapid, concerted action!' At least three things made the phaseout of CFCS feasible: i. Compelling scientific evidence Scientists Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina warned us of a potential ozone problem a decade before the ozone hole was ever detected. Without this decade to prepare, diplomatic 84

Ozone Awareness negotiations would only have started in 1985. The Montreal Protocol would have been unthinkable just two years after "ozone depletion" became household words. There was also incontrovertible evidence of the changes, with color images of the burgeoning ozone hole making front-page news. Perhaps most importantly, the ozone hole materialized overnight—at least in our consciousness—in 1985. We weren't lulled to sleep by incremental changes over decades or centuries as we are with global warming today. 2. A potential threat to human health Ozone depletion caused a direct threat to human health, as cataracts and carcinomas turned an abstract danger into a personal one. Political consensus can be rapid when a link to human health is clear. 3. A technologically feasible solution The short-term solution to CFCS was relatively simple: substitute one set of chemicals for another. Despite the billions of dollars needed for the change, it was also relatively cheap. Imagine how much more difficult the phaseout of CFCS would have been if it had meant the end of air conditioning or refrigeration. Ignoring such economics, would the risks of increased skin cancer have outweighed the health benefits of food preservation? How would such a decision have been made, and who would have made it? The global consensus to ban CFCS would never have been forged so quickly without a simple technological alternative. The ozone hole is still bigger today than ever before—in spite of all the historic steps to combat it. It covered ten million square miles in 1998 and was even larger in September 2000. In that month, an ozone hole opened for the first time ever over a city— Punta Arenas in southern Chile, where 120,000 residents experienced extremely high levels of uv radiation. The delayed recovery of the ozone hole reminds us that ozone depletion and other environmental problems like the buildup of 85

The Earth Remains Forever greenhouse gases and global warming will take centuries to fix after we act to solve them. (In fact, most CFC replacements are themselves powerful greenhouse gases, a tradeoff that will eventually surface as their concentrations rise.) Moreover, we now know that if the chemical industry had used bromine instead of chlorine in formulating the original "CFCS" many years ago—a perfectly plausible choice at the time—the earth would have experienced catastrophic ozone loss everywhere and all year long by the 19708 because of bromine's power to catalyze ozone destruction. We avoided this catastrophe by one simple and unreliable happenstance—blind luck. The springtime ozone hole over Antarctica isn't expected to disappear until 2050 at the earliest. Although most of us won't be alive to see it, our descendants will be thankful that we acted when we did.

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While lauding the

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The Changing Earth

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. MARGARET MEAD The international response to ozone depletion was unparalleled— arguably the first time that humanity created a global environmental problem, recognized its significance, and solved it. The solution was relatively painless, too. We didn't have to reduce the earth's population or use fewer resources. No one suggested turning down the heat or buying a car without air conditioning; no one questioned the need to own a car at all. Solving other problems like biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, and global warming will be much more difficult because they are so entwined with the lives of people around the world. Contrast the swapping of chlorine-free hydrofluorocarbons for CFCS with the need to curb energy use or slow deforestation. There is no simple technological solution for such problems, and while the threats they pose to human health are real, they aren't always as obvious as the cancer scare that prompted ozone action. To address these problems, only strong leadership and a revolutionary consensus will slow rising population and consumption humanely in the coming century. By some counts there will be more people alive in the twenty-first century than in the rest of recorded history, while at the same time we in industrialized nations are demanding more of the earth than ever before. Threefifths of the world's population currently lives in what the World Bank calls "low-income countries." In 1995, their average an-

The Earth Remains Forever nual gross national product was about $390 per person, less than what many Americans paid monthly for an apartment (and ignoring, for now, inequalities in the United States). In contrast, the billion or so of us in "high-income countries" had an average gross national product that was sixty times higher. The current global inequality in wealth and consumption is untenable. Laying a foundation for change is the goal of the rest of this book. That foundation involves learning from the past and looking to the future, seeking a collective vision that both celebrates our successes and acknowledges how much work remains to be done.

The context for "change" LOOKING BACK

People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. KURT VONNEGUT, Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

We sit perched above the largest colony of mammals in the world. The Bracken Bat Cave on the edge of the Texas hill country is summer home to forty million Mexican free-tailed bats, a species that migrates north each spring to give birth and to eat insects. Bracken's bats eat thousands of pounds of bugs every night, flying a hundred miles to gorge on the pests that live around farmers' fields. Their nightly exodus forms a dark cloud visible for miles. Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico was discovered when a cowboy mistook a similar cloud for smoke and went to investigate the source of the "fire." Bracken's flight is larger still, so large that it can be seen nightly on doplar radar. Mexican freetails are the fighter jets of the bat world. They have long, tapered wings tailored for speed. The tradeoff for speed is maneuverability, so the bats need caves with large openings to give them room to spiral and climb. Learning to fly like a jet is perilous. Young bats have poorer echolocation skills than adults, and they sometimes blunder into the walls or ceiling of

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The Changing Earth the cave or into rocks as they fly out of the sinkhole. More rarely, a young bat will impale itself on a cactus near the entrance. The cave opens like a great maw in the side of a deep sinkhole, a fiery sunset the backdrop to our view. Bats have been returning quietly to Bracken for thousands of years, depositing the remains of their meals on the cave floor in a carpet of guano now seventy feet thick in places. This carpet is unusually rich in nitrates and provides a record of past climates and a source of incendiary firepower. Confederate soldiers first mined it during the Civil War for gunpowder, and soldiers in World War I used it in rifle and artillery fuses. At the back of the cave an old mine shaft rises to the surface where miners lifted the guano in buckets on a rusted pulley that still hangs nearby. Rufous lint from the fur of the bats drifts up through the shaft and, thick as fabric, clings to the wooden ceiling above. In World War II the cave was home to the top-secret "Project X-Ray." The military goal of the project (which had nothing to do with X-Rays) was to capture millions of bats, glue tiny firebombs to their backs, and release them over Japan. The bats were then supposed to roost in Japanese buildings where they would explode and ignite a firestorm. This two-year project was the brainchild of part-time dentist and inventor Lytle "Doc" Adams. Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt were friends, so his idea had quick access to the President. (On first hearing of it, FDR wrote, "This man is not a nut.") Over the next few years the United States spent millions of dollars learning to trap the bats, glue special bombs to their backs, and ship them stacked like firewood in the belly of airplanes. Napalm provided the firepower, Bracken provided the bats. In 1943 scientists tested the plan at a brand new training station near Carlsbad, New Mexico. During the demonstration a handful of bats escaped, flew into various buildings, and burned the new air station to the ground. Depending on the viewer's perspective, the test was either an unmitigated success (the scientists' view) or an unbridled disaster (the view of the commander whose station went up in smoke). The optimists temporarily triumphed, and a permanent marine guard was stationed to watch

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The Earth Remains Forever over Bracken's valuable residents. Within a year, however, the glow had worn off the idea. Detractors pointed out some problems with transporting exploding bats—each 3-2.5 bomber was to carry 2.5,000—and the military canceled the plan. Disappointed but undaunted, Doc Adams moved on to his next brainchild: the Adams Aerial Pellet Seeding System for turning the world's deserts green. As the sunset fades, we lug our gear to the edge of the sinkhole. The smell of ammonia wafts up in pulses on a desultory breeze as we set up the corer and lubricate its threads. Coyotes howl irregularly around us, and a pair of red-tailed hawks sails across the sinkhole, marking the pending flight. Tonight's flight finally begins. Our first sight of the bats is a swirling mass just inside the cave entrance. Airborne, they fidget with the pent-up energy of kids waiting for recess. When a few finally break free and spiral out of the sinkhole, others soon follow, and a sound faint as raindrops builds from their flapping wings. As the number of bats grows, plants around the sinkhole begin to sway in a living breeze. The swarm of bats ebbs and flows, now closer to us, now farther, the wind pulsing across our faces. A redtailed hawk swoops down, snatches one from the throng, and departs, lighting in a nearby tree to enjoy its meal. Snakes hang in the cave entrance, waiting to snatch the flying bats. Occasionally an albino bat leaves the cave, circling three or four times as it climbs. There are so many bats and their flight is so fast that they are impossible to follow singly, rising instead from the sinkhole in unison like a dark funnel cloud. The albino bats reduce that cloud to individual spirals as they circle counterclockwise, gaining height with each rotation. We watch the flight for more than an hour, hypnotized by its swirling cadence. The night's flight eventually ends. Stillness returns, the hawks and coyotes fall silent, and Venus beckons in the western sky above the cave's entrance. With the last of the bats gone, we don headlamps and descend into the cave. The humidity rises steadily as we climb down carrying the heavy coring equipment, the textured limestone walls reflecting hues of light and dark around us. We walk to the 92.

The Changing Earth back of the cave across a soft moonscape that holds the ancient remnants of the insects the bats eat each night. Bat skeletons litter the ground, supporting a seething mass of beetles and other life on the cave floor, as old mining supplies—rotting wood planking and broken ladders, tools, and burlap bags—decay in the heavy air. The smell of ammonia is overpowering. We set up our equipment. Our task this night is to core seventy feet into the cave floor, unlocking the rich history of the guano to study the diet of the bats in centuries past and find a record of the climate they lived in.

Around the four sides of the square at even intervals, the new standards of the five-bulbed lamps cast down implacably upon those cataleptic pavements the cataleptic silence of their hard white light. . . . And poignantly, pitifully, and unutterably their harsh, white silence evokes the moth-like hunger of the American for hard, brilliant, blazing incandescence. THOMAS WOLFE, Of Time and the River (1935)

There is a danger in the way we see the world, in our attempt to fix it immutably as we know it today or, more often, as we knew it in the first twenty or so years of our lives. Our pace of existence is both too fast and too slow to grasp many changes in the world around us. Looking in the mirror each morning, you know that you've aged and that your face was less careworn once, but you can't see the changes day to day. The differences are obvious, though, when you see a picture of yourself from the past. Similarly, when you see a friend for the first time in years, you sense instantly that she's aged but you're not sure exactly how, and her new face quickly becomes the way she has "always" looked. Our memories are hazy palimpsests, our mental pictures more Dorian Gray than da Vinci. Our view of the earth is this way, too. We may notice when a forest near us is cleared, but other changes aren't so obvious or occur over longer periods of time. To understand how the earth is changing today, we first need

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The Earth Remains Forever to know what it was like in the past, because it's only "changing" relative to something else—an earlier time or a different place. Sometimes a few decades of baseline data are enough, like the ozone record at Halley Bay. For other things we need thousands or even millions of years of data to understand the earth's complex history; you can't comprehend the ebb and flow of ice ages just by comparing data from a few decades. Peering into the past is one of the most exciting areas of science today. From ice cores to isotope chemistry, fossils to foraminifera, our past is made present in ingenious ways. Earlier in this book, I described how the fossil record helps anchor current extinctions in their historical context. Extinction rates in the last few centuries have approached those seen only five times in the earth's history. The most recent episode was sixty-five million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared, almost certainly from a meteor impact and the climate change it caused. In general, it's not hard to estimate extinction rates from the fossil record, painstakingly measuring plant and animal fossils to reveal the rise and fall of species over time. Establishing the historical context for other changes on earth is more difficult, and the relationship between rising atmospheric co^ and temperature is a good example. How do we know what CO2 concentrations were a hundred or a hundred thousand years ago? How much confidence should we have in our estimates? The same questions apply to global warming and to the relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature. The basic physics of greenhouse warming were first described more than a century ago. In 1827 Jean-Baptiste Fourier outlined how the atmosphere warmed the earth by trapping infrared radiation. Fourier was also the first person to use the analogy of a greenhouse for this phenomenon. In the 18905 Svante Arrhenius and P. C. Chamberlain independently proposed that a buildup of coz from fossil fuel burning would similarly warm the earth. Neither recognized that the process might already have begun. In fact it had—or at least the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was slowly under way—but it wasn't until the 19508 that scientists documented this buildup by monitoring cox con-

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The Changing Earth tinuously in the earth's air. Begun as part of the same International Geophysical Year that spawned the ozone studies at Halley Bay, the Mauna Loa record is the longest continuous set of CO2 measurements in the world. Scientists chose Mauna Loa for the monitoring station because Hawaii is far from most sources of pollution and because the air near the top of the volcano is high enough to be well mixed. The measurements that began there have shown an immediate and steady increase in carbon dioxide concentrations from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 to 370 ppm in 2.000. Perhaps not surprisingly, the rate of increase is also growing. Of the 2.65 billion tons of carbon generated in fossil fuel burning and other activities since 1750, half came after 1975. In consequence, COz concentrations have risen as much as three ppm in recent years (almost one percent per year), although typical rates are about half that. The data from Mauna Loa and other stations around the world are now indisputable, but the industrial revolution didn't start in 1958. How can we extend the record back to the time of Fourier and before? Since no continuous coi record existed before Mauna Loa, we need other ways to understand what the earth was like. One of the most ingenious methods for looking into the past uses tiny bubbles of air trapped in ancient glaciers. Glaciers build up over time much as sedimentary rocks do, with new layers on top and older layers below. In January 1998, a team of French, Russian, and American scientists finished drilling eleven thousand feet into a glacier at the Vostok station in Antarctica. They took the cores back to their laboratories, dated the sections, and crushed layers of ice under a vacuum, capturing and analyzing the air trapped in the bubbles. The amazing Vostok record allows us to examine the actual atmosphere four hundred thousand years ago. The ingenious Vostok record, and independent measurements from Greenland and elsewhere, show just how unusual the recent increases in cc^ have been. At no time in the last four hundred thousand years were coi concentrations above 325 ppm. In fact for most of that period they ranged from 180 to 280 ppm, the value at the start of the industrial revolution. Since the 17008, however, they've climbed to 370 ppm and will likely top 95

The Earth Remains Forever 500 by the end of this century, a doubling of preindustrial levels. Other greenhouse gases, such as methane, have grown even faster. In consequence, the earth is projected to warm as much as ten degrees Fahrenheit before GOi stabilizes. (While that may not be bad news for people in Siberia, the rest of us have something serious to think about.) What, then, is the recent record of warming? The United States maintains data from seven thousand temperature stations around the world, a thousand of which go back more than a century. Since 1860, when measurements at the stations began, the warmest decade on record was the 19908. Ten of the warmest fifteen years were also in the 19908 (every yvsx in the decade was far warmer than average), as were the six hottest years on record. A proxy record of temperature from tree rings and other methods also reveals that the decade was the warmest in at least six hundred years, and most likely twelve hundred, which is as far back as such records go. All of this evidence could be just a coincidence, but I doubt it. There were times in the distant past when the earth was apparently warmer than it is today. The mid-Holocene period five to seven thousand years ago may have been warmer in summer,

Tm starting to get concerned about global 'warming.

The Changing Earth but only in the Northern Hemisphere, and not in winter. The cause of this unusual climate was a well-understood change in the earth's orbit and solar radiation, a mechanism definitely not causing global warming today. The ice core record and other data show a strong relationship between carbon dioxide concentrations and the earth's temperature in the past. When GO i concentrations in the atmosphere were high, temperatures were generally higher, and in cold periods CO2 concentrations were typically lower. Many other factors also affect the earth's temperature, including changes in the earth's orbit, the sun's energy, and volcanic activity, but none of these explains the warming of recent decades. Studying the past provides the context for understanding changes today, and the evidence that something unusual is happening is already overwhelming. The earth's atmosphere and climate are changing dramatically, in many more ways than I describe here, and the rate of change is increasing. In consequence, we can quibble about details or we can design ways to slow climate change and adapt to it as quickly as possible. A report released in November 2.000 by the U. S. Department of Energy suggests that tackling global warming may be much cheaper than once believed. Creating incentives for improving energy efficiency, using renewable fuels—such as solar and wind power—and adopting a carbon trading system for companies to buy and sell carbon would help cut coz emissions threequarters of the way back to 1990 levels at little cost to consumers. Any additional costs would be offset by the benefits of emissions cuts and better fuel efficiency, also reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Marilyn Brown of Oak Ridge National Laboratory co-organized the study and summarized how easy such adjustments could be: "There are no real heroic efforts here." To help slow global warming, we'll need to curb emissions of other greenhouse gases such as methane as well, but many of the pieces are already in place. As a society, can we afford not to try?

In the summer of 2000, scientists discovered a new greenhouse 97

The Earth Remains Forever gas in the atmosphere. Trifluoromethyl sulfur pentafluoride (SF CF ) has no natural sources and first appeared in our air in the 19608, a fact that we know from air samples trapped in Antarctic snow and ice. Concentrations of the gas, while still small, are growing at six percent per year. Several factors make this discovery important. On a per molecule basis, SF CF is the most potent greenhouse gas ever found in our air, tens of thousands of times stronger than carbon dioxide. Just as importantly, it lasts a long time in the atmosphere, typically a thousand years or so. This powerful combination of strong warming and unyielding stability in air is what makes it so potentially troublesome. Because concentrations of SF5CF3 are still small, it won't be a problem for global warming in our lifetime. But if we don't discover where it's coming from and slow its growth, it will become our descendants' problem. Thirty or forty generations are a wealth of lifetimes; a thousand years is a long time to wait.

With earth's temperatures topping the stars All the animals got in their cars The jaguar and toucan Drove north to the Yukon And the polar bears all left for Mars

LOOKING OUTWARD

You're so smug^ is what gets me. Don't you ever think you're going to have to pay a price?" She looks at him now, squarely with eyes bloodshot from being in the water. She shades them with her hand. These aren't the eyes he met that night by the parking meters, flat pale discs like a doll might have. The blue of her irises has deepened inward and darkened with a richness that, singing the truth to his instinct, disturbs him. JOHN UPDIKE, Rabbit, Run (1960) 98

Tke Changing Earth As of the spring of 2.001, the earth's surface had warmed by about i°F since 1860. The changes so far have been fairly modest but are speeding up quickly. As just discussed, the 19908 were the warmest decade on record and 1998 was the warmest year of the twentieth century. The results of this "modest" warming are already apparent around the world. Insects are emerging earlier and trees are staying green longer. The Northern Hemisphere in particular is greener that it was just twenty years ago. In North America, for example, satellites indicate that the growing season for the continent north of Denver or Philadelphia lasted twelve days longer at the end of the century than it did in 1980; in Eurasia the increase was even longer—eighteen days overall—with spring arriving a week earlier and autumn delayed by ten days. Warming is also leading to longer frost-free periods and to ice melting and breaking up more quickly on rivers and lakes. At Hudson Bay the ice is breaking up two weeks earlier than normal, and the famous polar bears of Churchill, Manitoba, are literally shrinking—they're losing weight, their birth rates are dropping, and their cubs are dying more often. Because they need ice to hunt seals, the bears come ashore when it breaks up, fasting from late July to November. When the ice melts earlier, as it has in recent years, the bears have a shorter hunting season and go longer without food. Across the continent in Glacier National Park, only 37 of the 150 glaciers present in 18 50 remain today, with the rest expected to disappear in a few more decades of warming. In a generation or two, some unsuspecting child may ask why the park is called "Glacier" anyway. Whether any change is "good" or "bad" depends in part upon our perspective. It depends on whether we consider animals and plants, too, or restrict our discussion to people. It depends on which people we consider, where and how they live, and what happens in a particular area. For example, in a warmer world a farmer's crop might benefit from a longer growing season but still suffer from the increased insect pests that accompany it. Although the changes so far have been fairly modest, those 99

The Earth Remains Forever to come in the new century likely won't be. The best evidence to date suggests that the earth will warm about 6°F from 1990 to 2100. As just one example of the profound changes that such an increase could bring, models of the spread of disease suggest that a 5°F rise could increase the cases of malaria by fifty to eighty million people a year (independent of population growth). The actual temperature increase may be as "little" as three degrees and as large as ten depending on our actions—whether and how quickly we curb growth in the earth's population and cut energy use. And these changes are only for one century. There is another century after that. And another. The theme of families and multiple generations runs throughout history and politics and throughout this book as well. In 1992 the Rio Earth Summit was the birthplace of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The goal of the framework, supported by more than 175 countries including the United States, was to stabilize "greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [human-induced] interference with the climate system." As a small first step it called for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2.000. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for the years of negotiations that ultimately led to the landmark Kyoto Protocol. Signed in December 1997, the Kyoto Protocol is the next generation in a plan for reducing greenhouse gases—the son or daughter, if you like, of the Rio Convention. Only four short years after the memorable Kyoto meeting, newspaper headlines such as this one from the Bangkok Post in March 2.001 documented a political change of heart: "Kyoto gets the Bush kiss of death." The nascent administration of George W. Bush scotched nine years of negotiations by pronouncing the Kyoto Protocol "dead." The reasons given included suggestions that stricter emissions limits could worsen energy shortages in places like California. President Bush himself stated, "I will not accept anything that will harm our economy. . . . " Never mind the narrow bounds of "harm." Never mind working within the system to improve the treaty and to address the many difficult and complicated issues that remain. Never mind

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The Changing Earth that the cuts for America—reductions of seven percent from 1990 levels by the year 2012—were less stringent than those for the European Union, and that overall cuts wouldn't come close to stabilizing atmospheric coi concentrations. (If you're a hundred pounds overweight, a plan to shed the first twenty pounds is still welcome.) Never mind diplomacy and international leadership. Today, 180 other nations strive towards a final agreement without the United States. E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one. A generation comes, and a generation goes, but the earth remains forever. Just a decade before, an earlier U.S. administration signed, supported, and helped ratify the Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiated at Rio de Janeiro. That president, while running for office, gave the following justification for action: "Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect are forgetting about the White House effect. As president I intend to do something about it." The name of that president was George Bush.

Although Dorothy's trip wasn't planned She decided to help back on land Her first sight with Toto, Wasn't Oz, but Kyoto, A flight plan America banned.

LOOKING AHEAD: A CALL FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING

But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic. . . . F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby (192,5)

As we peer into the past, pictures help us see how we have changed and how our surroundings have changed with us. Looking back in time also helps us document how the earth is chang-

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The Earth Remains Forever ing today. In tomorrow's world, however, "today" will be a part of the past. A hundred years from now, even a thousand, our descendants will be reconstructing the earth's recent environmental history, and we can help them by keeping the best records possible. Whenever we visit doctors, they record our symptoms and the treatment that we receive. Apart from legal concerns, they do this because they make smarter choices with a patient's medical history in hand. Did she have heart trouble before? Did her parents have any heritable diseases? Future generations need the best possible records about the environment so that they can decide which problems are getting better and which are getting worse, and how best to solve them. What I am proposing here is an ambitious, long-term plan to monitor the environment. By "long-term" I mean timescales far longer than we usually think about—a century or two at a minimum, with our grandchildren's grandchildren as a guide. An investment in environmental monitoring today will pay dividends now and in the future. We can use the information to help solve current problems, to improve human health, to verify environmental commitments, and to help raise everyone's stan-

"Are you justpissing andmoaning, or can you verify whatyoure saying wifh data?" 102.

The Changing Earth dard of living. Such a plan could also provide baseline data for any surprises that arise. When scientists began working at Halley Bay, no one knew how important their ozone measurements would eventually be. Without their data, we would have had nothing to compare the ozone hole to, and people would have bickered incessantly about whether it was normal or unusual, real or a figment of doomsayers' imaginations. Such arguments occurred even with the baseline data. In honor of one of the foremost observers in history, literary history at least, we might christen our global monitoring program the HOLMES network: Horizons in Observing, Linking, and Monitoring the Earth System. (Every program needs a catchy acronym.) As Sherlock Holmes put it: You see, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. Choosing what to monitor will take careful planning. Take something as apparently simple as rainfall. As a first step, we might decide to establish a set of long-term weather stations around the world. Most of the ones that we already have are near airports, so where should the new ones be? Adding stations in poorer countries and in remote locations would give us better coverage of the earth. In Antarctica, for example, a complete melting of the ice would raise sea level by two hundred feet, flooding half of the world's population. Some stations in places like that might be useful after all. Not only do we need to choose where to place our stations, 103

The Earth Remains Forever we need to choose how similar each station should be. What if the best technology in deserts isn't best in the tropics or over the oceans? Should stations in remote areas be simpler so that they'll need less maintenance? How often should we calibrate the instruments, and how can we be consistent over decades and centuries? Stepping back even further, are point estimates all that we need? Flow gauges in rivers and streams help us estimate rainfall across watersheds, though factors other than rainfall then become important. Satellites can derive rainfall estimates, but their data need to be calibrated with actual surface measurements. Archiving rainfall samples--real, physical samples--would also allow future scientists to compare rainfall then with rain from today. They might want to know when a new chemical first entered the environment or what the rain was like in the past. As an example, acid rain is a problem because the quality of rainfall changed, not the amount. Archiving and distributing the data will take just as much foresight and planning as deciding what to measure. If we had wanted to store Top 40 music thirty years ago, we might have filled an air-conditioned room with eight-track tapes. Today almost no one would be able to use them. Fortunately, amidst this bewildering array of possibilities (and rainfall is just one of many important environmental variables), a number of monitoring plans are already under way. NASA is using satellites and remote sensing to study the earth. By taking measurements over many decades, satellites can record such things as deforestation or the timing of tree growth in the spring as an indicator of global warming. Plans to monitor specific environmental variables are also under way. One new program is the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization, the U.N. Environment Program, and the International Council for Science. GCOS is designed to provide observations that will enable governments to respond to global climate change in timescales of decades to centuries. It also has counterparts on land and in the oceans—the Global Terrestrial Observing Sys-

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The Changing Earth tern and the Global Oceanic Observing System. Ocean monitoring includes changes in sea level and temperatures, recorded with an array of satellites and floating buoys. Programs like these are a beginning, but they're only the tip of the iceberg. Much more is needed and will be possible only with guaranteed long-term funding. In fact, at the same time that we are considering a global monitoring network, budget cuts threaten the stations that exist. The U.S. Geological Survey has been measuring stream flow for over a century, but in the past three decades more than a fifth of its gauges on small, freeflowing streams have been eliminated. We're losing monitoring stations just when we need them most. Calling for a monitoring network is easier than deciding how to pay for it. In an age of budget surpluses, maybe some of this money could be used to establish a monitoring network or to set up an endowment for the environment. A more fanciful way to fund the network might be a national or an international lottery for the environment. The most realistic approach of all, though, would be to let the network help pay for itself. Insurers, farmers and fishermen, community planners, and manufacturers could pay to use its data. So might doctors, as monitoring opens new opportunities for preventing disease around the world. Epidemics of Rift Valley fever break out in East Africa every five to ten years. Because the disease is spread by mosquitoes, epidemics tend to occur after heavy rains. Using monitoring data, including new rainfall analyses, ocean surface temperatures, and satellite images of plants in the region, scientists can now predict outbreaks of Rift Valley fever up to five months before they occur, saving lives in result. The possibilities for a monitoring network are immense. A B-2. bomber, the most expensive plane ever built, costs two or three billion dollars. A global monitoring network couldn't carry twenty tons of bombs, fly six thousand miles, or avoid enemy radar, but as a society we might choose to put a few less bombers in the air and instead create a monitoring network for the future.

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The Earth Remains Forever

A historical analogy There is no merit in putting off a war for a year if, when it comes, it is a far worse war or one much harder to win. WINSTON CHURCHILL, The Gathering Storm (1948)

That the world is changing is increasingly obvious; knowing when to intervene in that change is more difficult. For the reasons outlined above, I believe that the time to act is now. Building a global consensus will take considerable work, and the price of not acting is uncertain but potentially enormous. I also share a nai've view with many people that dealing with problems sooner rather than later is preferable, before the problems worsen. When it comes to the environment, dealing with them later means leaving them to our descendants. In detailing the need for action, I want first to draw an analogy using World War II as an example. It isn't based on the war itself or on any good-versus-evil characterization, it's based instead on Allied responses to Germany in the decade before the war. A cascading series of mistakes contributed to World War II. One of the earliest was underestimating the seriousness of the problem. After Hitler's failed beer-hall putsch in 1913, he used his year in prison to define his nationalistic plan, including restoring lost honor, securing living space, and purging "undesirable" races from Germany. His road map of that plan, Mein Kampf, sold six million copies in Germany alone and was the best-selling book of the decade. His goals were hardly a secret. In 1932. Hitler's National Socialists polled thirteen million votes in an election and became a national power. That year he was summoned by President Hindenburg to enter a coalition government and serve as Vice-Chancellor to Franz von Papen. Hitler refused, demanding in his own words "all or nothing." Hindenburg turned him down. Von Papen pronounced his own

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The Changing Earth judgment on Hitler: "TZ;#£man for Chancellor? I'll make him a postmaster and he can lick stamps with my head on them." Six months later Hitler governed Germany. After obtaining power, Hitler implemented his plan with alacrity. Germany immediately withdrew from the League of Nations, and the Allies took the first step down the path of appeasement. In 193 5 Hitler denounced the disarmament clauses of Versailles. He passed the infamous Nlirnberg Laws, depriving Jews of the rights of citizenship and forbidding intermarriage. He also announced mandatory military conscription and formed the Luftwaffe in the same week, both forbidden by treaty, daring the Allies to confront him. They, in turn, failed even to impose economic sanctions for fear of provoking Germany. Sensing the lack of Allied resolve, Hitler turned from rearmament to the other goals of Mein Kampf. The first was to denounce the Locarno Pact of 192.5 and reoccupy the Rhineland on the border with France. This was the first time that German troops had invaded "foreign" territory since the treaty of Versailles ended World War I. Here, surely, was a step the Allies would repudiate. Hitler himself said, "The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-wracking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with shame and disgrace, for the military resources at our disposal would have been entirely inadequate for even a remote resistance." Hitler's future chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, put it more succinctly: "Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces." Germany's war ministers believed that the collapse of the Reich was imminent. What was the Allied reaction to the invasion? The French, with the largest and best-trained army in the world, dithered. Generalissime Maurice Gamellin announced that the French army was " uneforce purement defensive" French Premier Albert Sarraut then queried the British, who equivocated. Neville Chamberlain told the French that "public opinion would not support us in sanctions of any kind." Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin re107

The Earth Remains Forever fused even to lodge an appeal to the League of Nations because he feared it would "result in Germany going Bolshevik." Meanwhile, the United States was comfortably ensconced across the Atlantic. The United States, at least, wasn't bound by treaty to respond, because the Senate had rejected the Versailles covenants in 1919 and, with them, American membership in the League of Nations. A few people saw the Rhineland invasion for what it was. Ralph Wigram of England's Foreign Office said, "War is now inevitable, and it will be the most terrible war there has ever been.... I have failed to make the people here realize what is at stake." He committed suicide several months later. Winston Churchill, out of power at the time, scoffed at notions that Germany's appetite was finally sated: "After a boa constrictor has devoured its prey, it often has a considerable digestive spell." The spell was short-lived, as the Anschluss brought the invasion and annexation of Austria in 193 8. Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg stood up to the Nazi invasion and went to Dachau concentration camp as a result. By now the Allies were genuinely afraid of Germany, and stopping her would be difficult. The German air force had grown larger than the French and English combined, and the annexation of Austria meant a dozen new divisions for the army. Allied inaction led to further aggression as Germany set its sights on dismembering Czechoslovakia. At a conference in Munich, England and France agreed to yield the Czech Sudetenland to the Germans. In return, Hitler recognized Czechoslovakia's remaining frontiers, and England and France guaranteed them. (Not surprisingly, the Czechs weren't invited to the banquet at which their nation was served as the main course.) The French, bound by treaty to defend the Czechs, finessed the problem by negotiating for peace. Former French Premier Leon Blum wrote at the time, "I feel myself torn between a sense of cowardly relief and shame." Six months later the Nazis ripped up the pact and swallowed Czechoslovakia anyway; World War II began soon after with the invasion of Poland. 108

The Changing Earth

There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceas'd; The which observ'd, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Henry IV, Part II

When people behave self-destructively, it helps to try to understand why, to learn from their mistakes or risk repeating them. In hindsight, Allied actions are hard to fathom. How could the victors of World War I behave so self-destructively a few years later? More than ten million people died in World War I. The British suffered four hundred thousand casualties in one battle, the Somme, and failed to advance more than seven miles. Allied responses were unquestionably based on a desire for peace and the mistaken belief that everyone shared the same desire. But other factors were also important, and these factors are relevant for solving today's environmental problems. The first is that the Allies were unwilling to tackle a difficult problem immediately, failing to see the Nazi threat for what it was. Hitler's plan was clear and his actions clearer, but his words were contradictory. Former ambassador to Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, expressed these frustrating sentiments: "I have never felt so depressed or so nauseated as I feel now and this because it seems to me that our Government have, for a year or more, failed to look ahead or to understand the character of the man with whom they are dealing...." The Allies kept grasping at Hitler's words, hoping they could make the problem disappear. The Allies also lacked the resolve to face the problem. Facing an international military tribunal after the war, German General Alfred Jodl stated how easy it would have been for the French to invade Germany if the Germans had been forced to fight for Czechoslovakia: "It was out of the question...to hold out against 100 French divisions. That was militarily impossible." England also had its share of lost opportunities. After the Austrian

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The Earth Remains Forever Anschluss^ Parliament member Robert Boothby wrote, "On four occasions Hitler and his gang of bloody murderers could have been brought down, and a second world war averted, by an ultimatum.... Every time we failed to do it." A lack of planning also played a role. The French relied on the Maginot Line to stop a German invasion, but they ignored gaps in the line, most notably in the Ardennes and along the River Meuse. (Marshal Petain, the French hero of World War I, pronounced the rugged Ardennes "impenetrable.") The second, more mystifying, error was that the French left no force in reserve if Germany broke through or outflanked their line. Once this had occurred, France fell in a month. The English also lacked a coherent plan, relying primarily on diplomacy and appeasement. By the late 19308 what other choice did they have? The Germans were outspending them five to one on rearmament. In 1939 the Reich could field an army larger than the English and French combined—seven million men. In fact the Germans had 150 divisions available for the western front, ten times more than the Allies would have faced if they had opposed the Rhineland invasion three years earlier. All of this was foreshadowed when Hitler became Chancellor. At that time, a Rumanian foreign minister observed, "Germany has her plans. Do other countries have their plans? If the other powers are without plans, we will be forced to go along with Germany." A final factor was subtler but also applies today: a lack of respect and trust. International stereotypes from the times are especially revealing. After touring Nazi Germany, American aviator Charles Lindbergh professed admiration for the teutonic efficiency he had witnessed. He told a small group of Englishmen that German air strength meant "the end of England as a great power." He wrote in his diary, "It is necessary to realize that England is a country composed of a great mass of slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people, and a small group of geniuses." The English and the French were equally scornful. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin spoke of the "low intellectual ability" of Americans. His foreign secretary Lord Halifax responded to a typical meeting with the French by observing, "The French are no

The Changing Earth never ready to face up to realities. They delight in vain words and protestations." (This was the same diplomat who mistook Hitler for a servant during his first official visit to Germany in 1937; that episode, at least, was an accident.) The French were equally myopic. Journalist Henri Beraud expressed this subtle version of Anglophobia: "I hate England. I hate her by instinct and tradition." With the fall of France imminent, commanderin-chief Maxime Weygand is reputed to have mocked the English: "In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken." Marshall Petain chose to become the first quisling leader of Vichy France rather than continue the fight from across the English Channel; any further union with Britain would have been, in his words, "fusion with a corpse." Today, similar stereotyping feeds mistrust among groups. How often do we hear generalizations like these: Corporate America: Business people only care about money; they've fought every environmental law ever written. Environmentalists'. Those doomsday extremists care more about nature than people. They only want to keep us from obtaining the wealth they already have. Government bureaucrats'. They infringe on our rights and privacy; their rules only make our lives more complicated. Ivory-towered academics'. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. (The list is shorter for academics because we are in fact smarter and better than everyone else.) Stereotypes abound on the issues as well: "Population growth causes the world's problems; if people in developing countries could just get their birth rates down everything would be fine." "Rich nations are using environmental fears to control the global economy. Climate change is their doing—let them fix it." "Why do Americans spend so much time talking about tropical deforestation? Where are their old-growth forests?" A lack of vision, resolve, planning, and respect hampered Allied responses to Germany, the same attributes that we need to solve environmental problems today. The list sounds vaguely like wisdom from a self-help manual, but others have expressed similar ideas with greater eloquence: Ill

The Earth Remains Forever It is my purpose, as one who lived and acted in these days, first to show how easily the tragedy of the Second World War could have been prevented; how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous; how the structure and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for even ten or fifteen years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead direct to the bull's-eye of disaster. We shall see how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics. WINSTON CHURCHILL (1948)

A vision for the future Without a vision, the people perish. Proverbs 2.9:18

Recent decades have shown how vulnerable the environment can be to our individual actions. Ozone depletion revealed this lesson in a new and unnerving way. Who would have guessed that simple conveniences of daily life like hairsprays, deodorants, and air conditioners could open a hole to the top of the atmosphere? The ozone hole also showed that we could respond quickly and effectively to an environmental challenge. Individual actions mattered for repairing the ozone hole and they matter for slowing rates of global warming, extinctions, and population growth as our demands on the environment grow. As discussed earlier, we in the United States generate a quarter of the world's fossil fuel emissions with less than five percent of its population. The earth likely can't sustain six billion people living as we do, yet more and more people in other countries 112

The Changing Earth will inevitably approach our standard of living, something that is neither "bad" nor "good" in any simplistic way. Taking the world's coal reserves as an example, there are at least a thousand billion tons of coal and lignite recoverable with today's technology, about ten times the known reserves of crude oil or natural gas. China has more than a tenth of this coal for its 1.2,5 billion people. What moral footing do we have to ask the Chinese not to use their energy reserves, at whatever rate they want, when we use more energy and natural resources than any people in history? The United States and other wealthy nations must supply the leadership for a sustainable environmental future. Individually, this means making do with a bit less, without a radical restructuring of our world. We could start with small adjustments, like learning to enjoy the outdoors sometimes without motorized toys, reducing air conditioning in malls and theaters so we don't have to put on sweaters when we go inside, recovering a social fabric that lets people tell stories or play music together without "consuming" anything at all. Simple lifestyle changes would help us exercise more, lower our stress, and make us healthier. According to the American Medical Association, almost one in fiv Americans is obese. Obesity kills three hundred thousand people a year and causes more preventable deaths in the United States than anything but tobacco. Those are difficult statistics to explain to the millions of hungry people in the world. Simple behavioral changes really can make a difference. Just two decades ago, only one in ten Americans wore seat belts. Today more than seventy percent do. New laws prompted some of this change (with New York the first state to mandate seat belt use in 1984), but education, attitude, and behavior also played important roles. People got the message that seat belts saved lives and responded accordingly. Today, if I pull out of the driveway without mine on, I hear about it from young voices in the back seat. In just the same way that we changed our behavior with seat belts, we can make similar changes in energy use. Turning off lights when we leave a room or turning down the thermostat H3

The Earth Remains Forever when we leave the house can become instinctive. We can learn to think about every piece of trash we discard—and how to minimize it—and whether that errand in the car really is necessary. These aren't huge changes but, coupled with new technologies, they can make a tremendous difference in our future. In addition to the "little things" from each of us, the "big things" also matter, and here too we can do better. Our laws and institutions need to encourage sustainable resource use. Governments should create a competitive system that rewards companies for problem solving and environmental planning. Our economic theories need to weigh the benefits of natural ecosystems more realistically and the needs of future residents more honestly. For example, why should the "future costs" of dealing with fossil fuel emissions be estimated so cheaply as to make them inconsequential? Are the costs really inconsequential, or are we just ignoring them!1 How do we acknowledge the economic benefits of not using an underground aquifer so that the water is there for future generations? Our accounting for natural systems and for our descendants is deeply flawed; we simply don't know how to deal with such issues honestly. Discount rates applied to the future are a good example. A dollar today is typically worth more than a dollar tomorrow for several reasons. The first and most obvious is inflation. A second is that per capita income in recent decades has grown two percent a year, even factoring out inflation, so a dollar will likely represent a higher proportion of income today than it will tomorrow. A third, more personal, reason is that most of us would rather have something today than wait for it tomorrow. We like having things now, and we may not be here tomorrow to enjoy them. Economists call this tendency a "rate of time preference" and estimate that people will pay three or four percent a year for it. The assumptions behind "rates of time preference" are critical for environmental policy. Using these assumptions, if we knew that a disaster a century away would cost one thousand dollars in damages, we would only be willing to spend seventeen dollars today to prevent it (one thousand dollars adjusted a hundred times at an annual rate of four percent). Ignoring the two additional

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The Changing Earth factors of inflation and income growth, the "cost" of the problem calculated in today's dollars is a little more than one percent of the cost in a century. Apply the model for two centuries and any action today becomes almost pointless: a thousand dollars in two hundred years is "worth" only twenty-eight cents today. Economists argue the merits of such calculations, but we are using models developed for short time scales and applying them to problems that may take fifty or five hundred years to run their course. No one has the slightest idea if the assumptions will hold over time. More importantly, we aren't setting aside money to deal with future problems even at the severely discounted rates. There is no endowment for the costs of global warming or habitat loss or pollution or any of the other environmental problems of our making. We are simply leaving our descendants the bill. As examples, consider half a dozen environmental and legal policies in place today and their questionable economics: AUTOMOBILE SUBSIDIES AND FUEL EFFICIENCY

As a nation we are in love with the automobile. There is a registered vehicle for almost every driver in the United States, and the number of cars around the world more than doubled between 1970 and 1990. Our fascination with the automobile is both liberating and enslaving. We shape our self-image and our sense of freedom around cars, and we shape our society around them—so pervasively that in many places it is difficult to function without one. This costly dependence on driving contributes a fifth of fossil fuel emissions around the world. Our reliance on cars is perhaps the most subsidized part of American life today. Depending on how you tally the costs, the U.S. government spends 50 to 150 billion dollars a year on drivers. Four million miles of public roads crisscross America covering one percent of its lands. We pay for roads, bridges, parking, and traffic control, but we don't pay in a way that promotes conservation because the costs are hidden in our taxes. Other than the price of gasoline and maintenance, we rarely consider what driving really costs. H5

The Earth Remains Forever The economics of gasoline pricing and fuel efficiency are also questionable policies today. In the mid- to late 19908 American gas prices adjusted for inflation were the lowest in half a century. (They rose substantially in late 1999 and 2.000 but were still only half of what most European drivers pay.) We are driving more and paying less, with little economic incentive to conserve. Our vehicles are also losing fuel efficiency. The United States has had mileage and emission standards set by the federal government since the oil crises of the 19708, but pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles are excluded from these standards. Americans now buy more than three million gas-guzzling suvs a year. A 2,000 Ford Excursion gets about ten miles to the gallon; an original 1908 Ford Model T got twenty. Including trucks and suvs, the 1997 automotive year had the poorest fuel efficiency in sixteen years, with the trend continuing to date. Just when global warming is apparent, Americans are driving bigger vehicles and paying less for gasoline than most people in other countries. We have the "right" to drive whatever cars we want, but other people today and tomorrow are paying for that right. Paying the real cost of driving when we drive would give us

"Believe me, with the Equalize^ here, you II never take any crap from an S.U.V. again." 116

The Changing Earth clearer incentives to conserve. We would drive less in smaller, better-engineered vehicles. Both Honda and Toyota now sell hybrid gas/electric cars that get more than fifty city miles to the gallon, go up to eight hundred miles on a tank of gas, never need to be plugged in, and zip along at highway speeds. General Motors has new fuel-cell technology that produces water from hydrogen and oxygen, generating power four times more efficiently than the best gasoline engines of today. Its HydroGen technology should be in showrooms as early as 2004. We don't need to ban automobiles, we just need to be smarter, less wasteful drivers with a government that encourages energy-saving technologies. There are other changes we could make as well. We could provide better public transportation, acknowledging the special needs of rural and low-income drivers, and design suburbs in which people aren't helpless without cars. By paying the real cost of driving every day, we would conserve more and recognize how much cheaper and healthier other forms of transportation can be. SURFACE POLLUTION

Surprisingly, the greatest source of water pollution in the United States today isn't from huge industrial complexes or sewage treatment plants. Companies have made great strides in controlling pollution from these sources because they can be regulated at a single "point." Instead, more than four-fifths of water pollution comes from "non-point" sources such as run-off from agricultural fields, construction sites, feedlots, and urban areas. Translated into common language—it's each of us. What are some consequences of this pollution? Eutrophication of our lakes and streams, weeds choking our waterways, toxic algal blooms, die-offs in coral reefs, and dead-zones in coastal areas and estuaries, to name a few. In recent years, a deadzone the size of New Jersey has grown off the Louisiana coast where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico. Caused primarily by nitrogen runoff from farms and other sources, oxygen levels in the water drop to just a few parts per million each summer, killing sea life in one of the most productive and economically important regions of the United States. 117

The Earth Remains Forever There are also direct consequences of surface pollution for human health. These include methemoglobinemia ("blue-baby disease") from excess nitrogen in drinking water, poisoning from contaminated shellfish, and long-term neurological damage from newly discovered toxins in dinoflagellates and other organisms. The issues in controlling surface pollution are similar to those for automobiles and fuel efficiency. We need to include all of the costs of using a product in its shelf price. For example, chemical companies make fertilizers, and farmers apply them; but everyone pays the costs of cleaning them up. If manufacturers and users paid their real costs in advance, and passed those costs on to consumers—who already pay them in hidden forms—we would all have direct economic incentives to conserve, with bigger rewards for companies that develop more efficient technologies. PESTICIDE USE

Thousands of years ago the Egyptians used chemicals to drive fleas from their homes, and Homer's hero Odysseus used sulfur to kill pests. Today we do the same with maniacal fervor. There are now at least three thousand different pesticides sold commercially: chlorines, phenols, sulfates, arsenic, mercury, and leadbased products, to name a few. Globally we apply more than six billion pounds of pesticides each year, a pound of prevention for every person on earth, and a twenty-billion-dollar-a-year business. In the United States alone we pour, slosh, and spray a billion pounds of pesticides annually. Pesticides do wonderful things. They help our crops grow, keep food from spoiling, cleanse our homes, and save lives. In fact it's difficult to conceive of modern industrialized life and agriculture without them. But as in the above examples, there are hidden costs to pesticide use that manufacturers and users don't pay—we all do. Pesticides build up in the environment even with varieties that break down faster than DDT. They concentrate in food chains, in drinking water, in rivers and river sediments, and sometimes in people. Wildlife and "non-target" species suffer as well. There is no way to test the effects on human health of all, or

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The Changing Earth even most, of the combinations of pesticides used today. Doctors are starting to worry about the combinations of medicines people take and the interactions that arise; if we're worried about mixing medicines, how concerned should we be about the mixtures of pesticides flooding the environment:1 Because we don't know how to deal with such issues honestly, we ignore them. LOSS OF WETLANDS

Wetlands are nature's recycling centers. They protect us from flooding, filter pollution, and provide important habitat for wildlife. More than half of the original 350 thousand square miles of wetlands in the United States have been filled, dredged, or drained, often at taxpayers' expense. River channels have also been straightened and "cleaned." The federal subsidies that once encouraged wetland destruction are generally gone, but leniency in defining and enforcing regulations led to the destruction of fifteen hundred more square miles of wetlands between 1983 and 1996. In the sodden spring of 1993, the Mississippi River raged through the midwestern United States at more than a million cubic feet per second, inundating thirty thousand square miles. The three states hardest hit—Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri—had less than fifteen percent of their original wetlands remaining. Taxpayers' tab for the flooding was more than six billion dollars in disaster relief, and insurance companies paid out tens of billions. We all pay the costs of wetlands loss. DECLINING FISHERIES

Of the seventeen major fisheries in the oceans, thirteen face commercial depletion or serious decline. Some of these fisheries are controlled by single nations like the United States and some are in international waters. Why do we allow fisheries to be so consistently overused? In 1992., Newfoundland closed its harvests in the Grand Banks, costing twenty thousand Canadian workers their jobs. New England followed suit in 1994, prohibiting cod, haddock, and yellowtail fishing in the Georges Bank. The New England fishery 119

The Earth Remains Forever council didn't even bother to shut down halibut fishing because there are so few halibut left that it doesn't regulate them. If we had harvested fish in the Georges Bank with restraint, fishermen could be catching more than 2.00 million pounds of cod, yellowtail, and haddock each year sustainably. Instead, they caught less than 70 million pounds a year in the mid-1990s. The culture and economics of fishing are complex. People need years to pay off their investments in boats and equipment, and the economies of whole towns depend on the fishing industry. Taking such human factors into account, we must do a better job of setting sustainable catches to rebuild the fisheries and to provide better harvests in the future. Twenty years ago Rhode Island fishermen caught lobsters that weighed up to thirty pounds apiece. Today, after decades of harvesting, most of the lobsters weigh less than two pounds, and a four-pounder is the catch of the year. The lobsterrnen work long, backbreaking days harvesting fewer, smaller lobsters in a downward spiral that may end only when the lobsters disappear. As one of them put it recently, "Right now, my only incentive is to go out and kill as many fish as I can. I have no incentive to conserve the fishery, because any fish I leave is just going to be picked up by the next guy." He continued. "It's like we're backing up to the edge of a cliff blindfolded, and we don't know if we're fifty feet away or have two wheels over the edge." Fishermen in southern Australia work in a different system. In the 19608 the government there began selling licenses for a limited number of lobster traps. A typical license that might have cost two thousand dollars a trap in 1984 today is worth thirty or forty thousand (a value not lost on the fishermen). By limiting their harvests, Australian lobsterrnen work fewer hours and haul fewer traps, catching more lobsters than their American counterparts. Because they own the licenses, they also have a direct incentive to conserve. An Australian biologist summarized the benefits of the system: "It's a win-win for the fish and the fishermen. The lobsters are thriving and the fishermen are spending more time at home with their families." I2O

The Changing Earth GROUNDWATER PUMPING

At least a quarter of the world's population draws its drinking water from underground. Drier regions have some of the largest aquifers, including the southwestern United States, Arabia, and the Sahara, but most of this water is non-renewable—a relic of the wetter climates and melting ice sheets of the past. In analogy to fossil fuels, this "fossil water" accumulated over tens of thousands of years and, once used, cannot be replenished. Like water in most areas of the world, groundwater in the United States is treated like a commodity—anyone who owns land over an aquifer is free to pump it. The Ogallala Aquifer in the central United States is the earth's largest aquifer. After World War II, farmers drilled two hundred thousand wells into the Ogallala, making it the primary water source for a fifth of irrigated farmland in the United States. Irrigation in the region peaked in the 19805 at fourteen million irrigated acres and at pumping rates of six trillion gallons of water a year. Formed slowly over tens of thousands of years, the Ogallala may be gone in as little as a century. The farmers who use such water are making an honest living under the economic and legal guidelines that we set as a society. What we could agree to do as a society is to price the water more realistically. The farmers, like the Rhode Island lobstermen, currently have little incentive to conserve. Important questions to be resolved include the rate at which groundwater should be extracted, how to compensate landowners during the transition to more realistic water pricing, and who if anyone will safeguard the needs of future generations. One way out of the impasse might be to buy "water rights" on a piece of property much as we now buy development rights, a policy that would conserve water and reward landowners.

If we distilled the essence of the above list into a common theme, it would be that the real costs of consumption should be included in the price of each product. A cradle-to-grave approach means that prices should include what happens to a product 12,1

The Earth Remains Forever before and after it is used. Can it be used again? If not, can it be recycled? Does it end up in a landfill, in our waterways, or in the atmosphere? How quickly does it decompose and are any of its breakdown products dangerous? In today's world, few if any of these downstream costs are included in store prices. If they were, we would give more thought to what we use and to what we waste. Confounding this goal is that we don't always know how to estimate all of these costs because our accounting is inadequate. When we don't know how or don't want to deal with a cost, we simply set it outside the bounds of our estimates. In the lexicon of economics, we "externalize" it. As an example, we currently pay nothing for our automobile exhaust. If the earth warms 5°F in the coming century because of fossil fuel emissions and the oceans rise a foot or two in consequence, why should someone in the Maldive Islands have to pay to move their home because of our pollution? There is no easy solution to this issue, but we need to develop ways to include the full costs—the global costs—of consumption in the prices that we pay. There are other reasons to pay more honestly for our pollution, with incentives to conserve as one of the most obvious. The federal government collects about six hundred billion dollars in payroll taxes each year. We could eliminate a third of all such taxes with a two-dollar-a-gallon increase in the gasoline surcharge, acknowledging that the needs of poorer people would have to be addressed. At first glance that may seem preposterous, but the $3.50 or $4 we would then pay for a gallon of gasoline is comparable to what Europeans already pay. The incentive to conserve would be great, and we could apply some of the surcharge creatively—cleaning up pollution, setting aside money for the future costs of our pollution (an environmental endowment, if you will), and providing incentives for cleaner technologies. Another reason to pay more honestly for our pollution today is that we can avoid paying for it again later. The last decade saw the advent of successful lawsuits against cigarette and handgun makers by individuals, health-care providers, and governments (ignoring the perverse logic that lets a government support tobacco 12.2.

The Changing Earth growers and sue cigarette makers all at the same time). Such lawsuits hold cigarette and handgun makers responsible for the health costs of their products. Some cigarette makers are already bankrupt because of the lawsuits, and others may follow. In October 1999 Philip Morris, the world's largest cigarette maker, publicly admitted that smoking is addictive and causes cancer. Cases against handgun makers are also now underway. In the same month as the Philip Morris admission, Colt's Manufacturing Co. announced it was eliminating seven handgun lines and was contemplating ending public handgun sales entirely after a century and a half in the business. We can debate the fairness of such lawsuits, whether they acknowledge the responsibilities of the users, and whether morality or money is the motivation, but they are now a fact of life. I believe that similar lawsuits will soon appear against industries generating fossil fuel emissions and other forms of pollution. Bight or wrong, oil giants, automakers, and power companies could meet similar fates at the hands of consumers, insurance companies, and other groups. (Will that family in the Maldives find a way to sue American companies for the rise in sea level?) We can forestall these claims and seek cleaner technologies for the future, or we can continue to let the economic incentives of creative conservation pass us by. If we do, we may fight the same rearguard battles of legality and conscience that tobacco companies fought. Corporations see the same choices and the same trillion-dollar opportunities in green technologies and greenhouse-gas trading. In 1999, executives from oil giants Royal Dutch/Shell and BP Amoco announced that they believed global warming is real and should be dealt with immediately. What once was heresy is now seen as an opportunity. In September of the same year, DuPont, the world's largest chemical company, voluntarily committed to reducing its own greenhouse-gas emissions by twothirds before 2010. Novel partnerships and strange bedfellows are also appearing. Canadian energy companies are joining American farmers to preserve carbon in soils and to reduce erosion. American Electric

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The Earth Remains Forever Power recently announced it would spend millions of dollars protecting Bolivian rainforests to offset some of its carbon emissions. Some people see these kinds of solutions as tainted penance for industry. (Johann Tetzel, sixteenth-century monk and seller of papal indulgences, once promised, uSo soon as coin in coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.") However, we need ways to combine environmental idealism with market pragmatism. Perhaps most importantly, we need to alter our fundamental relationship to the earth. That change includes how we treat the environment, the value we place on the needs of future generations, how we price nature's services, our respect for other species, and the kinds of solutions we adopt. The past century is littered with disjointed, one-at-a-time approaches to our environmental quandaries. If traffic is congested, we build more roads. If a subdivision floods, we dam the river. If a species goes extinct, we lament its loss and proceed apace. What we don't do is face the cause of each problem: Why build subdivisions on a floodplain? Do we really need to consume this much? Why couldn't we stop in time? Just as the earth is changing, so can we. In 1996 New York City invested more than a billion dollars to buy land and restore habitat in the Catskill Mountains. The investment might seem strange, since the land was far from the city's boundaries, but it made environmental and economic sense. The city's water supply that comes from the Catskills was increasingly polluted with sewage, fertilizers, and pesticides. A new filtration plant, the "old" way of doing business, would have cost eight billion dollars to build and three hundred million dollars a year to run. In contrast, preserving the watershed and letting nature do the work was just as effective and cost one-fifth the price, without the hundreds of millions of dollars a year in upkeep. It made perfect sense—once people stopped to think about it. The EPA recently estimated that we will need $140 billion in the next twenty years in the United States to update our drinking-water infrastructure; surely there are similar opportunities elsewhere. When Merck & Co. pays the government of Costa Rica to preserve tropical forests—and pays royalties on drugs developed

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The Changing Earth from the species in them—everyone has a financial stake in conservation. Innovations like these, and the history of the ozone layer discussed earlier, reveal the benefits of national and international cooperation; but people play important roles in each of these innovations. More than a century ago, a prescient John Wesley Powell recognized the need to manage watersheds in total rather than in pieces. He even suggested that the western states of the United States be established with river basins as borders, a system far more sensible and ecologically meaningful than the arbitrary boundaries of latitude and longitude that were chosen instead. Because his advice was ignored, today sees Colorado battling Arizona battling California for the dwindling flow of one river's water, while the people of Mexico consume the meager portion we remit. Contrast this past legacy with the recent progress made in places like the Florida Everglades. Here, an ecological and economic treasure is being restored through planning, ecosystem management, and compromise. The vision is collective—public and private, governmental and corporate--and its advocates include former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and the Florida lawmakers who passed the Everglades Forever Act in 1994. Its most remarkable advocate, though, was Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a woman small in stature but large in vision, who founded Friends of the Everglades in her eightieth year. She dedicated her life to the pursuit of a world she believed in, and lived to see much of her vision come to pass. Perhaps that vision is what sustained her until her death in 1998 at the youthful age of 108. Near the ancestral home of the Lapita, Fuiono Senio and Paul Alan Cox also envisioned a world that could be, and, in doing so, saved the last lowland rainforest in Samoa. The Samoan archipelago has many endemic plants and animals, including the endangered Samoan flying fox. Faced with the choice of logging the surrounding forest to pay for the only school in the area, Senio and Cox rallied their Samoan colleagues and raised enough money to save the forest habitat and the flying fox, establishing a sustainable industry at their new Falealupo Rain

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The Earth Remains Forever Forest Preserve. Cox and his family were even willing to mortgage their home and possessions to preserve a tract of thirty thousand acres. In one extraordinary year they helped save seven species of flying foxes and established the first U.S. national park in American Samoa and the Falealupo Preserve, for which they received the Goldman Environmental Prize, the "Nobel prize of the environment." In his spare time, Cox worked with local Samoan healers as an ethnobotanist documenting the plants they valued; the anti-AIDS chemical prostratin came from the bark of the Mamala plants he collected. Such successes provide hope against a backdrop of challenges. Tackling environmental problems may seem like a luxury when poverty, disease, displacement, and social unrest are common today, but in a world six billion strong, the solutions to such problems can't be isolated from the environment. If we sought an appropriate symbol to rally around, a place literal and symbolic, we might choose a table where representatives of every nation could gather together to work on these issues. It should be large enough so that every nation would have a seat, and suitably shaped—round, perhaps, with no sides or head. It should also be constructed in a spirit of openness and cooperation. In western mythology, King Arthur's round table reputedly seated all 250 knights of Camelot, about the same number of nations that we have today. There his knights listened and learned and conducted their affairs of state. I have no idea in which dusty antique shop or medieval chateau the original round table currently resides, or if it ever really existed, but we could easily build another if we chose to. Alternatively, we could support the framework of the United Nations, the closest construct to the spirit of the round table that the world has today. As the centerpiece of Arthurian ideals, the round table lasted longer as metaphor than it did as meeting place. Apparently, it takes more than idealism and a spirit of cooperation to succeed. The hard work, creativity, and sacrifice needed to solve today's problems can come from each of us.

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Epilogue

"O Pangloss!" cried Candide. "This is an abomination you had not guessed; this is too much, in the end I shall have to renounce optimism." "What is optimism?" said Cacambo. "Alas!" said Candide, "it is the mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched." VOLTAIRE, Candide (1759)

In October 1999 the world's six billionth resident was born. Two hundred thousand more people were born that day than died, each life unfolding in a balance of abundance and privation, wealth and poverty, joy and sorrow. One year later in September of 2.000, another child was born. He arrived in a typically clean, well-lit American hospital room, the third son of a typical American couple. My wife and I weren't planning on a third child. We already had two healthy sons, and because of the responsibility, the risk, and, yes, even the awareness of the demands on a world filled with six billion people, we believed that two was the right number for us. Our wonderful son came anyway, forty-three years to the day after my parents lost their first child, the older brother I never knew. The irony that our third child came at the same time I was finishing a book on global change and population issues isn't lost on me. In the introduction to this book I wrote that many of us, if we live long enough, come to do and think and say things that we never thought we would. So today I have a case of what psy-

The Earth Remains Forever chologist Leon Festinger called "cognitive dissonance," trying to reconcile a conflict between a belief strongly held and an action conceived in opposition. This conflict, I believe, provides a glimpse into the challenges that face the environment. To succeed in solving today's environmental problems, a great deal of human nature and history must be overcome. There are the obvious deep-seated urges for survival—of our species, ourselves, and our genes. There is also the fear that while we should seek win-win solutions for the environment, human history recounts winners and losers, and we all fear being on the losing end. Additionally, what we typically called "win-win" solutions in the past usually involved two or more groups of people; only recently have we begun to include the other species on earth and the potential needs of future generations. A philosophy of change for the environment is easier to articulate than a specific plan is to craft and implement. The details are where things get tricky. The "details" include how we set environmental, economic, and social priorities, how much power we cede to governments and international groups, how we balance individual rights with national and international controls. Just dealing with different conservation strategies for public and private lands in America is a challenge. How do we balance personal property rights with the good of the majority, and which majority? How do we cope with social unrest—helping people and other species when their lives are disrupted? The mountain gorilla is one of our closest living relatives, with the 650 or so left in the wild clustered in a few parks near the borders of Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda. In 1995 their habitat was overrun by almost a million refugees from the Rwandan civil war that killed half a million people. Burgeoning population, civil unrest, and dwindling habitats around the world make these kinds of interactions increasingly likely. By pushing species into smaller and smaller havens, we make it harder and harder to guarantee their survival, and "their" survival is inseparable from the quality of life and the survival of the people around them. When we seek the win-win solutions mentioned above, how

12.8

Epilogue

will we guarantee that people and organizations act fairly? Like most of us, I have an inherent distrust of bureaucracies: the larger and more powerful the bureaucracy, the greater the distrust. If we cede greater rights to governments or to international organizations, how will we set controls on their behavior? Who sets the priorities on which they act? One possible solution is to have international organizations recommend policy changes and broker compromises. Treaties and economic incentives could be used to encourage environmentally responsible policies, especially when problems cross national borders, as they did for the ozone hole and the Montreal Protocol. This approach would still allow national governments to set their own priorities and encourage market solutions wherever possible. The goal of halting all global change in the coming century is unrealistic. Truthfully, there may never have been a halcyon time when the earth was perfectly stable, but the pace of change today is unprecedented. As we decide which problems to ameliorate or solve first, we also need concrete plans for helping people adapt to the changes that will inevitably occur. Based on current scientific evidence, I believe that by the end of the twenty-first century: 1. There will be at least nine billion people on earth. 2. Annual global energy use will be at least fifty percent higher per capita than at the end of the twentieth century, and total energy consumption will triple. 3. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will be more than five hundred parts per million, double the pre-industrial levels and higher than at any time in the past forty million years. In consequence, the average temperature of the earth will be at least 5 °F warmer. 4. Thousands, perhaps millions, of species will be extinct. The demographic and economic momentum behind these changes is immense. Taking population growth as an example, six billion people growing at an annual rate of just 0.4 percent— less than a tenth of the return for a typical savings account— 129

The Earth Remains Forever leads to nine billion people in the year 2,100. Today's annual growth rate of i .3 percent must be cut by more than two-thirds if we're to have "only" nine billion neighbors in a hundred years. If it isn't, and if today's rate holds through the century, there will be more than twenty billion people. No one knows exactly what will happen, and most population experts believe that the growth rate will slow somewhat, but it has to slow a lot just to keep the earth's population under ten billion. The momentum behind energy use is equally strong. If global population rises to "only" nine billion people in 2,100, total energy use would rise by half even if per capita use stays the same. But in the last half of the twentieth century, per capita GOi emissions actually increased by three-quarters. More than twice as many people each using more energy individually created a fourfold increase in just fifty years. Per capita energy use is likely to rise even further in the coming century as the tremendous gulf between the haves and the have-nots narrows. In the decade ending in 1998, per capita energy use went up "only" 2.3 percent in the United States but rose fourteen percent and forty-five percent in China and India, respectively. Someone in China or India still uses less than ten percent of the energy that we do, so who here will deny them their march towards a more consumptive lifestyle? Couple greater individual consumption with the earth's growing population, and the challenge of slowing the use of energy is daunting. No one knows exactly how many species will have gone extinct by 2100, but I believe that habitat loss is the most immediate threat to life on earth. The reason it's so important is the repeated litany: more people using more resources supported by a finite amount of space. The "natural world," whatever that means, and the space left for other species will continue to shrink, perhaps as in no century before. "Wilderness" and "wildness" will become increasingly relative terms. Perhaps most daunting of all is that the short list above applies to just one century. There is another century after that, and another, and still another. Our world will be a radically dif130

Epilogue

ferent place if similar changes continue for five hundred years or a thousand. In the face of all of these facts, figures, numbers, and evidence, it's hard not to be pessimistic. The changes the last century brought and those that the twenty-first century will bring are immense, and there is no easy solution for them. Half of me knows this. The other half, my less rational side, remains cautiously optimistic—pensive about our future, concerned about our legacy, mindful of what our descendants may think—but sanguine and optimistic, nonetheless. I can't say why that is. It may be wishful thinking or naivete. It may be because I have lived most of my life in a privileged subset of the most privileged nation in the earth's history. It may also be because pessimism leads to the inevitable question, "Why bother?"—a question that I fear. I simply don't know why. Despite all the problems we face, the tremendous challenges ahead, the mistakes we will make, if you asked me now whether I would want to live in our world in fifty or five hundred years and meet the people who will be alive then, I would leap at the chance. Two centuries ago Thomas Jefferson balanced fear and optimism on the same scale for the future. It was a time of expectation and uncertainty—of optimism, as the War of 1812. had just ended, and of fear, as the uncertainty of future conflicts loomed. He made clear his faith in the outcome in a letter to John Adams: You ask, if I would agree to live my seventy or rather seventythree years over again? To which I say, yea. I think with you, that it is a good world on the whole; that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us. There are, indeed (who might say nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say, how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened! My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern. 131

The Earth Remains Forever I don't know if the world will be a better place for us in a hundred years. I have trouble envisioning ways in which it will be better for the millions of other species on earth, but again, that is my rational side. Most of all, I want to know that we did our best, that we tried everything we could to preserve the quality of life for people today and tomorrow and saved as much room as possible for the rest of life on earth. Who doesn't want this? The moral, the practical, the ultimate question is what we will do about it, what we will give up today so that we and our descendants and the rest of life on earth may have their tomorrow.

132,

References

Introduction The official date of India's population passing the one billion mark was May n, 2000; the U.N. Population Fund estimates that India reached one billion persons in August 1999. Data on China's population can be found at the China Population Information and Research Center on-line at http://www.cpirc.or0.cn/eindex.htm-, in 1980 China's population was 987,050,000, and in 1981 it was 1,000,72.0,000. Data on fossil fuel emissions are from G. Marland, T. A. Boden, R. J. Andres, A. L. Brenkert, and C. Johnston, "Global, Regional, and National coz Emissions," from Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, 1999). The figures on weight loss are from a study by the National Institutes of Health, "Methods for Voluntary Weight Loss and Control," Technology Assessment Conference Statement, 30 March-i April 1992, Bethesda, Maryland: National Institutes of Health, Office of Medical Applications of Research. Available on-line at http://text.nlm.nih.gov/ nih/ta/www/i o .html. The poverty figures are from the United Nations Development Program (http://www.undp.or0.fj/poverty/). A concise summary of the environmental issues facing the

The Earth Remains Forever Maldives is "Not Sinking but Drowning," The Economist, May 13, zooo, p. 87. Many people will be shocked by what will happen in the very near future. The decade of the 19808 could very well be the last decade of history as we know it. HAL LINDSEY, The 1980*: Countdown to Armageddon

Living With Success A MOVING TARGET

Charola, A. E.. Easter Island: The Heritage and its Conservation. New York: World Monuments Fund, 1994. Lee, G. An Uncommon Guide to Easter Island. Hong Kong: International Resources, 1990. Van Tilburg, J. "Symbolic Archaeology on Easter Island." Archaeology 40 (1987): 2,6-33. Manhattan Island is approximately 28 square miles in size; Easter Island is 42 square miles. The story of bird extinctions throughout the Pacific is chronicled in numerous papers by David Steadman, including "Prehistoric Extinctions of Pacific Island Birds: Biodiversity Meets Zooarchaeology, Science 267 (1995): 1123-1131. Line, L. "Gone the Way of the Dinosaurs." International Wildlife (July/August 1995): 16-21. Maunder, M., et al. "Conservation of the Toromiro Tree: Case Study in the Management of a Plant Extinct in the Wild." Conservation Biology 14 (2000): 1341-1350. SAFETY IN NUMBERS?

The most thoughtful book that I know of on population issues is Joel Cohen's How Many People Can the Earth Support? (New York: Norton, 1995). It includes a much more thorough analysis than I present here of the many complicated biological, sociological, and economic issues surrounding population increase. J

34

References

For discussions of population trends, "developed" countries include Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, and North America; developing countries are the remainder (yet another bias in our vocabulary). A population of 3.5 billion people growing at 2 percent a year will increase by 70 million people in the first year (1.02 x 3,500,000,000). Even though the current rate of growth is smaller, "only" 1.3 percent, the current population is almost twice what it was when growth rates were highest; hence current growth is about 80 million people a year (1.013 x 6,000,000,000). In terms of the number of additional people on earth, peak population growth occurred in 1989 (87 million per year). Current population density is 11.2 people per square kilometer (or approximately 30 people per square mile). About 150,000,000 square kilometers of the earth's surface is land (including deserts, glaciers, mountains, etc.). So the density of people on land is about 38 people per square kilometer (or 105 people per square mile). That's a little more than 6 acres of land per person. Six thousand years at 1.3 percent growth, starting with two individuals, yields 9.07 x io33 people on earth (2 x i.oi36oo°); dividing by 150,000,000 square kilometers of land gives 6.05 x ioz5 people/km2, 6.05 x io19 people/m*, 6.05 x io13 people/mm2-. Starting with two people and the current annual growth rate of today, 1.3 percent (6,000,000,000 = 2 x [1.013]'), it takes 1,689 years to reach the current population of six billion (in 311 A.D.). A CONSUMING PASSION

Data on fossil fuel emissions are from John Houghton's book Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 251. Detailed information on per capita consumption rates of fossil fuels are found in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 135

The Earth Remains Forever Change (IPCC), Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See pp. 94-95 and Fig. 3.1. See also similar volumes updated in zooi.

The Richness of Life NEW DISCOVERIES

The number of described species can be found in such articles as R. M. May's "How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?", Scientific American (October 1992.): 42-48. New phylum of organism found living in a lobster's mouth: P. Punch and R. M. Kristensen, "Cycliophora Is a New Phylum with Affinities to Entoprocta and Ecotprocta" (Nature 378 [1995]: 711-714) and Conway S. Morris, "A New Phylum from the Lobster's Lips" (Nature 378 [1995]: 661-662). See also "Dipterocarp Trees Found in Columbia" (Pseudomonotes tropenbosii)^ Science 269 (2.5 August 1995): 1049. For further information on the dipterocarps, see D. J. Mabberley's Tropical Rainforest Ecology (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992), p. 9. Dung, V. V., P. M. Giao, N. N. Chinh, D. Tuoc, P. Arctander, and J. Mackinnon. "A New Species of Living Bovid from Vietnam." Nature 363 (1993): 443-445. See also A. Rabinowitz, "Lost World of the Annamites," Natural History (April 1997): 14-18. Reyes, J. C., J. G. Mead, and K. Van Waerebeek. "A New Species of Beaked Whale Mesoplodon peruvianussp. n. (Cetacea: Ziphiidae) from Peru." Marine Mammal Science 7 (1991): 1-2.4. See also C. S. Baker and S. R. Palumbi, "Which Whales Are Hunted? A Molecular Genetic Approach to Monitoring Whaling," Science 2.65 (1994): 1538-1539, and K. Schmidt, "Scientists Count a Rising Tide of Whales in the Seas," Science 2,63 (1994): 2,5-2.6. On the subject of Ernst Mayr and Papua, New Guinea: Keeton, W. T. Biological Science. 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980 (page 791). Mayr clearly recognized the wealth of information that native peoples across the Pacific held.

136

References

Watkins, T. H. "The Greening of the Empire: Sir Joseph Banks." National Geographic 190 (n November 1996): 2.8-52.. The material on Jaime Hinton is from an unpublished short story he wrote called "Lenina." LIFE IN TRANSITION

Data on species extinctions may be found in the 2,000 IUCN Red List of Threatened Animals, compiled by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (The World Conservation Union). Additional source: World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Global Biodiversity: Status of the Earth's Living Resources (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992.). The figure for freshwater animals is from A. Ricciardi and J. B. Rasmussen, "Extinction Rates of North American Freshwater Fauna," Conservation Biology 13 (1999): 12.2.0-12.22.. Estimates of losses of species over geologic time are from M. J. Benton, "Diversification and Extinction in the History of Life," Science 268 (1995): 52-58, and from D. H. Erwin, J. W. Valentine, and J. J. Sepkoski, "A Comparative Study of Diversification Events: The Early Palaeozoic Versus the Mesozoic," Evolution 41 (1987): 1177-1186. Tree data come from The World List of Threatened Trees (Cambridge: World Conservation Press, 1998). See also commentary by N. Williams, "Study Finds Ten Percent of Tree Species Under Threat," Science 281 (1998): 1426. The quote from The Inferno is from the version translated by John Ciardi (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 66. OVERHARVESTING: ON BOUNTY AND BANKING

For information on the Steller's sea cow, see D. Haley, ed., Marine Mammals (Seattle, WA: Pacific Search Press, 1978). The quote from Steller is from De Bestiis Marinis (quoted in Haley, pp. 238-239). James J. Audubon's The Birds of America was first published in London in multiple volumes from 1827 to 1838. The Carolina Parakeet was the only common parrot to breed

The Earth Remains Forever in the United States. Rarely, a few other species of native parrots breed in southern Arizona and southern Texas. Alexander Wilson's American Ornithology was originally published in nine volumes from 1804 to 1814. His work included illustrations of 268 bird species, including twenty-six new species that he described. For further information on global fishing stocks, see "Fishing: Out of Control?", Science News 149 (1996): 367;}. Roughgarden and F. Smith, "Why Fisheries Collapse and What to Do about It," Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 93 (1996): 5078-5083; R. Kerr, "Biologists Sort the Lessons of Fisheries' Collapse," Science 264 (1994): 1252-1253; and D. Cramer, "Troubled Waters," Atlantic Monthly, June 1995, pp. 22-26. The quote from John Cabot's companion Raimondo de Soncito is recounted by Roughgarden and Smith (from Olson and Bourne, eds., The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1934). See also J. A. Hutchings, "Collapse and Recovery of Marine Fishes," Nature 406 (2000): 882-885. Data on the barndoor skate are from J. M. Casey and R .A. Myers, "Near Extinction of a Large, Widely Distributed Fish," Science 281 (1998): 690-692. For information on butterfly collecting, see T. Williams, "The Great Butterfly Bust," Audubon, March/April 1996, pp. 30-37. The case was controversial because some of the butterflies in the collection were certainly on the U.S. endangered species list, but the collector maintained that they were caught prior to listing. In either case, the raid highlights the problems and ambiguities of collecting today— rare species are hunted because people love them. INVASIONS: THE MIXING OF LIFE

Lake Victoria is 25,000 square miles and is situated on the borders of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. The equator runs through the northern portion of the lake. 138

References

The vegetation surrounding Lake Victoria is described by D. J. Herlocker, H. J. Dirschl, and G. Frame in "Grasslands of East Africa" and in R. T. Coupland, "Ecosystems of the World," both in Natural Grasslands, vol. 8B (New York: Elsevier Publishers, 1993), pp. 2.2.1-2.64. $ee also M. Collins, The Last Rain Forests (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 145. The classic evolutionary analysis of cichlid jaws, and the role of this development in their rapid speciation, is described in Karel F. Liem, "Evolutionary Strategies and Morphological Innovations: Cichlid Pharyngeal Jaws," Systematic Zoology 2.2. (1974)-'42.5-44IThe upper limit of 2,00,000 years for the radiation of Lake Victoria cichlids is based on analyses of mitochondrial DNA by A. Meyer et al. See, for example, A. Meyer, T. D. Kocher, P. Basasibwaki, and A. C. Wilson, "Monophyletic Origin of Lake Victoria Cichlid Fishes Suggested by Mitochondrial-DNA Sequences," Nature 347 (1990): 550-553. A description of the types of cichlids and their various niches is in E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992,), pp.108-110. The history of Lake Victoria, particularly the evidence that the cichlids radiated in the last 12,400 years, is found in T. C. Johnson, C. A. Scholz, M. R. Talbot, K. Kelts, R. D. Ricketts, G. Ngobi, K. Beuning, I. Ssemmanda, and J. W. McGill, "Late Pleistocene Dessication of Lake Victoria and Rapid Evolution of Cichlid Fishes," Science 273 (1996): 1091-1093. Information on cichlid extinctions in Lake Victoria can be found in R. H. Lowe-McConnell, "Fish Faunas of the African Great Lakes: Origins, Diversity, and Vulnerability," Conservation Biology 7 (1993 ):634~643. A brief description of the consequences for the Nile Perch of fishing in Lake Victoria is in S. Riedmiller, "Lake Victoria Fisheries: The Kenyan Reality and Environmental Implications," Environmental Biology of'Fishes 39 (i994):32.9-338; 139

The Earth Remains Forever see also N. Simon, Nature in Danger, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 51. A description of the consequences of Nile Perch introduction into other African lakes is found in R. Ogutu-Ohwayo, "Changes in the Prey Ingested and the Variations in the Nile Perch and Other Fish Stocks of Lake Kyoga and the Northern Waters of Lake Victoria, Uganda," Journal offish Biology 37 (1990): 55-64The discussion of the economics of Lake Victoria and the Nile Perch is taken from S. Riedmiller, "Lake Victoria Fisheries: The Kenyan Reality and Environmental Implications," Environmental Biology of 'Fishes 39 (1994): 32.9-338 and E. J. Reynolds and D. F. Greboval, "Socio-economic Effects of the Evolution of Nile Perch Fisheries in Lake Victoria," CIFA Technical Paper 17 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1988). "With World Opening Up, Languages Are Losers." The New York Times, 16 May 1999, sect.i, p. 17. Thomas, Robert, Jr. "Carl Gorman, Code Talker in World War II, Dies at 90." The New Tork Times, i February 1998, sect.i, p. 2.1. Langeland, K. A. "Hydrilla verticillata (L.F.) Royle (Hydrocharitaceae), the Perfect Aquatic Weed," Castanea 61 (1996): 2,93-304. Stein, B. A. and S. R. Flack, eds. "America's Least Wanted: Alien Species Invasions of U.S. Ecosystems." Arlington, Virginia: The Nature Conservancy, 1996. Information on the root aphid Phylloxera can be found in B. B. Simpson, Economic Botany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995), pp. 479-480, and A. Lubow, "What's Killing the Grapevines of Napa?", The New Tork Times Magazine, 17 October 1993, pp.2,6-2.8, 59-63. The quote about the Irish potato famine is from The Dublin University Magazine, April 1847, pp. 5O2.-54O. The chronicle of Guam and the brown tree snake is best described in J. Savidge, "Extinction of an Island Forest Avi140

References

fauna by an Introduced Snake," Ecology 68 (1987): 660668. See also T. H. Fritts, M. J. McCoid, and R. L. Haddock, "Symptoms and Circumstances Associated with Bites by the Brown Tree Snake (Colubridae: Boiga irregularis) on Guam," Journal of Herpetology 2.8 (1994): 27-33, and G. H. Rodda and T. H. Fritts, "The Impact of the Introduction of the Colubrid Snake Boiga irregularis on Guam's Lizards," Journal of Herpetology 26 (1992): 166-174. Statistics for the zebra mussel may be found in John Ross, "An Aquatic Invader Is Running Amok in U.S. Waterways," Smithsonian, February 1994, pp. 40-49; M. L. Ludyanskiy, D. McDonald, and D. MacNeill, "Impact of the Zebra Mussel, a Bivalve Invader," BioScience 43 (1993): 533-544; and P. A. Berkman et al., "Zebra Mussels Invade Lake Erie Muds," Nature 395 (1998): 2.7-2.8. Pulling Together: National Strategy for Invasive Plant Management, 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998. See also the website for the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds, which is http://refuges.fws.gov/ FICMNEWFiles/FICMNEWHomePage.html. Part of the history of Etienne Leopold Trouvelot can be found in J. K. Herman and B. G. Corbin, "Trouvelot: From Moths to Mars," Sky and Telescope, December 1986, pp. 566-568. ALTERED HORIZONS

The discussion of land conversion is in B. L. Turner II, D. Skole, S. Sanderson, G. Fischer, L. Fresco, and R. Leemans, "Land-use and Land-cover Change," IGBP Report No. 35, Stockholm and Geneva, 1995. Land areas used in the calculations (from the Rand McNally Illustrated Atlas of the World, 1985): Earth is 197,000,000 sq. mi. or 510,000,000 sq. km., with the northern hemisphere being 41,000,000 sq. mi. (41.6 percent land, 58.4 percent water) and the southern hemisphere being 17,000,000 sq. 141

The Earth Remains Forever mi. (17 percent land, 83 percent water). Of the whole earth, 29.3 percent is land, 70.7 percent water. Europe is 3,835,000 sq. mi.; North America, 9,406,000 sq. mi.; South America, 6,883,000 sq. mi.; Argentina, 1,068,000 sq. mi.; and the United States, 3,679,000 sq. mi. Data on the number of registered vehicles in the United States come from the Federal Highway Administration's "Highway Statistics Summary to 1995." In Z 995 there were 12.8 million cars and 202 million vehicles in total registered in the United States. Statistics for house sizes are from the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1998, U.S. Department of Commerce (pp. 573, 718); data on the number of individuals per dwelling are from the Statistical Abstract of the United States 1920, U.S. Department of Commerce (p. 70). Estimates of forest area lost this century are from the Forest Resources Assessment 1990 (Forestry Report #124) from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Rome, 1995). The calculation of forest area per capita is based on an estimate of 40,000,000 sq. km. of forest and woodland in 1700 and a global population of 679 million people. The forest data are from E. Matthews, "Global Vegetation and Land Use," Journal of Climate and Applied Meteorology 22 (1983): 474-487 and M. Williams, "Forests," in B. L. Turner II, W. C. Clark, R. W. Kates, J. F. Richards, J. T. Mathews, and W. B. Meyer's book The Earth as Transformed by Human Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 179-201. The population estimate is from P. Demeny, "Population," also in Turner et al., pp.4i~54 (see previous page). The extent of nitrogen fertilizer use and its history are found in P. M. Vitousek, J. Aber, R. W. Howarth, G. E. Likens, P. A. Matson, D. W. Schindler, W. H. Schlesinger, and G. D. Tilman, "Human Alteration of the Global Nitrogen Cycle: Causes and Consequences," Issues in Ecology i, Ecological Society of America, 1997. See also V. Smil, "Nitrogen and

142,

References

Phosphorus," in Turner et al., pp. 423-436 (see p. 139). The figures for pesticide use come from Al Gore's introduction to the 1994 edition of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin). Information on the Great Plains is from W.E. Riebsame, "The United States Great Plains," in Turner et al., pp. 561-575 (seep. 139). For a good discussion of wetland loss, see Ann Vileisis, "Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands" (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997). The quote from Peter Kalm is from A. Benson, ed., Peter Kalm's Travels in North America^ (New York: WilsonErickson, 1937), p. 300. Estimates of deforestation in the Amazon are from D. Skole and C. Tucker, "Tropical Deforestation and Habitat Fragmentation in the Amazon: Satellite Data from 1978 to 1988," Science 2.60 (1993): 1905-1910. The more recent study documenting dramatic changes brought about by fire and logging crews is D. C. Nepstad et al., "Large-scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire," Nature 398 (1999): 505-508. The quote from Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud of the World Wildlife Fund is from an Associated Press story by S. Leeman that appeared in the 17 December 1997 issue of the Austin American-Statesman on p. Az6. Examples of tropical rainforest diversity are in E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.). A history of changing landscapes in Britain is found in H. C. Darby, "The Clearing of the English Woodlands," Geogra^36(1951): 71-83. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. New York: The Modern Library, 18 3 5, p. 17. Data on the extent and consequences of trawling and dredging are in L. Watling and E. A. Norse, "Disturbance of the Seabed by Mobile Fishing Gear: A Comparison to Forest Clearcutting," Conservation Biology 12. (1998): 143

The Earth Remains Forever 1180-1197. See also T. Brailovskaya, "Obstacles to Protecting Marine Biodiversity through Marine Wilderness Preservation: Examples from the New England Region," Conservation Biology 11(1998): 12,36-1240. The Disney World analogy for the lack of protection of marine systems is based on the observation that the federal government is responsible for eight times as much marine "landarea" as it is federal lands. Consequently, the single loo-square-mile marine preserve would be analogous to a 1 2. 5 -square-mile national park. Disney World is actually four times larger than this: 30,000 acres or 47 square miles. Much of the material in this section is derived from R. B. Jackson, S. R. Carpenter, C. N. Dahm, D. M. McKnight, R. J. Naiman, S. L. Postel, and S. W. Running, "Water in a Changing World," Ecological Applications 1 1 (2,001): 1027-1045 (and references therein). See also I. A. Shiklomanov, "Comprehensive Assessment of the Freshwater Resources of the World," Stockholm: World Meteorological Organization, 1997 and G. M. Hornberger et al., "A Plan for a New Science Initiative on the Global Water Cycle," Report of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, Water Cycle Study Group, 2000. The Mobile River example comes from C. M. Pringle, M. C. Freeman, and B. J. Freeman, "Regional Effects of Hydrologic Alterations on Riverine Macrobiota in the New World: Tropical-Temperate Comparisons," BioScience 50 (2000): 807-823. Information on the Aral Sea is from J. Kindler, "Linking Ecological and Development Objectives: Trade-offs and Imperatives," Ecological Applications % (1998): 591-600; L. R. Brown et al., State of the World (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), p. 118; and R. Stone, "Coming to Grips with the Aral Sea's Grim Legacy," S«ence 284 (1999_: 30-33. Data on the Colorado River are from H. E. Schwarz, J. Emel, W. J. Dickens, P. Rogers, and J. Thompson, "Water Quality

144

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and Flows," in Turner et al., pp. 253-270 (see p. 139). See also M. I. L'Vovich and G.F. White, "Use and Transformation of Terrestrial Water Systems," pp. 235-252 in the same volume, and M. Dynesius and C. Nilsson, "Fragmentation and Flow Regulation of River Systems in the Northern Third of the World," Nature z66 (1994): 753-761. Information on the historical disputes in Italy and the Near East is from P. H. Gleick, The Worlds Water 1998-1999 (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1998). The history of water use in the United States can be found in such references as R. H. Boyle, J. Graves, and T. H. Watkins, The Water Hustlers (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1971); Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). The Benjamin Moeur quote is from a Postal Telegraph cable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dated 10 November 1934. The offer to supply paint to the Arizona Navy (in a 1934 letter to Governor Moeur) is from Ray Busey of "The Paint Store," Phoenix, Arizona. (These and many other original sources were supplied to me by the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, and are gratefully acknowledged.) The Truman quote is from a 1945 speech he made in Kansas City. NATURE AS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION

Chapin, F. S., E. S. Zavaleta, V. T. Eviner, R L. Naylor, P. M. Vitousek, H. L. Reynolds, D. U. Hooper, S. Lavorel, O. E. Sala, S. E. Hobbie, M. C. Mack, and S. Diaz. "Consequences of changing biodiversity." Nature 405 (zooo): 2.34-2.42,. Sala, O. E., F. S. Chapin, J. J. Armesto, E. Berlow, J. Bloomfield, R. Dirzo, E. Huber-Sanwald, L. F. Huenneke, R. B. Jackson, A. Kinzig, R. Leemans, D. M. Lodge, H. A. Mooney, M. Oesterheld, N. L. Poff, M. T. Sykes, B. H. Walker, M. Walker, and D. H. Wall. "Biodiversity—Global Biodiversity Scenarios for the Year 2,100." Science 2,87 (2.000): 1770-1774. 145

The Earth Remains Forever Naeem, S., F. S. Chapin III, R. Costanza, P. R. Ehrlich, F. B. Golley, D. U. Hooper, J. H. Lawton, R. V. O'Neill, H. A. Mooney, O. E. Sala, A. J. Symstad, and D. Tilman. "Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning: Maintaining Natural Life Support Processes." Issues In Ecology 4, Ecological Society of America, 1999. An excellent source for the benefits of preserving biodiversity is E.O. Wilson's book The Diversity of Life (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992.) from which some of the examples in this section come. Other sources include B. B. Simpson and M. C. Ogorzaly, Economic Botany: Plants in Our World (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995); World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Global Biodiversity: Status of the Earth's Living Resources (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992); and J. L. Swerdlow and L. Johnson, "Nature's Rx," National Geographic, April 2000. Cancerous cells die in the presence of taxol because they can't dismantle microtubules. For a discussion of this topic in the popular press, see the piece "Tree of Life" by Douglas Daly in Audubon, March/April 1992,. The basis for estimates of the value of pharmaceuticals derived from natural sources, and the assumptions behind them, are found in N. R. Farnsworth and D. D. Soejarto, "Potential Consequences of Plant Extinctions in the United States on the Current and Future Availability of Prescription Drugs," Economic Botany 39 (1985); and P. P. Principe, "Valuing the Biodiversity of Medicinal Plants," in The Conservation of Medicinal Plants, O. Akerele, V. Heywood, and H. Synge, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 79-124. See also World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Global Biodiversity: Status of the Earth's Living Resources (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1992). In the summer of 2000, Merck and Co., Inc., was the world's second largest drug company. Further information on its partnership with Costa Rica's InBio program can be found at http://www.inbio.ac.cr/en/. InBio's bioprospecting agree146

Referencess ments stipulate that 10 percent of research budgets and half of any future royalties be awarded to the Ministry of the Environment and Energy for reinvestment in conservation. Bannon, A.W., M. W. Decker, M. W. Holladay, P. Curzon, D. Donnelly-Roberts, P. S. Puttfarcken, R. S. Bitner, A. Diaz, A. H. Dickenson, R. D. Porsolt, M. Williams, and S. P. Arneric. "Broad-spectrum, Non-opioid Analgesic Activity by Selective Modulation of Neuronal Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors." Science 2,79 (1998): 77-81. A commentary on the article can be found in E. Strauss, "New Nonopioid Painkiller Shows Promise in Animal Tests," Science 279 (1998): 3 2-3 3. The name of the frog from which the original painkiller was derived is Epipedobates tricolor.

Ozone Awareness THE O-ZONE Although concern for the ozone shield is only a few decades old, ozone has been used in medical applications and in municipal water treatment for more than a century. The section on the history of the earth and the evolution of atmospheric oxygen was derived in part from W. H. Schlesinger, Biogeochemistry: An Analysis of Global Change (San Diego: Academic Press, 1997). For a technical analysis of the history of atmospheric oxygen, see D. E. Canfield and A. Teske, "Late Proterozoic Rise in Atmospheric Oxygen Concentrations Inferred from Phylogenetic and Sulphur-isotope Studies," Nature 382, (1996): 127-132 (and references therein). The boundary between the troposphere and stratosphere varies with latitude and is highest near the equator and lower over polar regions. The range I have chosen here is six miles. Others choose a distance as high as ten miles for the lower boundary of the stratosphere. The relationship between the energy of a photon and its wavelength is E=hc/l, where E=energy, l=wavelength, c=speed 147

The Earth Remains Forever of light, and h=Planck's constant. Doubling the wavelength of radiation decreases its energy by half. For a clear discussion of the nature of radiation and the electromagnetic spectrum, see H. G. Jones, Plants and Microclimate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp.10-14. Much of the material about the effects of uv radiation on plants and animals is from a publication of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Ambio, Vol. 24, May 1995) and references therein. Articles of particular relevance are J. D. Longstreth, F. R. de Gruijl, M. L. Kripke, Y. Takizawa, and J. C. van der Leun, "Effects of Increased Solar Ultraviolet Radiation on Human Health," pp. 153-165; S. Madronich, R. L. McKenzie, M. M. Caldwell, and L. O. Bjorn, "Changes in Ultraviolet Radiation Reaching the Earth's Surface," pp. 143-152; and D. P. Hader, R. C. Worrest, H. D. Kumar, and R. C. Smith, "Effects of Increased Solar Ultraviolet Radiation on Aquatic Ecosystems," pp. 174-180. The statistics on cases of skin cancer in 1996 are from D. J. Leffell and D. E. Brash, "Sunlight and Skin Cancer," Scientific American, July 1996, pp.52-59. A few examples of Antarctic studies documenting decreases in phytoplankton production in the presence of the ozone hole include R. C. Smith, B. B. Prezelin, K. S. Baker, R. R Bidigare, N. P. Boucher, T. Coley, D. Karentz, S. Maclntyre, H. A. Matlick, D. Mezies, M. Ondrusek, Z. Wan, and K. J. Waters, "Ozone Depletion: Ultraviolet Radiation and Phytoplankton Biology in Antarctic Waters," Science 255 (1992): 952-959, and O. Holm-Hansen, E. W. Helbling, and D. Lubin, "Ultraviolet Radiation in Antarctica: Inhibition of Primary Production," Photochemical Photobiology 58 (1993): 5^7~57OThe effects of uv radiation on plants are summarized in such articles as M. M. Caldwell, A. H. Teramura, M. Tevini, J. F. Bornman, L. O. Bjorn, and G. Kulandaivelu, "Effects of Increased Solar Ultraviolet Radiation on Terrestrial Plants," Ambio 24 (1995): 166-173. Results of the soybean study 148

References

are from A. H. Teramura, J. H. Sullivan, and J. Lydon, "Effects of UV-B Radiation on Soybean Yield and Seed Quality: A Six-Year Field Study," Physiologic Plantarum 80 (1990): 5-11. Research by Andrew Blaustein and coworkers can be found in J. M. Kiesecker, A. R. Blaustein, and L. K. Belden, "Complex Causes of Amphibian Population Declines," Nature 410 (2,001): 681-684, and A. R. Blaustein, P. D. Hoffman, D. G. Hokit, J. M. Kiesecker, S. C. Walls, and J. B. Hays, "UV Repair and Resistance to Solar UV-B in Amphibian Eggs: A Link to Population Declines?" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 91 (1994): 1791-1795. A popular review of related research is A. R. Blaustein and D. B. Wake, "The Puzzle of Declining Amphibian Populations," Scientific American, April 1995, pp. 52-57. The vulnerability of coral reefs to UV radiation is discussed in D. F. Gleason and G. M. Wellington, "Ultraviolet Radiation and Coral Bleaching," Nature 365 (1993): 836-838. See also S. V. Smith, "Coral Reef Area and the Contributions of Reefs to Processes and Resources of the World's Oceans," Nature 2,73 (1978): 2,2,5-2.2,6. "The Sky Is Limited" is the tide of an article by Don Bunker, chemistry professor at the University of California at Irvine. It appeared in The Nation, 30 November 1974, pp. 562,564. THE RISE OF CFCS

Harold Johnston's research indicating possible ozone effects from the exhaust of SSTS is in H. S. Johnston, "Reductions of Stratospheric Ozone by Nitrogen Oxide Catalysts from Supersonic Transport Exhaust," Science 173 (1971): 517-522. Paul Crutzen's crucial work on the role of nitrogen oxides (NO and NOj and ozone destruction can be found in "Influence of Nitrogen Oxides on Atmospheric Ozone Content," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 96 (1970): 32,0-32,5, and "Ozone Production Rates in 149

The Earth Remains Forever an Oxygen-Hydrogen-Nitrogen Oxide Atmosphere," Journal of Geophysical Research 76 (1971): 7311-7327. Rowland and Molina's seminal paper was M. J. Molina and F. S. Rowland, "Stratospheric Sink for Chlorofluoromethanes: Chlorine Atom-Catalyzed Destruction of Ozone," Nature 249 (1974): 810-812. Relevant articles include S. C. Wofsy and M. B. McElroy, "HOX, NO x , and CLOX: Their Role in Atmospheric Chemistry," Canadian Journal of Chemistry 52 (1974): 1582-1591, and R. S. Stolarski and R. J. Cicerone, "Stratospheric Chlorine: A Possible Sink for Ozone," Canadian Journal of Chemistry 52(1974): 1610-1615. CGL 3 F=CFC-ii or Freon n; cci^F^CFC-12 or Freon 12. For an early discussion of the chemical manufacture of CFCS n and 12 and the companies involved, see W. L. Faith, D. B. Keyes, and R. L. Clark, "Dichlorodifluoromethane," Industrial Chemicals, 3rd ed. (London: John Wiley & Sons, I965),pp.3i5-32i. For a brief history of the development of CFCS, see A. Makhijani and K. R. Gurney, Mending the Ozone Hole: Science, Technology, and Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), ch. 3. Midgley's scientific description of the first CFC refrigerants is found in T. Midgley and A. L. Henne, "Organic Fluorides as Refrigerants," Industrial and Engineering Chemistry 22 (1930): 542-545. Some of the information on CFC production is taken from L. Dotto and H. Schiff's interesting 1975 book The Ozone Wars (New York: Doubleday and Co.). A related discussion of ozone depletion and other global issues is M. E. Kowalok, "Common Threads: Research Lessons from Acid Rain, Ozone Depletion, and Global Warming," Environment 35 (1993): 12-20, 35-38 (borrowing from the Dotto and Schiff book). The Lovelock quotes are from two of his papers in the early 19705: J.E. Lovelock, "Atmospheric Fluorine Compounds as Indicators of Air Movements," Nature 230 (1971): 379, and J. E. Lovelock, R. J. Maggs, and R. J. Wade, "Haloge150

References

nated Hydrocarbons in and over the Atlantic," Nature 241 (1973): 194-196. Photolysis of CFCS does not occur at wavelengths longer than 290 nm (UV-B), so the breakdown of CFCS in the troposphere is minimal. They are also essentially insoluble in water. The photolysis of stratospheric CFCS generates free chlorine. According to Molina and Rowland, the wavelengths most responsible are 175-220 nm (radiation shorter even than UV-B). Although Molina and Rowland independently deduced the chlorine chain reaction for ozone destruction, they were not the only ones to do so. See, for example, the following references mentioned earlier: S. C. Wofsy and M. B. McElroy, U HO X , NO x , and CLOX: Their Role in Atmospheric Chemistry," Canadian Journal of Chemistry 52 (1974): 1582-1591, and R. S. Stolarski and R. J. Cicerone, "Stratospheric Chlorine: A Possible Sink for Ozone," Canadian Journal of Chemistry 52 (1974): 1610-1615. The current best estimate for the average atmospheric residence time of CFC-II is -50 years (from Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, Executive Summary, World Meteorological Organization Global Ozone Research and Monitoring Project, 1998). Two immediate follow-up articles confirming the importance of Molina and Rowland's work were R. J. Cicerone, R S. Stolarski, and S. Walters, "Stratospheric Ozone Destruction by Man-made Chlorofluoromethanes," Science 185 (1974): 1164-1167, and S. C. Wofsy, M. B. McElroy, and N. D. Sze, "Freon Consumption: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone," Science 187 (1975): 535-537. The New York Times cover story written by well-known science journalist Walter Sullivan appeared on 26 September 1974 ("Tests Show Aerosol Gases May Pose Threat to Earth"). The Time magazine story (7 October 1974) was titled "Death to Ozone: Effects of Freon," pp. 93-94.

i5i

The Earth Remains Forever OZONE DEPLETION: PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY AND PUBLIC TRUST For background, see S. Mitchell, "The Politics of Freon," The Nation, 2,8 June 1975, pp.775-778. The James Lovelock quote is from L. Dotto and H. SchifPs 1975 book The Ozone Wars (New York: Doubleday and Co.), p. 2,4. Rowland was one of a number of authors who published the analysis of mercury in museum tuna. See G. E. Miller, P. M. Grant, R Kishore, F. J. Steinkruger, F. S. Rowland, and V. P. Guinn, "Mercury Concentrations in Museum Specimens of Tuna and Swordfish," Science 175 (1972): 112.1-112,2,. "Earth's Sunscreen Is Rotting Away." Science Digest 77 (January 1995): 18-19. Roberts, M. "Doomsday Sprays." The New Republic 173 (2, August 1975): 7-9. The quote from Russell Peterson is on p.7 of the article. The movie Day of the Animals, released in 1977, is reviewed in Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 2.80. The full quotation is: Fair action thriller in the nature-on-the-rampage mold, with a cast of backpackers in the High Sierras at the mercy of hostile creatures crazed by the sun's radiation after the earth's ozone layer has been ecologically destroyed. Final score: beasts 7, cast o (in acting as well as survival). The discussion of DuPont's new CFG plant in Texas and the quotes from employee A. B. Rhodes are from S. Mitchell, "The Politics of Freon," The Nation, 28 June 1975, PP-775-77&. A number of articles in the popular press discussed ozone and CFC issues. Some useful ones include T. Alexander, "What We Know—and Don't Know—about the Ozone Shield," Fortune, August 1975, pp. 184-194; R. Boyle, "Forecast for Disaster," Sports Illustrated, 16 November 1987, pp.79-91; and a cover story in Time by M. D. Lemonick, 152.

References

"The Heat Is On: Chemical Wastes Spewed into the Air Threaten the Earth's Climate," 19 October 1987, pp-5867. The quote by Rowland about 100,000 ozone molecules is in the Time cover story, p. 62. COOL SCIENCE AT THE SOUTH POLE

The Hugh Odishaw quote is from Walter Sullivan's book Assault on the Unknown (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p.4. Sullivan was a New York Times science writer when he covered the IGY, and was science editor when he "broke" the story on ozone and CFCS 15 years later. Another chronicle of the International Geophysical Year is Sydney Chapman's IGY: Year of Discovery (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959). As part of the IGY, the United States successfully launched its first satellite on 31 January 1958, four months after Russian scientists placed Sputnik I into orbit 550 miles above the earth's surface. The slight but natural decrease in spring ozone over Antarctica was first described by Gordon Dobson. For a review, see G. M. B. Dobson, "Forty Years' Research on Atmospheric Ozone at Oxford: A History," Applied Optics 7 (1968): 387-405. The conditions that cause this normal phenomenon are described in K. Tung, "On the Relationship between the Thermal Structure of the Stratosphere and the Seasonal Distribution of Ozone," Geophysical Research Letters 13 (1986): 1308-1311. The existence of the ozone hole was first documented by J. C. Farman, B. G. Gardiner, and J. D. Shanklin. "Large Losses of Total Ozone in Antarctica Reveal Seasonal CLOX'/NOX Interaction," Nature 315 (1985): 207-210. The follow-up to the Farman et al. article was R S. Stolarski, A. J. Krueger, M. R Schoeberl, R D. McPeters, P. A. Newman, and J. C. Alpert, "Nimbus-7 Satellite Measurements of the Springtime Antarctic Ozone Decrease," Nature 322 (1986): 808-811. The authors reported measurements from the Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet (SBUV) instrument and the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) on the Nimbus 7 sat*53

The Earth Remains Forever

ellite. Their measurements confirmed the Antarctic ozone hole as a regional phenomenon. Data on the production of CFC-II and CFG-12 from 1976 to 1985 are from R. Hoppe, "Ozone: Industry Is Getting Its Head out of the Clouds," Business Week, 13 October 1996, pp. no-iii. Estimates of total CFC production from 1976 to 1985 are from E. Linden, "Who Lost the Ozone>", Time, 10 May 1993,PP- 5^-58. The John Chafee quote comes from S. N. Wellborn, "Putting a Freeze on Freon," U.S. News and World Report, 17 November 1986, p.72. The quote from scientists urging caution is from R. S. Stolarski, A. J. Krueger, M. R. Schoeberl, R. D. McPeters, P. A. Newman, and J. C. Alpert, found in Nature 322 (1986): 808-811. Lemonick, M. D. "What Is Destroying the Ozone?" Time, 3 November 1996, p. 80. Two sources for information about the solar cycle theory and ozone depletion are R. Kerr, "Taking Shots at Ozone Hole Theories," Science 234 (1986): 817-818, and Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, Executive Summary (Report No. 37) from the World Meteorological Organization Global Ozone Research and Monitoring Project, 1994. For a thorough analysis of the anomalous ozone readings at Dumont d'Urville in 1958, see P. A. Newman, "Antarctic Total Ozone in 1958," Science 264 (1994): 543-546. The author concludes, "There is no credible evidence for an ozone hole in 1958." Three important studies helped clarify the chlorine reactions in polar stratospheric clouds. They are: S. Solomon, R. R. Garcia, F. S. Rowland, and D. J. Wuebbles, "On the Depletion of Antarctic Ozone," Nature 321 (1986): 755-758; L. T. Molina and M. J. Molina, "Production of CLzOz from the Self-Reaction of the CLO Radical," Journal of Physical Chemistry 91 (1987): 433-436; and J. G. Anderson, W. H. J

54

References Brune, and M. H. Proffitt, "Ozone Destruction by Chlorine Radicals within the Antarctic Vortex: The Spatial and Temporal Evolution of CLO-O Anticorrelation Based on in Situ ER-2 Data," Journal of Geophysical Research 94 (1989): 11465-11479. The timing of the appearance of the ozone hole in relation to the signing of the Vienna Convention is complicated. The convention was signed in March of 1985, two months before the Farman et al. Nature paper that documented the ozone hole was published; nonetheless, most of the delegates knew of the existence of the ozone hole before the Convention was signed. The Convention might have been signed even if the ozone hole had not been discovered, but we will never know for certain. Russell, J. M., Ill, M. Luo, R. J. Cicerone, and L. E. Deaver. "Satellite Confirmation of the Dominance of Chlorofluorocarbons in the Global Stratospheric Chlorine Budget." Nature 379 (1996): 526-52,9. See also the related paper by W. Brune, "There's Safety in Numbers," Nature 379 (1996): 486-487. Anderson J. G., D. W. Toohey, and W. H. Brune. "Free Radicals within the Antarctic Vortex: The Role of CFCS in Antarctic Ozone Loss," Science 251 (1991): 39-46. The Donald Hodel quote is from "State Department Pushes Radical Ozone Treaty," Human Events, 20 June 1987, pp. 6-8. The original 24 signatories of the Montreal Protocol (16 September 1987) were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Ghana, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Portugal, Senegal, Sweden, Switzerland, Togo, United Kingdom, U.S.A., Venezuela, and West Germany. As of January 2001, 175 nations had ratified the Protocol. Two useful books with insight into the Montreal Protocol are R. E. Benedick, Ozone Diplomacy: New Directions in Safeguarding the Planet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University *55

The Earth Remains Forever Press, 1991) and A. Makhijani and K. R. Gurney, Mending the Ozone Hole: Science) Technology) and Policy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) (see Chapter n in particular). As ambassador, Benedick was chief U.S. negotiator for the Protocol, and the quote is from an address he gave in 1987 (see p.4, Ozone Diplomacy). See also S. Begley, "An Exemplary Ozone Agreement," Newsweek, 28 September 1987, p. 8. BANNING CFCS: THINK LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY

Information on the development of HFC-13 4a can be found in J. Weber, "Quick, Save the Ozone," Business Week, 17 May J 993> PP-78-79- Additional material is from E. Linden, "Who Lost the Ozone?", Time, 10 May 1993, pp.56-58. Data on ozone depletion is from D. J. Hofmann, "The 1996 Antarctic Ozone Hole," Nature 383 (1996): 129. The misinformation about CFCS and aerosol sprays on television comes from an article by J. Kaplan, "Are the Ninja Turtles Misinformed?", Omni, June 1996, p. 27. Paul Craig Roberts, chairman of the Institute for Political Economy, wrote his column "What's Flying out the Ozone Hole? Billions of Dollars?" for Business Week ("Economic Viewpoint," 13 June 1994, p. 2.2.). Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion, Executive Summary, published (1998) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United Nations Environment Program, and the World Meteorological Organization. The complete document is Report No. 44 from the World Meteorological Organization Global Ozone Research and Monitoring Project. Randel, W. J., R. S. Stolarski, D. M. Cunnold, J. A. Logan, M. J. Newchurch, and J. M. Zawodny. "Atmosphere—Trends in the Vertical Distribution of Ozone." Science 285 (1999): 1689-1692. The Washington Post cover story is B. Rensberger, "After 2000, Outlook for the Ozone Layer Looks Good," 15 April 1993. 156

References

The final quote is from F. S. Rowland and M. J. Molina, "Ozone Depletion: 2.0 Years After the Alarm," Chemical and Engineering News, 15 August 1994, pp.8-13. LEARNING FROM SUCCESS

Recent articles on the progress and uncertainties of ozone recovery include D. T. Shindell, D. Rind, and P. Lonergan, "Increased Polar Stratospheric Ozone Losses and Delayed Eventual Recovery Owing to Increasing Greenhouse-Gas Concentrations," Nature 391 (1998): 589-592,; R. A. Kerr, "Deep Chill Triggers Record Ozone Hole," Science 282 (1998): 391; P. Wennberg, "Bromine Explosion," Nature 397 (1999): 299-301; P. J. Fraser and M. J. Prather, "Uncertain Road to Ozone Recovery," Nature 398 (1999): 663-664; S. A. Montzka, J. H. Butler, J. W. Elkins, T. M. Thompson, A. D. Clarke, and L. T. Lock, "Present and Future Trends in the Atmospheric Burden of Ozone-Depleting Halogens," Nature 398 (1999): 690-694; and the Associated Press, 6 October 2000, "Hole in Ozone Layer Exposed a City." The record ozone hole in September 2000 was recorded by the British Antarctic Survey, whose updated bulletins are available on the internet at kttp:// www.antarctica.ac.uk/met/jds/ozone/bulls.htm. In a Reuters news story written by Matt Daily (12 July 2001), Paul Crutzen was quoted as saying that an abrupt change in climate could have occurred in the 19705 if a slightly different combination of ozone-depleting chemicals had been used. "Had industry used bromine instead of chlorine in the chemicals used in spray cans and as solvents and refrigerants, we would have had a catastrophic ozone hole everywhere and at all seasons by the mid-1970s." He went on to say, "Consequences for life on the surface of the planet would have been severe. We avoided such a fundamental change in the Earth's chemical mode of operation by luck rather than planning and foresight."

157

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The Changing Earth THE CONTEXT FOR CHANGE

Couffer, J. Eat Bomb. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992. Uppenbrink, J. "Arrhenius and Global Warming." Science 272 (1996): 1122.

Etheridge, D. M., L. P. Steele, R. L. Langenfelds, R. J. Francey, J. M. Barnola, and V. I. Morgan. "Natural and Anthropogenic Changes in Atmospheric co^ over the Last 1000 Years from Air in Antarctic Ice and Firn." Journal of Geophysical Research 101 (1996): 4115-4128. Neftel, A., E. Moor, H. Oeschger, and B. Stauffer. "Evidence from Polar Ice Cores for the Increase in Atmospheric coz in the Past Two Centuries." Nature 315 (1985): 45-47. Petit, J. R., J. Jouzel, D. Raynaud, N. L Barkov, J.-M. Barnola, I. Basile, M. Benders, J. Chappellaz, M. Davis, G. Delayque, M. Delmotte, V. M. Kotlyakov, M. Legrand, V. Y. Lipenkov, C. Lorius, L. Pepin, C. Ritz, E. Saltzman, and M. Stievenard. "Climate and Atmospheric History of the Past 420,000 Years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica." Nature 399 (1999): 429-436. Briffa, K. R., P. D. Jones, F. H. Schweingruber and T. J. Osborn. "Influence of Volcanic Eruptions on Northern Hemisphere Summer Temperature over the Past 600 Years." Nature 393 (1998): 450-455. Delmas, R. J., J. M. Ascencio, and M. Legrand. "Polar Ice Evidence That Atmospheric CO2 2O,ooo-Yr BP Was 50 Percent of Present." Nature 284 (1980): 155-57. Mann, M. E., R. S. Bradley and M. K. Hughes. "Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries." Nature 392 (1998): 779-787. Crowley, T. J. "Causes of Climate Change over the Past 1000 Years." Science 289 (2000): 270-277. There are many good webpages on the subjects of coi? temperature, and greenhouse warming. See, for example, http://GCTE.org/, http://www.igbp.kva.se, http:// 158

Referencess www.pages.unibe.ch/, and http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ globalw arming/ (and links therein). The Department of Energy report on ways to fight global warming was released 19 November 2000 by the Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest National labs and by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It was covered in most major newspapers, including USA Today (i 6 November 2.000, p.i6A), and by Patrick Connole of Reuters. Sturges, W. T., T. J. Wallington, M. D. Hurley, K. P. Shine, K. Sihra, A. Engel, D. E. Oram, S. A. Penkett, R. Mulvaney, C. A. M. Brenninkmeijer. "A Potent Greenhouse Gas Identified in the Atmosphere: SF CF ." Science 289 (2000): 611-613. Using approximate radiative forcings of 0.57 W m z (ppmb) for SF CF andi.Sxio 5 W m 2 (ppmb) for CO2, the relative efficiency of a molecule of SF CF relative to CO2 is approximately 30,000. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2.001 working group summaries, Groups I, II, and III. Climate Change 2001. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhou, L., C. J. Tucker, R. K. Kaufmann, D. Slayback, N. V. Shabanov, R. B. Myneni. "Variations in Northern Vegetation Activity Inferred from Satellite Data of Vegetation Index during 1981-1999." Journal of Geophysical Research—Atmospheres 106 (2,001): 2,0069-2.0083. See additional commentary from Reuters, "Satellites See a Greener Northern Hemisphere," 4 September 2001. The data on Glacier National Park are from Daniel Fagre, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, as quoted in the Nature Conservancy magazine (March/April 2001). Patz, J. A. , P. R. Epstein, T. A. Burke, and J. M. Balbus. "Global Climate Change and Emerging Infectious Diseases." Journal of the American Medical Association 275 (1996): 217-223. Doyle, Arthur Conan. "A Study in Scarlet." From The Com159

The Earth Remains Forever plete Sherlock Holmes. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960. See, for example, the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP): http://www.gewex.com/gpcp.html. Linthicum, K. J., A. Anyamba, C. J. Tucker, P. W. Kelley, M. F. Myers, and C. J. Peters. "Climate and Satellite Indicators to Forecast Rift Valley Fever Epidemics in Kenya." Science 2.85 (1999)' 397-400. Data on the loss of gaging stations in the U.S. are from United States Geological Survey, "Streamflow Information for the Next Century: A Plan for the National Streamflow Information Program of the U.S. Geological Survey," 1999 uses Open-File Report #99-456. Information on the B-z bomber came from "Stealthfare," The Economist, 10 August 1996, pp. 2,1-2,2.. AN HISTORICAL ANALOGY

The story about von Papen and Hitler is from Winston Churchill's book The Second World War: The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), pp. 68-69; the Wigram and Baldwin quotes are from the same source, pp. 190 and 216, respectively. Some of the historical chronology comes from W. L. Langer, ed., An Encyclopedia of World History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.). The Boothby quote is from page 2,86 of William Manchester's book The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill (Alone: 1932-1940) (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1988). The quote on "resolve" is from The Gathering Storm, pp. 17-18. For the history of the Maginot Line, see J. E. Kaufmann and H. W. Kaufmann, The Maginot Line: None Shall Pass (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1997). The quote from General Gamelin is from Winston Churchill's 1949 book Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 46. The quote from the Rumanian foreign minister is from The

160

References

Last Lion, p. 102.. The Weygand and Petain quotes are from Their Finest Hour, p. 213. The Lindbergh quote (in Manchester, Vol. II) is from The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 22. The Hitler and Jodl quotes, the Chamberlain quote, and the Baldwin quote were in The Last Lion, pp. 175-176, 186, and 57, respectively. A VISION FOR THE FUTURE

Global wealth and consumption figures are from IPCC, Climate Change 1995: Economic and Social Dimensions of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 91Data on obesity are from Ali H. Mokdad, Ph.D., Mary K. Serdula, M.D., M.P.H., William H. Dietz, M.D., Ph.D., Barbara A. Bowman, Ph.D., James S. Marks, M.D., M.P.H., and Jeffrey P. Koplan, M.D., M.P.H., "The Spread of the Obesity Epidemic in the United States, 1991-1998," Journal of the American Medical Association 282 (1999): 1519-1522. Kasting, J. F. "The Carbon Cycle, Climate, and the Longterm Effects of Fossil Fuel Burning." From Consequences: The Nature and Implications of Environmental Change, Vol 4. Michigan: Saginaw Valley State University, 1998. See also A. S. Manne, "The Rate of Time Preference—Implications for the Greenhouse Debate," Energy Policy 23 (1995): 391-394. For the analogy of discounting in the text, $i,ooox(i-o.O4)IO° =$16.87. Automotive fuel figures come from Consumer Reports, November 1997, p. 54. The automobile statistics are from the Federal Highway Administration's report "Highway Statistics Summary To 1995"; there were 128 million cars and 202 million vehicles in total registered in 1995. For a dis161

The Earth Remains Forever

cussion of the ecological consequences of roads, see R. T. Forman, "Estimate of the Area Affected Ecologically by the Road System in the United States," Conservation Biology 14 (2000): 31-35. Information on non-point sources of pollution is found in S. R. Carpenter, N. F. Caraco, D. L. Correll, R. W. Howarth, A. N. Sharpley, and V. H. Smith, "Nonpoint Pollution of Surface Waters with Phosphorus and Nitrogen," Ecological Applications % (1998): 559-568. Information on wetlands is found in Ann Vileisis, Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History of America's Wetlands (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997). Tierney, John. "A Tale of Two Fisheries." New Tork Times Magazine, 2,7 August 2,000, pp. 38-43. For just one example of corporate recognition of global warming, see "Seeing Green," The Economist, 5 November 1999, P-73The Tetzel quote is from C. J. H. Hayes and F. F. Clark, Medieval and Early Modern Times: The Age of Justinian to the Eighteenth Century (New York: MacMillan, 1996), p. 2.95. Cox, P. A. Nafanua: Saving the Samoan Rain Forest. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1997. The plant that he collected which yielded prostratin was Homalanthus nutans. Chichilnisky, G. and G. Heal. "Economic Returns from the Biosphere." Nature 391 (1998): 629-630. A good "historical" account of King Arthur's court is Sir Thomas Malory's 1903 Le Morte dyArthur, Volumes i and 2., edited by William Caxton and, later, by A. W. Pollard, who added modern spellings to Caxton's edition. It was published by Macmillan.

Epilogue The official date of October i999(the exact date put forth was October izth) is simply the date chosen as a best guess by the United Nations. The notion that we know global popu161

References

lation precisely enough to estimate the day, or even the month, that the earth crossed the six billion mark is preposterous. Other organizations estimated that the six billionth person was actually born slightly earlier. According to the FAO, global population in 1998 was 5,901,054,000. The 1999 value was 5,978,396,000, an increase of 77 million people. This growth rate is approximately 1.3 percent. To have "only" nine billion people in the year 2.100, the average growth rate for the list century must be 0.4 percent (6,000,000,000 x i.oo4 IO °). Figures for carbon emissions since 1750 are from G. Marland, T. A. Boden, R. J. Andres, A. L. Brenkert, and C. Johnston, "Global, Regional, and National coz Emissions," in Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change (Oak Ridge, Tennessee: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1999). The figures on energy use for China, India, and the United States from 1989 through 1998 are from the Energy Information Administration (http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/iea/). Sarewitz, D. and R. Pielke, Jr. "Breaking the Global-Warming Gridlock." Atlantic Monthly (July 2.000), pp. 54-64. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams dated 8 April 1816 (p. 609 of The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson [New York: Modern Library, 1993]).

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Index

Amazon, 34, 43-44 American Electric Power, 123-124 Antarctica, 19, 65, 66, 70, 76-78,80,86,95,98,103 Aral Sea, 49 Arizona Water War, 50-52 armadillo, 55 Arrhenius, Svante, 94 aspirin, 56 Audubon, James J., 25-26 automobile subsidies, 115117 Babbitt, Bruce, 125 Banks, Joseph, 18 bats, 90-93, 125 Benedick, Richard, 80-8 1 Bering, Vitus Jonassen, 24-25 Bird Life International, 23 bison, 42 Blaustein, Andrew, 67-68 Bracken Bat Cave, 90-93 British Petroleum/Amoco, 123 bromine, 81-82, 86 brown tree snake, 38-39

Brown, Marilyn, 97 Bruno, Giordano, 54 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 101 Bush, George W., 100 cancer, 55-60, 65-67, 80, 89, 123 carbon dioxide, 9-11, 63-64, 94-97, 129-130. See also fossil fuels Carlsbad Caverns, 90-91 Carlton, James, 37 Carolina Parakeet, 2.5-27 Carson, Rachel, 42 Catskill Mountains, 124 CFCS, 68-86, 89; substitutes for, 81-82, 84-85 Chafee, John, 77 Chamberlain, P. C., 94 China, xvi, 10, 29, 50, 113, 130 Chinese tallow tree, 36 chlorine, 63, 69-72, 77-86 chlorofluorocarbons. See CFCS

cichlids, 3 2-3 3

The Earth Remains Forever Clark, Robert, 19 GOz. See carbon dioxide Colorado River, 49-50, 5152, 125 Cook, James, 18 Copernicus, 53-54 Costa Rica, 41, 57-58, 12.4 Cox, Paul Alan, 12.5-12.6 Crutzen, Paul, 69, 84 cyclosporine, 57 Daly, John, 58-59 dams, 48-49 da Vinci, Leonardo, 50 deforestation, 32-34, 41-46, 89, 104, in dipterocarp, 17 DNA polymerase, 55 Douglas, Marjory Stoneman,

fisheries, 27-30, 33-34, 49 119-120 Fleming, Alexander, 5 7 Florida Everglades, 125 fossil fuels, xvi, 9-11, 63, 9495, 112-115, 12.2-123 fossil water, 121 Fourier, Jean Baptiste, 94 freon, 70, 7*~73, 75, 84. See also CFCS

frogs, 58-59,67-68 fuel efficiency, 115-117 Galileo, 53-54 Glacier National Park, 99 Global Climate Observing System, 104 global warming, xvi-xvii, n, 63, 85-86, 89,94-101, 112, II5-II6, 123, 129-

12-5

DuPont, 69-70, 75, 8 1, 12.3 Easter Island, 1-5 economic discounting, 114H5 energy use, xvi, 9-11, 100, 113, 129-130. See also fossil fuels epibatidine, 58-59 Everglades. See Florida Everglades extinctions, 3-5, 21-59, 129-130

Farman, Joseph, 76-77 fertilizer, 42, 117-118, 124

130. See also carbon dioxide; energy use; fossil fuels; greenhouse gases Gorman, Carl, 3 5 Great Plains, 42 greenhouse gases, 10, 86, 94-97, 100-101, 123. See also carbon dioxide groundwater pumping, 121 Guam, 38-39 gypsy moth, 40-41 habitat loss, xvi, 23-24, 4147, 56, 119, 128 Halley Bay, 76-78, 94~95> 103 166

Index Hinton, George, 19 Hinton, Jaime, 19-20 Hodel, Donald, 79 horseshoe crab, 56 Hudson Bay, 99 Hudson River, 3 6 humpback chub, 49 hydrilla, 37 hydrochlorofluorocarbons . See CFCS, substitutes for hydrofluorocarbons. See CFCS, substitutes for India, xvi, 7, 10, 130 invasive species, 32-41, 49 Irish potato famine, 38 Johnston, Harold, 69 Kepler, Johannes, 53-54 kudzu, 36 Kyoto Protocol, 100-101 Lake Victoria, 32-34 Lapita, 1-5, 18, 125 lemur, 18 Lenina, 20 Lindsey, Hal, xvii-xviii lobsters, 16; fishing for, 120, 121

Lovelock, James, 70-72, 74 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 50 Madagascar, 18, 56 Magnuson Act, 28 malaria, 56-57

Maldive Islands, xvi-xvii, 12,3 Mauna Loa, 95 Mayr, Ernst, 18 melanoma. See cancer Merck Pharmaceutical, 57-58, 12.4 methane, 96-97 Mexican free-tailed bats. See bats Midgley, Thomas, Jr., 69 Mitchell's satyr, 3 1 Mobile River, 48-49 Moeur, Benjamin, 51-52. Molina, Mario, 71-74, 77, 84 monitoring the environment, 101-105 Montreal Protocol, 80-8 1,

83-85

Morris, Simon Conway, 17 mountain gorillas, 12.8 Nabokov, Vladimir, 3 1 Navajo code talkers, 3 5 New York City's water supply, 124 Nile perch, 32-34 nitrogen oxides, 69 Ogallala Aquifer, 121 over- harvesting, 2.3-32,, 119-120 oxygen, 16, 54,64, 117 ozone, xvi-xvii, 63-89, 94, 95, 103, 112., 125, 129

167

The Earth Remains Forever Pacific Yew, 56 Papua New Guinea, 18 Parker Dam, 50-52 passenger pigeon, 2,5-2,7 penicillin, 57 Permian extinction, 21 pesticides, 41, 42, 118-119, 114 Phylloxera^ 38 Phytophthora infestans, 3 8 phytoplankton, 67 polar bears, 98-99 pollution, surface, 117-1 1 8 population, xvi-xvii, 3-4, 59,41-43, 50, 89, 100, 111-113, 127-130 Project X-Ray, 91-92 Punta Arenas, Chile, 85 pygmy beaked whale, 17 quinine, 56-57 rainforest, 17, 34,43-45, 57-58, 124-125 razorback sucker, 49 Reagan, Ronald, 80 rice, 56 Rift Valley Fever, 105 Rio Earth Summit, 100 rosy periwinkle, 55-56 Rowland, Sherwood, 71-73, 77,84 Royal Dutch/Shell, 123

Savidge, Julie, 38-39 Schultz, George, 80 sea level, xvi-xvii, 103, 105, 123 seat belts, 113 Senio, Fuiono, 125 Shackleton, Ernest, 19, 70 skates, 30 skin cancer. See cancer snakeroot, 57 Solomon, Susan, 78 space shuttles, 69 Steadman, David, 4 Steller, Georg Wilhelm, 24-25 Steller's sea cow, 24-25 sun-tailed guenon, 18 supersonic transports, 69, 74 Symbion pandora, 16 tamarisk, 36 TattersalPs sifaka, 18 taxol, 56 Thermus aquations, 5 5 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 45-46 Toromiro tree, 3, 5 trawling, 46-47 Trifluoromethyl-sulfurpentafluoride, 98 Trouvelot, E. Leopold, 40-41 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, 100IOI

Samoa, 125-126 Samoan flying fox, 125-126

uv radiation, 65-68, 71, 74, 79, 85 168

Index Vienna Convention, 78-80 Vostok ice cores, 95 Vu Quang ox, 17

Wilson, Alexander, 2,6 Wilson, Edward O., 18 World Conservation Union, 2,3 World War II, 106-112,

Weddell Sea, 19 West Nile virus, 3 6 wetlands, 43, 48, 50, 119

Yellow River, 50 zebra mussel, 36-37, 49

169

With billions of people to feed, Life's riches to nurture and lead, Where we turn in the end May one day depend On distinguishing want from need.