Our leading conservationist delivers an emergency plan for continued life on this planet.
The Last Days of Earth Resources
In a large auditorium a concert was about to begin when flames were seen licking at the backstage curtains. The audience began to rush for the doors when they noted a cool-headed pianist onstage who strode nonchalantly to the piano. Seated himself deliberately, and began to play. This calmed and reassured the audience, who returned to their seats and burned to death. Moral: if you run into a coolheaded pianist, get excited. He should lull you while Big Brother takes over. He could bring on 1984 ten years earlier than George Orwell expected it.
The specter of 1984 has been appearing a bit much lately. We are running out of resources and patience so fast that a man doesn’t trust his neighbor and the government is unwilling to trust either of them. We have to remember what the government would like us to forget. Remember how adroitly the government tried to bury Watergate? — “Grab them by their gas tanks, and their hearts and minds will follow.’
Who could have predicted how successful the “energy crisis” would be? “The energy crisis,” William F. Buckley, Jr., put it nicely back in late December, “is that we are being asked to get by on slightly more energy than we used in 1970” [emphasis added].
In 1970, you’ll remember, we were still budgeting vast sums of energy on guns, bombs, overseas troops, B-52 raids, and other forms of conspicuous consumption. Yet we also had generous amounts of butter with our guns, and gas stations offered prizes to get people to buy more.
It goes to show that you can always make a cupboard look bare, if it serves your purpose.
What will it be like, at this rate, in the year 2014, or even 2004? The dates are not too far ahead to think about. Think back as far as 2004 is ahead and you are at the dawn of the atomic age and the end of World War II. Think as far back as the year 2014 is ahead, and you are back in the Great Depression.
Jacques Yves Cousteau, who explores and worries about oceans so well, likens our home to an egg. If the earth were that small, he says, all the water in the oceans, lakes, streams, and glaciers would be but a single drop on the egg’s shell.
What about the atmosphere? If you reduce it to the density of water, then it is a mere thirty-three feet deep (a figure to remember when you think of how much garbage or heat we want it to carry). That amounts, on the egg’s scale, to a droplet, to one thirty-second of an inch in diameter.
And the soil, upon which all life depends? On the egg scale, a barely visible speck.
Drop, droplet, and speck are all that make this planet different from the moon.
So much for our home. Now, consider man’s time. We compressed the earth to an egg. Let’s compress time even more, and squeeze the earth’s four billion years to the six days of the week of creation. This makes available a startling instant replay.
Creation began, we can say, at midnight Sunday. Until noon on Tuesday it was all just a construction job. There was too poisonous an atmosphere when we finally got one, and there were too many toxic metals — such as mercury, lead, and cadmium —for life. They had to be locked out of the system, except for a few essential traces here and there, before life could take hold.
At noon Tuesday the miracle happened: there was a cell, there was a chromosome in the cell and genes in the chromosome. The genes said, “Let’s split.” We’ve had life on the planet since.
Life continued to expand through Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and into Saturday morning. It increased in abundance, diversification, stability, and beauty. Life produced the environmental capital of the earth, the “biomass,” which is now so important to us. On Saturday morning, at about five o’clock, the oil that we’re now using up so rapidly began to be laid down. At seven we had cockroaches, so well designed that there have been no important changes since. At four in the afternoon, the dinosaurs and other big reptiles came on-stage; at nine they were off. Just before they left, there were redwoods and pelicans. An hour later the whales went back to the sea, and an hour after that, the seals.
All of this was the prelude to The Great Event. Three minutes before midnight, something like man arrived. What we readily recognize as man waited until eleven seconds before midnight. This was Neanderthal man, and with him came the beginning of our political process. Next, at one and one-half seconds before midnight, we had in Southeast Asia the first agriculture. Half a second later, agriculture had already destroyed most of the forests ringing the Mediterranean. such as the Cedars of Lebanon. Then, one-quarter of a second before midnight, Christianity arrived.
We create this perspective for one main purpose: it was not until one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the last day in the week of creation, that the Industrial Revolution began. Out of the marriage of coal and iron, we developed the capability to destroy the environmental capital of the earth. We came to like that so much that in the last 1/500th of a second before Sunday we became possessed by an idea that we appear to accept as a natural law: the only way we can continue to make this whole thing work is to continue to grow, and to grow faster. It is the key to economic survival, we thought. Almost all leaders leaped to the conclusion that growth was the only economic approach that would work. Grow — grind the environment down, use it up.
“People often don’t realize that you can have an environment without an economy, but not the other way around”
Growth leads to problems of doubling that we could once forget, but now cannot. Two percent growth per year (the rate our population was growing until recently) will produce a doubling in thirty-five years. Seven percent growth (the rate of our growing demand for electricity) will produce a doubling in ten years. Zero growth (which is all the planet can grow) produces no doubling ever, and there’s the problem. Either rethink growth or expand the planet. You can’t have one without the other, but you can borrow for a while and fool yourself into thinking that you got away with it.
A French riddle will help to dramatize just how desperate our situation is: Suppose you own a pond on which a water lily is growing. The lily doubles in size each day. If the lily were allowed to grow unchecked, it would completely cover the pond in ten days, choking off all other forms of life in the water. But the lily plant seems small and so you decide not to worry about cutting it back until it covers half the pond. On what day will that be? Answer: The ninth day. You have one day to save the pond.
Our world is stocked with a given number of nonrenewable resources. There are also renewable resources that have been turning out to be less renewable every year. This doesn’t just mean the not very renewable two-thousand-year-old redwoods. It refers to air, land, and sea that have had too much poison dumped into them by people who think the economy is more important than the environment, not realizing that you can have an environment without an economy but not the other way around.
The renewable resources are those that have kept renewing themselves with no more interruption than a volcanic cataclysm or major glacial advance. After that, the Industrial Revolution gave man the tools with which to make permanent interruptions, such as forcing a species into extinction. This kind of interruption makes a once renewable resource nonrenewable.
Renewable resources are not now, and never have been, self-sufficient. They rely upon an interdependency you have to see to believe.
A good many living things depend upon air, and there is no being that is self-sufficient in air. The earth has a single atmosphere. You can build a high smokestack up into it, spew your noxious poisons far above your reach, and they are dispersed by the winds. But dispersed where? Into the rain that brings the stuff down on your neighbors. Or the poison can circle the earth.
All living things depend upon water, and water has a way of seeking its own level. It is of all things most yielding, as the Chinese observed a few millennia ago, and it can overcome that which is most hard. It can reach things you wish it wouldn’t. For example, the lethally radioactive wastes from atomic reactors — the permanent garbage we try to bury out of water’s reach because we must not have it back in radioactive water or in any other form. But water has a way of bringing things out in the open. It will rust a container, corrode or erode it, seep into it, seep back out, and bring the lethal burden back to our door, where we should never have made it. And if it wants to, water can get tough on a moment’s notice and break things up. In quantity, ice can return to Hanford, Washington, which the glaciers left a mere nine thousand years ago, and can excavate and release into the global environment the deadliest poison we know — the plutonium garbage that Dixy Lee Ray of the Atomic Energy Commission assures us will remain permanently isolated for 500,000 years in the Hanford clay, because she intended it that way.
The renewable resources renew themselves when all recycling systems are “GO.” This is the way the world works. The systems have been built and tested over a period of three billion years, and we are not likely to second-guess them very well even though we keep trying to. The United States, with 6 percent of the world’s population, presently uses about 50 percent of the world’s resources and 33 percent of the world’s energy. And many people feel that we need a still larger share. Before we blindly accept this prescription for unlimited growth — and disaster — we should examine how we are now using what we have and how we could use it more wisely.
For instance, transportation now takes up about one-fourth of America’s energy bud get. Since World War II, we have favored the most wasteful means of transport. Waterways and railroads are approximately equal in efficiency; trucks use up about four times more energy per weight-unit of payload than trains; and airplanes use about sixty times as much as trains.
But the real waste occurs in America’s passenger cars. They are the symbol and key element of everything that was so right and has become so wrong with America. Who could foresee what cars would do to oil and air, how they would make “Los Angeleses” out of cities, bedrooms out of nearby towns, and ghosts out of others? Could we have ever guessed the depth of our addiction to such a destroyer of fertile land, mineral resources, people, and even government? Did we know what willing victims of the road gang (oilers, pavers, automakers) we were letting ourselves become, and how we would shun the cold turkey of kicking addiction?
Replacing the car with mass transit will really stretch the oil fields. Commuter rail systems would be ideal, but they require a long lead time and terrific amounts of capital. In the interim, the expansion of bus systems is needed badly. The small entrepreneur could make a dent in the energy crisis by setting up jitney services that would require only enough capital to buy a modest amount of rolling stock, gasoline, and advertising. Small businessmen could buy microbuses to set up commuting runs and systems of transportation between cities or suburbs and working/shopping/ entertainment centers.
Eric Hirst, energy-overuse analyst at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, estimates that automobiles could be redesigned to be about twice as efficient (using half the fuel) by limiting car weight to 2,200 pounds, and using radial tires (they slip less and save 10 percent on fuel) and standard transmissions. These reforms might even put fun back into driving — and are within extant technology. Beyond that, changing from the internal-combustion engine would be a big help — auto diesel engines are about 44 percent more efficient than the standard internal-combustion engine, and stratified-charge engines are about 15 percent more efficient.
Hirst’s basic strategy for making alt transportation, both of freight and of folk, more efficient is to make better use of existing equipment. If trucks, airplanes, and buses travel full, or nearly so, the savings will be significant. The airlines have already given this a start by reducing the number of flights. This makes some things less convenient, perhaps, but taking a little longer on all our trips would not be such a bad idea — we could have more time with books, magazines, meals, naps, and stewardesses. Jumbo jets are more efficient than conventional jets: 747’s use only 53 percent as much fuel per passenger-mile as 707’s. Add to this the nice lounges and stand-up bars on 747s, DC 10’s, and L-011’s, and you have a set of nice ancillary benefits. So, rather than fifteen flights daily from San Francisco to New York — some 707’s, some others, most of them flying one-quarter full — why not two or three 747’s? Let the airlines trade departure days, times, crews, meals, and ads so they can keep competing. They can pick up Europe’s (and Dulles Airport’s) wise plan of busing passengers to a common airplane parking lot. They can then fill whatever airline’s craft is handy, letting the accounting offices sort it all out for financial reports. After all, who can tell TWA or American Airlines from United or Delta in the dark?
America’s goal for July 4, 1976, is clear: Get the big cars off to pasture and recycling centers. Favor small cars (under 2,500 pounds) but not too many, and longer lasting, with a lot more craft in them. Persuade armies of commuters to leave their cars with pleasing, subsidized mass transportation. Recognize buses as the most energy-conserving mode of passenger transport. End the short airline flights — take railroads instead. Let’s hear it for stewardesses (stewards, too) on trains and buses! Let’s long-haul freight on trains, piggyback, with truck drivers along in Pullmans, if that aids the transition.
The 1973 Federal Aid Highway Act (the Highway Trust Fund Act) will put up $200 million for buses in 1975 and $800 million in 1976 for buses and railroads, if the cities will demand it. Raise the ante. The bus business and railroad-car and locomotive business could keep Detroit thriving, moving into people-intensive, better-engineered work as the automobile age dies out.
A tremendous amount of energy is also wasted on housing. In 1970 almost 57 percent of all electricity produced in the United States was used for housing. Of this, 7.5 percent went into actually producing building materials and putting them in place. The rest went for lighting, heating, cooling, cooking, and so on. Last winter forced a cutback in all these uses of electricity and, hopefully, ushered in an era of energy practicalism. We will have to look very carefully, for a change, at how we use energy and whether we can make do with less.
New housing should be centered around apartment buildings, for a number of reasons. First comes cost. In the last ten years land costs have risen 50 percent, materials 46 percent, and labor 40 percent. Taxation has followed suit. Zoning is coming under scrutiny. The single-family home may once again become everywhere the luxury it once was in cities. Apartments and other large buildings can be heated more efficiently because they lose less heat to the outside The per-person cost of keeping warm is less. It is also easier to deliver heat and light in a large building, to collect garbage, to deliver mail, to service telephones, and to recycle trash for paper, heat, and valuable metals.
Garrett Hardin, professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has scolded architects for being unaware of the existence of the sun. They design the hot, sunny side of a building the same way they build the cool, shady side, wasting vast quantities of energy. The Chinese use less electricity for everything than we, with but a quarter of their population, use for air conditioning alone. The World Trade Center in New York uses as much electricity as the city of Schenectady (population 100,000), partly because the building is heated with light bulbs — a rather inefficient device for heating! The lights are simply left on most of the time to keep the building warm through the waste heat they give off. Then, when the building gets too hot, it is air-conditioned to make it bearable.
Improved insulation, though it adds to the initial costs of a building, ultimately saves money because heating and cooling costs go down, sometimes by as much as one-fourth. As electricity moves into full-pricing, instead of the upside-down rates now used by utilities (where the biggest users pay the least per kilowatt hour), these savings in maintenance will be important.
We may also see the beginnings of the exploitation of solar and wind energy for housing needs. Though the government assures us that solar energy is not yet feasible, it is misrepresenting the facts by referring to generating electricity on a mass scale from solar power. There are far humbler uses: it can heat rooms, it can heat and cool water. This technology is already here, in the form of rooftop solar plants common in Europe and Israel. The Massachusetts Audubon Society’s new building will depend on solar power for part of its energy. On a simpler level, a young Englishman, Colin Moorcraft has equipped a house with solar power that provides 80 percent of its energy needs.
Professor William Heronemus of the University of Massachusetts has suggested what would have been laughable a few years ago but no longer seems droll — using windmills to generate power for our houses.
We can exploit wind by using technology we had almost forgotten. With land it is different. There is currently a revolution going on in land-use planning. Today many planners, together with their host communities, are questioning the whole idea of constant growth. Do the economic benefits really compensate for the loss of land, the loss of openness, of wilderness?
The idea of setting a size limit to a community is gaining ground. It may be too late for communities like Boulder, Colorado, which saw the light a little too late to prevent the spread of urban blight. But other areas are restricting the tract developments realizing that once open space is gone, it is hard to get it back; and once wilderness is gone, there is no way at all.
Second-home developments are in for retrenchment in the next few years. The community that was once grateful to be a resort is beginning to resent having to pay the economic and environmental bills for absentee residents, even though their children are schooled elsewhere. Communities are beginning to be careful about selling their character, their uniqueness, and their wilderness to the highest bidder.
Growth in replanned communities can be redirected. Large buildings, or a cluster of smaller ones, as opposed to scattered structures, make more efficient use of the land around them. For example, if we have a fifteen-acre parcel, we could, as in suburbia, divide it into sixty lots of equal size. Or we could put all the housing and services on five acres and leave ten acres of open space that everyone can use. Think of all the wasted space in tract-home developments — all the unused front yards, all the miles of concrete!
As rising gasoline prices make commuting more difficult, more people will question the value of a two-hour, five-dollar (or more) commute every day. There will be a slow migration of city people back to the cities — and green-thumb people back to farms. People who return to reclaim cities can restore them or rediscover the wonderful places they ought to be. The silver living of the energy crisis could be in the cities.
With mobility more limited, we won’t be spending so much money on recreational vehicles, second cars, house trailers, snowmobiles, campers, powerboats, trail bikes, and dune buggies. We will be more interested in making where we are more livable rather than making the wilderness less enjoyable.
Try to imagine an energy-saving home in the city. It has windows that open and close; it is well-insulated; it has doors between rooms so that different areas can be kept at different temperatures. It is near shops and public transportation. Look closely at that description. It fits an older apartment exactly, one built perhaps in the Twenties or Thirties. It is to be found in a neighborhood, not someplace called Vista Village (or Pasture Plaza). It has shops, movies, people, neighbors, instead of a Shopping Mall and Entertainment Center five miles down the pike. It even has what planner Jane Jacobs recognized long ago as a city essential — a diversity of sin to fit everyone’s taste, admitted or secret.
Sins we don’t need are the zoning and tax laws that force the tearing down of structurally sound buildings that have decades of life left in them, or if they were put together really well, a century or more. Replacing them with flimsy, flashy structures is monstrously wasteful of resources, including energy. Happily, renovation, as opposed to steamroller urban renewal, is becoming accepted. Far fewer materials are needed, saving resources like wood, steel, aluminum, and copper — and saving, too, the handiwork of people who knew beauty, cared, and built solidly and well.
In the end, though, we are more concerned with how we live than in what we live. The real revolution in housing will not be how much we have but what we do with it. With so much money not having to go for escape, people will spend more on discovering their families and friends, sharing better television and radio, books and records, food and conversation. They will also find time to make their own music, paint, carve, sculpt, write, weave, make an art of cooking, sew, make mobiles, reinvent quilting bees, get and stay in shape, and otherwise improve their capacities. They will take a page from the European countries and make tiny allotments of derelict land blossom and bear fruit.
Agriculture is a little-discussed side issue of the energy problem. We use five times more energy in wet-rice agriculture then we get out of it, while the Indochinese farmers get out fifty times more than they put in. Opinion polls say that most people would prefer to live in the country if they could only support themselves there, but how can they? Farms, to survive, must now be huge, mechanized, drenched with capital. Big farms use more fertilizer per acre and, for the most part, get no better yields than the small ones. Their energy-intensive methods tend to harm the land and make us dependent on oil for our food supply. Worse, the soil, in effect, is mined. Nutrients are not returned to the land and a desert begins forming. A second desert is started when the nutrients get dumped in large concentrations in the sea. Sometimes land is over-irrigated, causing mineral salts to accumulate and threatening productive valleys like the Imperial Valley of California with salinization and death.
A major economic crisis is brewing that will make the Great Depression look no more serious than a child’s blowing his week’s allowance foolishly. It will come directly from our stubborn persistence in making agriculture increasingly dependent on super-farms, which in turn need oil-derived fertilizer. This is our present policy. It widens the gap between rich and poor, and it widens it rapidly. Blacks and Chicanos lead in taking a beating, and are far more vulnerable now, insecure in the cities, than they were in the Thirties, when they were home on the land and owned some of it, with good air to breathe and with food from the work of their own hands.
In high-energy agriculture, food prices must skyrocket as energy prices surge. Getting nutrients out of a retrograde soil costs more, transportation costs more, and agricultural profits must go up if agribusiness is to compete for capital with other sectors using more energy — such as the energy business itself. The profits on food will have an affinity, we know, for middlemen — processors, chemical manufacturers, the chain stores. Prices keep rising as we keep diverting more land, sea, air, water, and dollars to generate more and more energy, the lion’s share going anywhere but to food production. The age of the food surplus is long past, here and abroad. And suddenly the oil is gone too.
Too unlikely a scenario to worry about? We wish it were. It isn’t. What happened to that storied great dark lake of untapped Arab oil that could produce more oil than all history has used? Present policy would blow it fast, ten or fifteen years. That is the goal of the oil companies and the American government.
We must move swiftly to a policy that recognizes that our overcommitment to high-energy agriculture has pushed nature too far already. If we do, we can avert several agricultural catastrophes brought on by the use of too much energy in non-agriculture. For instance, we should stop cooling atomic reactor and other electrical-plant condensers with water needed by crops. We shouldn’t cool them with air, either, because air doesn’t have that much cool. We shouldn’t burn high-sulfur coal in fossil-fuel power plants because the sulfur is bad for crops as well as for lungs and eyes. We should avoid strip-mining for coal in Iowa (some of the best farmland in the world) and in Montana and Wyoming and the Dakotas (some of the best grazing land). We should get needed coal from deep mining, made safer. Strip-mining, though it’s cheaper if you cheat on reclamation, should be considered only as a last resort, relied upon when we no longer need the soi I involved. We should avoid poisoning a state or two, and all their crops, with the potentially catastrophic nuclear power plant accidents that so many scientists and ordinary people have predicted, but that Dixy Lee Ray and her Atomic Energy Commission have been trying to pretend are not a major threat. We don’t need those reactors.
What will we do for the energy generation we thus forego? We’ll do with less, as we have easily proved we can in every year of our lives so far. And why will we do with less energy? Because we like food and we hate hunger and famine — wherever it is, but especially at home.
Besides, we will have better food. We will end the lowering of protein in corn (down from 21 percent, where it used to be in the U.S. and still is in other places, to 11 percent in the U.S. now). We will deep-six other examples of skidding nutrition — such as iceberg lettuce, developed for easy transportability but nutritionally inferior. Similarly, squarish tomatoes will go; they pack better, but hardly taste like tomatoes. A society learning to use less energy will soon find itself in a world where you grow lettuce and other things nearer where you eat them. We will start getting better food from infancy, because the post-industrial age will have enough jobs for people, instead of for machines, to make it possible for every mother who has the equipment, and the serenity to operate it, to provide her children with do-it-yourself breast-feeding and a food scientifically designed over a very long period of experimentation to be exactly what an infant needs, with no preservatives necessary ….
STOP. These are just hopeful suggestions of what life could be like in the 21st century. But can we get to the 21st century from here? Is it at all possible? The first requirement is to persuade decision-makers that continuous growth on a finite planet will not work if this growth depends on wiping out resources. The growth we’ve all been admiring until the last few minutes is exactly this wrong kind of growth.
How do we direct it, turn it, ease it, force it, con it, tempt it, or reason it onto a tenable, lasting course? ”Growth” is something we will always have to live wit — and die with. Nebulas grow. Universes grow, ours along with them. Although our present lone, little, beautiful planet will not grow anymore, things on it can — but only so long as everything that grows also withers. The good, the young, the fresh, the new — these can grow. The bad, old, stale, and worn — these can wither. This will work. on our unstretchable earth, for all living things and their manifestations, such as countries, governments, political parties, Supreme Court justices, corporations, boards of supervisors, restaurants, journalists. Without the withering, there is no new growth. That is the law, and all your tears and wit cannot cancel out a word of it. It will never, never be rescinded. We can rescind, however. the reasoning that thinks differently. And we must.
It is the last day of the week of creation. It is midnight. We have ripped into our resources so efficiently that within the 20th century, in a mere fifty years, we have used up more than in all previous history. We have stepped up our rate of using resources so much that in the next fifteen years, at this acceleration, we will need as much as all the people who ever lived have used until today. We are digging into and unlocking the very toxic metals that had to be put out of action before life could begin here. We are placing ourselves in still more dire peril by playing around with radiation. How do we get off the collision course we’re on? That is still the question.
In Wales, Alwyn Rhys made a suggestion: “When you are at the brink of an abyss, the only progressive move you can make is to step backwards.’
Back to the cave?
Not at all, even though that would probably be preferable to striding past the brink in one last giant step for mankind that nobody needs.
A reasonable person at a time like this is expected at the very least to pause, then turn, so there is a chance to step back, remembering everything civilization has taught, to the last known landmark. Then choose a reasonably safe alternate course.
A civilized and brilliant man, Dr. Paul B. Sears, has taught us this:
“As we lengthen and elaborate the chain of technology that intervenes between us and the natural world, we forget that we become steadily more vulnerable to even the slightest failure in that chain.’
So let’s predict that we will remember, not forget. We will let technology serve, not command.
“The time has long since passed,” Sears says, “when a citizen can function responsibly without a broad understanding of the living landscape of which he is inseparably a part.’
So we will pause at the brink, admire the view, and determine to leave some of it to others, turn, and find our way back to the last known landmark. We know more about the terrain now, and can imagine with some horror in our mind’s eye what it would have been like if we had stubbornly taken that last forward step: there would be the exhilarating rush of air as we picked up speed, our acceleration being exponential; we would be able to view the wall of the abyss quickly and completely; and there would really be no problem until we hit. As a matter of fact, our problems would end then, but that wasn’t quite the ending we had in mind.
That was only in our mind’s eye, because we stopped in time. We’ve seen, we’ve learned, and we will combine the two in setting out in a tenable direction with a goal our children will thank us for: that the net worth of the only earth is to be at least as high when we leave it as it was when we came.
The fact that this insightful editorial hit our pages a half a century ago might have been the biggest point of conversation in our offices. Seeing as how we appear to be moving into another four years of “climate change is a myth” leadership, perhaps now more than ever we need to look inward. It will be easy to find Green Living suggestions online if you spend even a little time. We only have a limited number of resources — both locally and on the planet — so it behooves us all to be as smart as possible in our own lives, regardless of administration, um … theory. (You can tell this advice holds importance because nothing ever “behooves” for silly things.)
