TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061791/0617640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 131 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 82

Saving Nature, But Only for Man


By Charles Krauthammer


    Environmental sensitivity is now as required an attitude
in polite society as is, say, belief in democracy or aversion
to polyester. But now that everyone from Ted Turner to George
Bush, Dow to Exxon has professed love for Mother Earth, how are
we to choose among the dozens of conflicting proposals,
restrictions, projects, regulations and laws advanced in the
name of the environment? Clearly not everything with an
environmental claim is worth doing. How to choose?

    There is a simple way. First, distinguish between
environmental luxuries and environmental necessities. Luxuries
are those things it would be nice to have if costless.
Necessities are those things we must have regardless. Then apply
a rule. Call it the fundamental axiom of sane environmentalism:
Combatting ecological change that directly threatens the health
and safety of people is an environmental necessity. All else is
luxury.

    For example: preserving the atmosphere -- stopping ozone
depletion and the greenhouse effect -- is an environmental
necessity. In April scientists reported that ozone damage is far
worse than previously thought. Ozone depletion not only causes
skin cancer and eye cataracts, it also destroys plankton, the
beginning of the food chain atop which we humans sit.

    The reality of the greenhouse effect is more speculative,
though its possible consequences are far deadlier: melting ice
caps, flooded coastlines, disrupted climate, parched plains and,
ultimately, empty breadbaskets. The American Midwest feeds the
world. Are we prepared to see Iowa acquire Albuquerque's
climate? And Siberia acquire Iowa's?

    Ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect are human
disasters. They happen to occur in the environment. But they are
urgent because they directly threaten man. A sane
environmentalism, the only kind of environmentalism that will
win universal public support, begins by unashamedly declaring
that nature is here to serve man. A sane environmentalism is
entirely anthropocentric: it enjoins man to preserve nature, but
on the grounds of self-preservation.

    A sane environmentalism does not sentimentalize the earth.
It does not ask people to sacrifice in the name of other
creatures. After all, it is hard enough to ask people to
sacrifice in the name of other humans. (Think of the chronic
public resistance to foreign aid and welfare.) Ask hardworking
voters to sacrifice in the name of the snail darter, and, if
they are feeling polite, they will give you a shrug.

    Of course, this anthropocentrism runs against the grain of
a contemporary environmentalism that indulges in earth worship
to the point of idolatry. One scientific theory -- Gaia theory
-- actually claims that Earth is a living organism. This kind of
environmentalism likes to consider itself spiritual. It is
nothing more than sentimental. It takes, for example, a highly
selective view of the benignity of nature. My nature worship
stops with the April twister that came through Andover, Kans.,
or the May cyclone that killed more than 125,000 Bengalis and
left 10 million (!) homeless.

    A nonsentimental environmentalism is one founded on
Protagoras' maxim that "Man is the measure of all things." Such
a principle helps us through the thicket of environmental
argument. Take the current debate raging over oil drilling in
a corner of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.
Environmentalists, mobilizing against a bill working its way
through Congress to permit such exploration, argue that we
should be conserving energy instead of drilling for it. This is
a false either/or proposition. The country does need a sizable
energy tax to reduce consumption. But it needs more production
too. Government estimates indicate a nearly fifty-fifty chance
that under the ANWR lies one of the five largest oil fields ever
discovered in America.

    We have just come through a war fought in part over oil.
Energy dependence costs Americans not just dollars but lives.
It is a bizarre sentimentalism that would deny ourselves oil
that is peacefully attainable because it risks disrupting the
calving grounds of Arctic caribou.

    I like the caribou as much as the next man. And I would be
rather sorry if their mating patterns are disturbed. But you
can't have everything. And if the choice is between the welfare
of caribou and reducing an oil dependency that gets people
killed in wars, I choose man over caribou every time.

    Similarly the spotted owl. I am no enemy of the owl. If it
could be preserved at no or little cost, I would agree: the
variety of nature is a good, a high aesthetic good. But it is
no more than that. And sometimes aesthetic goods have to be
sacrificed to the more fundamental ones. If the cost of
preserving the spotted owl is the loss of livelihood for 30,000
logging families, I choose family over owl.

    The important distinction is between those environmental
goods that are fundamental and those that are merely aesthetic.
Nature is our ward. It is not our master. It is to be respected
and even cultivated. But it is man's world. And when man has to
choose between his well-being and that of nature, nature will
have to accommodate.

    Man should accommodate only when his fate and that of
nature are inextricably bound up.The most urgent accommodation
must be made when the very integrity of man's habitat -- e.g.,
atmospheric ozone -- is threatened. When the threat to man is
of a lesser order (say, the pollutants from coal- and oil-fired
generators that cause death from disease but not fatal damage
to the ecosystem), a more modulated accommodation that balances
economic against health concerns is in order. But in either case
the principle is the same: protect the environment -- because
it is man's environment.

    The sentimental environmentalists will call this saving
nature with a totally wrong frame of mind. Exactly. A sane --
a humanistic -- environmentalism does it not for nature's sake
but for our own.