TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100989/10098900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.2 KB | 171 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 119

Fear in a Handful of Numbers


By Dennis Overbye


    Everybody talks about the weather, goes the saying (often
wrongly attributed to Mark Twain), but nobody does anything
about it. The word from scientists is that whoever said this was
wrong. All of us, as we go about the mundane business of
existence, are helping change the weather and every other aspect
of life on this fair planet: Los Angelenos whipping their sunny
basin into a brown blur on the way to work every morning; South
Americans burning and cutting their way through the rain forest
in search of a better life; a billion Chinese, their smokestacks
belching black coal smoke, marching toward the 21st century and
a rendezvous with modernization.

    On the flanks of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, an instrument that
records the concentration of carbon dioxide dumped into the
atmosphere as a result of all this activity traces a wobbly
rising line that gets steeper and steeper with time. Sometime
in the next 50 years, say climatologists, all that carbon
dioxide, trapping the sun's heat like a greenhouse, could begin
to smother the planet, raising temperatures, turning farmland
to desert, swelling oceans anywhere from four feet to 20 feet.
Goodbye Venice, goodbye Bangladesh. Goodbye to millions of
species of animals, insects and plants that haven't already
succumbed to acid rain, ultraviolet radiation leaking through
the damaged ozone layer, spreading toxic wastes or bulldozers.

    A species that can change its planet's chemistry just by
day-to-day coming and going has, I suppose, achieved a kind of
coming-of-age. We could celebrate or tremble. What do we do
when it is not war that is killing us but progress? When it is
not the actions of a deranged dictator threatening the world but
the ordinary business of ordinary people? When there are no
bombs dropping, nobody screaming, nothing to fear but a line on
a graph or a handful of numbers on a computer printout? Dare we
change the world on the basis of a wobbly line on a graph? We
can change the world, and those numbers, slowly, painfully --
we can ration, recycle, carpool, tax and use the World Bank to
bend underdeveloped nations to our will. But the problem is
neither the world nor those numbers. The problem is ourselves.

    In our relations with nature, we've been playing a deadly
game of cowboys and Indians. We all started as Indians. Many
primitive cultures -- and the indigenous peoples still clinging
today to their pockets of underdevelopment -- regarded the earth
and all its creatures as alive. Nature was a whistling wind
tunnel of spirits. With the rise of a scientific, clockwork
cosmos and of missionary Christianity, with its message of man's
dominion and relentless animus against paganism, nature was
metaphorically transformed. It became dead meat.

    The West was won, Los Angeles and the 20th century were
built, by the cowboy mind. To the cowboy, nature was a vast
wilderness waiting to be tamed. The land was a stage, a backdrop
against which he could pursue his individual destiny. The story
of the world was the story of a man, usually a white man, and
its features took their meaning from their relationship to him.
A mountain was a place to test one's manhood; an Asian jungle
with its rich life and cultures was merely a setting for an
ideological battle. The natives are there to be "liberated." By
these standards even Communists are cowboys.

    The cowboys won -- everywhere nature is being tamed -- but
victory over nature is a kind of suicide. The rules change when
there is only one political party allowed in a country or there
is only one company selling oil or shoes. So too when a species
becomes numerous and powerful enough to gain the illusion of
mastery. What we have now is a sort of biological equivalent to
a black hole, wherein a star becomes so massive and dense that
it bends space and time totally around itself and then pays the
ultimate price of domination by disappearing.

    Modern science, a cowboy achievement, paradoxically favors
the Indian view of life. Nature is alive. The barest Antarctic
rock is crawling with microbes. Viruses float on the dust.
Bacteria help digest our food for us. According to modern
evolutionary biology, our very cells are cities of formerly
independent organisms. On the molecular level, the distinction
between self and nonself disappears in a blur of semipermeable
membranes. Nature goes on within and without us. It wafts
through us like a breeze through a screened porch. On the
biological level, the world is a seamless continuum of energy
and information passing back and forth, a vast complicated
network of exchange. Speech, food, posture, infection,
respiration, scent are but a few pathways of communication.
Most of those circuits are still a mystery, a labyrinth we have
barely begun to acknowledge or explore.

    The great anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson
pointed out 20 years ago that this myriad of feedback circuits
resemble the mathematical models of thinking being developed
for the new science of artificial intelligence. A forest or a
coral reef or a whole planet, then, with its checks and balances
and feedback loops and delicate adjustments always striving for
light and equilibrium, is like a mind. In this way of thinking,
pollution is literal insanity (Bateson was also a psychologist).
To dump toxic waste in a swamp, say, is like trying to repress
a bad thought or like hitting your wife every night and assuming
that because she doesn't fight back, you can abuse her with
impunity -- 30 years later she sets your bed on fire.

    Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that
consequences may take years or generations to manifest
themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is
a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to
have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of
a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When
these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them.
Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself
or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change,
that is, aging -- Where did those clothes and that strange
haircut come from? Was I really that skinny?

    We weren't born with the ability to taste carbon dioxide or
see the ozone layer, but science and technology have evolved to
fill the gap to help us measure what we cannot feel or taste or
see. We have old numbers with which, like old photographs, we
can gauge the ravages of time and our own folly. In that sense,
the "technological fix" that is often wishfully fantasized --
cold fusion, anyone? -- has already appeared. The genius of
technology has already saved us, as surely as the Ghost of
Christmas Future saved Scrooge by rattling the miser's tight
soul until it cracked. A satellite photograph is technology, and
so are the differential equations spinning inside a Cray
supercomputer. There is technology in the wobbly rising trace
on a piece of graph paper. There is technology in a handful of
numbers.

    The trick is to become more like Indians without losing the
best parts of cowboy culture -- rationalism and the spirit of
inquiry. We need more science now, not less. How can we stretch
our nerves around those numbers and make them as real and as
ominous as our cholesterol readings? Repeat them each night on
the evening news? We need feedback, as if we were the audience
in a giant public radio fund-raising drive hitting the phones
and making pledges. Like expert pilots navigating through a
foggy night, we need the faith to fly the planet collectively
by our instruments and not by the seat of our pants. In the West
we need the faith and courage to admit the bitter truth, that
our prosperity is based as much on cheap energy as on free
markets. A long-postponed part of the payment for that energy
and prosperity is coming due if we want to have any hope of
dissuading the Chinese and the rest of the Third World from
emulating us and swaddling the planet with fumes and wastes.

    What if the spirit doesn't hit? We can't afford to wait if
we want to survive. While we are waiting for this sea change of
attitude, we could pretend -- a notion that sounds more
whimsical than it is. Scientists have found that certain actions
have a feedback effect on the actor. Smilers actually feel
happier; debaters become enamored of their own arguments; a good
salesman sells himself first. You become what you pretend to be.
We can pretend to be unselfish and connected to the earth. We
can pretend that 30-ft.-long, black-tinted-glass,
air-conditioned limos are unfashionable because we know that
real men don't need air conditioning. We can pretend that we
believe it is wrong to loot the earth for the benefit of a
single generation of a single species. We can pretend to care
about our children's world.

    The air has been poisoned before, 3 billion years ago, when
the blue-green algae began manufacturing oxygen. That was the
first ecological crisis. Life survived then. Life will not
vanish now, but this may be the last chance for humans to go
along gracefully.