TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/100989/10098900.000

Text File | 1990-09-18 | 9KB | 162 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.