2025-04-15 - Ecotopia Emerging by Ernest Callenbach
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> Under the Nazis in World War II, when the social order really
> did break down, the people who survived were the people with
> friends--support networks. Power grows out of social cohesion, not
> the barrel of a gun. You're only as strong as the people who will
> come to your aid.
A new online friend encouraged me to read this prequel to Ecotopia.
Below is a link to my notes from the original Ecotopia.
Ecotopia
In Ecotopia Emerging ideas are central. Character development and
plot are secondary. It's similar to Atlas Shrugged, but for hippies.
I wanted to like this book, but alas, i didn't like it.
Published in 1981, this book made many critical observations about
the United States in the early 1980s. It also made a few intelligent
projections. For example, it predicted the growth of food deserts,
where it would be nearly impossible to buy fresh, wholesome produce.
This book shows enthusiasm for group theory, urban planning, and
flaunting sexual mores. It contains many manifestos, some printed in
all italic, others presented as fireside chats from Vera Allen, the
president of Ecotopia. The chapters frequently switch between
different characters, including Lou, a young inventor of a
revolutionary new solar panel.
I like that Lou is into DIY and wants to freely publish
specifications and instructions in such a way that "anyone" could
easily and inexpensively make their own solar panels and use her
invention. She feels disdain for patents and the profit motive.
She has little patience for dishonesty. My kind of person!
This theme of Lou's brilliant invention reminds me of classic
science fiction, which focused a lot on gadgets and inventions.
This book introduces the original Ecotopia book in a clever way. An
east coast journalist writes a satirical article intended to
discredit the new political movement. He coins the term Ecotopia
intending to make it look like a naive dream. The "naive dreamers"
take ownership of the term, then one of them writes a fiction titled
Ecotopia. In it, a skeptical east coast journalist travels to
Ecotopia expecting to discredit it, but ends up falling in love.
Since ideas are the primary focus of this book, i guess that would
make the manifestos the most important part. Below are samples of
the author's manifesto writing style.
* * *
For four billion years the earth has moved in its steady course
around the sun. The known history of human beings is little more
than an eye-blink in that planetary lifetime. Yet, in their brief
years upon the planet, humans evolved such astonishing capacities in
hand and brain that they became a species which altered its own
environment. Chimpanzees might build rude nests of greenery in the
jungle and occupy them for a few days, but humans learned to pile
shaped stones into protective walls and buildings. Antelopes might
range for miles seeking lusher grass; humans learned to dig ditches
and divert streams to their gardens.
Thus, little by little, this unique species discovered ways to
overcome the ravages of predators and famine and disease. And once
humans found ways to live together in towns and cities, their
collective powers greatly increased; their populations multiplied.
In Asia and the Middle East they built canals and aqueducts to
irrigate vast realms and support elegant imperial courts. The Romans
flung their roads, their laws, and their armies over an empire
stretching for thousands of miles. Many such great centers of
civilization arose and flourished and then collapsed--in a majestic
cycle almost as imposing as the earth's own seasonal rhythms.
Through these slow pre-industrial centuries the cultivation of new
land gradually produced more food, and the impact of starvation and
malnutrition lessened; nonetheless, humans continued to live in a
rough balance with their fellow species. Only with the development
of technological society, which ambitiously harnessed the energy in
coal and oil, did human population soar. Then huge factory cities
spread over whole counties and the scale of human activities, in
engineering and in social organization, became overwhelming. By the
time that European peoples designate in their calendars as the end of
the twentieth century, the planet was home to over five billion
humans. Like a plague of locusts, they seemed to have escaped all
natural checks and were devouring everything in their path. Unlike
any creatures ever seen on the earth, humans exterminated other
species by the tends of thousands--either directly with guns, or
indirectly by destroying habitats in forest and river and grassland.
But the population explosion of the industrial epoch also subjected
humans themselves to new and unprecedented perils. Human
activities--even the detonation of nuclear bombs--remained puny in
comparison to the huge transfers of solar energy by winds and storms.
Nonetheless, in certain critical respects humans had acquired the
power to diminish the earth's capacity to support life. Deserts were
spreading because exploitative land ownership patterns drove desperate
people to overgraze and defoliate the land. Cancer and degeneration
of the gene pool through mutations were rising, consequences of human
cleverness in producing new chemical compounds for agricultural,
industrial, or military use. The burning of immense quantities of
coal and oil was steadily increasing the carbon dioxide of the
atmosphere; if this continued, a "greenhouse effect" would raise
temperatures enough to melt the polar ice caps, inundate parts of
many coastal cities, and make deserts of now fertile temperate
agricultural areas. Nor was there any certainty that the process
could be reversed; it might turn much of the earth's surface into a
Mars-like wasteland.
One peril was still more threatening. Under the industrial mode of
life, humans were subjugated in vast quarrelsome patriarchal
nation-states. The rulers of these states were now armed with
nuclear weapons so fearsome and so numerous that if they were used
even in small part they would end modern civilization, at least in
the northern hemisphere. Even more ominously, a nuclear war would
affect the outer atmosphere in unpredictable ways; its protective
layers might lose the critical ability to shield the earth from the
lethal blaze of the sun's radiation.
Thus, paradoxically, the technological ingenuity which had enabled
humans to proliferate into every habitable niche on the earth's
surface had also begun to threaten the survival upon the planet of
all plant and animal life--including the human species itself.
* * *
Since the seventies, the Western economy had been heavily dependent
on oil--particularly Middle Eastern oil. Because of American
domination of the territories around the Persian Gulf, this oil had
been available for several decades at extremely low prices compared
to coal and other energy reserves. When effective steps were
initiated by the OPEC nations to drive the price of oil upward, the
initial shock had taken both Western governments and corporations by
surprise. They reacted with confusion and a variety of ineffective
plans.
The conservative political tide which had swept the United States in
the eighties had also pushed federal energy policies in suicidal
directions. Vast sums were dispensed to subsidize synthetic fuel
production even though such fields would by, by the time they finally
came on the market, more costly than renewable biomass alternatives
and would cause additional cost burdens through air and water
pollution damage. New missiles and other armaments were put into
production, weakening the economy but adding to the public impression
that American might could always preserve access to the Gulf oil
fields. Federal funds shored up failing automobile
corporations--which had proved unable to compete with Japanese firms
in producing gas-efficient cars--instead of diverting them toward
production of busses, trains, and other low-energy means of
transportation. At a time when even utility executives recognized
that nuclear energy was becoming economically unviable, the federal
government slashed its budget for solar energy and conservation
measures and put the money into nuclear development.
The government's only significant realistic action was price
decontrol, which allowed oil companies to raise prices further,
generating almost incalculable profits. Higher prices drastically
penalized the poor, who drove old cars and lived in badly insulated
houses, but they did cut down on public gasoline and oil consumption.
Most American politicians, however, continued to believe that
reliance upon oil must continue and that increased drilling in the
United States and in areas within its immediate sphere of influence
(such as Mexico) would somehow provide so much new oil that prices
would fall. Support for this belief could be found in the history of
other industries, where increased demand had often led to increased
production.
But oil was not an ordinary industry. Along with agriculture--which
some thought could be made productive enough, through the application
of ever more chemicals, to pay for oil imports--the oil industry had
become the foundation of all social activity. And it depended upon a
resource which, however much of it might remain to be discovered, was
getting steadily more expensive to produce. Deeper wells took more
complex drilling equipment, better crews, used more drilling and
pumping energy. Wells offshore or in the Arctic required
sophisticated drilling rigs and extraction technology; transporting
their oil required expensive pipelines and often posed difficult
ecological and political problems.
Oil prices, then, would ultimately continue to rise until energy
consumers developed other, competing sources they could turn to, thus
providing a real check. But this idea was so unpalatable, and its
consequences so drastic, that it was literally unthinkable both to
politicians and to most of the citizenry at large. So a widespread
national flight from reality occurred, in which numerous alternatives
to oil were considered and rejected. After all, it was felt, oil
might be getting more expensive, but it was there; the alternatives
were untried. Moreover, because the alternatives were at the moment
slightly more expensive than oil, excuses could be found to reject
them on hardheaded economic grounds--ignoring the fact that they
would soon be cheaper since they relied on "free," inexhaustible
sources as the wind, the earth's geothermal heat, or ocean thermal
differentials. Alternatives to oil for transportation purposes, such
as burnable oils produced by desert plants, or alcohol fermented from
sugar cane, grain, or agricultural wastes, were similarly discarded.
Instead, officials fell back on a naive faith that the oil companies,
if "unleashed," would somehow revive the good old days of cheap
gasoline.
Thus, like a lumbering dinosaur unable to face the fact that the
climate had changed, daydreaming of the better pasturage of
yesteryear, oil-hungry America lurched toward some unseen economic
catastrophe.
* * *
Since the beginning of the war-production drive of 1940-1945, which
transformed the United States into the greatest industrial machine
the earth had yet seen, chemists had been developing new substances
at an astonishing pace. Once they learned the basic techniques of
hooking and unhooking atoms their imaginations seemed unlimited.
They played with shiny colored balls that represented atoms, building
them into beautiful, complex new molecules; then, first in
laboratories and later in immense plants that resembled oil
refineries, they produced the actual compounds.
Many of these new materials had extraordinarily interesting
properties. Some of them could kill insects; these were manufactured
by the millions of tons, and given names like DDT or 2-4D. Some were
useful as drugs, though they had unsuspected side-effects of nausea,
headaches, sweating, gastric upsets, circulatory disorders. Some
were glue-like and hardened as strong as steel, but could be molded
into infinitely varied shapes. Some could be made into thin, almost
weightless transparent films. Some could be used in foods as
preservatives, flavorizers, tenderizers, or to make foods stiffer or
creamier. Some were dyes, widely used in foods, clothing, plastics.
Some were capable of foaming up and then hardening into spongy or
rigid forms.
They appeared in paints and varnishes, they were made into bottles
and pan-coatings and phonograph records. They were eaten and drunk,
sprayed and powdered, applied in a thousand ways upon the landscape
and all the creatures who inhabited it. By the end of the seventies
there was no human activity in all the United States, from
contraception to the management of terminal disease, carried out free
of materials that had not existed on the face of the earth forty
years earlier. This, it was widely believed, was a testimonial to
humankind's improvements on nature. People clamored for the new
wonder products, and could no longer imagine living without them.
Especially during manufacture, but also for weeks or months later,
some of the new compounds gave off some of their molecules into the
surrounding air, which thus became permeated with strangely
penetrating smells. Children and animals attempted to evade these
smells, but tens of millions of adults were exposed to them
regularly--on their jobs in industrial plants or on farms, in their
houses, on the roads, and in the streets. Through the lungs, and
also through food and water, the new molecules entered into human
bodies. What they did there, aside from causing an occasional
headache or bout of nausea, nobody then regarded as important.
About thirty years after the great boom in chemical production began,
American public health officials and doctors realized that the nation
was experiencing an alarming new rise in the incidence of cancer.
Some attempted to explain this by saying that modern sanitation and
medicine enabled people to live longer, and that when they lived
longer they just naturally fell prey to diseases like cancer. Others
noted the rise in certain cancers due to cigarette smoking, or the
taking of popular drugs that had been insufficiently tested, or
dietary factors. Research was hampered by the fact that there were
so many different types of cancers, and many of them took twenty
years or so to develop. Increasingly, however, people of all ages
were suffering from the disease--with more than one in every four
Americans becoming victims.
Through the endless ingenuity of chemists about a thousand new
chemicals per year were introduced into the environment; the total
reached well past 80,000, of which almost 35,000 were officially
classified as known or potential hazards to human health. After many
citizen protests, the federal government had begun a program of
testing these substances to determine how severe were the dangers
they posed. But it was estimated that, at the budget allotted, this
testing program would not catch up for a hundred years--if then.
Meanwhile, pesticides were being impregnated into upholstery and
carpets and building materials. They were sprayed or painted onto
buildings by insect and rodent exterminators. Pesticides and
herbicides were sprayed in parks and public buildings and buses and
on gardens and golf courses. They were sprayed along roadsides,
where they drifted into nearby houses. Highly toxic materials called
PCBs were dispersed throughout the land as insulation material in
millions of electric-pole transformers and capacitors, television
sets, fluorescent light fixtures, and industrial equipment; whenever
these leaked or exploded or were tossed into dumps, the oily
persistent liquid diffused over nearby earth, automobiles, or people.
Agricultural pesticides and herbicides were sprayed from airplanes
and helicopters; combined with fertilizers, they were used to soak
seeds before planting. Each year, in the western states alone,
hundreds of millions of pounds of carcinogenic and mutagenic
compounds were distributed. Toxic substances in quantities large
enough to require destruction of poultry and eggs ended up in food
supplies of 17 states; in the East and Midwest, many lakes and
streams were closed to fishing because of dangerous chemical
concentrations.
Researchers hoping to find a viral cause for cancer were reluctantly
driven to the conclusion that, though some virus process might be
involved, the precipitating causes of cancer were something like 80
percent environmental. People were doing it to themselves. But this
was not a message that most Americans were then prepared to hear; it
went largely unreported and undiscussed, and the cancer rates
continued rising. Chemistry graduates continued to receive lucrative
job offers before they even stepped off campus. People went on
breathing air that was known to be dangerous to their health,
drinking water known to be contaminated, eating pesticide- and
additive-laden foods, and concentrating their attention on making
money in order (as they imagined it) to survive.
* * *
Riding the public enthusiasm for clean air and clean water which had
moved Congress during the seventies to enact major environmental
protection measures, the Environmental Protection Agency had early
scored substantial victories. An immense program of improved sewage
processing facilities--welcomed by construction interests as well as
the public--helped to lower pollution of streams and rivers. (It did
not, however, address the ultimate necessity of removing industrial
wastes--toxic metals, dangerous chemicals--from sewage sludge, so it
could be recycled back onto the land and thus sustain a permanent
agriculture.) Air quality standards helped to reduce the burden of
certain pollutants, though auto smog in major cities remained severe,
and the auto industry secured delays and exemptions to exhaust
pollution abatement.
Other industries also proved recalcitrant. Illegal night-time
dumping of toxic compounds was commonplace; EPA regulations designed
to track dangerous substances from their creation to final disposal
proved easy to circumvent. Many large corporations making steel and
paper and chemicals found it cheaper to flout environmental laws and
pay the insignificant fines that resulted, rather than to clean up
their operations. Then, in the early eighties, Congress's support
of environmental protections waned--despite the fact that a
substantial majority of Americans remained stubbornly in strong
support of them, even at considerable financial cost. The EPA thus
gradually ceased to be the champion of a clean environment and
promoter of public health and welfare; instead, it became a
weathervane responding to which ways the winds of Washington pressure
blew. Good people continued to work within its programs, but their
efforts were more frequently countermanded by higher levels of the
administration--more concerned with budget-cutting or rewarding
powerful political contributors than with the death and destruction
being wreaked upon the people.
In some cases the EPA's lethargy became literally farcical. When it
finally got ready to issue hazardous-waste regulations (two and a
half years behind its Congressional deadline), an official ceremony
was planned to take place at a notorious chemical dump in New Jersey.
However, the dump exploded before the ceremony could be held, with
55-gallon drums hurled through the air amid a spectacular fire which
sent a cloud of dangerous fumes over adjacent counties. Release of
the rules was then blocked for some days by budget officials who
feared suits from the chemical industry. As if to remind mortal that
nature will not indefinitely allow herself to be mocked, the dump
exploded twice again in succeeding weeks.
In the usual Washington style, the agency acted mainly when compelled
to--usually through lawsuits brought by environmental groups, who
were able to prove it was derelict in its duties. At other times
only massive citizen outrage could bring action. Thus, in the
forested areas of the Northwest, women who lived in small towns
surrounded by timberland noticed a dismaying rise in the umber of
miscarriages, deformed fetuses, and birth defects, along with an
increase in various chronic kidney and other diseases. The women and
their doctors went to the media with horrifying photographs;
anti-spraying groups spread throughout the lumber country. Finally
EPA agreed to put a temporary ban on 2,4,5-T spraying.
However, the timber and chemical companies fought back ferociously.
One chemical firm argued that traces of toxic dioxin in the forests
did not come from 2,4,5-T at all, but from forest fires. In any
case, other sprays were available--perhaps safer, or perhaps more
dangerous. Ad so spray helicopters resumed their runs, and people's
suspicion of federal inaction settled into despair or defiance.
* * *
The city of Berkeley, California, had experimented in the seventies
with a plan for diverting through traffic around certain residential
neighborhoods. However, since the plan had not been accompanied by
improvements in bus services or other public transportation
facilities, it merely increased congestion and pollution on the major
arteries surrounding these lucky neighborhoods. As a result, the
city was bitterly polarized on the issue; the traffic barricades only
survived by a narrow referendum majority. And irate drivers
continued to vandalize the wooden barriers, sometimes even ramming
them.
However, as the years went by, the greater quiet, safety for
children, and fresher air within the barricaded neighborhoods was
widely noticed. More frequent bus service and cheaper taxi service
was gradually provided, and the growth of neighborhood shopping
centers cut down the amount of cross-town traffic. A network of
"slow streets" with bumps to slow cars to around 15 miles per hour
had been instituted, giving bicyclists and people using slow
vehicles (wheel chairs and little electric cars) safe routes through
the city. Nonetheless, residents of two Berkeley neighborhoods
petitioned the city council to turn their streets into narrow
cul-de-sacs where cars would park end-on to the curbs and would have
to share the street, at a walking pace, with pedestrians and
children.
The plan was closely modeled on successful Dutch practices but it was
rejected by the council, which feared a repetition of the barriers
controversy. Int he weeks that followed, the residents of one of the
neighborhoods fumed, argued, then plotted and prepared. And one fine
night they turned out en masse and, working all night with a great
burst of shared energy, built a masonry wall across one end of their
street, planted trees and bushes along it, removed all non-resident
cars and parked their own inside white stripes they painted on the
asphalt. When morning came they sat on their stoops with their
coffee or tea and waited. Some people went off to work. A few
visitors arrived and duly parked in the vacant spots. At about ten
o'clock a police car finally passed the walled-off end of the street,
paused, then drove on--the officer in it probably assumed that the
traffic department was trying some experiment he hadn't heard of yet.
In fact it was not until three days later, when a city streets
department truck crew happened to drive past, that the dastardly deed
was discovered. Police visited the block, and everyone from
greybeards to tiny tots told them that the wall had always been
there, and they had no idea who built it. The police, who in
Berkeley wear long mustaches and rather luxurious hair, were amused,
but duly made their reports. Court orders were filed; the street
department laid plans to bulldoze the wall. It was rumored that the
county D.A. was not at all amused, and planned prosecutions.
At this point the neighbors, who by now loved their protective wall
passionately, realized they had to wage a do-or-die political
struggle. They organized visits to the street by journalists, TV
crews, and block organizations from many other parts of the city.
They managed to get almost all the members of the city council to
come and take a look. They provided safety statistics and readings
of sound levels, and a poetic neighborhood petition signed by all the
residents. They made an elaborate and ingenious but legally hopeless
argument defending their "direct citizen volunteer construction plan"
as a response to city budgetary stinginess.
Most of the press and media coverage of the case was surprisingly
favorable, though editors worried over the precedent-setting danger
of citizens taking their neighborhood welfare into their own
hands--especially in the dark of night. "Vigilante Progress?" was
the headline of one ambivalent editorial. In the end the city
council, rather embarrassed by the whole affair, passed an ordinance
that gave official blessing to this particular street-closing and
also defined a procedure that residents of other streets could follow
in debating, designing, and building their own street patterns. The
D.A. dropped plans for prosecution, and to celebrate this
announcement the neighbors--this time acting on strictly legal
lines--secured a proper city permit and closed their street entirely
for a Sunday afternoon block party. Small children added flowers to
the planting box that ran along the top of the new wall. Bigger
children dug holes for more trees, and the adults beamed at each
other and lifted each other off the ground in great bear-hugs, and
joked about renaming it "Wall Street."
* * *
Like persons, societies are sometimes seized by unconscious suicidal
impulses which remain inexplicable to outsiders. Individuals may
drive recklessly or drink or smoke too much; societies may become
addicted to impressive but precarious technologies which actually
contribute to friction and ultimate social breakdown. Sooner or
later, societies, like individuals, must seek to replace such
destructive behavior patterns with constructive ones--or they will
die.
An example is close at hand. In the fifties and sixties the United
States indulged in persistently self-destructive behavior regarding
its transportation system. Inheriting an extensive, efficient (and
rapacious) railroad industry, the country proceeded to displace it by
a truck-based freight industry and airplane- and automobile-based
passenger moving industries--all heavily subsidized from the public
treasury.
Commonsense might have pointed out that railroads require only about
a fourth of the fuel required, ton for ton and mile for mile, by
trucks. However, energy was then too cheap to be a determining
factor, and through a complex combination of political pressures the
highway and air lobbies defeated the railroad lobby for government
favor. In the decades following World War II, railroads had to
maintain their tracks and stations at their own expense, while $525
billion of federal, state, and local funds were spent on highways and
streets, $23 billion on dredging and locks for barges, and $50
billion on air transportation facilities.
The resulting decay of rail transport seemed relatively painless at
the time. The slow rise of one industry and the decline of another
does not normally cause great anguish to the public--although, in
this case, a small but vocal group protested the strangulation of
passenger train service. However, without realizing it, the general
public was in fact paying heavily for this particular change. The
true total shipping costs of many goods were several times higher on
the highway system than they would have been for shipping by rail;
but the part of these costs met by government subsidies was paid
indirectly and invisibly in taxes rather than in higher retail
prices.
By the late seventies, when rising energy costs began to make it
plain that the oil-dependent trucking system was a major contributor
to the nation's energy problem, the railroads had deteriorated in
many parts of the country almost to a disaster level. (The roadbed
was so bad in places that trains had to move at a walker's pace.)
Even determined efforts to rebuild the rail system would take many
years--while the enormous drain put on the economy by the need to
purchase foreign oil would continue.
Worse still, while double-track railway decently maintained could
carry the traffic of a 20-lane superhighway, the once-proud
interstates were proving so vulnerable to the pounding of trucks that
further massive capital subsidies would be required to keep them in
passable shape, since truck taxes came nowhere near the sums needed.
(A single truck caused 10,000 times the wear on a highway that a
passenger car did.)
Thus decisions made on the basis of short-term economic and political
calculations int he energy-flush earlier years have returned in later
times to haunt us, the children of their makers, with increased costs
for every item of merchandise that moves in the American economy,
and every plane trip. ...
* * *
As the first European colonists landed on the coast of North America
they faced a fast, forbidding sea of trees stretching from the
Atlantic beaches all the way to the Great Plains. The settlers
hacked at these trees in a frenzy. They chopped them down to make
room for agricultural plantings; they sawed them up for lumber to
build houses and piers and even roads. They burned them to stay
warm. But they also cleared the land simply because trees
constituted the hateful wilderness which they felt it was their
God-given mission to subdue. Only in the Northwest, whose immense
stands of virgin timber were isolated from Eastern markets, did
sections of the original forest survive; and after the second World
War these too fell rapidly to the chainsaws of the logging companies.
The original forest floors were rich reservoirs of nutrients,
accumulated by the leaf and twig droppings and the rotted trunks of
hundreds of generations of trees. The forest floor was tunneled by
worms and insect larvae, penetrated by roots, inhabited by
microorganisms busily decomposing materials that would soon be
recomposed into the next cycle of growth. The thick tree and
undergrowth cover gentled the impact of even the heaviest storms, so
that rainwater percolated into the earth instead of running off, and
creeks ran steadily and clear year round.
Once the trees were chopped down, the immense fertility they had
created could be exploited. Farms spread throughout the areas that
had enough rainfall to support crops, with only small woodlots as
remainders of what had been. Year after year, in all the vast
farmland stretching from Boston to Colorado, farmers extracted from
the earth the richness that the trees (or, father west, grasses) had
built up. Driven by market forces controlled by speculators in the
cities, they abandoned the ancient peasant wisdom of crop rotation
and mixed farming; they became corn farmers or wheat farmers,
dependent on the fluctuations of international markets. They no
longer planted ground-holding legumes to replenish the soil's
nitrogen, but turn3ed to chemical fertilizers. Seventy percent of
available agricultural land was devoted to the production of grain
for meat animals. Professional agricultural experts began to speak
of "factory farms."
Once the soil was denuded of its tree cover, erosion had set in.
Where there was heavy rainfall, as in the South, poverty-stricken
tenant farmers were driven to such desperate practices that gully
erosion sometimes consumed half a farm's acreage. In the dry Plains
area, grasslands plowed up for wheat simply blew away in dry years,
leaving the desolation of the Dust Bowl.
Gradually, most farmers had learned to plow with the contour of the
land, to plant windbreak trees, to sow soil-holding crops.
Nonetheless, even in years of benign climate and with the best
possible farming methods, topsoil losses through wind and water
erosion greatly exceeded soil build-up through organic processes.
From each row in each field, in all the thousands of fields making up
the watersheds of the nation, rivulets of rain carried soil particles
to the ditches and creeks and rivers, which became brown with the
soil suspended in them. The land lost the absorbency it had had when
forested, so run-off became rapid and great floods were common. In
dry seasons, wind scoured the fields, blowing loose soil into the
gullies. By the seventies, for each bushel of corn grown in Iowa,
six bushels of soil eroded away; in eastern Washington, 20 pounds of
topsoil were lost for every pound of wheat produced. Even in
well-tended farm country such as Wisconsin, about eight tons of
topsoil were being lost from each acre each year, and only about four
tons regenerated. The national average net loss was almost nine tons
per acre. Three million acres of cropland per year were being lost
to highways, factories, subdivisions, but the equivalent of another
three million was blowing and washing away.
In the great farm belts of America, vast tracts of land were worked
by machines which consumed large quantities of petroleum fuel.
Further expenditures of costly energy were made in food processing,
packaging, and distribution. Indeed, for every calorie of food
energy consumed, more than one calorie of fossil fuel energy was
being expended in producing and delivering it. The overall energy
budget of American agriculture had thus begun to show a net loss.
Paradoxically, the situation would have been improved if human beings
or their livestock could eat oil directly--and in fact during the
sixties, when oil was very cheap, researchers had tried to develop
bacteria what ate oil and could then be made into porridge or cattle
feed.
However, most people preferred to believe that the natural abundance
of the American soil was eternal. After all, corporate advertising
told them that the ingenuity of American agribusiness could control
nature and extract unimagined productivity from the land. The
underlying energy consumption of the system remained invisible,
except in steadily rising prices for foodstuffs. Few Americans would
have relished the idea that their food supply was in reality
critically dependent on oil wells in feudal countries half a world
away, prey to sudden revolutions and disruption. The point at which
energy outlays would no longer be able to make up for declining soil
fertility came ever nearer. But the prospect of food shortages in
America seemed as remote as the prospect of gas shortages had seemed
a decade earlier.
* * *
From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it had been an article
of faith that there were always economies in greater scale: if a
factory could be doubled in size, it could turn out more than twice
as many goods and return more than twice the profits. This belief led
to ever increasing size in corporate enterprises, and it was applied,
by powerful analogy, to every aspect of life. The bigger a
power-generating station, the better. The bigger a steamship, the
better. The bigger a city, the better.
This tendency, however, came to stand in fundamental opposition to
another principle, which might be called the irreducibility of error.
Careful design of human-machine "interfaces" such as control panels
could reduce human errors, especially if operators were carefully
trained and frequently tested. But, surprising though it might seem
in the abstract, errors could never be eliminated entirely. It was
never entirely possible to foresee all possible breakdowns.
Moreover, the human mind was more complexly flexible than any
computer; evolution of the human mind had equipped it to deal with
rapidly changing situations that required instinctive judgment and
the balancing of uncertain risks, but the very qualities of broad
adaptability that gave it survival potential also made it more
erratic than simpler organisms. And no machine remained reliable
forever. The strongest metals in the end developed fatigue;
insulation broke down; even computers aged and developed electronic
failures or mysterious bugs in their complex programs.
The establishment of extremely dangerous large technologies, such as
those of nuclear warfare or nuclear plants or those involving the
production of immensely toxic chemicals like dioxin, thus brought the
possibility of large-scale disasters to human populations into
juxtaposition with the unavoidability of error. Clever military
designers inserted fail-safe devices into command and control
systems, and they surrounded bomb trigger mechanisms with multiple
layers of protective devices. Their industrial counterparts
interposed computer links between human operators and reactor cores,
wrote ever more complex programs, provided more warning bells, left
fewer human over-rule possibilities.
Nonetheless, both human and machine error persists. A pilot of 20
years' experience, landing with ample ground control contact on a
clear day, puts an airliner down in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
Operators of a nuclear plant forget that certain valves have been left
open, a partial core meltdown occurs, a hundred thousand people must
be evacuated. A bomber inexplicably drops a hydrogen bomb by
accident; five of the bomb's six safety devices fail, and only the
sixth prevents the destruction of much of North Carolina.
Under such circumstances, the art of risk assessment becomes
metaphysical. Professional insurance staticians opt out of these
games, knowing that the risks are not amenable to normal actuarial
analysis. Nonetheless, sophisticated calculations are made by eminent
scientific committees, and then revised and re-revised. They provide
estimates of the likelihood of irreparable catastrophic
events--making a major American city uninhabitable, for instance, or
mistakenly believing a Russian missile attack was in progress and
responding by devastating the entire Northern Hemisphere.
The risks in such calculations always turn out to be impressively
small, indeed minute--smaller by far than the risk the ordinary
citizen takes in crossing town by car. However, ordinary citizens do
not possess the statistical refinement needed to evaluate a risk
expressed as .000001% And so the normal political process, which
depends upon the judgment of ordinary citizens fitfully informed by
the news media and by a few conscientious scientists, cannot come to
terms with such risks.
It is only when a major disaster occurs, as in the explosion that
scattered dioxin over the town of Seveso in Italy, or a near-disaster
such as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, that
the political process re-exerts control over technology. Then the
trend toward ever greater scale may be checked or even reversed;
people demand security against super-catastrophic risks even at the
cost of more frequent smaller risks.
In the United States as in elsewhere in the world, people began to
discover that nuclear installations suffered far more "minor"
accidents than had been publicly revealed. Moreover, as existing
nuclear plants aged, many experts placed the risk of further
Three-Mile-Island type accidents at near certainty over a range of
ten years or so. The chances of worse accidents--seriously
contaminating a few miles around a plant, with large but perhaps
acceptable damage to property and some lives lost through radiation
exposure--still seemed bearable to some. but the risks of a meltdown
accident, which would render several counties uninhabitable, perhaps
for generations, and which directly or indirectly caused tens of
thousands of deaths, might be statistically very small and yet very
politically and morally insupportable.
In the end, thus, commonsense reasserted itself over arcane
statistics. People decided that they would rather expose themselves
to a 1% chance of a solar boiler blowing up and killing three people
than the .00001% chance of a nuclear meltdown. ...
author: Callenbach, Ernest
detail:
LOC: PS3553.A424 E3
tags: book,fiction
title: Ecotopia Emerging
Tags
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book
fiction