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SURVIVAL KIT: The couple's
eighth book sets a political agenda.
Linda Cicero / News Service |
"there's no vicious debate
in the scientific community about whether the global
climate is going to change—and whether that will
be disastrous for humanity,” says Paul Ehrlich,
Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford. “It’s
just a question of how large the damage is going to
be.”
He and Anne Ehrlich, his wife, a senior researcher in
biological sciences, are sitting in his rather cluttered
office in the Herrin Building. Photos and posters plaster
the room. The place looks settled.
It should. The Ehrlichs have been on the Stanford faculty
since 1959. But their partnership goes back earlier:
they’ve been married for half a century. The couple
has written eight books together on environmental issues,
and their latest, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption,
and the Human Future (Island Press/Shearwater Books,
2004), is a kind of anniversary commemoration.
In it, they argue that humankind faces the fate of Nineveh,
the ancient Assyrian capital that crumpled under the
effects of deforestation and unsustainable irrigation.
But this time, they warn, the devastation will be global.
In short, we are accelerating toward ecological suicide.
The encyclopedic work reads like a status report for
the environmental movement, and an indictment. Timothy
Wirth, PhD ’73, president of the United Nations
Foundation and a former Colorado senator, deems the
book “a brilliant account of the issues that should
be at the top of the nation’s agenda but have
been all but ignored.”
At the heart of the matter: politics. Paul was boosted
to fame in 1968 with his landmark The Population
Bomb. It was one of the books that alerted the
world to the dangers of unchecked population growth
and helped create a social movement. Beginning with
the Nixon administration, he says, the nation embarked
on effective, incremental change. “We put in some
of the best environmental legislation in the world.
It was not enough, but it was good.”
But that momentum faded, the Ehrlichs write in Nineveh.
“President Bill Clinton’s administration
did surprisingly little to address [environmental and
humanitarian] issues, and the George W. Bush administration
has been determinedly moving in the opposite direction.”
Paul blames Bush—and Reagan before him—
for measures “destroying 30 years of progress.
This country can ill afford another four years like
the last four years,” he says.
Moreover, the Ehrlichs say, legislators usually identify
red-hot, urgent priorities—and push to the back
burner medium- to long-range problems they believe can
be solved easily when the time comes.
“When something like global warming is discussed,
it is always as one more political issue rather than
something well established by abundant scientific evidence
and potentially much more threatening to civilization
than Saddam Hussein could ever have been,” the
authors write. As evidence of that threat, they cite
the 15,000 French who died in the 2003 heat wave, which
also sparked forest fires in France, Spain and Portugal.
The authors criticize both sides of the political divide.
Conservatives are “blithely confident that decay
of the human environment, even if serious, will not
be a grave problem for those with the financial means
to keep their personal surroundings safe and pleasant,”
they write. “Those on the right believe that their
end of the lifeboat is unsinkable.” Liberals wish
to distribute resources more democratically, but don’t
understand that we are staring at the bottom of the
box. “Those on the left think that if the lifeboat’s
load were appropriately redistributed and properly balanced,
its capacity would be essentially infinite,” the
Ehrlichs write.
Besides global warming, overpopulation remains a big
item on the authors’ agenda, despite critics’
jabs that their direst predictions haven’t come
true. Since the Ehrlichs were born, in the early 1930s,
the world population has exploded from 2 billion to
6.3 billion—and it’s still booming, despite
falling birth rates in many developed nations. The impact,
they say, threatens the world’s resources within
decades.
“I have severe doubts that we can support even
2 billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.,”
Paul told the New York Times recently. “The
world can support a lot more vegetarian saints than
Hummer-driving idiots.”
Even a relatively modest 2 billion increase in the next
century would be a “gigantic addition,”
says Paul. “Let’s put it this way, if you’re
driving a car into a wall at 50 mph, and slow down to
30 mph, you double your chances of surviving. But that
doesn’t make it a wonderful event.”
Nineveh points out that the lopsided distribution
of population perpetuates inequities in wealth distribution.
The average European cow earns $2.50 per day in government
subsidies, while almost half the Earth’s population
lives on less than two bucks a day.
The authors also cite the ongoing dangers of runaway
consumption in the West. In the year 2000, the United
States, with less than 5 percent of the global population,
used about 23 percent of the world’s energy. The
size of the average U.S. home built in the last half-century
nearly doubled, despite smaller households.
In 2002, more than half the passenger vehicles sold
in the United States were fuel-inefficient light trucks
and SUVs—and Americans own more than a quarter
of the world’s cars.
“Human beings are extremely
clever: if they can get around denial, they'll
do something.”
- Paul Ehrlich |
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What can be done? The Ehrlichs still think it’s
possible for individual action to circumvent a rush
toward doom—but only if people bother to be well-informed
about the human predicament. They find it astonishing,
for example, that students can get a bachelor’s
degree without knowing where their food comes from.
They also argue for more thoughtful behavior; in fact,
they exemplify it. Paul walks 1 3⁄4 miles a day
each way to Stanford. They use solar-heated water at
home. Foremost, in Paul’s view, they only had
one child. The Ehrlichs are far from self-congratulatory,
however, given the role of airlines in their lives.
“We are adding carbon dioxide to the air so that
we can attend meetings about global warming,”
Paul comments wryly.
They also suggest reforming democracy to fit the 21st
century. For example, perhaps multinational corporations
should not be accorded the same rights as human individuals.
The couple recommends that the UN sponsor a “Millenium
Assessment of Human Behavior,” to measure how
individual acts affect other people, the planet, our
descendents.
What won’t work, in their view, is the complacent
assumption that technology will fix all problems created
by technology. Nuclear power did not solve human energy
and food problems, and it produced events like Chernobyl
and Three Mile Island. The world’s poor are not
being fed by leaf protein or algae grown on sewage sludge,
once a hope for the future. And more freeways did not
solve traffic problems.
An example closer to hand is Paul Ehrlich’s office,
covered with papers. Wasn’t the electronic age
supposed to get rid of paper clutter forever? He gestures
helplessly. “That’s what everyone thought,”
he admits, but the problem has become worse. “The
paperless office has given way to the paper-swamped
office.”
Given the sobering data in their books, it’s surprising
how upbeat the Ehrlichs are. They conclude their book
with a thought that could be their motto: “In
the face of pervasive injustice and massive environmental
need, idealism can be realism.” In person, they
energize visitors with their enthusiasm and can-do optimism.
Their staff admits it can be hard to keep pace. The
couple is often on the road, and during the summer they
navigate between Stanford and the Rocky Mountain Biological
Lab in Crested Butte, Colo., where they’ve done
fieldwork for more than 40 years.
Where does their hope come from? In Nineveh,
they conclude that “all is not dark; that many
human beings have had, and many still have, a vision
of a world of peace and equality—and that substantial
progress in that direction has been made.”
In the end, they have confidence in human nature. “Human
beings are extremely clever: if they can get around
denial, they’ll do something,” Paul says.
Meanwhile, we have the Ehrlichs to remind us that the
clock is ticking. |
