Earth Odyssey

Book by Hertsgaard Mark

Will the human species survive the many environmental pressures crowding in on it at the end of the twentieth century?

By the time I left China in 1997, I had spent the better part of six years trying to answer that question. My quest had taken me on a trip around the world that included extended (and sometimes repeated) stops in nineteen countries and interviews with everyone from heads of state like Vàclav Havel in Prague to starving peasants in war-torn Sudan. I had left the United States in May 1991, eighteen months after the Berlin Wall fell and three months after a U.S.-led army drove Iraqi invaders from Kuwait to maintain the flow of oil that modern economies crave like lungs crave oxygen.

Leaving San Francisco and traveling west to east, I began my global tour in Europe. After two months in Holland, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden, I went to what was still the Soviet Union for five weeks. I continued on to Czechoslovakia, Greece, Turkey, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Thailand, and Brazil, where I visited the Amazon and attended the UN Earth Summit in June 1992. I later returned to Europe and the United States before concluding my travels with six weeks in China. I financed my wanderings by traveling light, living low on the food chain, and writing occasional magazine articles from the road.

Scientists had long studied whether elephants in the wild and dolphins in the deep were heading for extinction. I wanted to shift the gaze and turn the binoculars on my fellow humans. Just as scientists compare a given animal's behavior with the dynamics of its habitat to determine whether it is endangered, I planned to analyze human behavior in relation to the earth's ecosystems to gauge the environmental prospects of Homo sapiens.

In The Naked Ape, his provocative study of the human animal, zoologist Desmond Morris observed that humans "suffer from a strange complacency that . . . we are somehow above biological control" and that our collapse as the earth's dominant species is therefore impossible. Such complacency, Morris pointed out, flies in the face of all we know about the natural world. Biologists have estimated that 99 percent of all species in the history of the planet have ended in extinction. These 99 percent have been unable to survive the ceaseless competition--against the elements, against other species--that is the biological essence of life. The best known example is the dinosaurs, which, if current scientific thinking is correct, were doomed by a dramatic shift in the earth's climate some sixty-five million years ago, perhaps brought on by an asteroid colliding with the planet. Dinosaurs flourished for one hundred million years before meeting their demise, but the average species lasts no more than one million years before expiring. That bodes well for humans if one dates the birth of our species at 200,000 years ago, as recent DNA studies suggest; it is less comforting if one begins the count with the earliest cases of stone tool creation, between 1.5 and 2.5 million years ago. In any case, Homo sapiens are part of the lucky 1 percent of species that have survived so far, as are the millions of other species currently in existence. But survival is a constant challenge. Ecosystems are forever in flux, and the scramble for life takes unexpected turns.

"The main piece of bad news at the end of the twentieth century is that we humans can now destroy ourselves, in either of two ways. We can destroy ourselves quickly, through nuclear weapons, or slowly, through environmental degradation," Hubert Reeves told me in Paris near the start of my global journey. Reeves was a cosmologist and bestselling author--a sort of French Carl Sagan. His appearance was dominated by a full gray beard that hung down to his chest and gave him the look of a wizard from the dim past who had miraculously been reincarnated and fitted out in modern garb. Yet in fact, he was the director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the French government's main science institute. With the Cold War over, Reeves was optimistic that humanity could avoid nuclear self-destruction. He was less sanguine, however, about the threat posed by global warming, excessive population growth, and other more gradual forms of environmental overload. "This problem will be much more difficult to solve," Reeves said, "because it is so much more complex. You can't just have two men sit down at a table and agree to stop being stupid."

Indeed, many modern environmental hazards are rooted not in the collectively suicidal "logic" of nuclear weapons deployment but in economic activities and technological choices that bring pleasure, profits, paychecks, or simple survival to millions: the production and use of automobiles, the felling of rainforests by landless people, the relentless advertising and consumerism that boost sales figures the world over. Averting global warming, for example, could require phasing out fossil fuels altogether in favor of solar and other renewable energy sources, a shift that even solar advocates like Christopher Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., acknowledge is "inconceivable" to most people (not to mention anathema to some powerful economic interests).

Of course, human activity has always imposed burdens on the earth's ecosystem. But the scale and technological power of twentieth-century civilization are many times greater than those of earlier generations, and so are the environmental side effects. Historically, sewage disposal has been the great challenge for human societies trying to maintain clean water supplies. That challenge remains today, especially in poor nations, but modern humans also live in a world awash in man-made chemicals. Global production increased 350 times between 1940 and 1982; the U.S. alone produced 435 billion pounds of such chemicals in 1992. Dioxin and other hormone-disrupting chemicals persist in the environment for decades and can travel thousands of miles; contamination and fertility declines have been detected even among Arctic polar bears. Likewise, the explosion at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 was arguably the most destructive accident in industrial history. The blast left the surrounding countryside uninhabitable for decades and brought death and disease to thousands of civilians. (The precise number of victims is still uncertain; see chapter 4.) The fact that different wind patterns could have sent most of the explosion's radiation across western Europe, where much of it blew in any case, attracted attention across the continent and generated new respect for environmental issues among masses and elites alike. "It was Chernobyl that caused the big change in public opinion about the environment," Antonio Cianciullo, the environmental reporter for the Italian daily La Repubblica, told me in Rome. "Our readers were more interested in these questions after the accident. This caused editors to take environmental issues more seriously and increase coverage of them."

Chernobyl made clear the irrelevance of national borders to modern environmental problems, a theme underlined by other key developments of the 1980s. Scientists had suspected since 1974 that the stratospheric ozone layer, which protects the earth from excessive ultraviolet radiation, was being damaged by man-made chemicals, especially chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the active agent in air conditioners and refrigerators. Epidemics of skin cancer, weakened immune systems, and damage of the marine food chain were but some of the potential consequences of ozone layer destruction. But definitive proof of the problem did not come until 1985, when scientists observed a large hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. The hole was so large that at first it was dismissed as impossible and blamed on a faulty sensor. But after subsequent observations confirmed the initial finding, and large ozone losses were also reported over much of the northern hemisphere, an international agreement ordering a phaseout of CFC production was signed in 1987. The negotiators of this so-called Montreal Protocol breathed a sigh of relief--prematurely, it soon turned out.

Another atmospheric threat making headlines in the late 1980s was global warming. Once again, the scientific community had long known about this danger; the first scholarly analysis appeared in 1896. But not until 1988 did global warming become a household term, thanks to the combination of an extremely hot summer in the United States and some remarkably frank congressional testimony by a prominent government scientist, Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Space Institute. "It's time to stop waffling," Hansen said. ". . . The greenhouse effect is here."

Svante August Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist who authored the 1896 paper, had theorized correctly that the carbon dioxide released when fossil fuels were burned could have a warming effect on the planet's atmosphere. Like glass in a greenhouse, carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun that otherwise would reflect off the earth and back into space. Perhaps because Arrhenius hailed from a cold weather country, he speculated that the greenhouse effect might produce "more equable and better climates." Modern scientists, however, saw trouble ahead. Higher global temperatures could melt glaciers and expand oceans, causing sea levels to rise and flooding such low-lying capitals as Amsterdam, Shanghai, and Washington, D.C. Since one-third of the world's people lived within thirty-five miles of a coastline, the potential loss of life and property was enormous.

Global warming would also likely cause more extreme weather events in general: more droughts, hurricanes, blizzards, and the like. The reasons are complex but boil down to the expectation that higher temperatures would increase water evaporation around the world. The extra evaporation would lead to more rainfall and storms for many regions even as it caused dry, inland areas like the Great Plains--the world's breadbasket--to experience more dryness. Although a warmer world might bring some benefits, most experts worried that it could disrupt global food production and price millions of the world's poor out of their daily bread. A hotter planet would likely be more disease-ridden as well, as insects and other agents of infection spread malaria and other tropical diseases to areas previously protected by their relatively cool temperatures.

To complicate matters, many of the emerging ecological threats seemed to reinforce one another. The same CFCs that widened the ozone hole also intensified the greenhouse effect. And the greenhouse effect, by raising temperatures too rapidly for plants and animals to adjust to, threatened to hasten species' extinction, another hazard attracting notice in the 1980s. According to Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, civilization was wiping out species thousands of times faster than the usual "background" rate of extinctions that had pertained over the previous ten thousand years. This did not bode well for humans, Wilson wrote, because biodiversity "supports the natural ecosystems on which human life ultimately depends [by] enriching the soil, purifying the water and creating the very air we breathe." (Earthworms, for example, help make soil fertile by loosening it enough for oxygen and water to penetrate it.) Since tropical rainforests are home to more than half of the world's organisms, species loss has been driven most powerfully by tropical deforestation, which in the late 1980s was occurring so rapidly that, if the pace was maintained, the world would have no rainforests at all by 2050. Bringing the problem full circle, deforestation also boosted global warming because it released additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere even as it deprived the planet of millions of trees that, through photosynthesis, could absorb excess carbon dioxide.

A further complication: although it is hard for humans to feel much urgency about problems far in the future, many of these problems have short fuses. The long lag time between cause and effect means that ozone depletion, climate change, and population growth could acquire so much momentum that they cannot be halted, much less reversed, quickly. The ozone layer, for example, is certain to remain depleted for decades, despite the CFC phaseout mandated by the Montreal Protocol, for the simple reason that CFCs remain in the atmosphere for decades. Not until 2050 are atmospheric concentrations of CFCs projected to return to the levels of the late 1970s, when the ozone hole first appeared. (And that assumes, naively, that everyone obeys the protocol.) Meanwhile, there will be costs. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 1991 that some twelve million Americans would develop skin cancer over the coming fifty years.

Likewise with global warming: the world's automobile tailpipes and industrial chimneys have been spewing greenhouse gases for decades, producing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide 50 percent higher than what existed before the Industrial Revolution. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2,500 scientists and other experts commissioned in 1988 by the United Nations to study the problem, to stabilize concentrations at even this level--which might or might not deter significant climate change--global emissions would have to be cut by 50-70 percent, taking them back to 1950s levels. Carbon emissions have instead been growing by almost 1 percent a year, a trend that will concentrate twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 2100 as existed during the preindustrial era, thus increasing the chances of severe climate change.

Like the captain of an oceanliner who has to turn the helm miles ahead of where he actually intends the vessel to change course, humans will have to alter their environmental behavior years in advance of seeing much positive effect. But is such farsighted behavior consistent with human nature? Millions of years of evolution have left humans capable of responding to immediate threats--the rustle of leaves or the sudden shadow overhead signaling the approach of a predator--but less inclined to react to dangers in the distant future. "We have a saying in Russia," Moscow television reporter Sergei Skvortsov told me while explaining why Russians cared more about the economic collapse and political conflicts convulsing their nation than about their disasterously polluted environment. "We say, 'Even the old grandmother does not cross herself until the lightning strikes.' Which means that people don't worry about bad things until they start to happen."". . . We Are Still Here."

The biggest problem of prejudice we face today is not black versus white . . . but rich versus poor.
--Jimmy Carter
Was it a dream, a trick of the night? Or the coming of dawn? Inside the hut, the darkness was total. There was only sound: the insistent keening of a great multitude of birds-not cheerful songsters but agitated complainers whose hoarse moans rose and fell, rose and fell, like a chorus of the dead jealously trying to hold back the day. The hut sat on a riverbank, and as the lamentation continued it became evident that the birds were in the trees across the river, in Ethiopia. Outside, it was still too dark to see, but the sky above the treeline was showing its first streaks of gray. By midday the sun would strike the earth so forcefully that neither man nor beast would venture far from shade, but for now the air was surprisingly cool and utterly still; not the slightest breeze grazed the skin. As the gray light advanced, the birds' cries receded, as if the approaching sun was driving the flock inexorably back to the netherworld of night. But the birds...