For
March 7
Excerpt
from Edmund Morgan, The Sixties
We refuse to remain on the margins of society,
and we refuse to enter that society on its terms.... The human values that
women were assigned to preserve [must] expand out of the confines of private
life and become the organizing principles of society.... The Market, with its
financial abstractions, deformed science, and obsession with dead things-rnust
be pushed back to the margins. And the "womanly' values of community and
caring must rise to the center -as the only human principles.
-Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her
Own Good
Consumed by the war overseas, rebuffed by
a resistant mainstream culture, battered by repression at home, and spinning
out of control, the Movement lost its sense of euphoria, its belief that it
could save the world while simultaneously saving its soul. Despite the
countercultural quest for community, the late Sixties and early Seventies were
a time of chaos and division rather than purpose and unity.
Yet new Movement energy was being born
in the midst of this chaos. As the black power movement and New Left spiraled
into their apocalyptic phases, women claimed center stage in the evolution of
the Sixties' vision, embracing and extending the fusion of prefigurative and
instrumental politics. Women in the civil rights movement and New Left
challenged their male counterparts' failure to live up to their political
values.
The counterculture was fertile ground
for women to liberate themselves from mainstream cultural constraints. Yet, as
Michele Ryan recalled, it was a double-edged liberation:
It came in with the hippie thing, that we're all
free, men and women, there should be no inhibitions. You could make love as and
when you felt
like it. As a woman one really believed that at the time. And for a while it
was liberating to feel you no longer had to obey any conventions or
inhibitions, that you could sleep with anyone because you were on the pill. If
you fell in love or felt desire, you could actually say it. But the other side
of the coin was that, having said it, it was used totally to the man's
satisfaction. Nothing seemed to have changed very much.'
With
its emphasis on sexual expression and domestic commonality, the counterculture
provided small, symbolic openings for both genders' liberation from confining
sex stereotypes. Struggles between men and women on the editorial boards of
underground papers or in communal kitchens set in motion dynamics that, for
some, led to more fundamental attitude changes. At a theoretical level, much of
the counterculture's opposition to mainstream values was an assertion of the
same "domestic" values-nurturance and love, feeling, kinship and
family, the natural-with which feminists later countered male dominance and
female subordination in a patriarchal society. Indeed, the counterculture's
instinctive hostility toward technocracy and scientific objectivity was
consistent with the feminist critique that evolved during the 1970S.
The counterculture also stimulated the
other major new beginning of Sixties' activism--the environmental-ecology
movement.' Rejecting material acquisitiveness and instrumental utility, the
counterculture embraced simplicity and respect for the primitive and natural.
Its sensitivity to human destructiveness extended to the earth, indeed, to the
universe that many sensed themselves part of. The back-to-the-earth movement
spun off the urban counterculture at about the same time that the environmental
movement held the first Earth Day and began the struggle to end the plunder of
natural resources. "Live simply that others may simply live" read one
slogan that both hippies' and ecologists could endorse.
Finally, the apocalyptic New Left not
only alienated many who had been drawn to movements of the Sixties, but it also
led to an intellectual dead end. One result of the radicalization of Sixties'
activists was that the vanguardist traditions of Marxism-Leninism and Maoism
were transposed by self-styled revolutionaries to a nonrevolutionary United
States, with predictable results. However, the radicalizing experience of the
Sixties also awakened a new aware- ness of the contradictions between
capitalism and democracy, resulting a reassessment of Marxism and the
blossoming of neo-Marxian studies in a wide range of academic disciplines.' One
product of this reawakening was fresh awareness of the link between Sixties
concerns and the imperatives of American and global capitalism.
Feminist, ecology, and neo-Marxian critiques have continued to
evolve since their formative experiences in the late io6os and early lo70s.
Their continuing challenge to the mainstream culture remains one of the most
direct legacies of the Sixties. Together they provide crucial insights into the
main- stream culture and its dominant institutions, extending our understanding
of the hard lessons that decade can teach us. In the process, they broaden and
enrich the democratic vision of the Sixties in ways that are necessary if it is
ever to be realized. . . . .
We are for an economic system oriented toward the
vital requirements of people and of future generations, toward the preservation
of nature and the judicious handling of natural resources. We have in mind a
society in which interpersonal relationships and the relationships between
humans and nature become ever more the subject of conscious consideration, a
society where attention to nature's life cycles, the development and use of
technology, and the relationship between production and consumption become the
business of all those concerned.
-The Federal Program of the Greens (die Gruenen)
Like the women's movement, and the
civil rights and antiwar movements before it, the modern ecology movement that
emerged at the end of the ig6os encompassed both a liberal, reformist wing
rooted in the political mainstream, and a more radical wing grounded in the
Sixties vision of community and the counterculture's rejection of materialist
Western culture. Mainstream environmentalism encompasses a variety of
ideological viewpoints, from conservative claims of enlightened corporatism to
liberal reformism to a more radical critique of capitalism.
The more radical ecology stance builds
on ecological science and its focus on relations between organisms and their
environment. As ecofeminism, it draws on woman's connectedness with the oikos
or home, and critiques the patriarchal characterization of both women and
nature as "other." As social ecology it links hierarchical domination
in human society to destruction of the nonhuman environment and attempts to
bring biological and social aspects of ecology into harmony. As deep ecology it
draws on Eastern spiritual traditions, the study of Native Americans, and a
variety of eco-philosophers to advocate a "gestalt of 'person in nature.' Deep
ecology converges with strains of cultural ethnicity to advocate a
decentralized bioregional future that emphasizes the physical, spiritual, and
communal significance of place
Finally,
the Green's socialism urges, along with local democratic participation and
feminist liberation, the transformation of inherently destructive economic imperatives.
The various ecological perspectives
differ (and sometimes conflict) in significant ways. Yet they converge in their
radical perspective that harmony between human and nonhuman nature requires
both the transformation of the prevailing Western and masculinist mindset and
restructuring of global political and economic institutions. Like many
environmentalists, radical ecologists believe that nothing less than the
survival of the earth is at stake.
Both mainstream environmentalism and
the more radical ecology perspective are rooted in the twentieth century
tradition of conservation that dates back to the Progressive era. In
contemporary form, both reflect the revival of environmental concerns that
began to emerge in the ig6os and took off after Earth Day in 1970. The 1963 publication of
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which documented the spread of DDT
throughout the biosphere, stimulated a growing ecological consciousness within
the biological sciences that in turn helped to generate environmental activism.
During the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society included clean air and clean
water legislation, and in 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental
Policy Act. By requiring environmental impact statements for proposed new
development and creating a
Council
on Environmental Quality charged with monitoring pollution and collecting
environmental data, the new law eased the way for subsequent challenges to
environmental despoliation.
Like the antiwar movement,
environmental activism was triggered by events that brought the silent perils
of ecological destruction graphically to light. One of the first of these was
the explosion of an oil well off the coast of Barbara, California in January
1969; the resulting spill ran unchecked for days, coating the beaches of
greater Santa Barbara and killing vast quantities of sea creatures. As Ross
MacDonald recalled in 1972, "The industry and the federal bureaucracy,
whose rules and safeguards had to prevent it. . . . It triggered a social
movement and helped to create politics, the politics of ecology, which is
likely to exert future elections and on our lives."" Dramatic
examples of ecological damage and threats to human health drew increasing
attention in the next several years; these included the blanket of smog
enveloping Los Angeles, the burning Cuyahoga River outside Cleveland, and the
controversial to construct a trans-Alaskan oil pipeline.
The ecology movement began to
mobilize with the first of several annual Earth Days held in April 1(70. As the
Christian Science Monitor anticipated the event, "Mark the
date: April 22. On that day, if the present indicators produce the expected
snowballing effect, this nation will witness the largest expression of public
concern in history over what is happening to the environment." Well over
100,000 Americans observed the first Earth Day, and far larger numbers became
involved in one or more aspects of the initial Earth Week. Originally conceived
by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin as a kind of national teach-in modeled
on the antiwar movement, Earth Week combined local community cleanup projects,
large demonstrations in urban centers, and a one-day "liberation" of
downtown streets from the automobile. It became
a nationwide celebration of environmental awareness reminiscent of the Vietnam
Moratorium, drawing attention to rising public concern and highlighting
widespread local Initiatives.
Speakers across the nation ranged
from the New Left to the business community. Not surprisingly, they blamed
diverse sources for environmental destruction and offered a confusing array of
solutions. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the new environmental
initiative. Black protesters criticized students at San Jose State College when
they barred a brand new car as part of Earth Week. George Wiley, chair of the
National Welfare Rights Organization, anticipated future debates when he
argued, "You must not embark on programs to curb economic growth without
placing a priority on maintaining income, so that the poorest people won't
simply be further depressed in their condition but will have a share, and be
able to live decently." Some
activists warned that the Nixon administration would use the environmental
movement to drain energy from antiwar and racial struggles. And for the
stablishrnent, Atomic Energy Commission chair Glenn Seaborg hedged against
ecology scare tactics: "What is most disturbing to me is that this trend
of thinking is filled with enough logic and truth to suggest that many of the
nightmares projected by today's doomsayers could come true-if we were to
continue unresponsively and irresponsibly on our current course." While some business people supported Earth
Day concerns, others like Thomas Shepard, publisher of Look magazine, argued
that "we are solving most of our problems . . . conditions are getting
better not worse."
Earth Day was closely followed by
publication of the Ralph Nader study group report "Vanishing
Air," which documented air pollution and pointedly criticized
congressional iiiaction (particularly the "environmental Senator” Edmund Muskie of Maine,
then the leading Democratic presidential contender). In 1970, publication of
influential books like Barry Commoner's The Closing Circle and Lewis
Mumford's The Myth of the Machine broadened the ecological critique.
As popular concern for the environment
grew, politicians responded. Some, like Senator Muskie, spoke at the original
Earth Day celebrations. President Nixon embraced the new wave of concern when
he signed the new National Environmental Policy Act into law, proclaiming,
"The nineteen-seventies absolutely must be the years when America pays its
debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our
living environment. It is literally now or never." Symbolizing
the degree to which environmentalism had penetrated mainstream consciousness,
California State Assembly leader Jesse Unruh claimed, "Ecology has become
the political substitute for the word 'motherhood."'
The early 1970s were the heyday of
environmentalism. The Clean Air Act Amendments Of 1970 called for sharply
reduced emission levels for such pollutants as carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide,
and nitrogen oxide. New emission level restrictions were to be phased in for
automobiles, utilities, and fossil fuel burning industries. The Clean Water Act
imposed similar restrictions on pollution of the nation's waterways and water
supplies. Several states, most notably California, passed tough new pollution
control laws.
Like
the Great Society programs of the Johnson administration, the political history
of this phase of environmental legislation is instructive. First, the issue of
environmental pollution passed from the invisible realm of
"non-decisions" onto the political agenda as a legitimate public
policy concern. In good part, the new attention to pollution reflected the fact
that public opinion had been mobilized by the activists' rallies, projects, and
confrontational tactics, and by newspaper editorials and letters to the editor. "
Second, the political system responded to
pollution in classic liberal fashion. Amidst surging public attention, much was
made of the massive legislative effort to clean up the environment. Public
officials were aglow with hopeful rhetoric about the new public priority. Yet
all was not rosy; it soon became clear that environmental protection was not in
"everyone's interest" as some had claimed. One year after President
Nixon's glowing pronouncement, he reappraised his environmental policies and
informed an audience of auto industry executives that he would not allow
environmental concern "to be used sometimes falsely and sometimes in a
demagogic way to destroy the system." Behind the scenes in Congress, the industrial
polluters lobbied hard and successfully to postpone the implementation of new
emission limits. Within mainstream imperatives of economic growth, centralized
energy, and corporate power, the OPEC Oil cartel and the recession of 1973-1975 produced a crisis that virtually
killed progress on environmental regulation. Congress explicitly waived the
environmental impact statement requirement to expedite construction of the
Alaskan oil pipeline, an act that was to reap bitter fruit in the 1988 Exxon
Valdez oil spill. BY 1970 President Carter had proposed an Energy Mobilization
Board empowered to waive local environmental regulations that might block
energy development. With the ascendancy of the Reagan administration in 1980,
the effort to roll back environmental safeguards accelerated.
Man poisons Nature; Nature poisons man in return.
-John Rodman,
"The Dolphin Papers"
As the legislative struggles of the
Seventies proceeded, a more radical ecological perspective was developing on
two fronts. First, increasing aware- ness of ultimate limits on the earth's
resources clashed with the prevailing growth fixation of industrialized
nations. Second, activists influenced by anti- war experiences turned their
attention to the nuclear power industry in lo74, one year after U.S. troops
were withdrawn from Vietnam.
Both fronts reflected the Sixties
climate of disenchantment with the rnod- ernist dream. In i968, Stewart Brand's
Whole Earth Catalog conveyed the prefigurative vision of the Sixties in
announcing that "a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power
of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape
his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever (sic] is
interested."60 Repelled by the horror of technological war in Vietnam,
drawn to a simpler communal "back-to-the- earth" lifestyle, and
intrigued by Eastern spiritualism and Native American culture, many young
people were predisposed to carry an environmental ethic to its more radical
conclusions. As Langdon Winner has observed, "Many of the same concerns
and passions that fueled activism in civil rights, the New Left, antiwar
protests, counterculture, and environmentalism led eventually to a critical
reexamination of the foundations of modern industrial society.
The
Antinuclear Movement. One of the primary early targets of eco- logical activism was the
nuclear power industry. In fact, of all forms of environmental politics, the
antinuclear movement was the most directly reminiscent of Sixties activism.
With citizens' referenda, lobbying, litigation, and administrative
intervention; civil disobedience and other forms of direct action; and mass
rallies aglow with countercultural trappings, the antinuclear movement recalled
the antiwar movement that had just ended. In its early days, it was largely
populated by former peace activists as well as feminists, assorted
environmentalists, and counterculture communards. As writer Anna Gyoirgy
observed,
In the mid to late 70s, as the nuclear program
spread across the country, people who had been politically active in the late
6os began to get involved in the nuclear issue. The new nuclear opponents found
the same kinds of cover-ups, lies, vested corporate interests and inhumanity
involved in nuclear power as in the war issue. In fact, nuclear power seemed in
many ways to be "the Vietnam war brought home." By aiding the nuclear
industry while assuring the public it had nothing to fear, the government was
supporting an energy source that could prove as lethal as any war.
The antinuclear movement also took on international overtones as anti- nuclear protests spread through Europe. Along with a growing peace movement, the European antinuclear movement helped spawn the West German Green movement. Public opposition to nuclear power has grown in the wake of accidents like those at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island facility in 1(79 and the Soviet Union's Chernobyl plant in 1986, as well as long-term leaks at nuclear weapons facilities at Savannah River, South Carolina, and Hanford, Washington.
One catalyst for the antinuclear movement was the energy crunch
of 1973- 1974 and President Gerald Ford's Project independence, aimed at
freeing the United States from its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Among
Ford's recommendations was the construction of 2.oo new nuclear power plants,
despite growing evidence of health hazards associated with nuclear power.
Citizens intervened in administrative hearings before the Atomic Energy
Commission and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, eventually leading to a National
Intervenors coalition made up of
scientists and other professionals. Ralph Nader's first Critical Mass
conference on alternative energy was held in 1974.
Amidst rising public concern, the
dramatic direct action of one individual in Montague, Massachusetts, galvanized
the antinuclear movement:
On 22 February 1974 [less than two months after
Northeast Utilities announced plans to build a dual-reactor nuclear plant in
Montague], organic farmer Sam Lovejoy took a crowbar to the support structure
of a weather-monitoring tower NU had put up at the site. With its bright
blinking lights, the 550-foot tower symbolized the impending nuke. Lovejoy
felled 349 feet of the tower and turned himself in to the local police. He
presented a statement in which he took full responsibility for the action.
Like
antiwar protesters before him, Lovejoy's civil disobedience was aimed at
putting the nuclear industry and a corrupt political process on trial. In
testimony regarding Lovejoy's action, Howard Zinn maintained,
These governmental institutions have not been very
adequate to protect people, and from time to time, when grievances became too
deep, groups of people had to go outside the machinery of government, had to
break the law, had to commit civil disobedience, in order to dramatize some-
thing that was happening. And it seemed to me that after the most recent acts
of civil disobedience, that is against the Vietnam War, maybe the time is right
now for people to look closer to home at the dangers to our lives posed by
corporate control of our lives.
Antinuclear momentum grew rapidly in the
months after Lovejoy's action. Typically, antinuclear actions were locally
based and coordinated by an alliance or coalition of peace, environmental, and
feminist activists. As Gyorgy notes, "Most intervention efforts have been
organized by women.... The new groups stress democratic decision-making and
open participation. They are consciously non-sexist and non-hierarchical.
Responsibilities are shared, with no elected "officers" or designed
[si cl leadership. People who do the work make decisions, and, given varying
(volunteer) time commitments, people share the organizational work and
direction setting.
The first such collective action was
the Clamshell Alliance's campaign against the proposed Seabrook nuclear plant
on the New Hampshire coast. Inspired by a citizen occupation that blocked
construction of a West German plant, the "Clams" consisted of several
dozen New England affinity groups trained in nonviolent civil disobedience,
coordinated by a representative committee and governed by consensus decision
making. Beginning with a Seabrook march on April 10, 1976, the Clamshell Alliance engaged in
a variety of actions over the next several years, including an
occupation in May 1977 that resulted in over 1400 arrests. Many of those
arrested refused to pay bail and were held in national guard armories. Echoing
the perceptions of SNCC field hands
over a decade earlier, one detainee noted, "it was like the state had
given us five free conference centers."
Over
18,000 appeared
at a Stop Seabrook rally in l978. As protests continued apace, Seabrook
opponents challenged each stage in the approval process through administrative
hearings and litigation.
In the aftermath of the initial
Clamshell Alliance action, groups with similarly colorful names reflecting
potential nuclear victims cropped up across the country. The SHAD (Sound and Hudson against
Atomic Development) Alliance opposed the Shoreham plant on Long Island.
Pennsylvania's Susquehanna Alliance fought unsuccessfully against the Berwick
and Limerick plants and joined with West Virginia's Panhandle Alliance to
confront Three Mile Island. Major extended actions were held by the Abalone
Alliance against the Diablo Canyon plant in California and by the Rocky Flats
Action Group against that weapons facility in Colorado. The Potomac Alliance
concentrated on federal government officials.61
The
watchword of all these groups was local grassroots organizing. News- letters
like No Nukes Left! and Abalone Alliance's Radioactive Times provided
an information link among activists and outreach to the general public. Local
canvassing and public meetings continued alongside more dramatic nonviolent
civil disobedience like the Seabrook occupation and the Abalone Alliance's
"Declaration of Nuclear Resistance."
The
antinuclear movement was the opening salvo in a campaign to shift from
traditional American reliance on fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources. The
preference for decentralized, community-based institutions, concern for natural
resources and pollution, and the oil crisis all stimulated initiatives for
solar, wind, and hydroelectric energy. On April 18, 1977, President Carter
presented his National Energy Plan to the nation. Carter's strong initial
emphasis on energy conservation, "the moral equivalent of war," was
subsequently scuttled in the Senate and by 1978 was replaced by energy growth
through natural gas price deregulation and new support for nuclear energy.
After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Iran hostage crisis, the
Reagan administration took power and began its assault on the environmental
regulations of the 1970s.
The 1972 publication of the Club of Rome report, The Limits
toGrowth, provided the first spark for a debate that continues to the
present-day concern for sustainable growth. Using a computer model that
projected trends in population, agriculture, industry, natural resources, and
pollution, the authors forecast a grim future. In less than one hundred years,
the earth's limits would be exceeded, resulting in precipitous declines in
population and industrial capacity. Although The Limits to Growth was
highly controversial, it had a major
impact on ecological thinking. It confirmed the more intuitive,
"feel-it-in-our-bones" understanding of those who would later call
themselves ecofeminists and deep ecologists.
The theme of limits inspired visionary statements like E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful, incisive logical metaphors like Garret Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons," and more radical political tracts like William Ophuls' Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity." Along with the decentralist im- pulses of the counterculture, it fostered a movement for appropriate technology and soft energy. The latter, as articulated in Amory Lovins' Soft Energy Paths, emphasized decentralized, renewable energy and low technology rnatched to end-use needs" instead of the highly polluting, centralized, and corporate fossil fuel and nuclear industries.
Soft energy is grounded in a vision
that replaces the traditional Western view of man over nature with a
communitarian ethic of human and non- human nature in ecological balance."
Along with other variants of radical ecology, this vision builds on the
counterculture's exploration of noncerebiral ways of knowing and echoes the
Sixties belief in participatory democracy while rejecting the priesthood of
technocratic experts. It recoils in aesthetic and em- pathic horror at
environmental destruction wrought by imposing an aggressive human technology on
nature. Thus Langdon Winner wrote of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant:
To put the matter bluntly, in that place, on that beach, against those rocks, mountains, sands, and seas, the power plant at Diablo Canyon is simply a hideous mistake. It is out of place, out of proportion, out of reason. It stands as a permanent insult to its natural and cultural surroundings. The thing should never have been put there, regardless of what the most elegant cost/benefit, risk/benefit calculations may have shown. Its presence is a tribute to those who cherish power and profit over everything in nature and our common humanity.
The
ecological vision is made radical because it is irreconcilable with the
interlocking institutions of the American mainstream. As Amory Lovins has
written of the contradiction between soft and hard energy paths:
T'hese two directions of development are
mutually exclusive: the pattern of commitments of resources and time required
for the hard energy path and the pervasive infrastructure that it accretes
gradually make the soft path less and less attainable. That is, our two sets of
choices compete not only in what they accomplish, but also in what they allow
us to contemplate later. They are logistically competitive, institutionally in-
compatible, and culturally antithetical."
The
quest for renewable, soft energy contains an implicitly radical challenge to
the undemocratic economic control under-lying the nuclear industry, as well as
the consolidated power of the giant oil Corporations. As H. Nowotny argued,
"Opposition against nuclear power in its social structures roots is opposition
against those who will benefit from further economic and political
concentra- tion and centralization. It is directed against "big"
industry, seen in collusion with "big" government and "big"
science. It is the opposition coming from those who feel powerless and small
in the face of these developments."16 In brief, society cannot
adequately pursue the soft energy path without the radical transformation of
political, technical, and most of all economic institutions.
However, the radical ecological vision
goes further. It identifies the ultimate dynamic of ecocide in the very fabric
of modernity: in liberal individualism and corporate capitalism, nationalism,
and the competitive global economy. As William Ophuls has argued, "the
tragedy of commons radically challenges fundamental American and Western values.
Under conditions of ecological scarcity the individual, possessing an
inalienable right to pursue happiness as he defines it and exercising his
liberty in a basically laissez-faire system, will inevitably produce the
ruin of the commons." 71 Francis
Carney observed this conflict in the smog-filled Los Angeles basin:
Every person who lives in this basin knows that for
twenty-five years he has been living through a disaster. We have all watched it
happen, have participated in it with full knowledge just as men and women once
went knowingly and willingly into the "dark Satanic mills." The smog
is the result of ten million individual pursuits of private
gratification. But there is absolutely nothing that any individual can do to
stop its spread. Each Angeleno is totally powerless to end what he hates. An
individual act of renunciation is now nearly impossible, and, in any case, would be mean-
ingress unless everyone else did the same thing. But he has no way of getting
everyone else to do it. He does not even have any way to talk about such a
course.,,
Ultimately,
Garrett Hardin's metaphor of the commons applies to the ecosphere as a whole.
It requires a fundamental transformation in political and economic institutions
around the globe if ecological disaster is to be avoided.
Hardin and Ophuls' analysis points
toward a kind of ascetic authoritarianism on a planetary scale, which is one
clear counterpoint to the indulgent privatism of the marketplace. However,
nothing could be more antithetical to the democratic vision of the ig6os, or
for that matter to ecofeminism or bioregionalism. Critics from the Left
maintain that ecocide may be avoided through a combination of forces: growing
global awareness of impending dis- aster, the mobilization of community
activism against forces that endanger the environment, and the transformation
of economies away from the imperatives of capitalism. Social ecologist Murray
Bookchin identifies a basic contradiction of capitalism, namely, that it
simultaneously promises an end to material scarcity and creates appetites that
can never be fulfilled, thereby accelerating the exploitation of natural
resources and the destruction of community: "Having demolished all the
ethical and moral limits that once kept it in hand, market society in turn has
demolished almost every historic relationship between nature, technics, and
material well-being.... We have arrived at a point in history's account of need
where the very capacity to select needs, which freedom from material
scarcity was expected to create, has been subverted by a strictly appetitive
sensibility."
Despite a major environmental
protection effort in the 1970s, the world is no closer to the vision of a
healthy and unpolluted ecosphere. Instead, as the World Commission on
Environment and Development observed in 1987:
Each year another 6 million hectares of productive
dryland turns into worthless desert. Over three decades, this would amount to
an area roughly as large as Saudi Arabia. More than ii million hectares
of forests are destroyed yearly, and this, over three decades, would equal an
area about the size of India. Much of this forest is converted to low-grade
farmland unable to support the farmers who settle it. In Europe, acid
precipitation kills forests and lakes and damages the artistic and
architectural heritage of nations; it may have acidified vast tracts of soil
beyond reasonable
hope of repair. The burning of fossil fuels puts into the atmosphere carbon
dioxide, which is causing gradual global warming. This "green- house
effect" may by early next century have increased average global
temperatures enough to shift agricultural production areas, raise sea levels to
flood coastal cities, and disrupt national economies. Other industrial gases
threaten to deplete the planet's protective ozone shield to such an extent that
the number of humau and animal cancers would rise sharply and the oceans' food
chain would be disrupted. Industry and agriculture put toxic substances into
the human food chain and into underground water tables beyond reach of
cleansing.
Each
year seems to bring new, sobering reminders of the earth's fragility. The
accelerating global crisis virtually insures that the ecology movement will be
an enduring legacy of the Sixties. As William Ophuls has contended, "The
crisis is real, and it does indeed challenge our institutions and values in a
most profound way-more profoundly, in fact, than some of the most ardent
environmentalists are willing to admit." . . . .