Project Survival

Thomas Malthus missed the first environmental teach-out at Northwestern University on January 23. The disaster he had predicted--mass starvation as a result of world population expanding more rapidly than the ability of agriculture to sustain it--had been deferred for 160 years by the Industrial Revolution. But that Friday night in Evanston, Illinois, the same intense sort of people who gathered in London salons to discuss Parson Malthus' gloomy prophecies listened raptly as new doomsdayers--Paul Ehrlich, Lamont Cole, Barry Commoner and others--told them that technology is no longer the salvation of the world and may, in fact, be its doom. They preached a common theme of urgency, and everyone was fashionably distressed.

"We call it a teach-out instead of a teach-in because we want to dramatize our attempt to reach beyond the campus, to involve the off-campus community," said one of the sponsors. A Chicago radio station estimated that "15,000 concerned citizens packed Northwestern's technology building," but the organizers settled for 6000--while insisting that even this more modest turnout caused many to be turned away. In any case, an event that would have attracted a few dozen dissidents a year ago drew a crowd large enough to provoke widespread press coverage and, more important, gave those concerned enough to attend a sense of their number (continued on page 140)Project Survival(continued from page 71) and a chance to collectively celebrate their concern. As an opening skirmish in the student campaign to save the environment, it was a victory.

It was cold around Lake Michigan that Friday. Snow had been frozen on the ground long enough to collect a heavy coat of soot. Ugly industrial-gray slush splattered over cars and people. Off-campus participants had fight the rush-hour traffic creeping slowly north along Sheridan Road through Chicago into the prosperous suburb Evanston and quasi-Gothic Northwestern. The meeting was scheduled to start at seven P.M. and by that time, parking was difficult. Counditions were right for an event called "Project Survival."

The metaphor was almost too good: Northwestern's technology building wasn't large enough for all the people who wanted to hear someone tell lobby, people wandered in all direction carrying cassette recorders, 35mm cameras and a few sleeping bags for the all-night affair. The "kids" crossed all categorical lines. There were hard-core radicals with wild tangled hair, Spartan clothes and fierce looks-perhaps the first ecological Weatherman. Most were a little straighter: hair long but under control, and clothes that were carefully careless. They were loose; it was their pep rally and they were the majority. They crowded into little groups, shouted above the din and barged determinedly through the milling crowds.

There were conventional college students there, too--hair neatly trimmed, regulation-length sideburns, expensively hip clothes, well-scrubbed faces. They mingled in cramped, drafty corridors, because of the lack of room for all of them to see the main event. But the vibes were good out in the halls, so they really didn't mind. Some older people could be seen among the students, many looking too nervous and awkward to be professors. But most either found a seat early or left; it was simply too frantic for them.

Those who had arrived early enough sat in the central auditorium, where the speakers gave their talks, or in scattered lecture rooms where closed-circuit TV monitors picked up the program. All these roams were packed with moving, shuffling people. Photographers pushed through aisles to get better shots of the guests; kids with tape recorders wormed in closer to the monitors, so they wouldn't have too much background noise from the whisperers clustered around the back doors. The fact that people were willing to endure the crush seemed a good measure of their concern for the issue.

The Project Survival people had set up desks all over the lobby. Smiling girls at one desk sold bumper stickers and buttons. The big sellers were the Population Bomb is Everybody's Baby and Give Earth a Chance. There were information desks, tables that supported huge coffee urns and stacks of Styrofoam cups and a big table where some girls simply took donations without the pretense of giving something in return. Another table held piles of free literature.

The organizers had sent press releases out early in the month and the response matched their hopes. Local radio stations set up for broadcasting in two classrooms just off the auditorium. TV imposed its microphones, cables and floodlights on the event. The staff improvised a press room complete with coffee and doughnuts, where student press, local papers and some of the national media had people jostling around for seats. They filled the room with smoke, debris and noise.

One obvious point that this affair made was that the environmental problem has become a full-blown issue, probably the issue. Right now, it's one of the few questions that seem to arouse a response that cuts across political lines; but positions are rapidly becoming politicized. In fact, a person can just about be pinpointed on the left-right spectrum by the label he attaches to the problem. If he says pollution, he's a mainstreamer, right there with the editorial cartoons, radio editorials, citizen's groups and President Nixon. ("This thing's a serious problem and we've got to roll up our sleeves and tackle it before it's too late.") Conservationists are farther to the right. They've been talking for years about saving our natural resources. But, like most conservative concerns, the grip on total reality is slight; a part stands for the whole. The slow death of our forests is aesthetically is slight; a part stands for the whole. The slow death of our forests is aesthetically repugnant to these people, but the question of oxygen supply is too remote and too problematic to interest them. If someone talks about ecology, he knows about the support cycle and its breakdown. He can talk about the apocalyptic aspects of the problem with a matter-of-fact smugness: thermal pollution, greenhouse effect, tritium. He's fashionably to the left.

Then there are the jungle lawyers on the hard right. They advocate shackling our impulse to save wretched lives--to control population growth backward; let the weak die off. Environmental fascism or laissez faire. Over at the other end are the militant population controllers. They agree with the hard right about the severity of the crisis--a disturbing characteristic of this era. They believe population must be controlled--one way or another--because it's scientifically necessary. We can involuntarily starve, poison or nuke ourselves to death--or take unavoidably stern measures to stem the population explosion and live in a state of reduced material frenzy on a clean planet. Either/or. At the Northwestern teach-out, the hard-liners scored the most points; it was that kind of crowd.

The first speaker was Lamont Cole of Cornell. He is a small, nervous man who considers the environment raw data, to be measured and tested, analyzed in the laboratory and reported on. The size and chaos of the crowd seemed awesome to him, something that wasn't really vulnerable to his system. That made him more nervous and he spoke quickly, glancing up and down from his notes, never establishing eye contact with his audience or trying for any dramatic effect. He just passed his information on to them--quickly, so he could get out. When the audience interrupted to applaud, he became even more disconcerted, as if to ask how the hell anyone could applaud facts.

Like most scientists who study the problem, Cole is obsessed with the delicacy of the support cycle. He worries that our excessive consumption of resources and consequent bilge-pumping of pollutants into the biosphere may cause its breakdown and finish us all. He speculates that we may already have used enough DDT to threaten the phytoplankton in the oceans--source of 70 percent of the world's oxygen supply. After he finished his speech, he found a drink and a cigarette and relaxed enough to give a brief press conference, where he was a little wry about it all. He acknowledged that population control is the most critical problem but questioned the efficacy of some methods, especially the male pill, since it's toxic in combination with alcohol. He seemed to believe that the failure to take basic steps toward cleaning things up--elimination of lead from gasoline, use of smaller engines in automobiles, burning of stack gases by industry--was evidence of total indifference and justified resignation. So he took another sip of Scotch and smiled ironically about the dire things he predicted.

Most of the reporters were young and dressed in the indifferent style of students, and the older representatives from the establishment press looked like professors. But one young man was carefully buttoned into a three-piece suit that made him look like he came from an outfit that trains its reporters by showing them Thirties newspaper movies starring Jimmy Stewart. The guy needed only a snap-brim hat with a press card stuck in the brand. He had made one apparent concession to modern journalism--he carried a tape recorder-- but that was because he worked for a radio station. The NU student who was running the press conference introduced the speaker (continued on page 149)Project Survival(continued from page 140) who followed Cole--a dry, sarcastic demographer from State University of New York named Lawrence Slobodkin--and opened the questioning. Three-piece-suit thrust his microphone into Slobodkin's bearded face and demanded earnestly: "Dr. Slobodkin, let's get right to the heart of the matter. Is there anything we can do about pollution?" ("Good evening. This is the six-o'clock news. Last night an eminent professor from a New York university predicted the end of the world if something itsn't done about pollution.")

The petulant Slobodkin sniffed that we very likely couldn't do anything about it if we insisted on taking the hysterical approach. He and hard-nose went back and forth for a few minutes about journalistic sensationalism, with the rest of the press laughing a little nervously in the background. Finally, someone asked a straight question, but the doctor was so miffed by this time that he wanted to know why the questioner hadn't listened to his speech. Everyone protested that it was impossible to get near the speeches, that the press room had no hookup with the auditorium, that it was about a half mile away.

Slobodin cooled down and gave a short synopsis of his talk. In order to reduce birth rates, a nation must first, paradoxically, reduce death rates, so that families don't have to rely on a large number of children to ensure survival of the name. Simultaneously, it must reduce economic uncertainty about the future (this is also a function of lowering the death rate) by providing a good Social Security system that will relive people's fear that they have only their children to rely on in old age. Finally, the child-bearing role of women must be minimized. With a glib maxim, he allied himself with the very latest cause: "We are not going to be able to control the population explosion short of employing fascism until the Planned Parenthood people stand tennis shoe to tennis shoe with the feminist movement."

Meanwhile, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford was knocking them out in the auditorium. Ehrlich is the ecology movement's most effective propagandist--a role at which he works hard. His book The Population Bomb has sold over 1,250,000 copies. His two Johnny Carson show appearance generated tremendous phone and mail response. When he speaks, he has an almost suspiciously thorough grasp of statistics. His language is blunt and his presence commanding. (Ehrlich will be the subject of the August Playboy Interview.)

He started by telling the audience that population control is no panacea; all it does is buy time. Politicians who focus on such obvious manifestations of the problem as air and water pollution, he said, are just trying to throw a bone to concerned citizen. In fact, they're not even committed to solving those problems, since they care only about visible pollution, which constitutes about two percent of the total.

He went on to say that the "green revolution"--the combination of break-throughs in agriculture that is being touted as a reprieve for the world's hungry--is a fraud. Improvement in agriculture production could be traced to good weather condition over the past few years. Even if everything the agronomists say is true, population growth will gobble up the increased production in less than 20 years.

"Those who think that population control consists of passing out condoms in ghettos," said Ehrlich, "better wise up, because that is not where it is." The average white middle-class baby in this country, he told the audience, puts 50 times more stress on environmental systems than the average child in Calcutta.

If Nixon thinks we can continue to expand production, adding another 500 billion dollars to the Gross National Product, "it will be the very last addition to any G.N.P." We must shift from a consuming, wasting, pollution economy to one in which everything is recycled and built to last--"from a cowboy economy to a spaceman economy." He said that we must change our system of Government so we won't be led by a "mob of elderly rustic boobs."

This is what Ehrlich told his young, white, middle-class audience--time is running out, the issue is survival and it's up to them--and it applauded every one of his observation. Some wanted him to run for president. In his press conference, Ehrlich gave the three-piece-suit man a full week's shrill headlines and won the rest of the press with some fine gallows humor: "The Mother of the a Year should be a woman who has been voluntarily sterilized and adopted two children."

"We've got to take the pressure off women in this society to reproduce before Mendal Rivers wakes up some morning and discovers the problem. He'll run down to Congress and introduce legislation making sterilization mandatory." "You've got to see the whole problem interdependently. There are people starting by the thousands in Latin America, and their doctors are doing heart transplant."

Every question got what the press calls "a highly quotable response." Ehrlich talked about Slobodkin's proposals, sex education, tax structures, agricultural pollutants and several other problem on the environmental-crisis board. Finally, he had to leave to catch a palne for California and a similar meeting the next morning. A small group of reporters hovered around him, asking more questions. One hit the mark and Ehrlich truned back to the room and said, "By the way, I'm married, have one child and have had a vasectomy. Population control starts at home."

Ehrlich would have been a tough act for anybody to follow, but Illinois attorney general William Scott, who has filed several lawsuits against industrial polluters, including the airlines, thinks the solution is simple and straightforward: Stop pollution by making it uneconomical by penalizing the polluters with heavy fines. He told the press that he'd had to learn about ecology from scratch, that he was still learning, but that he thought everyone had a right to a clean environment and he wanted to see this right written into law. A few months earlier, Chicago had gone through one of its worst pollution crises. Mayor Daley had called the press in and chewed them out for exaggerating the problem, reminding them that, after all, "No one has died." So Scott, perhaps the only government official, local or Federal, who has moved beyond the simple posture of anti-pollution to action, was warmly received by the audience at Northwestern.

During his speech, Scott made the point that politics is a secondary consideration when the big questions of survival and quality of life are at stake. Adlai Stevenson III, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, did not applaud. He hadn't come out to Northwestern on that cold night to transcend politics. If points were going to be scored, he wanted them tallied in the right column. So he stood at the podium and, in a voice that could only be called condescending, questioned the credibility of "Secretary of the Interior Hickel as the generalissimo of a war against pollution." After more of the same, he turned the floor over to Paul Simon, Democratic lieutenant governor of Illinois, who made some rhetorical points about pollution.

Scott and Simon talked briefly to the press, both using phrases such as "complete reordering of priorities" and "urgent need for action at every level" and making only a few ripples. Then Barry Commoner arrived. Commoner, with his book Science and Survival, was the first scientist to put the problem in the stark perspective of survival for the race. He doesn't have to call himself professor, because it's unlikely that anyone would think him anything else. His hair is graying and his olive-colored face is picking up some dignified wrinkles. When the passion starts to build and the simplistic questions flow, he carefully points out the gaps in logic and information, using patient phrasing: "What you have to understand is ..." or "No. The problem is ..."

He answered the press's questions firmly, using a blackboard to illustrate the cyclical nature of the ecosystem. He pointed out that we have to be willing to make our technology compatible with the system and that doing so involves more money than most people are willing to even talk about. Nixon's plan for cleaning up water and processing sewage, he said, is nothing but a method of convetring raw sewage into its inorganic components and dumping them into streams and lakes, fertilizing the plant life in the water and causing eutrophication--overgrowth of algae--the real scourge of moribund Lake Erie.

Commoner believes the system is the fixed point against which every variable must be considered and that sound analysis and planning can make our technology symbiotic with it. Pollution is his index of how far our current trend diverges from the ideal, of how much we have overstressed the ecosystem. He is a stern pragmatist who plays neither of the two most popular ecology games--fingering villians and prophesying cataclysm. Solutions are available, he says--tough and expensive, but available. He spends a great deal of time testifying before Senate committees.

While Commoner gave the press his short course in ecology, attorney Victor Yannacone (On the Scene, Playboy, November 1969) told the kids, "The time has come to housebreak industry." They were with him; nothing scores with them like sticking it to the corporations. He went on with his imagery: "The way you housebreak a pet is with a rolled-up newspaper, and the way you housebreak industry is with the complaint and summons." Right on. Yannacone is belligerent, crude and thoroughly charming. His war cry is "Sue the bastards." He has done it and won against some very tought corporate opposition.

He said things that would normally have outraged idealistic youth. One long description of the methods he used to make new and influence the press displayed a kind of cynicism that would usually get people in trouble on campuses. But it worked to Yannacone's advantage, not only because he doesn't stand to gain personally from his manipulative efforts. You could tell that by looking at the suit he wore. He is selfless to a degree that almost embarrassed some of the kids, so he could get away with lecturing them. When one young man wailed that there just wasn't enough money available to carry on the kind of legal battles they were talking about, Yannacone pointed a finger at him said, "There more money walking around this campus in the form of loose change than we had during the three years of the DDT case. We got DDT outlawed in Wisconsin for $78,000. If the people around Lake Michigan can't raise that kind of money to save the lake, then I say they deserve what they get."

Yannacone's was the last speech, and at midnight, a sing-out began. Folk singer Tom Paxton was onstage and a few of the kids went to the auditorium to listen. He sang a sad number about the vanishing beauties of nature, and young girls, long straight hair parted symmetrically around their faces, sat humming with the music. The sing-out was a pleasant interlude, a tranquil moment, but most of the kids have gone beyond the naïveté that finds comfort in collective singing. During the break, they clustered in groups, talked and gesticulated earnestly and slipped out for whatever refreshment they craved. A few people went off into corners and curled up in sleeping bags-- there were some who had come from other campuses and most of them weren't prepared for lodging any more elaborate than that. There was a blackboard on which people who had space at home for these nomads could put their names, but it never saw much use.

After the folk singing, seminars began. They covered the entire technology building and the whole spectrum of issues. There were professors prepared to chair discussions on subjects such as: "Life or Death for the Oceans." "Surplus People and Instant War," "Psychological Problems of Overcrowding," "Ethics of Ecology--Philosophical Considerations in the Preservation of Man and His Environment." Academic language is wonderfully versatile. But the titles didn't make much difference. The kids had been talked to for over four hours and they were ready to say some things themselves.

There were three recurring themes in each of these discussion-seminars: the immediacy of the crisis, the importance of students in the effort. But this was a sort of vague agreement on the general nature of things; fighting over the moral posture students should assume, however, was intense. Sometimes they sounded like Jesuits on a lunch break. They seemed to need to define their position, as an exercise in ontological reasoning, to go beyond simple decisions of whether or not to work from within the system.

Early in the evening, the technology building had begun to suffer under the weight of all this use of its resources. Programs, Styrofoam cups, cigarette butts and posters carelessly knocked off walls had accumulated in the passageways until university janitors were called in to clean up. It took all night. This was an irony too good for a lot of people to pass up. Those idealistic kids getting together to talk about pollution and blame the establishment: They can't even keep one building clean, can't even use the trash cans.

Around three or four in the morning, people stayed on from sheer inertia. In the classrooms, there was redundant moral discussion and scattered radical activity. One kid demanded a "John Brown of the ecology movement." Another protested that Yannacone and other lawyers, who were holding a seminar on legal questions involved in pollution, were simply part of the whole stinking system that had brought all of this down on us. They deserve no better treatment than any of the rest of the guilty when the time comes. In the same seminar, another lawyer tried to define a "low profile" opposition to the establishment that he thought would be effective without galvanizing resistance from the other side. He talked about the way Europeans put low-key pressure on government. Yannacone backed him up by describing the effect of a roomful of grim-looking citizens at a licensing hearing. But these kids had cut their activist teeth on stronger stuff and mannerly, insidious protest simply bores them. It may be a sad fact that our brightest generation is still not as politically sophisticated, at least in terms of tactics, as the European proletariat.

In one large lecture room, they debated the sainthood question under floodlights and TV cameras. The most eloquent purists naturally gravitated to this arena. The question was pretty basic: The FWPCA (Federal Water Pollution Control Administration) had sponsored a group called Scope (Student Committee on Pollution and the Environment) to elicit student recommendations on environmental questions; five members of Scope had been selected and five more were needed, so the original five wanted suggestions for names to fill the roster. That seemed pretty straightforward. Not so; there was immediately the question of financing. Even since the CIA funding of the National Student Association, student groups have lived in fear of Federal subsidies, which lead to co-option, the ultimate degradation. As it turned out, the Government was, indeed, funding Scope, and the fight was on. The pro Scope position held that while Government financing may not be good, perhaps it could ultimately be used against the Feds. Anyway, it didn't seal off all other routes. The purists wouldn't tolerate any alliance with the Government, no matter how slender. One sternlooking young man in a buckskin jacket climbed over three rows of seats to get at a microphone and vowed to the Scope leader. "We won't let you get away with this."

"Why do we always have to start fighting among ourselves?" a girl asked.

That's the question everyone phrased one way or another that morning. If they could just "get it together" at a tactical level, things might start happening. But they still haven't defined their position. They worry too much about purity. Every moral question has to be resolved before they can begin to act. The enthusiasm that Commoner, Cole, Yannacone and, especially, Ehrlich aroused early in the evening was dissipated through the long night in weighty debates over moral issues that are ultimately trivial. The same flaw that existed in the McCarthy kids exists in these; probably a lot of them are the same people. Somehow, working for a goal at the level of the possible, the attainable, tarnishes the goal and makes it unworthy of the effort. Too much paradox for most people, but the kids understand it perfectly.

The night ended on a weak note: a dawn sing-out at 6:30. For the first time, there were surplus seats. A folk group did some old Baez numbers without much response. Back in the civil rights days, people used to sing out, clap hands and feel the glow when they did This Land Is Your Land. Not tonight. It all ended with coverage in the papers; some people turned on to the issue, and oldline commentator Paul Harvey scolded the kids for littering the building, that awful irony he seemed to think he'd discovered.

But the fact remained: Pollution, ecology--whatever you call it--is the issue. The Northwestern meeting was a rehearsal for the April 22nd nationwide teach-out on the environment and there will be many more such gatherings. Action will be slowly generated as leaders emerge to direct the energy. It's spreading out beyond the campuses; people are forming anti-pollution committees and action groups. As Ehrlich pointed out. "When Ronald Reagan starts talking about a problem, you know everyone is alerted."

It's an issue that literally cannot be blown away by gusts of political wind. It's possible to detour around a ghetto or to forget about the war if you're not draft age, but burning eyes or stench from a sewage-saturated lake is not easily ignored. The solutions are not as simple as some people like to think. A satisfactory environment may not be something we can buy. But the kids at Northwestern had a gut feeling for this simple but elusive truth: Some--like the girl who stood regally in the halls in her leopard-skin coat--are tied too tightly to the waste cycle, but most of them are only slightly tainted. If they don't become part of the problem--by turning into compulsive consumers--they may be part of the solution.