Up to Here with Green

I admit it, I betrayed the green revolution. Bette Midler, lying in the hospital, playing mother earth in the prime-time TV extravaganza, had made me feel pretty bad about spoiling the air with rapid acceleration. The very next morning, I was stuck in traffic for an hour on the San Diego Freeway. When I finally saw daylight, my foot hit that gas pedal as hard and fast as it could. Varoom ... it felt good. Then the traffic and the guilt closed in again.

Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm ecosensitive. I hate spending three hours a day in my polluting car. Take the train instead, I can hear one of those Hollywood types preach. You have to be kidding. What train? Efficient mass transit does not exist here or in many parts of the country. Why didn't Bette and Robin and Barbra and Meryl complain about that? Was it just too controversial? Shrewdly deflected by the companies that have co-opted the environmental movement and turned it into nothing more than a plaintive plea for separated garbage?

Look, I recycle. And I ask the guy at McDonald's for a glass instead of a Styrofoam cup. But he never has one, just as my car dealer didn't have the electric car I wanted, so I had to get a gas-guzzler. Individual effort is fine, but putting the emphasis on guilt won't save the earth. To suggest it will is a sham aimed at making ecological issues noncontroversial.

So Earth Day came and went without any serious discussion of what's really important: population explosion, the threat posed by nuclear power and weaponry, conspicuous consumption, the mad Styro-foam-cup-and-aluminum-can invasion of Third World markets and the exploitation by the industrialized nations of the nonrenewable resources of the rest of the world.

Admittedly, it's safer to talk about putting a plastic bottle in the toilet to conserve water than about putting millions of condoms on a rainbow of penises. But who are we kidding? At the present rate, the population of the Third World, already a great burden on cropland and other resources, will double in the next 33 years. China's population alone increased by 100,000,000 since the last time anyone noticed. Yet the U.S. Government still opposes UN-sponsored birth-control programs lest the Right-to-Life lobby get exorcised.

Nor is overpopulation concern only for the developing world. The U.S. population is growing at a clip of 2,200,000 a year and by the year 2000 will be more than double what it was in 1940. What obscurantist nonsense to discuss the world's ecological problems without confronting the population boom. That boom exacerbates problems such as waste management, carbon-dioxide emissions, the destruction of forests and demands on the water supply.

There has long been much salivating in U.S. business circles over the vast potential of the near-virgin Third World market. "There are eight hundred million gullets in China," the PepsiCo V.P. for finance told me in 1975, "and I want to see a Pepsi in every one of them." Now, let's say Western marketeers realize their dreams and the less developed market opens up for even more expensive exports than a Pepsi (and now a Coke) in China or a Big Mac in Moscow. Take the private auto. It's a disaster in the making--literally hundreds of millions of additional cars doing the nasty things that cars in the West do. Of course, the developed countries led by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have no plan to encourage alternatives to mass transit. After all, we don't do it here for ourselves. Instead, the pressure is on to sell more and more cars, which, given the lack of other means of transportation, should find a welcome market. Already, Fiat and other multinationals are racing to double and triple the number of cars in the Soviet Union.

Do we really want the Soviet Union to be just like us? The U.S., with only five percent of the world's population, accounts for close to one third of the hydrocarbons, sulphur oxide and carbon monoxide released into the earth's atmosphere. What will happen as other nations claim their right to release pollutants proportionate to their population?

Population growth is not by itself the root of the problem, as Barry Commoner points out in his excellent book Making Peace with the Planet. If intelligently managed, the resources of this earth could support a much higher population than the one expected in the next 30 years. The problem is that there is no reason to expect this intelligence in the newly developing world if it can't be found in the richer, more experienced countries that make up less than one fourth of the world's population but manage to consume 75 percent of its energy.

If the market economy has produced this result during centuries of relatively leisurely growth in the privileged world, how can we expect more eco-sanity from desperately poor countries in their frantic attempt to catch up?

Let's be candid. The economic model of the wealthy nations is compatible with the fragile ecology of the planet only if most of the world's people are left out of the equation. We get to eat high on the hog--excuse me, the food chain--because they often don't eat at all. Then there are all the other goods--oil, nickel, bauxite, wool, sugar, wood--doled out in proportion to that tyrannically powerful if benign-sounding statistic called per capita income.

Per capita income: what they have divided by how many they have. In the 77 percent of the world that's defined as developing, it represents a scant six percent of what it is in the industrialized countries. If those Third World countries ever do develop and get to use up even 20 percent of what we in the West consume, the planet will not be able, as currently constituted, to stand the crunch on resources.

I'm easy to please. Why didn't Meryl Streep, in her Earth Day cameo, just mention that the production, sale and consumption of goods that we enjoy depend on the strict continuance of abject poverty in the world? And abject it is. Today, a billion people live in absolute poverty, meaning stunted growth, miserable health, dangerous water supplies and virtually total illiteracy. Not what Pepsi has in mind for its new generation.

To include these disenfranchised among the citizenry, not to mention the billions slightly better off, means restructuring the way we live. It means rethinking the way we drive, eat and house ourselves. It will require world-wide planning to utilize the planet's resources. If that's not done, don't act surprised when the people outside the wealth loop do things to improve their lot that are harmful to birds and bushes.

But I gave at the office, you say. At least our country did. Cut it out. Most of our foreign aid has been military-oriented and distributed selectively to advance our own narrow (concluded on page 141)Up to here(continued from page 50) preoccupations. And consider the bottom line: The net result of rich nations' "charity" is that developing countries now pay the industrialized countries 30 billion dollars a year more in interest on loans than they receive in assistance. They are helping carry us--not vice versa. If we had paid them a fair price for their raw materials in the first place, of course, they wouldn't have required loans.

This ugly state of affairs is masked by an insufferable self-righteousness that targets the world's poorer countries as the main culprits in the planet's despoliation. Take note of the Brazilian Amazon rain forest. "Save the rain forests" is chanted as a pagan rite of passage in Earth Day celebrations exorcising the demons of pollution. Not to take anything from stars such as Sting and Tom Cruise, who have journeyed down to the Amazon to call attention to what is, indeed, a serious and accelerating loss. But the emphasis is all wrong. And that fault lies less with the entertainers, generally a savvy bunch eager to avoid the sins of ethnocentrism, and more with the media and the commercial advertisers who have exploited the artists' concerns.

Yes, the rain forest must be saved. But don't blame the poor farmers who clear a few acres each year or the gold miners eager to climb from the depths of Brazilian poverty. Once again, the problem is a result of the immense differences in income between the world's rich and poor, leaving the poor in such dire straits that they must pit their children's immediate survival against that of the forest.

These contradictions are summarized brilliantly in The Fate of the Forest, by Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, by far the best study of the rain-forest problem. Planning to save the rain forest must proceed from a recognition of the survival needs of the people who live in the area, argue the authors. "Any program for the Amazon begins with basic human rights; an end to the debt bondage, violence, enslavement and killings practiced by those who would seize the lands these forest people have occupied for generations .... If there is one word that is the keystone to [these people's] demands and hopes for the future, it is the single word on which all hopes for the Amazon rest: justice."

There it is, the key to the environmental problem, whether you're on the freeway or in the rain forest. We all want to do what is right for the planet if there are serious alternatives. Even Californians will use mass transit if it exists. The peasants will nurture the forest given a realistic means of earning a livelihood. But the alternatives must be real and just.

So what to do? Bette Midler must rise up out of that hospital bed and give up that doleful mother-earth shtick. In that sassy, demanding way of hers, she should gut-check the fellows with the coins to play and pay fair. It's time to act straight, guys. Stop pushing sugar water on the natives. What they and we need are sensible means of moving people, growing and packaging food and educating the young in harmony with the limits of our environment. It will cost, but so has the military budget for the past 50 years, and this war is necessary.

Let's not be cheap, Midler might trumpet on the next Earth Day special. If there are billions of dollars for one Mike Milken and 500 billion dollars from taxpayers to pay for his junk-bond hustles, then we can find the means to build a world infrastructure--transportation, agriculture and industry--that will permit the dispossessed and the rest of us to live and breathe.

"She should gut-check the fellows with the coins to play and pay fair. It's time to act straight, guys."