The Genesis Strategy
Bardach, Eugene
why they have to visit old Doc Gooch for a shot or two of penicillin. But they'll settle in. Convention delegates are remarkable people, not like you or me. Let me tell you about one. I...
...The most ingenious proposal (which was aired first in Science in an article with William Kellog) is for "no-fault climate disaster insurance," whereby countries involved in climate modification schemes would in effect put up a bond which could be used, if necessary, to compensate unintentionally injured parties...
...Compare this to the utterances of Aurelio'Peccei, wealthy founder of the Club of Rome and promoter of the "limits to growth" idea: "The specter of famine is...rising again on the planet--but for the first time so huge as to be called megafamine...
...Yet Schneider is no polemicist, and his tone is entirely free of mockery or any other form of stridency...
...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 achieved without some effort on Schneider's part, as he is constantly at pains to remind us throughout the text...
...Naturally, all sides to the debate over ecological risks suspect their opponents of rationalizing unstated motives...
...Charlie broke out some funny Republican convention hats and some noisemakers, and he and his friends marched around the house, singing along and shouting, "four more years...
...However indirect the causal linkages, climatic changes in one region do pop up in distant regions...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 p~easeenter a [] new [] renewal subscription for: [] One year--S10 [] Two years--S18 [] Three years -- $25 [] Payment enclosed [] Please bill me The Alternative: An American Spectator November 1976 29 Name Address City State _ _ Zip PLEASE PRINT 102B...
...that the stratospheric ozone shield could be destroyed by aerosol sprays...
...The words of Jeremiah are certainly more plangent, more deeply possessing...
...The "Pollyannas" suspect that the "Cassandras" are in the service of a decadent (and largely elitist) political reaction against bourgeois culture and capitalist economics...
...In political polemics such suspicions are made into accusations...
...He says a good many unflattering things about our governmental institutions and about scientists in their employ...
...DDT, after all, is suspected of inducing mortality and ecological stress in the long run...
...Indeed ecological jeremiads seem often to contradict experience and perception, for the oceans are not boiling and the seasons come dutifully in their course...
...The first class arises from the highly decentralized organization of human activities (like agriculture, manufacturing, or product use) that create wastes or other "side effects" which increase stress on the biosphere...
...And given the Republican civil war this time round, he may not have made it to the Kansas City convention...
...that pesticide residues and other poisons could build up to deadly levels through progressive concentration in the food web...
...Is the ozone shield (against ultra-violet radiation) being depleted by fluorocarbons, or is there a "natural sink" for these, or does the natural rate of ozone replenishment offset any likely depletion...
...How to explain the relatively greater success of these latter-day prophets...
...It was an LP, with a dozen or so versions of that memorable work--Duke Ellington played it, if I remember correctly, and people like Sammy Davis and the Ubangi maiden sang it...
...After a political mumble I'd given to a small group in Phoenix, Charlie invited me to a party at his house...
...There were drums...
...But he also goes several steps beyond the conventional negativist cautions--i.e., "Stop...
...Some of the main scientific tools for probing the system are computerized simulation models, and of course it is through such models alone that one can hope to predict the consequences of massive land clearance or weather modification projects...
...Hon...
...I don't remember what he did for a living--sold drapes, perhaps...
...I met him in Phoenix, where I'd gone to teach in 1971...
...But if he wasn't there in body, his spirit permeated Kemper Arena--and for that matter Madison Square Garden-for Charlie is the quintessential national convention delegate...
...No doubt a great deal of the credit for this achievement, as well as for the lucidity of the prose overall, belongs to Schneider's collaborator Lynne Mesirow, whom he describes in his acknowledgements as "a writer...
...Surely it cannot lie in their superior rhetoric...
...No doubt a more workable idea is his proposal for a food stockpile (the main element of his "Genesis Strategy") to carry the world through periods of temporary and intermittent food shortage --periods which he predicts are imminent if not already upon us...
...But that was incidental...
...With regard to issues of climatic disturbance and control, therefore, we must probably look forward to a future riddled with scientific uncertainty and political controversy...
...Stephen H. Schneider is a climatologist at the Natural Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado...
...Perception, experience, "common sense' '--these are simply not relevant tools...
...Contemporary prophets of ecological doom fare a lot better...
...I can't remember his name now, but I'l...
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...They draw large audiences...
...THE ALTERNATIVE, Subscription Department, P.O...
...Seemingly every prediction that grows from it quickly induces an opposite prediction...
...He argues his case not merely as a scientist but as an unabashed political advocate...
...Melting the Arctic Ocean ice pack could conceivably boost Soviet agriculture in several different ways, but there is a "definite possibility," according to Schneider, that this would indirectly lead to another glaciation of Canada and Europe...
...Is the global atmosphere warming, cooling,, staying the same, or doing some combination of the above...
...they receive grants from private philanthropists and liberal foundations...
...that the progressive elimination of genetic diversity in plants and animals could leave us vulnerable to widespread crop failures...
...Suddenly the lights went down, and the strobe lights came on, and Charlie's air-conditioned house literally shook with the noise...
...And tonight, he told us, we were in for a special treat...
...After a few drinks, Charlie disappeared into another room...
...Don't!...-of ecological conservatives, in that he recommends certain new institutions which could buffer risk rather than avoid it altogether...
...What is not so obvious--because it seems so often to be ignored--is that for certain kinds of problems no course of action (including inaction) is free from uncertainty and risk...
...Respectable scientific opinion can be found in support of all positions...
...Clearing the forests of the Amazon for cropland could result in serious and adverse regional effects, and could even affect weather patterns in areas thousands of miles away...
...Schneider's recommendations for how to cope with these problems are terribly naive, being suffused with the romance of international cooperation, but their failings simply reflect the magnitude of the problem at hand...
...But climatological theory is still so primitive that Schneider cannot tell us much more than that "the climatic system cannot be 'kicked' very hard in one place without 'bulging' elsewhere...
...I never saw Charlie again after that...
...that the waste heat from energy consumption could build up in the atmosphere until it melts the polar ice cap or triggers other drastic alterations in climate...
...There were trumpets...
...Jeremiah remonstrates with his countrymen: "Even the stork in the heavens knows her times...
...William E. Simon Join Treasury Secretary Simon, William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol, and thousands of other thoughtful Americans who read The Alternative...
...And suddenly there was a woman with a Ubangi voice shrieking something nearly unintelligible which proved to be "Nixon's the One...
...Scientific reason is remarkably protoplasmic...
...Schneider emphasizes a second class of ecological risks, which arise from publicly sponsored and managed large-scale manipulations of climate or geography...
...That human values must weight the relevant risks of alternative courses of action is obvious...
...And although he didn't say so, I'm sure that Charlie believed that heaven would very closely resemble one huge and continuous political convention, with an eternal supply of signs and hats and noisemakers and bands and speeches and roll call votes...
...It is important to emphasize, though, that all respectable argument on such issues emerges from the protoplasm of scientific reason...
...He believes that we are rapidly heading towards big ecological troubles, perhaps catastrophes...
...The difference in favor of Mr...
...This is not a welcome situation, but at least it is familiar...
...I would divide ecological risks into two general classes according to their social origin...
...International cooperation to mitigate the risks of serious ecological damage will probably be as elusive as cooperation to reduce the risk of war and international terrorism...
...And with the process of selecting our Presidents ultimately in the hands of men like Charlie, we don't have anything to worry about...
...Peccei and his brethren, I believe, lies in the fact that Jeremiah was talking about things people could see and hear, the misdeeds of everyday life, whereas ecological jeremiads, conversely, refer to intangible long-term trends, to "rising" specters, to "increasing stress on the biosphere," and the like...
...These stylistic virtues are not Eugene Bardacb teaches public policy at the Unwersity of Cakfornia, Berkeley...
...Interestingly enough, the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that, under a wide range of conditions, when evidence contradicts belief, belief is reinforced...
...As these proposals perhaps suggest, the main difficulty with preventing ecological disruption and hedging against its possibility is political rather than scientific...
...And a grand treat it was...
...He offers some genuinely alarming speculation as to what might happen if national interest and technocratic hubris were to become routir.e allies pressed into service against the actuality or the expectation of chronic food shortages...
...Reason has a dark underside, known since Freud as rationalization...
...He was going to Miami in '72, and he hoped to continue to go until he was called to his reward by the Big Pol in the sky...
...Such problems are perceived only in a halflight, which makes them more intriguing and, paradoxically, more believable...
...Yet, it must be admitted that those of Peccei are more lingering, more obsessing...
...that inorganic fertilizers could destroy the humus in the soil and threaten the nitrogen cycle...
...Later, when we finished the roll call and the mood turned mellow, Charlie put on the collected speeches of Douglas MacArthur and told me about himself...
...Our interests didn't quite coincide...
...and so on...
...Do we ? BOOK REVIEW The Genesis Strategy Stephen H. Schneider (with Lynne E. Mesirow) / Plenum / $14.95 Eugene Bardach The prophets of ancient Israel were, as everyone knows, largely ignored, despised, and dishonored...
...A memorable evening indeed, lacking only a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "My Kind of Guy, Ted Agnew Is...
...The implications of this uncertainty are themselves unclear...
...For instance, it is alleged that oil and other toxic elements dumped into the oceans could destroy enough phytoplankton to disrupt the photosynthetic cycle...
...The "Cassandras" suspect that the "Pollyannas" are enslaved by the habit of optimism, addicted to material comfort, and victimized by pseudo-eternal verities about the subordination of nature to man...
...Of course, the prophets of ecological catastrophes have not been completely effective, and converts to the belief in ecological catastrophe are still a minority...
...they install sympathizers in high elective and appointive office...
...These can be very sharp indeed when barbed--as they often are--with the edge of mockery...
...but in the short run the ban on DDT is suspected of increasing deaths from malaria...
...Schneider's general inclination is, of course, to be "conservative" with respect to ecological issues...
...The imperfections of American domestic politics will be negligible compared to those of international politics...
...call him Charlie...
...Unfortunately, the measurements these models need (such as simple temperature dhta) are often crude and, at best, very patchy...
...The Old Testament prophets appealed to experience and perception, whereas the latter-day prophets appeal to theory and reason...
...One of the most impressive attributes of The Alternative is the thoughtful understanding and insight it shows on questions relating to free enterprise and the democratic process...
...It was a handsome, sprawling, one-story Southwestern house, and Charlie, a happy fellow with pink eyes, was especially proud of the sound system he'd just installed...
...For the workings of the "climatic s y s t e m " - atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice--are little understood...
...and the turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming...
...but my people know not the ordinance of the Lord...
...The important thing was that since 1964, Charlie had been going to Republican conventions as a delegate...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
