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 implications of this uncertainty are themselves unclear...
...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...
...that the progressive elimination of genetic diversity in plants and animals could leave us vulnerable to widespread crop failures...
...Respectable scientific opinion can be found in support of all positions...
...but my people know not the ordinance of the Lord...
...Unfortunately, the measurements these models need (such as simple temperature dhta) are often crude and, at best, very patchy...
...Surely it cannot lie in their superior rhetoric...
...they receive grants from private philanthropists and liberal foundations...
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...In political polemics such suspicions are made into accusations...
...Of course, the prophets of ecological catastrophes have not been completely effective, and converts to the belief in ecological catastrophe are still a minority...
...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...
...That human values must weight the relevant risks of alternative courses of action is obvious...
...Seemingly every prediction that grows from it quickly induces an opposite prediction...
...Don't!...-of ecological conservatives, in that he recommends certain new institutions which could buffer risk rather than avoid it altogether...
...Perception, experience, "common sense' '--these are simply not relevant tools...
...How to explain the relatively greater success of these latter-day prophets...
...but in the short run the ban on DDT is suspected of increasing deaths from malaria...
...Jeremiah remonstrates with his countrymen: "Even the stork in the heavens knows her times...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Stephen H. Schneider is a climatologist at the Natural Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado...
...Is the global atmosphere warming, cooling,, staying the same, or doing some combination of the above...
...call him Charlie...
...The difference in favor of Mr...
...The important thing was that since 1964, Charlie had been going to Republican conventions as a delegate...
...Interestingly enough, the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance predicts that, under a wide range of conditions, when evidence contradicts belief, belief is reinforced...
...And given the Republican civil war this time round, he may not have made it to the Kansas City convention...
...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...
...The imperfections of American domestic politics will be negligible compared to those of international politics...
...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...
...I would divide ecological risks into two general classes according to their social origin...
...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...
...Such problems are perceived only in a halflight, which makes them more intriguing and, paradoxically, more believable...
...They draw large audiences...
...And with the process of selecting our Presidents ultimately in the hands of men like Charlie, we don't have anything to worry about...
...I met him in Phoenix, where I'd gone to teach in 1971...
...This is not a welcome situation, but at least it is familiar...
...Our interests didn't quite coincide...
...Yet, it must be admitted that those of Peccei are more lingering, more obsessing...
...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...
...Hon...
...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...
...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...
...These can be very sharp indeed when barbed--as they often are--with the edge of mockery...
...But he also goes several steps beyond the conventional negativist cautions--i.e., "Stop...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...DDT, after all, is suspected of inducing mortality and ecological stress in the long run...
...It is important to emphasize, though, that all respectable argument on such issues emerges from the protoplasm of scientific reason...
...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...
...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...
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...For the workings of the "climatic s y s t e m " - atmosphere, oceans, land, and ice--are little understood...
...He says a good many unflattering things about our governmental institutions and about scientists in their employ...
...I never saw Charlie again after that...
...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...
...Yet Schneider is no polemicist, and his tone is entirely free of mockery or any other form of stridency...
...However indirect the causal linkages, climatic changes in one region do pop up in distant regions...
...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...
...He believes that we are rapidly heading towards big ecological troubles, perhaps catastrophes...
...After a political mumble I'd given to a small group in Phoenix, Charlie invited me to a party at his house...
...they install sympathizers in high elective and appointive office...
...But that was incidental...
...Suddenly the lights went down, and the strobe lights came on, and Charlie's air-conditioned house literally shook with the noise...
...Indeed ecological jeremiads seem often to contradict experience and perception, for the oceans are not boiling and the seasons come dutifully in their course...
...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...
...Scientific reason is remarkably protoplasmic...
...For instance, it is alleged that oil and other toxic elements dumped into the oceans could destroy enough phytoplankton to disrupt the photosynthetic cycle...
...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...
...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...
...As these proposals perhaps suggest, the main difficulty with preventing ecological disruption and hedging against its possibility is political rather than scientific...
...These stylistic virtues are not Eugene Bardacb teaches public policy at the Unwersity of Cakfornia, Berkeley...
...A memorable evening indeed, lacking only a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "My Kind of Guy, Ted Agnew Is...
...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...
...I don't remember what he did for a living--sold drapes, perhaps...
...Schneider emphasizes a second class of ecological risks, which arise from publicly sponsored and managed large-scale manipulations of climate or geography...
...And a grand treat it was...
...Contemporary prophets of ecological doom fare a lot better...
...The words of Jeremiah are certainly more plangent, more deeply possessing...
...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...
...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...
...that the stratospheric ozone shield could be destroyed by aerosol sprays...
...And suddenly there was a woman with a Ubangi voice shrieking something nearly unintelligible which proved to be "Nixon's the One...
...And tonight, he told us, we were in for a special treat...
...Schneider's general inclination is, of course, to be "conservative" with respect to ecological issues...
...that inorganic fertilizers could destroy the humus in the soil and threaten the nitrogen cycle...
...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...
...After a few drinks, Charlie disappeared into another room...
...The Old Testament prophets appealed to experience and perception, whereas the latter-day prophets appeal to theory and reason...
...and the turtledove, swallow and crane keep the time of their coming...
...Naturally, all sides to the debate over ecological risks suspect their opponents of rationalizing unstated motives...
...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...
...The "Pollyannas" suspect that the "Cassandras" are in the service of a decadent (and largely elitist) political reaction against bourgeois culture and capitalist economics...
...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...
...Reason has a dark underside, known since Freud as rationalization...
...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...
...I can't remember his name now, but I'l...
...that pesticide residues and other poisons could build up to deadly levels through progressive concentration in the food web...
...There were drums...
...and so on...
...He argues his case not merely as a scientist but as an unabashed political advocate...
Vol. 10 • November 1976 • No. 2
