The Gnat Is Older than Man, by Christopher D. Stone/Ultimate Security, by Norman Myers
Worth, Robert
WARMING TO A GLOBAL ETHIC THE GNAT IS OLDER THAN NAN Global Environment and Human Agenda Christopher D. Stone Princeton University Press, $21.95, 341 pp. ULTIMATE SECURITY The Environmental...
...ULTIMATE SECURITY The Environmental Basis of Political Stability Norman Myers W.W...
...Right-wing ideologues like Rush Limbaugh have made ample use of those uncertainties to call the whole question of global warming a sham...
...Most climate researchers 23 agree that there is a better than even chance that the climate will warm by at least 3.5 degrees over the next century...
...In so doing, he demonstrates that fundamental problems like access to clean water—already a very sensitive issue in the Middle East—has always been a problem in the third world...
...At the same time, Stone has (like his father, the famously contentious journalist I. F. Stone) a penchant for the outrageous...
...toxic wastes threaten to seep into our oceans and lakes...
...Ideas like these, as Stone describes them, are still sketchy, vulnerable to critique...
...In fact, as Stone suggests in The Gnat is Older than Man, to dwell too long on the uncertainties of global climate change is to grant a kind of PR victory to the other team...
...He has a keen eye for the resentments and vaguenesses that undercut efforts like the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit...
...The source of this media frenzy lies perhaps less with scientists than with the media itself...
...The Wall Street Journal has bristled with editorials against the "conspiracy" of environmentalist groups to delude the public about the dangers of global warming and the ozone hole...
...general principles of international law are notoriously difficult to enforce...
...Global solutions, he argues, are not always the best approach to global problems...
...But they are important first steps toward a legal framework that would accommodate greater sympathy with the nonhuman world around us—creatures, objects, the landscape—than has ever been formally recognized before...
...What the world needs, Stone argues, is less gloom-and-doom prophecy, less flaky idealism, and more careful thought about the legal, social, and economic issues surrounding environmental problems...
...Instead, he favors bilateral and multilateral treaties...
...Whatever the effects of our decisions, they will be with us for a long time...
...topsoils are disappearing and farmlands turning to desert...
...CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries...
...The Global Commons—the oceans and Antarctica—are increasingly polluted...
...To read them is to gather a philosophical idea that is, at the same time, a source of real political hope for the future...
...Two new books, Christopher Stone's The Gnat Is Older than Man and Norman Myers's Ultimate Security, provide a welcome antidote to the shallow polemicism that has plagued media coverage of the environment...
...Stone argues for the designation of international "guardian" groups that would be responsible for the welfare of specific areas or natural populations...
...In the past, environmental advocates have tended to be Jeremiahs, howling at us for our ecological sins, pointing a finger at the coming apocalypse...
...And, as Myers argues in Ultimate Security, these environmental dangers are already turning into deadly sources of political instability...
...Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects was an exploration of some of the issues that have been most embarrassing to mainstream environmentalists...
...And it would be a welcome challenge to the narrow utilitarianism that tends to govern our thoughts about the natural world...
...Thanks to implementation of the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Reduce the Ozone Layer, ozone depletion appears likely to decline in the future as chlorofluorocarbon production comes to an end...
...Robert Worth The past year or so has seen an unprecedented "backlash" against the environmental movement, particularly on global climate issues...
...He also suggests the creation of a Global Commons Trust Fund for the reparation of international environmental damage...
...Fresh water sources around the world are suffering from overuse and pollution...
...And he offers inventive solutions to problems that fall outside any current national jurisdiction...
...As a professor of law, Stone is particularly concerned with the politics of international cooperation...
...Myers takes four regional case studies—the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and Mexico—to flesh out his argument...
...His previous book, Should Trees Have Standing...
...Norton, $25, 308 pp...
...He deliberately leaves the "spiritual and moral" dimensions of his discussion for last...
...Five years ago, after the hot summer of 1988, the air was full of frantic warnings about melting icecaps and dwindling ozone...
...Even if the critics prove right and temperatures remain perfectly stable for the indefinite future, there are plenty of other problems to worry about...
...To his credit, however, Stone turns around to condemn the self-indulgence and futility of such judgments...
...But the critics, instead of applauding this victory of environmental advocacy, insist that the whole thing was exaggerated in the first place...
...fisheries are dwindling...
...The ozone hole comes up for similar attacks...
...Stone readily grants that recognizing moral rights in nonpersons is an absurdity...
...Since then the weather has cooled off and the opposition has made use of an insight that was there all along: prophecies are never safe...
...While the pale-skinned North worries about increases in skin cancer from ozone depletion, millions of people in the South die every year from polluted-water diseases like diarrhea, cholera, and typhoid...
...Rightwing think tanks have been putting out books with titles like Apocalypse Not and Environmental Overkill...
...But efforts by one nation to make another pay for transboundary pollution rarely succeed...
...Such disparities breed resentment, and they make it all the harder to achieve an international understanding on global issues like climate change and deforestation...
...Some form of legal right, however, might be the best form of protection, if administered by designated "guardians"— as in the example of the Global Commons...
...Both authors begin by reminding us that our uncertainty about climate change ought to provoke caution, not recklessness...
...With a gentle insistence that is typical of his book, Stone criticizes other environmentalists for being too ready to blame the environmental crisis on Western culture, religion, or capitalism...
...and he brings to these questions an unparalleled sophistication and rigor...
...Particularly where computer models are asked to simulate vastly complex systems of weather and climate, there will be disagreements about the factors involved— CO2, water vapor, emissions—as well as the likely results...
...Stone begins his essay with a borrowed phrase that typifies this approach: "The Earth has Cancer, and the Cancer is Man...
Vol. 121 • February 1994 • No. 4
