There Isn't Much Time

...and I teach about 200 magnificent young people at Harvard...

...The second threat arises from the fact that every nuclear reactor of any type now at work produces as a by-product plutonium 239, probably the most toxic substance known...

...The grain that might otherwise go to feeding a starving peasantry is instead fed to hogs and cattle to supply this enormously increased demand for meat in the affluent world...

...I am one of those scientists who, try as we will, hope as we do, that something in our view of things is wrong, still find it difficult to see how the human race will get itself much past the year 2000...

...About three years ago experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, where I do my summer research, estimated that by then the oil residues floating in the upper layers of the ocean exceeded in bulk all the photosynthetic organisms...

...We can opt for life rather than death...

...And our role as the middle class, the role for which we are designed, trained, employed, and paid, is to help that to happen, to do what we can to smooth the way to that disaster...

...Until a few years ago, if something was done by the Government that upset a lot of people, we would organize a demonstration...

...One microgram is likely eventually to cause lung or bone cancer...

...Each of these situations changes as one studies it...

...It is no accident that we lack a politics that might change our society...

...Nuclear power, that enticing prospect, in all its present forms threatens our future as a civilization and as people, in three different ways...

...I hoped until recently that a democracy such as we are told we have in the United States could vote itself a social revolution...

...physicians and lawyers...

...And a society like our own, which puts the maximization of profits above all other considerations, is therefore heading for destruction...

...Our crisis is not a crisis of information but a crisis of decision, of policy...

...one can live well on other people's troubles...

...What are we to do...

...to rationalize its contradictions...

...The standard reactors now in use produce enough plutonium as a by-product every year to make dozens of fission bombs...

...The only way to get the poor to have fewer children is to give them some assurance that the children they have will survive...

...We now have only 3.7 billion to feed, but rather than feed them, we are being offered a rhetoric to rationalize letting them starve...

...In an obsessive pursuit of short-term profit and power, it threatens to bring an end to the human enterprise...

...It is easy to say what is wrong, but how do we make it right...

...If you can imagine any place on the surface of the Earth or under the seas to store that kind of thing with some assurance that it will stay put for 20,000 years, 50,000 years, 100,000 years, you begin to see the problem...

...Depending upon location, one such accident could kill hundreds of thousands of persons, and devastate and contaminate a huge area—my state of Massachusetts, for example...

...One milligram inhaled is enough to kill a person within hours by massive fibrosis of the lungs...

...This places an enormous burden upon the poorer and hungrier parts of the world, because producing meat requires a bad nutritional bargain...

...Well, suddenly such crises began to hit us about once a week...

...one shuts it off and tries to live some kind of normal life...

...If population control in the entire developed world reached the level of simple replacement by the year 2000—that is, if every couple produced only two children who themselves grew to the age of reproduction— and if the so-called underdeveloped world reached the same point by the year 2050, then by the year 2120, the world population would have risen to about thirteen billion...

...If people are hungry, set up a well-funded project on hunger...

...Life in the United States is much more like being on a luxury liner to the Bahamas...

...to foster its acceptance through education, indoctrination, and religious exhortation...

...We already know enough to begin to cope with all the major problems that now threaten human life and much of the rest of the life on the Earth...

...But in recent history it has turned destructive...

...But with all the means of mass communication and all the machinery of social control in the hands of the power elite, it is not at all clear that this is even possible...

...It's a way of life...

...to fragment and dilute any opposition, and in the event of serious challenge to control or crush it...

...every alleged work injury represents an insurance or compensation cost...

...So there isn't much time...

...That condition is beginning to involve the whole human race...

...It takes about eight pounds of grain to make one pound of meat...

...Perhaps the least important threat ultimately is the possibility that many of us worry about most, the possibility of major accidents in nuclear power installations...

...at times and places in the past it may have done so...

...The population explosion raises problems of another magnitude...

...George Borgstrom of Michigan State University has calculated that U.S...

...The automobile, of course, is a major killer of healthy persons...

...Rather than serve the power elite in its present plunge toward destruction, we can turn the other way and serve the people...

...Before that ozone layer formed, life on Earth had to remain under water...

...All too often it serves as such an excuse—as in the case of the big industrial diseases, pollution, tobacco smoking, and cancer, and most recently with the aerosol spray-cans and the ozone layer...

...It is now 3.7 billion, and a lot of us are beginning to feel crowded...

...all military and police officials...

...I am a researcher, and I believe research is a fine thing...

...There Isn't Much Time GEORGE WALD Our country suffers from a condition I think of as saturation politics...

...If we haul them aboard, the lifeboat will sink and all will be lost—so let them drown...

...Though we already know enough to cope with all our major problems, however, I don't know one of those major problems that we can begin to cope with while maximizing profits...

...It is a rhetoric of irresponsibility— Cain's "Am I my brother's keeper...

...Now we are told that the propellant in most of those convenient aerosol spray-cans is attacking the ozone layer...

...After several years of that, we ended with a numbed, dazed, punch-drunk public, incapable of further response...

...But that is not the world in which we live...

...Garrett Hardin, the biologist, asks us to imagine that we are all in a lifeboat, rowing through a sea filled with struggling persons about to drown...

...The third danger in nuclear power is that no one knows how to store the waste products, which will remain dangerous for half a million years...

...It is estimated that if we were to stop all use of spray-cans now, we will already have lost about 10 per cent of the ozone layer...

...The reason is obvious: Every attempt to make the workplaces safer increases the cost of production...

...But we do not have to accept that role...

...In between is the middle class to which we ourselves belong...

...We are told to meet the famine problem by practicing "triage"—helping those nations which we have decided can be saved, and letting those die which we decide are too far gone...

...As Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said some years ago, "There are now more people living on cancer then dying from cancer...

...We register about 22,000 deaths by industrial accident every year, and 2.2 million disabling injuries—but those statistics don't touch the slow killing: the black lung of the coal mines, the brown lung which is produced by exposure to the dust of cotton, hemp, and flax in the textile mills, the silicosis, asbestosis, and uranium poisoning, and the variety of cancers associated with these conditions...

...The role laid out for it is to mediate between the power elite and the working masses—to keep the system running, if possible smoothly, but to keep it running at all costs...

...It is leading our society rapidly toward disaster...

...you could carry that amount in a brown paper grocery bag...

...Then who are the masters...

...The stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the United States and the Soviet Union several years ago reached the explosive equivalent of ten to fifteen tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on the planet...

...If our world is coming to an end, set up a well-funded Project Apocalypse...

...I believe our so-called free world is now wholly controlled by such multinational super-enterprises as General Motors, Exxon, the Chase Manhattan Bank, ITT, Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum...

...You might think that enough...

...We live with the myth that if only our governments had the proper information, it would be used, it would be acted upon...

...We are told that "all the facts are not yet in"—but all the facts are never in...

...At present this stuff is being stockpiled just about where it is produced, while we try to figure out what to do with it...

...George WaldisHiggins professor of biology at Harvard University and1968Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine...

...professors, journalists, and clergymen...

...but we are now—both superpowers—in the middle of a huge escalation, replacing all the single warheads by multiple warheads, and devising new and more accurate guidance systems...

...As they rise gradually into the high atmosphere, shortwave radiation from the sun liberates their chlorine, which then initiates a catalytic chain reaction that destroys ozone...

...We now have it in our hands to wipe out all humanity and much of the rest of life on Earth...

...We live in a highly lethal society...

...It is frequently said that the poor should not have so many children, that they are poor because they have too many children...

...These rhetorical flourishes are intended to reconcile us to doing nothing for the hungry, to going on living our well-to-do, overfed, middle-class lives while the poor in our own countries go hungry and the Third World starves...

...And anyone who knows this business understands that the accounts kept of the production of plutonium 239 allow a scale of leakage that makes the covert production of nuclear bombs perfectly feasible...

...It would be altogether possible to feed the present world population...

...Fortunately that scale of accident has not happened anywhere yet, but the safety record of present installation is far from reassuring...

...A plutonium 239 bomb of the explosive force of a bomb that leveled Hiroshima and killed one hundred thousand persons would take six to seven kilograms...

...You'd have to put that into a shopping bag...

...What we need is a reorganization of our society, a fundamental change in its direction, so as better to meet human needs, to fulfill human values, to humanize what is now increasingly alienating, to serve life rather than death...

...This is the familiar tactic of blaming the victim...

...they need to have many children so that one or two may survive to feed them in their old age and bury them when they die...

...The whole of human civilization is perhaps 10,000 years old, and we are producing material that will represent a lethal liability for man and for life on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years to come...

...Until recently the intensifying food shortages in the world could be ascribed mainly to increase in population, but a new element has been added within the last decade—a sudden, large increase in the demand for meat, for beef and pork, in the developed nations...

...Furthermore, this is the most convenient material out of which to make fission bombs...

...In the United States, the workplaces are at least as big a killer...

...This is an especially frightening part of the wider problem of industrial pollution...

...How are we to get that change in direction...

...But I have no feeling that I'm in a lifeboat...

...as we began to organize a protest, the next crisis hit us, and then the next, and then the next...

...Within a month or so we could bring 100,000 to 500,000 persons to Washington to protest...

...I still have young children at home...

...Such statistics are hard to come by, because industry fights tooth and nail to keep them concealed...

...We have a choice...

...At the other end of the social scale is a great, faceless mass of workers, increasingly urban and hence increasingly dependent on their employment...

...If we go on much longer, we could lose it all...

...Our recent political experiences are not encouraging...

...They must be expressed in the form of political power exercised by an aroused people who insist on taking their lives back into their own hands...

...One puts it away...

...Still, the only solutions for the problems I have mentioned are political...

...All of humanity now suffers from a series of exceedingly threatening new developments, all coming to a head at about the same time—close to the year 2000...

...livestock consumes enough feed materials to nourish 1.3 billion persons, and world livestock consumes enough to nourish 15 billion persons...

...But research must not be allowed to become a trap, an excuse for endlessly putting off action...

...One does not live with that kind of thought day in and day out...

...Our politics is controlled like every other business in America, and by the same people—a small elite in which is concentrated more power and wealth than ever before in human history, and which by now acts essentially in collusion in its world-wide operations...

...The "trigger quantity"—the amount of plutonium 239 with which one can make an atom bomb, is two kilograms...

...All of us should realize by now that it's the other way around: People have too many children because they are poor...

...That exceedingly delicate layer of ozone filters out of the sunlight reaching the Earth the shortwave radiation which would otherwise kill all forms of life exposed to it...

...But it is always in the background...

...After photosynthesis had put oxygen into our atmosphere, a thin layer of ozone formed high up in the atmosphere...

...Conceivably such a system could work to social advantage...

...We are often told that the famine already in progress in increasing parts of the Third World, and hunger among the poor in some developed countries, is somehow the fault of the hungry...

...Once that is achieved, they will be glad to have smaller families...

...No society in human history has cultivated the technology of killing and destruction as has Western society under Christianity...

...That dismal apprehension will not be repaired if we work only on health care...

...We never know enough about anything...

...Though I desperately want to, I cannot find any assurance that they have a future—any assurance that they will be in physical existence ten, twenty, twenty-five years from now...

...Having many children is a strategy for survival among the very poor...

...We live with a constant sense of the insecurity of life on Earth today...

...No one knows what the ultimate effects of that situation will be...

...Let me cite an example: The photosynthesis performed by plants, which keeps oxygen in our atmosphere, occurs, for the most part, not on the surface of the land but in the uppermost layers of the oceans...

...We scientists have one answer all prepared: Do research...

...Let us, by all means, have more research, but let us also act, let us do what is needed...

...In what we fondly call the "free world"—that phrase used to trouble me until I realized that it meant those nations which get their armaments free from the United States—the governments are in reality not the masters but the servants...

...It includes all government officials, high and low...

...In fact, some of the demographers who tell us not to worry too much about the population explosion estimate that with careful management we could feed as many as forty billion people on the Earth...

...The propellant gasses, mixtures of chlorofluoromethanes, often with the carcinogenic vinyl chloride added, are now entering our atmosphere in ever-increasing quantities...

...It is not only atomic bombs we need to fear...