Mendes’s name soon spread throughout the world. For those concerned about the forest he became a hero, but for Amazon developers he was something else. They were used to getting what they wanted, using either bribes or bullets. Among Mendes’s enemies were some local ranchers, the Alves da Silva family, who were clearing land they claimed was theirs. In 1988 Mendes sought to have this land declared a reserve. The Alves made it known they planned to kill him, and reporters came from far away to witness the event. One day Mendes blundered, setting foot outside his door without his bodyguards. From behind some bushes, gunmen shot and killed him.
Everybody knew who shot him: an Alves rancher and his son. But with their money and important friends, would they ever be tried? They were, but only after two years had passed, and because of outside pressure. The court sentenced the father to nineteen years in prison for ordering the murder, and his son to nineteen for carrying it out. The two escaped from prison, but police recaptured them.
ECONOMIC GROWTH AND nature often fought against each other. At times it seemed as if the price of economic gain was ecologic loss. If living standards rose, that happened at the cost of water, beauty, soil, and air; and animals and plants.
In the 1900s we began to warm the air around us. (Or so it seems, for not everyone blames man.) In the entire 20,000 years since the recent ice age ended, the surface temperature of earth had risen from five to nine degrees. But in the 1900s alone, it rose by one degree. What’s more, the rate of warming quickened as the 1900s passed. The 1970s were warmer than the ’60s, and the 1980s were warmer than the ’70s. The 1990s were warmer still.
From the North Pole to the South Pole, glaciers melted. The Greenland ice cap shrank. Glacier Park, Montana, looked as if it might run out of glaciers. In Africa, the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro were about to disappear. As we saw in chapter 2, it was the shrinking of a glacier in the Alps that exposed the body of the Iceman. In Peru one could sit and watch the Andes glaciers shrink sixteen inches a day. The glaciers of Antarctica have been melting, threatening to raise the level of the oceans and to flood low-lying cities everywhere.
What caused the warming? Experts disagreed, but a consensus slowly grew. Fuels that humans burned had liberated carbon dioxide and other gases. Then these gases acted like a greenhouse, or like the windshield of a car on a sunny day. They allowed the sun’s rays to penetrate them so that the rays reached the earth, but then they trapped the resulting heat. A little of this kind of warming is a natural and a useful thing, and nothing new. But, the experts said, a problem rose when we began producing too much carbon dioxide. Those figurative greenhouse panes got thicker and the earth got warmer.
Some blamed the “greenhouse effect” on the burning of the Amazon forests, which do indeed make carbon dioxide. But the bigger problem was the burning everywhere of fossil fuels, mainly coal and oil. This happened most in richer countries, which generated many times more greenhouse gas than did the poorer ones.
Earth was also suffering in other ways. Everywhere — not only in Amazonia but everywhere — humans wiped out other species. This was nothing new. Several centuries ago, sailors landing on an island in the Indian Ocean came upon a kind of pigeon that was unlucky enough to be both edible and flightless. All that’s left of it today is heads and bones on museum shelves, and the phrase “as dead as a dodo.”
In North America in the early 1800s, many, many million bison wandered on the western plains. Indians killed them, sometimes recklessly, for food and other uses. They also sold the hides to whites for use as blankets. Later, white men joined the killing. Leather companies hired hunters to kill the bison, and “sportsmen” shot them from trains as they sped across the prairies. Soon the whites and Indians were killing two or three million bison every year. Anybody could foresee the outcome. Near the end of the century a museum expedition searched the West for bison and found a mere two hundred.
Humans often thought they had no choice but to annihilate another species. One example was the Mexican silver grizzly bear. By 1960, loss of habitat and hunters had reduced these bears to only thirty, roaming in the mountains of Chihuahua. Local ranchers, worrying about their livestock, campaigned to wipe out even this remainder, and the U.S. Department of the Interior, it is said, provided poison. By 1964 the silver grizzly bears were gone.
In part, our wiping out of other species resulted from our ignorance of nature’s balance. Because mosquitoes carry malaria, officials on the Indonesian island of Borneo wanted to get rid of them. When they sprayed these pests with DDT, the poison also slaughtered wasps, which formerly had fed on caterpillars. Although saved from the mosquitoes, the local people now endured a plague of caterpillars, which ate the thatched roofs of their houses, making them cave in. Meanwhile the officials also sprayed to wipe out flies. Previously, gecko lizards had killed the flies; now they ate their corpses, which were full of DDT. As geckoes died of poison, house cats ate them, ingesting DDT, which had concentrated as it passed from flies to geckoes. The cats expired, and this prepared the way for rats. These rodents were a threat to humans’ food supplies, and they also raised the threat of plague, which rats can carry. Trying to restore the balance, officials parachuted in more cats.4
4Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, Extinction: the Causes and Consequences of the Disappearance of Species (1981), pp. 78–9.
While we warmed the air, polluted it, melted glaciers, and eliminated other species, humans also littered earth with trash. It sometimes seemed as if this self-inflicted damage couldn’t be avoided. By the year 2000 humans numbered well over 6 billion, and in many places we could now produce so much, and so cheaply, that getting rid of everything we couldn’t use had grown to be a problem. Cities had more trash than they could deal with.
In 1986 incinerator workers in Philadelphia, on America’s east coast, loaded 15,000 tons of ashes on a ship. The Khian Sea headed east and south, searching for a landfill. No less than five small Caribbean nations and Bermuda turned the ship away, but in Haiti things went better. Having told officials they were fertilizer, the captain dumped 4,000 tons of ashes on a Haitian beach. Although these were just a quarter of his cargo, they made a mound 100 yards in length and eight feet high. When Haiti learned the truth, it ordered Khian Sea to leave. The captain could not or would not reload the ashes, but he left.
The Khian Sea was like the legendary Flying Dutchman, the ghostly vessel doomed to sail forever. Escorted by some Haitians, the ship returned to Philadelphia. But then, defying Coast Guard orders, it left the port. Three months later, now renamed Felicia, it stopped in what was then Yugoslavia. Not long after that, now re-renamed Pelicano, it docked in Singapore. Only now it wasn’t hauling Philadelphia’s ashes. The captain later testified that he had dropped them in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans.
FOR SEVERAL BILLION humans, material life got better in the latter 1900s. They had more to eat, more to wear, and better housing. But life did not improve for all, and the gap between the rich and poor got wider. Meanwhile, in return for economic gains, planet earth was made to pay an awful price.
Chapter 23
We walk along the brink.
AT THE END of World War II, we asked ourselves, would iron-fisted tyrants rise again, as several had between the two world wars? Would the nations that held empires turn their restless colonies free? If they did so, would the liberated peoples organize themselves as stable nations? Would the “superpowers” attack each other, use their superbombs, and end all life on earth?
In the spring of 1945, while the Russians took Berlin, delegates from fifty countries met in San Francisco and formed a global league that they named the United Nations. In its charter they declared its missions: “To save succeeding generations from the scourges of war, and to reaffirm faith in the fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women, and of nations large and small…to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.”
In the fifty ye
ars that followed, the United Nations often proved as feeble as the League of Nations had been between the two world wars. A U.S. president (Lyndon Johnson) once declared, “It couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.” However, even to articulate its goals of “saving” us from war, “reaffirming” rights, and “promoting” higher living standards was a help. At the least the UN as a body offered nations higher ideal standards for behavior.
TWO “SUPERPOWERS” EMERGED from World War II. America had escaped the devastation and was rich, productive, and the sole possessor of “the bomb.” Russia had been flattened in the war, but it garrisoned 3 million soldiers, the biggest army in the world. Americans believed themselves the guardians of freedom and free enterprise (or capitalism). The Russians saw themselves as leaders of a worldwide socialist (or communist) revolution. To some extent both countries’ sweeping global goals were covers for their national objectives and the pleasure that they took in holding power.
Stalin, still the autocrat of Russia after twenty years, focused — no, obsessed — about the danger of encirclement by “capitalist” nations. He resolved to guard his borders, especially from Germany, which had battered Russia both in World War I and World War II. So Russia turned the smaller Eastern European nations that it held at the end of the war — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania — into satellites. Each was ruled by communists, who took orders from Russia. Russia’s domination of Eastern Europe shocked the western, democratic nations. Winston Churchill coined a phrase; he said an “iron curtain” had descended in the midst of Europe.
The superpowers, each fearful of the other, did the things they had to for their safety and their sense of mission. They propagandized, argued, bluffed, and blustered. Truman stated that America would “contain” communism everywhere in order “to assist free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation.” The Russians talked as tough as Truman. Nikita Khrushchev (whom we’ll meet below) once told the West that “history is on our side. We will bury you.” He was speaking of an economic triumph but was widely understood to mean much more.
As the superpowers quarreled, we humans walked along the brink of an abyss. But they shunned a major battle, and this caution at the highest level would persist for decades. Someone named this state of all-but-all-out war the “Cold War.”
In the Cold War’s early years, the biggest big-power confrontation centered on Berlin. The victorious allies had divided Germany into four zones: British, French, and American zones and a Russian one. Berlin, the former German capital, lay deep inside the eastern, Russian zone, but the city itself, like the country, was divided. Russia governed “East Berlin,” and the other allies jointly governed “West Berlin.” But in 1948 Russia responded angrily to a plan by the western powers to rebuild western Germany, and blocked them from Berlin. To do this, Russia cut their access to the city (through the Russian zone) by closing roads and railroads.
To the western allies, this blockade became a test of will. If they now abandoned West Berlin, they might encourage Stalin to push the Iron Curtain farther west, probably by using his huge army to seize all of Germany. So they countered the blockade by setting up an airlift into West Berlin, their section of the city. For about a year, allied airplanes flew in food and other goods to allied soldiers and 3 million West Berliners.
Truman told his top advisers that he prayed he wouldn’t have to use atomic bombs to save Berlin. But if it should be necessary, Truman said, let no one doubt that he would use them. Russian planes harassed the western ones but didn’t shoot them down, and the major powers stopped short of going to war. In the spring of 1949 the Russians lifted their blockade. Soon the British, French, and American zones united to form the republic of West Germany, and the Russian zone became East Germany.
In the meantime the United States performed a good — and also prudent — deed. The recent war had shattered Europe’s infrastructure — railroads, factories, and ships — leaving many million people unemployed and hungry. By 1947 recovery was under way but the Europeans still badly needed aid, and America decided to support their reconstruction. Secretary of State George Marshall claimed the project was “directed not against any country or doctrine [that is, Russia and communism], but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” In Western Europe the Marshall Plan enjoyed a huge success. It speeded up recovery, and eased the hardships many people were enduring. The Eastern European countries also badly needed aid, but Russia called the plan a “venture in American imperialism.” It rejected aid and forced its satellites to do the same.
Meanwhile Western European countries felt endangered by the Russian army. Russia (worried about its own safety) had positioned many units not in Russia but in its satellites. So Russian troops were close to Western Europe, just across the Iron Curtain. The western nations understood that safety lay in having a joint defense. So delegates from Canada, America, and Western Europe met in Washington in 1949 and agreed on a military alliance. They said that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all.
Out of this agreement rose the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO. To serve as a nucleus for NATO’s forces, the United States stationed a third of a million troops in West Germany. These soldiers also were a trip wire, a fact that reassured the Western Europeans. If the Russians tripped the wire by attacking the Americans, the United States would have to fight beside its allies.
But as it happened, war broke out in Asia, not in Europe. It happened in Korea, the offshoot of the Asian mainland that Japan had ruled until Japan was conquered at the end of World War II. The winners of that war had split the peninsula, and therefore the nation, into two “temporary” occupation zones. In the southern half, America had built a client country, South Korea. Although South Korea called itself a republic, its president tolerated no political party but his own. In “North Korea” Russia had installed a communist regime under Kim Il Sung (“Great Leader”) that was more totalitarian than Hitler’s Germany had been. Each of these two men burned to reunite Korea — under himself of course.
Suddenly in June of 1950 Kim Il Sung rushed his armies into South Korea. Stalin had approved the war plan, probably believing the United States would not defend the south. But the UN speedily approved the measures that America now urged, and UN forces, mostly from America, joined the South Korean side. Fifteen other nations joined them.
Armies pushed each other up and down the peninsula. First North Korea’s army drove the southern forces all the way to South Korea’s southeast tip, almost to the sea. But in September their commander, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, brilliantly surprised the North Koreans. He invaded from the sea, halfway up the western coast. He thus outflanked the North Koreans. The allied forces pinched, then smashed the North Korean Army. Then they hurried north through North Korea to the Yalu River, North Korea’s Chinese border.
China’s CCP regarded the North Koreans as fellow communists in need and the UN forces as imperialists, insolently camping near their border. Suddenly they poured 180,000 Chinese soldiers into North Korea. Wave after wave, they stormed the UN lines, blowing bugles, many of them dying as they charged. In bitter winter fighting, China’s army drove the UN forces south below the South Korean border. But then the tide reversed again. Allied bombing drove them back, and then the fighting stopped in 1951. And where did the armies face each other now? Roughly where the war had started, at the border of the two Koreas.
The war had lasted a year, but making peace took two. The upshot was that North and South Korea remained as they had been before the war. UN (mostly U.S.) help had saved the South. Together, about 1.7 million Chinese and North and South Korean soldiers and 3 million civilians had been killed or wounded. The U.S. dead numbered 36,000. As we shall see again, in modern wars the nations that have better arms and technical support suffer fewer deaths than others.
ON A WINTER NIGHT in 1953 the chief contenders for the throne of Stalin joined the aged ruler at h
is villa for a drinking bout. The next day someone found him on the floor unconscious, victim of a stroke or possibly of poison. (That suspicion arises because the other partiers, who were summoned to the villa, kept Stalin’s condition secret for a day.) Four days later Stalin died. For the next two years the contenders struggled to succeed him until one of them, Nikita Khrushchev, won control.
In 1961 the danger of an all-out East-West war arose again. For the Russians West Berlin was still a major aggravation. Three million Germans had left the harshly governed Russian zone and moved to West Berlin. Most of them were trained and useful people. All too well the Russians knew that fleeing workers hardly proved that communism was succeeding.
At a meeting with America’s new president, an exasperated Khrushchev demanded that the western powers pull out of West Berlin. When the meeting ended badly, the scent of danger filled the air. Back in the United States, John Kennedy requested that Congress increase the U.S. forces. At the same time, NATO allies gave the United States their support. But soon the crisis faded. Once again an all-out conflict hadn’t taken place.
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