. . .
Americans were fed a stream of corporate “information” about various resource exploitations that sounded satisfactory and in many cases were lies.
Lumber companies took advertising space in the mass media, for one example, to point out proudly that they were “planting” more trees than they cut. Statistically, that was correct. However, it did not note that where they had cut, and where they then replanted, trees a century or many centuries old were destroyed. The new “crop” would be “harvested” sooner, at a smaller size, and after a half century’s wait! Also, the harvesting of a natural forest resulted in the ruin of the ecology of the region to a massive and permanent degree. Before lumbered areas could be replanted, the very soil was often eroded away and what remained was bare rock or hardpan. America’s wood supply was, in fact, vanishing.
. . .
A different procedure, largely the work of the Army Engineer Corps, was scraping and raping the land in the name of “flood control,” the provision of “navigable waters” and the erection of immense dams for several other alleged purposes, including the provision of hydroelectric power sources and the making of lakes for “recreation,” irrigation and pollution management. The last meant water-impounding to enable sewage and industrial pollutants to be pushed along, downriver, faster, at peak-load periods.
“Navigation” was often meant for barge haulage, and in 1970 some ditches for that kind of use were being dug to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and to Dallas, Texas, making them “seaports” and using waterways that, in dry months, were themselves near dry. The stated use for such multibillion-dollar follies was gravel transport, since little other cargo could be found for those two vast canals. Gravel and “pleasure boats” would travel to the sea from cities hundreds of miles inland. The minute slope of those and many other such Army Engineering Corps jobs—and the locks essential in most of them—guaranteed they would become near-stagnant filth traps for their entire lengths.
Rivers were straightened, and streams and creeks were turned into chutes and their banks steel-faced, stone-lined or cement-paved. The flood-control philosophy did not take into account years of abnormal rainfall because it could not. But the act resulted in extensive industrial and real estate development on sites safe from flooding in normal or subnormal years. In the others, unpredictable and yet sure, these new areas were drowned, resulting in devastation and economic loss to individuals, corporations and whole communities. Turning rivers and tributaries into paved chutes brought such waters downstream at accelerated rates.
Water-hungry industry was attracted to the lakes made by the Corps and other such agencies. Humanity followed: the jobs were there. Hydroelectric plants rose below the giant dams. But this nationwide situation had one disadvantage. The impounded waters were rapidly silted up as they blocked previous flow and caused formed runoff to be precipitated behind the dams. A lake built and presumed to be viable for a century and a half might reveal that, in fact, it would be mud to the surface in twenty or fifty years. The response was, often, to build many more dams upstream as, mainly, silt traps.
Silt, in general, is topsoil. The escalation of industry to provide an exploding population with goods and services, the agricultural pattern of “mining” soil, the tree-denuding practices, the paving and covering of the land for more homes, roads, factories and so on reduced the arable land rapidly, and although, in 1970, a surplus of such potential food source existed, the surplus would not last long, clearly. What was deposited behind the thousands of dams was food of the future. No means to reclaim it existed.
. . .
As 1970 matured the suddenly alerted public realized it had, indeed, a problem. Before that year was out new and unexpected risks were found for the first time . . . by the average voter.
Years earlier scientists in Japan and Sweden had grimly realized that certain lakes and salt-water bays were heavily contaminated with mercury. Until then it had been casually assumed that in its metallic and other industrial states mercury, being heavy, would sink to the bottom of any body of water, soon be ooze-covered and then remain there, unmoving and harmless forever. Deaths in Japan and other odd phenomena led to the finding that anaerobic bacteria in all such waters could and did convert mercury into organic forms—forms, in short, which could and would enter the life chains, the ecosystems.
For several years federal authorities in USA ignored the ever more frightening data being received from abroad. But, as is so common in such affairs, almost overnight the government experts, along with various private investigators, discovered that literally hundreds of streams, ponds, lakes, bays and the like were inhabited by a mercury-loaded biota. And soon it was learned that some of the most prized food fishes in the seas were mercury-bearers.
There had always been a trace of mercury in sea water and in many fresh waters. How much of the metallic taint present in fishes and other sea and fresh-water foods was owing to a buildup that had gone on for eons, and how much was due to the mercury added by man, was not easily determined. And how much organic mercury man himself could tolerate without harm was unknown. The point where harm might begin, and even the nature of what such possible, chronic symptoms might be, was unknown.
The civilized world stumbled into 1971 determined to ascertain these plainly vital bits of information.
. . .
But though few laymen were concerned even in early 1971, some additional numbers of scientists began to wonder, at least, about other toxic metals that were being added to man’s water sources in quantities exponentially greater than those naturally found there. There was selenium; cadmium, known to be harmful in small doses to the liver and other organs; beryllium; plutonium.
Quite a list, since most of the elements were being used in some or even many industrial processes, and a great many elements are hazardous or even lethal to genus Homo, in very minute quantities.
. . .
As the more literate members of the cultures of the West began faintly to realize the theoretically possible peril in the simple elements, a far, far more appalling truth was called to the attention of all who could and would heed.
By 1970 it was estimated that industry and allied human activities were dumping into the environment at least half a million chemical compounds, many of incredible complexity, of which tens of thousands were known or could be surely predicted to have toxic effects on some species.
None of these five hundred thousand diverse chemicals was of a sort that existed in nature, so that all life forms encountering any one of them would have no genetic or inherent capability for managing to co-exist with the substance. These additives ended up in the seas, brought by rivers, runoff or rain. And while some of them were small in quantity, thousands upon thousands of them went to sea by the thousands or tens of thousands of tons.
Finally, not only were their effects unknown, though sure to be deleterious in some mammoth, undreamable degree, but the seas themselves were a chemical factory. That is to say, these alien materials were certain to be intermingled and to form “x” thousands of different, additional compounds unknown to science. What these were, of course, nobody had attempted to imagine. Funds for research into such rarefied areas simply didn’t exist, and were not appropriated in the years beyond 1970.
What finally was done was a mere stopgap: the planet’s seas, by 1980 carrying more than a million new chemicals, were monitored. When some harmful effect became detectable (or happened to be detected) a study of its cause was undertaken. Myriads of these statistically predictable eco-calamities were not monitored soon enough, of course.
. . .
Since those and many other similar circumstances were known at least to relevant experts, and since those noted here had been repeatedly described by all the mass media, the author feels justified in the choice of 1975 for the title of this volume.
The year was, surely, that last at which mankind, had he owned the will, reason, sanity, logic and the mere “instinct for self-preservation” h
e boasted of, might have faced about and begun to undertake to live realistically in the real world as he was then able to know it.
A later date was too late.
However, in 1971, the first (and inevitable) reactions to the “environmental scare” appeared.
For some fifteen months there had been a surge of concern. But this was followed by growing resentment, ennui and boredom. From the first, ecologically informed citizens had feared that reaction. Editorial writers began in ’71 to complain that there was an overemphasis on “environment.” TV networks found that their presentation of the ever growing data about the crisis was causing millions to switch stations—and that, of course, was not to be permitted. It “lost viewers”: cost money. Other factors began to militate against the brief time of sanity. Industry capitalized on the changed mood by increasing its disastrously untruthful pretense that it was taking the costly and correct measures to reduce its contribution to the filthy earth. And the public, no doubt, began to realize in its deep unconsciousness that any genuine effort to halt destruction of the earth’s life-support systems would put an end to “progress,” “affluence”—almost everything men thought of as civilized.
Again, by 1971, so much data about the general peril had been proffered to average persons that they surely knew the subject was too vast, various and specialized for broadly useful thought by them. It thus became an area of responsibility for somebody else, the scientists, in sum. And since the “scientists” had provided the wonders, comforts and miracles of their age, it seemed reasonable to most people that they would eventually take care of the unhappy spin-off.
The trouble was ignorance.
In 1970, not two Americans in a thousand could have defined “science.” It is, of course, knowledge, pure knowledge, with its teaching and the means to add to its sum. But what was regarded as “science” by nearly everybody in that period, many scientists included, was the material result of applications of knowledge. And all these were made for special ends that were achieved with little or no reference to the vast remainder of science (of knowledge) wherein lay, or could lie, information as to what dire results might accompany the one end gained.
The men who used scientific theories to make automobiles did not consult biology to learn what horrors that achievement might carry. In 1970 it can be safely said that only a few thousand, or perhaps not even one thousand, men and women in the entire USA had a sufficiently wide understanding of science, together with the essential breadth of imagination and also the inclination or motive, to think about their world and its near future with any relevance whatever.
So it is that by hindsight alone this author can set forth where the massive blunders occurred, what they were and when they became irreversible, leading to the shocking condition of us all in the year of this writing (1994) and the dismal prospect some foresee, still.
If the first sufficiently telling alarm sounded in 1970, it was being ignored widely in 1971—and a turning point was thereby missed, the last, as I shall here attempt to prove, available.
For in 1971 people switched off the grimly growing news about their endangered environs.
They were sick and tired of it.
Being tired of it was infantile.
What came later, when an effort was made to compel industry and cities to stop polluting, was worse. The effort meant temporary shortages, and that the people, led by labor, would not endure.
An infantile majority became lunatic.
II
“Vengeance is Mine,” sayeth Nature
A note on the following section by its editor, Willard Page Gulliver, and some examples of early disasters.
1. Editorial and Personal Note
In Part II of this collection the reader will encounter numbers of real persons. Among them will be Miles Standish Smythe, and it will be gathered that this man was among the great figures of all time, a twentieth-century Leonardo in mental stature and a prophet with no front runner—the convention for a historic or legendary herald.
Miles Smythe was born on January 1, 1953, the son of Jason Smythe, an exceedingly wealthy man and a renowned or—to many—notorious physician, psychiatrist and author. Miles’s mother was Amy Gorham, a beauty of international fame, a talented musician and the sole heiress to a second, equally huge fortune. She died when her daughter Nora was nine and Miles seven. In 1963 Jason remarried. Patricia Hunt Collier Evans was a leader of the feminist (and, later, the “women’s liberation”) movement. Patricia Smythe was also a celebrated beauty and almost as well known (from nearly as diverse viewpoints) as Jason Smythe.
The doctor was a huge, powerful, extroverted, unique and difficult man. His concepts of the nature of human sexuality and of the effects of man’s long-standing taboos were a cause of controversy that raged from the mid-fifties through his lifetime. His second wife, Patricia, supported his ideas. The theories, however, were a cause of great humiliation to the Smythe children, and perhaps explain in part their often unconventional ways of behaving.
Miles attended the Fifth Avenue Special School in Manhattan from grade one till he went on to Princeton University. He and his family lived in a two-story penthouse on Park Avenue. Dr. Smythe had his offices in a facing but otherwise identical penthouse. Fifth Special was experimental, advanced, highly unconventional, and yet its basic curriculum was designed so its students were among the highest-scoring college applicants every year.
Because Fifth Special students came largely from families with money, status and power the trustees (Dr. Jason Smythe was one) still followed a program of “student balance” launched by the founders. A small number of boys and girls from poor families, Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Orientals and others, were admitted on scholarships. The scholarships were generous, and any child admitted that way to Fifth Special was enabled to maintain face with his classmates owing to an ample allowance. The father of such a student might be a plumber, a Bowery bum or unknown and the mother a whore—but (theoretically) any youngster admitted to Fifth Special (in grades three to five, only) would presumably enjoy equality with the others from then on.
These “free students” made up less than a tenth of the enrollment of about three hundred for the twelve “grade equivalents.”
I was such a fortunate one.
My Scottish father, George Gulliver, was a dye and pattern maker and an alcoholic. He was seldom seen in our railroad flat on East Eighty-third Street in Manhattan. Mother was half Irish, and never admitted the other half was Indian. She claimed it to be Spanish and we five youngsters were reared in that belief. As a grown man and long after her death I learned the truth: her father had been a member of the Mohawk tribe, one of that strange clan of nerveless men who did most of Manhattan’s high steel construction in that period.
My first years at Fifth Special among largely wealthy and highly privileged children were almost too hard to bear and only my mother’s pride, together with the open resentment of my young chums (which I met with a rage faked to hide my fears and inferiorities), kept me struggling to remain in Fifth Special.
Here it was, of course, that I met Miles, and was unwittingly instrumental in his choice of a career.
At that time we had a class in something called introductory sociology taught by a martinet (one of the very few members of that faculty who was not a superb teacher) named Elroy Corddy. On a day in December of 1965, Mr. Corddy used the recent New York blackout as a sociological theme. Elroy Corddy was a member of the National Guard and a volunteer air raid warden. His harangue—and he was given to harangues—on the topic soon began to irritate me.
The incident had taken place that November, in the evening, and it was merely the first of what became a succession of blackouts and brownouts common there, as elsewhere. But Corddy’s analysis of mass behavior under those conditions grated on me. It was, however, the most common attitude, one taken by editors and by nearly everybody else.
Light and power were cut off that time on a clear, cool night with a full m
oon. In the ensuing hours of dark, public behavior was surprising. Crime dropped to a low level—not the seemingly more likely opposite. People spent the night trapped in high buildings and in stalled elevators, where panic could have occurred. But there was little or none. Ordinary citizens went into the streets and became self-appointed traffic directors. Cars and trucks, using headlights, continued to move everywhere under such amateur policing. Police cars and fire apparatus got through when and as needed.
In sum, the New Yorkers behaved magnificently.
Corddy’s next deduction from that was what irked me most.
“It simply shows,” he said to the class, sniffing, “that even under nuclear attack the people of this city would remain calm and levelheaded, helping one another in parallel degrees, thus frustrating major enemy expectations in his use of such weapons.” (That may not be verbatim but it is the way the little, red-bristly man spoke.)
I snorted after containing myself as long as I could.
“You disagree, Gulliver?”
To my own astonishment, I not only answered that I did, but I stood up and said, in a manner I’d never remotely thought I could or would use here, “It’s crap.”
“Perhaps you’d add to that—ah—rather plebeian and—ah—inadequate comment?”
By then I began to regain my senses. So I tried to get off this unprecedented hook. “I sort of think people might react differently in a nuclear war. The first bomb would maybe level Manhattan. Start the place in fire storm.”
“We hadn’t realized your military competence, Gulliver. Proceed.”
I sat down, however, palms sweaty. Corddy addressed the class. “Gulliver’s remark is based on information that is not supplied in any Civil Defense manual,” he said, smirking. “Perhaps he has sources other than federal? Sources I lack?”
There were some sixth-grade, teacher-polishing sniggers.
I had sources and I was angry but I knew Corddy wouldn’t accept my information about hydrogen bomb effects so I switched, saying only, “Suppose there hadn’t been any moon, in the blackout?”
End of the Dream Page 4