Books

A brief for an environmental ethic

It is common practice among chemi­cal industry executives to secure for themselves some peaceful tract of land where, if the deer and antelope don't play, there is offered at least healing doses of biotic solitude away from the fumes of their plants or the stresses of corporate headquarters.

The average plant worker or mid­dle management executive can't af­ford such places, naturally enough. But according to Robert Cahn in his book, "Footprints on the Planet," the earth itself would be such a place if we would but practice an environmental ethic.

Cahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose inspiration is Aldo Leopold, the original champion of the land ethic. Leopold wrote in his clas­sic "A Sand County Almanac" what he thought should be everybody's rule: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Moses couldn't have proclaimed it plainer. But is it doable?

Cahn cautiously thinks so and outlines the opportunities and ob­stacles for getting there in his plain­tive book. It is the result of his trips throughout the country to report on how the environmental ethic has been faring since the National Environ­mental Policy Act was passed in 1970. Cahn, fresh from winning his Pulit­zer, was appointed to the three-man Council on Environmental Quality that the act created.

The results, Cahn reports, are a shaky positive. Shaky in that things don't seem to be moving fast enough. Positive because the ethic now is at least writ down in law. But still, the social and psychological internaliza­tion of that ethic has not yet hap­pened and his points invite some comparison with the civil rights movement. One would suspect that civil rights and environmental rights stand at the same stage of progress. Everything hasn't exactly happened all at once.

"The many good state and federal laws are not fully effective," Cahn says. "Most businesses, industry, and government agency decision-makers seem to feel that they have done enough if they simply stay within the letter of the law, and some of them

A prize-winning

journalist argues the

case for a more

responsible treatment of

the land about us

"Footprints on the Planet" by Robert Cahn, Universe Books, New York, 1978, 277 pages, $10.95

Reviewed by C&EN senior editor Wil Lepkoivski, who has long followed de­velopments in environmental and science policy from Washington

evade, resist, or seek to delay com­pliance with environmental laws. Some corporate managers, believing that their own careers may depend on short-term gains, avoid accepting responsibility for the long-term en­vironmental consequences of their products or processes."

So his book is largely a lament and the lament is chronicled in his re­porting. He opens with a defense of the Tellico Dam decision that sacri­ficed a Tennessee Valley Authority dam on the Little Tennessee River to preserve that most celebrated of fish, the tiny snail darter. He says a vote for the snail darter is a vote for the longevity of mankind. The logic isn't exactly airtight, but one gets the general drift: If we keep killing off little fishes and other living things in the name of progress, we'll end up killing off ourselves.

Cahn doesn't give us much of an intellectual basis for figuring out a way to make cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or Detroit work along the rules of an environmental ethic. These centers of civilized humanity are dependent on high and low tech­nology that was never meant to har­monize with anything environmen­tally ethical. Their very shape was designed to defy nature's message that its fossil fuel bounty is lim­ited—political insults to the second law of thermodynamics.

His book is in the end a plea for individual rather than systemic ac­tion. This reviewer, also a reporter of sorts, is afraid that collective action, with a clearly articulated theoretical basis promoted by strong political leadership, is the only kind that is going to work.

Cahn writes a richly detailed book on the struggle toward acceptance of an environmental ethic, and this is its main value. He recalls incidents with President Nixon and his staff during the early days of CEQ and concludes that Nixon's record on environmental matters, although not heartfelt, was nevertheless not all that bad.

He takes us through classic con­frontations between citizens groups and companies such as AMAX, Gulf Resources & Chemical, Reserve Mining, Weyerhaeuser ("Best of the S.O.B.'s"), General Motors, Cummins Engine, Union Camp, and more. Each tale is distinct, but the pattern is the same: a clash between profits and protection.

Additionally, Cahn gives us an ex­tensive look at what could be life styles of the future when the wasteful economy gives way to the home-on-the-range mentality. He visits several self-sufficient communities in various stages of development along the "appropriate technology" lines of E. F. ("Small Is Beautiful") Schu­macher. There is no doubt where Cahn's sentiments lie. But now he needs to write another book about why it makes ultimate economic sense to institutionalize the land ethic.

He gives a small amount of space to speculate on the possibility that it is

. in the end the pattern of investment that controls decisions and that may be the source of many environmental ravages. It, after all, is responsible for most of the investment capital for growth. But he doesn't take the proposition far enough through any systematic analysis of how this all happens.

So it is obvious that Cahn's book isn't the last word on the challenges ahead. But it is a solid reporter's fac­tual attempt to lay down for us a profile of attitudes, and a report on what Cahn would call progress in re­claiming the biosphere from the technosphere as the true home for man. •

58 C&EN April 23, 1979

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Letters Continued from page 2

The public must be educated to recognize and become reconciled to the inevitability of the progressive impoverishment of many aspects of our material life. Then, if good sense finally prevails, perhaps we shall learn at last to ap­preciate the values that money cannot buy.

R. T. Sanderson Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Fort Collins,

Colo.

SIR: A letter from George Wald (C&EN, March 26, page 4) under the heading of "Economics and Inflation" took issue with an earlier letter (C&EN, Jan. 29, page 4) by R. B. Blodgett, by citing increased spending for arms procurement as a cause of inflation. Wald wrote: "All through the Vietnam War it [spending] hovered around

$21.4 billion. Now it's about $35 billion. That's pure inflation; and you don't need to get into any complicated economics to understand that."

Let's take a closer look to see how uncom­plicated that really is. At a "modest" (?) inflation rate of 7% compounded annually, $21.4 billion in arms, or anything else for that matter, would cost $35 billion a mere 71/2 years or so later. (Actually, the true inflation rate, as opposed to the rate admitted to "officially," probably has far exceeded 7% average in the ensuing years.) So the $35 billion now being spent is a reduction in spending expressed in constant dollars! That is, it is buying less arms than $21.4 billion bought just a few years ago.

It seems that all this has more to do with government printing presses than it has with arms procurements. As Blodgett pointed out, higher prices are an effect; government presses are the root cause. The situation Wald cited actually reaffirms Blodgett's conclusion rather than refuting it.

It is ironic that Wald's letter emanated from Harvard. Wasn't it Harvard that served as home base for Fabian Socialist John Maynard Keynes for so many years while he was preaching his destructive economic doctrines? It is Keysnes-ian economics that got us into this mess in the first place. Let's hope a saner future generation banishes Keynesianism forever. It is now a proven failure. Nazareth, Pa. J. Gregory Neff

SIR: A letter in a recent issue by George Wald said that the major cause of inflation was the large military budget, mainly because products

made by workers on military projects are not available for purchase by those workers. A few comments:

1. The assumption here seems to be that consumer spending has a different effect on the economy than government spending. If worker Q, who designs cruise missiles, is paid $16,000, the government may get $6000. Then Q spends $10,000 and the government its $6000. Since the same amount of money is being spent with or without taxation (assuming a balanced budget) it is difficult to fathom Wald's point.

2. Wald makes a phenomenological argu­ment: In the recent past the military budget has grown, and so has inflation. Ergo, military spending causes inflation. But if one considers real dollars, the military budget has remained nearly constant while the social welfare budgets have doubled and tripled in the recent past. Should we revise our conclusion to "social welfare spending causes inflation"?

3. Economists, Wald implies, do not act like scientists when evaluating their theories. Yet it has been repeatedly shown that growth of Μ τ and the government deficit are the only mea­sures that correlate with inflation rate. Doesn't that force Wald, as a scientist, to conclude that the growth of the money supply is the root of inflation?

I, too, favor major cuts in the military budget because I believe that this country can ade­quately protect itself and its allies with less money more wisely spent. But I am not inter­ested in using twisted logic to blame all our problems on the military and its budget. New York City Scott R. King

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