Sir Arthur C.B.E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. wrote:
> In article <bndphh$62u$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Mark Graffis
> says...
>>
>> Guardian | Road to ruin
>> America produces a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions,
>> the population has risen by 100 million since 1970 and when an area
>> three times the size of Britain was recently opened up for mining,
>> drilling, logging and road building, no one took much notice. What
>> does the Bush administration do? It ignores all attempts to curb
>> environmental damage. In a major investigation that took him from
>> the Salton Sea in California to Crooked Creek in Florida, Matthew
>> Engel reports on how America is ravaging the planet
>>
>> Road to Ruin
>>
>> Matthew Engel
>> Friday October 24, 2003
>> The Guardian
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,38...103680,00.html
>>
>> On the map of the United States, just below halfway down the east
>> coast, you can see a series of islets, in the shape of a hooked
>> nose. These are the Outer Banks, barrier islands - sun-kissed in
>> summer, storm-tossed in
>> winter - that stretch for 100 miles and more, protecting the main
>> coastline of the state of North Carolina. They are built, quite
>> literally, on shifting sands.
>> Twenty years ago, these were, by all accounts, magical places, hard
>> to reach and discovered only by the adventurous and discerning. They
>> are still fairly magical, at least the seemingly endless stretch of
>> unspoiled beach is. It is the lure of that which causes the traffic
>> jams on the only two bridges every Saturday throughout the summer.
>> The narrow strip of land behind the beach, however, has been built
>> up with enormous holiday homes, costing up to $2m (#1.2m) each. And
>> prices rose by 15-20% (25% for those on the ocean front) in 2002
>> alone, according to one agent.
>> This is what local agents call "a very nice market", and last month
>> their area had a week of free worldwide publicity. Hurricane Isabel
>> swept in, washing out much of the islands' only road and picking up
>> motels from their foundations and tossing them, according to one
>> report, "like cigarette butts". One island was turned into several
>> islets, with a whole town, Hatteras Village, being cut off from the
>> rest of the US - for ever, if nature has its way.
>> Residents, journalists reported, were in shock. Many scientists were
>> not. Speaking well before Isabel, Dr Orrin Pilkey, professor
>> emeritus of geology at Duke University in North Carolina, described
>> the Outer Banks property boom to me as "a form of societal madness".
>> "I wouldn't buy a house on the front row of the Outer Banks. Or the
>> second," agreed Dr Stephen Leatherman, who is such a connoisseur of
>> American coastlines that he is known as Dr Beach.
>> For the market is not the only thing that has been rising round
>> here. Like other experts, Pilkey expects the Atlantic to inundate
>> the existing beaches "within two to four generations". Normally,
>> that would be no problem for the sands, which would simply regroup
>> and re-form further back. Unfortunately, that is no longer possible:
>> the $2m houses are in the way. According to Pilkey, the government
>> will either have to build millions of dollars worth of seawall,
>> which will destroy the beach anyway, or demolish the houses.
>> "Coastal scientists from abroad come here and just shake their heads
>> in disbelief," he says.
>> The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a
>> metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what
>> is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While
>> millions of words have been written every day for the past two years
>> about the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a
>> vengeful Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood
>> of multiple attacks in the future is far more certain.
>> Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister,
>> Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot
>> wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is
>> actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the
>> planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land,
>> global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise
>> in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been
>> booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in
>> hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan
>> appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American
>> politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most
>> committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the
>> subject when chasing the presidency in 2000.
>> Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible
>> opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the
>> weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in
>> America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing
>> commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They
>> gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter
>> (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska). When the
>> dissident "good news" scientist Bjorn Lomborg spoke to a
>> conservative Washington thinktank he was applauded not merely
>> rapturously, but fawningly.
>> While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting and
>> Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has been
>> telling its scientific advisers to do more research before it can
>> consider any action to restrict greenhouse gases; the scientists
>> reported back that they had done all the research. The attitude of
>> the White House to global warming was summed up by the online
>> journalist Mickey Kaus as: "It's not true! It's not true! And we
>> can't do anything about it!" What terrifies all American
>> politicians, deep down, is that it is true and that they could do
>> something about it, but at horrendous cost to American industry and
>> lifestyle.
>> In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do is to
>> buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring that a
>> portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming
>> initiatives". Wow!
>> Potential Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination have
>> been testing environmental issues a little in the past few weeks.
>> Some activists are hopeful that the newly elected Governor
>> Schwarzenegger of California is genuinely interested. But, in truth,
>> despite the Soviet-style politicisation of science, serious national
>> debate on the issue ceased years ago.
>> Of course, nimbyism is alive and well. And, sure, there are localised
>> battles between greens and their corporate enemies: towns in Alabama
>> try to resist corporate poisoning; contests go on to preserve the
>> habitats of everything from the grizzly bear to rare types of fly;
>> Californians hug trees to stop new housing estates. Sometimes the
>> greenies win, though they have been losing with increasing
>> frequency, especially if Washington happens to be involved. These
>> fights, even in agglomeration, are not the real issue. Day after day
>> across America the green agenda is being lost - and then, usually,
>> being buried under concrete. "We're waging a war on the environment,
>> a very successful one," says Paul Ehrlich, professor of population
>> studies at Stanford University. "This nation is devouring itself,"
>> according to Phil Clapp of the National Environmental Trust. These
>> are voices that have almost ceased to be heard in the US. Yet with
>> each passing day, the gap between the US and the rest of the planet
>> widens. To take the figure most often trotted out: Americans
>> contribute a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. To
>> meet the seemingly modest Kyoto objective of reducing emissions to
>> 7% below their 1990 levels by 2012, they would actually (due to
>> growth) have to cut back by a third. For the Bush White House, this
>> is not even on the horizon, never mind the agenda.
>> Why has the leader of the free world opted out? The first reason
>> lies deep in the national psyche. The old world developed on the
>> basis of a
>> coalition - uneasy but understood - between humanity and its
>> surroundings. The settlement of the US was based on conquest, not
>> just of the indigenous peoples, but also of the terrain. It appears
>> to be, thus far, one of the great success stories of modern history.
>> "Remember, this country is built very heavily on the frontier
>> ethic," says Clapp. "How America moved west was to exhaust the land
>> and move on. The original settlers, such as the Jefferson family,
>> moved westward because families like theirs planted tobacco in
>> tidewater Virginia and exhausted the soil. My own ancestors did the
>> same in Indiana."
>> Americans made crops grow in places that are entirely arid. They
>> built
>> dams - about 250,000 of them. They built great cities, with
>> skyscrapers and symphony orchestras, in places that appeared barely
>> habitable. They shifted rivers, even reversed their flow. "It's the
>> American belief that with enough hard work and perseverance anything
>> - be it a force of nature, a country or a disease - can be
>> vanquished," says Clapp. "It's a country founded on the idea of no
>> limits. The essence of environmentalism is that there are indeed
>> limits. It's one of the reasons environmentalism is a stronger ethic
>> in Europe than in the US."
>> There is a second reason: the staggering population growth of the
>> US. It is approaching 300 million, having gone up from 200 million
>> in 1970, which was around the time President Nixon set up a
>> commission to consider the issue, the last time any US
>> administration has dared think about it. A million new legal
>> migrants are coming in every year (never mind illegals), and the US
>> Census Bureau projections for 2050, merely half a lifetime away, is
>> 420 million. This is a rate of increase far beyond anything else in
>> the developed world, and not far behind Brazil, India, or indeed
>> Mexico.
>> This issue is political dynamite, although not for quite the same
>> reasons as in Britain. Almost every political group is split on the
>> issue, including the far right (torn between overt xenophobes such
>> as Pat Buchanan and the free marketeers), the labour movement and
>> the environmentalists. The belief that the US is the best country in
>> the world is a cornerstone of national self-belief, and many
>> Americans still, wholeheartedly, want others to share it. They also
>> want cheap labour to cut the sugar cane, pluck the chickens, pick
>> the oranges, mow the lawns and make the beds.
>> But the dynamite is most potent among the Hispanic community, the
>> group who will probably decide the destiny of future presidential
>> elections and who do not wish to be told their relatives will not be
>> allowed in or, if illegal, seriously harassed. "Neither party wants
>> to say we should change immigration policy," says John Haaga of the
>> independent Population Reference Bureau. "The phrase being used is
>> 'Hispandering'". Yet extra Americans are not just a problem for the
>> US: they are, in the eyes of many environmentalists, a problem for
>> the world because migrants, in a short span of time, take on
>> American consumption patterns. "Not only don't we have a population
>> policy," says Ehrlich, "we don't have a consumption policy either.
>> We are the most overpopulated country in the world. It's not the
>> number of people. It's their consumption." Ehrlich may be wrong. It
>> is, though. somewhat surprising that the federal government's four
>> million employees do not appear to include anyone charged with even
>> thinking about this issue.
>> This brings us to the third factor: the Bush administration, the
>> first government in modern history which has systematically
>> disavowed the systems of checks and controls that have governed
>> environmental policy since it burst into western political
>> consciousness a generation ago. It would be ludicrous to suggest
>> that Bush is responsible for what is happening to the American
>> environment. The crisis is far more deep-seated than that, and the
>> federal government is too far removed from the minutiae of daily
>> life.
>> But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing regular
>> edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling back environmental
>> control, usually while pretending to do the opposite. Morale among
>> civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington
>> was already close to rock-bottom even before its moderate leader,
>> Christine Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip
>> round town was that she had endured two years of private humiliation
>> at the hands of the White House. Few environmentalists have great
>> hopes for her announced successor, the governor of Utah, Mike
>> Leavitt.
>> What is really alarming is the intellectual atmosphere in
>> Washington. You can attend seminars debunking scientific
>> eco-orthodoxy almost every week. Early in the year, there was much
>> favourable publicity for a new work Global Warming and Other
>> Eco-myths, produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an
>> organisation reputedly funded by multinational corporations. Outside
>> Washington, it can be far nastier. "I've never threatened anyone in
>> my life," a conservation activist in Montana complained to the
>> Guardian. "I do know, though, that I have gotten very ugly threats
>> left on my telephone answering machine over the past year, and twice
>> had to scour my sidewalk in front of the building to erase the dead
>> body chalk outlines."
>> Out in the west, words such as enviro-whackos are popularised by
>> rightwing radio hosts such as the ex-Watergate conspirator Gordon
>> Liddy, who passes on to his millions of listeners the message that
>> global warming is a lie. "I commute in a three-quarter-tonne
>> capacity Chevrolet Silverado HD," he swanked in his latest book.
>> "Four-wheel drive, off-road equipped, extended curb pickup truck,
>> powered by a 300hp, overhead valve, turbo supercharged diesel engine
>> with 520lb-feet of torque... It has lights all over it so everyone
>> can see me coming and get out of the way. If someone in a little
>> government-mandated car hits me, it is all over - for him." Fuel
>> economy in American vehicles hit a 22-year low in 2002.
>> In this country, green-minded people can't even trust the good guys.
>> The Nature Conservancy, the US's largest environmental group with a
>> million members - with a role not unlike Britain's National Trust -
>> was the subject of an exhaustive exposi in the Washington Post in
>> May, accusing it of sanctioning deals to build "opulent houses on
>> fragile grasslands" and drilling for gas under the last breeding
>> ground of the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, whose numbers have
>> dwindled to just dozens.
>> On April 22, 1970 more than 20 million people attended the
>> first-ever Earth Day. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to
>> traffic and 100,000 people attended an ecology fair in Central Park.
>> The Republican governor of New York wore a Save the Earth button,
>> and Senator John Tower, another Republican, told an audience of
>> Texan oilmen: "Recent efforts on the part of the private sector show
>> promise for pollution abatement and control. Such efforts are in our
>> own best interests..."
>> So what happened next? The problem for the green movement was not
>> what went wrong, but what went right. Ehrlich's book, The Population
>> Bomb, said: "In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines - hundreds
>> of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any
>> crash programmes embarked on now." The famine never came. And after
>> the oil crisis came and went, and Americans began to tire of the
>> gloom-filled, eco-oriented presidency of Jimmy Carter, they turned
>> instead to Ronald Reagan, who proposed simple solutions of tax cuts
>> and deregulation and, lo, the world got more cheerful. With doomsday
>> postponed indefinitely, the politics of the Reagan years have
>> lingered.
>> Some activists remain bitter about the Clinton White House, which
>> was only patchily interested in green issues. "It left a bad taste
>> in the mouth of the environmental community," says Tim Wirth, a
>> former senator and one-time Clinton official. "They trimmed their
>> sails over and over again. The old House speaker, Tip O'Neill, had a
>> very important political aphorism: 'Yer dance with the person who
>> brung yer.' They never did." This bitterness was one of the factors
>> that led to the hefty third-party vote for Ralph Nader in 2000,
>> which proved disastrous for Al Gore, the inhibited environmentalist.
>> In the three years since then, Bush has danced like a dervish with
>> the folks who brung him. Yet, even now, no one dare say out loud
>> that they are against environmentalism: the political wisdom is that
>> the subject can be a voting issue among the suburban moms, ferrying
>> the kids around to baseball practice in their own Chevrolet
>> Silverados. Instead, the big corporations and their political allies
>> have - brilliantly - manipulated the forces that the eco-warriors
>> themselves unleashed and turned them back on their creators. "In the
>> 80s they took all the techniques of citizen advocacy groups and
>> professionalised them," explains Phil Clapp. "That's when you saw
>> the proliferation of lobbyists in Washington. The environmental
>> community never retooled to meet the challenge. They had developed
>> the techniques, but were still doing them in a PTA bake-sale kind of
>> way."
>> Thus every new measure passed to favour business interests and ease
>> up on pollution regulations is presented in an eco-friendly,
>> sugar-coated, summer's morning kind of way, such as Clear Skies, the
>> weakening of the Clean Air Act. The House of Representatives has
>> just passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, presented by the
>> president as an anti-forest fire measure. Opponents say it is simply
>> a gift to the timber industry that will make it extremely difficult
>> to stop the felling of old-growth trees. Another technique is to
>> announce, with great fanfare, initiatives that everyone can applaud,
>> such as a recent one for hydrogen-based cars. We can expect more of
>> these as November 2004 draws closer. When they are scaled back, or
>> delayed, or dropped, there is less publicity. It is a habit that
>> runs in the family. Governor Jeb Bush's grand scheme to save the
>> Florida Everglades was much applauded; the delay from 2006 to 2016
>> was little noticed.
>> Even now the White House does not win all its battles. In the
>> Senate, where a small group of greenish New England Republicans has
>> a potential blocking veto, there are moves to compromise on the
>> forests bill. The New England Republicans were largely responsible
>> for Bush's inability to push through his plan to allow oil drilling
>> in the Alaskan wildlife reserve. Occasionally, there is good news:
>> some of the small dams that have impeded the life-cycle of Pacific
>> salmon and steelhead trout are being demolished; there are reports
>> of a new alliance between the old enemies, ranchers and greenies, in
>> New Mexico; renewable energy is under discussion. But some of their
>> policies are already having their effect. Carol Browner, Clinton's
>> head of the EPA, claims the Bush administration has set back the
>> campaign to cut industrial pollution in ways that will last for
>> decades. "This administration has sent a signal to the polluting
>> community, 'You can get away with bad habits'," says Browner. "State
>> governments in the north-east were much tougher, so the
>> north-eastern power stations upgraded their emissions standards in
>> the 90s whereas the mid-west guys, who are their competitors,
>> didn't. Now they're not enforcing the law." "So what they're saying
>> to the companies is: 'Don't go early, don't comply with the law
>> first. The rules might change.' Even a company that wants to do the
>> right thing has to look at its bottom line. If they get into a
>> situation like this, they think: 'We spent $1bn to meet the
>> requirements and our competitors didn't. Yeah, great. We're not
>> going to do that again.'"
>> Under Bush, the lack of interest at every level has at last come into
>> balance. The US is equally unconcerned globally, federally,
>> statewide and locally. The environmentalists' macro-gloom has been
>> off-beam before, of course. Perhaps global warming is a myth;
>> perhaps the CEI is right and there will be a blue revolution in
>> water use to complement the green revolution. There is probably just
>> as much as chance that the next big surprise will be a thrilling one
>> - the arrival of nuclear cold fusion to solve the energy dilemma,
>> say - as a disaster. Maybe biotechnology, pesticides, natural gas
>> and American ingenuity and optimism will indeed see everything
>> right. It does seem like a curiously reckless gamble for the US to
>> be taking, though, staking the future of the planet on the spin of
>> nature's roulette wheel. But it is only a bigger version of the bet
>> being taken by the home-buyers of North Carolina. In a country
>> supposedly distrustful of government, the Outer Bankers have
>> remarkable faith in their leaders' ability to see them seem right.
>> Post-Isabel, a group of residents there wrote a letter demanding
>> government action so they can protect their livelihoods and families
>> "without the fear of every hurricane or nor'easter cutting us off
>> from the rest of the world". Quite. Who would imagine that in the
>> 21st century the most powerful empire the world has ever known could
>> still be threatened by enemies as pathetically old-fashioned as wind
>> and tide?
>> Orrin Pilkey thinks it quite possible that sea levels might rise to
>> the point where the Outer Banks will be a minor detail. "We're not
>> going to be worried about North Carolina. We're going to be worrying
>> about Manhattan." Still, macro-catastrophe may never happen. The
>> micro-catastrophe, however, already has: the US is an aesthetic
>> disaster area.
>> If you fly from Washington to Boston, there are now almost no open
>> spaces below. This is increasingly true in a big U covering both
>> coasts and the sunbelt. In the south-west, the main growth area,
>> bungalows spread for miles over what a decade ago was virgin desert.
>> The population of Arizona increased 40% in the 1990s, that of
>> next-door Nevada 66%. That's, as Natalie Merchant sang, "...the
>> sprawl that keeps crawling its way, 'bout a thousand miles a day",
>> which is not much of an exaggeration.
>> Every day 5,000 new houses go up in America. Many of these fit the
>> American appetite for size, however small the plot: "McMansions", as
>> they are known. The very word suburb is now old-hat. The reality of
>> life for many people now is the "exurb", which can be dozens of
>> miles from the city on which it depends. In places such as
>> California, exurban life is the only affordable option for most
>> young couples and recent migrants.
>> These communities are rarely gated but often walled, creating a vague
>> illusion of security and ensuring that the residents have to drive
>> to a shop, even if there happens to be one 50 yards away. Naturally,
>> they have to drive everywhere else. In August it was announced that
>> the number of cars in the US (1.9 per household) now actually
>> exceeded the number of drivers (1.75).
>> In many places - especially those growing the fastest - developers
>> have to deal only with the little councils in the towns they are
>> taking over. There are often minimal requirements to provide any
>> kind of infrastructure, such as sewage or schools, to service these
>> new communities. The rules for building houses in the computer game
>> Sim City are stricter than those that apply in most areas of the Sun
>> Belt. Too late, some parts of the country have concluded that this
>> is untenable. The buzz-phrase is "smart growth", which means no more
>> than the kind of forethought before building that has been routine
>> in Europe for half a century. Even the Environmental Protection
>> Agency is not above being helpful: its policies for making use of
>> brownfield sites have seen people moving, improbably, back into the
>> centre of cities such as Pittsburgh.
>> But where it matters, no one is talking strategy. "In the really
>> fast-growing states, the pace of development is such that they can
>> build huge numbers of houses without anyone considering what it
>> means for the infrastructure," says Marya Morris of the American
>> Planning Association. In California, more than perhaps any other
>> state, there is a debate. But while people talk, developers act: a
>> city catering for up to 70,000 people will soon arise at the foot of
>> the Tehachapi Mountains. According to the Los Angeles Times, it
>> would effectively close the gap between Los Angeles and Bakersfield,
>> theoretically 111 miles away. "Southern California is coming over
>> the hill," said one resident.
>> Americans still have a presumption of infinite space. But I have
>> made a curious and mildly embarrassing discovery. In states such as
>> Maryland and Ohio, the pattern of settlement in supposedly rural
>> areas is such that it can actually be quite difficult to find a
>> discreet spot away from housing to stop the car and have a pee. Amid
>> the wide-open spaces of Texas, it can be worse: the gap between
>> Dallas and Waco is a 100-mile strip mall. The concepts of townscape
>> and landscape seem non-existent: there is land that has been
>> developed and land that hasn't - yet.
>> And yet. Time and again, around the US, one is struck by the
>> stunning beauty of the landscape, not in the obvious places, but in
>> corners that few Americans will have heard of: amazing rivers such
>> as the Pearl in Louisiana, or the Choptank in Maryland or the Lost
>> River in West Virginia; the Chocolate Mountains and the San Diego
>> back country in California; the bits that are left of the Outer
>> Banks...
>> And equally one is struck by the sheer horrendousness of what man
>> has done in the century or so since he seriously got to work over
>> here. In the context of ages, the white man is merely a hotel guest
>> in this continent: he has smashed the furniture and smeared
>> excrement on the walls. He appears to be looking forward to his next
>> night's stay with relish.
>> Of course, there are still huge tracts of untouched and largely
>> unpopulated land: in the Great Plains, where people are leaving, in
>> the mountains, deserts and Arctic tundra. But last spring, in
>> another of Washington's Friday night announcements, the Department
>> of the Interior announced - no, whispered - that it was removing
>> more than 200m acres that it owned from "further wilderness study",
>> enabling those areas to be opened for mining, drilling, logging or
>> road-building. That's an area three times the size of Britain. The
>> New York Times did write a trenchant editorial; otherwise the
>> response was minimal.
>> Not long ago I went for a walk in the Vallecito Mountains in
>> California. After a while, I got myself into a position where the
>> contours of the land blotted out everything and, after the noise of
>> a plane had died away, there was no sight or sound at all that was
>> not produced by nature. This lasted about a minute. Then, from
>> somewhere, a motorcycle roared into earshot. Sure, there are still
>> places in this vast country where it is possible to escape, but they
>> get harder and harder to find except for the fit, the adventurous
>> and those unencumbered by children or jobs. Most Americans don't
>> live that way. And nowhere now is entirely safe from being ravaged,
>> sometimes in ways that prejudice the future of the whole planet.
>> Al-Qaida and the Iraqi bombers have no need to bother. America is
>> destroying itself.
>>
>> Guardian Unlimited ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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