State Of Fear

Page 52

  "How big?"

  "Nine hundred square feet. I do not own a car. I fly coach. "

  "I dont believe you," she said.

  "I think youd better," Bradley said. "This guy knows what hes"

  "Shut up, Ted," Ann said. "Youre drunk. "

  "Not yet, Im not," he said, looking wounded.

  "Im not judging you, Ann," Kenner said quietly. "I know youre a dedicated advocate. Im just trying to figure out what your real position is on the environment. "

  "My position is human beings are heating the planet and poisoning the planet and we have a moral obligation to the biosphereto all the plants and animals that are being destroyed, and to the unborn generations of human beingsto keep these catastrophic changes from taking place. " She sat back, nodding her head.

  "So our moral obligation is to othersother plants, animals, and other people. "

  "Exactly. "

  "We need to do what is in their interest?"

  "What is in the interest of all of us. "

  "Conceivably their interest is not the same as ours. Conflict of interest is the usual case. "

  "Every creature has a right to live on the planet. "

  "Surely you dont believe that," Kenner said.

  "I do. Im not speciesist. Every living creature. "

  "Even the malaria parasite?"

  "Well, it is part of nature. "

  "Then do you oppose the elimination of polio and smallpox? They were part of nature, too. "

  "Well, I would have to say its part of the arrogant pattern of mankind, changing the world to suit his purposes. A testosterone-driven impulse, not shared by women"

  "You didnt answer me," Kenner said. "Do you oppose the elimination of polio and smallpox?"

  "Youre playing with words. "

  "Hardly. Is changing the world to suit ones purposes unnatural?"

  "Of course. It is interfering with nature. "

  "Ever seen a termite mound? A beaver dam? Those creatures change the environment dramatically, affecting many other creatures. Are they interfering with nature?"

  "The world is not in danger," she said, "from termite mounds. "

  "Arguably it is. The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? And methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. "

  "I cant continue this," Ann said. "You enjoy arguing. I dont. I just want to make the world a better place. Im going to go read a magazine now. " She went to the front of the plane and sat down, her back to Kenner.

  Sarah stayed where she was. "Her intentions are good," she said.

  "And her information is bad," Kenner said. "A prescription for disaster. "

  Ted Bradley roused himself. He had watched the debate between Kenner and Ann. He liked Ann. He was pretty sure he had gone to bed with her; when he was drinking, he sometimes couldnt remember, but he had a vaguely fond memory of Ann, and he assumed that was the reason for it.

  "I think youre being harsh," Bradley said, in his presidential tone. "Why should you call someone like Ann a prescription for disaster? She cares very much about these issues. She has devoted her life to them, really. She cares. "

  "So what?" Kenner said. "Caring is irrelevant. Desire to do good is irrelevant. All that counts is knowledge and results. She doesnt have the knowledgeand, worse, she doesnt know it. Human beings dont know how to do the things she believes ought to be done. "

  "Like what?"

  "Like managing the environment. We dont know how to do that. "

  "What are you talking about?" Bradley said, throwing his hands in the air. "This is nonsense. Of course we can manage the environment. "

  "Really? Do you know anything about the history of Yellowstone Park? The first national park?"

  "Ive been there. "

  "Thats not what I asked. "

  "Could you just get to the point?" Bradley said. "Its pretty late for Q-and-A, Professor. You know what I mean?"

  "All right, then," Kenner said. "Ill tell you. "

  Yellowstone Park, he explained, was the first wilderness to be set aside as a natural preserve anywhere in the world. The region around the Yellowstone River in Wyoming had long been recognized for its wondrous scenic beauty. Lewis and Clark sang its praises. Artists like Bierstadt and Moran painted it. And the new Northern Pacific Railroad wanted a scenic attraction to draw tourists west. So in 1872, in part because of railroad pressure, President Ulysses Grant set aside two million acres and created Yellowstone National Park.

  There was only one problem, unacknowledged then and later. No one had any experience trying to preserve wilderness. There had never been any need to do it before. And it was assumed to be much easier than it proved to be.

  When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903, he saw a landscape teeming with game. There were thousands of elk, buffalo, black bear, deer, mountain lions, grizzlies, coyotes, wolves, and bighorn sheep. By that time there were rules in place to keep things as they were. Soon after that, the Park Service was formed, a new bureaucracy whose sole job was to maintain the park in its original condition.

  Yet within ten years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt saw was gone forever. And the reason for this was the park managerscharged with keeping the park in pristine conditionhad taken a series of steps that they thought were in the best interest of preserving the park and its animals. But they were wrong.

  "Well," Bradley said, "our knowledge has increased with time amp;"

  "No, it hasnt," Kenner said. "Thats my point. Its a perpetual claim that we know more today, and its not borne out by what actually happened. "

  Which was this: the early park managers mistakenly believed that elk were about to become extinct. So they tried to increase the elk herds within the park by eliminating predators. To that end, they shot and poisoned all the wolves in the park. And they prohibited Indians from hunting in the park, though Yellowstone was a traditional hunting ground.

  Protected, the elk herds exploded, and ate so much of certain trees and grasses that the ecology of the area began to change. The elk ate the trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers vanished. That was when the managers discovered beavers were vital to the overall water management of the region.

  When the beavers disappeared, the meadows dried up; the trout and otter vanished; soil erosion increased; and the park ecology changed even further.

  By the 1920s it had become abundantly clear there were too many elk, so the rangers began to shoot them by the thousands. But the change in plant ecology seemed to be permanent; the old mix of trees and grasses did not return.

  It also became increasingly clear that the Indian hunters of old had exerted a valuable ecological influence on the park lands by keeping down the numbers of elk, moose, and bison. This belated recognition came as part of a more general understanding that native Americans had strongly shaped the "untouched wilderness" that the first white men sawor thought they were seeingwhen they first arrived in the New World. The "untouched wilderness" was nothing of the sort. Human beings on the North American continent had exerted a huge influence on the environment for thousands of yearsburning plains grasses, modifying forests, thinning specific animal populations, and hunting others to extinction.

  In retrospect, the rule forbidding Indians from hunting was seen as a mistake. But it was just one of many mistakes that continued to be made in an unbroken stream by park managers. Grizzlies were protected, then killed off. Wolves were killed off, then brought back. Animal research involving field study and radio collars was halted, then resumed after certain species were declared endangered. A policy of fire prevention was instituted, with no understanding of the regenerative effects of fire. When the policy was finally reversed, thousands of acres burned so hotly that the ground was sterilized, and the forests did not grow back without reseeding. Rainbow trout were introduced in the 1970s, soon killing off the native
cutthroat species.

  And on and on.

  And on.

  "So what you have," Kenner said, "is a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repairs, as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic dump. Except in this case there is no evil corporation or fossil fuel economy to blame. This disaster was caused by environmentalists charged with protecting the wilderness, who made one dreadful mistake after anotherand, along the way, proved how little they understood the environment they intended to protect. "

  "This is absurd," Bradley said. "To preserve a wilderness, you just preserve it. You leave it alone and let the balance of nature take over. Thats all that is required. "

  "Absolutely wrong," Kenner said. "Passive protectionleaving things alonedoesnt preserve the status quo in a wilderness, any more than it does in your backyard. The world is alive, Ted. Things are constantly in flux. Species are winning, losing, rising, falling, taking over, being pushed back. Merely setting aside wilderness doesnt freeze it in its present state, any more than locking your children in a room will prevent them from growing up. Ours is a changing world, and if you want to preserve a piece of land in a particular state, you have to decide what that state is, and then actively, even aggressively, manage it. "

  "But you said we dont know how to do that. "

  "Correct. We dont. Because any action you take causes change in the environment, Ted. And any change hurts some plant or animal. Its inevitable. Preserving old-growth forest to help the spotted owl means Kirtlands warbler and other species are deprived of the new-growth forest they prefer. There is no free lunch. "

  "But"

  "No buts, Ted. Name an action that had only positive consequences. "

  "Okay, I will. Banning CFCs for the ozone layer. "

  "That harmed Third World people by eliminating cheap refrigerants so that their food spoiled more often and more of them died of food poisoning. "

  "But the ozone layer is more important"

  "Perhaps to you. They might disagree. But were talking about whether you can take an action that does not have harmful consequences. "

  "Okay. Solar panels. Water recycling systems for houses. "

  "Enables people to put houses in remote wilderness areas where formerly they could not because of lack of water and power. Invades wilderness and thus endangers species that were previously unmolested. "

  "Banning DDT. "

  "Arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitoes, and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere near as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. * Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it. "

  "But DDT was a carcinogen. "

  "No, it wasnt. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban. "

  "It was unsafe. "

  "Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years, in one experiment. * After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides. "

  "We disagree about all this. "

  "Only because you lack the relevant facts, or are unwilling to face up to the consequences of the actions of organizations you support. Banning DDT will someday be seen as a scandalous blunder. "

  "DDT was never banned. "

  "Youre right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldnt get foreign aid. " Kenner shook his head. "But the unarguable point, based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban, Ted. Once again, there can be no action without harm. "

  A long silence followed. Ted shifted in his seat, started to speak, then closed his mouth again. Finally he said, "Okay. Fine. " He adopted his most lofty, presidential manner. "You have persuaded me. I grant you the point. So?"

  "So the real question with any environmental action is, do the benefits outweigh the harm? Because there is always harm. "

  "Okay, okay. So?"

  "When do you hear any environmental group speak that way? Never. Theyre all absolutists. They go before judges arguing that regulations should be imposed with no consideration of costs at all. ! The requirement that regulations show a cost-benefit was imposed on them by the courts after a period of wretched excess. Environmentalists screamed bloody murder about cost-benefit requirements and theyre still screaming. They dont want people to know how much their forays into regulation actually cost society and the world. The most egregious example was the benzene regulations in the late 1980s that were so expensive for so little benefit that they ended up costing twenty billion dollars for every year of life saved. * Do you agree with that regulation?"

  "Well, when you put it in those terms, no. "

  "What other terms are there, Ted, besides the truth? Twenty billion dollars to save one year of life. That was the cost of the regulation. Should you support organizations that push for such wasteful regulation?"

  "No. "

  "The lead benzene lobbying group in Congress was NERF. Are you going to resign from its board?"

  "Of course not. "

  Kenner just nodded slowly. "And there we have it. "

  Sanjong was pointing to the computer screen, and Kenner came over, sliding into the seat next to him. The screen showed an aerial image of a tropical island, heavily forested, and a broad curving bay of blue water. The photo seemed to be taken from a low-flying airplane. Around the bay were four weathered wood shacks.