How To Think About The Environment

Max Ways

[Reprinted from "How to Think about the Environment,"
Fortune, Vol. LXXXl, No. 2 (February 1970), pp. l00ff.]

. . . Although environmental issues do have a grave moral content, there's little sense in the tendency to present the case in the dominant art form of a TV horse opera. This isn't, really, a confrontation between "the polluters" and the good guys in the white hats. Nevertheless, casting for the villainous roles proceeds briskly. "Greed" is to blame. "Man, the dirtiest animal," is to blame, especially because his numbers are increasing. "Technology" is to blame - and this charge, as we shall see, contains much truth, though far less than the whole truth. "Capitalism" is to blame. "The poor," who throw garbage in the streets, are to blame. "Democracy," which seems unable to find remedies, is to blame. And, of course, "the establishment" everyone's goat of atonement, is to blame.

In general, the nomination of villains follows the familiar pattern of dumping the ashes of contrition on somebody else's head. A Columbia law-school senior this year was reported to have boasted that he told recruiters for law firms he "would not defend a client who was a polluter- and most of the clients who pollute are the big ones," a remark indicating that even law-school seniors may have something to learn.

For all men are polluters - and all living Americans are big polluters. The greedy and the ungreedy alike befoul the air with automobile exhaust fumes, the humble 1960 jalopy contributing somewhat more poison than the arrogant 1970 Cadillac. So long as our laws and habits of land use foster chaos, the homes of saints will aggress as rudely upon nature as the haunts of sinners. Who killed the rivers of Illinois by extinguishing perhaps forever their ability to cleanse and renew themselves? The effluents of big industries did a substantial part of the damage. Sewage from towns did part. But most of the damage to the rivers of Illinois came from farms onto which decent and well-meaning "little" men, in the pursuit of the legitimate aim of increasing crop yields, poured nitrogen fertilizers. The result bears the mellifluous name of "eutrophication"; algae, slimy green gunk, rampantly feed upon the fertilizer drained into the rivers; the decay of dead algae consumes so much of the available oxygen as to destroy the bacterial action that once cleansed the rivers of organic wastes.

At the root of our environmental troubles we will not find a cause so simple as the greed of a few men. The wastes that besmirch our land are produced in the course of fulfilling widespread human wants that are in the main reasonable and defensible. Nor will we find capitalism at the root of the trouble. The Soviet Union, organized around central planning, has constructed some of the most terrifyingly hideous cityscapes on earth, while raping the countryside with strip mines, industrial pollutants, and ail the other atrocities that in the U.S. are ascribed to selfish proprietary interest. Aware, as well they might be, of American environmental mistakes in handling the mass use of the automobile, Russians keep saying they will do it better; but today, as automobiles become more numerous in the U.S.S.R., it is hard to find in city or highway planning, in automobile design, or in any other tangible area signs that they are in fact better prepared for the automobile onslaught than the U.S. was in 1920.

The Japanese, though their basic culture lays great stress on harmony between man and nature, are not handling their environmental relations significantly better than the Americans or the Russians. Japan's economy, combining private enterprise with government central planning, seems able to do anything - except cherish the material beauty and order that the people value so highly.

If we wish to think seriously about the environment, we have to give up indulgence in barefoot moralism and the devil theory of what's wrong. We have to identify a root cause that explains the environmental failures of systems as different as the American, the Russian, and the Japanese. Obviously, all three are high-powered, industrialized, technologized societies, and our quest for a root cause can start by tentatively picking technology as the villain.

For Every Man, 500 "Slaves"

Despite billions of words on the subject, we still underestimate the magnitude of technological advance and its implications. Thirty years ago in Fortune's tenth anniversary issue, R. Buckminster Fuller found an apt way of expressing what had occurred. He calculated the total energy generated in the U.S. as equal to the muscular energy that would be generated if every American had 153 slaves working for him. Today a similar calculation would indicate about 500 "slaves" for every American man, woman, and child.

These slaves enable us to increase our own mobility hundreds of times and to toss around incredible masses of materials, altering not only their location and external shapes but their very molecules. Excluding construction, earth moving, and many other operations, the U.S. economy, according to one estimate, uses 2,500,000,000 tons of material a year. That's nearly thirteen tons per person.

These figures explain a lot of environmental woes that are otherwise mysterious. Although our cities are not more densely populated, they produce more maddening and wasteful congestion than any cities of the past. Our crowding is not basically a matter of too many human beings to the square mile but of the enormous retinue of energy and material that accompanies each of us. Like King Lear with his hundred riotous knights and squires, we strain the hospitality of our dwelling space, and from our situation, as from Lear's, much grief may follow.

Two hundred million of us are bustling about the U.S., every one sheathed in a mass-and-energy nimbus very much bigger, noiser, dirtier, smellier, clumsier, and deadlier than he is. The paper, plastics, scrap, ash, soot, dust, sludge, slag, fumes, and weird compounds thrown off by the mass-and-energy nimbus exceed by many magnitudes our own bodily wastes. If ten billion mere people, sans technological nimbus, inhabited the U.S., they could not create more congestion, blight, and confusion. The three million high-technology U.S. farmers put more adverse pressure on their land and rivers than the hundred and fifty million low-productivity peasant families of China put upon their land and rivers.

The Rats Who Rule the Elephants

How should a city be designed and its circulatory system arranged to accommodate a people that employs energy and mass at present American levels? The past offers only wisps of inspiration, but no usable models. Consistently we have failed to face the sheer physical challenge of the contemporary city, assuming that old urban forms would be adequate if we amended them a little to meet one crisis after another.

Along with all kinds of congestion, our cities produce a paradoxical effect of isolation and desolation. Not rationally shaped for the needs of this society, the cities may be shaping us toward irrationality. Frequently mentioned in environmentalist circles these days is a research project carried out by John Calhoun at Bethesda, Maryland. He placed Norway rats in a closed area ample for the original population. As they multiplied, the crowded animals, though well fed, developed most distressing psychoses, which, out of a decent respect for the privacy of rats, will not be here detailed. Many who have heard of this project see a close parallel with our cities.

But the analogy is not quite true to the situation of contemporary urban man. It would be better to find a strain of rats each one of which had the services of a half-house-broken elephant to do its work, run its errands, and cater to its wants. In an ill-organized space these lordly rats, even if they did not multiply, might go crazier quicker than did their cousins in Bethesda.

People who center their anxiety on "the population explosion" see the challenge much too narrowly. In the U.S. and other advanced countries, population has been increasing less rapidly by far than the explosive acceleration of the total energy and total mass deployed. If the population declined and technology continued to breed, without any improvement in the arrangements for its prudent use, a small fraction of the present U.S. population could complete the destruction of the physical environment while jostling one another for room.

A Retreat to Poverty?

We come, then, to the question of whether a headlong retreat from technology would be the right strategy. This option needs to be honestly appraised, not toyed with as it is every day by nostalgic romanticists wiggling their toes in secondhand memories of Thoreau's Walden Pond.

The casualties of a withdrawal from technology would be heavier than many suppose. Everybody, of course, has his own examples of unnecessary technologies, unnecessary products, unnecessary activities. But because we are, thank God, diverse in our wants, the lists do not agree. The man who has since childhood said to hell with spinach has a ready-made response to the news that a high incidence of "blue babies" recorded in Germany has been attributed to heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer on the spinach crop. But other consumers will have good reasons for wishing spinach yields to increase. We will not improve our environmental situation by recommending a technological retreat on the basis of what each of us considers the superfluous items in the households of his neighbors.

To be effective in protecting the environment a technological retreat would extend over a wide front and go back a long, long way. A century ago we had already slaughtered the bison, felled the eastern forests, and degraded the colonial cities. Retreat to the 1870 level of technology, while not giving long-range protection to the environment, would place the median American standard of living far below the 1970 poverty line. Among the consequences of such a retreat would be the closing of 75 percent of the present colleges and most of the high schools. We would give up not only automobiles and airplanes but also mass education and social services. Grandpa would return to living in the abandoned hencoop.

Since we are not going to choose such a retreat from technology as a deliberate social policy, sheer practicality forces us to seek another way out. In that quest we have to ask seriously why the U.S. and all the other advanced countries have failed so dismally in handling the unwanted effects of technology.

Modern technology did not spring out of the void. It did not well up simultaneously in all the world's peoples. It appears first in European culture, and, although it is now disseminated over the whole globe, its main generative fonts remain to this day Western.

The Western origin and leadership in technology, the main agent of environmental destruction, inevitably raises uncomfortable questions about Western culture itself. The Judeo-Christian religious formation is not essentially "anti-nature," as some angry men now aver. But in contrast to Oriental religions, it does sharply separate its idea of God from its idea of nature and does look upon man as having a special relationship with the Creator and a unique place within creation.

The Western tendency to objectify nature - to see it "from outside" - is undoubtedly responsible for much arrogant and insensitive handling of the material world. But it ought not be forgotten that this same attitudinal "separation" of man from nature forms the basis of man's ever increasing knowledge of nature. In recent centuries, especially, Western man has empirically confirmed his ancient notion of himself as unique among the creatures: no other species possesses a glimmer of his ability to learn about nature and to operate, for better or worse, upon it.

Surely it can be no accident that four centuries of science are attributable almost entirely to Western culture. Extending the pattern of Western religion and philosophy, which had drawn sharp distinctions between ideas of God, of man, and of nature, the scientific method began to separate one aspect of nature from another for purposes of study. This superlatively effective way of discovering solidly verifiable truths tends, precisely because it is sharply focused, to ignore whatever lies outside its periphery of attention. Science, seeking only to know, is guiltless of direct aggression against the environment. But technology, devoted to action, feeds ravenously upon the discoveries of science. Although its categories are not the same as those of science, technology in its own way is also highly specialized, directed toward narrowly defined aims. As its power rises, technology's "side effects," the consequences lying outside its tunneled field of purpose, proliferate with disastrous consequences to the environment-among other unintended victims. Millions of Pharaohs Complicate Life Modern Western man has advanced the principle of separation or differentiation also in areas of life, such as psychology and politics, that are seemingly remote from science and technology. These trends, too, have contributed to our environmental diseases. The undifferentiated human mass, say of ancient Egypt, has been replaced by modern men who regard themselves-and in fact are-highly individuated. The long trend to individualism, which has Greek as well as Judeo-Christian origins, has sharply accelerated during the modern centuries. One of its aspects, democracy, is based on the assumption that the diverse wants, skills, interests, and opinions of individuals should not be ignored or rudely aggregated from above, but must be somehow coordinated from below. The latter process is clearly the more difficult, especially when applied to such large questions as how to protect the physical environment from human misuse. The pharaonic society employed its most potent technology, irrigation, on the premise that everybody shared a common desire to eat. The knowledge required to operate the system was closely held in a group of priestly intellectuals, and the decision-making power was concentrated in the will of Pharaoh. With its technology under unified control, with few conflicts or complications arising from a diversity of skills, interests, rights, and powers within the community, the pharaonic society could maintain for centuries a stable, harmonious relation with nature and could also achieve stylistic and functional coherence within its man-made environment - such as it was.

One can hear today in environmentalist circles half-serious remarks that every city needs a king and every country an all-powerful planner to unify decisions affecting the environment. Such suggestions underestimate the human cost of the reversal, as do proposals for a retreat from technology. We will not voluntarily abandon the view that society should be made up of highly individuated men pursuing their own aims by their own lights.

We have permitted the free combination of individuals on the basis of shared specific aims. By means of such groups, mainly corporations, we have organized and stimulated technological advance, matching techniques to particular group aims. Though this pattern all too often ignores the undesirable side effects of its single-minded thrusts, it fits so closely with the evolution toward human diversity and freedom that we would shrink from a return to the pharaonic kind of harmony and stability. We are not fellahin, and the road back to that condition might be more arduous and more disorderly than the road we have traveled.

What the Garbage Specialists Overlook

Western culture has never denied that a society stressing the individuality of its members needs the restraint and to some degree the positive leadership of government. But the character of government has also been affected by the trend toward differentiation. The Lord's annointed, with unspecified and even "absolute" power, has been split up into sharply segregated bureaucratic functions.

These, too, generate undesirable side effects. A highway department's mission is defined by statute and by specific appropriations. As it goes about its assigned task of building the most road for the least measured cost, it rips up neighborhoods and landscapes, creating enormous social disutilities that never get into the department's benefit-cost calculations. A sanitation department, told to dispose of garbage, may tow it offshore and dump it. When the refuse washes back upon the beaches and into the estuaries, the problem belongs to some other department. Or the specialists in solid-waste disposal may burn trash and garbage in places and in ways that transfer the pollution to the air.

Fragmentation of modern government occurs even in "totalitarian" countries. Administration of the Soviet economy is divided among fifty-odd ministries for the sake of efficiency. If a paper mill is needed, the men told off for that responsibility look around, like any capitalist, for plentiful timber, plentiful water, and cheap electric power. One paper mill was placed on the shore of beautiful Lake Baikal because the protection of this unique body of water lay outside the field of assigned vision of the men in charge of paper production. They were not being "greedy" or even "stupid" in the ordinary meaning of those words. They were wearing the blinkers of concentration, using the great Western device of fixing attention on the job at hand, of dealing intelligently with one segment of reality at a time.

A Problem of Balance

Though the principle of segregated attention proves gloriously successful - in research, in work, and in government - it can collide disastrously with the principle of unity. For each man is a unit though his skills and wants may be various. A society is a unit as well as a multitude. Nature, most marvelously connected throughout all its diversities, is a unit. Violation of these unities invites penalties and poses formidable tasks of reintegration.

Here we come to the root cause of our abuse of the environment: in modern society the principle of fragmentation, outrunning the principle of unity, is producing a higher and higher degree of disorder and disutility.

How can balance be restored? Since it is profoundly unrealistic to believe that we will or should retreat from such bastions of diversity as science, technology, and human individuality, then we have to seek improved methods of coordinating our fragmented thought and action.

During recent centuries, institutions of coordination, though lagging behind diversity, have not stood still. In economic affairs the market performs, albeit imperfectly, a stupendous job of mediating disparate wants, skills, resources. Government, amidst its bureaucratic fragments, has not completely lost the notion that it is supposed to serve such unitary purposes as "the general welfare." Specialized knowledge has a medium of transfer in the great modern webs of information, particularly the universities where all the sciences meet even if they do not fluently communicate.

How might such integrative agencies as market, government, and university be used, separately or in combination, so as to minimize the damage that fragmented action now does to the environment? This is the question on which the chance of actual reform, as distinguished from alarm and breast-beating, depends.

Subsidizing Destruction

In two areas, air and water pollution, a moment's reflection should convince anybody that the market, as now set up, is rigged against the environment. A hundred and fifty years ago it was almost unimaginable that clean water, much less clean air, could become scarce in the U.S. economy. Rightly, these resources were then considered common property and used without charge. The price of everything else the economy uses - land, minerals, food, labor, time -becomes dearer. But clean air and water, though now precious, are still left out of the pricing system, still free of charge.

Because the market has failed to keep pace with changing economic reality, the pricing system, expressing relative demand and supply, works against the conservation of clean air and water. A manufacturer is under great pressure to offset rising labor and material costs by developing new techniques. He has been under no comparable pressure with respect to clean air and water. Not surprisingly, techniques for conserving these resources have developed very slowly. The effect of omitting free resources from the pricing system is to make the economy as a whole pay a high subsidy to those activities that put above average pressure on free resources. In short, we are now providing a huge, unintentional market incentive to pollution.

The most direct and logical way of getting clean air and water into the market system is by a federal tax graduated in respect to the quantity and undesirability of the pollutants. Such a tax, escalating over the first five or ten years so as not to destroy industries whose cost structures are based on the present system, would stimulate the development of antipollution techniques.

Taxes on the abuse of water and air would not replace the present trend toward stricter antipollution measures enforced by police power. Radioactive wastes, for instance, can be dangerous in very small quantities because they concentrate as they move up the food chain. The strictest control of such wastes is required - and may prove expensive. Nuclear power will be better able to absorb such costs if its competitor, fossil fuel, is forced to pay for the clean air and water it displaces. By such combination of government police power and taxing power we can turn the market toward protection of the environment - or at least achieve its "neutrality."

Correcting the market is much more difficult in that growing class of cases where the bad environmental side effects do not occur until the product is in the hands of the consumer or even until after he has disposed of it. It is by no means clear that automobiles, for instance, now carry taxes equivalent to the true social costs incurred by their use and disposal. If we become serious about the preservation or restoration of public transport in American cities the first step would be to make sure that public policy is not subsidizing the automobile.

Still more difficult to deal with is the product that is innocent until it interferes with some technique of protecting the environment. Many plastics give trouble in this indirect way. The polyvinyl chloride bottle causes no problems unless it is burned in a trash incinerator that is equipped with a scrubber designed to catch soot and fly ash. The burning PVC causes hydrochloric acid to form in the scrubber, destroying its metal casing. Some companies that hoped to sell more scrubbers for smaller incinerators have given up because they cannot guarantee their devices against the increasing incidence of PVC in trash. A small tax based on the nuisance side effect of certain plastics would either drive them off the market or encourage a new technology that abated the nuisance. As technology advances into more and more esoteric compounds, each carefully designed for a particular use, protection of the environment will require public policies that force innovators to pay more attention to the side effects of their products.

With gratifying frequency and emphasis, business spokesmen these days are expressing their determination to exercise greater care of the environment. If business greed lay at the root of our environmental troubles then this repentance would itself signal the great turnaround. In fact, a more sensitive and socially responsible business attitude will be of very limited help - unless it is accompanied by new ground rules. Under the present set of rules, if one corporation is environmentally a good citizen, incurring heavy costs to fight pollution, and if its competitor operates on an environment-be-damned basis, then the first corporation will be punished and the second rewarded. The market will practice selection against the environment.

Instead of getting on with the formidable job of rewriting the rules, public discussion wastes time and energy on irrelevant questions, such as how much of business profit should be diverted to environmental betterment. The problems have become so huge that we would not necessarily make a dent in them with all the profits of American business. . . .

How to Locate a Power Plant

... At a meeting in New York last month, various environmental ills, including the appalling mess of the Jersey Meadows, were excoriated. Said one of the guests, a businessman: "Jersey Standard's officers should have been shot for putting a refinery there in the first place." Another guest asked: "Where should they have put it - in the Rocky Mountains?" The businessman was appalled by this sacrilegious suggestion, but he refused to deal seriously with the question of a refinery's location.

So do most conservationists. Everybody wants ample electric power, for instance, but more and more communities are prepared to resist the presence of a power plant. Decisions on plant location are being made in a basically disorderly way with each fragmented community interest in turn poised against the fragmented interest of the power company. More and more of these cases are getting into courts. But the courts, operating in the narrow dualism of adversary proceedings, are hardly in a position to say where a power plant ought to go. In this decision system the most apathetic or careless community would get stuck with the power plant or refinery - and this might be exactly the worst place to put it from either a business or an environmental viewpoint.

Obviously, a high-technology society needs, and its government should provide, forums for the rational resolution of such questions. Carl E. Bagge, a member of the Federal Power Commission, argues that regional planning bodies should become the forums for deciding on such questions as the location of new power plants and power transmission facilities.

Better handling of the environment is going to require lots of legal innovation to shape the integrative forums and regulatory bodies where our new-found environmental concerns may be given concrete reality. These new legal devices will extend all the way from treaties forbidding oil pollution on the high seas down to the minute concerns of local government. But the present wave of conservationist interest among lawyers and law students does not seem to be headed along that constructive path. Rather, it appears intent on multiplying two-party conflicts between "polluters" and victims. …

To Put the World Together Again

…A key contribution to the environmental future can be made by the university, the most significant institution in the whole communication network. Indignation concerning the environment is now at a very high pitch among students and faculty. Not all of this emotion, however, is translated into efforts within the university to balance specialized fragmentation with integrated studies.

An interesting view of faculty attitudes toward the environment was elicited from Robert Wood, Undersecretary (and briefly Secretary) of Housing and Urban Development in the Johnson Administration and now director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard. On his return to academia, Wood found that, throughout the faculties, interest in environmental affairs had suddenly become emotionally intense. "They are a little like the atomic scientists after Hiroshima," he says. "They had assumed that science was automatically improving the world. Confronted with contrary evidence, they feel guilt. But they tend to become impatient when their condemnations of what is happening are not immediately followed by correction."

Many faculty members who are most indignant about the environment would be unwilling to direct their own research or teaching effort to environmental questions. Urban-affairs centers and institutes of ecology are proliferating on campuses but in many cases they are not allowed, because of the jealousy of the entrenched disciplines, to give credit courses or degrees. In the academic structure, such interdisciplinary institutes are looked down upon much as a mongrel would be regarded at a show sponsored by the American Kennel Club.

U.S. society is going to need tens of thousands of "integrators," men who can handle environmental material from several natural sciences in combination with material from several of the social sciences. These men will utilize very high technologies, such as computers and space satellites, to diagnose and cure the side effects of other technologies. Tomorrow's integrators, moreover, must be able to deal with broad questions of human value, purpose, and law that lie beyond (and between) the sciences. The universities that produced the specialists who taught us how to take the world apart will now have to train the men who will take the lead in putting it together again.

Can We Afford It All?

Environmental damage is so widespread and is continuing so rapidly that there is a serious question as to whether we can afford reform-a question that is not necessarily answered by the glib truth that we cannot afford to go on as we are. . . .

If certain twentieth century trends such as population growth and, especially, the enlargement of the per capita mass-and-energy nimbus are simply extrapolated into the future, it's obvious that at some point we will destroy ourselves by consuming the earth. But these rates may not soar on forever. After ten years of falling U.S. birthrates, it has become possible to believe that the U.S. population may stabilize between the years 2000 and 2020 at not much above its present level, as a few demographers have predicted.

Limits of growth are also in sight for the more important rate of mass-and-energy used. The heavy environmental pressures come from agriculture and manufacturing (including mining). We are already producing more food than we consume and more than we would need to feed all the hungry in the U.S. The total value of manufactured goods will probably continue to rise for several decades, although substantial reductions in this demand could result from better environmental policies. Many things (e.g., the second family car, the second home) that we now buy are made "necessary" by wasteful environmental arrangements. The U.S. will probably reach saturation in manufactured goods in any event at some point in the next fifty years, if only because the time to use all the things we buy is becoming scarce.

Meanwhile, this economy will be very hard pressed to keep up with its increasing needs on the "services" front. A society that is both highly specialized and rapidly changing requires, as ours has already demonstrated, an elaborate "nerve system," employing millions, to maintain its cohesion and determine its direction. Among the elements of the "nerve system" are education, communications, law, finance, etc., which burn little fuel and consume small tonnages of materials.

We Won't Snuggle Back

The probability that gross pressure on the environment is due to stabilize does not of itself constitute a ground for optimism. It merely indicates that our prospect is not hopeless, and that by a huge and intelligent effort we might reverse the present devastation.

Whether that effort will be made depends primarily on how we think about the challenge. We did not get into this mess through such vices as gluttony, but rather through our virtues, our unbalanced and uncoordinated strengths. If we do not succeed in bringing under control our new-found powers, the failure will be attributable to the father of all vices, inattention to the consequences of our actions.

Modern man, Western or Westernized, is not going to snuggle back into the bosom of nature, perceiving all reality as a blurred continuum. That possibility of innocence we lost long ago in - of all places - a garden. We have understood differentiation, specialization, individuation-, we have known the glories of action concentrated upon a specific purpose. Our path toward unity lies through diversity and specialization, not in recoil from them. A high-technology society without adequate institutions of coordination will produce either chaos or tyranny or both. Freedom will become meaningless because individual men will cease to believe that what they want has any relevance to what they get. But a high-technology society that can innovate adequate structures of decision will expand the freedom of individual choice far beyond any dream of the low-technology centuries.

The chief product of the future society is destined to be not food, not things, but the quality of the society itself. High on the list of what we mean by quality stands the question of how we deal with the material world, related as that is to how we deal with one another. That we have the wealth and the power to achieve a better environment is sure. That we will have the wisdom and charity to do so remains - and must always remain - uncertain.