Newsgroup: it.cultura.filosofia
Titolo: "Road to ruin" from "The Guardian - Friday October 24,2003"

"ROAD TO RUIN"
FROM "THE GUARDIAN"
FRIDAY OCTOBER 24,2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1069882,00.html
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
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 exposé 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.
--
"Nihil est in intellectu quod prius non fuerit in sensu,nisi intellectus
ipse"



