A Truce With Nature

Environmental science was pioneered in the United States by biologists trying to figure out what was killing their plants. Rachel Carson documented their concern in her book, “Silent Spring,” published in 1962. The concern blossomed into a movement on Earth Day in 1970, giving America’s young people something besides the Vietnam War to protest against. Federal agents took names at the Washington rally.

As the movement matured, its science expanded to the point that last week environmental specialists from 124 nations gathered in London to discuss what to do about bald spots in the layer of ozone in the Earth’s atmosphere. The ozone layer filters out ultraviolet rays from the sun that can cause skin cancer; as the ozone blanket thins out, cancer rates can be expected to rise. The ozone is being eroded by chlorines and bromines from a chemical, chlorofluorocarbon, that escapes from aerosol cans, refrigerators, automobile air-conditioning units and even plastic coffee cups. When it drifts into the layer, it causes ozone to decompose.

With environmental maturity, and the urgency imparted by sophisticated scientific calculations that say the Earth has not a minute to waste in getting the chemical out of the atmosphere, has come global dissension.

The United States began talking more than 10 years ago about phasing out production of chlorofluorocarbons and looking for substitutes. Two years ago, 31 countries agreed to cut production of the chemical by half before the end of the century. Countries that have taken the pledge, or plan to, produced about 92% of the world supply of the offending chemical.

But as Times writer Larry B. Stammer reports from London, Third World countries are saying, in effect, that industrial societies would deny them a standard of living that the producers of the chemical have enjoyed for more than 50 years. In China, for example, only one home in 10 has a refrigerator. It has built 12 plants to produce chlorofluorocarbons in an attempt to catch up. It is neither anxious nor ready to join the movement to ban production. The Soviet Union has not refused, but it wants time to think about the statistics.

African nations chime in that European industry uses their continent as a toxic dumping ground. An Indian scientist complained, correctly, that the United States has no right to complain about the devastating effect on the environment when rain forests are destroyed. North Americans, he said, will not even put limits on their use of cars, major polluters that also contribute to the Greenhouse Effect, a steady rise in temperatures caused by a blanket of air pollutants that trap the sun’s heat.

A truce with nature may be the most urgent matter on the world’s agenda. Arranging that will involve science only as a guide to what must be done. Above all, it will be a political exercise on a scale never even attempted before, an attempt to persuade industrial societies to give up some of the luxuries provided by energy and chemicals and Third World societies to do with less than they want. It makes solving the problems of Third World debt, nuclear arms reductions and the sagging American Savings and Loan empire look like a child’s book of riddles. Still it cannot be postponed, nor can the United States wait for others to lead the way.

The reason for urgency does not take volumes to explain; Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, said it all in a few words in London last week:

“There is not a single nation or individual on Earth whose well-being is not finally dependent on its biological resources,” he told Stammer, “its seas and rivers, grasslands, forests, soil and air. . . . Unless all nations (mount) a massive and sustained effort into safeguarding their shared living resources, we would face a catastrophe only on a scale rivaled by nuclear war.”