The Final Disaster We Must Avert : Environment: In our pursuit of “progress” we are attacking the fragile envelope of air, water and earth that sustains life. Surely nature will exact a fearful revenge.

Many years ago, as a third-year student at Harvard Law School, I was selected to become a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. That spring, on a visit to Harvard, the justice met with me and asked when I intended to come to Washington.

“As soon as school ends,” I replied.

“Take some time off for a vacation first,” he advised.

“I don’t need a vacation,” I answered, whereupon the diminutive Frankfurter wheeled toward me and pointing an admonishing finger, sternly rejoined: “Young man! There’s one thing I want you to remember for the rest of your career--the laws of physiology are inexorable.” I took the vacation.

Tuesday’s earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area is but another reminder of the truism that nature pursues its own remorseless course, is ignored or defied only at the peril of human existence. The damage to the Bay Area is reversible; structures will be rebuilt and life will continue. But history teaches that this is not always the case: Pompeii still lies buried beneath ancient lava flows; the dinosaurs will never return.

We live at a time when human defiance of nature is unparalleled in scope and ferocity. And surely nature will exact a fearful revenge. In our obsessive pursuit of “progress”--the accumulation of wealth--we are attacking the fragile envelope of air, water and earth that sustains life. We call this the “problem of the environment.” But the problem is not with the environment, but with the systematic, willful, devastating defiance of the human race.

We continue to pump man-made poisons into the air and water; unleash the chemicals that slowly dissolve the life-protecting layer of ozone guarding us from the sun; heap up the blanket of gases that are transforming the climate of the Earth and endangering the intricately woven chain of life. Much of this damage is already irreversible. Thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, have already been condemned to a premature death--from man-caused cancers or heart attacks or respiratory diseases. And this reality is only the first, faint and distant warning of calamities yet to come, calamities that only immediate, drastic and costly action can avert.

We all know this to be true. Still we persist. We are in the grips of a malady as old as the race--the wishful thinking, the barely conscious self-deception, that disaster will somehow be averted, that it can’t really happen to us, that some kind of magic (in our time known as technology) will find a way to turn back the steadily mounting tides.

“Nature,” it has been written, “is the great democrat.” Surely this is true of the vengeance that our ravaging of the Earth is bringing upon us. Even the wealthiest and most powerful cannot purchase escape from life-threatening air, poisoned water, the warming of the globe. The truth is that there is no more time. We have already exceeded the limits that nature can bear.

There’s no question that to save ourselves, we must take action immediately that will reduce our standard of existence, change the course of development. Perhaps faced with so stark an unavoidable a choice--once we admit that is the choice--science will find other means of enhancing our material existence. And, perhaps not. But one thing is certain. Such alternatives will be found only when the crisis is actually upon us. We are too choked with arrogance and gifted with self-deception to forgo present satisfaction for the sake of the future--even the future survival of our own descendants. This incapacity is not a peculiarly modern affliction. History is littered with the wreckage of past empires that overreached themselves and tumbled into the abyss of memory.

Yet, always before, as civilizations dissolve, others succeeded. Now we confront not so trivial a displacement, but the potential devastation of the entire planet. An Earth can have no successors. An overstatement? Perhaps. But a mounting possibility. Although some, indeterminate damage has already been done, it is not too late--probably--to avert far larger catastrophe. The nations of the world, the leaders among the nations, could meet to declare a global emergency and take those severe actions that might arrest the process of destruction.

We can do this. But I have little confidence that we will do so. Only a swelling clamor, a demand, from the threatened people of the Earth can stir the powerful of enterprise and government to action.

The time for analysis is past. If we fail now, we will have made a prophet of T.S. Eliot when he wrote: “This is the way the world ends. . . . Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

And we will have deserved such an ending.