Today’s Environmental Challenge

Last summer, I paddled across a northern Adirondack lake with a state biologist to visit an eagle’s nest. Thirty years before, in an effort to curb blackflies, communities in this area put big blocks of the chemical insecticide DDT in the streams.

The blackflies survived--they hung in clouds around us all this morning, contemptuous of pine-scent Old Woodsman. But the eagles, among others, didn’t. The DDT thinned the shells of their eggs. When the mother eagles sat on their eggs as they always had, the shells collapsed.

Finally, last year, three pairs of eagles returned to the Adirondacks and built nests. The DDT levels in the water had dropped enough to allow them back.

We sat in the canoe and watched a big eagle circle above us: He was the very eagle from the dollar bill, eyes beady with patient irritation, head ruffled. His mate was on the nest, and we were too close. He swooped nearby; we backed off. He rose with a beat or two of his wings--he had a six-foot wingspan--and flew for the nest. When he got there, he stuck out his wings, stalled, and dropped softly down.

This grand sight I owe to Rachel Carson. Had she not written when she did about the dangers of DDT, it might well have been too late before anyone cared about what was happening. She pointed out the problem; she offered a solution; the world shifted course.

This is how this series should end, too.

Why can’t this problem be solved in the way that, say, DDT was solved? Because, first of all, it’s a problem that’s different not only in quantity but also in quality. Carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases come from everywhere, so they can be fixed only by fixing everything. The small substitutions and quick fixes are difficult.

Many in Congress, for instance, support the development of methanol-fueled vehicles that emit fewer pollutants like nitrogen oxide. But most methanol would be made with coal--the process would dramatically increase levels of carbon dioxide.

The size and complexity of the industrial system we’ve built makes even the most obvious and immediate changes physically difficult.

For instance, one answer that people often suggest to deal with the carbon dioxide crisis is that we plant more trees. And we should. But, as one study showed, enough American sycamores to soak up 50 years of the world’s output of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel would cover a land area the size of Europe with American sycamore seedlings. And a land area the size of Europe doesn’t exist uncovered by crops or desert or ice.

Also, say EPA researchers, there may not be enough phosphate, nitrogen, or potash for fertilizer. And acid rain is killing the trees we do have. And as it gets hotter in the next few decades--as a result of carbon dioxide already released--huge tracts of forest may die, as we have seen. And if we plant huge numbers of trees on fallow land, we might change the albedo--or reflecting power--of the Earth.

This is a controversial point. But some scientists contend that fewer of the sun’s rays would be reflected by the dark green of the trees than the grassland they replace. (One study even estimated that massive tree planting could reduce the Earth’s reflectivity 20%, increasing the world temperature at a rate roughly equivalent to seven years of carbon-dioxide emissions.)

Another common suggestion is to replace much of the coal and oil we burn with natural gas, since it produces only about half as much carbon dioxide. But if natural gas--methane--escapes into the atmosphere before it burns, it traps solar radiation 20 times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. And natural gas does leak--from wells, from pipelines, from appliances.

Switching to natural gas may have no effect on the greenhouse effect. It might even make it worse.

Not only is the industrial system huge, but the trend toward growth is incredibly powerful. At the simplest level, the population increase continues, just a little abated. In some developing countries, 37% of the population is under 15 years of age; in Africa, the figure is 45%.

Demographers calculate that the world’s population may plateau by the middle of the next century. That sounds like good news, but before it happens, a population the world already strains to support is expected to double, and perhaps nearly triple. Without a stabilized population, even the most immediate and obvious goals, such as slowing deforestation or cutting fossil fuel use, seem far-fetched. If we double energy efficiency but also double the number of energy users--the math is forbidding.

Over the last century, a human life has become a machine for burning petroleum. At least in the West, the system that produces excess carbon dioxide is not only huge and growing but also psychologically all-encompassing. It makes no sense to talk about cars and power plants and so on as if they were something apart from our lives--they are our lives.

George Orwell, writing before World War II, when this addiction was still in its early stages, said, “The coal miner is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders everything that is not grimy is supported. . . . In the metabolism of the Western world, the coal miner is second in important only to the man who plows the soil.”

Now that agriculture depends so heavily on fossil fuels, even that rank is reversed.

In the face of such tidal forces, our traditional answers are like the magic war paint donned by American Indians, which their medicine men assured them would ward off bullets. At best--and at worst--they provide a false sense of security.

Take, for instance, the widespread idea that the “free market” will accomplish any necessary goal. The price of oil is currently low and seems set to stay there for a while. When it is below $25 a barrel, the economists say, most of the incentive for finding new energy sources disappears. And the easiest--and therefore cheapest--inefficiencies were wrung out of the system during the energy crisis.

Governments have already “made what many of them believe are heroic efforts” to cut oil use, concluded a National Academy of Sciences report. Our weird problem is an abundance of resources and a shortage of hard economic reasons not to use them.

But the obvious alternative--international government action--will be almost as difficult. For any program to be a success, we must act not only as individuals and as nations but as a community of nations. “Unless all act together,” the Worldwatch Institute warned, “there is little reason to act separately.”

One trouble, though, is that some countries may perceive themselves as potential “winners” in a climatic change; the Soviets, for instance, may decide that the chance of increased harvests from a longer growing season is worth the risk of the global warming. And since the Soviets, the Americans and the Chinese own about 90% of the world’s coal reserves, any one of them can scuttle progress.

The possibilities for other divisions--rich vs. poor nations, for instance--are large. Every country has its own forms of despoliation to protect; just as an example, the Canadians, who are forever moaning about their role as the helpless victims of American acid rain, are cutting down the virgin forests of British Columbia at a semi-Brazilian pace.

And the fact that decisions must be made now for decades ahead means that, in the words of deputy secretary of state for the Environment, Health and Natural Resources, Richard Benedick, “Somehow, political leaders and government processes and budget makers must accustom themselves to a new way of thinking.” Of all the quixotic ideas discussed here, that may top the list.

All this is not to say we shouldn’t act. We must act, and in every way possible, and immediately. We must substitute, conserve, plant trees. We stand at the end of an era--the hundred years’ binge on oil, gas and coal, which has given us both the comforts and the predictment of the moment.

George Woodwell, a Woods Hole marine biologist, who is currently studying the world’s forests to discover just how fast they are dying, says we are committed to a warming of several degrees. But if we do not dramatically cut carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the atmosphere will never reach a steady state and “There is virtually no action that can be taken to assure the continuity of natural communities.”

Even the countries that think they wouldn’t mind warming of a degree or two for a longer growing season can’t endure an endless heating. There is, Woodwell says, “no question that we’ve reached the end of the age of fossil fuels.” The choice of doing nothing--of continuing to burn ever more oil and coal--is not a choice, in other words. It will lead us, if not straight to hell, then straight to a place with a similar temperature.