COMPUTER PREDICTS WORLD COLLAPSE

I was one of the team of people at MIT who wrote a book that created a worldwide burst of media foreboding. It began as a small report. Within a few months we were reading headlines like the one above with complete astonishment.

We didn’t think we had written a prediction of doom. We had intended to issue a warning, but also a vision. We saw, with the help of the computer, not one future but many, all possible, some terrible, some terrific.

In the introduction to The Limits to Growth, we listed three main conclusions, one of danger, one of hope, and one of urgency. The press picked up only the first and the third:

1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next 100 years.

 

2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future.

 

3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.

You wouldn’t think such simple conclusions would stir up much of a fuss, but the fuss was incredible. The storm went on for years. It inspired conferences, studies, books of denial, and books of affirmation and elaboration. Eventually, like all media-generated storms, this one settled back down.

Later, people who remembered Limits began asking me: Is this it? Are we running into the limits to growth? Were you right after all?

The question “Were you right?” bothered me. It is the wrong question. One can only be right or wrong if one has made a prediction. We didn’t do that. We offered a choice, and people heard a pronouncement of doom.

Are we pushing the limits?

Photo: NREL/PIX.

Since we wrote Limits, the human economy has more than doubled its physical presence, from vehicles to electric power plants to garbage. At the same time, there has been great erosion of the planetary resource base. Species, forests, wetlands, soils, and habitats have been lost, buffers and degrees of protection have decreased, options have narrowed.

I have spent the past 20 years immersed in statistics that describe this decline. I’ve watched them unfold. I’ve presented them to classes and to audiences many times and in a calm tone of voice. I haven’t cried over them. I haven’t yelled in outrage.

That’s because of psychic numbing, I’m sure. I haven’t been hit all at once, as I was the first time I saw the birth-rate graph. Watching the numbers slowly get worse is like watching a child grow up — or a better analogy would be watching someone die of a wasting disease.

Exponential growth of population and physical capital, exponential depletion of resources and degradation of the environment are not necessary to the human condition. But collectively we have been behaving as if they were. Growth is still the pattern of the human system. As yet no corrective processes have been strong enough to stop it. But there are signs of such processes. The good news is that some are coming from human ingenuity and restraint. The bad news is that some are coming from environmental breakdown.

There is a bright side.

Photo: NREL/PIX.

I’ve grown impatient with the kind of debate we used to have about whether optimists or the pessimists are right. Neither are right. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.

I am not afraid of the challenge of easing the throughput of human society back down within its limits — I think that can be done fairly easily and even with considerable benefit to the human quality of life. I am afraid of what the world might do with the idea that we are beyond the limits. I have already experienced the hostility, denial, and ridicule engendered by the idea that there are limits. I would expect more of the same from the idea that those limits are already exceeded.

Even worse than denial or ridicule would be simpleminded, uncritical, hysterical acceptance. I can see the headlines now:

BEYOND THE LIMITS: COLLAPSE IS COMING

 

or

BEYOND THE LIMITS: POPULATION, STANDARD OF LIVING MUST BE CUT

Those are the two worst possible conclusions to jump to. The first confuses trend with destiny again, leaps at prediction, denies choice. The second recognizes only the most dramatic, conflictual, and violent of the possible responses to a state of overshoot.

To ease my fear, to set the record straight, to forestall the destructive headlines, let me write my own headlines in even larger type:

OVERSHOOT DOES NOT MEAN COLLAPSE

 

and

MATERIAL AND ENERGY THROUGHPUT MUST BE CUT, BUT NOT PEOPLE, NOT LIVING STANDARDS, NOT THE DREAM OF A BETTER WORLD

Polar bears are walking on thin ice.

Ice now covers 15 percent less of the Arctic Ocean than it did 20 years ago. In the 1950s that ice averaged 10-feet thick; now it’s less than six-feet thick. At the current rate of melting, in 50 years the northern ocean could be ice-free all summer long.

That, says a January 19 article in Science, would be the end of polar bears. In fact many creatures of the Arctic Ocean are already in trouble.

Until recently no one knew that there were many creatures of the Arctic Ocean. In the 1970s, a Russian biologist named Melnikov discovered 200 species of tiny organisms, algae and zooplankton, hanging around ice floes in immense numbers, forming slime jungles on the bottoms of bergs and plankton clouds in every break of open water. Their carcasses fall to the bottom to nourish clams, which are eaten by walruses. Arctic cod live on algae scraped off the ice. The cod are eaten by seabirds, whales, and seals. The king of the food chain, hunting mainly seals, is the great white bear.

That was the system until the ice started to thin. In 1997 and 1998 Melnikov returned to the Beaufort Sea and found most of the plankton species, many named by him (and for him), were gone. The ice was nearly gone. Creatures dependent on the plankton (like the cod), or on the ice for dens (seals), or for travel (bears) were gone, too.

Many had just moved north, following the ice, but that means moving farther from land, with widening stretches of open water between. Creatures like the black guillemot, a bird that depends on land for shelter and the ice floe for food, can no longer bridge the gap.

The Arctic is changing faster than scientists can document. Inuit hunters report that ivory gulls are disappearing; no one knows why. Mosquitoes are moving north, attacking murres, which will not move from their nests, so they are literally sucked and stung to death. Caribou can no longer count on thick ice to support their island-hopping in search of the lichens that sustain them. One biologist who spots caribou from the air says, “You sometimes see a caribou trail heading across [the ice], then a little wormhole at the end with a bunch of antlers sticking out.”

Hudson’s Bay polar bears are thinner and are producing fewer cubs. With the ice going out earlier, their seal-hunting season is shrinking. Hungry bears retreat to land and ransack garbage dumps. The town of Churchill in Canada has more jail cells for bears than for people. The bears are also weakened by toxic chemicals that drift north from industrial society and accumulate in the Arctic food chain.

Every five years the world’s climatologists assess current knowledge about global warming. Their latest report was just released. It erases any doubt about where this warming is coming from and warns that we ain’t seen nothing yet. If we keep spewing out greenhouse gases according to pattern, we will see three to 10 times more warming over the 21st century than we saw over the 20th.

Some biologists are saying the polar bear is doomed.

A friend of mine, in response to this news, did the only appropriate thing. She burst out weeping. “What am I going to tell my three-year-old?” She sobbed. Any of us still in contact with our hearts and souls should be sobbing with her, especially when we consider that the same toxins that are in the bears are in the three-year-old. And that the three-year-old over her lifetime may witness collapsing ecosystems, north to south, until all creatures are threatened, especially top predators like polar bears and people.

Is there any way to end this column other than in gloom? Can I give my friend, you, myself any honest hope that our world will not fall apart? Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of the polar bear, the whale, the tiger, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral reef, while fearing for the three-year-old?

Heck, I don’t know. There’s only one thing I do know. If we believe that it’s effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last — well, then yes, it’s over. That’s the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally, I don’t believe that stuff at all. I don’t see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there’s something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls.

I still think every egg is a miracle, though they appear on our farm by the dozen every day. Our leading-edge chemists are miles from being able to convert cracked corn and cabbage leaves into an egg, much less a chick. The biotech biz can’t make grass into wool and lambs either, though my sheep, which were not at all smart, used to do it with great reliability.

All these years the one farm miracle I never got to witness firsthand was the transformation of hay into calves and milk. I never got a cow. I was daunted by their size and by the prospect of never-fail, twice-daily milkings. “The only difference between being in jail and having a cow,” my then-husband used to recite, “is that in jail you don’t have to milk the cow.”

So I stuck with chickens and sheep, until two years ago, when one of my farm-mates drove in one day with a tiny Jersey calf in the back of the truck. We named her Maple. Maple has just had her own first calf, and we are awash in milk.

I shouldn’t have been surprised at how good fresh, sweet, organic milk is. After all, once I tasted fresh organic eggs I never went back to supermarket ones. The same goes for vegetables and fruits out of the garden. But somehow I thought milk was milk was milk. So I have just learned one more time what we give up in taste and quality for the dubious privilege of living far away from the sources of our increasingly industrialized food.

I was also surprised at the quantity. Jerseys are not big producers, and ours is still working up to her peak, but she’s already milking five gallons a day. That’s nothing to a big farm with Holsteins and vacuum lines and bulk tanks. But when you’re operating out of your kitchen, five gallons a day is a river — a river of possibilities. You can do so many great things with milk!

Most of ours goes into cheese. Up to a month ago I had only the vaguest idea how milk becomes cheese, though this age-old art was once practiced in most rural households. Here’s how it works. You heat milk gently in a stainless steel vat and stir in a magical lactobacillus that turns the milk sugar lactose into lactic acid. You monitor the acidity of the mix to follow the bugs’ working. At just the right moment you add rennet, which congeals the curds. Then, depending on what kind of cheese you’re making, you cut, heat, stir, and salt the curds, scoop them into cheesecloth-lined forms, and press them (with bricks or a bucket of water). The next morning you have a wheel of cheese. You soak it in brine, then age it, ideally in a cave with constant temperature and humidity. Lacking a cave, we built a walk-in cooler.

We just tasted our first cheese, now 45 days old. It’s bland, because it’s only halfway through its minimal aging period. But it’s nutty, elastic, melty, good cheese. In my totally biased opinion, it’s on its way to glory. As with that first egg, I’m in awe.

I am not good at delayed gratification, so I take some milk to experiment with products that can be eaten immediately. So far my favorite trick is this: I start with two gallons of milk and scoop off the top layer of wonderful, thick cream. The cream goes into a hand-cranked churn. After 20 minutes of lackadaisical cranking (I read a book while I do it), the paddles hang up on a half pound of golden butter. I pour off three cups of surrounding liquid, which, kids, is called buttermilk. Great for biscuits or pancakes.

Taking off the cream leaves a gallon and a half of skim milk. That I warm to 90 degrees and stir in a little commercial buttermilk (which contains live lactobacillus). After sitting overnight, it separates into white jelly-like curds and watery yellow whey. (Along came a spider and sat down beside her … now I know where those nursery rhymes come from.) I cut the curds into pieces, warm them a little, scoop them out, add a bit of salt, and voila! A quart and a half of low-fat cottage cheese! I feel very clever, though it was the bacillus and the cow and the housemate who milked the cow who did the real work.

One more transformation could turn the whey into ricotta. But we make that with the whey from the other cheesemaking, so our refrigerator is well stocked. (Lasagna, blintzes, cheesecake!) I take the whey out to the chickens, who slurp it up contentedly. It’s full of nutrients that flow into the eggs. The composted chicken and cow manure go to the garden to flow into the vegetables.

Simple miracles. Satisfying work, like baking bread or building a shelf. Fresh, delicious food. Nutrient cycles closed right at hand. Health for land and people. Sometimes I wonder, with all our supposed progress, what we’re rushing toward and what we’re leaving behind.

Why not?

The powers that don’t have to be.

As I hear people try to explain California’s electricity problem, I wonder whether anyone really understands the market system. We discuss it endlessly, we have whole university departments to study it, we nearly worship it. But when we say things like “competition will bring down rates,” I wonder if we know what we are talking about.

I’m not sure I can explain California either. (Ever. About anything.) But there are some things I can make strong guesses about, even from a distance.

First, electricity restructuring is not being driven by the goal of reducing residential rates. The drivers are technology and industry. New ways of making electricity, such as combined-cycle natural gas generators, and soon fuel cells, allow industrial users to produce their own power at lower cost and with less pollution. One by one they are slipping off the grid, leaving the utilities, with their huge, outmoded, unpaid-for power plants, in a panic.

To save themselves, the power companies meet in back rooms with politicians. They must accomplish three things. First, they must allow big customers to lock in low rates, so they will stay on the grid. Second, they must pay off the debt for their dinosaur plants. Third, they must sell the deal to the public by promising lower rates.

The only way to pull off this miracle is with a public bail-out, called “stranded costs” in the back rooms. Stranded cost payments mean that your electric bill will actually be higher, but a chunk of it will be hidden in your tax bill. This maneuver has nothing to do with a free market. It is perverse socialism. Prop up a dying industry by forcing the people to pay for bad investments. Order utilities to cut rates for awhile to lull taxpayers. Then let the people shop for power in competition with the big guys. That’s where the market will come in, but markets aren’t kind to little players competing against big ones.

Restructuring has already squeezed out the best supply strategy, namely efficiency. In almost any application, from lighting to water pumps to electric motors, it is cheaper and far better for the environment to install devices that deliver the same service with less power.

However, the market competes for lowest up-front price, not lowest price over the lifetime of a product. How many of us will buy a 10-buck compact fluorescent light bulb instead of a regular one for $1.50? Even if we believe that over 10 years the more expensive bulb will save money?

In the old electric system, it cost utilities less to subsidize our more efficient bulbs than to build another dinosaur power plant. In the deregulated system, they have only one incentive: to sell us as much power as possible at the lowest apparent price. So much for efficiency.

California at the moment is experiencing another market flaw. Prices oscillate. The magic point where supply meets demand is not written in the sky. It is found only by producing too much, finding that the excess isn’t selling, so cutting price and production until you’ve cut a little too far, then correcting upward again. This cycle is especially vicious for electricity, because the machines that produce (generators) and consume (motors, appliances, heating and air conditioning systems) tend to be expensive, long-lived, and slow to build. Therefore over- and under-corrections can go on for months or years. One of the difficult blessings of the old regulated system was that it forced onto utilities a bias toward overcapacity that damped market cycles.

California’s immediate problems result, I think, from all the above factors plus bad luck. Temporarily capped residential rates, giving consumers no incentive to conserve, spurred demand not so much in California as in surrounding states on the grid. A few major power plants happened to shut down. The feds chose that vulnerable moment to remove caps on the wholesale rate that utilities can charge each other. Suddenly California utilities had to buy power at uncontrolled rates while selling at controlled ones. Consumers with their fixed rates saw no reason to cut back. Opportunities opened for price gouging. Aluminum plants in Washington state are making a bundle by shutting down and selling power (which they buy at locked-in low rates) to California. Because money cannot instantly transform itself into working power plants, there are still rolling blackouts.

Could it happen in the East? Not likely, I think, but not impossible. Other surprising things could happen too.

How do we help this vital system make the transition to a decentralized future, with power supplied by gas, sun, wind, and hydrogen instead of coal, oil, and nuclear fission? No one fully knows. But some general rules are obvious. Plan far ahead, and plan for the welfare of the whole system, not just the utilities or the big consumers. Remember that demand reductions are just as effective as supply increases, and cheaper and cleaner. Don’t set up the poor to bid against the rich. Don’t try to control prices in only one part of the system. Don’t hide real costs. Throw away comfortable myths about how the market will do everything for us and start thinking.

Above all don’t allow anything as critical as electricity (or health care or airline safety or food or pharmaceutical safety) to be restructured by power brokers in back rooms.

The president-elect prepares to step up to the plate.

Well, but you know, the Rs would feel the same way if a few hundred Florida votes had tipped the other way. Only worse. If the tables were turned, the Rs would be whipping up their talk radio attack dogs, organizing more threatening mobs, turning over rocks looking for grounds for the next impeachment. At least for the next four years we will be relieved of that kind of bitterness. Whatever their faults, the Ds lose more politely than the Rs do.

But a president who knows and cares so little! Who spent more hours working out and playing video games than being governor of Texas! Who has no idea what it’s like to lead a non-privileged life! Who never accomplished anything without the help of his dad and his dad’s rich friends!

Great country, isn’t it? Anyone with the right dad or friends can become president. Anyway, he’s not running the country alone. Colin Powell will probably be a good secretary of state.

But that James Watt clone as secretary of Interior! A property rights activist in charge of the national lands! Oil and mining companies come right on in, drill anywhere, dump your toxic mine tailings. Property rights means you have all the private rights you want to public property. So long wilderness, hello clearcuts, overgrazing, and snowmobiles all over the national parks!

Oh, come on, calm down. We survived James Watt. We’ll survive this. Think how it will invigorate the enviro groups.

But W. is acting like he has some kind of a mandate, for Pete’s sake! He claims the nation actually asked for that tax cut that will favor the rich and bring back the deficits! And for turning Social Security over to the stock market casino! And for the end of the inheritance tax! If he’d been forthright about his platform of helping the rich get richer, this would not have been a close election and he would not be able to pretend he won.

Well, but 50 million people did vote for him. Right, I know, 50 million voted for Gore, too. So hey, be thankful for checks and balances. W. will never get everything he asks for. He may not get anything he asks for.

But the Supremes, the Supremes! They hijacked the election on the most flimsy and inconsistent legal grounds. Now the Rs are in a position to stuff the court with more crooked politicos like that. So long civil rights, farewell to legal abortion, good-bye to what remains of our already shredded ideal of equal justice under the law! Don’t be so melodramatic. The Ds occupy half the Senate. They can block any court nomination they want to.

They won’t. They’re so darn polite.

They’re not brain dead. They’re the loyal opposition. That’s how democracy works. If you’re in the minority, you don’t roll over, you go on making your case as persuasively as you can, under the assumption that if it’s a good case, eventually it will prevail.

I no longer believe that assumption. The majority of people are not in favor of ripping off the national lands, weakening control on tobacco or guns or pollution, or building up the rights of corporations at the expense of the rights of citizens. W. never admitted he would do those things. Not only did he win on false pretenses, he ran on false pretenses.

But everyone who was paying attention knew what the Rs’ real agenda is. Not enough people pay attention. And they’re brainwashed by the sappy campaign ads and the jiggered debates and the phony conventions, all of which serve to hide real agendas.

Hey, I thought you voted for Nader. So what are you complaining about? This outcome was your fault. I could get furious with you about that.

Why get furious at a person who votes for the policies she deeply believes in — single-payer health insurance, strong environmental protection, an end to corporate welfare, and no more over-expensive useless weapons, and controls on global corporatization — policies you believe in too — and that, polls show, most Americans believe in, only they never heard anyone defend them publicly, because neither of the big-party candidates dared.

Okay, okay, okay, enough, I’ve heard that rant.

But the point of it — okay here’s the point — the point is, this political system sucks. The issues and concerns of the people are squeezed out by the issues and concerns of the centralized money-makers. The country runs on money-making at the expense of all other purposes and values.

So, Republican John McCain, with the moderate Rs and virtually all the Ds, is ready to ram campaign reform down W’s throat and at least get the soft money corruption out of politics.

Now there’s an issue where I can whip up some enthusiasm for national unity!

Don’t spray it.

That question underlies most environmental regulations. We are not sure what pesticides are doing to soils, waters, other creatures, or ourselves. We have only a vague idea what our rising greenhouse gas output will do to the climate. We’re in the dark about the consequences of genetic engineering. So should we go ahead? How fast?

U.S. policy, and that of most other countries, has ranged from acceleration to moderation. Often the cost has been revealed only decades later, in the form of poisoned wells, sickened rivers, unhealthy air, dying wildlife, deformed babies. Now some governments are saying it makes more sense to slow down or stop.

The go-slow policy is hotly discussed in Europe and in the United Nations, but it is rarely mentioned in the U.S. news. It is called the “precautionary principle.” The basic idea is familiar to everyone. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Look before you leap. If you can’t afford to lose, don’t gamble.

Or as a scientific gathering in 1998 put it: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

Or as Christine Todd Whitman put it, two months before George W. Bush appointed her to head the Environmental Protection Agency: “We must acknowledge that uncertainty is inherent in managing natural resources, recognize it is usually easier to prevent environmental damage than to repair it later, and shift the burden of proof away from those advocating protection toward those proposing an action that may be harmful.”

If she meant that, she may be a historic EPA director.

U.S. environmental policy is based not on the precautionary principle, but on “risk management.” That means balancing risks against benefits. If the benefits seem to outweigh the risks, full steam ahead. If a pesticide will give cancer to only one person in a million, but make a corporation a hundred million bucks, go for it.

There are two big problems with risk/benefit policy. The first is that those who bear the risk are rarely the ones who get the benefits. The second problem is that the benefits are usually much better known than the risks. It is astonishing how much we don’t know about what we are doing.

See, for example, an article by 17 scientists from six countries in a recent Science magazine that summarizes the literature on climate change. It cites facts like this: In the past 100 years human fossil fuel burning has raised the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide higher than it has been for the previous 420,000 years — and we’re still accelerating.

The article repeats over and over that we do not know what that means for the planet. “As we drift further away from the domain that characterized the preindustrial Earth system, we severely test the limits of our understanding of how the Earth system will respond,” say the authors. And “humans have affected virtually every major biogeochemical cycle, but the effects of these impacts on the interactions between these elemental cycles are poorly understood.”

So, push the accelerator pedal to the floor?

Another Science article in December surveys what we know about the effects of genetically engineered organisms (GEOs). This article is another ode to uncertainty. “Neither the risks nor the benefits of GEOs are certain or universal.” “Our ability to accurately predict ecological consequences, especially long-term higher-order interactions, increases the uncertainty associated with risk assessment.” “Additional or unidentified benefits and risks may exist that published data do not yet address.”

Should we turn hundreds of GEOs out of our labs and plant them on millions of acres of land?

Yet another recent Science article summarizes the findings of an expert panel on endocrine disrupters — hormone-mimicking chemicals, including many pesticides and plasticizers. The panel concluded that incredibly tiny concentrations of these chemicals — concentrations virtually all of us are exposed to — can cause development problems in rat and mouse embryos. The findings are especially disturbing, because they contradict the basic assumption underlying all toxics policy: that a low enough dose of any poison is essentially harmless.

But the studies were done on lab animals. “How these results may relate to disease late in life in animals, let alone humans, is uncertain,” says the article.

Shall we go on cranking out the chemicals?

Yes, say those who make money from them. No, says the precautionary principle. Plastics, pesticides, fossil fuels, gene-modified crops may make someone money and may save us all time or increase our convenience. But there are ways to proceed, probably more slowly, without them or with much less of them. It’s not worth risking human health or the planetary functions that sustain us, just to keep going fast.

So welcome, young people, to the entertainment that never ends. Once the question “who won?” is settled, other questions begin. What are the people who won up to? For whose benefit? At whose expense?

Mufasa, Steller sea lion.

Photo: NOAA

Take, for example, the epic battle between Bill Clinton and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. (The standard media title is “the POWERFUL head of the Appropriations Committee.” This guy controls the bills authorizing all the money the government spends.) Clinton and Stevens have been wrestling for months over those government funding bills. Central to the fight has been the fate of an animal called the Steller sea lion.

The sea lion, which can reach the size of a small car, lounges along the chilly coasts of the Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands, and the Gulf of Alaska in Sen. Stevens’s home state. Its population is crashing, down from 140,000 in 1960 to 16,000 now. In 1990, environmentalists sued to make the government declare the Steller endangered. (Why, young people may ask, do citizens need to sue the government to make it enforce an environmental law? Well, that has to do with campaign funding, as you’ll see in a minute here.)

Sen. Ted Stevens and the Alaska fishing fleet owners, who provide him with campaign funds, say they have no idea why the Steller sea lion is in trouble. But this is actually a no-brainer. The sea lion lives on fish. Its population started plummeting precisely when and where huge bottom-trawlers started to scoop up cod and pollock and mackerel in million-ton quantities. The main catch, the pollock, is shipped to Japan, where it is ground into fish paste or made into fake crab meat. The fake crab meat is handy, because the bottom trawlers also destroy crabs.

The cold waters off Alaska are full of nutrients and therefore full of fish and therefore full of creatures that eat fish. Here’s what happens when people take virtually all the fish away. The sea lions and seals and sea birds starve. The orcas — sleek black and white killer whales — can no longer live on their favorite snack of fat seal. So orcas start eating sea otters, those cute aquatic acrobats that float on their backs and play games in the water. The sea otters disappear. That causes an explosion of sea urchins, which is what sea otters eat, when they’re around, which they aren’t any more. The bloated sea urchin population munches away the great kelp, the many-foot-long seaweed that forms underwater forests where hundreds of other species live.

In short, the whole ecosystem falls apart. The fishery is also on the verge of falling apart. There are so few pollock left that the ships are having trouble filling their government-determined quotas — quotas that have been raised steadily over the past 10 years, despite the endangered state of the sea lion and despite biologists’ warnings that the fishery itself is near depletion.

Under court order, government biologists finally drew up a plan to cut back the allowed pollock catch by about 20 percent, so that sea lions, seals, birds, orcas, and otters might live (and fishermen too, in the long run). So Ted Stevens, Powerful Head of the Appropriations Committee, routinely sticks onto every spending bill a little “rider” saying that the Endangered Species Act shall not apply to the Steller sea lion. Let it go extinct. Sea lions don’t give campaign contributions, and their friends the enviros don’t give nearly as much as the fishing industry does.

The Republican-led Congress, in its wisdom, approves the bill with the rider and sends it to the president. Take that, Bill Clinton! Sign, or the government will run out of money! Enviro groups pelt the White House with letters, faxes, and emails pleading “don’t sign, don’t sign!” Clinton sends the bill back to Stevens unsigned and tells him to take the rider away.

Stevens takes the rider off, attaches it to the next spending bill, and so it went all fall. Last month, they got to the last bill. High noon. Sea lion or fishery. Government funding or Endangered Species Act. Stevens vs. Clinton, eye to eye, do or die.

Every bit as exciting as hanging chads!

Clinton, knowing it was his last chance, didn’t blink. Stevens, knowing he’s about to have a much more amenable president, settled for a $50 million bribe (to go to sea lion research and Alaskan fishing communities). The rider was removed. The government will have operating funds and will enforce the Endangered Species Act. For a year, anyway.

What do you think will happen next year?

Young people, this is just one small tale from the multi-channel soap opera of politics. It’s better than “The West Wing,” and it runs every day, with never a rerun. Better yet, you get to play with the plot; you get to write letters and faxes and emails, to give campaign contributions if you can afford it, and to decide — if you vote and if they count the votes — who shall win next time, what they shall be up to, for whose benefit, at whose expense.

All-natural breast milk — now fortified with POPs!

Photo: Art Wolfe, Inc.

POPs is the hot new acronym for persistent organic pollutants. These chemicals are immediately toxic or cause cancer or reproductive difficulties or birth defects (or all of the above) and are almost immortal in the environment. They are human-made, new to the planet. Few life forms know how to break them down. Furthermore most POPs contain strong chlorine-carbon bonds that tend to make them stable even in cold, heat, and sunlight. That stability renders them handy for industry and real hard to clean out of ecosystems.

The first global agreement on POPs was successfully negotiated earlier this month in Johannesburg. After five years of preparation and seven days of word-by-word wrangling, delegates from 122 nations agreed on a document that will, when ratified, impose worldwide bans or controls on a “dirty dozen” POPs. They include nine pesticides (aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex and toxaphene), plus three chemical families called PCBs, dioxins, and furans.

Most of these chemicals are already banned in industrial nations. Some of those nations, including the U.S., still make them and export them to developing countries. Doing so is stupid, because POPs come back to haunt us. They are global travelers, drifting through air and water, found as readily in the Arctic or on imported coffee as in Hudson River bottom mud. The average American’s body is likely to contain at least 500 human-made chemicals, with the highest amounts being DDE (a breakdown product of DDT) and PCBs — though their manufacture has been banned in the U.S. for decades.

POPs tend to be more soluble in fat than in water, so once they are eaten, say by a minnow snapping up a POP-contaminated bit of plankton, they are stored in fat. The minnow carries nearly all the POPs it has ever encountered. A larger fish accumulates the POPs from all the minnows it eats. And so on. Whatever eats the biggest fish — an eagle or polar bear or seal or person — can get a POP dose hundreds of thousands of times more concentrated than the water in which that fish swam.

So eagles around the Great Lakes still have trouble reproducing. North Sea seals with high body loads of PCBs have compromised immune systems that can’t fight off common infections. Female polar bears are found with male reproductive organs that render them sterile. Breast milk in India and Zimbabwe gives babies on average six times the acceptable daily intake of DDE. Around the world women who have nursed are less likely to develop breast cancer; one possible reason is that they have downloaded part of their body load of POPs to their infants.

Clearly time to do something. Decades past time, actually. Our world is full of POPs, many more than the dirty dozen covered by the new global agreement. More than 50,000 synthetic organic chemicals are in regular use, most of which have never been properly tested for their health impacts, environmental lifetimes, and tendencies to bioaccumulate. Roughly a thousand new chemicals enter industrial production every year. The barn door has been open far too long. Closing it on 12 horses out of thousands is a start, but only a small one.

Sweden is taking the next step. Its prime minister is about to submit to a willing parliament a law banning from commerce any substance (organic or inorganic — including the lead in Sweden’s famed leaded crystal) that is persistent and bioaccumulates. Industry will be given five years to test, at its own expense, the 2,500 chemicals it uses in quantities over 1000 tons per year. (Testing for health effects, which is time-consuming, expensive, and often inconclusive, is not required — only testing for persistence and bioaccumulation, which in combination is sufficient to generate a ban.) By 2010, all industrial chemicals must be tested.

For any new chemical the burden of proof in Sweden will be shifted to industry to show that it’s safe, rather than to the public to prove, often the hard way, that it’s harmful. While the jury is out, the chemical cannot be used. That is the reverse of the policy in the U.S. (and other countries), where a chemical is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

The amazing part of this story is the grown-up behavior of Swedish companies. The policy was shaped by a panel of experts from government, academia, and industry led by the Bayer chemical company. Swedish industry already has pooled resources for the necessary testing. Orrefors Kosta Boda, the glass company that can see coming the end of the legal use of lead, is calmly developing ways to make scintillating glass with barium instead.

Meanwhile, at Johannesburg Clinton-Gore negotiators opposed expanding the POPs list beyond the dirty dozen. Everyone knew that a Republican-dominated Congress would never ratify the treaty anyway. The Bush-Cheney administration is expected to listen only to the short-sighted side of the chemical industry.

It’s a good thing others aren’t waiting around for us.

Noisy crowds should not influence vote counts or court decisions. The constantly repeated query “are Americans getting tired of this yet?” is ominous, when the real question is “for whom did Americans really vote?” There is no noble reason to suppress, delay, or disqualify the careful recounting of disputed votes.

Generations from now, when present passions are spent, when George W. Bush is only a historic name like Boris Godounov, when the facts are viewed in the cool light of history, the U.S. 2000 election will be presented as a drama of corruption, small and large. Small partisan shenanigans in Florida. Large cracks in the political process that elevated two candidates so evenly unlikable that small-scale corruption could swing the outcome.

When the story is told fairly, it will show both sides playing tricks to tilt the vote. But scholars will note that Florida was in the hands of the Republican brother of one of the candidates. The legislature and political appointees were predominantly Republican. The Republican party was full of far-right, take-no-prisoners power brokers, furious that eight years of vicious attempts to depose a Democratic president had failed.

The history books will consider it important that:

• Exiting voters gave pollsters the impression that they had tilted slightly but definitively toward Gore. The networks were mocked for forecasting wrong from those polls, but they may have read voter intent right.

 

 

• Tens of thousands of ballots in Democratic counties were discarded because of mechanical flaws.

 

 

• The only county that registered thousands of votes for anti-Semite Pat Buchanan has a large Jewish population. That result makes no sense until you see how that county’s confusing ballot must have misrecorded votes meant for Gore.

 

 

• Black voters, overwhelmingly Democratic, were harassed and turned away from polling places.

 

 

• Republican partisans spent days behind the scenes in at least two county offices, tampering with absentee ballots.

 

 

• With a vanishing narrow lead, Republicans put enormous effort into blocking or discrediting all recounts.

This is ugly stuff, but small, probably only shifting a few thousand votes, important only because by the quirks of the electoral system it had the power to decide the election.

The large issue is what the history books will say happened next. They could say that Americans rose up in outrage over this erosion of their democratic rights. The people insisted on trustworthy vote-counting mechanisms in all states and counties. They made sure that ballot handling, before and after elections, was bipartisan and balanced. They reaffirmed and enforced their voting rights act. They promptly voted the power brokers out of office.

Then they asked why they had been served up such puny candidates. How did indolent, ignorant Bush prevail over tough, moral, experienced McCain? How did the mechanical showoff Gore beat out the genuine, dedicated Bradley? The problems were clear: money and misleading publicity. Interdependent problems, both fixable. The people insisted on getting elections financed from their taxes (so candidates not only had an even playing field but were beholden only to them) and air time evenly available instead of buyable. In reclaiming their democracy, the American people inspired others all over the world to do the same.

Or the story might go another direction. Dispirited by mendacious candidates and disrespect for their votes, the people sank into a TV-fed trance. Declaring the system stupid and crooked, they ignored it, leaving the dark-minded manipulators of the sock-puppet president to their own devices. The sock-puppet permitted them to gut Social Security, weaken education, enrich the rich, despoil natural resources, and flood the nation with feel-good public relations (which in other venues is called propaganda).

Corporations had free speech but not people. Court appointees undermined civil rights. The gap between the rich and the poor accelerated. The poor were forgotten, resentful, rebellious. The once-proud nation sank of its own corrupt weight. Finally, all pretense of democracy gone, the power brokers turned on each other.

In Russia, Boris Godounov came to power after many machinations, including the mysterious murder of the rightful heir. He died seven years later. His son was murdered by a pretender, who reigned for a year before he was himself murdered by one of the handlers who had whipped up that crowd that yelled for Boris. That guy lasted four years before he was thrown out by yet another putsch.

That’s what history looks like, when successions are determined by crowd clamor, background manipulation, complete disrespect for the people, and the unrestrained desire for power. That’s what democracy was designed to avoid.

The meeting in The Hague was the sixth attempt since the Kyoto conference of 1997 to forge an international agreement that could actually do something about climate change. At Kyoto the industrial countries made solemn promises to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Europe promised to cut back 8 percent from its 1990 level, Japan by 6 percent, the U.S. by 7 percent.

These cutbacks seem laughable in the face of the climatic facts. Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent. The latest scientific assessment has almost doubled the predicted rate of warming if no changes are made. The Arctic ice pack has thinned by 40 percent. The Inuit people are seeing thunderstorms for the first time in legend or memory. Glaciers are almost gone from Glacier National Park. However, since Kyoto, the world’s nations have not even been able to agree on a definition of “cut back.”

You would think “cut back” would mean, you know, cut back, burn less fossil fuel. Everyone except the far right wing of the Republican Party realizes that oil, gas, and coal burning are the main activities that have sent the climate into bigger floods, droughts, hurricanes, and El Ninos.

But the present administration, which as we know has trouble defining what “is” is, wants to define “cut back” in a way that will irritate no oil, coal, gas, electric, or automobile company, and no driver of a gas-guzzling vehicle. Therefore it wants to cut back using forests and farms.

There is some sense to this proposal. Trees and soils can absorb carbon dioxide released by fossil fuel burning. It would be great to subsidize responsible farmers and forest managers. The possibility has even opened the minds of some Western Republican senators to the whole climate issue.

But calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it. Not only should you give credit for tree growth or the buildup of soil humus, you should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus. There is a terrible political temptation to ignore the demerits, to fudge the numbers, to pretend you’ve helped out the atmosphere when you’ve actually done no such thing.

You may be able to fool the voters that way, but not the atmosphere. Nor the scientists who know how to do proper carbon accounts. Nor, it turns out, the European nations, most of which take climate change very seriously. After days of wrangling, they finally refused to let the U.S. get away with cheating.

So everyone went home mad (at us) and the climate continues to deteriorate. After eight years with Al Gore in as much power as he may ever be, our country is far from a global leader on this issue. We are the obstructionist, the outlaw, the Saddam Hussein. And George W. cares as much about climate change as you would expect from a Texas oilman.

So here’s the good news. A knowledgeable and courageous U.S. president could help enormously in leading the world’s nations toward saving the climate, but an ignorant or servile president can’t stop committed nations, companies, or people from doing it anyway.

Whatever the United States does, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent — and in the process pioneer and patent the new energy technologies that will inevitably replace coal and oil.

Seven corporations, who together emit enough greenhouse gases to qualify as the world’s 12th largest emitting nation, have pledged cutbacks of 15 percent — twice the Kyoto targets. They even include two forward-looking oil companies, Royal Dutch/Shell and British Petroleum (whose new motto is “Beyond Petroleum.”) Polaroid is working toward cuts of 25 percent, DuPont 65 percent. Real cuts, not offset by trees.

Honda’s and Toyota’s new cars that get 50-70 miles per gallon are selling faster than expected. Daimler-Benz is close to marketing fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen (and emit only water). In a few years, Ford is planning to market a fuel-cell-powered SUV.

And you and I don’t need a president or a global treaty to tell us to use stop wasting energy. We benefit immediately from doing so, with lower bills, less air and water pollution, less dependence on the Middle East, and ultimately, hopefully, a climate that is no longer zinging out of control.

No point in waiting around for leadership, in Florida or The Hague. Leaders only get their power from us, anyway.