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Technological Trajectones and the Human Environment. 1997.
Pp. 1-13. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
The Liberation of the Environment
JESSE H. AUSUBEL
The passage of time has connected the invention of the wheel with more than
ten million miles of paved roads around the world today, the capture of fire with
six billion tons of carbon going up in smoke annually. Must human ingenuity
always slash and burn the environment? This essay and this volume suggest a
more hopeful view. Indeed, the liberator of our title is human culture. Its most
powerful tools are science and technology. These increasingly decouple our goods
and services from demands on planetary resources.
Most observers emphatically designate the present as a period of intense
environmental degradation. Surely, human numbers must weigh heavily, and
they are highest now. Present world population stands at about 5.7 billion and
each month increases by a number equivalent to the population of Sweden, So-
malia, or New Jersey.
But for what period should we feel nostalgia? Has there been a golden age of
the human environment? When was that age?
· In 1963, before the United States and Soviet Union signed the Limited
Test Ban Treaty after more than four hundred nuclear explosions in the atmo-
sphere?
.
In 1945, after much of the forest in Europe had been cut to provide fuel to
survive World War II?
· In 1920, when coal provided three quarters of global energy, and choking
smogs shrouded London and Pittsburgh?
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JESSE H. A USUBEL
· In 1870, when the Industrial Revolution boomed without filters in Silesia,
Manchester, and Massachusetts?
In 1859, before Edwin Drake first drew petroleum from an underground
pool in Pennsylvania, when hunters slaughtered tens of thousands of whales for
three million gallons of sperm oil to light American lamps?
.
.
In the 1840s, when land-hungry farmers, spreading across North America,
Australia, and Argentina, broke the plains and speedily shaved the native woods
and grasses?
· In 1830, when cholera epidemics in many cities and towns literally deci-
mated the populations that dumped their wastes in nearby waters?
· In 1700, when one hundred thousand mills interrupted the flow of every
stream in France?
· In the late 1600s, when dense forests, once filled with a diversity of life,
became seas of sugarcane in coastal Brazil and the Caribbean?
· In 1492, before Columbus stimulated reciprocal transatlantic invasions of
flora and fauna? (The Old World had no maize, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans,
groundnuts, sunflowers, cocoa, cotton, pineapple, vanilla, quinine, or rubber.)
· In the tenth century, before the invention of efficient chimneys, when
people in cold climates centered their lives around a fireplace in the middle of a
room with a roof louvered high to carry out the smoke and much of the heat as
well?
· In 55 B.C., when Julius Caesar invaded Britain and found less forest than
exists today?
· In the centuries from Homer to Alexander, when the forests of the Eastern
Mediterranean were cleared?
· Before the domestication of cows, sheep, pigs, and goats, when hunters
caused a holocaust of wild creatures?
· In neolithic times, when building a house used up to thirteen tons of
firewood to make the plaster for the walls and floor?
Environmental sins and suffering are not new (see, for example, Diamond,
1994; NACLA, 1991; Starbuck, 1964; and Turner et al., 1990~. Humans have
always exploited the territories within reach. The question is whether the technol-
ogy that has extended our reach can now also liberate the environment from
human impact and perhaps even transform the environment for the better. My
answer is that well-established trajectories, raising the efficiency with which
people use energy, land, water, and materials, can cut pollution and leave much
more soil unturned. What is more, present cultural conditions favor this move
ment.
ENERGY
Two central tendencies define the evolution of the energy system, as docu
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THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
3
.
mented by Nebojsa Nakicenovic (this volume). One is that the energy system is
freeing itself from carbon. The second is rising efficiency.
Carbon matters because it burns; combustion releases energy. But burnt
carbon in local places can cause smog and in very large amounts can change the
global climate. Raw carbon blackens miners' lungs and escapes from containers
to form spills and slicks. Carbon enters the energy economy in the hydrocarbon
fuels, coal, oil, and gas, as well as wood. In fact, the truly desirable element in
these fuels for energy generation is not their carbon (C) but their hydrogen (H).
Wood weighs in heavily at ten effective Cs for each H. Coal approaches parity
with one or two Cs per H. while oil improves to two H per C, and a molecule of
natural gas (methane) is a carbon-trim CH4.
The historical record reveals that for two hundred years the world has pro-
gressively lightened its energy diet by favoring hydrogen atoms over carbon in
our hydrocarbon stew. We can, in fact, measure this decarbonization in several
different ways. As engineers, we can examine the changing ratio of the tons of
carbon in the primary energy supply to the units of energy produced. From this
perspective, the long-term, global rate of decarbonization is about 0.3 percent per
year gradual, to be sure, but enough to cut the ratio by 40 percent since 1860.
As economists, we can assess decarbonization as the diminishing require-
ment for carbon to produce a dollar's worth of economic output in a range of
countries. Several factors dispose nations toward convergent, clean energy devel-
opment. One is the changing composition of economic activity away from pri-
mary industry and manufacturing to services. End users in office buildings and
homes do not want smoking coals. America has pared its carbon intensity of
gross domestic product per capita per constant dollar from about three kilos in
1800 to about three-tenths of a kilo in 1990. The spectrum of national achieve-
ments also shows how far most of the world economy is from best practice. The
present carbon intensity of the Chinese and Indian economies resembles those of
America and Europe at the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century.
Physical scientists can measure decarbonization in its elemental form, as the
evolution of the atomic ratio of hydrogen to carbon in the world fuel mix. This
analysis reveals the unrelenting though slow ascendance of hydrogen in the en-
ergy market. All the analyses imply that over the next century the human economy
will squeeze most of the carbon out of its system and move, via natural gas, to a
hydrogen economy (Ausubel, 1991~. Hydrogen, fortunately, is the immaterial
material. It can be manufactured from something abundant, namely water; it can
substitute for most fuels; and its combustion to water vapor does not pollute.
Decarbonization began long before organized research and development in
energy, and has continued with its growth. Many ways to continue along this
trajectory have been documented. Still, the displacement of carbon remains the
largest single environmental challenge facing the planet. Globally, people on
average now use 1,000 kilograms of carbon per year compared, for example, to
120 kilograms of steel.
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JESSE H. AUSUBEL
Part of economizing on carbon is economizing on energy more broadly.
Efficiency has been gaining in the generation of energy, in its transmission and
distribution, and in the innumerable devices that finally consume energy. In fact,
the struggle to make the most of our fires dates back at least 750,000 years to the
ancient hearths of the Escale cave near Marseilles. A good stove did not emerge
until A.D. 1744. Benjamin Franklin's invention proved to be a momentous event
for the forests and wood piles of America. The Franklin stove greatly reduced the
amount of fuel required. Its widespread diffusion took a hundred years, however,
because the colonials were poor, development of manufactures sluggish, and iron
scarce (Reynolds and Pierson, 1942~.
As Arnulf Grubler explains (this volume), we often fail to appreciate the
speed and rhythms of social clocks. Many technological processes require de-
cades or longer to unfold, in part because they cluster in mutually supportive
ways that define technological eras every fifty years or so. The good news is that
in a few decades most of our devices and practices will change, and major
systems can become pervasive in fifty to one hundred years. It is also good news
that latecomers to technological bandwagons can learn from the costly experi-
ments of pioneers and that no society need be excluded from the learning. Evolu-
tionary improvement and imitation transform the economy. Two percent per year
may sound slow to a politician or entrepreneur, but maintained for a century it is
revolutionary.
In energy and other sectors, the efficiency gains may have become more
regular as the processes of social learning, embodied in science and technology,
have taken root. In the United States since about 1800, the production of a good
or service has required 1 percent less energy on average than it did the previous
year. Nevertheless, embracing the full chain from the primary energy generator to
the final user of light or heat, the ratio of theoretical minimum energy consump-
tion to actual energy consumption for essentially the same mix of goods and
services is still probably less than 5 percent (Ayres, 1989~. No limit to increasing
an. . .
etilclency IS near.
But engineers are working hard and getting results, as Ausubel and Marchetti
dramatize (this volume) with a panorama of the past and future of electricity. In
about 1700 the quest began to build efficient engines, at first with steam. Three
hundred years have increased the efficiency of the devices from 1 to about 50
percent of their apparent limit. The technology of fuel cells may advance effi-
ciency to 70 percent in another fifty years or so. While the struggle to improve
generators spans centuries, lamps have brightened measurably with each decade.
Edison's first lamp in 1879 offered about fifteen times the efficiency of a paraffin
candle. The first fluorescent lamp in 1942 bettered Edison's by thirty times, and
the gallium arsenide diode of the 1960s tripled the illumination efficiency of the
fluorescent. Moreover, lamps are not the only means for illumination. The next
century is likely to reveal quite new ways to see in the dark. For example,
nightglasses, the mirror image of sunglasses, could make the night visible with a
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THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
s
few milliwatts. We will speed efficiently to what we see. Using the same energy
consumed by a present-day car, magnetically levitated trains in low-pressure
tubes could carry a passenger several thousand kilometers per hour-connecting
Boston and Washington in ten minutes.
LAND
Agriculture is by far the greatest transformer of the environment. Cities,
paved roads, and the rest of the built environment cover less than 5 percent of the
land in the forty-eight contiguous American states. Crops occupy about 20 per-
cent of this land and pasture 25 percent. Crops cover 35 percent of France and 10
percent of China. Agriculture has consumed forests, drained wetlands, and voided
habitats; the game is inherently to favor some plants and animals over others.
Farms also feed us.
Yet since mid-century the amount of land used for agriculture globally has
remained stable; and, as Paul Waggoner explains (this volume), the stage is set to
reduce it. A shift away from eating meat to a vegetarian diet could roughly halve
our need for land. More likely, diets will increase in meat and calories; under
such conditions, the key will be the continuation of gains in yield resulting from
a cluster of innovations including seeds, chemicals, and irrigation, joined through
timely information flows and better-organized markets.
In fact, US wheat yields have tripled since 1940, and corn yields have quin-
tupled. Despite these accomplishments, the potential to increase yields every-
where remains astonishing even without invoking such new technologies as the
genetic engineering of plants. The world on average grows only about half the
corn per hectare of the average Iowa farmer, who in turn grows only about half
the corn of the top Iowa farmer. Importantly, while all have risen steadily for
decades, the production ratio of these performers has not changed much. Even in
Iowa the average performer lags more than thirty years behind the state of the art.
While cautious habits and other factors properly moderate the pace of diffusion
of innovations, the effects still accumulate dramatically. By raising wheat yields
fivefold during the past four decades, Indian farmers have in practice spared for
other purposes an area of cropland roughly equal to the area of the state of
California.
What is a reasonable outlook for the land used to grow crops for ten billion
people, a probable world population sixty or seventy years hence? Future calories
consumed per person will likely range between the 3,000 per day of an ample
vegetarian diet and the 6,000 that includes meat. If farmers fail to raise global
average yields, people will have to reduce their portions to keep cropland to its
current extent. If the farmers can lift the global average yield about 1.5 percent
per year over the next six or seven decades to the level of today's European
wheat, ten billion people can enjoy a 6,000-calorie diet and still spare close to a
quarter of the present 1.4 billion hectares of cropland. The quarter spared, fully
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JESSE H. A USUBEL
300 million hectares, would equal the area of India. Reaching the level of today's
average US corn grower would spare for ten billion people half of today's crop-
land for nature, an area larger than the Amazon basin-even with the caloric
intake of today's American as the diet.
The present realities of large amounts of land in Europe and North America
reverting from farm to woodland, and high public subsidies to farmers, make the
vision more immediate.) Beyond a world of ten billion people, it is not crazy to
think of further decoupling food from land. For more green occupations, today's
farmers might become tomorrow' s park rangers and ecosystem guardians. In any
case, the rising yields, spatial contraction of agriculture, and sparing of land are a
powerful antidote to the current losses of biodiversity and related environmental
ills.
WATER
Watts and hectares are yielding more. What about water? Chauncey Starr
(this volume) points out that water is both our most valuable and most wasted
resource. In the United States, total per capita water withdrawals quadrupled
between 1900 and 1970. Consumptive use increased by one-third between just
1960 and the early 1970s, to about 450 gallons per day. However, since 1975, per
capita water use has fallen appreciably, at an annual rate of 1.3 percent (US
Geological Survey, 1993~. Absolute US water withdrawals peaked about 1980.
Alert to technology as well as costs, industry leads the progress, though it
consumes a small fraction of total water. Total industrial water withdrawals
plateaued a decade earlier than total US withdrawals and have dropped by one-
third, more steeply than the total. Notably, industrial withdrawals per unit of
GNP have dropped steadily since 1940, from fourteen gallons per constant dollar
to three gallons in 1990. Chemicals, paper, petroleum refining, steel, food pro-
cessing, and other sectors have contributed to the steep dive (US Geological
Survey, 1987~. Not only intake but discharge per unit of production are perhaps
one-fifth of what they were fifty years ago.
Law and economics as well as technology have favored frugal water use.
Legislation, such as the US Clean Water Act of 1972, encouraged the reduction
of discharges, recycling, and conservation, as well as shifts in relative prices.
Better management of demand reduced water use in the Boston area from 320
million gallons per day in 1978 to 240 million gallons in 1992 (Stakhiv, 1996~.
Despite such gains, the United States is a long way from exemplifying the
most-efficient practice. Water withdrawals for all users in the industrialized coun-
tries span a tenfold range, with the United States and Canada at the highest end
(OECD, l991~. Allowing for differences in major uses (irrigation, electrical cool-
ing, industry, public water supply), large opportunities for reductions remain. In
the late 1980s wastewaters still made up over 90 percent of measured US hazard
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THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
7
ous wastes. Importantly, as agriculture contracts spatially, its water demand will
likewise tend to shrink.
In the long run, with much higher thermodynamic efficiency for all pro-
cesses, removing impurities to recycle water will require small amounts of en-
ergy. Dialytic membranes open the way to such efficient purification systems.
Because hydrogen will be, with electricity, the main energy carrier, its combus-
tion may eventually provide another important source of water, perhaps 50 gal-
lons per person per day at the level of final consumers, or about one-fourth the
current withdrawal in water-prudent societies such as Denmark.
MATERIALS
We can reliably project decarbonization, food decoupled from acreage, and
more efficient water use. What about an accompanying dematerialZzation?
Wernick, Herman, Govind, and Ausubel define (this volume) dematerialization
primarily as the decline over time in the weight of materials used to meet a given
economic function. This dematerialization too would spare the environment.
Lower materials intensity of the economy could translate into preservation of
landscapes and natural resources, less garbage to sequester, and less human expo-
sure to hazardous materials.
In fact, the intensity of use of diverse primary materials has plummeted over
the twentieth century. Lumber, steel, lead, and copper have lost relative impor-
tance, while plastics and aluminum have expanded. Many products for ex-
ample, cars, computers, and beverage cans have become lighter and often
smaller. Although the soaring numbers of products and objects, accelerated by
economic growth, raised municipal waste in the United States annually by about
1.6 percent per person in the last couple of decades, trash per unit of GDP
dematerialized slightly.
The logic of dematerialization is sound. Over time new materials replace old,
and theoretically each replacement should improve material properties per unit of
quantity, thus lowering the intensity of use. Furthermore, as countries develop,
the intensity of use of a given material (or system) declines as each country
arrives at a similar level of development. The new arrivals take advantage of
learning curves throughout the economy.
But superior materials also tend to make markets grow and thus take a kind
of revenge on efficiency, offsetting the environmental benefits of each leaner,
lighter object by enabling swarms of them to crowd our shelves. And our shelves
lengthen. In Austin, Texas, the residential floor area available per person almost
doubled in the past forty-five years unsurprising when we consider that five
people resided in the average US home in 1890 and 2.6 do now.
So far, trends of dematerialization are equivocal. Yet, as Robert Frosch
theorizes (this volume), the potential surely exists to develop superior industrial
ecosystems that reduce the intensity of materials use in the economy, minimize
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JESSE H. A USUBEL
wastes, and use persisting wastes nutritiously in new industrial food webs. Since
1990 recycling has accounted for over half the metals consumed in the United
States, up from less than 30 percent in the mid 1960s (see Wernick and Ausubel,
1995~. The trick is to make waste minimization a property of the industrial
system even when it is not completely a property of an individual process, plant,
or industry. Advancing information networks may help by offering cheap ways to
link otherwise unconnected buyers and sellers to create new markets or waste
exchanges.
LIBERATION FROM THE ENVIRONMENT
I have focused primarily on trajectories, strategies, and technologies that
lessen pollution and conserve landscape. It would hardly make sense to do so
unless we wish to expand human notions of the rights of other species to prosper
or at least compete. Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich explicitly argues (this volume;
see also Meyer-Abich, 1993) that we must stand up for the "co-natural world,"
with which humans share Earth. We must take seriously the Copernican insight
about Earth's position in the cosmos and not simply replace geocentricism with
anthropocentricism. As advised by the great early nineteenth-century natural
historian Alexander von Humboldt, we should participate in the whole as part of
a part of a part of it, together with others. We may draw parallels between
expanding notions of democracy and enfranchisement within human societies
with respect to class, gender, and race, and our broadening view of the ethical
standing of trees, owls, and mountains.
Yet the condition for our widespread willingness to take the Copernican turn
is surely the successful protections we have achieved for our own health and
safety. Recall how deaths from the human environment have changed during the
last century or two (Ausubel et al., 1995; McKinlay and McKinlay, 19771.
First, consider "aquatic killers" such as typhoid and cholera, the work of
bacteria that thrive in water polluted by sewers. In 1861 Queen Victoria's hus-
band, Prince Albert, died of typhoid fever reportedly contracted from Windsor's
water. Indeed, until well into the nineteenth century, townsfolk drew their water
from ponds, streams, cisterns, and wells. They threw wastewater from cleaning,
cooking, and washing on the ground, into a gutter, or into a cesspool lined with
broken stones. Human wastes went into privy vaults shallow holes lined with
brick or stone, close to home, sometimes in the cellar. In 1829, New Yorkers
deposited daily about one hundred tons of excrement into the city's soil.
Between 1850 and 1900 the share of the American population in towns grew
from about 15 to about 40 percent. The number of cities with populations over
fifty thousand grew from ten to more than fifty. Overflowing privies and cess-
pools filled alleys and yards with stagnant water and fecal wastes. The environ-
ment could not be more propitious and convenient for typhoid, cholera, and other
water-borne diseases. They reaped 11 percent of all American corpses in 1900.
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THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
9
But by 1900, towns were also building systems to treat their water and
sewage. Financing and constructing such facilities took several decades. By 1940
the combination of water filtration, chlorination, and sewage treatment stopped
most of the aquatic killers in the United States. Refrigeration in homes, shops,
trucks, and railroad boxcars took care of much of the rest. Chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs), the agents in today's thinning of the ozone layer, were introduced in the
early 1930s as a safer and more effective substitute for ammonia in refrigerators;
the ammonia devices tended to explode.
More killers have come by air, including tuberculosis (TB), diphtheria, influ-
enza and pneumonia, measles, and whooping cough, as well as scarlet fever and
other streptococcal diseases. In some years during the 1860s and 1870s, TB was
responsible for 15 percent of all deaths in Massachusetts. Earlier in the nineteenth
century, diphtheria epidemics accounted for 10 percent of all deaths in some
regions of the United States. Influenza A is believed to have caused the Great
Pandemic of 1918-1919, when flu claimed about a quarter of all corpses in the
United States and probably more in Europe. (My own existence traces directly to
this pandemic; my grandfather's first wife and my grandmother's first husband
both died in the pandemic, leading to the union that produced my father.J
Collectively, the aerial killers accounted for almost 30 percent of all deaths
in America in 1900. Their main allies were urban crowding and unfavorable
living and working conditions. The aerial diseases began to weaken a decade later
than the aquatics, and then weakened by a factor of seven over thirty years. Credit
goes to improvements in the built environment: replacement of tenements and
sweatshops with larger and better-ventilated homes and workplaces. Credit is
also due to medical interventions. However, many of these, including vaccines
and antibiotics, came well after the aerial invaders were already in retreat.
Formerly, most aerial attacks occurred in winter, when people crowded in-
doors; most aquatic kills occurred in summer, when organic material ferments
speedily. Thus, mortality in cities such as Chicago used to peak in summer and
winter. In America and other industrialized countries in temperate zones, the
twentieth century has seen a dramatic flattening in the annual mortality curve as
the human environment has come under control. In these countries, most of the
faces of death are no longer seasonal.
Thus, when we speak of technological development and environmental
change, it is well to remember first that our surroundings often were lethal.
Where development has succeeded and peace holds, we have made the water
fresher, the air cleaner, and our shelters more resistant to the violence of the
elements. In the United States, perhaps 5 rather than 50 percent of deaths now
owe to environmental hazards and factors, including environmentally-linked can-
cers. The largest global change is that humans vulnerable, pathetic mammals
when naked have learned how to control their environment. Science and tech-
nology are our best strategies for control, and our success is why we now number
nearly six billion.
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JESSE H. A USUBEL
But here is a catch for homo faker, the toolmaker. Our technology not only
spares resources but also expands the human niche, within particular time frames.
As Robert Kates explains (this volume), the intertwining of population, resources,
and technology looks quite different depending on the time frame that one uses.
From the greatest distance, human population appears to have surged three times.
The first was associated with the invention of toolmaking itself, lasted about a
million years, and saw human numbers rise to five million. The second surge
swelled our population a hundredfold to about five hundred million over the next
eight thousand years, following the domestication of plants and animals. Today
we are midway into a third great population surge, which may level off at eleven
billion or so three to four hundred years after the modern scientific and industrial
revolution began.
But if one looks instead at the size of populations of regions over thousands
of years, what goes up eventually comes down. In Egypt, Mesopotamia, the
Central Basin of Mexico, and the Mayan lowlands, reconstructed population
records show waves in which the population at least doubled over a previous base
and then at least halved from that high point. Social learning works, but not
forever. Societies flourish but they also forget and fail.
Shortening the time scale to recent centuries, we observe above all a system-
atic change in vital rates. Many countries have passed through the "demographic
transition" from high death and birthrates to low death and birthrates. Technol-
ogy certainly accounts for much of the increase in child survival and longevity,
but no one can securely explain the changes in fertility, which ultimately deter-
mines the size of humanity. With respect to technology and fertility, the "pill"
and its possible successors while certainly more reliable do not introduce an
essential discontinuity in birth control. Many strategies against conception have
always existed; parents have always essentially controlled family size. Though
technology can ease implementation, population stabilization is a cultural choice
(Marchetti et al., 1996~. Fertility rates have been falling in most nations and are
below levels needed to replace the current populations in Europe and Japan,
which may implode. Perhaps the idea of the small family, which originated in
France around the time of the Revolution, will become the norm after 250 years.
Still, recent population growth, which peaked globally at 2.1 percent per year
around 1970, is unprecedented. The effect is that in the coming interval of a few
decades human society will need to house, nurture, educate, and employ as many
more people as already live on Earth. In the present era of lengthening lives and
rising numbers, it appears, rather ironically, that our environmental achievement
has been to liberate us from the environment.
In fact, high incomes, great longevity, and large population concentrations
have been achieved in every class of environment on Earth. We manufacture
computers in hot, dry Phoenix and cool, wet Portland. We perform heart surgery
in humid Houston and snowy Cleveland. Year round we grow flowers in the
Netherlands and vegetables in Belgium. The metro in Budapest runs regardless of
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THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
11
the mud that slowed Hungarians for a thousand years. In Berlin and Bangkok we
work in climate-controlled office buildings. We have insulated travel, communi-
cations, energy generation, food availability, and almost all major social func-
tions from all but the most extreme environmental conditions of temperature and
wind, light and dark, moisture, tides, and seasons.
The Japanese have even moved skiing and sand beaches indoors. In the
world's largest indoor ski center, Ski-Dome near Tokyo, the slope extends 490
meters by 100 meters, with a thrilling drop of 80 meters that satisfies the stan-
dards of the International Ski Federation for parallel slalom competition. On the
South Island of Kyushu, Ocean-Dome encloses 12,000 square meters of sandy
beach and an ocean six times the size of an Olympic pool, filled with 13,500 tons
of unsalted, chlorinated water kept at a warm 28°C. A wave machine produces
surf up to three-and-a-half meters high, enough for professional surfing. Palm
trees and shipwrecks provide the context.
In fact, careful records of human time budgets show that not only New
Yorkers and Indians but also Californians, reputed nature enthusiasts, average
only about one-and-a-half hours per day outside (Jenkins et al., 1992~. Fewer than
5 percent of the population of industrialized nations work outdoors. In develop-
ing countries, the number is plummeting and should be below 20 percent globally
by 2050. As Lee Schipper shows (this volume), life-styles revolve around the
household. The achievement of ten thousand years of human history is that we
have again become cave dwellers with electronic gadgets.
THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
For most of history thick forests and arid deserts, biting insects and snarling
animals, ice, waves, and heat slowed or stopped humans. We built up our strength.
We burned, cut, dammed, drained, channeled, trampled, paved, and killed. We
secured food, water, energy, and shelter. We lost our fear of nature, especially in
the aggressive West.
But we also secured a new insecurity. Although we have often cultivated the
landscape with judgment and taste, we now recognize that we have transformed
more than may be needed or prudent. Certainly, we would redo many episodes
given the chance, particularly to protect precious habitats.
Some of our most arrogant behavior has been recent. Together the United
States and the Soviet Union rocked Earth with close to two thousand nuclear
blasts during the Cold War. The French, British, Chinese, and Indians also sig-
naled their presence. The fifty-year bombing spree appears finally to be nearing
an end.
Attitudes worldwide toward nature, and perhaps inseparably toward one
another as humans, are changing. "Green" is the new religion. Jungles and for-
ests, commonly domains of danger and depravity in popular children's stories
until a decade or two ago, are now friendly and romantic. The Amazon has been
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JESSE H. A USUBEL
transformed into a magical place, sanctified by the ghost of Chico Mendes, the
Brazilian rubber tapper. Environmental shrines, such as the Great Sarcophagus at
Chernobyl, begin to fill the landscape. The characterization of animals, from
wolves to whales, has changed. Neither the brothers Grimm nor Jack London
could publish today without an uproar about the inhumanity of their ideas toward
nature and I would add, with regard to gender and race as well.
Although long in preparation, great cultural changes can sweep over us in
decades once under way. Moreover, standing against them is hopeless when they
come. Magyar nobles vigorously opposed the spread of Protestantism and in
1523 declared it punishable by death and by the confiscation of property; despite
all the edicts, Protestantism took firm hold in Hungary. In the nineteenth century
in Europe and America a rising moral feeling made human beings an illegitimate
form of property. Within about fifty years most countries abolished slavery.
Many countries vocally rejected women's suffrage at the outset of the twentieth
century. Now, politicians, though still mostly male, would not dream of mention-
ing the exclusion of women from full citizenship in most parts of the world.
The builders of the beautiful home of the US National Academy of Sciences
in Washington, D.C., inscribed it with the epigraph, "To science, pilot of indus-
try, conqueror of disease, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the universe,
revealer of nature's laws, eternal guide to truth." Finally, after a very long prepa-
ration, our science and technology are ready also to reconcile our economy and
the environment, to effect the Copernican turn.2 In fact, long before environmen-
tal policy became conscious of itself, the system had set decarbonization in
motion. A highly efficient hydrogen economy, landless agriculture, industrial
ecosystems in which waste virtually disappears: over the coming century these
can enable large, prosperous human populations to co-exist with the whales and
the lions and the eagles and all that underlie them if we are mentally prepared,
which I believe we are.
We have liberated ourselves from the environment. Now it is time to liberate
the environment itself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Rudolf Czelnai, Cesare Marchetti, Perrin Meyer, and Iddo
Wernick for assistance.
NOTES
1. For discussion of the re-creation of the "Buffalo Commons" in the US Great Plains, proposed
by geographers Deborah and Frank Popper, see Matthews (1992). For a net estimate of changes in
land use from growth of cities as well as changes in farming and forestry in the United States over
the next century, see Waggoner et al. (1996).
2. For more information on required rates and amounts of change, see Ausubel (1996).
OCR for page 13
THE LIBERATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT
13
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
water withdrawals
