A L S O_ T O D A Y Earth odyssey By Mark Hertsgaard Excerpt: A visit to Bangkok reveals the economic temptations and environmental troubles of the Technological Age [ NEWS ] The war against sprawl I By Rob Gurwitt Think Al Gore's "smart growth" plan is a no-brainer? Think again [ NEWS ] The war against sprawl, II By Susan Zakin It's owls against developers in Arizona's Oro Valley   T A B L E_T A L K Will you party like it's 1999? Discuss your upcoming New Year's Eve plans in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Check out barnesannoble.com's fabulous selection of travel book bargains! ___________________   R E C E N T L Y Sex and fate in Macau By Rolf Potts Inspired by a sidewalk fortuneteller, a traveler tries his luck at an erotic cabaret in this soon-to-be-transferred Portuguese colony (01/20/99) Teaching the cannibals to dance: Part Two By Craig Nelson A mock battle culminates in a transcultural two-step -- and an unexpected gift (01/19/99) Teaching the cannibals to dance By Craig Nelson An adventurer journeys farther than expected into a land of penis gourds and pig sacrifices (01/17/99) This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/15/99) Beijing's Backingham Palace By Mary Elizabeth Williams From back rubs to bowling to B-movies, this Chinese spa has it all (01/14/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		CAN THIS PLANET BE SAVED? | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - Can you talk more about the Global Green Deal you describe in the book? Well, the Global Green Deal is just my name for an idea that is scattered throughout the environmental literature. It basically says that there is a way for us to clean up our environment and to have economic improvement at the same time for both the poor and the rich. There's this myth that cleaning up the environment has to cost jobs, has to cost profits -- and it's a myth that is shared by pretty much everybody that I talked to around the world. The Global Green Deal would be a major initiative by the United States government to grasp this opportunity of making the restoration of our ravaged environment the single biggest business enterprise of the 21st century. Basically, we have to acknowledge that our current structures, our technologies, our social and physical infrastructure in our societies, is not environmentally sustainable. And we have to renovate it to make it environmentally sustainable. There's a wonderful quote from the guys at AT&T in my chapter on this that basically says, "We are talking about rewiring our entire civilization." And there's the Japanese official who says that the profits are virtually limitless, because the market is limitless; you're talking about essentially letting capitalism start over again. Think about it: putting new insulation into every uninsulated house and apartment building and so forth. But in order for that to happen, we have got to change the economic rules of the road, and right now our market economies undervalue the environmental services that the planet performs for us: the fresh air, the fresh water, the soil, etc. So we've got to change -- government has got to change the incentive system that motivates how marketplaces function. We've got to have environmental tax reform, we've got to stop subsidizing environmentally destructive things and start subsidizing environmentally benign things. Once we do that, then we can allow the private marketplace to use its genius to pursue these goals. The role of the government is to set the rules of the road and to prime the pumps. "Global Green Deal" is obviously a takeoff on FDR's New Deal, but instead of a conservation corps that builds bridges, you're building solar panels. Instead of government subsidies to the then-new Social Security system, there should be government subsidies to the solar industry. The reason everybody's got a computer on their desk right now is because the Pentagon bought enormous numbers of computers in the 1960s and lowered the unit price. It's the same with Xerox copiers. The government can do that. In fact, the government is doing that all the time, in one way or another. It's just that now it's still choosing the old, environmentally destructive patterns. We have to break those patterns and go in a new direction. And I think that will make an enormous amount of money for most people, for most sectors of the economy. China is the example I like to use, because we could really make a lot of money there. China could use 50 percent less energy if they just installed the technologies currently available off the shelf for energy efficiency. Now it so happens that American firms are the leaders in those technologies, even though you'd never guess that from looking at our national behavior. And you know, if the White House and Congress were smarter, they would be selling or at least financing a lot of that technology in China. Instead of selling China satellites and nuclear power plants and all these things that are making the world a more dangerous place, why not sell them that, save the planet plus make a lot of business for American firms and American workers. To me, it's very obvious. But of course, there are big political obstacles in the way. And that's part of the second half of the Global Green Deal: We've got to get these technologies into the South because while it's the rich North that has created the current crisis, the emerging South has so many more numbers of people, that's where the problems are really going to come in the 21st century. They are going to ascend from poverty, and we've got to help them do that with green technology. That means we have to develop those technologies and install them here first. Because they will not be guinea pigs in the South. They are not going to go solar if they see us still sticking with fossil fuels; they'll say, "Hey! We're not going to be second-class here." But you know, there's a lot of precedent for this. This is how the arms manufacturers have been getting rich for decades. You start the book asking, "Are we as a species going to commit suicide? Or are we going to make it?" Now what do you think? I set off around the world to try to find that out, and all I can say now is that I make the distinction between optimism vs. pessimism, and hope vs. despair. Optimism is more a question of intellect, it's a question of trends and facts, whereas hope is much more a matter of the spirit, and action, and initiative. So I would say if you look honestly at the trends of things like global warming and species destruction, you would be very hard-pressed to be optimistic. The trends that these people were talking about in the '90's as getting out of control -- well, none of them have been reversed and many of them are accelerating, such as global warming. Some of them are even accelerating very fast, as is the case with species destruction. Now there are also bright spots, such as ozone depletion. The ozone layer is being depleted very rapidly right now, but this is one of these cases of the lag effect. At least international agreements have been made that oblige us to stop producing and consuming so many other CFCs. Now, as my colleague Mark Dowie has shown with some brilliant investigative reporting, a lot of those agreements are being ignored. Nevertheless, we at least have a good chance that we will decrease the amount of CFCs being produced so that somewhere in the future the ozone hole will heal itself. Although for the next 20 years, folks, I'm sorry, we are stuck with the hole getting bigger and bigger and bigger, so make sure your kids don't spend too much time in the sun. Population too is something of a bright spot. The trends are not as bad as they used to be. But even there, experts are talking about the Earth's population stabilizing at about 8 billion people. Well, we've got 6 billion today, and already the ecosystems are fraying beneath the weight. It's going to be 8 billion, and they're presumably going to be consuming at an even higher level of environmental burden. So that's why I say in terms of optimism -- well, I can't say I'm optimistic. But that's why I draw a distinction between that and hope. And that's why I wrote so much about Václav Havel in the book. Because he, to me, personifies that distinction. There's a wonderful quote from him that I use: "I can scarcely imagine living without hope." He says, "Many things could happen, from the very best to the very worst, but hope forces me to believe that the better options will prevail. And above all" -- and this is what I would underline -- "above all it forces me to do something to make them happen." Here's a guy, if you had asked him in 1979, "Are you optimistic that the Soviet Union will ever leave Czechoslovakia?" -- well, nobody would've been optimistic. Yet he did what he did and was thrown into solitary for four years because he believed in it. And because he said you can't let the question of optimism determine your actions. You have to believe in hope. That's the distinction I would urge on everyone. Believe in hope and try not to worry about the optimism. And we've had hope strike! Havel, Mandela, Gorbachev -- it has been happening. So we should keep the run going. The challenge, it seems to me, is on that very, very personal, one-to-one level, the challenge of cracking our complacency. And here I'm speaking about all of us in the North. Cracking our complacency, somehow turning the equation around so that it's clear that it's in our self-interest to be worried about these problems and to be doing something about them. Does that frustrate you? Does it seem like a danger? If people just read your book and go, "God, you know, he's right. There's a lot of problems out there, and I'm glad that I know more about them. Now, what's on the tube?" -- nothing will change. You've got to motivate people on some very fundamental level. You're absolutely right. You do have to motivate people, and cracking that complacency is the first step. It's what I try to do with this book, and especially in the later chapters I try to show that there are positive things happening, that you can take action, and that action can work. For example, I write about how Greenpeace bought a bankrupt East German refrigerator company and put it back into business producing environmentally friendly refrigerators, and about the Brent Spar affair, where a boycott of Royal Dutch Shell gas stations stopped the company from irresponsibly burying an oil-storage rig that contained toxic sludge. At the end of one chapter, I write, "The answer begins with you. Not everyone else -- you." As a writer, and an agitator, I don't know what more I can do than that. At that point it is up to the reader to say, "OK, I am going to go out and join my local environmental group. I am going to start to figure out ways to organize my neighbors to do something about this. I am going to change how I live my own life." There's also this notion that has grown up in the United States over the past 10 years or so that recycling is enough to save the planet. That's not going to be enough. We have to do more than change our own individual stuff. We've got to take political action. Unfortunately, people have become so turned off to the entire political process -- and I don't mean just here in the States because of the Lewinsky stuff. What I found all over the world was that people care very much about the environment, even in very remote areas, and this was very heartening. Certainly people who don't live in such a technological society, because their relationship to nature is not mediated by all this technology, they recognize very clearly that they cannot survive separate from a healthy environment. They want to do something about it, but the problem is that people feel politically powerless. They don't know what to do. They don't know how to have action. In this country, it's a case of big money controlling politics. In China, it's a case of Big Brother controlling politics. So if Americans feel like, "Well, gee, I'd like to do something, but I can't really do anything," at some level I understand it, but on another level, the part of me that's been through China just feels like screaming, "Give me a break! You have a lot more political freedom here to challenge your government, and to get results, than a lot of people around the world. So don't give me that crap. Don't give me that rationalization for your apathy." Yes, but this points up what I think is the critical problem in trying to deal with the kinds of issues you're talking about: People are so absorbed in their own really immediate, day-to-day issues, how do you get them to look beyond those, how do you say, "OK, what you're dealing with is important, but how about thinking about some of these other important issues too?" I'll tell you how I think that's going to happen, and I think it's not going to be long. It's that the environmental crisis is going to be hitting people on a much more immediate basis. Part of the reason Americans are so complacent about the environmental crisis is that their wealth and geographical luck has insulated them from a lot of these problems. But that's not going to remain the case for very long. We're already seeing the way that the weather is going crazy, presumably because of global warming -- the fires in Florida last year, just how bad El Niño was last year, the drought in Texas. This stuff is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The scientists are saying that in 20 years, most of the beaches on the East Coast are going to be gone. What's going to make that happen are all these incredible storms. And these storms are going to create a lot of electric power shortages, blackouts. And a blackout in 1999 or 2003 -- I'm not talking Y2K -- a blackout in today's society is far, far more serious than it was 30 or 20 years ago, because everything is run by computer. All the money, all the food, all the water, everything is computerized. Not to mention people's mind drug of television. And when these kinds of systems begin to break down because the storms get to be so severe, and because the droughts get to be so extended, and because the El Niños are beginning to come every year, instead of every seven years, then I think you'll see that people begin to focus on this. I notice this already with the very weird warm weather that we've had this winter. People know at some level that this ain't right. So far it's not been a big problem, but we are early in the game, folks. Global warming has just begun. It's kind of like that scene in the "Jurassic Park" follow-up, "The Lost World." All these people who are seeing these wonderful living dinosaurs for the first time are saying, "Oooh, my God, that's amazing! Isn't this great?" And Jeff Goldblum, who's been there before, says, "Ahhh, sure, yeah. Really great. Oooh. You know, I remember from last time, always it's 'Oooh. Aaah.' But then there's running. Screaming.. Slaughter!" That's what I have a feeling global warming is now: "Oooh, aahh, I love 60 degrees at Christmas." Well, 10 years from now, when it's a lot warmer and funkier, people ain't going to love it. Then you are going to see reactions. The problem is that we think, "OK, we'll wake up then and then we'll deal with it." Well, that's not how these things work. Maybe you can deal that way with nuclear war, nuclear weapons; as one source in the book says, "You can just have two men sit down at a table and agree to stop being stupid." Take the weapons out of their delivery systems. But you can't do that with global warming. This is something that takes 50 years to turn around. So that's why I can't be optimistic. I can only be hopeful. SALON | Jan. 21, 1999