We are all, every one of us, involved with issues of ecology, and we seem to adopt one of two ways in approaching the problems posed by a deteriorating environment. The first is to try to do something on an individual or family level. We use less water to flush our toilets, we separate and recycle our garbage, we buy cars that run more economically, we insulate and retro-fit our houses, and generally practise conservation and preservation whenever possible. We join consumer initiatives to campaign against toxic chemicals in agriculture, to keep trees from being cut down or to save the whales. The second way is mentally to shrug our shoulders and decide to ‘leave it to the experts’. This amounts to shirking our moral accountability and leaving ethical responsibilities to an ill-defined group of scientists and activists.

I would suggest that we add a third way. We must examine what each of us can contribute from our own specific role in society. We must ask the question: ‘What can I do as a professor, construction worker, taxi-driver, school teacher, sex worker, lawyer, pianist, housewife, student, manager, politician or farmer? What is the impact of my work on the environment?’

There is an ecological and environmental dimension to all human activities. Whatever the subject he or she teaches, a professor can make a personal contribution by cutting down on the immense waste of paper, using computers to store data and reducing the amount of photocopying for classes. The construction worker or taxi-driver must examine how his or her work touches the environment; switching off instead of idling the engine of the cab or the construction machinery, waiting rather than cruising for fares, these seemingly minor interventions can help. Simple acts can empower the individual by providing a feeling of doing something to help. Managers, politicians and lawyers are in positions of power; they must sharpen their understanding of the precise balance between ecology and economics – a relationship that is frequently falsely portrayed as confrontational, whereas recent studies show that ecological awareness can have positive economic consequences. The question of ecological intervention will be explored throughout the whole of this book.

During the summer of 1993, enormous floods in the Midwest of the United States wreaked havoc through nine states, and for nearly three months the Mississippi river was six times wider than normal. The Sahel, the sub-Saharan part of Africa, has seen a dry, desert-like climate moving southwards starting in the late 1970s, and these continuing droughts have devastated Niger, Chad, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. The incidence of major typhoons in south-east Asia doubled between 1990 and 1994. Bangladesh suffered the two worst floods in its history in 1982 and 1983; during the second an incredible 81% of the land surface was under six feet (2m) of water for several days.

The most devastating hurricane to strike Florida occurred in 1992, and major hurricanes continue to batter the east coast of the USA. El Niño, the recurrent warming of the westward ocean currents heading towards South America, led to heavy rains that resulted in killer landslides in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

The completely unpredictable temperature and weather patterns of the last few years suggest that we are living through a time of massive environmental change. In June 1993, when this chapter was written in southern Spain, which normally has a desert-like climate, the ambient temperature was distinctly chilly and a heavy rain was falling. At the same time a colleague arriving from Helsinki reported that for the previous few weeks there had been a heatwave there that would have been considered tropical in August.

The first great energy crises came long before the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. Twelve thousand years ago agriculture (the transformation of wild annual grasses into domesticated cereals) began in the southern Levant under the simultaneous pressure of drought, high temperatures, over-population and over-exploitation of natural resources. This forced foray into plant genetics brought about massive changes in nutrition, trade and settlement patterns.

The ‘Little Ice Age’ in Western Europe lasted roughly from 1550 to 1700 and helped to shape ways of living, farming, and, as a consequence, artistic expression.¹ More time spent indoors during the longer winters led to a flowering of the crafts that made life more comfortable, such as quilt-making, blanket and carpetweaving, and pottery. Mirrors and crystals were used in experiments to enhance candlelight, and interest grew in choral singing and in decoration for home and church. Conditions during the ‘Little Ice Age’ must have been very like those in the isolated, dark and snow-bound farms in Finland during the 18th and 19th centuries. This home-centred mode of living nourished all kinds of artistic expression, especially in music and literature which sprang from story-telling and narrative poetry. One of the most obvious results of the colder climate in England was the disappearance of much of the common land (due to the increase in sheep farming) leading to great changes in land ownership, travel and class structure.

The depletion of forests occurred not once, but many times and in a great many different places. An energy crisis was developing in England by the 16th century, forcing people to burn coal or peat – foul-smelling, inconvenient and dirty – to keep off the chill during the winter months. Yet in a landscape drastically deforested and turned into sheep pastures in the northern Midlands and Scotland, a roaring log fire was no longer practical.² Coal-mining not only changed the structure of settlements through the building of mining towns and row upon row of working-class cottages, but also ushered in the ‘dark Satanic mills’ and the beginning of pollution through the use of fossil fuels. The precipitation of soot and coal-dust could soon be measured by the changes in the appearance of the peppered moth (whose wings turned from silvery-white speckled with dark spots for camouflage against birch bark, to a uniform dark brown, matching the birch trees now blackened by soot).

In China the overcutting of forests caused a fuel shortage that lasted from 1400 to 1800, a vivid dress rehearsal for the oil embargoes of the 20th century. The Chinese were forced to burn straw and – by learning to build with bamboo – developed a bamboo-based structural technology equalled only by that of Latin America before the conquest.³ Historian-ecologists now have much data on China and are preparing to study the possible relationship between rainfall and drought cycles in the development of treeless terrain and the subsequent expansion of the Central Asian steppe peoples.⁴ The inhabitants of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, lands where forests have been destroyed, burn dried cowdung, lacking other fuels.

It is salutary to remember that almost all the deserts in the world – with the exception of the central Australian outback – are human-made. Recent studies suggest the influence of climate and eco-catastrophes on the shifting fortunes of the Mayan civilization of Central America.

The historical view also makes clear the alarming increase in the speed of change in the last few decades. I now live in Kansas and learned that in the western part of the state, one June day in 1860, it was as dark as night – the light of the sun had been blotted out by a flight of between three and five thousand million passenger pigeons, breaking trees when they came down to roost.⁵ Now, a little over a hundred years later, there is only one passenger pigeon left – it is stuffed and stands in my university’s museum of natural history.

This was followed by large-scale dioxin poisoning in Sardinia and other parts of Italy, which started in 1949. Since then we have had, among hundreds of smaller nuclear accidents, the thermonuclear-reactor near-meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1982; the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine in 1986; we have had the poisoning of thousands by a US chemical corporation in Bhopal in India in 1984; in 1986 a Swiss pharmaceutical factory accidentally released large amounts of toxic chemicals into the Rhine, poisoning the river from its sources in Switzerland throughout its course in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, eliminating fish-life for more than five years.

We have had an average of one major oceanic oil spill every second day for the last eighteen years. The Exxon Valdez oil-tanker spill in 1989 affected wildlife and the Alaskan coastline and fishing grounds, and will continue to do so into the next century, putting into jeopardy the cultural life and very existence of the indigenous peoples of Alaska who subsist from hunting and fishing. In August 1994 the US courts found the Exxon Corporation guilty of criminal negligence and it was ordered to pay five thousand million dollars to the indigenous peoples and fishermen of Alaska, in addition to almost two thousand million dollars already awarded as direct damages.

The explosion of the Siberian oil pipeline of June 5, 1989, in Russia, also derailed two trains killing hundreds of people. On an average of three times a day, towns or villages have to be evacuated somewhere in the world because of the spillage of toxic chemicals from train wrecks or truck crashes.⁶

People often seem to be far ahead of their governments in concern for ecology. The second greatest human-made ecological tragedy in the 20th century was the burning of over five hundred oil wells in Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War. By far the most terrible ecological disaster in our time was the systematic destruction and defoliation of the south Asian forests in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1968 to 1971 through the use of Agent Orange and other chemical and biological ‘goodies’.

There are other disasters, no less devastating for their more insidious development. The slow death of northern European and North American forests and lakes is largely caused by effluvia from factory smoke stacks which turns rain acid; the gases given off by factories in the American Midwest cause acid-rain damage in Canada; factories in the Ruhr district of Germany and the Czech Republic are affecting Sweden and Denmark.

There is the terrible threat of the increase in ‘greenhouse’ gases. Some of the heat from the sun is radiated back from the surface of the Earth and much is trapped by several naturally occurring gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane, which act like the glass in a greenhouse. Clouds also work as magnifiers: cirrus clouds let in sunlight, yet trap rising heat. This effect is necessary for the existence of life as we know it, for without it our planet would be considerably colder. On the other hand, human activity, compounded by the explosive rise in the population, has increased the production of greenhouse gases so alarmingly that scientists predict a wholescale global warming, which may already be apparent in the recent climatic changes.

Through sample drillings in rock, Arctic ice and soil it has been established that the carbon-dioxide content in the air never rose above 280 parts per million during the last twelve million years. By 1958 it had risen to 315 parts; to 340 parts by 1988, and to 350 in 1993.⁷ This is the result of the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) and the diminishing of tropical rainforests which absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide as well as producing oxygen.

Nitrous oxide is also produced by fossil-fuel burning, and more comes from the increase in the use of fertilizers in agriculture. Enormous amounts of methane are generated by cattle (now bred in increasing numbers by a fast-growing human population, particularly for the meat and dairy products of a Western-style diet), by waterlogged soils such as rice paddies, oil and gas production, and by landfill.

CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), not invented until 1930, are responsible for the holes in the ozone layer, increasing the risk of skin cancer, leukaemia and birth abnormalities all over the world as we lose protection from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, and – more ominously – contributing to the radical warming of the Earth’s climate. CFCs are being phased out because of their threat to the ozone layer, but are being replaced as refrigerants, solvents, blowing agents for foam plastics, by related gases, the HCFCs and HFCs, which, though less powerful ozone-depleters, are long-lasting greenhouse gases.

Our best computer-modelling tells us that we may expect a rise of temperature of 1º to 1.5ºF (0.6º to 0.8ºC) by the year 2000, and a consequent rise in sea levels of about three feet (one metre). This doesn’t sound too threatening until one stops to calculate that on a sloping beach, such a rise could bring the ocean as much as 295 feet (90m), above its current tideline.

The razing of tropical rainforests has to be halted now. Sadly some of these natural green lungs of Earth have already been eliminated within the last few years. The destruction of the huge rainforest areas in Sarawak, which started at the beginning of 1991, had eliminated all rainforests in northern Borneo by mid-September of that same year. The Amazonian and other rainforests are still with us; besides their great importance to the Earth’s atmosphere, they contain millions of species, many still unknown to us, some of which are in danger of being eliminated forever. The rosy periwinkle, native to the shrinking rainforest of Madagascar, yields two compounds that are successful in treating two cancers – lymphocytic leukaemia and Hodgkin’s disease.

Even in the United States there are examples of previously unknown beneficial plants, such as the Pacific yew whose bark and needles have proved to be helpful in the treatment of ovarian and cervical cancers and some breast cancers. Hoping to cure or at least control AIDS, pharmaceutical companies continue to study plants, lichen, spore...