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lUUStIUTIONS BY PATRICK III Df AN
t A Ta ] ra in a Tabloid World - The
V V 11V entire media establish
ment has invested in titillation and celebrity as
a way to hang on to an audience and make
money. The news and information we need to
live intelligently — is harder to find, when it
exists at all.
Remember early in the ‘90s, when the hole in
the ozone layer was discovered and the effects of
global warming were major news items, pro
voking constant debate? An Earth Summit was
held in Rio. Eighty heads of state attended.
That was then. What's happened in the inter
vening six years? Have the problems been
addressed? Are we in better shape as a species
and a globe? Unfortunately not. It's safe to say
that the globe is in decidedly worse shape and
there's much more trouble on the horizon, espe
cially as China rapidly transforms itself into an
economic superpower. But the continual degra
dation of the environment is now media back
ground, at best.
We have resumed our collective avoidance of
news about potential environmental disasters.
Industry flacks and advertisers continually trot
out thoroughly discredited "evidence'' that
global warming isn't a problem. Meanwhile, the
developing nations — especially China — insist
that economic growth is more important than
protecting the environment, a lesson they have
learned well from the biggest polluter and con
sumer of all, the United States.
With his new book Earth Odyssey (Broadway
Books/Random House) Mark Hertsgaard has
stepped forward with a wake up call. Hertsgaard
is a hne journalist. His book On Bended Knee
exposed the enormously effective manipulation
of the media by the Reagan administration's
R* FOR THE WORLD
Mark Hertsgaard traveled the world to assess our environmental health.
His diagnosis is not good. Interview by Don Hazen.
political machine. But with Earth Odyssey
Hertsgaard raises the stakes and forces us to
examine the totality of our future on the globe.
He traveled the world, on and off for six years,
to see for himself, horn the bottom up, what the
situation was. His quest: To gather information
and decide if our species would survive for the
next hundred years. Don Hazen recently spoke
with the author; Hertsgaard's news is not good.
Flagpole: Symbolically, your book begins
where your tnp ended: In China, a country of
1.22 billion people with devastating pollution.
You suggest that because of Chinas market
reforms and economic growth, the problems of
ozone depletion and global warming will worsen
for the rest of the world. What do you expect from
China? What can the rest of the globe do to work
with China or confront China?
Mark Hertsgaard: Reporters spend too much
time predicting. That's not what we re here to
do. But I can describe the dynamics in play. The
Chinese government knows it has to clean up,
not because they are good guys, but because the
environmental degradation is canceling out
nearly all of China's famed economic growth. Air
and water pollution is costing $54 billion a year
— 8 percent of the gross national product. And
that doesn't count such environmental costs as
the enormous floods that China suffered last
summer. It didn't get much media coverage in
this country, but 56 million people were left
homeless by those floods. That's nearly twice the
population of California.
The government responded by admitting its
policies helped cause what were some of the
worst floods to hit China in the 20th century,
and it pledged to reverse those policies. It
promised to stop the deforestation in the upper
Yangtze ecosystem and to restore the lakes and
wetlands in the Yangtze flood plain that used to
absorb the excess flood waters. But the govern
ment almost surely isn't going to be able to carry
out those reforms. If you stop logging, for
example, what do you do with the tens of thou
sands of unemployed loggers? And where do you
resettle the tens of millions of people who live
on the Yangtze flood plain? There's no room to
put them somewhere else.
The Chinese government is caught between
the economic costs of environmental damage,
which is forcing them to change, and the polit
ical consequences of environmental reform,
which don't let them change. The latter will
probably win out. because the only thing
keeping the party in power anymore is con
tinued economic giowth. No one in China
respects the Communist party anymore,
including high party members who I talked to.
And the party knows damn well that nobody
respects them. So even top environmental offi
cials in the government say, "We've got to keep
economic growth going. If we don't, its chaos.
Its back to the cultural revolution and then all
bets are off." If that happens, they say, forget
cleaning up the environment. It's a gloomy pic
ture.
FP: Your time in Africa seemed both daunting
and uplifting. You use Jimmy Carter's quote that
the "biggest prejudice we face is not black versus
white, but rich versus poor." Why did you use
that quote for the Africa chapter?
MH: I felt very strongly when I was traveling
among the Dinka tribe in a civil war and starva
tion zone in Sudan, that these people simply do
not exist in the minds of most Americans. They
may as well be living on another planet. At the
same time, I was struck by how their sad fate is
largely the luck of the draw. Why wasn't I born
into that life, rather than the privileged one I
got? But most of the wealthy people in this
world just don't want to be bothered. They basi
cally don’t care, and I suppose my trip has left
me less tolerant of that kind of complacency.
FP: It’s amazing how people feel that their
privilege is God given. That they don't have to
give anything back.
MH: With privilege should come a sense of
responsibility.
FP: One of the themes of the book is that cor
porations give lip service to environmental'
reform, but don't change policies. Yet there is a
lot of evidence that money can be made by being
more environmentally sound in business practices
and that global warming will have enormous eco
nomic impact. One example you use is that most
of the beach along the East coast of the U.S. —
insured to the tune of S2 trillion dollars — may
be wiped out. It seems profits are greatly threat
ened, but action is negligible. Can you explain
this paradox?
MH: I would call it a contradiction, as Karl
Marx used to say.
FP: Yeah, I guess Marx never used the word
paradox.
MH: You knew, Lerun once said, "A capitalist
will sell you on Tuesday the rope with which
you plan to hang him on Friday." Capitalism by
its very nature does not see or care about the
long term. That's why you have to have govern
ment intervene to keep the system working. It's
like that story in Earth Odyssey about the insur
ance guys in Germany (Gerling-Konzern
Globale), who in theory are as green as you can
get. You've got a guy at the top of the company
— a billionaire — wno knows green is where
they've got to go. But the finance department
would not let them switch their investment
portfolio to encourage the transition to solar
energy. And even the green billionaire boss will
not intervene in the portfolio decisions of the
company. That's the epitome of the contradic
tion. They are completely caught in the pres
sures of the marketplace. These guys running
the insurance industry have $1.4 trillion a year
tnat they have to invest and they still put a lot
of it into fossil fuels development and use,
which will only make things worse for them
ultimately.
f
T r the idea is that things look
X X too hopeless to change
them, well, if that scares us off,
then we are probably going to
fail the evolutionary test.
Mark Hertsgaard, left, author of Earth Odyssey
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