Let the twenty second Albright Lecture
begin with words from a book published two years before Horace
Albright graduated from this campus (and two years before I was
born a few blocks from it).
In 1910 Charles Richard Van Hise wrote in The Conservation
of Natural Resources in the United States,
" . . . the period in which
individualism was patriotism in this country has passed by; and
the time has come when individualism must become subordinate
to responsibility to the many."
He realized that
"we cannot hope that we shall
be able to reverse the great law that energy is run down in transformation,
or that we can reuse indefinitely the resources of nature without
loss."
He wondered what changes in social structure
would result "when people begin to feel pinched by meager
soil and the lack of coal." (He had already concluded that
the greatest use of petroleum would be as a lubricant, and he
had not contemplated that automobiles would use any.) He concluded
that "the paramount duty remains to us to transmit to our
descendants the resources which nature has bequeathed to us as
nearly undiminished in amount as possible, consistent with living
a rational and frugal life." He concluded: "In a few
thousand years man has risen from the level of the savage to
the height of the great creations of science, literature, and
art . . . It is in order that humanity itself may be given an
opportunity to develop through millions of years to come under
the most advantageous conditions that we should conserve our
natural resources, and thus make possible to billions of future
human beings a godlike destiny."
And his text ended with a familiar line:
"Conservation means
'the greatest good to the greatest number -- and that for the
longest time.'"
Even as he was writing, people were forgetting a critical part
of that definition --"for the longest time." They were
already eroding and ignoring the Declaration of Governors adopted
May 15, 1908, at the White House conference for conservation
of natural resources called by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Van Hise himself had not begun to appreciate
the devastating forces about to be unleashed by the addiction
to exponential growth. He foresaw, for example, that the burning
of coal could cause trouble, and cited a physicist who had identified
the greenhouse effect by 1896 and had predicted that if the carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 2.5 to 3 times its 1896
value the temperature in the arctic regions must rise 8 to 9
degrees Centigrade and produce a climate as mild as as that of
the Eocene period (abundant vegetation existed in Greenland then).
Van Hise suggested that "the coal consumption may be so
rapid as to accomplish this in 1000 years or less."
How quickly have we reduced that thousand
to 200 or less! And how firmly have we refused to take individualism
out of our patriotism to include an ardent love for the entire
earth! But it is not to late. And we can still care about the
millennia yet to spin out, and be concerned about the largest
population of all. That consists of the billions of people to
come, and the billions of children they will wish to have and
see grow up with hope in all those millennia. Their genes are
now in our custody. Quite a responsibility, that one!
*****
We have work to do. Today "the
longest time" is being given the shortest shrift in history.
There is no greater threat to national security, or to the global
security to which our own is inextricably tied, than the present
rampant discounting of the future -- the economists' greatest
sin. It fuels the insane contest now being exacerbated by the
superpowers. That contest can, in a moments confusion, bring
the nuclear exchange that would end forever the dream of a "godlike
destiny" for humanity. It would also extinguish the biological
diversity any benign successors would need. As President Carter
said in his farewell address, World War III would be brief.
Ray Dasmann, who gave the Albright Lecture in 1976, says:
"We are already fighting World War III and I am sorry to
say we are winning it. It is the war against the earth."
We were warned of this decades ago in Blueprint for Survival,
by Robert Allen, Teddy Goldsmith, and the team from Britain's
The Ecologist. More warning came in the Club of Rome's
The Limits to Growth and Mankind at the Turning Point.
The alarm was sounded in Stockholm in 1972 at the first major
international conservation conference. In Spring 1980 the International
Union for Conservation of Nature urged, after a long study by
many nations and scientists, that a world conservation strategy
was essential, and they published How to Save the Earth,
by Robert Allen, but not widely enough. The Brandt Commission
increased global anxieties in its study of the North versus South
conflict. The Global 2000 Report to the President was
issued in July 1980 after three years' preparation, to bring
the warnings splendidly up to date. The Global Tomorrow Coalition
of more than fifty U.S. organizations is trying to keep the warning
system operable. Meanwhile, Herman Kahn, Julian Simon, and David
Stockman try to dismantle the system; signs saying "Bridge
Out" annoy them.
Not to let earlier prophets be forgotten,
be it known that all these warnings were anticipated in an extraordinary
book published in 1960, drawn from an exhibit assembled by the
Sierra Club in 1956, both under the title,
"This
Is the American Earth"
Both were instigated by the 1975 Allbright
lecturer, Ansel Adams.
The text and design were by Nancy Newhall. All in all, I have
known fourteen of the Allbright lecturers, but worked with Ansel Adams more than with
all the rest combined. Most of the work was on the exhibit, the
book, and the many good things they led to.
For one thing, This Is the American
Earth led to 19 other Sierra Club books in the same format
and to ten more published by Friends of the Earth. For another,
it led to Justice William O. Douglas. He called the book "one
of the greatest statements in the history of conservation."
He was soon thereafter to serve on the Sierra Club's Board of
Directors. This in turn led to a letter from him to me that is
one of the high points of my life. He had attended a Ford
Foundation dinner, had there been told that they wanted his
recommendations about how to reorganize their conservation program,
and he ended his letter with"What shall I say?"
Robert Golden and I (he was on the club
staff) put our heads together. With coaching from Dr. Dan Luten,
well known in natural-resources circles on this campus and many
others, we devised a five-point program. Justice Douglas put
it in his own words and presented it to the Foundation, where
most of it seems to have been ignored. He asked me to follow
up and I tried, first presenting it to the public at the Sierra
Club's 1963 Wilderness Conference in San Francisco. (It was also
published in the 1964 annual Sierra Club Bulletin and
in Friends of the Earth's Not man Apart shortly after
Justice Douglas died.)
Let me present those five points to
you now, briefly and in reverse order. Four of them are as essential
as they ever were, and the last is the most important task there
is, I submit, for all of us.
*****
We called first for a program to build
careers in preservation. We noted the need to balance the "wise
use" graduates with guardians of reserves, and to give status
to both kinds of careers, not just wise users. We wanted to inculcate
ecological literacy in all fields, and still want to. We need
guardians of reserves in a broader sense -- genetic reserves,
places where the biological diversity of the earth can keep diversifying.
Zoos and seed banks are fine for those
who like them, but aren't even a down payment on survival.
Next we asked for a crash program for
reserving the irreplaceables. Private philanthropy must not be
relied upon, we thought, for revolving funds with which to buy
and hold certain key areas, particularly those in which wilderness
and biological diversity are paramount and threatened. The funds
would revolve whenever it was politically possible for the government
-- the commonwealth -- to exercise its responsibility for the
commons. The Ford Foundation liked the idea and provided a six-million-dollar
line of credit to the Nature
Conservancy to help carry it out. In our present situation
the need is greater than it was then. We need a thousand that
much now, across the whole foundation front.
Third was a plan for reinterpretation
of nature -- a conservation education program. The objective
would be to inform the public as promptly an thoroughly as possible
about ecosystems and peaceful stability -- more about which in
a moment. The reinterpreters would need to avoid economic and
natural-resource cliches and would be prohibited from saying
interface, elitist, input, output, parameter, paradigm, prioritize,
or holistic -- the latter, as Les Pengelly observes, being used
as a noun, an adjective, and a substitute for thought.
Fourth, we wanted a center for the advanced
study of ecosystems. This was the brainchild of the late Edward
F. Graham, of the Soil Conservation Service, who proposed it
in 1961, the year of the first Allbright lecture, The center
would seek out some Einsteins
of biology and give them a chance to speak out freely after
some reasonable periods of unharrased thought. Such a center
could explain the Law of the Minimum to us (e.g., it doesn't
help to have more water than you need if you run out of air),
or help produce such people as Robert MacNamara wanted around
to help him invest World Bank funds in a way that would be ecologically
sound. He wanted a thousand trained ecologists then and couldn't
find them. In keeping with Dr. Graham's dream, the center might
lead us toward ecologically sound agriculture instead of present
agricultural mining methods now being followed that could drive
society into the ground.
Most important we wanted the Ford
Foundation to make a major effort toward developing a blueprint
for economics of peaceful stability. If the Ford Foundation had
listened, I would not have felt the need to give this lecture.
And you would not be burdened with my using, as a preface to
the meat of the lecture, what we said in 1962 about the blueprint
for peaceful stability, extracts from which follow, slightly
edited:
The "vigorous growing economy"
all our leaders keep exhorting us to produce is not possible
on an earth of fixed size, and continuing attempts to produce
it are the basic threat to peace.
*****
The momentum of this phrase is so great
that it will take a major effort to offset it and prove we can
live without it. The UN is already showing concern about the
question, Can the economy withstand peace? The concomitant question
is, Can limited resources withstand a constantly expanding expenditure?
The answer to the first question is and must be yes, and to the
second question, no. Both answers are painfully obvious but universally
avoided. There is no better cause than to face them squarely
and learn to live with them.
It doesn't take much imagination to
demonstrate that unending growth will do our children and theirs
out of the heritage they deserve -- and that we can survive without
that unending growth and only without it. Do you know
any conservation group that is giving this serious consideration?
I don't think you do. It is one of the taboos. I do not think
that you can find an agency in government yet willing to question
growth. But some growth is bad -- for instance, malignant growth.
One way to combat malignancy is to examine for it periodically.
I believe there is malignancy in our economy, and that all conservation
will fail unless it is checked. We need to get the checking started.
We ought not be lulled by the euphoric statement, "man's
power to mold the world to his liking is almost unlimited."
We would do better to remember Loren
Eisely's warning about "the wounded outcry of the human
ego as . . . it learns that the world made supposedly for his
enjoyment has existed for untold eons entirely indifferent to
its coming."
'The need is not for more brains",
Eiseley said, "the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant
people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger,
and the bear. The hand that hefted the axe, out of some old blind
allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It
is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go
very deep."
Elsewhere Eiseley spoke of the machine
gun's monstrous successor. "He holds the heat of suns within
his hands and threatens with it both the lives and happiness
of his unborn descendants . . . caught in a physiological trap
and faced with the problem of escaping from his own ingenuity.
Paul Sears has told us this: "As
we lengthen and elaborate the chain of technology that intervenes
between us and the natural world, we forget that we become steadily
more vulnerable to even the slightest failure in that chain."
Joseph Wood Krutch agreed: "It
is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless this
terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall
not be able to live on it for long."
Lewis Mumford adds: "To put all
our hope in the improvement of machines is the characteristic
inversion and perversion of the present age; and that is the
reason that our machines threaten us with extinction, since they
are now in the hands of deplorably unimproved men."
So we need a blueprint for an economy
that will endure in peaceful stability, that will not require
the war with the environment that leads to war with fellow man.
The blueprint will not be easily prepared, nor can we keep all
our bad habits too long and live at all. If man learns the importance
of living at peace with his environment, wilderness will be safe.
So will he.
Which brings us to Henry David Thoreau:
"What's the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable
planet to put it on?"
*****
I have mellowed enough since 1962 to
put the question a different way: What kinds of growth must we
have and which kinds can we no longer afford. As the first of
two assignments, would you please make your own list off what
growth to add and what to subtract? By combining your list and
others in some impressive way, we may be able to persuade people
with capital on hand to invest it or deny it more usefully, with
their goal being the building of a sustainable society, as proposed
by Lester Brown, of Worldwatch.
Investors can make changes faster than governments can. They
are rapidly putting nuclear power out of business. Their investment
in oil conservation instead of in oil squandering could speedily
cool our temptation to risk the society in order to preempt Middle
East oil.Alternative investment could encourage our and Soviet
disarming, and help diffuse the population bomb.
In the brief period since the ink dried
on the proposal to the Ford
Foundation, the earth's population has grown by a billion.
When the echo had died on these words and nineteen more years
have passed, our present habits will put another two billion
people on earth (if we can find enough firewood to cook their
food), double the present acreage of the earth's deserts, extinguish
a million or two species of plants and animals, and otherwise
multiply ecological insults and deplenish the earth. By then
it bristles with missiles -- if they have not already been sent
on their mission to extinguish us all. If Armageddon had not
yet arrived the superpowers would by then have spent some 25
trillion dollars on armament -- and the opportunity to build
a sustainable society on the earth would have been deprived of
that much capital, resources, human effort, and human freedom.
Is there a better direction for our
society to choose? A way to find old friends, not lose them?
A sensitivity to what is leading the superpowers to join in panic?
Can we find an antidote to all this? A rededication to the idea
that led us to become a nation, updated with our knowing now
that the world flows together or it blows apart? A willingness
to share resources with the people who are here now, and share
also with so many more yet to arrive here, with needs as real
as ours, including their needing to know that we were capable
of thinking of them? More immediately, we can protect our
children's right to have a chance to grow up, and our own right
to love watching them grow up?
There is a better direction, and the
President of the most powerful nation on earth -- one which once
had a dream -- doesn't know it. Nor does the team he selected.
He and they are leading us into unprecedented disarray, with
malice toward all but a favored few. Call it the Disarrayed Society
of Ronald Reagan. The threat of the final war is so huge and
so imminent that we can forgive ourselves for not wanting to
think about it, but we dare not fail to think about it. People
who bury heads in sand these days may all to soon find that sand
fused.
In short, President Reagan has sidelined
outstanding Republican conservationists, irritated Wall Street,
alarmed our friends abroad, frightened the third world nations
by deepening the inequity of relations with them, and could be
driving our supposed adversary, with whom we never have fought,
to desperation. He has said it is none of our business who has
the bomb and denied having said so.He has said "It is not
the business of other nations to make American foreign policy"
and then said that he "was misinterpreted". He has
crippled energy-saving and oil-substituting programs and has
massively increased nuclear subsidies. He supports the Clinch
River Breeder Reactor boondoggle and has supported reprocessing
of spent nuclear fuel. This could lead to one of the most
horrendous of domestic threats.* It would also make a mockery of the Nonproliferation
Treaty which, weak though it is, is the best the world has achieved
so far in slowing the spread of nuclear weapons. He has said
that he believes limited nuclear war is possible. He has rescued
the Neutron Bomb and pushed forward theMX Missile and other moves
by President Carter to give us first strike capability. When
Secretaries Haig and Weinberger contradict each other about firing
a nuclear warning shot, he lets it be said that both are right.
He has ground the improvement of the national park system to
a halt when every day adds enormously to the cost. Let it be
added that he has issued a splendid statement in favor of saving
whales. For this act we are grateful. Not for the others. We
would favor the President's consistent support for corporations
if corporations were not so often a device for separating enterprise
from conscience -- and the hiring of a pride of lawyers to keep
the gap intact.
*****
The president's attitude toward the
Third World resembles Senator Hayakawa's toward the poor. Stopped
in a Senate Building corridor, the Senator suggested a heavy
gasoline tax to ease the energy crisis. What would that do to
the poor? He replied, "The poor aren't working. They don't
need gas." In jest, we hope. We would support such a tax.
The poor can be helped by better means than making gas cheap
for Cadillacs.
I would urge the President to replace
what is becoming known as the Reagan wrecking crew with competent
Republicans. There are many: they brought about environmental
achievements by President Nixon that most people have forgotten.
It would not hurt to add a Democrat or two. Bipartisan moves
have worked well in the past Thoughtful analysis of conservation
matters would improve national security by leading away from
the Strength Through Exhaustion syndrome that recent presidents,
including Mr. Reagan, suffer from. Mr. Reagan is extraordinarily
in need of environmental homework; otherwise we could justifiably
publish a Ronald Reagan Environmental Handbook, consisting of
a three by five file, empty.
We are hoping that the Republicans who
carried Mr. Reagan to the presidency will see the immediate importance
of persuading the president to make conservation moves in the
interest of national security.
The alternative, it seems to me, is
that his farewell address be expedited.
These words are harsh, harsher I am
sure than were ever spoken in an Albright Lecture. Harsher than
Horace Albright himself has used, far harsher than I like to
use or ever have used, but use now because I must. The war that
no one wants is inevitable, unless we say no. A chorus of voices
in both political parties is saying no and needs to be joined.
So do the voices with vast military experience, including words
President Eisenhower spoke and President Reagan should memorize.
So do the voices of the scientists and engineers working other
fields than preparation for war, fields that need the skills
of the other half of the professions who are coopted for war.
So do the voices of those who think self interest has driven
us too long, that technology has become too rampant, that serenity
and faith and love are all but lost and must not be. The appendix
contains relevant excerpts from W. Averill Harriman, General
Maxwell Taylor, George Kennan, John B. Oakes, and Senator Charles
Percy.
I could list things that these and other
people think our change of direction should consist of and that
I agree with, but it is far better for you to come up with the
list. Perhaps in this way:
You are President. You have a trillion
dollars to spend in the next five years to enhance your national
security, which itself cannot be enhanced without a context of
global security. You know how much more important conservation
is than did the governors President Theodore Roosevelt summoned
to the White House. You know, as you look ,about you in your
own neighborhood, your state and nation and planet, what things
need to be done and what seem most important to you. So with
this trillion dollars at your disposal -- and when did anyone
ever offer you that much before, with only one string on it --
what would you spend it on between now and the end of December
1986 to increase the earth's security and hence our own? The
string? You may not spend it on weapons. You realize, of course,
that a nuclear Maginot Line would be far worse than useless.
You realize too, that if you do not spend it on weapons, the
Soviet leadership will not need to do so either. So that makes
two trillion dollars or equivalent available for healing the
earth instead of wounding it further.
While you are thinking of items for
your list, I reveal that the first item that came to my mind
was reforesting the earth -- not all the original forest land,
of course, but that which should no longer remain derelict. Alfred
Heller would spend his trillion dollars on exactly what is being
started on the Santa Cruz campus, expanded on a global scale
-- agri-ecology. Combined with Mr. Fukuoka's One
Straw Revolution and Wes Jackson's New
Roots for Agriculture, agri-ecology could bring about
a sustainable food supply for an otherwise sustainable population.
One alternative Dan Luten suggested
long ago was to ship Detroit's guzzling inventory to the U.S.S.R.
free of charge and let the Soviets worry about fuel, maintenance,
highways, and deteriorating railroads. We could order Detroit
and the Army Corps of Engineers to get our own railroads back
on track, so as to provide sustainable mass transportation while
we still had enough affordable energy for the recovery. But all
those cars would be cruel and unusual punishment to an ally that
helped us immensely in World War II.
*****
I wish I could show you two maps and
stop talking for a while. One is a computer map of the U.S.
population in 1776, 1876, and 1976, prepared at M.I. T. On
the 1976 segment Los Angeles is barely perceptible. It had not
even become one of the largest 25 U.S. cities by the 1900 census.
The M.I.T. map is enough to assure even aHerman Kahn that we
can't go on in the next century the way we carried on in the
first two. It should assure the space colonizers that they couldn't
dissect asteroids fast enough to build colonies for our fertility
excess, or find fuel enough to ship it any farther than India,
where it is hardly needed.
The other map exists only in my mind
-- a demographic-drain map to show what resources were required
to sustain our new population peaks, a map in which the area
of countries is the product of their population multiplied by
their resource drain. Newsweek published a map on October
26 that comes close, but not close enough. Something better than
gross national product is needed to measure the drain of resources.
(For example, the U.S., with five percent of the worlds population,
uses one third of the resources; the remaining ninety-five percent
use the other two thirds -- a ratio of about ten to one. Our
225 million, multiplied by ten, equals 2.25 billion, half the
earth's population. On the global map, then, the U.S. would occupy
half the land area, and in the Newsweek map it doesn't
begin to. Africa would be tiny.) I think that if we looked long
and hard at such a map, we would realize why it has been said
that a lot of nations can't afford the U.S. anymore. When I first
heard that comment, scenes from Italy flashed through my mind,
abandoned castles on hills, castles once comfortably occupied
by the affluent who thought that if they kept their supporting
peasants ill-clothed and ill-housed and ill-fed enough, the peasants
couldn't muster enough strength to cause trouble. You could simply
tell them to lift themselves by their bootstraps, mind the magic
of the marketplace, and buy a do-it-yourself covered wagon and
go west, as President Reagan has in effect told the Third World.
We have better ideas, and I'm sure you
do. For the full Friends of the Earth list of things to spend
a trillion on, I refer you to Progress
As If Survival Mattered; A Handbook for a Conserver Society.
But while you are waiting to see it,
and before I give you your next assignment, let me try another
idea on you.
One of the nicest angles of all is the
180 degree angle. It enables one to change direction completely
and still go straight. It is the face saving angle and I suggest
that it is time to use it. The Superpowers, instead of standing
toe to toe, ought to stand back to back and see not what they
can do to each other, but what they can do for the rest of the
world. Contemplate a U.S. - Soviet Marshall Plan. Let it invest
not in resource depletion, but in resource recovery, in finding
ways to avoid fatal battles over what is in the bottom of the
barrel, to get our own numbers down, with deliberate speed, to
what the boundaries of a limited earth can sustain. If this means
an orderly retreat from the Land of Self-Interest and Avarice,
perhaps we have been there to long anyway. If all this sounds
utopian, the alternative is oblivion. Easy choice.
*****
The most important investment toward
global security that the North could make, as it looks more to
the South's needs instead of so much at its own, is investment
in recovery of renewable-resource potential. How can the lesser
developed countries use sun and soil better for their own advantage,
even if that means we are deprived of some surfeit? There are
various ways of going about this. A first requirement is to change
our mind set. Studies help.
Back in the mid-fifties we came up with
the idea of a Scenic Resources Review. It was suggested by the
periodic Timber Resources Review, and I thought we ought to look
at intangibles as systematically. Renamed the Outdoor Recreation
Resources Review, it was carried out by a commission that mixed
private individuals with Members of Congress. The Bureau of Outdoor
Recreation and a few other improvements came out of it all. But
it was too limited, and it is time to try again.
Perhaps a global Renewable Resources
Review and Intangible Resources Review could carry on where The
Global 2000 Report to the President left off, and give
the present administration something to do besides dismantle
the century's conservation gains in order to find money for missiles.
Instead of threatening to withdraw support from the United
Nations Environment Program, the U.S. could increase support
in order to celebrate, in 1982, the tenth anniversary of the
Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. Preparation for
that could assist groundwork for still another anniversary --
the seventy-fifth (diamond jubilee) anniversary of the Governors
Conference on Natural Resources that Theodore Roosevelt convened
at the White House. John F. Kennedy convened one, as one would
expect; his interest in conservation was obvious in his appointments.
In the Roosevelt conference only one voice, that of Horace J.
McFarland, spoke in behalf of scenic resources. In the Kennedy
conference it was the other way around, and only one voice spoke
for utilitarian conservation -- Congressman Wayne Aspinall at
Colorado, Gifford Pinchot won the first round, John Muir the
second.
Ronald Reagan now has a chance to make
use of that 180 degree angle. He could call for the seventy-fifth
anniversary, in mid-May 1983, a White House Conference on Conservation
and Global Security. There is just enough time for sound preparation.
He should welcome bipartisan support. Richard Nixon's chief environmental
advisor, Russell Train, currently co-chairman of the Year 2000
Committee, knows how to use such support. He has also worked
with Soviet conservationists. The conference could have no more
important goal than developing means by which a bipartisan world
could develop and apply conservation plans for the longest period
of peaceful co-existence in the earth's history.
We could remind President Reagan that
physicians, who are not notorious for their radical attitudes,
have set an example by organizing Physicians
for Social Responsibility. They are having an enormous influence,
for which we can be most grateful, in awaking the world to the
nuclear menace. Perhaps it is time to organize Politicians for
Social Responsibility -- responsible for seeking a sustainable
society on a global scale.
If this is a dream, buy it. Unless you
are hooked on nightmares.
*****
We are back to you and your trillion
dollars. Assuming that you would not take the easy out -- sparing
the taxpayers of that burden in the first place -- what else
would you do? What ten programs would you have the United States
design, with your help, to improve the human condition and the
life-support system most humans depend upon? What programs now
being starved, or not yet thought of, because of our preoccupation
with weapons, Trident, MX, cruise missile, throwweight, ground
zeroes, missile fratricide, electromagnetic pulse, assorted euphemisms
for megadeath, the needles acceleration of mutations, few of
them desirable? Ten is a good enough number to start with. Take
your time in making out the list and the allocation of funds
for each item. Your papers will not be due until Christmas, a
day in which quite a few people on earth remember to celebrate
a Prince of Peace who said the meek would inherit the earth and
who presumably did not think it would have been subdued and incinerated
before they received title to it.
Send your list to me, if you will, at
Friends of the Earth, in San Francisco. Perhaps we can get the
Gallop or Harris people to tabulate the data for us. Above all,
send a copy to Presidents Reagan and Brezhnev. You may also wish
to send President Reagan a copy of President Eisenhower's farewell
address, urging that his own be so thoughtful, his intervening
performance better. Remind him, if you will, that the ten percent
of the American populace who voted for him (plus the votes he
received that were against Jimmy Carter) do not constitute a
mandate for him, much less for Mr. Watt, Messrs. Edwards, Haig,
and Weinberger, or Senator Lexalt, Joseph Coors, and Mrs. Gorsuch.
Or for Mr. Meese -- who supported the philosophy of Governor
Reagan who a few years ago was willing to have a bloodbath on
this campus.
Harsh words again, yes. Derived from
fright, and the wish, however poorly put, to motivate you into
seeing that this planet does not perish from the Universe because
you had a part in letting it.
Your list of ten steps toward survival
need not be harshly presented. Let your prelude be the words
of the man who lost to General Eisenhower; UN Ambassador Adlai
Stevenson, in his last speech, given in Geneva in July 1965,
left us this wisdom, in the finest conservation message I know;
We travel
together, passengers on a little space craft, dependent upon
its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our
safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation
only by the work, the care and,I will say, the love we give our
fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half comfortable, half miserable;
half confident, half despairing; half slave to the ancient enemies
of mankind, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed
of until this day. No craft, no crew, can travel safely with
such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival
of us all.
These words should be in all the places
that celebrate the 1945 agreement that war must no longer be
the route to resolution. It should be carved in stone at the
United Nations centers, translated as necessary, in as grand
a manner as can be afforded. It should be ten feet high in the
Oval Office, printed somewhere on every calendar. And remembered
in every heart, especially the line in which we are spared by
"the work, the care and, I will say the love we give our
fragile craft" -- love given the earth. ourselves, and our
fellow creatures, remember (as we so often do not) that love
is the one resource that will be exhausted only if we forget
to use it.
