I miss getting stung

The first letter I remember writing was a postcard to my father. Written in the scrawl of a three-year-old, the message took up the entire writing space on the card. The message was “I got stung by a bee.” That was a big event and seemed worth writing to my father about. These days, I suppose a three-year-old kid with such an important message would send an SMS on her mobile telephone.

A couple of days ago, I was walking in a nearby city park and admiring the many heads of white clover growing in the grass, and my mind turned back to the painful lesson I had learned at the age of three about walking barefoot on a lawn filled with clover. The prospect of getting stung by a bee freighted the adventure with the thrill that goes with risk. But as I looked out over the clover in the city park a few days ago, I noticed something very odd. There was not a bee to be seen anywhere. Where there should have been hundreds or thousands of bees, there was not one to be seen.

Absences always get my attention, and the absence of the bees in the clover made me go looking at flowering shrubs and bushes that usually attract the critters, and I saw no bees anywhere. Their absence seemed ubiquitous.

I listen to quite a few science programs on the radio, broadcast by National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (a radio and television network funded by the Canadian government and based on the belief that there are people scattered around the country who would actually like to be informed and to hear intelligent discussion on important issues—think of it as the antithesis of Fox News and MSNBC). A few weeks ago on one of the several science programs I regularly listen to, there was a feature on an Australian biologist who has dedicated his life to studying all kinds of bees. He was talking about the dramatic worldwide drop in the populations of just about every species of bee. Whether one looks at North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Europe or Australia, bees are dropping like flies.

The decline of bees is very worrying, given that a large percentage of the food crops that the human race has become dependent on growing and eating are pollinated almost exclusively by bees. While it's true that pollen attaches to the hair of cats and dogs and other furry quadrupeds, nothing is as efficient as bees at delivering pollen to where it does the most good in fertilizing plants. It's not just that bees are fun to watch and add a touch of adventure to walking barefoot through the clover. Our lives depend on them. We will miss them, but not for long. Most of us will die before we have had a chance to cultivate protracted nostalgia.

So what accounts for the silence of the bees? There are numerous theories. Some say they are succumbing to pesticides. But pesticides have been around for many decades without having dramatic effects on the bee population. It could be that pesticides have cooperated with the general degradation of the environment to produce a critical mass of stress factors that have finally overwhelmed the bees. The Australian scientist I heard suspects something else: cell phones. All over the world there has been a steady rise in the use of mobile telephones, and in most parts of the most heavily populated parts of the world, transmission towers are popping up every few hundred meters. As a result, all of us are being exposed to large amounts of electromagnetic radiation and frequencies that are no doubt having some effect on our health, although we may not know how exactly the waves are affecting us until the damgae has been done.

Meanwhile studies have been done that suggest that the frequency of waves used to transmit all those terribly important text messages and telephone conversations being conducted via mobile telephones has a serious effect on the biological navigation systems of most kinds of bee. Because of impaired navigation abilities, bees are unable to find their way back to their colonies. They are not reproducing as frequently as they used to do, and they are not able to care for their young. One account of this effect is on the website of Institute of Science in Society.

There is so much to worry about these days. Will Sarah Palin attend her daughter's wedding with Levi? Who can worry about bees while such major issues as that are weighing on our minds? Still, one can't help hoping that the word will gradually get out that our addiction to cell phones is helping our addiction to oil to make our current way of life untenable.

May I request that if you do decide to help spread the word about the possibly deleterious effect of cell phones on bees, you use some medium other than an SMS?

"Spill, baby, spill!"

The world has failed to meet its target to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010, set under the 2002 Convention on Biological Diversity, according to a report released Monday by the convention secretariat.

Based on about 120 national reports, the third edition of Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO-3) acknowledged the failure to meet all 21 specific goals, including "status of threatened species improved."

In grades of 1 to 5, the best score was 3 for four targets. Three targets were given 1. (Asahi Shimbun)

As the world has helplessly been watching oil spurting upwards from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico at alarming rates, reactions from various quarters have been spewing into the airwaves. Some have sought to minimize the disaster—the most notorious being from Rush Limbaugh who first opined that since petroleum is a natural substance, there is no reason to be alarmed by an oil spill, and then recommended that the Sierra Club should be made to pay for the clean-up, since it was the lobbying of environmentalists that had pushed the oil companies off the land into the ocean. Others have pushed the point that oil spills are extremely rare and that the failure to continue drilling for oil wherever it is found would be, as one spokesperson put it, “to wave the white flag of surrender to countries in the Middle East that hate freedom.” Still others have said the calamity in the Gulf of Mexico is a wake-up call to Americans, a warning that we must find less environmentally damaging sources of energy; some have even offered the questionable suggestion that nuclear power is a source of energy that should enthusiastically be pursued.

As all these suggestions and counter-suggestions were being aired on radio, television and the Internet, a report was released by the Convention of Biological Diversity that not a single one of the twenty-one recommendations made eight years ago as part of a strategy for reducing the loss of biodiversity by 2010 has been met. This report prompted the producers of Science Friday on NPR to begin their May 14 program with this observation

As we sit here on this pleasant Friday afternoon — I hope you are having a pleasant afternoon — something is happening out there. Plants and animals are disappearing at an alarming rate, or some of them very close to disappearing.

Researchers say that about one-third of the world's species are now threatened with extinction. Nearly half of all bird and amphibian populations are declining, wildlife habitats are being overrun, and the march of invasive species is increasing on all continents in all kinds of ecosystems.

The rapid and massive loss of biodiversity cannot be attributed to a single simple cause, but the scientific consensus is that human activity is a root cause. The human population nearly quadrupled in the twentieth century, growing from approximately 1,600 million in 1900 to approximately 6,000 million in 2000. That alone has been sufficient to push many species out of habitats they had occupied for thousands of years into less hospitable environments. But the population growth has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the amount of energy that the human race uses to make itself more comfortable. As a result of increased population using more energy per capita, the International Energy Agency reports, global consumption of energy rose from around 1000 million tons of oil equivalent in 1900 to around 10,000 million tons in 2000. (See Janet L. Sawin's PowerPoint presentation entitled Making Better Energy Choices.) In other words, as the human population quadrupled, human beings collectively consumed ten times as much energy. The side effects of that energy consumption have been disastrous to the other species that share this planet with the human race and to the human race itself.

It is regrettable that it takes disasters to make people think of changing their habits; it is even more regrettable that often even the worst disasters are insufficient to make people think of changing their habits. Economist Paul Krugman has written that the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico could be just what it takes to reverse America's backsliding in environmental policies. One can only hope he is right. On the other hand, the fierce opposition to sanity on the part of those who stand to make profits from collective insanity should never be underestimated. Also not to be underestimated is the willingness of human beings to be comfortable and to be spared the pains and fatigue of hard labor. Few of the people who spend their days surfing the web in air-conditioned or heated buildings would voluntarily give that up to make a livelihood hunting and gathering food and warming themselves on a cold winter evening by huddling with others around a fire made of burning buffalo dung. In short, given a choice between unsustainable comfort in an impoverished ecosystem and sustainable hardship in an ecologically healthy system of rich biological diversity, not many would hesitate to opt the former. After all, there are fewer mosquitoes hovering around one's laptop in Starbucks than around one's unwashed body in a mountain forest.

The Chinese Daoist satirist Zhuangzi asked more than two thousand years ago why people kept building bridges over rivers and spoiling the serenity of the waterways with rowboats. Why can't people be content to stay where they are? Why do they build machines to save them from having to work with their own bodies? When we build machines, he observed, our hearts and minds become mechanical, and when our hearts and minds become more like machines, we lose our ability to enjoy the beauties of nature and of loving relationships with one another.

As I sit in my living room staring stupidly at a television set showing numbing pictures of plumes of crude petroleum rising into the ocean like columns of smoke blackening the blue summer sky, my old friend Zhuangzi makes more and more sense. Why, I wonder, am I not listening?

Learning from Granddaddy

A couple of years ago I had the unexpected pleasure of going to a social event in an apartment that was right above the apartment where my grandfather lived when I was a child. He lived in the apartment from 1935 until his death in 1964, and I spent many of my most joyful moments there. I have been past the apartment building many times over the years but had never been inside. The apartment immediately above his had almost exactly the same layout, so being in it was almost like returning to childhood for a few moments. As in all returns to childhood, everything had changed almost beyond recognition.

As a child, I learned a lot of important things from my grandfather. He taught me how to play solitaire, an important skill for an only child. He also taught me how to cheat at solitaire, which he said was an acceptable thing to do, since no one was really being cheated except an ornery deck of cards. Any other kind of cheating, of course, he strongly discouraged. He also taught me how to read the baseball statistics in the sports page, and eventually he taught me how to keep track of a baseball game on a scorecard. He also taught me how to use a typewriter and let me practice using his old Smith-Corona, the machine on which during my childhood I composed a number of stories about improbable heroes. I learned all that and more from him when I was a boy, soaking up knowledge of the world around me like a sponge left in the kitchen sink.

This year I'm the same age my grandfather was when I was born. I find I'm learning from him again. I'm learning from his example as I recall them, and I find a great deal of what he taught me through example is something that not only I, but many people I know, could benefit from mastering.

My grandfather was born in 1982 and spent his early life on a farm in Kansas. The electric light bulb was invented just four years before he was born, and he did not have electrical lighting for much of his early life. He was seven years old when Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz made the first automobile, and he was 26 years old when the first Model-T Ford came out in 1908. I have no idea when he starting driving a car, but I know he never trusted an automobile as much as a horse, or at least that's what he said. As long as he lived, he preferred to walk any distance less than about three miles. It didn't make much sense to start up the car to go any distance that could be walked to in less than an hour.

My grandfather had a telephone, so people could contact him. He initiated no more than about four calls a year. A telephone conversation with him rarely lasted more than thirty seconds, just long enough to make arrangements to meet somewhere in person so that one could have a proper conversation.

Perhaps because he never quite got over the feeling that electricity was a miracle, and a darned expensive one at that, he never turned on a light switch until it was pretty nearly impossible to see which cards were laid out in his solitaire game. The lights were never on during the day, of course. When he ate lunch in the small dining room of his apartment, he never turned on the overhead light, even though there were no windows in the room, and precious little light came through the small window in the adjacent kitchen. Electrical lights were to use after the sun was well down, and even then they were turned on only when there was really something one had to see (such as the cards in a solitaire game.) To my great shame, I probably use as much electricity in a day as he did in a few months, despite the fact that I use compact fluorescent bulbs and have formed the habit of turning lights off when I leave a room. Like most people I know, my house is full of appliances and gadgets that never existed when I was a child. All of them, strictly speaking, are unnecessary. It's a shame that I've become accustomed to having them.

People of my grandfather's generation never used credit cards, and they never bought anything for which they hadn't saved up the money. If my grandfather did not have enough cash in his savings account to make a purchase, he reckoned he had no real need to make that purchase. If there was a need, he saved up until he had the money to make it. As a consequence of those habits, he was a frugal man. He used a deck of cards until at least have the cards had broken in half and were held together with cellophane tape. When it was no longer possible to make out whether a face card was a King or a Jack, it was time to start thinking about getting a new deck, but not before. He wore a pair of shoes until it was no longer possible to repair them by having another sole and heel put on them.

As much as he approved of me, and even doted on me as only a proud grandfather can do, he did express his concern about how wasteful youngsters of my generation had become. Not wanting to dismay him too much, I developed the habit of keeping things rather than throwing them away, just in case I would someday learn to repair them or find some other use for them than the use for which they had been invented. I had several shoe boxes full of pencil stubs too short to sharpen further, eraser crumbs, and rusting paper clips. For about ten years I held on to a spark plug that I had found in an alley way. Unfortunately, I never did find a use for most of the contents of those shoe boxes. The only effect that came from keeping them was a habit to hang on to things that no one could use. That habit does have one good effect. It reminds me how many of the habits a person forms are really pretty useless, if not downright destructive. That's a good thing to be reminded of.

These days, as I look around at homes and offices filled with electrical and electronic equipment, gymnasiums filled with exercise machines that use electricity to tell people who many calories they are burning off, driveways with several vehicles parked in them, people ambling along talking into mobile telephones to tell people the stupendously important news that they are in a shopping mall and are thinking of buying a beef taco, and people using fuel-consuming machines to blow leaves instead of raking them or to mow a patch of turf that a push-mower could take care of in ten minutes, I wonder what on earth my grandfather would think of the world we now live in. If asked what is wrong with this picture, he would know the answer right away. Everything.

Pretty much everything has gone wrong. The average American family, I just heard on a news program, is $16,000 in debt, not counting mortgages for living accommodations. People are going into debt to buy things that make them lazy and sick. Our economy is no longer based on the manufacture and sale of goods and necessities. It is based on the manufacture of bads. People spend far less on needs than on their many addictions. Civilization has been destroyed and replaced with a pseudo-culture of delusions and fantasies. The American dream has turned into the world's nightmare. It needn't have turned out this way. But it did. Or at least it has so far. We cannot continue on the course we're on. Reality will not allow it.

Some of the damage done to civilization and the environment is irreversible. Some of the destructive habits we have let ourselves fall into might be unlearned, if we have the will to do things in ways that at first feel a little awkward and uncomfortable. Learning how to live a sensible and sustainable life might be possible if we study the ways of some of our ancestors. I have a grandfather to remember. You probably have someone, too.

Trying every solution but the obvious

It feels as though the US presidential primaries have been on forever. All the slogans have been memorized—“Change we can believe in,” “Ready to lead on day one,” “Faith, Family, Freedom”—and positions have been outlined in debate after debate. Candidates have been grilled by news anchors and commentators, and all the pandits have weighed in with their opinion as to who is most likely to win the black vote in general, the affluent black vote, the rural black vote, the dership by doing all those things?)

If one were to say such a thing, the response of much of the American public would likely be very much like that of the a news commentator whom I happened to hear yesterday saying “Some of the politicians would have us sitting in the cold and the dark. Well not me! I don't want to live like a European !” (I wish I knew which politicians were honest enough to say that more of us should be sitting in the cold and the dark. If I knew who was saying that, I might have a better idea whom to vote for.)

When environmental issues were being brought to everyone's attention a couple of decades ago, we all learned about the Three R's: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The order of those three measures was important; the most effective was named first, the least effective last. And yet recycling is about the only one that has received serious and sustained attention. There is money to be made in recycling. But if people stop buying unnecessary goods, and if they use things until they are no longer needed and then give them to someone else who may have a use for them, then dramatically fewer things will be bought and sold and manufactured. Dramatically fewer things would be thrown into landfill sites or burned or shredded. Reductions in manufacturing, sales and waste management, we are told, would mean fewer jobs and less economic growth. A slower economy is un-American.

So if doing what is right for the environment—living sustainably with the resources that the earth provides and reducing the amount of toxicity poured into the water and air and soil—is bad for the economy as we now know it, then doing what is right for the environment must be un-American. That so many Americans apparently think this way, and feel no shame for their addictions to possessions and comforts and pleasures, is very bad news for the third planet from the sun. And because it is bad news for the earth, it is also very bad news for the very people who are unwilling to change the way they live.

Those political candidates who are calling for change are right. Things must change. But the changes we require are not going to be achieved simply by having news faces in the the White House and the Congress. The changes we require amount to nothing less than a radical change in human behavior, and those changes probably cannot be made without equally radical changes in human nature. Philosophers and religious leaders have been saying as much since writing was first used to record human thoughts. The advice has been given repeatedly and eloquently. It has rarely been heeded. There is not much evidence that the advice will be heeded now.

This year's presidential campaign so far has focused on hope, experience, national security and conservative values. Experience shows there is little hope that the environment will be conserved and that the entire nation is therefore deeply insecure. Which politician has the honesty to try to win the vote of reflective people by saying that?

Indulging ourselves to death

The Chinese Daoist author Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) looked around the world in which he lived some twenty-five centuries ago and asked “Why are there so many boats on the river? Why are people building bridges just so they can easily get to the other side of the river? What is wrong with people that they can't be happy where they are?”

Do you have an answer to his question? Do you understand your own Wanderlust, your own compulsion to travel, whether by bicycle or automobile or airplane or virtually by serfing the Web? What is wrong with you? What is wrong with me?

One thing that is wrong with both you and me is that we are part of a network of enterprises that are destroying the only planet available to us and to our descendants. One Quaker writer, Marshall Massey, has argued that our current willingness to live in a way that destroys the earth that our children's children will inherit is morally equivalent to slavery. The people who founded the United States of America benefited from the labor of slaves. This was not much less true of those who did not own slaves than it was of those who did. People in colonial times enjoyed goods and services produced in an economy that depended heavily on the involuntary labor of captured human beings, people who would never enjoy all the things that their forced labor made possible. Today we look back on slave enconomies and find them deplorable. We feel a sense of justifiable smugness about our own moral superiority to our ancestors (or to those who enslaved our ancestors, as the case may be).

And yet we ourselves are enjoying goods that are, in effect, being stolen from future generations. We are living comfortable lives by depleting the resources of the earth, thereby making it impossible for our descendants to enjoy what we enjoy—perhaps even making it impossible for them to survive at all. Our oblivious insensitivity to the effects of our lifestyles reaches a scale of immorality—of evil if you prefer that term—that makes slavery look like a charitable institution in comparison.

Our generation is certainly not the first to live an unsustainable lifestyle. History is full of civilizations that have so destroyed their environments that the civilization fell into a state of ruin. In the Mesopotamia, the so-called cradle of civilization (in what is now Iraq), both the Sumerians and the Babylonians had enough people living such lavish lives that the environment eventually collapsed, bringing the human cultures down with them. The Romans had a similar effect on the environment of northern Africa during the times when rich and powerful people in the Roman Empire were living in luxury. The Easter Islanders, the Mayans of Guatemala and southern Mexico, and various other indigenous peoples in North America lived beyond the sustainability of their environments. People have been in the business of indulging themselves beyond the capacity of their environments to sustain their greedy pursuits for a very long time.

What makes modern times different from these past examples of environmental collapse, of course, is that nearly everyone everywhere is participating in a pursuit of pleasure and comfort that puts severe strains on the environment. When people destroyed their environments in the past, they could migrate to a new location. In the world in which we now live, the human population has grown so large that nearly all habitats that can sustain human life are filled to overflowing with human populations. The effect of the world-wide degradation of the environment is cumulative, both across space and through time. Environmental scientists have made the following observations:

• 20,000 species a year are going extinct, most of them because of degradation of the environment due to human activities.
• Human beings collectively consume approximately 20% more resources than the earth can produce.
• As a result, 60% of the earth's ecosystems have been severely compromised.
• At current rates of extinction, it is estimated that 12% of all bird species, 25% of mammal species and 30% of all amphibian species are likely to be extinct by the end of the 21st century. If you are a parent with young children, your grandchildren will live to see all this extinction —provided your children and grandchildren live as long as human beings now live, which may turn out not to be the case.
• 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators (such as tuna, swordfish and sharks) have disappeared in recent years.
• Degraded plastic is now found everywhere in the earth's oceans, and biologists report that all species living in and near the ocean have significant traces of plastic in their systems. Plastic is not bio-degradable, has no nutritional value, and often impedes the normal biological processes that keep a species healthy. Its toxic omnipresence is slowly strangling all the lifeforms on our planet.

While nearly every intelligent and well-informed person shows at least some level of concern about our relationship with the environment, few are both willing and able to see what radical changes would be required of all of us in how we live, what we buy, how and where and how often we travel.

It is as if we all believe that our own personal projects are so important that we can be excused from adjusting our lives. (For example, I am using the energy-guzzling medium of the Internet to disseminate this message. Does the fact that I am writing about the environment somehow lighten my share of the burden that is being placed on the weary earth? Does the fact that you are reading this message reduce your impact on the environment? You and I both ahve some thining to do.)

Every man woman and child, whether he or she is a Buddhist, a Christian, a Hindu, a Humanist, a Jew, a Muslim, a Sikh or a Wiccan, owes it to the rest of the human race and to future generations to give some thought to these questions.

• Why are we individually and collectively so blind and deaf to the effects our personal decisions have on other human beings, on animals and on plants?
• If we would like to put this into the language of Asian systems of thought, why are we so oblivious of our karma and its ripening?
• If we would like to put it into the language of the Abrahamic religions, why are we so unwilling to be custodians of God's creation and to preserve it for our descendants? How can we be so sinfully scornful of the creation of which we are a part?
• To put the matter in a language anyone can understand, how did we descend into such an abysmal ignorance and insensitivity that we fail to see the obvious?
• How can we change? If so, when do we start? Why are we waiting?

There is an environmentalist named Kurt Hoelting, who draws upon both Christian and Buddhist sources of inspiration, as well as upon scientific literature. He stresses our need as human beings to be in touch with wilderness. By losing touch with wilderness, he writes “we have placed our own psyches on the endangered species list.” The destruction of the environment is not only the consequence of our collective insanity; it is the cause of further forms of insanity. We have lost touch with something fundamental to who we are. We have lost touch not only with our animal natures but with what some would call our divine natures, namely, our ability to reason and to imagine courses of action other than the ones to which we have become habituated. This is nothing new, of course. The Chinese Daoist philosophers asked the provocative question “Of all the ten thousand things in nature, why is it that only human beings have to ask themselves ‘What is the Way?’” While the situation is not new, it is arguably more critical now than it has ever been before. We are now at the point where we cannot afford to be insane any longer.

To a human being in touch with wilderness, and with that part of nature that is not dominated by human obsessions with comfort and with pleasure, it is perfectly obvious that the individual self is a pure fiction. None of us are individuals. No one is independent. No one is free. No one can be secure. To pursue such fictions as individual rights and freedoms, and autonomy and freedom and security is to chase phantoms of one's vain imagining. We are all in this together—you and I and the chickadees and the mice and the salmon and the ladybugs and the juniper trees. Not one of us is free of the others or independent of the others—all of them.

When we lose touch with nature, we gain something, but what we gain is an illusion, an impossible dream that may begin with a seductive pleasantness but that sooner or later turns into a nightmare. We gain the delusion of individual selfhood and autonomous agency, and with that acquisition we take on the full brunt of the calamity of modern human life: the competitiveness, the greed, the insensitivity to others, the narcissistic isolation that manifests itself in constant struggle at the personal level and in warfare among peoples. When each of us is living in a way that depletes the available resources of material goods and energy, it is inevitable that we eventually feel justified in fighting to the death over them. We convince ourselves that we are entitled to live as we wish and that those who have the resources we need to do so are somehow undeserving to be living on the land that has the resources we crave. We turn them into demons. We invade their land. We kill them. Then we cannot understand why they resent us, and we turn their resentment into further evidence of their moral inferiority. This story is as old as history itself. But it is not the only story told in human history.

Ever since the dawn of recorded human history, there have been people offering us alternatives to the madness of personal and collective greed. In every part of the earth and in every culture there have been those who have invited us to learn to be content with having just what we need to survive, to be content with going no further than walking distance from our homes, or to be content to have so few possessions that we can easily carry our homes on our backs. Few people, especially in groups of people who pride themselves on being “civilized” accept the invitation. We may delude ourselves into thinking we are following the Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad, but how many people actually manage to live their lives as these great men lived theirs? There are a small handful of people who actually follow the examples of simplicity manifested in the lives of the Buddha or the Christ, but there are billions who imagine they are doing so.

You have read this. Now, what do you propose to do?

Is nuclear energy a solution to global warming?

The MIT study

In 2003 an interdisciplinary study group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study called The Future of Nuclear Power. The study is worth reading in full, but what I would like to focus upon here is a few of their observations and one of their important underlying assumptions.

First, the conclusion that the study reaches is that global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions as a result of human energy consumption is a serious problem that must be addressed. In that context, the study says that are there are possible strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that at this time none of those strategies should be rejected. The four strategies are:

1. increasing efficiency in electricity generation and use;
2. expanding the use of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass and geothermal;
3. the sequestration of carbon, that is, capturing carbon dioxide emissions at coal-fueled electrical generating stations and isolating it in places where it cannot easily enter the atmosphere; and
4. increasing the use of nuclear power.

Of those four strategies, all of which the study advocates using, the only one it studies in some depth is the use of nuclear power. It's recommendation is that at this time the best strategy would be to have 1000-1500 nuclear reactors around the world in use by the year 2050.. As of 2003, says the report, there were 366 nuclear reactors in service. So the recommendation is that during the next 43 years the number of nuclear reactors in the world be a little more than doubled at least and a little more than quadrupled at most. This would require the building of somewhere between fifteen and twenty-six nuclear reactors every year between now and 2050.

Hazards of increased use of nuclear power

The MIT study outlines several hazards of the increased use of nuclear-generated electricity. The principal concerns as with safety of using nuclear power, security risks of producing and storing nuclear fuel, and unresolved problems of waste disposal.

Safety

No nuclear plant design, says the study, is totally risk free. The possibility of leaks of hazardous levels radioactive materials into the environment arises from two realities: 1) any complex technological system is prone to having flaws in the design, and 2) any technological system operated by human beings is prone to human error. The most one could hope for, says the study, is to keep the probability of accidents down to an acceptable level. The acceptable level they suggest is one serious accident per fifty years. This level represents a ten-fold reduction in serious accidents from the level that has been attained up to this time.

It is worth asking how likely it is that a ten-fold reduction in the rate of accidents could be achieved. Even maintaining current levels of safety would require a steady repair of already existing nuclear plants, many of which in the United States are already older than the forty years for which they were designed to operate. Of at least equal concern is that maintaining and operating nuclear power facilities would require constantly educating people to serve as operators. In an atmosphere of general decline in education in the United States in mathematics and the sciences and technology, there is no reason to be optimistic that reliable operators will continue to be trained in the United States. In many important ways, the culture of expertise in the United States is in decline, and there are at present no signs that this trend will soon be reversed.

Waste management

Under this heading the report says:

The management and disposal of high-level radioactive spent fuel from the nuclear fuel cycle is one of the most intractable problems facing the nuclear power industry throughout the world. No country has yet successfully implemented a system for disposing of this waste.

At present there is only one site for high-level waste management in the United States, namely, Yucca Mountain in Nevada. To accommodate the proposed increased use of nuclear power, says the study, there would have to be similar storage facilities created somewhere in the world every three to four years. Moreover, the problem of safely moving radioactive waste from nuclear plants to these facilities would have to be solved much better than is now the case. While the short-term risks ofradioactive contamination are not too serious, says the study, the long-term risks are much more serious. Again, maintaining disposal sites requires the very best in technology and in human training and moral integrity. In a rapidly changing world such as ours, neither of these requirements can be counted on.

Security risks

Another hazard that has yet to be resolved satisfactorily is the likelihood of enriched uranium and plutonium falling into the possession of people who would not use it for peaceful purposes. It appears that the current trajectory of human civilization is not in the direction of greater co-operation and harmony. Even if hostilities around the world did not rise from their current levels, the likelihood of discontented groups of individuals breaching nuclear facilities or fuel-generating plants with catastrophic consequences for thousands or millions of people is a sobering reality.

Availability of fuel

One further point the study makes, albeit as a positive point, is that one can expect the world's supply of easily available uranium to last for approximately fifty years. After that, resources will be most probably become scarce. What the study does not say spell out is that when uranium becomes scarce, then a world that has become dependent on it for electrical production will be as likely to fight over scarce nuclear fuel as it has been to fight over dwindling fossil fuel resources. In other words, the nuclear solution is another short-term solution. Unlike others, however, it is accompanied by serious potential risks of catastrophic consequences, especially in the long term.

Unexamined presupposition

Despite all these potential risks, the MIT study group concludes that increased use of electricity produced by nuclear processes is less likely to produce disastrous consequences than the continued use of fossil fuels at current levels. That conclusion is very sobering for two reasons: it highlights just how serious the consequences of continued use of fossil fuels are, and it makes it sound as though there is no alternative to living in a world that is increasingly compromised by human consumption of energy.

What the study assumes is that human beings will continue to use electrical energy at the same rate of acceleration as it has during the past fifty years. Energy consumption in the United States has quadrupled during the past fifty years, as the population of the country has doubled. That means per-capita energy consumption in the United States has doubled. No responsible scientist of policy maker believes our current level of energy consumption is sustainable. It simply cannot continue to increase. Itcannot even remain at anything near its present rate.

Conclusion

Unlike the MIT study group, I am inclined to say that increased use of nuclear-energy-fueled electricity production is not a strategy that it would be responsible to pursue in the United States or anywhere else in the world. We who are living now owe it to future generations to find a way of living that dramatically reduces our negative impact on the environment. The increased use of solar, wind and geothermal energy is something to pursue. But even more important is a significant reduction of our use of electricity and other alternatives to using the energy of our own muscles. The human being is not designed to do as little physical work as most people in “developed” countries now do. When a human body does too little walking, lifting, carrying, reaching and moving, it tends to become overweight and to suffer a wide range of threats to health.

The next time you go to the gym to use electricity-driven machines to do some kind of exercise that could much better be done by using your body to do work and by using the legs to get from one place to another, ask yourself: What is wrong with this picture?