TRILOGY JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1992 0 ne of the great phenomena of our times is the environmental movement. Like any popular, large-scale movement, it has its irresponsible fringes, but it is impressive not only for its power, but for the number of its thoughtful, reasoning supporters. And none too soon, because within the past half-century the growing world population's drive to industrialize has reached the point where human activity is clearly damaging the environment, in some cases irreversibly. Such damage is not unique to our own times; the deforestation of ancient Greece and much of Europe and Britain in the past few hundred years are examples. Now the damage has become general and worldwide. The first, and intellectually the simplest response to that damage was to cry "Stop!" The earliest, and still a popular theme was, "If it's new technology or an expansion of old, stop it." We have, at least for now, effectively stopped the development of nuclear power in the United States. That happened because environmentalists feared reactor accidents and the certainty of nuclear wastes, and because of the mental association of "nuclear" with weapons. Though educated as a nuclear physicist, I happen to agree with that rejection, for specific reasons which seem rational to me. Successes like that, if such we call them, are isolated. France, a nation as advanced as our own and with its own strong environmental movement, continues to rely oveiwhelmingly on nuclear power. In the past 70 years, the drive to industrialize was so strong in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that environmental concerns were totally buried. Those examples point to worldwide forces that are, and probably always will remain, stronger by far than the forces allied for preservation of the Earth. Those forces are individuals' aspirations for a better standard of living. In developing nations the paramount drive is feeding one's own family and improving, even a little, the conditions of life. The destruction of the Brazilian rain forest, over-grazing in Africa, and pollution in the majority of Third World cities all attest to what forces win out in places where the standard of living is still far below that achieved in Europe, Japan, and the United States. How can we solve the problem? Even to INDUSTRY The least-developed industrial nations use only a hundredth as much energy as the most developed-but they suffer a living standard a hundred times lower in consequence.
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