TUESDAY, MAY 31, 2022: NOTE TO FILE

Survival of Spaceship Earth

A 1972 film

Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS

TOPICS: HUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEMATIQUE, FROM THE WIRES, LISTEN

Abstract: This film was produced for delegates to the first UN Comission on the Human Environment in 1972 to view, dubbed in 85 laguages. It was reportedly 'well received'. Scientists had been warning those in power for the last 10 years, and some were concerned enough to put up the money to make the film. Eight scientists got to express their concerns (and others to organize the conference), but only within the context of the assumption that governments, including their UN representatives, are the source of solutions. Conspiracy theorists believe the film was made to order by the New World Order, i.e. by our shape-shifting reptoid overlords. The film was seen by the public in 1992.

COOS BAY (A-P) — We have been warned many times by a few scholars/scientists that we modern techno-industrialized humans are destroying a planetary life-support system while imagining we can, to use a currently favored word, 'decouple' from nature and keep on keeping on. I fail to give video presentations 'a careful hearing' if I don't have a transcript, so I have had to make my own on a number of occasions. The year 1972 is starting to look special. It was the year Limits to Growth, this film, and if I recall correctly, the year Catton actually wrote the draft for 'Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change' published in 1980.

So maybe 1972 was humanity's 'Houston, we have a problematique' warning. The 1980s could be considered the decade of denial of (or simply ignoring) all prior warnings. The 1992 repackaging and the first World Scientists' Warning to Humanity 1992 seems to have been the last communique year to address the issues/existential concerns for humanity and the biosphere meme such that it could be briefly reconsidered before a consensus narrative arose among the intelligentsia that Limits to Growth had made predictions that failed to happen (it didn't), and so concerns about limits, too many people, and overshoot can and must be ignored by all right thinking thought leaders (so if you aspire to be one, don't even think about mentioning 'overpopulation'). We have since come to double down on denial, but our denial is unsustainable too. There are limits to denial.

Anyone educated since 1992, apart from a few autodidacts, is likely cluelessly unaware of How the World Really Works (A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future). My understanding is that while there may be smoke-filled rooms full of would-be rulers, but no one in or out of them is actually running the show. We are all riders of a storm (dissipative structure), part of a growth hegemon that is rapidly incurring an extinction debt (overshoot debt) posterity (most or all) will have to pay, a growth dynamic that is not remotely sustainable even though all Anthropocene enthusiasts deeply believe it is, there being a galaxy for the taking (and somebody has to take it).

On the upslope, politicians have been eager to take credit for the growth everyone loved, but as we move into climax and descent (even though no one voted for it), I'm guessing none will take credit for things falling apart. The public, however, will have to blame someone, anyone, other than themselves. They will form factions to fight over who will inherit the rubble..., oh, we already are, so never mind.

The video includes the scientist's warning message, but also that of policymakers, assorted 'thought leaders', and UN personnel who viewed themselves as the solution. To quote one, 'Unless the people of the world understand that what Stockholm is asking of them is really nothing less than a new sense of direction for the whole human race, then it's not realistic to expect that the governments of the world will take the kind of decisions that will make that possible.'

My best guess is that maybe 0.001% of people (then or now) understand their predicament enough to maybe effectively alter it. No one is suppressing information with the exception of everyone. I had full access to the information then (even though I couldn't have seen this film). The scientists, by 1972, had informed everyone who could listen, especially those pretending to govern the world, and so some scientists still had some hope that effective action could be taken following the first UN conference on the environmental crisis. With a 50-year hindsight, the information (that was available to the public if not on page 1 each day) was water off our collective duck's back. Our monetary culture selects for short-term self interests.

Watch the film, perhaps with captions on, or skip to the edited version of the transcript for the science-based content without the political drum beating. Two scientists do not appear (John Holdren and Russell T. Jordan (listed as a 'science advisor' who may not have been a scientist, who was also an associate producer, but I was unable to determine why Jordan was listed among the science advisors), but wrote some of the lines the narrators spoke (along with Rene Dubos who does appear). Dirk Summers (writer/actor), the film's producer and director, along with Barbara Ward (Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, British economist/writer with focus on developing contries, an early advocate of sustainable development), wrote other lines spoken by the narrators (Hugh Downs and Ramond Burr). Or skip both for the full transcript.

Survival of Spaceship Earth 1972

The Edited Version Featuring the Scientist's Warnings:

[Hugh Downs] Today, all the peoples of the world are moving into the same world, the world created by the accelerated technology of the 20th century, a world shaped by the people and events of that time. Our time.

In the 20th century we reached for the moon and developed the technology to grasp it. We traveled backward in time and saw what our own planet looked like in its primordial beginnings. Although we may travel in space and visit the moon, the earth is still our home because it's unique, the only accessible planet that can sustain our life.

[Raymond Burr] This film is an effort to an understanding of the environmental crisis and it's possible cure. We are looking at our earth. The thin red line running along the outer perimeter is our biosphere. As seen from space, it is the smallest veil of cover, imperceptible and delicate, the only known place in our solar system that can sustain life for man.

We cannot exist more than a few thousand feet above our earth, nor can we yet live beneath our oceans and soil. Most of us exist near sea level the inescapable fact is that man can exist only in his biosphere.

[Margaret Mead] The air we breathe is indivisible and this is something that we all share and is impossible for any group of people, any individual, any country to possess.

[Hugh Downs] The basic cause of the problem is people. As the population of the world rapidly increases, there is greater demand on the Earth's basic resources of land, water, and air. This planet's capacity to give sustenance, and to absorb and recycle waste, is not boundless.

In the next 25 years, the Earth's population will increase more than it has in the last million years. And to the nations of the world this poses a greater threat than anything we have experienced before. People on every continent, all facing disaster if we don't find a solution for the population explosion that now threatens the world. Because man, like all creatures, needs and depends upon the oxygen, the water, the food that is provided by the self balancing tendency of nature, and this is being threatened by the technology that makes civilization possible.

By our interfering with natural processes, we are destroying the natural environment upon which we all depend. If we do not now take action, drastic action, and develop the wisdom to maintain an environment which is basic to all life, the only answer can be disaster.

[Margaret Mead] I do think, to begin with, governments often appoint commissions so they won't have to deal with the problem. In this whole population question, I think we have to talk first about balance. We want to balance the population, the people that are here at any one time, with the resources at any one time. And we know at the moment we don't have the resources. We don't have the teachers to teach them. We don't have the doctors to care for them. We don't have enough older people to care for them because the older people are still dying. The children we've been saving, and in countries like the United States and northern Europe, we, each child, at present is responsible for using so much energy and producing so much pollution that this is a danger too.

[Raymond Burr] A prominent geo-astronomer, Dr. Walter Orr Roberts is president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

[Walter Orr Roberts] Well, I think, I think we need to first of all recognize that there is probably somewhere a limit to the population, but that we don't know what that limit is, and I do think that, in parallel with a study of what the true limits are to population growth, that that our ultimate limits for mankind, we should put a great deal of effort on to just what you have said, the better life with less waiste, better life with less energy, better life with less transportation, better life for the human being, almost certainly urban, but with opportunities to get out into nature more easily than now. Just the better life, and it can be done.

[Margaret Mead] There are places where the concentration of population is so dense, it's so terrible, that no one has a decent life now. Even if they aren't industrialized, and if they are industrialized it makes it a thousand times worse.

[Raymond Burr] Dr. Harrison Brown is Professor of Geochemistry and of Science and Government at the California Institute of Technology. He is foreign secretary of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC.

[Harrison Brown] There are several population problems and the most obvious one, of course, is that there are so very many people and that the numbers of people are growing so rapidly. But superimposed upon that, there would be population problems in these countries even were the population itself not growing. This results from the fact that people are moving so very rapidly from the land into the city.

[Margaret Mead] We have a population that, because of the way it's distributed, and because of the strain on the use of power and the use of pesticides and insecticides and all these things, a population that is endangering life in this whole planet and one is part of the other. Furthermore, the enormous population increase, increase that we're powerless to stem immediately, because we're undoubtedly going on is something like seven billion people. Obviously this is no moment to increase population. In fact, it's a moment to postpone the increase. I think, if we can think about the unborn children who will be our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren our great-grandchildren, we have an obligation to them, but they should not be born in a moment when their chances of the good life are so poor. We should postpone their birth until we've got this problem in hand so we're making this planet safer for people.

[Harrison Brown] Urbanization is taking place in these areas with frightening rapidity. People are moving into cities faster than city services can be provided, such as housing, sewage, transportation, and as a result of that you find it's a common phenomenon in virtually all of the developing countries, in virtually all of the poor countries, the rise of the vast slum areas: the variados of Lima the bustees of Calcutta the favelas of Rio de Janeiro... they have different names, but it's basically of the same phenomenon. Their slum area is growing out of control. Related to that is still another problem, and that is the people are pouring into the city more rapidly and jobs to be provided. So you have vast unemployment in these areas, and when you have vast unemployment, crowded conditions, conditions of deprivation and poverty, and have unrest. Basically you are creating conditions of instability.

There is only one remedial measure and that is development. It is terribly important that these areas develop more rapidly than they are developing now so that jobs can be provided, so that more food can be grown to relieve hunger, so that more facilities for education, for public health that can be created, so that death rates can be lowered and human happiness can be increased.

[Margaret Mead] This population increase is endangering the quality of life everywhere we can take less good care of our children, we don't know how we're going to build houses for enough of them when you realize that we have to build as many new dwelling units as of ever being built in the history of man we're going to house the people that live here now properly.

[Raymond Burr] Dr. Rene Dubos, the eminent microbiologist, is recognized as one of the world's foremost scientific humanists, and a Pulitzer winner.

[Rene Dubos] At the present time the population in this country, and in Europe, is increasing at the rate of about one percent a year. Whereas the consumption of electric power and the consumption of resources is increasing at the rate of six percent a year, so that even if we were to stop population growth we are not going to solve our problems unless we do something about the technological enterprise.

So first let me make clear that control of the technological enterprise is just as important as control of population, but after saying this much I also believe that unless we control population we won't solve our problem.

[Margaret Mead] So in this generation, now, we should invite fewer people to be born....

[Harrison Brown] Vastly greater quantities of materials are poured into the atmosphere, poured into streams, and so forth. What what goes into our system has to go out of the system in the form of refuge and then in the form of pollution.

[Rene Dubos] I questioned that we will be killed by pollution. Man is immensely adaptable. After all, there has never been a more polluted environment than the industrial areas of northern Europe a century ago at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. There's nothing in our time which is as polluted as this world, and men have survived. Men survived in the most terrible situations, with very little food, so the question is not destruction, the question is whether it is worth surviving under these conditions.

[Margaret Mead] What we're worrying about is what's going to happen to the atmosphere all around our earth and it's going to hit you where ever you are: in Africa and Asia and South America, just as much as it will hit the principal polluters in the world.

[Rene Dubos] For the first time in the history of mankind we have during the past 50 years introduced a variety of substances with which Nature has had no experience in the past so that nature does not know how to deal with them and when we speak of systems set aside but not what we really need that this is a kind of pesticide for which day is not in nature to destroy them and that's it perhaps largest single problem that we face today.

[Hugh Downs] In the controversy between population numbers and technological residues, which is the more crucial issue, the population or the pollution?

[Margaret Mead] I think that's the wrong question see, and I think we should add war. We should add all the consequences of scientific warfare today with radioactivity and destruction of territory that goes on in a modern war, and we should face the fact that its modern types of warfare, the population explosion, and the endangered planet in terms of the kinds of pollution that we're giving it, all together, that are producing the crisis.

[Walter Orr Roberts] Environmental problems of the atmosphere are very connected to weather forecasting and to weather research. The very same techniques that allow us to assess the distribution of rainfall, cloud cover, and so on are involved in assessing the fate of atmospheric pollutants, where they'll drift, to what the chemical reactions will be that occur. And, in fact, what the impact man's activity will be on the weather itself. And I suspect that one of the very most important studies of the next two or three decades will be the study of what the added heat pollution, the added dust burden, to the atmosphere by man's activities, what that actually does, will do to the climates so it's very much the same problem.

[Raymond Burr] The central fact in the consumption patterns of modern man is combustion. A very large part of our individual mobility and entertainment is tied up with the internal combustion engine, the pride, the joy, the workhorse of modern man, his car. In the United States there is now virtually one automobile for every second citizen.

We are, in fact, a new species, half man half automobiles, and it is the heavy breathing of our motorized half that poisons the air, destroys the lungs, and creates smog city. Yet cars are clearly the most popular of all consumer durables. They appear in the wake of affluence as man's first technological love. They will not be easily eliminated

An enormous part of our increased demand for more and more energy is satisfied through the burning of fossil fuels. A major problem is with coal. Electricity generation is expected to triple by 1990. Coal will still be providing at least half of this vastly increased flow. It is plentiful, although, to get it many countries will pay a terrible environmental price in scarred, abandoned landscapes. The air in Tokyo is so poisoned that special exercises are given to increase respiratory capability. These children are performing a daily practice that will hopefully strengthen their lungs.

[Rene Dubos] What we have to learn to do is to make it clear to people, whether they belong to rich countries or to developing countries, that whatever happens to our environment, in way of pollution or resources, will affect their individual lives, and more importantly the life of their children.

[Margaret Mead] Now I don't think we should talk about countries as growing. Countries aren't single organisms and if we talk about their growing we are saying in effect that if they finally reach maturity, the next thing they will do is to be senescent, senile and dead.

[Harrison Brown] At the present time there are 130 no some odd nations, each of which like to consider itself as sovereign, each of which likes to think that it can do anything it pleases. We now know that we are locked together in many ways. We inhabit this single planet together, and with the high levels of technology, we are beginning to interfere with each other.

[Hugh Downs] What do you say to a poor nation that pesticide and the right to develop, a nation that might not be so cautious about pollution?

[Margaret Mead] Well, I say you will, poor country. I understand it perfectly. I mean, you're trying to get the very rudiments of love. We're trying to get water into a village, you're trying to get electric lights into places where there's never been light before, and this means a tremendous amount to you. And I understand perfectly that if you think this issue is an issue about pollution, just as such, you know, that you may pollute a river, or you may deforest some of your hills, or you may destroy some of your land in some way or other. If you think this is a temporary local issue and see it as a barrier to a better life for all your people, of course you're against it and you think of it as something for the rich countries, but it isn't and it isn't local.

[Raymond Burr] Many marine biologists feel of the oceans are the most immediately threatened part of the biosphere. One-fifth of the entire quantity of protein consumed by mankind comes from the sea. Only the fact that so much of our planet is composed of water makes it habitable. It was in the oceans, after the downpour of the early rains, that life first began to stir. It was from the oceans that plants and animals emerged to colonize the land surface of the planet. It is the oceans which provides the water vapor which, drawn up by the Sun, falls upon the earth in harvest bringing life-sustaining rain. The oceans are the coolant to the tropics, the bringers of warm currents too cold regions. The universal moderators of temperature throughout the globe. The oceans are our major provider of oxygen. Yet we still appear to be under the ancient concept of an endless ocean.

[Margaret Mead] What's happening to the ocean in the middle of the ocean doesn't belong only to the industrialized countries because if we find that we have dangerous desperate toxic pollution in the bottom of the ocean that's going to affect all of us .

[Margaret Mead] We couldn't hope really for people everywhere in the world to understand what's happening when they're so concerned with feeding their own people, or so concerned with the kind of localized pollution we have in Europe and the United States.

[Raymond Burr] The oceans of the world become a global sink, a vast septic tank. Man uses the whole ocean as a receptacle for unwanted material in ways we do not know how much they can stand. In coastal areas we can see and smell a clear present danger. The British taxpayer has some idea of how many millions he had to pay to clean up after the Torrey Canyon disaster.

Modern technology has been called man's salvation and at the same time man's downfall. It is only in the controlled use of technology that man can hope to survive.

[Margaret Mead] We have to be certain now the technology is used for man, and the man is not made the slave of spiraling technology just for the sake of being able to make something new. We've been on a binge we've been on a binge all over the world in the belief that technology could solve everything.

[Raymond Burr] Man's use of technology has often been poorly controlled and often misapplied. These sheep were killed by a toxic accumulation of pesticide transported by undetermined means from an unknown location. Only the lethal results were positively identified.

[Harrison Brown] Our problems are soluble from a purely technological point of view. The real question that confronts us is, are they soluble from a human point of view.

[Rene Dubos] What impresses me more and more is that we have lost contact with the realities of nature, with the realities of the world, because there's always interference between us and direct perception, all those machines, which in some way make our life easier, but make it easier by disassociating us from the world around us and I think this is a very important problem in the rich countries.

[Walter Orr Roberts] I suspect that the style of life that we live will be totally different from today, and that General Motors will be building cities and not automobiles.

[Raymond Burr] The very base of man's existence, soil, has been abused by untold civilizations. Soil has long been laid bare by careless builders and ignorant farmers. The land has been lost in the downhill rush of rain driven water. The land has been stripped of its natural cover and passed through the waters to the ocean. Here the erosion settles over the vital coral reefs, and quickly smothers and kills these underwater havens of marine life. As if the loss of the soil were not enough, man has added his own waste and sewage to kill even more quickly. This reef, once so full of life, has been totally destroyed by the soil filtered down from many streams and the sewage pumped into this bay off the coast of Oahu. The only life these polluted waters can now sustain, the sludge worm, this scavenger, who seems to thrive on refuse.

With care and planning this same reef would have been alive and teeming with marine life providing the essentials for man's continued existence.

[Harrison Brown] People, very seldom, are going to do things just because it's a good thing to do. Their other has to be an incentive. I personally feel that one of the most important incentives that we can have is to increase the price of energy. Energy is ridiculously inexpensive when it comes right down to it, and as a result we waste it, we throw it away, we leave electric lights on, we take unnecessary trips, and so forth. We are able to do that, because we don't have to worry so much about the cost of energy. If the cost of energy were doubled, people think about it more.

[Hugh Downs] Dr. Brown, if you could address the delegates at the Stockholm conference, what would you say?

[Harrison Brown] I believe I would say that we are to solve the very crucial problems which are confronting mankind collectively. A higher level of cooperation, a higher level of morality, a higher level of discipline will be necessary for all mankind. And i would hope that the delegates from this conference would emerge with a sufficient understanding of these problems, and their seriousness, to express a willingness to delegate a part of the sovereignty which they believe their nations have over these problems, to an international organization, to the United Nations.

[Hugh Downs] What do you think of as a major good that could come out of the Stockholm Conference?

[Margaret Mead] Well, the fact that it's held at all, the fact that it is now a world conference, that people are coming from every country, that every government is alerted to the fact of an environmental crisis.

[Rene Dubos] The change is happening now, and by this I mean, that at very last, it interest the public, and especially the enlightened components of the establishment, have become aware of the urgency of the environmental problem.

[Hugh Downs] The human is not a simple animal. We have harnessed the power of the atom. We have reached the moon, and yet we do not seem to understand our place on earth, in the natural laws that govern us. It is in the understanding of these laws, in action in concord with them, that our salvation lies. The salvation of the earth and our own salvation. There is still time.

[Hugh Downs] Man inhabits two worlds: the natural one that preceded us by billions of years and the world we have built from our technology using our machines and science to create an environment obedient to our purpose and direction.

And now as we enter the last stages of the 20th century, there is a spreading sense of awareness that something fundamental and irrevocable is happening to man's relations between both his worlds. Our new knowledge of planetary interdependence demands a reshaping of our individual loyalties. We must develop a sense of planetary community and commitment. We must make 'our' Earth a center of rational loyalty for all mankind.

Nationalistic loyalties must become secondary to our allegiance to Earth. We can only hope to survive in all our prized diversity by achieving an ultimate loyalty and devotion to our single, beautiful, vulnerable planet, the Earth.

Alone in its life supporting systems, powered by inconceivable energies mediated for us through the most delicate adjustments, is this not a precious home for all us earthlings? Is it not worthy of our love? Does it not deserve all the courage and care which we are capable to preserve it from degradation and destruction?

We've seen what we've done to bring about the destruction of 'our' Earth. Is it not the time now to cure the disease that we ourselves have created? The answer is in our own hands, in your hands. Don't let this moment in time pass or we may never have another, not in our lifetime. Not in anyone's lifetime.

-------------------------------

The 'better view' [of systems ecologist H.T. Odum] starts with the 'two worlds', with noting there are two worldviews. One story is that humans are new comers to a 13.8 billion or so year old cosmos, which we are not the center of, of which we clothed apes know next to nothing. Natural laws govern us, apparently even those who don't belief they do. Other humans may pretend to govern us; in democracies, everyone who votes pretends to, but Nature doesn't listen to our pleas or decrees.

It is in the understanding of Nature's laws that humanity's salvation lies. Without humans on the planet, a damaged biosphere will likely persist and recover. Understanding what Nature selects for leads to a choiceless recognition of boundaries. Freedom (to persist) is the recognition of necessity, obedience to the nature of things, and that recognition changes behavior, limits behavior.

To understand what is selected for, what works (which Nature alone determines), is to persist (be saved). Those who live by a different story (e.g. human exceptionalism/destiny) will pass away even though no one votes to be selected against. The story of limits is antithetical to all empire-serving prior ones that tell stories only Lord Man can Like and Share. There can be two or more inconsilient worldviews, but we don't live in (persist in) two worlds, so recognize which one doesn't go away when you do or humanity does.

A consensus worldview based on evidence and reason is antithetical to the prior and still dominant worldview based on belief as asserted, e.g. in human centrality. One is naturcentric and based on humilitas. The other is humancentric and based on hubris. They both could be wrong, but both cannot be right. A culture includes a shared worldview, a consensus narrative as social construct. A culture based on best-guess stories has yet to emerge or reemerge.

Scientists are choicelessly forced to iterate towards one story, the one Nature tells to those who would endeavor to listen. Scientists listen. Other storytellers can freely invent comforting and believable stories (and incessantly do) that they insist/assert to be true. This dynamic selects for error, ignorance, and illusion—you as consumer are free to pick the story you like. The other dynamic iterates towards one story to live or die by.

These two ways of knowing, of fining things out, are not compatible. We live in Modern Techno-industrial society dominated by a humancentric monetary culture and the stories our wordsmiths tell, whose words all Anthropocene enthusiasts are avid consumers of, are stories told by idiots that signify nothing. Only those who listen to Nature (when actually endeavoring to do so), do not hear the primate prattle of belief-based consensus thinking.

It is entirely possible to serve modern techno-industrial society, to be paid to serve as a scientist whose view through the microscope is focused on the field one is paid to serve to help grow the economy. A minority of working/retired scientists habitually view themselves, others, and the entire system of human activity as possibly ephemeral subsystems within a geobiosphere, i.e. view the planet through the macroscope of systems thinking, which is nature centricism defined.

A lesser percentage of non-scientists habitually endeavor to look through the macroscope. Figure 15 million PhD endowed in the world, and 75% are in STEM. What percentage of the 11,250,000 are de facto members of the matter-energy systems worldview (as distinct from the belief-based monetary culture worldview) within or out of their specialty? If you guess more than one percent, you may be being wildly optimistic, or have known too few people with PhDs (1% of STEM PhDs = 0.002% of adult humans).

What can be done is to consider the two worldviews and self-select into one of them, walking away from the other. If you feel special, think that you can select into both, to embrace both as non-overlaping realms of magisteria, then do so; compartmentalization is possible, but don't expect to transmit a two-magisteria worldview to posterity. Don't choose—understand. As is your sort of understanding, so will be your sort of worldview.

We cannot choose to live properly with the planet. We can understand, get right with Mother, or die. Nature is unkind. Sorry about that.

The Full Transcript:

The author of numerous books, Barbara Ward is Albert Schweitzer Professor of International Economic Development at Columbia University. It is possibly the beginning of an era in which this vision of the planet that you see from the moon, a single, alone, full of light, full of life, and the only single planet that's got these qualities. The dab fish, especially among the young, can mean a redirection of how people think about this problem, because you will not create a community unless you've got some moral commitment. And moral commitment needs some very stern underpinnings 'cuz we ain't moral easy.

[Barbara Ward] Now it seems to me that the biosphere, in which we share a climate, we share system, we share oceans, and we cannot escape it, could be the physical, scientific, and technical underpinnings of a moral community, because we tend to be moral when we have no further choice.

[Raymond Burr] One of the world's great women, a foremost anthropologist, and a great humanist, Dr. Margaret Mead explains her view.

[Margaret Mead] The air we breathe is indivisible and this is something that we all share and is impossible for any group of people, any individual, any country to possess.

[Raymond Burr] President Nixon and the United States Congress established the Commission on Population Growth in the American Future. The chairman of this unique commission is John D. Rockefeller III.

[John D. Rockefeller III] We had a very broad ranging mandate. Nobody's had one of this character before, and just from that, this question of quality of life just emerged as the seemingly key issue.

[Hugh Downs] But the main finding was that stabilization of some kind is, is clearly desirable for the country.

[John D. Rockefeller III] If we sense that it is recognized that population cannot continue to grow indefinitely, nobody questions that, and we said from our findings, we felt that now the nation should welcome and plan for a stabilized population. The whole question of pollution, environment, and population came by much to the fore in amazingly rapid time, and President Nixon, in July 1969, made a statement to the Congress exclusively on this question, and I'd like to read to just two sentences from that statement as I think it's indicative of his concern in regard to the subject and his recognition of its importance, here and around the world.

He said, 'one of the most serious challenges to human destiny and the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man's response to this challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today.

[Raymond Burr] This commission, at the urgent request of President Nixon, and after two years of studying the problem, recommended that laws prohibiting abortion be liberalized; that government funds be made available to cover abortion services, and that abortion be covered in health insurance. Families are encouraged to have two children and it is suggested that sex education be widely available. The Population Commission also urges that individual states encourage teenagers to receive contraceptive services, and hospitals relax policies concerning voluntary sterility and make it easier to obtain. The Population Commission never advocated abortion as a means to control population. The commission's report has now been rejected.

[Margaret Mead] I do think, to begin with, governments often appoint commissions so they won't have to deal with the problem.

[Raymond Burr] No city is a greater example of the depersonalization of the human being than New York City. New York City has become practically ungovernable with almost weekly breakdowns and strikes disrupting all services to the city. This once shiny, golden door to a vital nation has become a cesspool of crime, overburdening welfare, and racial strife. New York is a product of a population out of control, unhealthy and unstable.

The population issue was discussed in depth with the Ambassador from Japan to the United Nations Mr. Motoo Ogiso.

[Hugh Downs] Japan was also one of the first nations, to my mind, that moved toward a stabilized population level. How do you account for that?

[Motoo Ogiso] I think it was brought about by the sort of spontaneous... a voluntary recognition by the people of the importance of population control. It was not first particularly, by the government, but the people themselves understood that without the appropriate population control, they would not be able to achieve the highest standard of living. In my personal opinion that was the main cause for the success of a preparation control in Japan.

[Raymond Burr] Chairman of the Preparatory Committee for the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment is the Jamaican Representative, Ambassador Keith Johnson.

[Keith Johnson] In my view, we have a first-rate family planning program, supported by a government, and in the past decade I watched a decrease in the natural increase in Jamaica and in the birth rate.

[Margaret Mead] In this whole population question, I think we have to talk first about balance. We want to balance the population, the people that are here at any one time, with the resources at any one time. And we know at the moment we don't have the resources. We don't have the teachers to teach them. We don't have the doctors to care for them. We don't have enough older people to care for them because the older people are still dying. The children we've been saving, and in countries like the United States and northern Europe, we, each child, at present is responsible for using so much energy and producing so much pollution that this is a danger too.

[Raymond Burr] A prominent geo-astronomer, Dr. Walter Orr Roberts is president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

[Barbara Ward] And we have to recognize also that the industrialized countries must balance their populace as vigorous, or more vigorously, than they ask any other part of the world to do because we may not be as we may be able to feed our populations on beautifully packaged food, it's been very carefully set up and is using tremendous amounts of polluting materials to bring that food into our home.

[Raymond Burr] Dr. Rene Dubos, the eminent microbiologist, is recognized as one of the world's foremost scientific humanists, and a Pulitzer winner.

[Margaret Mead] So in this generation, now, we should invite fewer people to be born....

[Raymond Burr] The quality of life, especially for the elderly, has reached the lowest point in modern times with ever higher and higher living and medical costs. The once bright promise of a golden age in life has become instead a time of despair, hopelessness, and resignation.

We are constantly adding tremendous quantities of discarded material into our biosphere. Whether they affect us as refuse, polluted air, or chemicals poured into our waters, they leave a lasting testament of death.

[Hugh Downs] In the controversy between population numbers and technological residues, which is the more crucial issue, the population or the pollution?

[Raymond Burr] We are looking at an electronic picture created by one of the world's most advanced computers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Leading scientists believe that the computer may be the key to a new era in global weather forecasts, revealing to us the secrets of the atmosphere and aiding mankind with a two to three weeks accurate forecast the weather throughout the whole world. Benefits from such knowledge in the fields of agriculture, transportation, and recreation are enormous.

The central fact in the consumption patterns of modern man is combustion. A very large part of our individual mobility and entertainment is tied up with the internal combustion engine, the pride, the joy, the workhorse of modern man, his car. In the United States there is now virtually one automobile for every second citizen.

Japan is not alone with its contaminated air. On the other side of the world, the very center of affluence, similar breathing drills are held on the rooftops of New York City. Research is accelerating on the effects, especially among the young, of our poisoned air. Bronchial diseases among children are rising at an alarming rate. Vending machines dispensing oxygen have become an accepted fact of life in the orient. In laboratories, animals subjected to the same mixture of air found in major cities, throughout the world have died a few days. These deadly conditions, once found exclusively in the developed world, are now in the emerging nation. The errors of the industrial revolution are now being inflicted on nation's most anxious for development. The question is how to balance development and safeguard the environment

[Keith Johnson] We haven't got the kinds of problems, necessarily, that the developed countries now experience. What we have, our own set of problems.

[Hugh Downs] Miss Ward, how do developed nations properly address themselves to developing nations, who have the desire and the right to develop, in cautioning them about harming the environment or adding to the numbers of people?

[Barbara Ward] I would suggest that the way in which developed nations can make any kind of case for environmental care, for the whole of this planet, which we share, is by giving an example themselves.

[Keith Johnson] We're talking about industrial development, this is fine, we are being told of the problems inherent in industrial development in so far as the environmental imbalances is concerned.

[Keith Johnson] As we have built up to the conference, developing countries have come to see more and more how they can benefit from the conference, as long as this program is not likely to inhibit our development.

[Barbara Ward] The developing nations don't have to have the dreadful cities that we've got in the developed world. They do not have to have megalopolises of 6 to 10 to 20 million people. If you begin now with a sensible concept of an urban grid, with holes of growth in various parts of the developing countries, you can have cities of half a million to a million as your centers of population. You can have the smaller cities serving the new agricultural markets and you can, as it were, disperse your population so that you don't have, well, you know what we call Boston to Washington, this Boswash, isn't it works? You can avoid this because the developing nations are not done in stone and concrete and iron and feel the way we are,

[Barbara Ward] I mean, it is inconceivable for any Western democracies to subsist even for ten years more if we didn't have, through progressive taxation, a steady transfer of resources from rich people to poor. Well, I consider that we can begin to talk about the world environment, and about safeguarding our planet, when we, the rich nations, are giving in perfectly formal institutionalized tax assistance, oh at least one percent of our gross national product in development capital for the poorer nations. I would go hire myself, we've got to stop lecturing them while we sit back and engross eighty percent of the world's income for twenty percent of the world's people, and that I think is the critical thing on this development environment issue.

[Keith Johnson] The developed countries have come to realize that we must have this development regardless, and that we can have it on a planned and on an intelligent basis, using some of the experiences of the developed countries. They have the technology, we need it.

[Motoo Ogiso] Japan is trying to explain the experience we had in industrial development. We concentrated our efforts to increase the production. We haven't paid too much attention to the environmental group so Japan is now suffering pollution and contamination problems, and if the developing nations understand those possible problems, they might be able to avoid, to repeat, the same experience which we had.

[Barbara Ward] What worries me is that so great is the shortage of capital, so obstructed as a means of development, but they won't even be able to learn from our mistakes. That is the same, that would be, ultimate tragedy. I mean, for us to go and make the mistakes and there's no one to learn them. That really would be a cosmic bad joke, wouldn't it?

[Harrison Brown] A substantial part of the flow of funds, and materials, and so forth in the rich countries to the poor, today is in the form of weaponry, in the form of military assistance, and that doesn't count. Yet we we call it foreign aid. we in the United States do it Soviet Union does the United Kingdom does it France does it

[Keith Johnson] We must have this development, we must have industrial development. We can't stop these, but we do want to protect the environment.

[Raymond Burr] Secretary General of the Conference on the Human Environment is Under Secretary-general of the United Nations, Mr. Maurice Strong.

[Hugh Downs] What does one say to an underdeveloped country that is more concerned about its development than perhaps the pollution that would result from it?

[Maurice Strong] The developing countries, in their response, are really the same as we are. They, for many years, whenever we've had to make a choice between the acceptance of a bit of pollution and the provision of industry that would bring economic benefits and jobs to our communities, most of the industrialized world has always made, and continues to make, the choice in favor of industry. Now that when you're faced with providing, as the developing countries are, the very basic necessities of life for their people: shelter, food, most rudimentary kinds of health care, and educational services, it's quite understandable that their preoccupation is with the provision of the economic resources that will do this.

[Hugh Downs] What do you say to a poor nation that pesticide and the right to develop, a nation that might not be so cautious about pollution?

[Keith Johnson] Because we are relatively unpolluted, we prefer to be able to stay relatively unpolluted, and one of the means in achieving this is to take a direct interest in the whole question of the environment, because we can't live in isolation. The environmental problems are all around us, the waters are bringing these environmental problems to us.

[Raymond Burr] We all tend to feel that once a polluted river empties into the open sea, once we conduct city sewer systems far enough away from the land, all waste will disappear in the space beyond the horizon as if we could pipe it away from our planet. The thoughtless disregard we have for our waters is graphically demonstrated by this slaughterhouse. The river runs blood-red for several miles downstream from the butchery. Visceral parts are dumped directly into these waters. In spite of a great body of protest, nothing to correct this has been done. Rivers bring down the runoff and fertilizer. Pesticides were carried out to the ocean. All discharge dumped or channeled into the sea from the very dawn of time until this moment has accumulated lowest section of our biosphere, the only one with no outlet.

Treatment of raw sewage requires urgent attention. As our population spirals, increased demands are made upon our inadequate, too often careless, handling of human waste. This is the shore of Southern California. Under these waters lie a threat to life in the sea. This long barnacled sewage pipe is an extension of man's waste, vomits forth 400 million gallons of sewage daily. Similar systems in Southern California produce a billion gallons of sewage per day, all dumped into the once beautiful and blue Pacific.

The oceans of the world become a global sink, a vast septic tank. Man uses the whole ocean as a receptacle for unwanted material in ways we do not know how much they can stand. In coastal areas we can see and smell a clear present danger. The British taxpayer has some idea of how many millions he had to pay to clean up after the Torrey Canyon disaster.

These waters carry a disease that affects one person out of every 15 in the world. Bilharzia is caused by a nematode parasite of the human body. All too often the eggs reach a river or body of water inhabited by snails. Here they invade the snail's tissue. Inside the snail the parasite multiplies rapidly. From the snails emergence of cercariae, a minute swimming form of the parasite. Every one parasite produces tens of thousands of cercariae and each cercariae can infect a human body. In the water, the cercariae bore through the human skin and end up as adult worms in the veins around the walls of the intestine and bladder, and there they lay their eggs. Some of the eggs remain in the body to block and destroy vital organs. Bilharzia has now appeared in the Western Hemisphere. There is a known cure, but a symptom of the disease is lethargy, and apathy. To combat Bilharzia, an entire way of life must be changed.

Modern technology has been called man's salvation and at the same time man's downfall. It is only in the controlled use of technology that man can hope to survive.

[Maurice Strong] Those countries which have produced wealth, because of strong material drives, and the command of science and technology, it's use for increasing of production and consumption, are simply going to have to reorient some of their own growth patterns around the provision of more non-material needs. And they're going to have to understand that those parts of the world that do not enjoy the same material benefits that we do are going to have to concentrate, for a good many years, on the provision of the more material needs of life. And so that these two things, I believe, are complementary and they give us a completely new set of reasons for taking a look at the total needs of the people of this world and the total resources which we have, and developing a much more cooperative attitude towards the care of and the use of the world's resources.

[Raymond Burr] Among the new technologies being developed for agriculture is a remarkable technique for stabilizing the earth with oil to retain moisture and stop erosion. This oil-based mantle has dramatically changed arid desert wasteland, empty since the time of man into productive fields of life-giving harvests. Agricultural research such as this has been carried on in laboratories throughout the world in an effort to turn the tide in man's search for additional food sources.

[Keith Johnson] We see that development can proceed once this technology is made available to us at a price that which we can back.

[Maurice Strong] But what we do have to do is put into the hands of the developing countries the levers of Power which they can use in bettering their bargaining position with us. We've got to give them better access to our own technologies.

[Harrison Brown] Our problems are soluble from a purely technological point of view. The real question that confronts us is, are they soluble from a human point of view.

[Walter Orr Roberts] I suspect that the style of life that we live will be totally different from today, and that General Motors will be building cities and not automobiles.

[Raymond Burr] The destruction of 'our' forests and the killing of the habitat so desperately needed by countless species is a crime against nature. The rape of the earth cries out for controls to ensure that topsoil is returned, trees replanted, damage repaired. A growing population creates a need for more cars and ever more freeway. People want to move. They want it so badly they accept an accident rage of 50,000 deaths a year in the United States along, which if caused by disease or war, would create a revolution. We not only need to slow our death rate, we need to slow and finally eliminate our mounting dump heap. Each year. The United States junk seven million automobiles, 48 billion metal cans, 26 billion bottles, and 65 billion metal bottle caps.

[Hugh Downs] What would you say is the major environmental problem of your country, Jamaica?

[Keith Johnson] I should think soil erosion is a matter of primary concern to us. We have to husband the soil. We haven't got all the land space in the world, and that which we have we have, to seek to ensure that we take good care of it, and we have been affected by soil erosion.

With care and planning this same reef would have been alive and teeming with marine life providing the essentials for man's continued existence.

[Maurice Strong] The central lesson of the environment issue for this generation is the necessity of our recognizing that we have reached the seminal point in human history, a point at which man's own interventions in the natural environment are really now the principal determinants of his own future.

[Barbara Ward] When we reach the ultimate of power, which we have done, we can only respond by having the ultimate of community, which is a single planet, and that is where self interest, moral interest, and sheer technical fact coincide.

[Hugh Downs] Many politicians are frightened to face their constituents with this kind of a truth. They have a fear that if they support the idea of a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, and so forth, that they would not be voted back into office. What do you say to them?

[Barbara Ward] Well I would say first of all that if you take some of the Western democracies: Canada, my own country Britain, Holland, all the Scandinavian countries, France up to a point, all these countries have now formally agreed that by 1975 they will give one percent of gross national product in aid to development. And one reason why they're doing that is because they're electorate would no longer accept the idea that you shouldn't do it.

[Hugh Downs] Dr. Brown, if you could address the delegates at the Stockholm conference, what would you say?

[Maurice Strong] Unless the people of the world understand that what Stockholm is asking of them is really nothing less than a new sense of direction for the whole human race, then it's not realistic to expect that the governments of the world will take the kind of decisions that will make that possible.

[Hugh Downs] What do you think of as a major good that could come out of the Stockholm Conference?

[Barbara Ward] So, on the one hand, I'm enormously optimistic cause I feel that there's a whole generation growing up that is tired of the more blatant forms of materialism, but is bewildered by the lack of institutional innovation and invention, and it's all really well to say well go ahead and innovate yourself, but you need experience and you need an actual sense of how things are organized to be able to do this kind of creative innovation.

[Raymond Burr] Hopeful signs are beginning to appear on the International horizon. The recent agreement signed between the United States and the Soviet Union on mutual environmental problems is a large step forward. Only through international cooperation can we hope to correct the crisis facing all mankind.

Now, for the first time in the history of man, an international movement is underway. The people of the nations, and the nations of the world, had joined together to find the answers. This building, and the world's representatives, hold the solution.

Back to Home Page

Soltech designs
logo

Contact Eric Lee