Fighting to Save the Earth from Man

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with the Devil," he says, "is that we will figure out the consequences of whatever we do. We may have a 100% probability of solving all those problems as they arise. But as we solve them, we may find that our only remedies will create more of the same problems."

One example is the mighty Aswan High Dam project, built on the Upper Nile River with Soviet aid. When an international team of ecologists studied the effects of the dam, they were shocked. For one thing, waterweeds are clogging the shoreline of Lake Nasser behind the dam. The weeds may well speed evaporation through transpiration to the point where the lake lacks enough water to drive the gigantic generators.

Unexpected Side Effects

The dam has also stopped the flow of silt down the Nile, which in the past offset the natural erosion of the land from the Nile delta. As a result, downstream erosion may wash away as much productive farm land as is opened up by new irrigation systems around Lake Nasser. Without the nutrient-rich silt reaching the Mediterranean, the Egyptian sardine catch declined from 18,000 tons in 1965 to 500 tons in 1968. As a final penalty, irrigation projects on the delta plain have allowed a moisture-loving snail to thrive. Since it carries schistosomiasis, most of the delta people have had that agonizing liver and intestinal disease.

An example closer to home: though President Nixon prescribes an increased dose of technology to cure pollution, his medicine may well have side effects. Consider his $10 billion plan to build new primary and secondary municipal water-treatment plants. While such plants do make water cleaner, they also have two serious faults. Unlike more expensive tertiary treatment plants, they do not exterminate man-killing viruses, like those that cause infectious hepatitis. They also convert organic waste into inorganic compounds, especially nitrates and phosphates. When these are pumped into rivers and lakes, they fertilize aquatic plants, which flourish and then die. Most of the dissolved oxygen in the water is used up when they decompose. As a result, lakes "die" in the sense that they become devoid of oxygen, bereft of fish, choked by weeds. In short, by solving one problem (dirty water), the sewage plants create another (eutrophication).

Behind the environment crisis in the U.S. are a few deeply ingrained assumptions. One is that nature exists primarily for man to conquer. Many thinkers have traced the notion back to early Judaism and Christianity. Genesis 1: 26 is explicit on the point that God gave man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth." The ecological truth is quite different. The great early civilizations —Babylonian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Chinese, Indian and perhaps Mayan—over-exploited the basic resource of land. In the end, says LaMont Cole, "they just farmed themselves out of business."

Another ready assumption is that nature is endlessly bountiful. In fact, the supply of both land and resources is finite. Martin Litton, a director of the Sierra Club, says: "We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones." Litton reaches this alarmist conelusion: "We've already run out of earth, and nothing we can do