 Dr. Woodwell played a major role in the development of ecosystem ecology which emerged as a fundamentally new era in ecological science in the late 1950s. He has taught at both Dartmouth and Yale but has spent the majority of his career as a scientist and director in private research institutions. He served in the biology department at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1961 to 1975. He then founded an ecosystem research center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 1985 he left the Marine Biological Laboratory to establish the Woods Hole Research Center, an independent institute for analysis of global environmental issues. In addition to his outstanding accomplishments as a scientist and director of research organizations, Dr. Woodwell has served as president of the Ecological Society of America and he has engaged throughout his career in the difficult interface between science and government. He has sought to infuse governmental management of environmental issues with the best information that ecology as a science can offer, particularly on problems involving the circulation of toxins in ecosystems and more recently the looming potential for global warming. No one would be more qualified to share with us insights on how the interaction between science and governmental institutions will need to change in the future if we are to avoid accelerating environmental degradation. Please join with me in a warm welcome to Dr. George Woodwell, who will speak to us on science and government, revolutions in store for the third millennium. Dr. Woodwell. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that most generous introduction and for this most generous audience. I'm going to talk about the enormous gap between what we know about the world and how it works and what we do with that information. The message is not a happy one. It isn't all that hopeful, but it is far from hopeless. There are two revolutions underway in the world at the moment. The first is the apparent, certainly partial, victory of democracy over communism and the attitude that most of the nations of the world would like to participate in some way in a democratic form of government. The second is a series of demographic and environmental challenges that will certainly change the way we live and the way governments can operate over the course of the next years. From my perspective at the moment, they will dominate the lives of our children well into the next century. It's this latter revolution that I shall talk about. Humans have set in motion a cascade of instabilities in the world that threaten to engulf even to destroy this civilization. The center of my argument will be the fact that the world is a biotic system. It's a living system and it's being systematically impoverished as a result of human activities. These activities have started a series of social and political pressures that in a reasonable world would require systematic intensification of governmental effectiveness in defense of human rights, human rights that are now generally taken for granted as the touchstone of democratic governments. But these rights, the simple rights to clean air, clean water, a healthful place to live, all fall victim to a combination of the soaring pressures of growth in all aspects of society, abetted by inertia, ignorance, ineptitude, classical greed, and corruption. The scientific and scholarly community made up of mere humans isn't above joining in this perversion of public interests, and that community too is affected by the same economic and environmental pressures that are triggering the wave of neoconservatism that's sweeping the world. That probably isn't all that clear as life becomes more difficult for individuals or for governments. It isn't at all surprising that the immediate interest turns to survival where the food comes from for the next meal. Under that circumstance, it's difficult to extract from a person or from a government a genuine interest in the common good. And so just at the moment when it becomes most appropriate to address common interests, the immediate interest of the individuals or the immediate interest of the government becomes taken by what amounts to imminent catastrophe. That breeds this burden of neoconservatism that we have to fight at the moment. I shall argue that these changes rooted in basic ecology are formidable and threatening and largely unrecognized. They'll dominate our lives and those of our children for all of time, at least time that matters to us. At the same time, I shall argue that while they're open to solution, time is not on our side. Powerful commercial, industrial and entrenched political pressures are working against the very purpose of governments in this increasingly complex scramble. The basic assumption of the ecologist is that the world is a biotic system and that the human enterprise is embedded in it and totally dependent on it. This view stands in contrast to the view that you read daily in newspapers that the world is primarily an economic system and a political system and that we are all dependent on those aspects of environment and can neglect, forget about, live within, but ignore the biotic aspects of the world. That circumstance has changed fundamentally and it's going to change even more fundamentally and rapidly than it has in the past. The driving force of the environmental squeeze, but not the only one, is growth. Growth of the human enterprise, not only growth of the population, but growth in the effect of the population on the earth as a whole. That growth is far greater than growth in the population alone, combined effect of the increase in the number of people and the availability of technology to use resources of the environment is far greater than just the growth of the population. The doubling time of that combination of changes is measured at the order of years as opposed to decades. But first, let's think about the population of the world. The world population will be more than six billion people within the next few years, well before the end of this century. The population will have doubled since 1960 and has the intrinsic potential of doubling again in the next 35 to 40 years. We're adding globally 250,000 people a day, about 100 million people a year to the population. The numbers are almost beyond comprehension. That's roughly a new Mexican population every year. The growth in human numbers guarantees the rapid cheapening of people globally. Even as television and radio spread the word of the wealth of the Western industrial nations and spread the hope that the poor of the world can share in that wealth. There are at least three billion people in the world who can never share in that wealth whatever we do. The total numbers are overwhelming, but the details are even more compelling. The growth is setting whole segments of the world against one another. Rich against poor, north against south, clan against clan. In Europe the growth rate is low, about two tenths of one percent annually, a doubling time of 300 to 400 years. In Eastern European nations it's actually negative. In North America the growth rate is about seven tenths of one percent, a doubling time of more than a century. If immigration is ignored, it can't be. But Central America has a growth rate of 2.2 percent, in Africa 3 percent, doubling times of about 30 and 24 years. In Asia with more than half the world's population, now the rate of increase is about 1.8 percent, a doubling time of 40 years, a little more than half a lifetime. In India with a population of 850 million, pushing a billion people, the doubling time is less than 35 years. In Bangladesh and Pakistan about 25 years. In China despite stringent measures to control population and a population already at 1.1 billion, population that strains all resources, the doubling time is about 50 years. There are several consequences. With such growth in numbers we can't be surprised that there are underway massive migrations as the underprivileged of crowded nations seek opportunities in the wealthier, less populous industrialized nations. Nor should we be surprised at the surge of illegal migration from Mexico and South America or China into the United States. Nor at the pressure of African migration across the Southern European frontier. Nor at the misery driven westward migration of refugees from the liberated countries of Eastern Europe, all impoverished. There are more people moving now than ever in previous history and the movement has only just begun as the pressures begin an inexorable upward trend in response not only to the growth in numbers and the surge in human aspirations, but also to the accelerated erosion of the human habitat, the progressive biotic impoverishment of extensive areas of the earth. These desperate people underway looking for a place to live for an opportunity to enjoy fundamental civil rights come as neoconservatives simply trying to find a way to live in this world. They come from disparate cultures. They may be illiterate. They don't share the ideals of democracy or the fundamentals of education required for to be responsible citizens in democratic nations. These are certainly threatening circumstances to all nations. The second major point here, the earth's nearly six billion people compete with all other animals and all of the decay organisms for the energy that's fixed by plants globally. We now turn 50% or more, probably more than 50% of the total amount of energy available to support living systems of the earth. That's energy that's available from plants. We turn that energy directly or indirectly into human use, mainly for food. We can't double that take over the course of the next years. There is ample evidence at the moment that what we are doing right now, the total effect of human activities, is rendering the earth unstable in ways that I shall elaborate in just a moment. It also moves under human influence from forest into agriculture and then into impoverishment. Because it's impoverished, it falls out of economic consideration, isn't measured. We just don't keep track of it. It's the largest growing land classification in the world. A third of the land area of India is now recognized by Indian officials as having been impoverished to the point where it supports no plants. It's outside of agriculture, outside of forestry, outside of any use. The impoverishment is the result of salinization, the accumulation of salts at the surface of the soil to the point where no plants can grow. Or it's the result of erosion under monsoonal winds and rains to rock. That in one of the world's most populous countries. Fourthly, into this already unstable circumstance on an earth that whose outer skin is the only human habitat and is called a biosphere because it is a living system, we're now introducing the possibility of a rapid warming of the earth. A warming of the earth that exceeds in speed, as far as we know, any change in the temperature of the earth that has occurred over the course of human history, and certainly of recent human history. This threat is but one, but it has the potential of such devastating effects globally that I shall dwell on it and use it for insights as to how we might expect to make progress in addressing a series of potentially overwhelming problems in the next years. The warming of the earth is caused by the accumulation of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere. These gases come largely from the use of fossil fuels, burning hydrocarbons, coal, oil, gas, organic matter. Burning that material produces as a product heat, energy, water, and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide goes off as a gas into the atmosphere where some of it accumulates. The rate of accumulation is significant. It is increased by this general process of impoverishment that I mentioned a few minutes ago. As forests move from forests into agriculture as a result of deforestation, they may move into grazing land or row crop agriculture. The carbon that was stored in the forest, which is large in quantity, moves as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and adds further to the accumulation of that heat trapping gas in the air. The result is the accumulation of additional heat in the atmosphere and the warming of the earth. The climatologists project on the basis of largely physical considerations, which are fairly sophisticated these days, that for the equivalent of a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration above the levels that existed at the end of the last century, we would have a warming that would be in the range of 1.5 to 2.3 degrees centigrade globally. That's an average change in the global temperature of that much. We can expect that extent of warming sometime before the middle of the next century, perhaps as early as 2035. One of the difficulties is that the warming is not uniform over the surface of the earth. The warming is higher in the higher latitudes, 2 to 3 times higher than the average for the earth as a whole. So if the warming for the earth as a whole were 1 degree centigrade or perhaps more realistically 2 degrees centigrade or even more in the course of the next 30 or 40 years, in the middle and high latitudes, we could expect a 4 degree centigrade or more warming. Ample data support that conclusion. There is a very good study of temperature in Canada, very detailed study carried out by the Canadian Meteorological Service showing that the average temperature in Canada has increased over the entire country by 1.1 degrees over the past 95 years. In northwestern Canada, in the Mackenzie region, the increase in temperature has been 1.7 degrees centigrade. This is roughly, it's more than, twice the average temperature rise for the earth as a whole over that period, about a half a degree centigrade. We know a lot about climate, despite the arguments that you read in newspapers every day now, the climatologists, meteorologists, and other scientists who address this problem are virtually unanimous in their opinion that adding heat trapping gases to the atmosphere will warm the earth, the extent of the warming will be of the order of what I have outlined as a minimum, not as an extreme, that number that they've come to is in fact a compromise among judgments by many scientists, hundreds of scientists around the world, published in an unusual document produced by an unusual group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a unique institution set up as a result of the imagination of people in the United Nations Environment Program located in Nairobi, and the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. That group was just established as a result of a need to consolidate the information in the scientific community about the warming of the earth and to make the most authoritative statement possible. They have issued two reports now, a main report and a supplement, and they're busy issuing a further report. These reports say substantially what I have just said, in fact much of what I have said has come from those reports. We have in addition confirming evidence as to our ability to predict changes in the temperature of the earth as a result of the experience from Pinatubo, Pinatubo is a mountain in the Philippines which blew its top two years ago and injected a large quantity of sulfur aerosol, small particles into the high atmosphere, into the stratosphere, far enough up into the atmosphere that air currents have carried them around the world and produced, as you must have noticed, red sunrises and red sunsets around the world for the past two years. That material absorbs the radiant energy from the sun and has cooled the earth. It has cooled the earth by roughly a half a degree centigrade in the course of about a year or so. So the earth is cooler than it was, and the increase in temperature of the earth over the past century has been negated by that debris in the high atmosphere. That debris is removed systematically as a result of exchanges of air between the high atmosphere and the troposphere, the lower part of the atmosphere that contains the weather. The particles are washed out in storms and the atmosphere gradually clears. The atmosphere is clearing at the moment and we anticipate that as the atmosphere clears the warming will progress as it was progressing, has been progressing over recent years. The rate of warming in the last decade, the decade of the 80s, was about two-tenths of a degree centigrade per decade globally, a greater rate of warming in higher latitudes. All of that by way of saying that the scientific community knows a lot about the warming of the earth, the questioning that has become common in newspapers and elsewhere, the shrill cries that the scientific community is exaggerating a problem are misleading, they are simply wrong. Scientific community knows pretty well what this problem is and the projections are of serious changes. Now you might say, well, what's a little heating of the earth? First point here is that the heating is not just moving to a new equilibrium, it's moving from an old substantial equilibrium to an open-ended warming, a continuous warming into the indefinite future. On that world, the human future is very limited indeed. There is simply no way that large numbers of people will survive on an earth that warms continuously. The first effect, of course, is to put more energy into the atmosphere. It makes bigger storms. We have observed larger storms on the East Coast over the past years, but more than that, it warms continental centers, differentially, dries out common continental centers. Warmer is generally drier. It moves agriculture. In the middle and high latitudes, where the warming could be of the order of half a degree, a decade, if things go as anticipated, we could expect the climatic zones to migrate by many miles in 10 years. That means that agriculture is not only subjected to greater vagaries of weather, unpredictable, but still more frequent droughts, but a migration of climate systematically of the order of 60 to 100 miles for a one-degree change in the temperature of the region. A one-degree change is possible in the course of a decade or two in the next few decades in these latitudes and north of here. That is big stuff. There's a further problem. Most of the land in the world is in the Northern Hemisphere. That land is, a lot of it, forested. I indicated that forests contain a lot of carbon. In fact, forests are the largest vegetation type on earth. They also contain the largest amount of carbon on earth. All of the plants and soils, including forests, contain about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere contains. More than half of that is in forests. So changes in the area of forest to the vigor of forest affect the composition of the atmosphere. There is further pool of carbon in the peat, the soil of the tundra, a large pool of carbon held in that place. That's largely in the Northern Hemisphere and all in the high latitudes. The warming of that region will increase the rate of decay of organic matter and the rate of destruction of forests. The estimates are that there could be an addition to the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from that source just as a result of the warming alone that is quite significant. Here I have to resort to some numbers. They're fairly simple numbers and I think you can keep track of them. The increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere annually is about four billion tons. It varies year by year depending on temperature of the earth and various other factors. That's the net accumulation in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels and destroying forests and probably as a result of changes in temperature of the earth itself. We observe that overall as the earth warms, has warmed in the past and warms currently, additional carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere. As the earth has cooled in the past and cools currently, the past being glacial time and currently being today, the rate of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drops. So it's very closely coupled to temperature suggesting that what I was suggesting just a few minutes ago is the dominant influence on the composition of the atmosphere in the short term. That's very important. Okay, the net accumulation in the atmosphere is about four billion tons, averaged out over recent decades. That is the product of about six billion tons released from burning fossil fuels plus one and a half billion tons from deforestation plus whatever else is released as a result of warming or absorbed as a result of serious cooling. So we're interested in one or two billion tons of carbon. If we were to decide that we wanted to stabilize the composition of the atmosphere today, we would have to remove from current releases globally four billion tons of carbon. We have to work with the fossil fuel release about six billion tons. We have deforestation about one and a half billion tons. We could reforest extensive areas if that land were available and would grow trees, a real question. But we don't have a great deal of leeway there. If the warming of the earth, as it very well might, were to release an additional two or three billion tons from forests in the middle and high latitudes and from the decay of organic matter in the tundra, we would be in the range where no matter what we did in removing carbon or stopping the use of fossil fuels, we would still have a further accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now you have the position that scientists have in addressing the warming of the earth. They recognize that stabilization of the composition of the atmosphere is absolutely essential. We cannot look forward to an earth that will support the present civilization, the present numbers of people, or much of a human future if the earth warms at the rates that are projected. There is no question that we have to move towards stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere and do that rapidly. This is an objective appraisal of the extent to which the earth is out of balance. Now what have we done? Well one year ago in Rio we had a major conference, the largest assembly of heads of state that has ever occurred. The assembly was to address the world global environmental problems. The assembly managed to address three topics, the warming of the earth, the crisis in forests, and what they called biodiversity. In the case of the warming of the earth, we did succeed in writing a treaty largely as a result of the extensive background of information available through the IPCC reports that I mentioned just a moment ago. With respect to forests, nothing was possible or substantially nothing. We got out of that meeting a non-binding series of principles dealing with forests. Commercial interests, lack of any concrete scientific background, lack of sufficient agreement among the nations of the world at forests, have a public interest value that is important enough to limit the interest in gaining immediate profits. Through the sale of timber was lost. That simply didn't exist and we were not able to make significant progress there. On what's called biodiversity, a treaty was signed by some of the nations of the world not then by the U.S. That treaty might better have been addressed to biotechnology for it addressed the use of genetic resources from forests or from nations that have genetic resources that might be exploited commercially. Again, commercial interests dominated. The absolutely essential need to preserve the biota, to stop this general process of biotic impoverishment, escaped interest there. So did the population problem. It was kept off the agenda by objections from the Catholic Church and from one or two nations. Well, that was what was possible one year ago internationally. The treaty on climate was a brilliant success without any question. The other two treaties were, the other two actions were less successful. Nonetheless, advances. There is an effort underway, actually as a result of initiatives of my colleagues in Woods Hole, to establish a world commission on forests to get over the hump. Get to the point that the IPCC has put the warming of the earth problem, put the forest problem into the same context. Now, I'd like to sharpen up that issue just a little bit. The issue here is an emergent issue of public interests in forests. It's clear that we cannot solve the warming of the earth problem without solving the forest management problem globally. All these global solutions are the product of local action. So the nations of the world have to agree among themselves that they're going to take local actions that will result in a sum of effects that stabilizes the forest resources of the world with public interests in a stabilized climate important. There are various other public interests, of course, in forests. Water supplies, stabilization of landscapes, and a continuation of all of the resources that we get from forests. So forests are big in the world's economy. They're also big in the world's ecology. And it's now clear that they are the subject that is emerging. I think of it as an emerging, think of them as an emerging public interest issue. Well, there's no doubt as to the complexity of politics surrounding these issues. The issues are turgid with economic and political interests that are threatened at any suggestion of a change in the present course of civilization or activities regarding those resources. They are equally threatened. These interests are equally threatened if we suggest that doing nothing at all at the moment implies a clear decision to allow those problems to fester and rapidly become worse to the point where we lose resources irreplaceably. Let me make three observations here. First, science and scholarship played an enormous role in the successes of the Rio conference. The IPCC background was absolutely essential. It said what the problem is and what must be done. Now, the nations of the world came to an agreement on that. The US has endorsed the agreement. We have ratified that treaty and it is now the law of the land. We have agreed to work with other nations to stabilize the composition of the atmosphere with respect to the heat trapping gases at a point where human interests will be preserved in the stable world. That is a remarkable step. What has our government done? Our government has said that we will stabilize our emissions of carbon dioxide by the year 2000 at the level of 1990. Now, that's quite a bit different from saying that we're going to do something that will stabilize the composition of the atmosphere. No nation in the world is taking any step that would contribute significantly toward stabilizing the composition of the atmosphere. That would require at least a 60% reduction globally in the use of fossil fuels and in the industrialized world, of course, it would be a larger reduction. That would be appropriate if we are serious about addressing the problem or even living up to a treaty that we have now ratified. If we were to take the step that Mr. Clinton suggested, which was to tax fossil fuels heavily, we would offer leadership to the world in the proper direction. Instead, we have adopted as a result of congressional action a 4.3% tax on gasoline, a trivial tax on a commodity that is priced now per gallon at a price that is in some parts of the world less than the price of water. We could easily tax that at 50 cents or even a dollar a gallon and probably should be taxing fossil fuels at a higher rate than that. Secondly, there is a set of emergent issues. I've mentioned the forest as an emergent public issue, public interest issue. There is a set of further emergent public interest issues that require the attention of governments, require all of our attention. These are public interest issues globally and nationally. I could run over a list of these, fill your head full of them. The issues all arise from the fact that natural systems that have maintained the human habitat are being systematically impoverished around the world. Thirdly, that conference, the experience in Rio, calls attention to the limits of governments in addressing critical issues of environment. As the issues become intensified and as some governments are reconstituted in a democratic format, the world would benefit from a reconsideration of just what we expect of our fellow citizens in a democracy when we establish a government and make them its officers. Just what is the key purpose of government and when and how is that purpose realized or likely to be realized? What is public purpose and what private? What form or system or segment of government is most effective in protecting an individual's rights to clean air, clean water, habitable earth? The issues take on urgency as pressures on resources and people accumulate. Now I don't wish to suggest that the problem is limited to the warming of the earth. Consider the toxic substances problem, for instance. We know that toxins injected into the air, as say, pesticides used in agriculture, are picked up in air currents and can be carried around the world in a short time, from days to weeks. We know that on the basis of a great deal of experience with radionuclides, which circulate if they're released into the air as small particles, and as pesticides themselves. So we have global contaminations with these toxins. The system we have worked out in the United States for addressing that topic is being worked out at the moment. It is not one that protects human interests well. The pesticide companies with their scientists have managed to claim that good science requires an appraisal of risks for each of these toxins. It's very hard to argue against good science, but I argue against this good science. The argument is that each of the toxins can exist in the world, that there is room for it, that there is a threshold for effects on people, and that that threshold should be appraised, and we should use the toxins in agriculture in such a way as to keep the toxin below the threshold of effects on people. There is no appraisal of how many toxins, or what the effects below the threshold might be, or whether the toxin does the person who gets it any good or not. I have at home a recent publication of the National Academy of Sciences that devotes 357 pages to the question of how much toxin in agricultural use can be allowed in the food of mothers and children. Now reflect on that. Does that toxin, any of those toxins, does any one of them do a mother or children any good? Who is deciding that it is appropriate that there be any toxin whatsoever in the food of children or in my food? Here we are impinging on my civil rights, and I object, and I should object, and so should you. We don't hire our governmental system to enhance the wealth of exploiters of agriculture and people that way. We build a governmental system to offer protection for individuals, not increased risk for commercial profit. It's as simple as that. Allow me to suggest, well, I think you should think about that all the time. Let me suggest that we reconsider daily the purpose of government. What do we want from government? Why do we establish government and governmental agencies and political leaders? I would simply argue that we establish government to provide equity and the relationships among ourselves and equity and access to resources. That we ask governments to protect us all from the actions of each and of all, that that's the central function of government, and that we need to remind government of that regularly. Governments, including our own, have responded to the challenge inherent in growth regularly by calling for more growth and paradoxically less regulation at the very time when more regulation is necessary. You'll recall not long ago, one year ago, in fact, an announcement by the then President, Mr. Bush, that in the interest of economic recovery, he was going to produce a moratorium on regulation. He made this announcement in the Rose Garden to the plaudits of a group of industrial representatives as though the further destruction of environmental resources, the further contamination of the earth would produce a world in which economic growth could proceed more effectively and vigorously. Now, think about that just a bit and think where it leads. If you want an example of what happens where unfettered economic growth, unregulated and unregulatable industries proceed, simply look across the border into Mexico or look into the former Soviet Union where I have spent some time in recent years. Go to Norilsk near the mouth of the north-flowing Yenisee River in the Soviet High Arctic in central Siberia, a smelting city where thousands and thousands of hectares, probably thousands of square miles of living systems have been destroyed by the effluent from that smelter, effluents that for some reason cannot even now be turned off. There are a hundred places like that in Russia or you could go to Copper Hill, Tennessee or to Sudbury, Ontario or to various places in South America. Go to the Ecuadorian Amazon and see what the oil companies have done. The assumption of industry, the assertions, are often that an unregulated economy will solve these problems. That is simply not so. The responsibility of business is to profits and we have taught in the United States and elsewhere that the focusing of profits narrowly and the spreading of costs widely and publicly is appropriate. The democratic system works to the extent that we regulate those profits and regulate the performance of those in business. We regulate them fairly and rigorously and relentlessly. The criterion of safety for toxic substances is not to be determined on the basis of personal risks from individual toxins, risks to people. Those are always permissive, but to be determined on the basis of risks to the biotic systems we live within, plants and animals. And when we do that, the standards for performance go up by factors of ten. They go up by many factors of ten, factor of a thousand or more. And when plants and animals are safe, people are safe. The tendency at the moment is to turn those regulatory functions over to scientists who represent the industries. And it's a formidable array of scientists. When the NRDC, which won recently, completely on the ALAR cases, went to court on ALAR, they could not find one scientist not associated with the industry available to testify on their behalf. They testified using their own scientists, their own background. They had impeccable data, they were impeccably correct, and they won at every turn, totally. But the point is that the scientific community has been let off away from those subjects, intimidated by the difficulty of dealing with them. That has to change. It has to change rapidly, and it has to change in the university community. It has to change in general around the world. How will it change? Well, it will change as a result of pressure from you and me once we understand the problems. I've devoted my time here to thinking about the scale of the problem, the gap between what we know about nature and how it works, how far out of balance it is, and how dependent, thoroughly dependent we are on it, and what we do about that lack of balance, as it's called. The lawyers have a phrase they slip around glibly as they do with so many Latin phrases, seek utere. It stands for a Latin formulation of the Golden Rule, seek utere tuo ut alienum non ledas. It means do with what belongs to you in such a way, use what belongs to you in such a way as not to interfere with the use of what belongs to others. That's a good motto to remember. It would seem to me that it's a good motto for all of us in dealing with these environmental crises, which are now emergent. They're now in the public realm as opposed to the private realm. They increasingly threaten us, our civil rights, to challenge our governments and our governmental systems. We'll correct it if we understand the problem and move strongly and persistently, continuously to address it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Woodwell. I will ask the other panelists to come to the table. There are ushers in the aisles with cards, which you can ask a question and send it up to the table. Just raise your hand if you wish a card. Sort of depends on the questions that come. I think they should be answered. One of the special aspects of the Nobel conference is the time that we have following the lectures for you to ask questions of our panelists. And while we wait for those questions to come in, I'd like to open the discussion to our distinguished guests and ask if any of us has any questions that he or she would like to ask of Dr. Woodwell. Any comments or reflections? Excessively live. George, I was very interested to hear your... I would like to hear you explore what a standard response would be from a chemical pesticide industry to one of the things you said. You said that it's... your right to be free from the... for the mother to be free from the pesticide. I think the standard response of the chemical industry would be to say it's also the mother's right to have food available. And so I think that question I'd like to see addressed is how you would respond to that when... I'm sure you've been asked that question. Yes, the assumption, of course, that the poison producer would like you to make is that the poison is absolutely necessary for production of food in the world, that it is completely consistent with contemporary agriculture and can be used safely that it while it's effective as a poison in agriculture it's completely harmless when ingested by people which has always been a mystery to me as to how a poison that's invented and used to be biotically effective in one place is not biotically effective in another. But I would challenge the fundamental assumption made there that it's necessary in agriculture it's convenient in agriculture it may produce blemish-free food in certain circumstances but you have to remember that it's an innovation that we have in agriculture that is now according to such interests totally dependent on chemical control of pests it's an innovation of the past 50 years agriculture is at least 10,000 years old and through virtually all of that time got along without this array of chemicals and there is increasing awareness in agriculture that it's possible to get along with first much less use and second in many cases no use certainly where food comes through contaminated there should be no use I would respond that way no one has an intrinsic right to contaminate my food or anyone else's that way and that should be a fundamental human right around the world Mr. Panelist to let me know when you'd like to speak so that we can signal to the sound Dr. May George I don't want to quarrel with you in public but I do think your position is excessively simplistic and interestingly resonates against the topic of the meeting there are instances of course where the purely use of pesticides to prevent cosmetic damage are just stupid on the other hand there are other underlying assumptions that are sometimes made by those who believe we don't need any form of chemical warfare against crop pests which implicitly or explicitly rest on the notion that there's a Russo-esque balance of nature out there if we didn't mess around with it the truth is there is a mounting wave of a great locust plague impending in Africa now the natural state of that is an imbalanced one and what is good for the locust is not good for us we will never control that with natural enemies and my view is that in a rational world a world of fewer people and a world more harmonious with the rest of living things nonetheless agriculture will rely on a carefully controlled rationally targeted integrated pest control program in which chemical pesticides that are specifically targeted in ways that use the physiology of an insect so different from us that what harms an insect doesn't harm us and I believe that has a place there is no question but that what's called integrated pest control is being practiced around the world at the moment and minimizing the use of pesticides is certainly a part of that objective I persist in my view however that the assumption that individuals are willing to take risks as a result of practices in agriculture is an assumption that is not based on a consensus of the people taking that risk I don't like to have risks imposed on me and in a tighter and tighter world which is what we're living in permissive uses of these toxins even under integrated control programs will lead to progressive contamination of land and water there isn't any way to live in a world in which we allow that sort of compromise to occur on a continuous basis I'm simply driving the issue to an extreme but driven to an extreme it's an intolerable circumstance we have had several questions from the audience specifically on this topic of what will happen to agricultural production in the absence of the use of toxins I'm glad we got a fight going right at the beginning of this conference just to make it interesting and I might be the only farmer up here on the panel I can hear that there are quite a few out in the audience and I'm an organic farmer and I lose crops and money occasionally because the methods of organic control and I'm fairly purist about it are either not sufficiently well researched or I haven't applied them well and occasionally they fail of course occasionally chemical methods of pest control fail as well in fact fairly often they do and I think I actually support George Woodwell's position not to the point probably of zero pesticides but to the point of the mindset of the regulatory mechanism and who is controlling it for whose good and if it's to be controlled for the good of the short term profits of the chemical companies that's one thing if it's to be controlled with at least the basic view the basic epic if I may use that word to do the least possible harm to nature to other insects other to birds and everything up the food chain and to human beings we would come out with it I think I know because I've done it we would come out with an extremely productive agriculture with high yields and with enormously less damage to nature Dr. Lovejoy George you made a very convincing case and I have subscribed to it for dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels the question is how to get there I wonder what thoughts you have to offer on that well the conclusion that the sages who have thought about this in various ways have come to is that the best way to get there is gradually just how gradually is hard to say because I'm not persuaded that we have all that much time there is no proof that we have that much time we may not there is a good chance that we don't if there is a good chance one wants to bet on the side of success what do you do well they have said these sages that the best way is to tax fossil fuels heavily and thereby make alternative sources of energy economically attractive that makes sense to me a heavy and progressive tax on fossil fuels in the industrialized world would do just that and there are alternatives we lived of course until the fossil fuel age largely on solar energy harnessed in various ways we have various ways now that are greatly improved for harnessing solar energy and we also have ways of using energy with a great with a far higher efficiency than we have used that sort of energy in the past so I look at this as an opportunity an industrial opportunity an opportunity to improve the world an opportunity to save money in many ways because money spent on fossil fuels as opposed to renewable energy or energy that you don't actually need because of improvements in efficiency is money saved I see all of that as opportunity as opposed to burden we are continuously regaled with the burden of shifting away from fossil fuels and that of course is promoted by those who stand to benefit from continued use of fossil fuels I think we have to do a bit of thinking for ourselves on such topics and I am persuaded that as opportunities arise we shall do that and move as rapidly perhaps not rapidly enough but as rapidly as possible toward alternative sources that could be greatly enhanced by a wise government in the United States that has been enhanced in the United States and enhanced globally we are, whatever we think leaders in the world on all of these issues we choose to lead badly as we are doing at the moment the world will follow us if we lead well the world will follow us there too we have a question from the audience that is relevant to this issue about the use of fossil fuels and one that I am sure is on the minds of several people what is the relative environmental impact of nuclear power generation versus the use of fossil fuels well, that is another one hour lecture at least just to raise the issues I am not a proponent of nuclear power for several reasons first, nuclear reactors are very highly concentrated centers of a great deal of radioactivity released into the general environment produces, has the potential for producing areas that are uninhabitable on the earth measured in thousands of square miles it has such a release has the potential for virtually infinite human misery each of the 110 reactors are so operating in the United States each of those may be regulated appropriately it requires absolutely perfect regulation to keep them operating safely we add in the increasing frequency of vandalism, of terrorism possibility of blowing one of them up just out of meanness why I find the hazard there unacceptable then I go around the world and look at other nations where the regulatory agencies are feeble or nonexistent and wonder how a reactor in Argentina is going to be operated safely reliably over a long period of time I add in to that the history of reactor use in the United States when we started out with reactors it was widely recognized that reactors were inherently dangerous instruments and they should be placed well away from centers of population the best thing to do was to keep the density of people near the reactor low as time has gone on why we have shifted away from that perspective of safety that perspective of safety says if something goes wrong in the reactor get away from it as fast as possible and we have put reactors in places where people can't get away from them if they go awy we have also instituted a law which was established in the 1950s to encourage the nuclear industry the Price Anderson Act the Price Anderson Act limits the liability of the industry and it also limits the liability of the federal government in the case of an accident a technology that limits the liability of the industry and limits the liability of the government says in essence that we don't really believe that this industry is thoroughly safe and if we have a big accident the people who are going to suffer will be only partially recompensed in money and the rest will simply go by the board that means that as we have moved on in the development of reactors we've placed them more or less arbitrarily in places of dense population and we have limited the liability of government and of the industry and said you people have to accept this risk whether you want to or not I find that another unacceptable imposition by industry on my civil rights I don't like the idea that somebody can expose me to the hazards of a reactor without my deciding whether I should have that hazard I can go on in this vein but those are among the reasons that I find the reactor industry finite in its potential it happens also that reactor energy is the most expensive source of energy currently another good reason for not using it when the reactors in the northeast stop working my electric bill drops we have a question from the audience on a much different kind of topic how do you regard NAFTA and how does this proposed treaty relate to what you have discussed in your lecture I'm in trouble there is no question but that the reason for NAFTA is to expand commerce into expand commerce by taking advantage of cheap labor and lower environmental standards which make it possible to produce cheaper goods elsewhere to take advantage of gradients in regulatory function around the world NAFTA is focused of course on Mexico and Canada the big difference lies between the US and Mexico and the proponents wish to take advantage of Mexico the effect of that of course is to undermine our own laws that we have fought through very hard to get established in the United States protecting environment and to undermine our laws that protect individual workers our social advances I find that anathema I don't like that change on the other hand the environmental institutions such as the NRDC the Natural Resources Defense Council and others were asked by this administration to lay out what would make NAFTA acceptable what they would like for restrictions dealing with environment in particular and they produced the most imaginative response to that that they could and each demand has been met the problem is that the demands are not severe enough are not acute enough are not likely to be as effective as they should be my benefit in this discussion from a discussion with the lady to my right who has thought about it and analyzed it a great deal more than I have I think it might be wise if you ask her to speak on it as well I have to say that I supported this in an official way thinking it's better to be engaged at the moment than not to be engaged the reason he refers to me is that we were having an argument about it at breakfast this morning and he knows that I've just written five newspaper columns in a row opposing NAFTA very strongly and I think the difference and the argument that we had by the way is the argument that is going on within the environmental community as a whole because as you may know six major environmental organizations are now supporting NAFTA and about 12 or so are opposed and so this is an honest argument I believe and I think it's a difference between tactics and strategy I think that the major organizations the NRDC the the NRDC the Audubon Society the World Wildlife Fund are going with NAFTA because A they were invited to comment and had an input to it and B they hope as part of an ongoing process to make it better after the fact and I think that the organizations that oppose it and the people like me who oppose it are very doubtful about the possibility of doing that that it's already a very weak document environmentally there are really very few powers even in the side agreements to allow the pressure of trade to do what it should do which is to bring standards and technologies up throughout the whole trading community rather than set up a process by which standards are bargained down in order to attract investment to one place because it has low environmental standards and therefore it's cheaper to produce there it could be and I would support a trade agreement that would have in it a process of bringing standards up as a strong design element this NAFTA doesn't have it and so what I have been writing in my columns is to say heal this one quickly and keep alive the idea and the next time we negotiate it have someone other than corporations in the room we have time for one more question from the audience and this one is directed in a very personal way to Dr. Woodwell he said the situation wasn't hopeless can you underscore the hopefuls that keep you going we have made remarkable progress I'd have to say in the sense of understanding how the world works we do know a lot about the world and we have made political progress in various ways over the past few years in the United States for instance I consider the activities of the conservation law groups as having brought a revolution in government a proper revolution the major reservoir of basic information about success in environmental regulation lies in those groups not in the Congress not in the staff not in the White House not in politics or in government it lies in the non-governmental organizations that have carved out for themselves an essential role in addressing the issue of how to keep government working properly this is a step of evolution in the democratic process that I admire and think has further potential much further potential nationally and internationally I think that the real meeting was both success and failure but it defined what was possible at that time and it also showed us how to make things work internationally that an overwhelming body of technical and scientific information does get credence and enable action that's good news so I'm not all that pessimistic as to political interests I also wreck political progress I also recognize that people in general are beginning to recognize where their interests lie that communal action in getting rid of guns is going to happen soon communal action on a whole host of other issues will happen as we recognize the extent to which commerce has usurped initiatives on environmental issues the pendulum will swing back and will pass the responsibility of proper regulatory procedure to government where it belongs so I'm not at all hopelessly established in this black cloud that I dropped on you recently I think that we can move on but recognizing the problem is one of the first and most constructive steps I would like to thank you the audience for your questions and the panel for a very fruitful discussion I have announcements to make before we break for lunch please know that the lines for lunch will be long that's one of the results of having a successful conference with a large attendance we suggest that you take a walk through campus if you don't wish to engage in those lines right away there is a concession stand on the upper level of this building a concessions trailer across the lawns by the student union and of course if you do have tickets the food service building is out the doors behind you and across the lawn we will reconvene for Dr. May's talk at 1.30 p.m. thank you very much