Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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But to get back to Cherry: Why, for God's sake, does he have to assume that our energy consumption will be at suchand-such an increased rate by the year so-and-so? Why do we double our consumption of power every fifteen or every ten or every eight or whatever-we're-down-to-now years? Why don't we cut it 10% each year? Why don't we trade in our standard of using and go back to a standard of living?

We could do it, you know. When I was in high school, the population of the earth was half what it is now . . . yet we used only one-tenth the energy we now consume. And the world worked. There was employment, there was beauty, there was good air, there was open space. I'm not necessarily saying that we should return to the world of my high school years . . . but we might learn something if we looked back once in a while to the days when we still lived within our environmental income.

Maybe, if we thought about it, we'd begin to ask some questions. Why, for instance, have we accepted the idea that we have to use as much electricity— for our air conditioning alone —as 800,000,000 Chinese use for everything? It's not really as if China never had a civilization, you know . . . or doesn't have one now.

Why does the wet rice agriculture of China return five times as much energy as is put into the crop while the wet rice agriculture of the U.S. returns only one-fifth the energy invested? Somewhere between those two sets of figures there must be a more rational way for us to grow wet rice.

PLOWBOY: That last one is a particularly good example. Many people now know that we consume far too much energy to air condition poorly designed tract houses and automobiles that should never have been built in the first place . . . but few of us realize the ridiculous and unnecessary quantities of power that we currently pour into farming on this continent.

BROWER: Yes, it's a vicious spiral. The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place. Then we have to invent still more energy-intensive synthetics which further spoil the natural processes that were doing all the work for free in the beginning. And every time we go around we say we've got to double the power we'll use on the next circuit . . . when, for God's sake, what we should do is just stop dead in our tracks.

Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place . . . before we started to intercept all the natural systems and chop off the interflow that gave us free maintenance. It's not just Shell Chemical or Standard Oil that's to blame . . . not as long as we continue our genetic mining. We play around with certain strains—such as miracle wheat—and make them more and more energy-intensive in order to get more production per acre . . . forgetting every ecological law in the book.

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