THE ENVIRONMENTALIST AND THE BOMB UPDATE: DAVE BROWER

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If you were to compress the earth to the size of an egg, all of the water on the planet would be but a drop, the air — liquefied for comparison — but a droplet, and the soil a speck barely visible to the naked eye. That trio — drop, droplet, and speck — make the earth unique among all the known planets in the universe, yet we rush to obliterate the difference.

We continue to spew the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. These emissions have already killed the fish in many lakes in the Adirondacks and thousands in Norway. Now they threaten some 50,000 bodies of water in Canada. We're also putting too much carbon dioxide into the air. I don't want to tell you the sky is falling because of all this C0 2 It's not, but the ocean is rising . . . and the icecaps are beginning to melt.

The population is still growing — according to the Global 2000 Report , there should be six billion people on earth by the turn of the century — and to feed all our people, we're mining our soil with intense mono culture plantings. These cause such enormous losses of topsoil that I believe Wes Jackson was right when he said the plowshare, in the long run, has done more harm than the sword.

We're also, in effect, burning our soil. To cook their food and keep warm, people around the world are desperately using all the wood and dung they can get for fuel. Thus, they're using up the very materials that allow the soil to renew itself . Conse quently, there may be 2-1/2 times as much desert land in the year 2000 as there is now. And by that same date we may also have lost a great deal of our planet's genetic diversity, since there'll likely be 500,000 to 2,000,000 fewer species then than there are now.

In sum, as Ray Dasmann says, "We are already fighting World War III, and I am sorry to say we are winning it . It is the war against the earth." Furthermore, that struggle is leading directly to the war of people against people with nuclear weapons . . . World War IV. The final nuclear quarrel over the resources left in the bottom of the barrel is inevitable if World War III — between humankind and our planet — continues.

To stave off that fate, disarmament of the superpowers is essential. The nuclear freeze is a step in the right direction, and Friends of the Earth supports a multilateral freeze. I myself think our nation could go further than that. We could make a unilateral move and start dismantling some of our weapons. We'd still have more than enough bombs to destroy the other side and everything else, yet such a move would set the necessary example for initiating real Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.

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