THE ENVIRONMENTALIST AND THE BOMB UPDATE: DAVE BROWER

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In addition, nuclear power plants produce great amounts of spent fuel that has to be disposed of, and one current popular idea for dealing with much of that waste is to put it through reprocessing plants. But such a facility accumulates an enormous inventory of high-level waste. Indeed, nuclear weapons expert Ted Taylor has said that the destruction of one reprocessing plant that had been operating for ten years could release more strontium 91 and cesium 137 than would the detonation of all the atomic weapons now on earth. If a single such facility were blown up in western Europe, that entire region would be rendered uninhabitable for generations. It's like building gargantuan land mines and then planting them in your own country!

To stop both the growth race and the arms race from destroying the planet — to keep the human-caused extinction of creatures and ecosystems from being a precursor of our own fate — we need to redefine security. Thus far the disarmament movement has been hard pressed simply to slow the buildup of nuclear weapons, so it hasn't been able to pay attention to alternative definitions of security. But we do need to establish some. We must search for the types of national security that will sustain the human race, recognizing that real national security can come only if we have improved global security.

I have my own set of ideas as to how we might start working toward that goal. One is for America and Russia to stop standing toe to toe and instead stand side by side, and see not what they can do to each other, but what they can do for the rest of the world . . . to form a U.S./Soviet Marshall Plan that invests in resource recovery, not depletion. And how would they fund such a massive undertaking? Just recall that the two nations, between them, plan to spend four trillion dollars in the next five years — 25 trillion in all by the year 2000 — for their counterproductive attempts to increase security through arms. So just spend that money on healing the earth instead of blowing it up.

I'd also like to propose that Homo sapiens adopt Magna Carta II. Magna Carta I came in 1215 when King John of England was required, by his abused barons, to grant a long list of rights to free commoners. The parallel between the need then for human law and order and the need now for natural law and order — to prevent a nuclear holocaust — provides an extraordinary opportunity for the most important paradigm shift in history. In Magna Carta II, the natural world's rights to its existence and freedoms would be acknowledged. We would quit trying to imprison and destroy other species and ecosystems.

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