THE ENVIRONMENTALIST AND THE BOMB UPDATE: DAVE BROWER

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But those are my personal ideas. To help us all examine the economics of peaceful stability, Friends of the Earth and other organizations are planning a three-day conference in mid-October to be called "Conservation and Security in a Sustainable Society: The First Biennial Conference on the Fate of the Earth". A long list of environmentally concerned leaders — including Ansel Adams, Wendell Berry, Lester Brown, Helen Caldicott, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Amory and Hunter Lovins, Linus Pauling, Russell Peterson, Pete Seeger, Gus Speth, and Stewart Udall — have agreed to serve as advisers. We want to spend three days looking into the links between the growth and arms races and planning an economically feasible route to a sustainable society so that disarmament will be possible.

The idea of the conference sprang, in part, from the series of biennial meetings we began in 1949 to work for passage of the Wilderness Bill. Those meetings had an enormous effect on the public's understanding of the need for wilderness . . . and they helped spawn the movement that led, in 1964, to the bill's final passage. In addition — as evidenced by its title — the conference's concept comes, in part, from Jonathan Schell's superb work, The Fate of the Earth . . . a book that may do more than any other single factor to make us end the threat of nuclear holocaust.

To those who say this effort sounds utopian, let me point out that the alternative is oblivion. To those who would ignore the threat of holocaust and hide their heads in the sand, let me say, "All too soon, you may find that sand fused." To those who think such decisions should be left up to the politicians, I quote Dwight Eisenhower's words: "Governments will not produce peace until the people force them to." And to those who believe the public can't change things, let me repeat that — according to H.R. Haldeman's book The Ends of Power — Richard Nixon would have used the atomic bomb in Vietnam if it hadn't been for the demonstrations of antiwar protesters. We all have to look at our own roles as participants in the strongest democracy there is and remember that democracies work best when they're participatory, rather than spectator, sports.

An individual alone can make a difference. Just think of Amory Lovins, whose first book Eryri: The Mountains of Longing saved Snowdonia National Park . . . Marion Edey, who made the League of Conservation Voters work . . . Rachel Carson, who almost singlehandedly sparked the environmental movement . . . and now, Jonathan Schell. These days, we all must participate to see that this planet does not perish from the universe just because one or the other of us had part in letting it go.

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