Conversation with Mother
(Page 10 of 11)
September/October 1986
By Lester Brown
Let me give you an example. In 1976, President Ford signed the automobile-fuel-efficiency legislation, and — partly as a result — the average fuel efficiency of new cars sold in the United States in 1985 was nearly double what it had been in 1973, which was the year before the OPEC price hike.
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There are many other areas where a similar national effort would improve the prospect for the long term. There's no reason why we shouldn't have a national beverage-container recycling bill. It would save energy, reduce pollution — air pollution, in particular — and also reduce the waste disposal costs that many cities are facing. One of the consequences of a throw-away society is the growing amounts of garbage that cities have to haul to landfills further and further away, causing costs to climb astronomically. All of these factors argue for moving toward the systematic reuse of materials. It's one thing to save your aluminum cans or your waste paper for recycling, but if there isn't a viable, stable, long-term, national market for these materials, then one day you'll find there's no place for your stack of papers to go.
And that's where I think we fail. At the individual level, we tend to concentrate on what we can do ourselves rather than trying to change the system, and that's why I think we have to become more politically active.
Population, for example, is an issue that most of us can have some influence on, at least when we're at the age of making childbearing decisions. But it's also an area where U.S. policy at the national and international levels is important, because it so directly affects global population trends.
MOTHER: From what you've been telling me then, Mother Earth is suffering from a rapidly growing human population that is not only eating away at the beauty of the planet and spewing out poisons, but destroying its host's basic abilities to sustain life. The prognosis doesn't look good.
BROWN: When considering the world as a whole, one does have to be impressed with the losses at this point. However, there are also the occasional gains — and some of them have been dramatic! I mentioned earlier that we're seeing in China — mostly as a result of progress over the past decade — a society with about a billion people moving into the industrial world. The gains in energy efficiency for the world as a whole have been most impressive since the late '70s.
But these postive changes are still unbalanced by world environmental deterioration — whether it be soil erosion, rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, or increases in acid rain and forest die-off: We have the African continent going downhill with nothing in sight to arrest that decline. In the absence of a major successful intervention in that process, catastrophe lies ahead — possibly on a scale that we've not experienced before.
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