PARTING SHOT

I’ve written a few columns that turned out to be wrong, and readers wrote in to let me know about it. Fair enough. But I’ve never started a column hoping I was wrong, and asking readers to write in and prove it.

The trouble started when I read a frightening, eloquent article titled”The End of Nature” in the September 11 New Yorker. I can’t do more than hint at Bill McKibben’s argument here because the piece runs well past 20,000 words. But every one of them is worth pondering.

If I tell you McKibben is worried about global warming, the so-called greenhouse effect, you may stop reading. Had it not been for his alarming title and the fact that he writes very well indeed, I might have bailed out too. But soon I was hooked, reading to find a flaw in the argument. Because if he is right, we are all very wrong.

The story is oozing with Figures and studies and computer projections that all point to one grim conclusion: we are altering nature-indeed, we have already altered it-by adding tons upon tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And that has changed and will change the climate. If you look at the figures, the change looks deceptively small, like the change in the number of white blood cells that signals the onset of leukemia. We’re at about .035 percent carbon dioxide now. Some scientists studying the greenhouse effect think we’ll go up to about .055 or .06 percent. Not very much, McKibben admits. “But enough, it turns out, to make everything different.”

Interestingly, the writer uses Dallas to show just how different the new world will be. We now average nineteen days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees. According to a computer model done by NASA’s Goddard Institute, doubling the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (as we may do by the year 2000) would give Dallas seventy-eight days of 100-plus heat-almost three months. We would have sixty-eight days when the nighttime temperature did not fall below 80 degrees. (We now have four.) And keep in mind that these figures, if correct, would be average temperatures. We would still have heat waves and abnormal bumps in the weather. Cities like Phoenix, which see 120-degree days now, could reach 130 or 140. Most of us have heard that the four wannest years on record have occurred in the Eighties; what these studies and others are saying is that it’s no coincidence. We all remember the heat wave of 1980 and more recently the blazing summer of 1988, when long stretches of the Mississippi dried up. What will life be like if such summers become the norm?

This is only the tip of the melting iceberg. The economy of the United States will be drastically altered as the Grain Belt states are parched by the conquering sun. In fifty or a hundred years Kansas and Iowa will be as dry as West Texas, while vast areas of Canada now too cold to sustain crops become the new “breadbasket of the world.” As more cool-weather forests wither and die in the heat, more carbon will escape into the air, and the vicious circle will go on.

But the altered climate, the increase in skin cancer, and the ever-more desperate and costly attempts to cool our cities are not the worst of McKibben’s message.

He is not talking about the end of the world. We can adapt, survive. Futurists are already talking about domed cities and giant, carefully controlled “tree plantations” to take carbon dioxide out of the air. Life will go on. What will vanish, McKibben makes poignantly clear, is something that we urban, industrial people have taken for granted: nature. Yes, there will still be trees, and flowers and storms and clouds. What we are losing-have almost lost now-is the wild, indomitable nature, the mysterious network of forces that was behind us and around us, but was not us. The nature that pantheists and poets identified with God. The nature whose absolute independence of man was echoed in phrases like “It’s raining” and “no telling what it’ll do next.” It. Not us.

If the greenhouse scenario is correct, there will be no more It. Now there will be a new, artificial, man-tainted nature. We literally will decide to have a warmer planet, a planet with vegetation here and desert there. And perhaps McKibben doesn’t go far enough: if nature is no longer seen as an impartial force, a series of acts of God, why shouldn’t we have lawsuits over the weather? Perhaps farmers will sue over their baking crops, and owners of coastal resorts over their flooded properties.

I’ve been scanning the papers since I read McKibben’s piece. Surely some scientist working for Mobil or a spokesman for the Department of the Interior will read this article, expose its errors, and tell us we don’t have to worry about changing our lifestyle. I hope they hurry, because McKibben needs refuting if we are to continue following the gospel of growth and consumption that has driven America in this century. If he’s right, we need a different vision of the future, and I don’t hear any of our politicians chanting anything but more, more, more. Jimmy Carter was the last president who dared suggest that maybe we should put on a sweater instead of cranking up the heat, and you remember what happened to him.

Thoreau said “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Forgive me, but I thought of that while watching Hurricane Hugo swirling across the television screen. The storm was horrible and destructive, but it was also awe-inspiring and even tinged, in its own wild way, with beauty. Whatever made us made hurricanes as well, and you do not have to be very religious to see them as a reminder that we were not meant to have dominion over everything. There is something larger and vastly more powerful than we, so powerful that we can’t bend it to our will, try as we might. Or so we thought.

Like you, I don’t want to worry about theenvironment. The problem is too big andconflicts with too many other things I want.Worrying about carpooling and paper vs.plastic is not my job. So please, write soon.Tell me I’m a weak-kneed Chicken Littlewith a head full of mush. Tell me that lifeunder a dome won’t be so bad. Show me allthe flaws I missed in McKibben and thescientists he quotes. I don’t want to worry. Iwant to be happy. Help.