The Global Citizen. - book reviews

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1991 by J. Baldwin

Having learned from the shortcomings revealed by critics of her famous but flowed Limits to Growth (it was too simple a view), Donella Meadows has turned into on essayist with an uncanny ability to cut through the ignorance and politics surrounding the more recalcitrant issues of our day Many of the essays address matters all too familiar to readers of this magazine, but certainly not in the some old way. Her analyses clear the air make you see what's important and what's really going on. She gives you a firm base from which to ad. You may disagree, but at least you'll know.

* Upper-class people never clean up after themselves or care for the physical needs of others. They consider their time too important to spend that way.

* Middle-class people clean up after and care for themselves and a few others in reciprocal arrangements - I'll do your laundry if you'll shovel the snow - and they consider themselves just ordinary folks.

* Lower-class people clean up after themselves and others all day, every day, and figure that's all they're good for.

* Gatherings of conservationists these days are almost unrecognizable because the lanquage is that of international banking and the sums are in the millions of dollars. But everyone knows that the nuts-ond-bolts economic talk is actually about something beyond price. A Nature Conservancy brochure lays out what the real deal is. it says: Just $300 for each hectare (2.5 acres) of Guanacaste National Park "buys you all of (forever): 0.001 jaguar, 0.5 parrot, 20 toads, 25 spiny pocket mice, 0.04 anteater, 100 vines, 0.03 spider monkey, 400 dung beetles, 0.01 muscovy duck, 0.00029 volcano. All purchases will be held for your on-site inspection by the Costa Rican Notional Park Service."

How could a form bill be written to guarantee the survival of the family farm?

Well, to begin, it ought to have that as its goal. The main problem with our current form policy is that it has too many goals. We are trying to make farm prices high for the farmer but low for the consumer, to produce all we can for export but reduce surpluses, to render humanitarian food aid but use food as a foreign policy weapon, to conserve farmland but make it produce more and more, to encourage young formers but weed out inefficient ones, to stabilize prices but allow the market system to work, to appease special interests and get the administration reelected, and, oh yes, to feed people.

Unless we sort out these goals, our farm policy will continue to be chaotic....

If we could bail out Chrysler, we can bail out the people who feed us.

* To a developer," the land is worth at least $1,000 an acre, cash down, much more for an acre near an intersection or by a lake or with a view. it is worth that only once.

From then on the economics of the land are changed. There may be utility for a homeowner, income from a shopping mall, revenues for a town. The money flow is greater, but that value no longer comes from the land. It comes from high-cost inputs - construction and maintenance, energy, labor, sewers, trash collection all of which draw resources from land somewhere else.

If we let the market guide development," we lose sight of most of the value of the land. The market sees only the one-time big profit of the developer." It discounts the modest perpetual income of the farmer. It ignores the beauty for each bypasser. The market does not value the groundwater, does not foresee the flood, and does not take into account future taxes for sewers and schools. To include and protect all kinds of land value, something has to be added to the market, something that expresses the longterm public interest.... New Hampshire, for example, has a small fund to buy development rights to formland. The farmer who sells those rights continues to own the land, manages it, lives on it, earns money from farming and logging it, and can sell it. But the deed is restricted so that no owner, now or in the future, ever can develop" it. The state acquires only one right in the deal the right to enforce that restriction.

The government can't help lying about nuclear matters. It operates according to the basic bureaucratic rules of information blurring, Use long, vague words. Never admit a mistake. When embarking on something new, pretend you are far more certain than you really are. The path of nuclear power is especially littered with lies because the technical nature of the undertaking encourages long words, necessitates many mistakes, and involves awesome levels of uncertainty...

The storage of nuclear wastes is a superhuman job, and governments are only too human. This stage in the development of nuclear power, like all the stages before it, will be trial and error, error, error.

Who should be exposed to the error? The government's answer is "as few people as possible, therefore we should go to the boondocks." Out here in the boondocks, we favor another answer. "Those who make the decisions should bear the risks."

Why not, indeed, leave the wastes aboveground where those who generate them can watch over them day and night? There's a five-sided space inside the Pentagon that would be just dandy for the wastes from bomb making. Wastes produced by DOE research programs would fit nicely in the courtyard of DOE's Forrestal Building, right there in downtown Washington.