I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing

I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of

processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn' t a good day. We were

anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central Asia, but

as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there

should have been gentle - blue green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there

was nothing but hot dry sand

–

as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships

of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the

way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the

world, comparable to the largest of North America's Great Lakes. Now it is

disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in an

ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the usert t. The new shoreline was

almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now

permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still

canning fish

–

brought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia from

the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.

My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to

travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At

the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun

glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and

talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through

time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and

peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on

which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades

ago.

bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small

reduction in one country's emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the

remotest end least accessible place on earth.

But the most significant change thus far in the

earth' s atmosphere is the one that

began with the industrial r evolution early in the last century and has

picked up speed

ever since

. Industry meant

coal

, and later

oil

, and we began to burn lots of it

–

bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in

the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth

. Fewer than a hundred yards from the

South Pole, upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its

engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists

monitor the air sever al times ever y day to chart the course of that

inexorable change.

During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that day's

measurements,

pushing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is

–

there at

the end of the earth

–

to see that this enormous change in the global

atmosphere is still picking up speed.

Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our

planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid

Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by

snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was

thinner

–

only three and a half feet thick

–

and a nuclear submarine hovered in the

water below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and

resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to

measure more accurately the

thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global

warming

. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientists and the U. S. Navy

to secure the re-lease of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data

that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to

see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were

crashing through that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful

snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little

hummocks, or

when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just as rapidly, and

ultimately temperature will rise with them

–

indeed, global warming is expected to

push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the

world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays

such a crucial role in the world's weather system,

the consequences of a thinning cap

could be disastrous.

Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise. Six months after

I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientists reported dramatic changes in the

pattern of ice distribution in the Arctic, and a second team reported a still

controversialclaim (which a variety of data now suggest) that, over all, the north polar

cap has thinned by 2 per cent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established

several years ago that in

many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the spring

snowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, the

temperature e of the earth is steadily rising.

As it happens, some of the most disturbing images of environmental destruction

can be found exactly halfway between the North and South poles

–

precisely at the

equator in Brazil

–

where billowing clouds of smoke regularly black-en the sky

above the immense but now threatened Amazon rain forest.

Acre by acre, the rain

forest is being burned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef;

as I learned when I

went there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dry season now,

with more than one Tennessee's worth of

rain forest being slashed and burned

each

year. According to our guide, the biologist Tom Lovejoy, there are more different

species of birds in each square mile of the Amazon than exist in all of North America

–

which means we are silencing thousands of songs we have never even heard.

But one doesn't have to travel around the world to wit-ness

humankind'

s assault

on the earth. Images that

signal the distress of our global environment

are now

commonly seen almost anywhere. On some nights, in high northern latitudes, the sky

itself offers another ghostly image that signals the loss of ecological balance now in

progress. If the sky is clear after sunset -- and it you are watching from a place where

pollution hasn't blotted out the night sky altogether -- you can sometimes see a strange

kind of cloud high in the sky. This

earth is first cloaked in the evening dark-ness; shimmering above us with a translucent

whiteness, these clouds seem quite unnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds

have begun to appear more often because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the

atmosphere. (Also called natural gas, methane is released from landfills , from coal

mines and rice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cut

forestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other human activities. )

Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in the past., all this extra

methane carries more water vapor into the upper atmosphere, where it condenses at

much higher altitudes to form more clouds that the sun's rays still strike long after

sunset has brought the beginning of night to the surface far beneath them.

What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simple wonder or the mix

of emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feel awe for our own power: just

as men

’

heads in such quantity as to threaten the beast with

extinction, we are ripping matter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset

the balance between daylight and darkness. In the process, we are once again adding

to the

threat of global warming

,

be-cause methane has been one of the fastest-growing

green-house gases

, and is third only to carbon dioxide and water vapor in total volume,

changing the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. But, without even considering that

threat, shouldn't it startle us that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky

which glisten with a spectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the

bright lights of civilization that we can't see these clouds for what they are

–

a

physical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilization and the

earth?

Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by now all

witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from our assault on the

environment --whether it's the new frequency of days when the temperature exceeds

100 degrees, the new speed with which the -un burns our skin, or the new constancy

of public debate over what to do with growing mountains of waste. But our response

to these signals is puzzling. Why haven't we launched a massive effort to save our

environment? To come at the question another way' Why do some images startle us

into immediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effectively? And

why do other images, though sometimes equally dramatic, produce instead a Kin. of

paralysis, focusing our attention not on ways to respond but rather on some

convenient, less painful distraction?

Still, there are so

many distressing images of environ-mental destruction that

sometimes it seems impossible to know how to absorb or comprehend them.

Before

considering the threats themselves, it may be helpful to classify them and thus begin

to organize our thoughts and feelings so that we may be able to respond appropriately.

A useful system comes from the military, which frequently places a conflict in one of

three different categories, according to the theater in which it takes place. There are

reserved for struggles that can threaten a nation's survival and must be under stood in

a global context. Environmental threats can be considered in the same way. For

example, most instances of water pollution, air pollution, and illegal waste dumping

are essentially local in nature. Problems like acid rain, the contamination of

under-ground aquifers, and large oil spills are fundamentally regional. In both of these

categories, there may be so many similar instances of particular local and regional

problems occurring simultaneously all over the world that the patter n appears to be

global, but the problems themselves are still not truly strategic because the operation

of- the global environment is not affected and the survival of civilization is not at

stake.

However, a new class of environmental problems does affect the global

ecological system, and these threats are fundamentally strategic. The 600 percent

increase in the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere during the last forty years has

taken place not just in those countries producing the chlorofluorocarbons responsible

but in the air above every country, above Antarctica, above the North Pole and the

Pacific Ocean

–

all the way from the surface of the earth to the top of the sky. The

increased levels of chlorine disrupt the global process by which the earth regulates the

amount of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is allowed through the atmosphere to

the surface; and it we let chlorine levels continue to increase, the radiation levels will

al- so increase

–

to the point that all animal and plant life will face a new threat to their

survival.

Global warming is also a strategic threat. The concentration of carbon dioxide

and other heat-absorbing molecules has increased by almost 25 per cent since World

War II, posing a worldwide threat to the earth's ability to regulate the amount of heat

from the sun retained in the atmosphere. This increase in heat seriously threatens the

global climate equilibrium that determines the pattern of winds, rainfall, surface

temperatures, ocean currents, and sea level. These in turn determine the distribution of

vegetative and animal life on land and sea and have a great effect on the location and

pattern of human societies.

In other words, the entire relationship between humankind and the earth has been

transformed because our civilization is suddenly capable of affecting the entire global

environment, not just a particular area. All of us know that human civilization has

usually had a large impact on the environment; to mention just one example, there is

evidence that even in prehistoric times, vast areas were sometimes intentionally

burned by people in their search for food. And in our own time we have reshaped a

large part of the earth's surface with concrete in our cities and carefully tended rice

paddies, pastures, wheat fields, and other croplands in the countryside. But these

changes, while sometimes appearing to be pervasive , have, until recently, been

relatively trivial factors in the global ecological sys-tem. Indeed, until our lifetime, it

was always safe to assume that nothing we did or could do would have any lasting

effect on the global environment. But it is precisely that assumption which must now

be discarded so that we can think strategically about our new relationship to the

environment.

Human civilization is now the dominant cause of change in the global

environment.

Yet we resist this truth and find it hard to imagine that our effect on the

earth must now be measured by the same yardstick used to calculate the strength of

the moon's pull on the oceans or the force of the wind against the mountains. And it

we are now capable of changing something so basic as the relationship between the

earth and the sun, surely we must acknowledge a new responsibility to use that power