Earth Odyssey:
Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
Mark Hertsgaard

Mark Hertsgaard is a freelance journalist with excellent credentials. The title of his previous book On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency suggests a willingness to 'tell it as it is' and Earth Odyssey does just that. In 1991 he embarked on a travel-fest, around the world in six years, travelling to 4 continents and 19 countries, in an attempt to answer the question: will the human race survive the next hundred years?

Hertsgaard pulls no punches: the ecological crisis rests squarely on the "dilemma" created by the technological and economic successes of the West: we in the advanced nations have been accustomed to generally unsustainable levels of consumption. Even worse are the consequences of trying to extend this standard of living to all 6 billion human inhabitants of a beleaguered planet earth.

It's a depressingly familiar story—at least in its broad outlines. But for those of us accustomed to thinking in terms of environmental problems such as PCB contamination, hyper-automobility and urban decline, failed waste disposal strategies, habitat loss and species extinction, or even, simply, he sports utility vehicle—in short, in terms of the affluent societies of the west —this book packs some surprises.

Leaving Africa, Hertsgaard arrived in Asia and Bangkok, Thailand, sometime around 2 a.m. Within minutes of leaving the airport his cab was caught in a ferocious traffic jam, now a common feature of life day and night. Talk about urban decline: Bangkok's embrace of the industrial model has turned the city into a smog-ridden, hyper-mobile and slum infested mess. Gone are the graces of a city whose canals and water-borne way of life once invited comparison with Venice.

In effect, Hertsgaard has given us an extraordinary catalogue of environmental degradation all around the nonwestern world. As the industrialized economic system spreads throughout the world (and this is particularly the case in Asia) and as the socialist idealism of the past fades into memory, entrepreneurship and commercialism have become the cornerstones of a new reigning ethos. In such a world there is virtually no understanding of ecological principles and the demand for economic development far outstrips the concern with the world's pressing environmental problems.

A Postindustrial Model?

All of us have heard about Chernobyl. But how many know that the power plant meltdown there released two hundred times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere as was released by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined? Undoubtedly you've heard about leaks and other problems associated with the nuclear processing facility in Hanford, Washington, but have you ever heard of Mayak?

Don't be surprised if you haven't. It never officially existed and was never shown on any Soviet map: It was the Soviet Union's equivalent to Hanford, an eighty square mile industrial complex that was the USSR's primary nuclear weapons production facility. It stands today is a deadly remnant of the Cold War and a reminder that a bureaucratic command-style economy and political system was even more irresponsible toward the natural world than capitalism has been. A visiting team of scientists called Mayak "the most polluted place on the planet" and Hertsgaard finds plenty of evidence to sustain that judgment, including the horrifying effects of the deliberate and unrelenting dumping of nuclear waste into the Techa River from 1949 to 1956.

Russia may well represent what I'll call the postindustrial model. As Hertsgaard points out, in Russia economic development is going in reverse: a 20th-century middle class is being forced back into the fields to eke out a subsistence living, becoming a kind of neo-peasantry. Maybe we'll all be there some day. In any case, the immediate results aren't very promising. Russia is awash in the flotsam and jetsam of 20th century technological waste. Under such circumstances neglect can never be benign and the temptation to avoid poverty by selling these industrial era by-products (read: plutonium) is a clear and present danger.

The Rising Newly-Industrialized Nations

If Russia represents past transgressions, China is leading the wave of coming environmental disasters. Hertsgaard's chapter on China, perhaps the most interesting in the book, is entitled "Is Your Stomach Too Full?" This is the response the Chinese give to outsiders who descry China's extraordinarily high levels of air and water pollution. In a country of officially 1.2 billion people where the actual population is closer to 1.4, perhaps as high as 1.6 billion, and where the capitalist ethos of achievement and market-orientation has replaced the social idealism and bureaucratic planning of the socialist era, there is just a huge appetite for all kinds of goods and services.

The phrase "pent-up demand" comes to mind. There was a large pent-up demand for housing and other goods and services in a postwar America, awakening after fifteen years of depression and war. Think of the pent-up demand in a country like China, which has been a poor and exploited nation ever for two centuries. Indeed some of the Chinese defend their fixation on economic growth in national terms: "China was long a leading civilization of the world; then came the rise of the West. Now we're back.

The Chinese Hertsgaard commonly met (and this included well-educated people) believed that their bodies were capable of building up immunities against chemicals they encounter in the air and water! And any thought of alleviating the incredibly high levels of air pollution in Chinese cities caused by burning coal were quickly silenced by the mere memory of the "bad old days" when the vast majority of the population had no heat at all. Coal burning is on the rise in China and with vast reserves available, China's already large production of carbon dioxide is bound to increase dramatically. Anyone who harbored any lingering doubts about the severity of world environmental problems will have them dispelled by this one prospect alone.

A reviewer for The New York Times thought that Hertsgaard's prescriptions for change were the weakest part of the book. Big surprise. Taking on the big issues makes pat answers impossible. And although there's no programmatic discussion of change (and rightfully so in this sort of book), I think Hertsgaard has laid a good foundation for public discussion. For me the keys points are as follows:

1. (at risk of employing a cliché) the world is more interdependent than ever and there are no solutions that don't involve taking a global perspective;
2. defeatism, apathy and quietism are our biggest enemies and like the American philosopher William James we must adopt a practical yet visionary idealism if we stand any chance of addressing these issues;
   
3. since the global system reflects an unfortunate American legacy of "hyperconsumptionism", the U.S. bears heavy responsibility for the state of the world and both the appetite of the American middle class and the influence of American corporations must be curbed within an international framework of economic and environmental reform—a reform which paradoxically begins at the level of the nation; finally
4. (and this is the toughest paradox) technological innovation and economic development cannot solve the environmental problems, bu, at the same time, these problems can't be addressed without new technologies and coherent strategies of economic development.

Reviewed by Mark Luccarelli
02.01.01