I feel much better about President Clinton now that he wants to stop global warming and save the earth. Personally, I have always wanted to save the earth. When I was a boy in New Mexico, it became obvious to me that the earth was going to hell in a hand-basket, and something had to be done. But what with school, and mowing the lawn, reading comics, and escaping the occasional bully, that something never got to the top of my agenda.
Later it was the same story. Distractions always seemed to put off my intention of saving the earth. There was growing up, and then the long trip to Britain, and then study at University College London and the Bristol Old Vic School. (This, you might think, should have helped; saving the earth is very big in show business these days. But at that time there were concerns of getting work, a place to live in London - all that trivial stuff which, I am now ashamed to say, took precedence over saving the earth.)
Still, this great cause never quite left my mind. Standing on a corner of London's Oxford Street, and even on visits to New York, I would whiff up the pale clouds of exhaust from taxis, cars, and bikes, and sample the bad breath of passersby, and think, something has to be done. Oddly enough, up in Hampstead, North London, where I lived then, the air was much more salubrious, but environmental concerns were much bigger than on Oxford street. We used to talk about them in a little cafe called The Coffee Cup, which I believe is still there.
This conversation taught me a lot about emissions, and waste products and pollution of one kind and another. But none of my fellow believers had much of an idea of what to do about all this. There was talk of banning cars, which were not only polluting the atmosphere but lethally impacting thousands of people every year. But we never got round the fact cars were necessary for other important things besides killing people and polluting the air.
A few of our noble crew wanted to ban oil companies. We would sit, waving plastic cups of soft drink, and go on and on about banning the oil companies. But then someone pointed out that without the oil companies there would be no plastic cups (among other things), and we would have to sip those soft drinks out of our sweaty cupped hands, which might affect the taste and nourishment value. There might not even be soft drinks to sip, because there would be no fuel to ship the ingredients for those drinks, let alone package the drinks themselves.
A few other people - the tougher members of our crew - wanted to ban garbage. The idea was that after a phasing-out period, no more garbage would be allowed. That meant no more packaging, no more throwing away things like bones and apple cores; we would insist on eating the whole apple, or oranges, or avocado stones, or whatever, and boiling all bones down into a nutritious jelly; and no more bottles or glasses (it seemed that glass factories also polluted the earth, though less seriously than oil companies).
Actually, when it came right down to it, factories would have to be eliminated altogether. This was ambitious, of course, but we reckoned that with the right spirit it was possible; people could feed and clothe themselves by growing flax instead of lawns, keeping the odd sheep, cow and pig, and maybe raise silkworms and anything else they needed. The spaces formerly occupied by factories would be democratically shared out for all this.
Someone supposed that if we also banned cooking and all fires, this would help. No more smoke or combustion by-products. Instead of boiling down the bones, we could use stones to grind them up for fertilizer. And we were told that cooking harmed the vitamin content of food, so it might be better to eat everything raw anyhow.
Someone else pointed out that the building industry had a lot to answer for - all that manufactured metal and plaster-board and milled lumber and especially the bricks, which were made in kilns which required burning fuel. (We had already decided that all kinds of fuel should be banned.) So no more houses or buildings and the present supply of buildings would be allowed to biodegrade. And we could all live in hand-dug holes in the ground, thatched with windfall branches to protect us from the rain.
Disposing of our own waste would take us back to fertilizer, like in the Third World, and this was highly moral and harmonious with nature and therefore very acceptable. I mentioned that there might be problems with hospitals (which could suffer hygienically if their buildings were all replaced with large hand-dug holes in the ground); and medicines, which - at least for the time being - were made in factories. But someone else remarked that most of our ills are a matter of spiritual imbalance anyhow, and the experience of a pure and unpolluted world would eliminate this imbalance and probably cure cancer, schizophrenia, and appendicitis and other signs of spiritual malaise.
Then it occurred to us that the cattle population is a major source of greenhouse gases. In fact the whole of the animal population was polluting the world. All those animals are breaking wind all the time, which constitutes a major threat to the ozone layer, violates the purity of the atmosphere, and raises the temperature of the planet.
Someone observed that if we phased out all the animals, this would eliminate that problem, and there would be a supply of bones for fertilizer, and fresh meat to eat raw. This left the problem of human population. Then we saw that if we just phased out all the people, this would solve all of the pollution problems - if not at a stroke, then at least gradually, which was better than nothing, and might save the world in the long run.
We were about to design ways to do this, when the explosion of property prices in Hampstead forced our branch of Friends Of The Earth to scatter out and live in other places, and we lost touch with each other. One or two of the group returned to America and joined the Democratic Party; I am delighted to see that their influence is now surfacing in the concerns of Al Gore and Mr. Clinton's speeches. It may be that those plans we discussed so passionately all those years ago in Hampstead will be take in hand at last and placed on a practical footing. Our leaders will make tough for fuel-consumers and other polluters' we will all move along smartly toward saving the earth. Congratulations to Mr. Clinton on his conversion to our cause.
Herb Greer is an author and playwright living in London.
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