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PART ONE: TOO MANY HUMANS?

Chapter One. Snapshot of a Modern Planet: busy and largely successful

Introduction

Section i The doom that never came

Section ii Sketching the success in food

Section iii The wider success

Section iv A very modern success

Introduction

At the end of the Second World War we barely knew how to feed two billion people; now we feed something like five billion. Mankind is doing much better than is commonly supposed.

Section i The doom that never came

At the time of Christ the human population of the earth was perhaps 200 million, about a twenty-fifth of what it is now. The Pyramids had stood for three thousand years. The human enterprise could already be reckoned as mature, and in some important ways it was recognisably modern. At least a few favoured places had made many cultural achievements: written language, mathematics, and government. If technology was crude by modern standards, in places there was a style of agriculture which many people on earth today can only aspire to. By the time of Christ, this species had already seen civilisations come and go, their decline partly a result of the failure of their farming methods, and partly the result of natural climate changes.

Developing in technology and understanding, accumulating skills, the species' numbers passed the 1000 million mark around the year 1800. In 1993, the species numbers are getting on for 5500 million souls. [[vii]] About 2000 years after Christ, we can expect to see something like 6300 million people. Within another half century, that number is likely nearly to have doubled. [[viii]] To put it another way: there is wide agreement (discussed in Chapter Two) that the human population will be 10 billion sometime in the next century. The world's population was somewhere around 3 billion around the end of the Second World War. So the last couple of generations of humans have already accomplished about half - perhaps a little less - of the extra feeding and providing which will have been required in the period from the mid-twentieth to the mid-twenty-first century.

This view contributes to the difficulty of believing the familiar story of rising numbers as an unfolding disaster. The idea of the "population explosion" is deeply-embedded in the way modern people see their world. It is normal now for people to believe that human numbers will create the world-shattering apocalypse which it was once believed nuclear warheads would create. We have substituted one bomb for another. Luckily, the facts are at variance with the fashionable view.

Environmental gloom is quite a young human perception, and yet it is old enough to have accumulated a history from which we can take some comfort. If the gloomy prognostications of the 1960s and 1970s had been right, the human predicament would be much worse than it has turned out to be.

One of the first environmental luminaries was Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Biology at Stanford University. His writing continued a theme made famous by a nineteenth century classic, The Essay on Population, by Edward Malthus. Both men argued that the rate of population growth was exponential and that of food production arithmetical. This is to say that populations grow very fast - snowballs - but food production only grows slowly and steadily. Result: starvation and famine. So far, malthusianism has not made its case.

Paul Ehrlich is important because he articulates so clearly the fallacious thinking of most casual observers. His most famous book, The Population Bomb, published in 1968, begins:

The fight to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death. [[ix]]

As John McCormick points out in his history of the emergence of green thinking and campaigning,

Ehrlich was an unashamed neo-Malthusian. Criticisms that he was alarmist did not upset him. 'I AM an alarmist', he told Playboy in 1970, 'because I'm very goddamned alarmed. I believe we're facing the BRINK because of population pressures.'.... Ehrlich warned that (1) hundreds of millions of people faced starvation in the 1970s and 1980s, (2) the limits of human capability to produce food by conventional means had nearly been reached, (3) attempts to increase food production would cause environmental deterioration and reduce the earth's capacity to produce food, (4) population growth could lead to plague and nuclear war and (5) the only solution lay in a change in human attitudes. [[x]]

As evidenced by their latest book, The Population Explosion [[xi]] the Ehrlichs (Paul Ehrlich is joined by his wife Anne for later books) do not seem to be much chastened by the way their earlier predictions of mass starvations and a world incapable of growing sufficient food were found to be off-beam. In this they seem to establish a pattern followed by the authors of the equally famous early text, Limits for Growth, published in the earthly 70s, and the follow-up to that book, Beyond the Limits (published in 1992). The mind-sets of both pairs of books will not let them respond to the evidence (for more on the Limits to Growth case, see Chapter Twelve). Writing in 1990, the Ehrlichs say that about 10 million people, mostly children, have annually perished needlessly of hunger and hunger-related disease over the past couple decades. This is sad enough, if true, but is a much lesser effect than they predicted two decades earlier. But the passing years have not brought the Ehrlichs to a happier interpretation of the data they very usefully draw to people's attention.

According to the Ehrlichs' most recent book , something pretty dreadful is already happening, with worse to come:

The alarm has been sounded repeatedly, but society has turned a deaf ear. Meanwhile, a largely prospective disaster has been turned into the real thing. A 1990s primer on population by necessity looks very different from our original work. The Population Explosion is being written as ominous changes in the life-support systems of civilisation become more evident daily. It is being written in a world where hunger is rife and the prospects of famine ever more imminent.

The truer picture is much more richly-textured than Ehrlich implied and he and his wife still imply. The World Bank, in one of the bold, flourishing sentences its annual World Development Report favours (this one was issued in June 1991) puts things very differently:

Famines disappeared from Western Europe in the mid-1800s, from Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and from Asia in the 1970s [[xii]] .

It is true that hundreds of millions of people are undernourished, and millions die of diseases against which better nourishment would have provided part of a defence. [[xiii]] A billion people are classified as poor and over half of them live in extreme poverty. Even allowing for the difficulty of assessing these things across profound cultural barriers, there clearly is widespread hunger and malnutrition in the world, and they contribute to an essentially avoidable death-toll. The World Health Organisation suggests, uncontroversially, as the Ehrlichs do, that these deaths arise because of hunger's power to weaken people's ability to fight commonplace disease:

Interactions between nutrition and infection to produce the 'malnutrition/infection complex' create the greatest public health problem in the world. [[xiv]]

All the same, the famines and mass starvations to death predicted by Paul Ehrlich are not happening in the 1990s, and did not happen in the 1970s or 1980s either. Such famines as we see, it is widely agreed, are the result of war, not ecological collapse. [[xv]] The evidence that mass starvation is avoidable and will probably stay avoided gets better, not worse, as we shall see in Chapter Three. Similarly, the evidence is that economic incompetence and political nastiness are far more likely contributors to present and most possible future sad outcomes than is the environmental failure predicted for so long by the Ehrlichs.

Section ii Sketching the success in food

The World Health Organisation gives a clear, blunt picture of the world's present human food supply:

Current and emerging food production and preservation capabilities are sufficient to ensure an adequate global supply of safe nutritious food. The food trade has increased markedly, resulting in an international market and creating a growing demand for the safe preservation of food during prolonged shipment. Improved food storage and processing considerably increase the availability of food for human consumption by limiting food spoilage and reducing food and crop wastes. Chronic hunger is due less to food shortage than to lack of purchasing power or of land on which food can be produced, or disruption of food distribution systems by civil unrest or violence. However, drastic changes in the agriculture, food and fishery sectors will be required to achieve an adequate food supply for the 7000 million or more people who will inhabit the world by the year 2010, if damage to the environment and risk of spreading infectious diseases are to be avoided. In particular, the problems of pre-harvest and post harvest losses will need to receive special attention.....Although agricultural supplies in most parts of the world appear to have kept up with the demand for food and, on the whole, per caput food supplies have shown some improvement over the last two decades except in some parts of Africa, FAO has estimated that by the end of the century the number of seriously malnourished people will reach 590 million. [[xvi]]

It is a common misconception that the entire developing world is suffering hunger. In fact, says the main UN development agency:

There has been a general global improvement in food production and calorie supplies. The daily supply of calories in the developing world improved from 90 per cent of total requirements in 1965 to 107 percent in 1985. Confirming this evidence, production data show a roughly 20 percent increase in average calories supplies per person between 1965 and 1985. [[xvii]]

Not only is there enough food in the world as a whole to feed everyone now on it, there is enough food in the developing world to feed every one of its citizens. However, the picture is uneven, both between countries and within them. UNDP continues:

Countries having the most urgent need for food show the slowest progress. For the poorest countries [as a group], the daily per caput calorie supply increased only from 87 percent of the total requirements to 89 percent between 1965 and 1985. [[xviii]]

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations' annual account of the condition of world farming and food put it in this way at the very beginning of this decade:

A wide gap of over 900 calories per caput per day currently separates average calorie supply in developed and developing countries. However, since calorie supply rose faster in developing regions, the gap has narrowed significantly since the early 1970s. Thus DES [dietary energy supply] in developing countries was equivalent to 65 per cent of that in developed countries in 1969-71 compared to 72 percent in 1986-88. [[xix]]

So far from the familiar, wrong view about food supply, we can say that whilst the developing world is probably overfed, as well as financially embarrassed by the amount of food its farmers produce, the third world is not, as a whole, hopelessly out of touch with the rich-world production and consumption record. It is true and a pity that the rate at which the third world is catching up with the rich world slowed in the eighties. The per caput supply of food rose less quickly in all the regions of the developing world in the 1980s than it had in the 1970s. [[xx]] All the same a situation which is improving less quickly than it used to is still an improving - not a deteriorating - situation.

Because so much suffering is involved, it is important to see the shadows in this fairly bright view. The numbers of undernourished people in the world have been rising for at least twenty years. According to the FAO, the hungry within the developing countries outside the Eastern Bloc and China rose by an estimated 15 million during the 1970s and by 37 million during the first few years of the 1980s. The hungry then numbered about 512 million. Even so, whilst the absolute numbers of undernourished people were rising,

their proportion in relation to total [developing world] population declined during the period to an estimated 21 percent in 1984-86. [[xxi]]

The proportion of hungry people seems continuously to fall, but fast-rising population numbers ensure that the absolute number of hungry people sadly increases slightly too.

The majority of the hungry are in the Far East, but that region also delivers great progress, so that whilst it held 61 percent of all the hungry in the developing market countries in 1969-71, fifteen years later it held 56 percent of them.

Africa was, as we shall often see, a hard case. During the 80s the calories per caput decreased very slightly across the Continent. Unlike other regions, the proportion of Africans who were hungry rose as did the absolute numbers. About a third of Africans are hungry, as was the case in the early 1970s. [[xxii]]

Part of the present human miracle is that so much - a clear and large majority - of the world's population is adequately fed, whilst a sizeable proportion of the world seems to suffer damage to its health because it eats too much (Chapter Eight looks at this issue). About a quarter of the human race is positively spoiled and much of the rest flourishes in ways which were unimaginable to the nineteenth century mind and certainly were not expected by the grandparents of children now alive.

Section iii The wider success

During the past twenty-five years, the world's population has risen by about 1500 million. During this time of unparalleled increase in numbers of human beings, there have been great advances, not merely in the absolute amount of wealth the world's people generate, but the degree to which it is available in places we think of as poor.

As the World Bank reports:

During the past three decades the developing world has made enormous economic progress. This can been seen most clearly in the rising trend for incomes and consumption: between 1965 and 1985 consumption per caput in the developing world went up by almost 70 percent. [[xxiii]]

Most of Asia, for instance, has done extraordinarily well. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) noted in 1990:

....the giant economies of China and India and the populous nations of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Thailand have also experienced ten years of rising per caput incomes and slow falls in the proportions of their populations living below the poverty line. [[xxiv]]

This is not to forget the poverty to be found in the self-same countries. As UNICEF continues:

approximately 40 percent of all the young children who die in the world each year, 45 percent of the children who are malnourished, 35 percent of those who are not in school, and over 50 percent of those who live in absolute poverty are to be found in just three countries - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. [[xxv]]

Much of the new wealth in the world goes into armies and Mercedes Benzes and services for the tiny minority of very rich, and does so in much more marked degree in poor countries than in rich and Western nations. It is a paradox that the greatest inequality is to be found in the poorest countries. This is not a trivial inequality. It is not merely that the many are poor and that there are a tiny minority who are rich in huge disproportion to them. Far more important is the fact that the rich minority apportion to themselves not merely huge wealth, but a large proportion of the wealth of their society. Moreover, the rich minority often feel little obligation to share their well-being. For a sense of this, consider how a two percent rise in taxation of the richest fifth of the population in Latin America would raise all the poor of the region above official poverty levels. [[xxvi]]

All the same, economic growth in poor countries seems usually to translate - albeit with painful imperfection in places - into human well-being. In the words of the United Nations Population Fund:

Life expectancy in developing countries increased from 51 [years] for men and 53 for women in 1965-1970, to 59 and 61 in 1985-1990. In 1965, for every 1,000 children born world-wide, 103 died before their first birthday. By 1985-1990 the yearly toll had been cut to 71. Average daily calorie intakes jumped from 2,116 in 1965 to 2,509 two decades later. [[xxvii]]

In a country such as the Republic of Korea, the transformations can be extreme and very heartening. Food, health and education services are being delivered in a society in which until recently they were very scarce. In Mexico, the successes are as marked. According to the Mexican government:

The average rate of illiteracy from 1941 to 1950 was 42.2 percent, dropping to 23.7 percent in 1970, 17 percent in 1980 and 8 percent in 1989. The goal set by President Salinas de Gortari's administration is to reduce illiteracy to 5 percent by 1994.

The country is aiming at universal vaccination of children against the major killer diseases and has a long-running if limited social security programme. In Brazil, to cite another example of very rapid progress, under the leadership of a young governor, one of the country's poorest states, Ceara, cut infant mortality by a third in four years. The infant mortality of that state is now headed for Mexican levels (30 deaths before age one per 1,000 live births rather than the 55 deaths which occur on average in Brazil). The country's infant mortality remains at least twice that of China, though the latter country has a per capita income one eighth that of Brazil. But the progress in Ceara shows what a very small shift in resources can achieve. Seven thousand-odd workers, a network of community-run clinics and basic medicines have worked the miracle. [[xxviii]]

Success is more general than might be supposed:

The developing countries have made significant progress toward human development in the last three decades. They ... immunised two-thirds of all one year olds against major childhood diseases. The developing countries also made primary health care accessible to 61 percent of their people and safe water to 55 percent (80 percent in urban areas). In addition, they increased the per caput calories supply by about 20 percent between 1965 and 1985.

Their progress in education was equally impressive. Adult literacy rates rose from 43 percent in 1970 to 60 percent in 1985 - male literacy from 53 percent to 71 percent and female literacy from 33 percent to 50 percent. The South's primary education output in 1985 was almost six times greater than that in 1950, its secondary education output more than 18 times greater. The results were 1.4 billion literate people in the South in 1985, compared with nearly a billion in the North. [[xxix]]

To take two of these examples, and flesh them out a little. A higher percentage of people in the developing world had access to safe water at the end of the eighties than in 1975. More than half the people in developing countries had access to safe water in 1986, up from 35 percent in 1975, and even the least developed countries showed some advance. The performance varies. Some developing countries managed to get clean water to nearly everyone, whilst in the least-developed countries only a third of people are within reach of drinkable water. Asia and Latin America in general can report good progress, though Bangladesh's people saw a deterioration in access. In Africa eight countries were able to deliver water to only a fifth of their people. [[xxx]] Turning to education: most developing countries have showed remarkable progress in enrolling children in school. By 1987 well over 80 percent of children of primary age were enrolled in primary schools, and even in Africa half the children of primary and secondary age attended school. In East and Southeast Asia, the newly industrialised countries manage secondary enrollment rates of 90 percent, with considerable increases in tertiary education. There are now four times as many children from the South in primary schools, and about twice as many secondary students, as there are children from the North . [[xxxi]]

There is another way of looking at the situation. Against a picture of generally but slowly rising enrollment percentages, there is a quickly increasing number of children available for schooling and of those who are left behind. Between 1960 and 1986 there was a steady reduction in the number of children of primary school age who were not in school. But 1987 saw a rise for the first time in four decades. [[xxxii]]

But surely the rich countries are getting richer and the poor countries are getting richer much more slowly? Was this not the message of the greedy 1980's, whether we look at nations or income groups within them?

There is hope even here. The gap in monetary growth between rich countries and poor countries is widening, even as most poor countries get richer. But that is not true of what one might call the well-being gap, which is the measure that matters. The United Nations Development Programme, in a very important new line of thinking, has invented the Human Development Index (the HDI, see also Chapter Twelve) as a way of assessing nations' progress toward providing the framework within which their citizens are able to live decent lives. The HDI is distinguished from Gross National Product or other monetary measures of overall affluence or poverty. It takes into account the health, education and social security of citizens, especially those citizens not able to fend for themselves, as well as their wealth or lack of it. UNDP has recently tried to build in ideas about political freedom. The HDI picture is rather encouraging:

North-South gaps in human development narrowed considerably during this period [the 60s-90s] even while income gaps tended to widen. The South's average per caput income in 1987 was still only 6 percent of the North's, but its average life expectancy was 80 percent and its average literacy rate 66 percent of the North's. The North-South gap in life expectancy narrowed from 23 years in 1960 to 12 years in 1987, and the literacy gap from 54 percentage points in 1970 to less than 40 percent in 1985. The developing countries also reduced their average infant mortality from 200 deaths per 1000 live births to 79 between 1950 and 1985, a feat that took nearly a century in the industrial countries. [[xxxiii]]

This implies that the development of the third world may mirror that of the rich world, but happen more quickly. It also suggests that quick third world development does not depend on Western levels of affluence being developed everywhere.

People we now count as very poor indeed can expect to benefit from conditions of medicine, mobility, education and hygiene available only to the very rich of previous generations, and in some respects not available to anyone of any station in life until the past couple of generations.

Part One

Chapter Two: Defusing the population bomb: Fertility, famine and affluence

Introduction

Section i The global picture

Section ii Kenya: the good news

Section iii Exponential Growth

Section iv Shouting the odds

Section v Winning the changes

Introduction

In 1992 I met a small-scale farmer and conservationist in Nairobi. This man was one of those many African men who have broken free of their village and rural traditions very recently, but are married to women who remain more firmly rooted in theirs. "I always thought that Africa was really a hopeless case", he said. "Its population growth was so enormous, and I could see nothing that would change it. But I have begun to think that things might change very quickly. My own wife has said to me that she thinks she should have no more children. Mind you, we have four already and that is too many".

The human population of the world is likely to be 10 billion sometime next century. This chapter tells why, and suggests some reasons to suppose that kindly means, and not disaster, may well stabilise the human population at about that figure, before what will probably be a long slow decline in numbers.

Section i The global picture

The human population will rise, unless tragedy intervenes, and there is nothing we can do about it. Broadly speaking, the Western world has achieved a situation in which its population is stable. The Western population is expected to grow little if at all (the possibility of immigration, and the high fertility of immigrants, complicates this picture a little). But the third world's population will grow fast: at an overall rate of about 2.1 percent.

The third world has a death rate close to the West's. But it has double the West's birth rate. To bring the two scenarios into something like line, and that will take time, the average third world woman would need to have as few babies as her average Western sister. That is, less than two, rather than her present something-like-four.

In the meantime, expect lots of babies. As the UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) says in its 1992 annual report:

World population in mid-1992 will be 5.48 billion. It will reach 6 billion in 1998. Annual additions to world population in the next decade will average 97 million, the highest in history. Nearly all of this population growth will be in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Over half will be in Africa and south Asia. The medium, or most likely, projection of population growth implies a near doubling of world population to 10 billion in 2050. Growth will probably continue for another century after that, to 11.6 billion in 2150. [[xxxiv]]

These are fairly optimistic figures, and constitute UNFPA's "medium" projection. Within the range of possibilities UNFPA discusses is a more worrying view, the "high" projection, which would put numbers at "12.5 billion in 2050 and heading towards 20.7 billion a century later". Even the medium view depends on success in helping developing countries to reach by 2000 the position in which mothers have around 3.3 children each. This would require a lot of good luck, but is not out of sight, according to UNFPA:

In family planning alone, reaching the medium projection means increasing the numbers of couples practising contraception [in developing countries] from 381 million in 1990 to at least 567 million by the year 2000. The cost of doing so will involve a doubling of resources devoted to population activities, from 4.5 billion US dollars to 9 billion US dollars. This is a relatively modest sum, just four days' military expenditure by the industrialised countries. If efforts are not maintained and it takes an extra 10 years to get down to 3.2 children per woman, then we would be on course for the high projection. The cost of a ten year delay would be an additional 2.5 billion people on earth by the year 2050, equivalent to the whole world population in 1950.

However if all governments, North and South, devote adequate resources to a broad strategy centred on all aspects of human resource development in developing countries, it might just be possible to come closer to [our] low projection.....we could achieve a global population in 2050 of perhaps 8 to 8.5 billion, 1.5-2 billion less than the medium projection. This is why the 1990s are so decisive. [[xxxv]]

Section ii Kenya: the good news

Kenya provides an example of a country where these global scenarios can be seen in more comprehensible detail. It is an extremely prolific country. As the World Population Conference heard in Bucharest in 1974:

The recorded total population of Kenya at the time of the first national census in 1948 was 5.4 million. In the censuses of 1962 and 1969, the total population had risen to 8.6 and 10.9 million respectively. The total population had therefore approximately doubled in 21 years. [[xxxvi]]

By 1990, Kenya's population was 24 million, growing at 3.7 percent a year. Its total population by 2025 was projected to be 79 million. [[xxxvii]]

In Kenya's case, we see a classic, but extreme, modern picture. The country is able to keep more and more people, and especially babies and children, alive. But families are still locked into having large numbers of babies.

This process implies the need for very dramatic changes in habit for Kenyan women, who on average had over eight babies thirty and less years ago and still have over six (well above the third world average of something-like-four). Africa's high growth rates have seemed obstinate but may well change dramatically.

Total fertility rates (measured as births per woman) in Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole have remained unchanged at about 6.5 for the past twenty-five years - a level much higher than in other parts of the world that have similar levels of income, life expectancy, and female education.

Recent statistics provide encouraging indications that a number of African countries are at or near a critical turning point. Total fertility rates have already fallen in Botswana (6.9 in 1965 to 4.7 in 1990), Zimbabwe (8.0 in 1965 to 4.9 in 1990), and Kenya (8.0 in 1965 to 6.5 in 1990) and are beginning to decline in Ghana, Sudan and Togo. [[xxxviii]]

These figures lie behind a World Bank assumption that Sub-Saharan Africa's population will rise from 500 million at present to about 1.5 billion by 2030 and almost 3 billion by 2100 (with the AIDS epidemic possibly reducing growth by 0.5-1 percent by the early decades of the next century).

Section iii Exponential Growth

We need a lot of good luck here because of the exponential effect of population growth in societies in which high birth rates are not matched by high death-rates. For exponential, read snowballing. A cohort of young people who breed more young people who breed yet more young people sets in train big increases in total numbers. There is some evidence that even after steep declines in fertility many third world countries seem to be stuck at the point where women have about twice as many babies as would be needed for fertility to reach replacement levels (families replacing themselves generation upon generation, but not increasing their number), as they have in the West.

So we see very stubborn qualities to population growth. They imply that whilst we can hope that the growth in human numbers is eventually by kindly means brought as low as possible, we must in the meantime assume human numbers will continue to rise quite dramatically.

But even though there is an inevitability to large human numbers, we need not exaggerate the power of the trap we are in. Though we are seeing a record number of births, rate of growth of increase in human numbers is now less than has until very recently been the case. This fact is not at odds with the inevitability of huge and record new numbers of births. Though the world's fertility is now much lower than it was in the 1960s (the world's population is growing at about 2 percent as against about 4 per cent then), even a low percentage growth of a big snowball makes for a very big snowball.

On the other hand, the tendency to lower population growth rates is happening even quicker in the third world than it did in the rich, as The Economist pointed out:

The transition that took a century to achieve in the West has come about in a generation in some developing countries. Third world fertility has dropped further and faster than anybody foresaw 20 years ago. [[xxxix]]

Section iv Shouting the odds

What are the chances of the third world following Europe and much of the rest of the rich world into a low death-rate, low birth rate, low population growth rate scenario?

One can easily enough see the way in which an endless round of childbirth was unavoidable and not entirely undesirable in even quite recent history. In non-technological societies, children can be useful quite young and can with luck grow old enough to be useful when their parents are infirm. They are cheap labour when they are young and an insurance policy when they grow up. The chances of death amongst a mother's children have historically been so great that it made sense to have plenty whilst one was fertile (otherwise, in the nature of things, a mother might discover the need to replace dead children only when she had ceased to be able to bear more).

In technological, developed societies, much of this picture changes. Where a family's income comes from a job and a wage rather than from working the land on one's own account, it is less obvious how young children can contribute to bringing home the bacon. For urban families, and these constitute a rapidly increasing proportion of the developing world's people, there are, for instance, no animals to be watched over, no stones to be picked from the fields, no birds to be scared away from young seeds. Conversely, children in cities are likely to need jobs in the industrial or service sectors of the economy and so need to be formally educated. So the expense of schooling becomes even more necessary than it is increasingly perceived to be in the country. In short, children are increasingly perceived as costing, not earning, money. Besides, the likelihood of a baby's growing into adulthood is fast improving. There is less and less need for families to produce "surplus" babies.

So the world is changing into a place in which families feel less need to have large families. It is the degree to which choice in the matter has come into play which also marks this century out. The moral and social climate in which families are formed has changed in many parts of the world, and conspires with new technology to put real power into the hands of families. Here is the good news of the Kenyan case in more detail:

A 1989 survey found that the proportion of women using any method of contraception had risen to 27 percent, from 17 percent only five years earlier. Two-thirds of these were using a modern method. The fertility rate [numbers of babies per woman of child-bearing age] had dropped from 7.7 to 6.7 over the same period, a level not expected before 1995 even on the United Nations' low projection.

And there was good reason to expect further improvement if services could be extended and improved. Half of all women with four living children wanted no more. The mean ideal number of children was only 4.4. For 15 to 19 year olds it was only 3.7.[[xl]]

The younger generation of Kenyan girls are expressing a desire to bear and raise the number of children which coincidentally is the number which would bring the medium, quite optimistic, population growth rates of human numbers. Not that mothers or families wanting fewer children necessarily turns into low numbers. Mothers may not be able to fulfill their wishes. Whilst many third world women want many children, many others want fewer than they have:

A survey of married women found 46 percent in Peru had not wanted their latest child; 37 percent in South Korea; 34 percent in Sri Lanka. [[xli]]

In other words, mothers are not getting their own way.

There is good evidence for a considerable level of existing unmet demand [for contraception]. Many women in developing countries have more children then they want; in 23 out of 38 countries in the World Fertility Survey, more than a quarter of women had larger families than they would have desired, and up to half of the women aged 40 to 49 did not want their last birth. The proportion of unwanted births is 10 to 20 percent overall. [[xlii]]

The reasons are not hard to find, and - perhaps oddly -they make for optimism. In many countries, the attitudes of family-makers are heading in the right direction and only services remain to be provided (the position would be far more dangerous if this was reversed):

In many countries family planning services are virtually non-existent, despite the apparent demand. In Ghana, for example, 20 per cent of the women in rural areas and 28 percent in the cities say they want no more children, yet modern family planning services reach less than 7 percent of the women. Ghana's fertility rate is 6.4. In Indonesia, where about half of the women want no more children, family planning services reach 44 percent of all women. Indonesia's fertility rate is 3.3. [[xliii]] In Africa....77 percent of married women who want no more children are not using contraception. The proportion in Asia is 57 percent. Only in Latin America does it fall below half, at 43 percent. If anything these figures probably underestimate unmet need for family planning services. They do not include unmarried women who need to avoid pregnancy, or married couples who would like to delay their next birth. Nor do they include married couples using unreliable or inconvenient traditional methods.

If these people could be reached, contraceptive prevalence could be increased immediately by perhaps six percent of all married couples in Africa, 15 percent in Asia and 18 percent in Latin America. [[xliv]]

Such improvements, UNFPA reckons, would go a long way toward meeting their middle-road target, in spite of very regrettably leaving perhaps 75 percent of couples in Africa and Asia without contraception.

Section v Winning the changes

UNFPA reckons that people are prepared to spend up to two hours a month and one percent of their income on the family planning issue. It thinks that for about 60 percent of the third world, contraception is available in exchange for this sort of effort. But the figure varies dramatically:

Some 95 per cent of people in east Asia have this level of access, 57 percent in south east Asia and Latin America, and 54 per cent in south Asia. But in the Muslim world the proportion falls off to 13-25 percent, and in sub-Saharan Africa to a mere 9 percent. Not surprisingly, the rank order for use of contraception is exactly the same. [[xlv]]

And so is the rank order for population growth rates.

The methods by which those who want contraception can be helped to get hold of it are well-established. They might be summarised as a matter of attitude and of access. Some institutions deliver both. Clinics can provide both access to friendly advice and affordable contraceptive methods. Everyone has known for decades that cheap, cheerful and commonsensical clinics work in poor countries, but they have been threatened in recent years by very tight government budgets. It is important to note that the best sort of clinic is not simply devoted to birth control. In keeping with the argument that improving the survival of their children is important in persuading parents to have fewer children, lowering fertility will probably flow best from clinics which are devoted to family health rather than simply to family limitation.

The education of women has long seemed to be a key. Report after report stresses that educated women have smaller families:

Education's impact on fertility and use of family planning is...strong. Women with seven years of education tend to marry an average of almost four years later than those who have had none. The level of contraceptive use among these educated women is very much higher - two and a half times on average, almost four times higher in Africa.

The first three years of education do not make much difference - indeed in Africa, women with one to three years' schooling have slightly higher fertility than those who have never attended school. But four to six years' education lowers fertility by between 5 percent in Asia and Africa and 15 percent in Latin America. The greatest effect occurs when women have seven or more years of education. These women have on average 2.2 less children each than those who have no education at all. The husband's education makes much less difference - families where the husband has had seven years in school have only 1.3 children fewer than those where he has had no schooling. [[xlvi]]

The case is put succinctly by the World Bank:

Investments in female education have some of the highest returns for development...Evidence from a cross section of countries shows that where no women are enrolled in secondary education, the average woman has seven children, but where 40 percent of all women have had a secondary education, the average drops to three children, even after controlling for factors such as income. Better-educated mothers also raise healthier families, have fewer and better-educated children, and are more productive at home and at work. [[xlvii]]

It is easy to believe, and it is often suggested, that men are the real block to reducing the size of families. UNFPA notes that many women say their husbands would beat them if they began to use contraception. But whilst this might be true in some cases, in many others, the matter had not been discussed within families at all. [[xlviii]] My conversations in Africa matched a strong prejudice of mine: that women are obstinate in promoting their cherished values and far more powerful in family life than one might believe, whether in wanting many babies or deciding to reduce family size.

Making the poor world richer, and more equitable, is high on our list of means by which population growth can be reduced kindly. In the meantime we are bound to look for any signs that things can change quickly even if economic growth is slow.

One is that almost all the population growth in the developing world will take place in cities. According to the World Bank,

In 1990 most people lived in rural areas. By 2030 the opposite will be true: urban populations will be twice the size of rural populations. Developing countries' cities as a group will grow by 160 percent over this period, whereas rural populations will grown by only 10 percent. By 2000 there will be twenty-one cities in the world with more than 10 million inhabitants, and seventeen of them will be in developing countries. [[xlix]]

Cities can produce great squalor and nastiness. Both were historically much evident in the emerging cities of the West. But cities also were the location of great, wildfire changes in the way people lived and reproduced. We have good evidence that fertility rates in cities can be reduced quite quickly.

As people move into towns, they have smaller families. A recent survey of 22 developing countries found that in all of them urban fertility rates were lower than those in the countryside. [[l]]

The reasons are not hard to find. We have noted that increasing the healthiness of babies is likely to lead to smaller families. Residents of urban areas have a higher chance of obtaining clean water and disposing of dirty water than do their rural cousins. They generally speaking have a higher chance of reaching health care. As the WHO says:

Urban growth can bring substantial health and environmental benefits. The concentration of production in urban areas brings many cost advantages in waste management, while the per caput cost of piped water, many kinds of sanitation, education, health care and other service is also less in concentrated populations. The process of urbanisation generally accompanies, and contributes to, the development of a more prosperous and productive economy. [[li]]

A less tangible advantage of urbanisation might well be that newly-urbanised populations are more likely to hear messages about fertility and family planning, from TV, radio and newspapers - whilst simultaneously being more likely to be free to think and choose for themselves, released from the inhibitions and taboos of an older generation in the village.

The conventional image of the third world and its emerging mega-cities is that future generations will be condemned to live in the latter. In fact, in the developing world a peasant who moves to an urban area is not necessarily moving to a city, still less one of the mega-cities. The WHO says:

Estimates for 1990 suggest that less than 2.5 percent of the urban population of the developing countries live in cities with 10 million or more inhabitants, and less than 25 percent in cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants. [[lii]]

So the new urbanites may be going to places which are free of inhibiting tradition, but able to deliver essential services, without necessarily falling into the enormous kind of problem which very densely packed big cities will pose.

A second, more obvious, factor is that political leadership can be a definite spur to very rapid and greatly reduced fertility. Leaving aside the allegedly aggressive methods of China or India, several countries around the world demonstrate that leadership counts. UNFPA takes heart from the case of Mexico, which in the mid-Seventies had a growth rate of African proportions (annual growth rate 3.2 per cent, fertility rates of 6.75 children per woman):

Then, quite suddenly in the mid and late seventies, things began to change dramatically. The total fertility rate dropped to 4.89 children in 1975-80, then again to 4.2 in 1980-85. Over the years from 1970-75 the birth rate fell from 43 to 32 per 1000. Population growth plunged to its current rate of below 2 per cent.

A steep rise in Government commitment, availability of family planning and public attention to the topic brought about this sudden shift. [[liii]]

The commitment from central government galvanised a network of local women which distributed contraceptives in 13,000 villages and this, combined with other initiatives, quadrupled contraceptive use until 42 percent of women were using modern methods. The point UNFPA draw from this experience is one which with luck can be applied much more widely:

...over the years the essential groundwork of progress in education and women's advancement had been laid. By 1975 adult literacy was 76 percent. Female primary enrollment was over 100 percent and level with male [quite how it could be over 100 percent escapes me]. Infant mortality was down to 60 per 1000. The social setting was in place and success awaited only a catalyst - easy access to family planning. [[liv]]

The UNFPA puts Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Mexico, the Republic of Korea amongst the leadership-inspired fertility-reducers.

It is worth pointing out here that the prevalence in a region of the Roman Catholic church does not seem to affect the prevalence of contraception. One African woman, living in a shanty breeze-block house in Lusaka, Zambia, told me that she was a devout Roman Catholic and had been on the pill for years. I had the impression that her priest was one of those many Roman Catholic priests who suggest that "natural" contraception is morally to be desired as a counsel of perfection, but that in the real world modern contraception methods achieve another moral good, namely families which stand a chance of flourishing.

My acquaintance certainly felt no guilt about crossing town for her supplies and using them. It is also true that she had at least four children: far fewer than would probably have been the case a few years ago, but too many to be a comfortable African average.

However we interpret these encouraging signs, we see that we are committed to very quick growth in human numbers. The rest of this book looks at how all these new people might be accommodated.

Chapter Three: Feeding the Future Billions: Some Clues

Introduction

Section i Man the farmer

Section ii Constraints all around the world

Section iii Destructive myths: the anti-farming propaganda

Section iv The real agenda

Section v Breaking through the barriers

Section vi The bio-industrial revolution

Section vii The global good news

Introduction

Driving along the red-brown tracks of the lush hill country near Arusha in Tanzania, a small-scale farmer turned to me and asked, as though I might know the answer better than he: "Why is it that this continent still has the sort of farming which would have been recognisable by Christ? Why can't we change?"

Man the farmer has learnt how to feed huge numbers of people. This chapter looks at the evidence which suggests that even a doubling of human population need not produce the starvation which is widely forecast.

Section i. Man the farmer

Man has become a chemist and an electrician, and before that his civilisation has been defined by its ability to mine and smelt, and to make steam work for him. In the future, he is almost certain to become strongly identified with the culture of bugs and the manipulation of genes. But these industrial activities disguise a fundamental about man: he became a farmer.

There has been something a bit like a man on the planet for about 4 million years. Hominids have existed for about a thousandth of the earth's history. A million years ago there is something more obviously human, and it becomes more and more obviously so about 100,000 years ago. The last 10,000 have been the farming years, and they have mattered to us partly for the odd reason that they seem to us like the years in which ever larger numbers of people ceased to be preoccupied with getting food. [[lv], [lvi]]

What made man develop, in the latest tenth of his history, the techniques of farming? Little is known about why man slipped out of his previous habits and into cultivation. But the process was quick, according to Sir John Burnett, executive secretary of the World Council for the Biosphere:

Clearly the boundaries between foraging and farming, especially if the former is associated with storage of seeds or fruits, and that between hunting and herding, are exceedingly narrow and must have been so for many millennia. It is, therefore, a quite remarkable fact that the change to early pastoral or farming communities was a relatively rapid process; moreover it was very recent, commencing perhaps not more than 20,000 years ago, becoming detectable some 10,000 years ago and being almost universal adopted as the dominant pattern for the future from about 6,000 bc.[[lvii]]

Was the farming revolution and the steady, fast increase in human numbers technology-driven, or did the technology derive from man's desperate need to feed the large numbers of people that pressed on the earth? Did man become a farmer because he was so numerous no other course but a development of high productivity was open to him? Or did he become numerous because high agricultural productivity allowed it? Did man become more prone to famine in his farming years, or less? Some of these questions are unanswerable because the evidence is so scanty. Still, they are important to us, so we have always attempted answers to them.

It is fashionable now to say that early on and ever since, man the farmer failed.

The despairists like to point out that entire farming civilisations have collapsed in hot countries. In this view, deforestation and over-grazing denuded the Mediterranean basin. They led to soil erosion in what are now Iran and Iraq which were then further damaged by the salts which uncontrollably built-up in badly-managed irrigation schemes. It is less often said of these disasters that the climate seems to have been turning against agriculture in those regions at about the same time, and that whilst there is almost always a risk of erosion following deforestation and of salivation following irrigation, they need not be crippling.

The idea that early societies were uniquely rich and environmentally friendly is as wrong as the suggestion that stone age life has nothing to offer except brutality. There are interesting modern cases of famine striking at African farming regions whilst hunter-gatherers nearby went unscathed. [[lviii]] But mankind has often called a famine what is really only a matter of food shortages. This is pointed out forcibly by Peter Garnish [[lix]], who also found that despite much discussion about famines and ecological degradation during the classical period, the Mediterranean remained a bread-basket capable of feeding large numbers of non-farmers. This was in spite of a local climate which varies greatly in space and time.

That shortages did not become famine depended on regional trade and local government action. That general picture has been true in quite recent history. In nineteenth century Britain - especially the Hungry Forties - many people experienced food shortages. But this was because rapid industrialisation had created distortions and strains in the market, more than that the fields were failing to produce. [[lx]] Farm productivity soon continued to rise handsomely to meet the case.

Monoculture is often criticised, and it is true that sometimes, farmers have concentrated on too few crops. The Irish potato famine was an obvious example of over-dependence on a single harvest. Even so, it was the failure of the trading system and of government to bolster demand in a period of local shortage which produced the hunger in Ireland. In Scotland, there was the same dependence on the potato crop, and the same catastrophe threatened when it failed. But landowners and the government combined to make supplies of food available. [[lxi]]

The past cannot have been as awful as the despair industry has it. We know perfectly well that the farming and trading system fed fast-rising human numbers, and whatever its periodic failings these were not for long sufficient to dent the onward march of the number of humans on the earth which its general success allowed. We do not know the whole reason why people using stone age technologies managed and manage to feed about a tenth of a person per square kilometre whilst even primitive agriculture manages to feed ten or twenty times that number. But we do know that in the modern world, we can support over 300 people on that area of land. [[lxii]] Doubtless, such productivity is a mixed blessing, but it is clearly a considerable technical and probably a social triumph too.

Section ii: Constraints All Around the World

Whilst it is likely that the planet can probably support as many people as it has to (as we shall later), we are not in a particularly good position to know to what degree the poor of the third world will be able to grow the food with which to feed themselves. If they cannot grow enough, or earn enough to buy in food, then the rich world will have to do something about the situation. The difficulties will be more political and economic than ecological. They will also be technical, and we will look at aspects of that soon.

Bodies such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) [[lxiii]] are struggling to adjust to new demands and put these alongside their historic core goal of a vast increase in production. The new demands are being made by the alert consciences of the Western governments and the prickly sensitivities of governments in the ex-colonies. International aid agencies now need to show they care about ecological concerns. They must not be thought patronising to governments in the third world. They must be highly sensitive to the needs of peasants. This is asking of the farming revolution something very new: that it be conducted without social and environmental trauma.

There has never been an increase in agricultural production which did not involve the use of less labour per hectare of land. The agricultural revolutions we have seen have all led to fewer people being needed on the land, and therefore all raise the problem of what happens to surplus labour.

Almost all agricultural improvement has grown out of increased specialisation within individual farms and usually within whole districts of the countryside. The history of agriculture has been the history of farms getting bigger, employing fewer people, and being part of an efficient market. Farming has gone from the variety subsistence requires to the specialisation which increases yields. It has done what the market required. But it is by no means clear that the competing need both for more food production and more jobs in the third world countryside can be reconciled. Everyone now seems to agree that the third world is looking for some brilliant new accommodation between the old and the new.

This is the way FAO expresses it:

To meet the declared objectives of SARD [Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development] most developing countries will have no choice but to intensify agriculture. Experience in developed countries shows that intensification can lead to pollution and problems of waste disposal. Moreover it can encourage consumption patterns that are ecologically and economically unsustainable. Other forms of agriculture and rural development are therefore needed, requiring an appropriate balance between both intensification and diversification in the choice of production systems, technologies and practices. [[lxiv]]

When FAO's advisers look at different regions, they see different problems, naturally. In Africa they note that there are large areas of land which hold untapped agricultural potential; and that

There is more scope in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region of the world for increasing input use to achieve sustainable agriculture with higher production. However, inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides should be used wisely, by integrated plant nutrient management [which uses as much on-farm nutrient and humus as possible] with emphasis on local inputs, and by integrated pest management with emphasis on biological and agronomic methods.[[lxv]]

By comparison with this sense that Africa was waiting for big increases in production, the Asia and Pacific region was already in many places facing difficulties from the overuse of chemicals, and suffering very unequal distribution of the benefits of modern agriculture.

FAO sees the Asia and Pacific region as having experienced a massive increase in cropped land alongside a massive increase in the numbers of landless peasants. It sees little chance of industry employing these millions of people. It sees people pushed onto steep or otherwise unsuitable land, and much farmland undernourished.

Appropriate technologies do not exist to sustain present and future populations for many resource-poor areas, and even some resource-rich areas are reaching their maximum output. The systems used by many producers are unsustainable, due either to commercial over-exploitation or an attempt to meet survival needs, and are induced by inadequate or inappropriate public or private incentives. Strategies to achieve sustainable crop, livestock forestry and fishery production systems, and combinations of them, will fail unless they are complemented by policies to slow down population growth and enhance alternative employment opportunities.[[lxvi]]

In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean region, FAO suggests that whilst there are areas of poverty on the Asian scale, there are also more generally wide opportunities for growth. There is land which is barely exploited at all, there are some chronically discouraging government policies and there are the usual egregious examples of skewed land ownership. The picture may look bleak, but it is not - generally speaking - as ecologically bleak as all that.

Almost all informed views suggest that if economic policies in poor countries were rewritten to favour agriculture there would be big increases in food production. That sounds reasonable. But even if land reform could give more peasants more land; even if capitalists could be attracted to put in big effective plantations where appropriate; even if unadventurous farmers could be encouraged to be as good as their best neighbours; even if there is a considerable following wind, there is a general assumption that with present technologies, present aid flows, present trading circumstance and present third world politics there will be many people very hungry in the third world. [[lxvii]] Even so, it is important not to overstate the difficulties we face.

Section iii Destructive Myths: the anti-farming propaganda

There is a potent myth that the further back in history one goes, the better the farming practices one finds. Yet research constantly turns up intriguing data to confound this anecdotal gloom. A recent contribution to Nature pointed out:

Although it is widely believed that the Spanish encountered an almost pristine landscape in AD 1521, some archival and palaeolimnological studies have suggested that extensive land clearance began before European contact....We identify three periods of accelerated erosion and conclude that erosion rates [before the advent of the Europeans] were at least as high as those after the Spanish conquest. One implication of these results is that soil erosion caused by the Spanish introduction of plough agriculture was apparently no more severe than that associated with traditional methods; it is therefore questionable whether a return to traditional methods would have significant environmental benefits. [[lxviii]]

Seeing a patchy record in modern farming, too many commentators pile on the misery. The World Resources Institute in Washington each year publishes "World Resources". It is an excellent source of information. Yet people who know anything about Britain will be surprised to find in the 1992-93 edition a soil erosion map of the world which shows about a third of the country as one of many "Areas of Serious Concern". It is shaded in the same colour that, more plausibly, covers parts of Africa and India. Intrigued as to how anyone could seriously suggest that Britain is at anything like risk of becoming a dust-bowl, I contacted the leading soil research institution of the UK, the Silsoe campus of the Cranfield Institute of Technology. The staff there kindly sent an overview paper by one of their experts, Professor R P C Morgan, who was - hardly surprisingly - the source from which a Dutch institution [[lxix]] had put together data which underpinned WRI's map. [[lxx]] What far-away Washington did not see as the most obvious nonsense, one would have thought a nearby Dutchman might have.

The paper I was sent [[lxxi]] of course did not say anything very alarming about Britain's soils, because their structure and fertility are by and large in good health. However, Britain's fields are required to be very productive indeed and are kept in good health only by expert farming skills and by inputs of man-made or mined chemicals. Nonetheless, soil is being lost to runoff quicker than it is being replaced, and, says the paper: "....soil erosion could threaten crop yields in the first quarter of the next century if allowed to continue at present rates". In that sense it is at risk. But there is no reason to suppose that the skills or the chemicals are going to dry up; nor that any additional materials the soil might need cannot be found and applied. The problem is more in semantics than in soils. The paper said clearly enough that there is more soil erosion in Britain than people think and that about a third of the country's arable land has highly erodible soils. The author wrote that his work

is an assessment of areas with erosion risk and areas of actual erosion. Where land is under dense vegetation cover or where soil conservation measures are practised, such as use of shelter-belts or plough-press tillage to control wind erosion, there may be little or no erosion. But this, however, does not detract from the risk of erosion in such areas if conservation measures are not employed and so it is appropriate to class these areas as having an erosion risk.

This sounds sensible, and strikes a useful cautionary note. But it not very different to the statement that a man walking in London's streets is at severe risk of death from passing cars unless he takes sensible self-preservation measures such as staying on the pavement.

One can go round the developed world like this. In the US, the Global 2000 Report to the President, Entering the Twenty-First Century [[lxxii]] stated:

Although soil loss and deterioration are especially serious in many LDC (Less Developed Countries), they are also affecting agricultural prospects in industrialised nations. Present rates of soil loss in many industrialised countries cannot be sustained without serious implications for crop production. In the United States, for example, the Soil Conservation Service, looking at wind and water erosion of US soils, has concluded that to sustain crop production indefinitely at even present levels, soil losses must be cut in half.

The outlook for making such gains in the United States and elsewhere is not good. The food and forestry projections imply increasing pressure on soils throughout the world.

This was just the kind of thing to give the troops. It called to mind images of the horrible scenes familiar to readers of John Steinbeck and American history: the Dust Bowl years. These and much less respectable predictions were very dire and made routinely. And yet the crisis has passed, even before it began to be economically significant. By 1995 various programmes in the US are likely to have succeeded in "reducing soil erosion in the USA by two thirds", says Lester Brown, of the World Watch Institute in Washington. [[lxxiii]] The reversion of inappropriate arable land to pasture or woodland is one of the main chosen techniques for combating soil erosion, as Mr Brown points out [[lxxiv]], but he makes of this an argument that soil erosion has indicated the final ecological limits which farmers are constantly trying to cross. It is just as reasonable to suggest that land which was turned to heavily-subsidised inappropriate grain-growing (much of it for consumption by animals) can be returned to much less damaging direct production of animal protein on the hoof.

Many American environmentalists now stress that American farming may yet die of thirst. The Western states are accused of mining the underground water supplies of aquifers and over-stretching the amount of water abstracted from rivers. [[lxxv]] Yet what seems to be happening is much more an extravagant squandering of water because of its artificial cheapness than an absolute shortage. [[lxxvi]] Lawns right across the Western states remain verdant, and farmers pay small fractions of the cost of the water they use in irrigation. Long before the US runs out of water a new balance of interests should emerge. Water will achieve its proper price and demand fall into step with supply. It is not man's necessary and frugal use of water which has caused a problem in the US, but profligacy.

Almost all green writers - including many of the moderates as well as all the purists - seem in thrall to the difficulties posed by the physical constraints to world food production. Even some of the most intelligent and informed of the green commentators, including Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute [[lxxvii]], Fred Pearce, a regular contributor to New Scientist and author [[lxxviii]], and Paul Harrison [[lxxix]] often stress the gloominess of the picture.

Characteristically, the gloomy view notes that historically irrigation schemes were often poorly-planned. It also notes that such schemes have often brought an increased risk of water-borne disease and soil wastage.

A rounder picture comes from Ian Carruthers, Professor of Agrarian Development, Wye College, University of London. He believes that the idea of "poorly performing irrigation" has become entrenched in spite of evidence that productivity of irrigated land is, clearly, often high. Besides, he says, the failure of irrigation to perform as well as it might often flows from projects which ignore the knowledge of local farmers and from schemes whose financing did not include a proper commitment to long term - very necessary - management. He suggests:

There is another puzzle concerning irrigation performance which most evaluations show to be sub-standard. There is a hard to prove but often claimed statistic that 35-50 percent of the world's food now comes from such "poorly performing" irrigation (mostly of rice - the first line of defence against Malthus). More importantly 50-60 per cent of the vital increments to developing world food supply between 1960 and 1980 came from irrigated land (mostly wheat - the second line of defence - and rice). In principle, this high marginal return to irrigated agriculture can be expected to continue because only when water supply is assured will farmers invest in the costly seeds and fertilizer and other yield increasing and quality enhancing innovations that are still emerging, albeit perhaps more slowly, from the agronomists' high-tech pipeline.

This "poorly performing" irrigated agriculture has been the major confounder of the expert opinion in the 1970s which predicted a doubling of world food prices in real terms by the 1990's. Prices are presently at historically very low levels and look set to stay there so long as irrigation continues to improve (and the industrial world continues to subsidize its own agriculture through production enhancement techniques). Perhaps the troubles of irrigation are more apparent than real and it is the high visibility of the infrastructure that creates the problem. [[lxxx]]

The gloomy, general view notes the shortage of good new land to exploit and the presence of much land which is already over-exploited. It creates the impression that hunter-gatherers were the wisest of humans, and that nowadays only tribal people or poor peasants are worth listening to. It always celebrates the successes of peasant agriculture (where they can be found) and seldom notes the success of larger-scale farmers.

The pervasive gloom has created potent myths. For instance, everyone knows by now that over-population and modern farming techniques are producing desertification. "The Sahara Desert is expanding southwards, engulfing degraded grasslands, at a rate of 590 kilometres (30 miles) every year", says Jonathon Porritt's Save the Earth. [[lxxxi]] And yet, in his Wasting the Rain, Bill Adams, a Cambridge University geographer, cites the battle which almost everyone who seriously studies grasslands and deserts has been conducting against this sort of view.

Overviews of the droughts and famines in Africa in the 1970s and 1980s have tended to focus on the problems of "desertification". The word was coined by the French ecologist Aubre[acute]ville in 1949 to mean the process by which desert-like conditions (arid areas with few plants) develop. In the 1970s use of the word expanded enormously, and desertification became a central element in debates about Africa's "crisis". By the late 1980s it was clear that there were significant problems emerging in the use of the term. It was ambiguous and had suffered what one analysis [by the British geographer, Andrew Warren] wryly described as an "erosion of meaning". It was widely taken to mean any loss of biological productivity which might lead to desert-like conditions. Thus this "desertification" included waterlogging and salinisation of irrigated land as well as loss of biomass, loss of vegetation cover or soil erosion.

Part of this verbal inflation can be traced back to the United Nations Conference on Desertification which was organised by the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi in 1976. Worthy though this effort was, it made "desertification" a highly politicised concept. Aid agencies wanted to be seen to put money into stopping it [[lxxxii]]

After that, any agricultural project could get itself a better sort of a name by being re-labeled, "desertification control". In the sudden alarm, some projects were instigated which had scant chance of success. But it is surprising how little we really know about how much damage is being done or what needs doing. The harder people look, the more confusing an honest assessment becomes.

As Bill Adams says:

It is now clear that simple and rather sweeping ideas about desertification are unhelpful, and can be seriously misleading. For example, there is remarkably little good evidence to support the widely-held view that the Sahara is advancing southwards year by year [[lxxxiii]]

These words are echoed in detail by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in its report on a very big study on the Sahel, published in 1989. [[lxxxiv]] Its brief popular account of the 1989 Sahel Studies [[lxxxv]] carries a simple headline on its front cover: "The Sahel - Out of the Myths".

Yet there can be few people who take even a passing interest in Africa who do not believe that deserts are spreading everywhere in the continent. Worse, the view the despair industry promotes is that deserts grow solely because man is pressing too many of his domesticated animals and too many ploughs into the fragile terrain which he is forced to colonise as population densities increase. Peasant as well as capitalist culpability satisfies some Greens because messages of human failure reinforce the campaigners' distaste for growing populations. They bolster the argument that man is already reaping a harvest not of food but of crisis as he pushes the planet beyond its supportive limits.

This view leaves out of the picture the confusing evidence that in some places in saharan Africa productivity is rising, its agricultural area expanding, and cattle numbers rising. All these need underpinning by better resources if they are to be sustainable, as Bill Adams points out. [[lxxxvi]]

Yet they point towards an understanding (we pursue it below) that Africa is nowhere near its productive limits.

There is a good deal of evidence that insofar as soils are being degraded and farmers find they scratch about for poor returns, it may in part be the result of one of Africa's periodic, normal and regular dry spells. Not a drought, the knowledgeable people are careful to point out, but a desiccation. [[lxxxvii]] Droughts are short and fairly rare; desiccations can be very long and common. Africa has seen a period of about 30 dry years during which it would have been very remarkable if farmers had found life easy. The difficulty for everyone trying to think about the problem is that it looks as though Africa has to assume such things will happen periodically for ever.

Africa is a dry place. But modern agriculturalists were surprised by the continent's recent harshness because the contemporary experience of Africa has included a relatively wet recent period, during the 1950s and early 1960s. [[lxxxviii]] It is one of many jokes fate seems to have played on the continent that its native leaders inherited the management of countries which had been enjoying an unusually long period of productive weather under their colonial masters, and were about to enter a very dry one. Drought or desiccation, famine or food shortages, had often disturbed European observers in the middle of the last century [[lxxxix]], but that was at levels of population well below those that modern medicine and hygiene now allow, and before the advent of widespread agriculture. Moreover, Europeans first saw Africa after a period when widespread disease had wiped out many people and animals.

So Africa of course faces enormous difficulties to do with large numbers of people and animals trying to get a living in a continent whose present and future may well be drier than we have grown to expect.

But there will probably be better years too. Knowledgeable commentators on Africa note that even in very dry places, it is amazing what can happen when the weather improves: that is, not only becomes wetter, but is wet at the right times of year. Land which had been given up for dead is suddenly verdant. Land which was assumed to have become irreversibly degraded by man's activities is found merely to have been pushed to its limits as much by rainless heat as by man's herds. Grass-swards which look as though they have been over-grazed turn out to be in surprisingly good health and perhaps to be working at their optimum productivity.

There are elements of the standard, sad view of Africa, and other arid and semi-arid areas such as Mexico, which hold up. There are plenty of places in which more and more people are pressing onto inherently unproductive land. Often they are pressing onto the sides of hills which were once grassed and wooded, and turning seasonal streams into deep gullies. There are places where soils develop a hard surface, through which neither shoots can grow upward nor life-bringing rain soak downward. Quite often, cattle herders have become very rich in cattle at the same time as the amount of grazing land for animals has shrunk because of population pressures. The result is a risk of erosion. We know that there is over-grazing and there are inappropriate agricultural practices. We know that in many places land should either be rested or better fertilised and nourished with water-retaining organic matter. We know there are traditional and modern techniques which could be introduced (we know this last especially because of excellent work by Paul Harrison [[xc]]). We also know that in many countries marketing methods and infrastructure are so primitive that it is barely surprising that farmers are poor. We know that in many places, cattle herders need to realise that their fellow countrymen need them to have fewer, better animals which go to market at a useful age. [[xci]] In some cases, grazing clubs can make an enormous difference to the productivity and impact of herds. [[xcii]] In others quite a small effort would usefully plant quick-growing grasses and stabilise river banks. [[xciii]]

That progress is being made and that the issues are very old can be seen very clearly in Machakos in Kenya. In the 1930s the British district authorities were concerned that the area was heavily over-exploited by man and animals. They took pictures to show the case, and the place looks barren indeed. As the World Bank's Environment Bulletin said, in reporting some work it had funded the British Overseas Development Institute to lead:

In the late 1930s, the District was considered by the Colonial administration to be degrading alarmingly and to be rapidly approaching, if not exceeding, its capacity to support inhabitants and their livestock. Today, the area has a population five times as great and the value of agricultural output per head (at constant prices) is estimated to be three times larger than it was then.

Cultivation has expanded by four times and there has been a corresponding reduction in the area of general grazing, bush and scrub. Much of the land used is now under continuous cultivation, and almost 100 per cent of the area is cultivated in some form of terracing.

The rate of erosion has been sharply reduced, although is still does occur, and there is no evidence that the quality of soils is declining under current practices. [[xciv]]

The reforms involved look like a textbook case for much of the rest of this chapter. The farmers of the area were helped to find useful markets, have sold produce for cash, took advantage of handy advice. Two of the researchers for the study believe that this Kenyan area goes a long way to disprove Malthusian gloom:

Machakos illustrates that land use and carrying capacity are not fixed. The land resource can be improved by investment in new technologies, knowledge and improved management techniques. These factors are assisted by a rise in population densities from very low levels. A recent cross-country study found that growth in rural non-farm incomes and in population density were both strongly related to higher agricultural income of the agricultural population. These relationships showed up much more clearly in Asia than in Africa, where most rural population densities are below 80/km2, but were evident in a densely populated area of southeastern Nigeria. [[xcv]]

Section iv The real agenda

When we look closely at agricultural issues, which often seem ecological, we find that in important ways they are not. They are overwhelmingly human and institutional. When you ask experienced people about why Africa looks as though it is going to be hungry, they often paint a picture which seems much more real, much more densely complicated, much more fully human, than the picture which the Greens have mostly given us. In Africa, even more than in most struggling regions around the world, too many places can recognise too many items on a catalogue of difficulties which includes:

* too many village elders and witchdoctors who hate to see young men get ahead;

* too few energetic and public spirited public servants at any level;

* too little technical education;

* too few sources of advice;

* too few local markets for trading inputs or produce;

* too few fair sources of very small loans;

* too little good land for small farmers;

* too few opportunities for very small farmers to become small farmers;

* too few opportunities for small farmers to become medium scale farmers;

* too few Western capitalists prepared to invest in large plantation schemes;

* too few non government organisations of every sort to ginger and encourage;

* too much late payment of fixed and low state prices for produce.

The answers to some of these problems fly in the face of Green convention.

Many people have a strong intuitive sense that poor farmers should grow and eat their own food. Peasant subsistence has a powerful pull on Western imaginations. However, it must be asked why very few well-off farmers in the rich world bother with any subsistence farming. How different should the picture be in the third world?

The romance of self-sufficiency springs partly from a belief that subsistence farming is somehow more secure than dependence on markets. Clearly, people in cities need the market to bring them secure food supplies. But even people in the countryside may find that both cheapness and security in food supplies are more easily had from the market than their own fields. This is likely to be a part of their calculations even when they are quite or very poor. The essence of this new security is that cash - even in small quantities - is a virtual guarantee of food, even if one's own land has seen a reverse in productivity, perhaps because of the weather. The creation in Africa of a vigorous trading sector is seen by some knowledgeable white Africans as the re-birth of what was quite a strong tradition of rural markets which colonialists stamped out the better to ensure that they had labour for white-owned farms.

Not that cash is always king. Many modern urbanite third worlders - especially men - live in cities in the hopes of getting work and money. They do so whilst depending on their wives to keep a village plot ticking over, but at least available as a last resort larder. Besides, as one experienced agriculture adviser pointed out to me on reading a draft of this chapter, cash can corrupt. He said that, too often, cash is squandered on beer and prostitutes: subsistence crops might have helped the family rather more.

So the picture is complicated. Yet, it seems fair to suggest that modern country people do not want the promise of a very slightly improved version of a primordial way of life which they left or want to leave because it did not pay and did not attract. Even poor people eschew back-breaking work in a claustrophobic family or village environment. These aspects of peasant life only satisfy those who have never known anything different or have never known it at all.

The rural dream of rich world romantics can no more be expected to survive in Africa or other third world places than it has anywhere else. Yet young disaffected, talented and useful men and women may come back from the cities into the countryside. The present best-hope youngsters who are already there may be enticed to stay.

Modern third world country people want the chance of a decent living gained by the nifty deployment of very small amounts of skill and capital. They want a scale of technology which is cheap but saves sweat. They may well become beneficiaries of the small-engine and hydraulic revolution which has yet to come to much of the third world. Technology is decried by romantics because it so often seen in its nineteenth century guise. This was the version of machine and technique which gave us factories and other forces of centralised enterprise gathered round monolithic machinery. The nineteenth century anarchist and geographer Prince Kropotkin may, however, be proved to have been merely a little early in predicting the arrival of decentralised, often hand-held, machinery everywhere in the world. This is the Black and Decker scale of technology (or the personal computer, outboard motor, and mechanical garden tiller sort of technology), which was celebrated by Ivan Illich half a century after Kropotkin.

Interestingly, labour-saving devices may not create unemployment. Many useful soil- and water-conserving jobs are now left undone because they are uncongenial and unprofitable. Quite small changes in markets and machinery may change that dramatically.

There has for years been a fierce debate about economic measures to increase food production, and the latest intelligent fashion is to argue that, amongst much else, the agriculture sector is an engine for economic growth. This might seem obvious, but it is not self-evident. For several decades, it has been assumed that even poor countries should concentrate on developing an industrial economy and that doing so would put money into the hands of farmers, and they would produce food as a consequence.

Now, increasingly, it is argued that it is worthwhile concentrating policy directly on improving the means farmers have of getting a living.

` The economic and social reforms that will bring about successful, small and medium-scale farming are emerging. They flow from the defeat, partly as a result of sustained bullying from Western governments, of third world command and control economic policies, and also from the gradual, forced, erosion of the nastiness of third world elites, and perhaps especially in land reform. The changes will make sure the grower, and not a bureaucrat, gets the profit from his or her crop.

There has been a good deal of discussion about how poor countries should put agriculture higher than industrialisation on their agenda of development goals. Actually, it seems likely that they need to progress together. Without paying customers, farmers starve. As Professor A H Bunting of Reading University, a very experienced agronomist, points out, few countries have ever grown rich by growing food. Rather, a healthy agriculture sector followed wealth. On the other hand, without benign government help - and aid - it is unlikely that farmers will see their goods flow along effective infrastructure to their customers. [[xcvi]]

No reforms will produce a limitless supply of food. But they will make it increasingly likely that it will be small- and medium-scale farmers in lucky parts of the world's continent who get nicely affluent by supplying food to the unlucky parts. This will be a marked improvement on the situation whereby American and European farmers are heavily subsidised to do so.

At present, many farmers cannot afford labour and chemicals because their produce does not find a market. Much of the ecological damage done by farmers stems from the lack of profit they find in the enterprise. Soils are left under-nourished, wells and terraces unmended, irrigation works poorly managed, not because the fields were asked to do too much work, but because too little cash came in for the produce they grew.

Section v Breaking through the barriers

The Green Revolution has lifted much of Asia and Latin America out of famine in the past two or three decades. This is a matter of applying plant breeding techniques - the core of the revolution - to create plant strains which could be heavily fertilised without falling over on their stalks. But agricultural experts do not expect the Asian and Latin American Green Revolution miracles to be repeated on the same scale in Africa or indeed in any area with very poor soils, adverse terrain or climates.

Equally, though, environmentalists do not do well when they snipe at the Green Revolution. It was more helpful to Asia and Latin America than it is fashionable to admit. In future a revised version of it will be helpful to Africa. Certainly, the Green Revolution involved social upheaval because it required and rewarded farmers who had access to skills and capital rather than the very small-scale farmer. Consequently, it was the large farmer rather than the small who benefited from it most, at the farming end of the changes. But the fact remains that in the huge areas where the Green Revolution took off, there had been a high expectation of famine as populations increased, and those famines did not happen. Instead of importing food or being dependent on food aid, these regions were - against all expectations - growing their own food.

In areas where the revolution took off, people lost their jobs, and that is a pity. But plenty of them found the means of making enough money to buy the cheap produce the revolution brought to the market. Without the revolution it is likely there would have been neither the produce nor the farm-work. Social and ecological problems went along with the Green Revolution, and it is tempting to see them as making the case against technological innovation. [[xcvii]] But they do not. Technological revolutions can be very brutal - as can economic transformations - if they are not cushioned by alert and conscientious social action. That makes a better case for a better politics than it does for abandoning technological change.

It is said that the Green Revolution was an ecological disaster. But at least one British aid official believes that such impoverishment of the soils as has been caused by the revolution's methods could be fairly easily cured by a little education and investment. "Nothing has been irrevocably lost", he says. [[xcviii]] Indeed, it is often for the absence of a few easily-delivered minerals, rather than for the lack of major inputs, that the soils of, say, the Punjab are impoverished.

It is also true that the Green Revolution involves many farmers in a vicious cycle of pesticide application. They are obtaining very high yields with new strains which are vulnerable to pests which the old strains had evolved alongside and with which they could co-exist. But after a spate of bad-news stories, we are beginning to hear that the Green Revolution is starting quite successfully to combine high yields with freedom from the need to use high doses of pesticides. Integrated Pest Management - which uses a wide range of ecological insights to reduce dependence on chemicals - has, for instance, proven very successful in protecting some of Indonesia's hugely-expanded rice crop. IPM will save countries millions of dollars of pesticide subsidies for their farmers. When more farmers pay the full cost of their pesticide-use the practice will take off dramatically. [[xcix]]

It has become fashionable to celebrate only the small farmer. This is a big mistake. We cannot afford to forget how successful plantations can be. At Mpongwe, in Zambia, to take just one example, the British Commonwealth Development Corporation has a big scheme which produces rainfed maize and soya, and irrigated coffee and winter wheat. Alongside a Zambian firm, the British development agency has become a 50 per cent shareholder in the enterprise, which CDC manages. With 4,000 hectares in production and a further 8,000 hectares to come, this is just the sort of large scale operation which seems inappropriate to the romantics who think that only peasant agriculture is right for poor countries, and that it must be wrong for partly foreign-owned farms to be able to export some of their profits out of Africa. And yet on these thousands of hectares, 1000 fulltime employees have livings, and in good years 2,500 seasonal employees get part of theirs. New and improved housing, a primary school for 700 pupils, a clinic, shops and a bank have all been created as part of the scheme. [[c]]

The land CDC and its Zambian partner uses was underemployed before they came along. It now produces foreign exchange and food for a country in bad need of both. It is also producing an important intangible: a success story in a country which needs them. Beyond the general lesson that Africa's soils and water supplies are not all as hopeless as they look, and Zambia's happen to be very good, CDC's scheme will also be helping to answer questions about what works and where. It is far better that this sort of experiment at least in part happens with foreign capital, especially if - sadly - it turns out not to work for long. If one such scheme does not work, then the next is more likely to because of the lessons learned.

Presuming that CDC's scheme flourishes, then perhaps some of Africa's rich people will follow where British enterprise helped lead. The capacity to take big risks, teach big lessons, and produce big quantities of food and foreign exchange is what the British brought to its scheme: that is surely a large series of pluses. It is CDC's purpose to invest money and management precisely in schemes and countries perceived as being too risky for most Western firms.

There is a growing awareness that plantation schemes have often proven that - contrary to myth - even tropical land can remain in good heart for many years under intensive production. Moreover, there is a growing awareness amongst some academics that they have generated a new and not altogether accurate myth about the virtue of small scale production. Professor Tim Harding, director of the International Centre for Plantation Studies at the Silsoe campus of the Cranfield Institute of Technology puts it this way:

I've been involved with tropical agriculture for 20 years and especially with small scale farming. More recently, with this new institute, I've become very much involved with large scale operations and have witnessed the extraordinary contribution they have made. You have to see the infrastructural developments which have gone along, which they have paid for: schools, hospitals, roads. I tended to view plantations as everyone else views them. You hear that they're exploitative, paying appalling wages to the labour force, devastating the environment, tearing out national forest, that their profits are repatriated to the UK and the Netherlands. In short that they are run by exploitative capitalists. Then there is the question of corruption.

You'd have to say that some of the multinationals can be accused of these things. There are some that I wouldn't work with. You worry about them all to some extent; they're in business and they have a labour force which is comparatively underpaid. But you see their conditions tend to be better than those of their neighbours; that people are keen to work for them. After all, their employees get education, health, welfare and that is all held in high regard. Indeed, the multinational corporations are under pressure to maintain high labour forces, whilst most of them would be more profitable if they were allowed to mechanise.

Tea companies, for instance, wouldn't mind having fewer, better paid workers. In principle they're interested in developing labour productivity, say by the use of shears in tea plucking.

Plantation companies like foreign exchange crops: they like long term tree crops, such as tea, coffee, cocoa, palm oil, sugar cane. And then you see that most of these big companies acquired concessions maybe a hundred year ago, and many have worked the same land for many years.

Tim Harding is sure that plantations have a role, but of course does not dismiss the received, almost self-evident, wisdom that smaller scale farming also has one, especially in producing very high grades of some crops, though in small quantities. Acre for acre, small scale farming can produce very high yields. But it is extraordinarily difficult to get really large volumes of crops from small scale farming, if you look at the problem from the point of view of production from a region rather than from an individual plot. And it is very hard, too, to match small scale farmers with the scale of food storage and processing which is the key to modern cheapness of production.

The CDC scheme affronts romantic ideals of several kinds. It produces cash crops, and at a plantation scale. It uses African land to produce crops which are not merely not for local consumption, but not even for African consumption. It has been a familiar Green argument for many years that poor people should work toward self-sufficiency and subsistence, and that any other route to growth is exploitative.

Overstated, as it often is, this view is nonsensical. Like Paul Harrison [[ci]], I have met farmers in Kenya and Tanzania whose handful of acres produce a wide range of crops, some of them for sale to Europeans. Two of the liveliest Africans I have met were engaged in producing carnations and would not have been without the crop. As we have already seen, cash is an important key to security in poor as well as in rich countries. And variety of crop can powerfully help farmers insure cheaply against the diseases which may strike at any time.

It will not be by peasants alone or plantations alone that the third world produces food and a living for its people. It will not be by relying on exclusively modern or exclusively traditional techniques. And it will not be by notions of self-sufficiency, either. It will be an amalgam of farming and trading techniques which will, with luck, help the poor countries of the world to discover their agricultural potential. It will also be by the application of techniques which have hardly been invented yet.

Section vi The bio-industrial revolution.

We know that about 90 percent of the increase in food production in recent decades has come from increases in yield of food per acre of land, and only 10 percent or less from increases in land under production. [[cii]] It is clear that in many places, perhaps most places, the new lands which might become arable or more intensively pastoral are less and less likely to be highly productive.

For at least one industry the constraints facing farmers seem almost like good news. Biotechnology offers a route out of some of the difficulties which afflict conventional agriculture. To take one major UK example, ICI Seeds (now known as Zeneca) has made a big effort to explain its potential role to anyone who will listen. This is only appropriate for a business which the public believes is more likely to make a Frankenstein than a new version of the miracle with fishes and loaves.

Under the general banner, Growing for a Better Future, ICI Seeds (as it then was) produced several accounts of the new opportunities and some of the attached dilemmas. [[ciii], [civ], [cv], [cvi]] One of these papers, Crop Protection In the Developing World, readily accepts many of the conventional limitations which block big new productivity increases. If there are limits to new land, to new supplies of water, and to new increases in the uses of pesticides and fertilisers - and there clearly are - then it makes sense, in the biotechnological view, to optimise their use.

Most of the major crops of the world - including rice, wheat, and soya - are drawn from a very broad genetic base, cross bred, and have been shifted out of their region of origin by pioneer agriculturalists, hundreds or even thousands of years ago. They have become prone to disease as they have become more productive, but they have also been developed to grow in areas where they could not have managed hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Zeneca maps out three stages in the likely future development of these ancient techniques, all of which will produce plants which deliver more and more of what man desires with less and less dependence on resources he is short of or worried about. In the short term (until the mid-1990's) the main developments will be in techniques which make hunting through existing plant gene types quicker and more efficient. Increasingly, in the mid-term, by the late 1990s, technology will allow the transformation of plant types by the addition of particular genes conferring particular new advantages. In the longer term, technologists expect to be able to make what Zeneca calls "more fundamental changes", which will take the manipulation to the point where man will be able to say he has in effect made new species.

The promise and threat of biotechnology flow from the skill mankind has developed in getting into the engine room of life; into, that is, the cells and genes which are life's building blocks. This new technology seems to many people to be an offence against nature. Biotechnology is, perhaps naturally, viewed with the same suspicion that was once reserved for nuclear power. It is only forty years and less since nuclear was touted as the power source which would produce electricity "too cheap to meter". The risks and costs have emerged later (and been exaggerated, as we discuss in Chapter Five).

Biotechnological development faces the obvious problem that man might create a monster - a virus against which man has no defence, a new super-weed, a new agricultural pest capable of wiping out entire crops. The industry and its regulators insist that biotechnology is doing little that nature could not do for itself. The regulators and the semi-official bodies which advise them clearly believe that we can proceed slowly, testing our confidence at every point. [[cvii]] But will the cautious optimism of industry and regulator still public anxiety?

Nuclear power and biotechnology share qualities of fearfulness and incomprehensibility. Confidence about technologies such as these will not come because Joe Public understands them. The non-technicians amongst us will far more likely come to trust biotechnology, or nuclear power, because we learn to trust the institutional process by which technologies and processes are judged on our behalf. The penultimate chapter looks at some institution-building which may help this process. Familiarity helps. Every year that passes without a major Western nuclear accident helps that industry, and with luck biotechnology will have an even better record.

The debate surrounding biotechnology has so far made one feel mildly confident that the progress of this development will be like most others: noisy, controversial, occasionally surprising in its capacity to go wrong, but controlled with increasing sensitivity and alertness as the years roll on.

But how much will gene-manipulation help feed the world? The developments which we see so far are, naturally enough, in products from which industry can predict high profits. So we find ourselves reading about the engineered tomato rather than the engineered rice plant. This is the way capitalism often works with the technologies it pays for, and the result is blind but often benign. The market funds marketable research into high-price product. But discoveries soon find their more general, and more generally useful, low-price outlets. It will not be at all surprising if insights which Zeneca or any other firm gains in tomatoes will soon be used in more nutritious plants, or that processes explored initially for private profit and for use in the rich world will be found to work well and cheaply in the third world. Doubtless, we will have to explore ways for Governments, foundations and charities to fund private firms to develop seeds and techniques for their dissemination in poor countries. [[cviii]]

Third world researchers worry that genetically engineered substitutes for pyrethrum, cocoa, vanilla and gum arabic could soon be produced in laboratories and factories in the West rather than in the tropical countries in which they are valuable cash crops. [[cix]] One simply has to hope that cases of loss will be matched by examples of other crops made to grow with less water, or less chemical inputs, than are presently needed and that these benefits help the poorer countries.

In any case, the general lesson of the past is that these sorts of concerns evaporate. In the instance of computing, there were fears that IBM would somehow monopolise hardware and software. What has happened, instead, is an explosion of variety of suppliers. Indeed, bio-technology is more like computing than it is like nuclear power in this sense: it will often be cheap, simple, easily dispersed into the market, and profitable to use.

Section vii The Global Good News

The third world will be very unlucky indeed if it does not grow very much more food than it now does, and with less ecological damage. But there is no certainty that it will be self-sufficient in food. Professor Ian Carruthers of Wye College, London University, wrote recently that, following six months traveling in the Third World, especially Asia, he felt that:

In thirty years' time four out of five of the world's urban people will live in the developing world. I cannot see the bulk of food supplies for these cities of the developing world coming from their hinterland but only from overseas. In 20 to 30 years' time the cities of the developing world will be fed from Chicago and possibly Kiev. [[cx]]

This may not matter.

Martin Brown and Ian Goldin [[cxi]] have pulled together many of the teasing paradoxes of world farming and food supply. Their message, drawing on a wide range of studies, is that the world as a whole can grow and trade quite enormous quantities of food. This food is likely to get cheaper in almost all cases (with rice as a possible exception) as technologies increasingly bite. Much of this bulk and cheapness can probably be achieved within tighter ecological controls. The most obvious and predictable source of the bulk and cheapness of food is the rich world. There will perhaps be the same number of very poor hungry people in the world in the next century as there are now: maybe a few more, maybe a few less. The proportion of the world's population which cannot feed itself by its own efforts will fall somewhat, but the absolute numbers of hungry will rise somewhat.

Mssrs Brown and Goldin's arguments imply that the world is nowhere near exhausting its capacity to feed humans. The food can be there when there are ten billion people to eat it. What is much less clear is how the very poor of the world will lay their hands on it.

The authors provide some ways of thinking about this problem. No one knows what the third world will be growing in the future. It would not, for instance, make sense for the poor of the world to be told to try to buy expensive local produce as opposed to cheap foreign produce merely on the grounds that it was produced by people of the same nationality as themselves. On the other hand, buying foreign food, however cheap, involves economies in getting hold of foreign exchange, and that may not be as easy as all that. The balance between earning the foreign exchange by exporting industrial or farm products and growing the food for oneself is a fine one and there are no clear answers as to where the line should be drawn.

But Mssrs Brown and Goldin offer quite firm guidance on a related topic. They stress that if one is trying to get a rural economy going then the cheapness of the produce which farmers grow will help a great deal. Modern analysis suggests that if a farmer can reduce his costs, and sell his food into markets cheaply, that will do him and the economy and his customers far more good than rigging things so that the consumer pays, and farmer is paid, falsely high prices.

These are arguments of immense hopefulness. They suggest there will be an abundance of cheap food available in international trade during the next century. The proportion of this tradable food which would be required to feed those who are predicted to have difficulty feeding themselves in the market is very small. In other words: the food needs of the poor of the world are likely to add up to a very small percentage of the total food which the world will be growing very cheaply by then.

It is surely likely to be possible to make the next little leap. If we have, say, half a billion hungry people and lots of food around, we will work out a way of getting the food to the people if we want to.

Chapter Four: Fuelling the Future Billions: some clues

Introduction

Section i. From science to policy: clearing the air

Section ii. Energy crisis: what energy crisis?

Section iii. Beauty or beast? Nuclear power

Introduction

The latest big environmental issue - man's effect on the atmosphere - is serious by almost everyone's reckoning. Even when one strips out the hype, atmospheric change remains a serious threat. Yet man's innovativeness is probably equal to finding a series of at least partial solutions, and this chapter suggests that the modern version of the energy crisis need not defeat us. The nuclear option deserves to be reassessed, not least because the public may dislike a big contribution from some renewable energy sources.

Section i. From science to policy: clearing the air

People have always had all sorts of ways of altering the atmosphere in which they live, usually for the worse. Smoke nuisance has required regulation since the medieval period and we have known for well over a century that our combustion creates acid rain. [[cxii]] Some modern problems have presumably been with us from the beginning. In the third world, perhaps 700 million people endure quite serious health risks from the smoke which fills their houses and huts from smoky fires. [[cxiii]] The World Health Organisation calls this the worst occupation-related health problem on the planet.

We hear more about problems which seem distinctively modern. Cities all over the world suffer direct pollution from vehicle exhausts. These are thought to have a direct health effect. But they also contribute to a variety of atmospheric effects, including seasonal smogs, formed as by-products of combustion react with sunlight. In the 1950s, London and many other cities suffered winter time smogs caused by smoky particles, until coal-burning - much of it domestic - was banned in and near towns. We now have summer time photochemical smog, mostly caused by emissions from vehicles working in areas which are subject to windless, oppressive weather. Such smogs are reckoned to effect around one billion people around the world.[[cxiv]]

The problem of vehicle exhausts can be reduced by an end-of-pipe technology, the catalytic converter. Catalysts can go some way to diminishing the emissions of nitrogen oxides and volatile hydrocarbons, an important source of the problem. The difficulty here is that such converters do not much help if they are badly maintained, or are used as an excuse to continue with big, inherently polluting engines in an uncontrolled number of cars.

It is an important argument against the use of catalytic converters on vehicles that they do nothing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (see the remarks on global warming below), and even tend to pander to the idea that even conventional engines can be clean. In fact, however, it is argued persuasively by some engineers that reliance on the introduction of catalysts took the West's eye off the development of leaner-burning engines (which use fuel much more efficiently than present types). These engineers now hope that lean-burn engines will be introduced, and that catalysts can be designed to work with them (unlike existing types). [[cxv]]

The Western world, and some less obviously rich countries, have already moved against photochemical smog by legislating for catalytic converters on vehicles. But photochemical smog in most countries is not a problem of the worst sort. It is temporary, in the sense that if cities impose half-way decent regulations, it can be diminished or banished overnight. Moreover, its effects are tangible and afflict the polluter. The polluter and the victim tend to be identical, which makes the politics of the issue relatively easy.

Acid rain was a rather tougher case. It was and is caused importantly by dirty power stations generating electricity whose use can be reduced, certainly, but is also inevitable and unavoidable. The form and seriousness of the effects of acid rain were and are debatable, and usually were and are most serious many miles from the offending plant. There is recent evidence to confirm an earlier hypothesis that natural sulphur emissions from the sea are greater than previously thought, and may be contributing as much as third of the acidity blown into Sweden and Norway. This somewhat reduces the blame which had attached to British sources.

International negotiations have sought to control acid rain by imposing limits on the amount of sulphur dioxide emitted by each country, and have largely succeeded, though the limits may need tightening up somewhat. [[cxvi]] When the international agreements were negotiated in the mid- and late-eighties, the solutions were thought to be very expensive, especially because it seemed inevitable that generators would have to retrofit clean-up technology. In the event, a switch to gas as a fuel, and recession, did much of the work for regulators and generators.

The West has been debating acid rain and smogs intensely for twenty five years and more. By the time of the mid-Eighties, when it became very obvious that something was wrong with the ozone layer which shelters earth from ultra-violet light from the sun, there was a good deal of green awareness and readiness to act. This is reassuring, granted that whilst smogs were local, and acid rain regional and international, ozone depletion was global: it was inherently less easy to grasp. The other issues had been fairly comprehensible and had vociferous victims. The ozone hole was remote, intangible, and complicated. All the same, politicians had had the acid rain and smog experiences to sharpen their sense that these sorts of issues have a power to excite people. They had also realised that environmental regulation was a little cheaper than they first thought. Besides, the bills were passed quickly through to consumers. Politicians had learned that if the public wanted environmental controls, there was often political mileage - and small cost - in giving the public what it wanted.

After a false start in the 1970's, the ozone hole issue really came into enormous prominence in 1985, partly as a result of work by the British Antarctic Survey which identified a seasonal ozone hole at the southern polar region. This new work blossomed into a strong theory of anthropogenic ozone depletion, and in particular of how man's emissions of CFCs (chlorofluoro carbons) released damaging chlorine into the stratosphere.

It is not clear how important the thinning of the ozone layer is, and there remains some dispute in judging the roles of man and nature in producing the thinning. James Lovelock, who invented the equipment which led to the discovery that chlorine was a problem, has always been sceptical that the phenomenon is a major problem. [[cxvii], [cxviii]]

There is evidence that volcanoes are factors in ozone loss, though they are thought much more as an exacerbating than a major cause of the effect. [[cxix]] Ozone depletion may have helped offset the global warming effect of man's various gaseous emissions. [[cxx]]

If some data seems to let us off lightly, other work suggests that increased ultra-violet radiation may diminish important phyto-plankton production in the oceans of the world, and increase cataracts and skin cancers. [[cxxi]] Conversely, anxiety about the human health effects of increased UV radiation may make people cautious about baring skin and leaving eyes unshaded. There may be fewer skin cancers and cataracts around the world when there is publicity about lessened ozone. [[cxxii]]

The issue has never been straightforward, but seemed to merit a precautionary approach (see Chapter Eleven). During the early part of the debate, ICI and most other chlorine producing firms (and ICI much longer than the leading US firm, Du Pont) argued their corner with too little appreciation for the strengths of the case against the chemicals they were selling. In the event, by the late 1980s ICI and the others were willing to embrace regulation of CFCs because they realised that not only were there alternatives which they could make and sell, but that the alternatives were more profitable. [[cxxiii]] In the CFC case, hardly anyone argued for an end-of-pipe solution (though recycling might have helped more than it was allowed to). A straight ban of the offending chemicals always seemed the attractive answer.

Negotiations for the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the international agreement to reduce the emissions of CFCs, were bedeviled by a factor which became even more serious in the case of the greenhouse effect and global warming a few years later. It has been possible to persuade third world countries to tolerate strict CFC regulations because it was possible to persuade them that they could be given access to the alternative technologies. This is going to be a much tougher business as we try to encourage energy use which does not tend to warm the planet.

Almost all human activities contribute to the emission of gases which are thickening the existing gaseous warming blanket which has always wrapped the earth. This blanket lets the sun's heat into our atmosphere but decreases the amount of heat which escapes back into space. The planet would be uninhabitably cold but for some sort atmospheric mantle to warm it. The point is that now man seems to have over-egged the pudding. On present trends, sometime half way through the next century, the global-warming potential of man's emissions will be twice what they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution. The methane from our rubbish tips, cattle and rice paddies; the CFCs we have used so freely until recently; and the carbon dioxide from our burning of fossil fuels are three of the most important contributors and will continue to be.

An important feature of the global warming problem is that it is the rich world which has contributed most to the industrial growth which lies behind it. The less developed countries now want to pursue growth strategies, in many cases have the fossil fuels needed, and will be reluctant to forgo that growth on account of the diminished environmental "headroom" mankind now has.

If the global warming is serious, so are its implications for the future of our heavily-populated planet.

A mountain of scientific evidence has been generated by teams of researchers mandated and funded by governments around the world to investigate the phenomenon. This internationally coordinated effort produced a consensus view in 1990. [[cxxiv]] It centred on a prediction that if they were not abated, man's gaseous emissions might produce a warming in the range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees celsius. The scientists took care to stress that there were huge uncertainties within important parts of the analysis, but that man's emissions were certainly producing a warming effect. The warming effect is, if not a much larger, certainly a much quicker, change in the world's temperature than any other in human history. [[cxxv]] However, and the flavour of this is much harder to convey, it is very unclear what the consequences of the warming will be. That man is adding a warming effect to the planet does not necessarily mean it is being warmed proportionately, or even at all. There may be contrary phenomena.

The worst gaps in our understanding attach to feedback loops in the climate system and weather-producing mechanisms of earth. These loops, which are responses to change, can variously accelerate or diminish the effect of the change which triggered them. There are simply dozens of big unanswered questions here. For instance, as the oceans of the world are warmed, will they absorb more or less carbon dioxide? As the planet warms, will the polar ice caps absorb more water, or less? Might big volcano eruptions cancel out the warming effects of years of carbon emission by man, as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo seems to have done in June 1991? An even bigger issue surrounds the role of clouds and water vapour. At least one important American scientist heavily criticises the consensus view that clouds will provide a positive feedback and increase warming. Richard Lindzen, a professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues forcibly - but very controversially - that they will provide a negative feedback. In other words, that the increased warmth will be, to some extent, self-limiting. [[cxxvi]]

Beyond these uncertainties as to the machinery at work in global warming and cooling, we are even less sure what the effects of a given warming might be in different places around the world. By some accounts, the seas will rise and flood many places where people live and work. In other accounts, the sea level will fall. [[cxxvii]]

The bottom line in the very important issue of food production seems to be that

studies have not conclusively determined whether, on average, global agricultural potential will increase or decrease. [[cxxviii]]

Thinking about global warming is, of course, divided. At an obvious level, there is dispute as to whether any effects of man's warming can yet be detected. Then there is dispute as to whether the absence of any definite evidence that man's influence has yet produced effects is a good reason for now doing rather little about the problem. There is the problem of whether the phenomenon is a problem at all, and more particularly, to what degree. Many people who have lived through previous environmental scares have become inured to them. The sceptics feel that so many previous scares became canards that we should not be rushed into inappropriate action by what may turn out to be yet another in the line.

Many people who have considered the problem feel that the climate issue is a perfect example of a case where man must act in line with the precautionary principle (see Chapter Eleven). To do so would be to act in advance of final and incontrovertible proof that man has or is about to cause an environmental crisis. Let's listen to this case first.

John Firor, erstwhile director of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and now a sort of guru-in-residence there, believes that it is inappropriate to wait for further evidence that might produce greater precision about what the effects of man's warming effect may be. In his view, the science is solid enough to justify firm action now. Dr Firor says our understanding of the seriousness of the problem will not be much enhanced by narrowing the range of predictions we make about how much the planet is warming and where the impacts will fall.

This case relies on our certain knowledge that the world's climate is inherently variable and that our warming almost certainly represents an acceleration of its variability. Dr Firor says:

If you look back 300,000 years you find that a stable climate is almost unknown. Except for one 10,000 year period, which is the present period, the earth's temperature has wandered around within a range of 2-3 degrees celsius. In our period it has wandered around by one degree. This interglacial is extraordinarily stable. Our best reckoning is that a business-as-usual scenario will produce a warming of about 3 degrees.

On this argument, man is throwing into the climate equation exactly the kind and degree of change which has pre-historically been associated with quite big changes in the habitability of regions of the earth. What is more, he is achieving changes in a century or so which nature habitually achieves across a millennium.

This view properly recognises that the world's climate seems quite naturally to be a temperature roller coaster. It seems very like a fairground ride. Our warming influence promises to accelerate the ride, and thus be dangerous, whatever its detailed outcomes. The crucial point about this argument is that whatever the degree of uncertainty we feel about our knowledge of the climate system, we know that we are adding a warming effect whose effects we cannot be certain about. These uncertain new effects will fall on a system which is already uncertain. This view sees it as unlikely or even inconceivable that it could be a sound principle to add to a risky system a further element of riskiness, and to do so in the hopes that somehow the system will accommodate the new factors and ameliorate them. This view argues that all we know is that man is definitely heaping a new uncertainty into the equation and that this is, at the very least, incautious.

If this sense of a white-knuckle ride and its acceleration do not suggest the need for a precautionary response, it is hard to see when such a response could be justified. This becomes especially the case when we remember the evidence which suggests that whilst the rich world may well be able to adjust to climate changes, the poor world will find the adjustments far harder. The essence of this argument is to remind us that a Holland may be able to adjust to rising seas - should that prove to be an effect of global warming - but that a Bangladesh would find it far harder. Similar difficulties surround the response of poor countries, say in Africa, to changes in the patterns of agriculture. An adjustment which might be tolerable in the US might be punitive in the sub-Sahara.

Beyond the idea that it is the rich who caused the problem and the poor whose response to it we must worry about, there is the difficulty that the worst effects will fall on future generations. This is usually described as a matter of "inter-generational" equity.

If we accept that man is adding to uncertainty, and that the worst effects may befall poor countries, the rich world, the main present contributor the effect, has an obligation to reduce its own emissions, and quickly. There is a clear moral need for the present generation of man, and especially of men in the rich world, to develop better technologies for the 10 billion quite affluent people we expect soon to be on earth. If we do not, then the carelessness of the present generation of energy-extravagant Westerners may well leave as a legacy an energy-hunger which will be unsupportable in future generations.

In recent years, the view that man is threatening his climate has come under full-frontal attack. [[cxxix],[cxxx]] I think it is fair to say that it has survived the crudest of these. But those who argue that we face catastrophe and must take very fast remediable action remain vulnerable to some serious criticisms.

In June 1993, the National Geographical Society's Journal, Research and Exploration, published a remarkable series of essays on the global warming debate. There were several which stated the consensus view. But there was a long piece by Richard Lindzen (referred to above) which cited suggestions that the doubling of carbon dioxide might well not happen in the first century of the next millennium, or at all. But Lindzen does not dwell on this hopeful scenario. He suggests not merely that man's warming may induce a response in the planet's water vapour and clouds which will provide a cooling effect. More radically, he argues that

It is commonly suggested that society should not depend on negative feedbacks to spare us from a "greenhouse catastrophe". This is a peculiar perversion of science, if the negative feedbacks are a sound consequence of scientific knowledge. Moreover, what is omitted from such suggestions is that current models depend heavily on artificial "positive" feedbacks to predict high levels of warming.

The strength of this argument is that it goes some way to undermine even the need to defend the "do-little" case from the precautionary case. A scientist of Lindzen's stamp is simply saying that the "problem" is a result of poor science and that to that extent there is no need to respond to it.

However, policy makers and the public have to judge the weight of Lindzen's arguments against those of the consensus view. This cannot be easy. Free-thinking people have a respect for the lone voice in science. It is often the right one. Besides, Lindzen is not entirely alone. Professor Keith Browning, onetime director of research of the UK's Meteorological Office, is chairman of the Cloud System Science team of the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment. He is solidly part of the global warming establishment, and yet in a long article for the Royal Society [[cxxxi]] he argued that it was dangerously easy to be wrong about the feedback effects of clouds - positive or negative - in such a way as dramatically to alter assumptions about the effects of global warming.

And yet the admitted uncertainties about global warming and its impacts do not necessarily add up to a case for complacency. The consensus scientific view seems to be that the issue is serious and demands action. Presumably, scientific discussion on the subject will mature, and perhaps reconcile the opposing cases.

In the meantime, there is a further line of argument which is, if sound, very helpful. Research and Exploration includes an essay by Michael E Schlesinger, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois. The essence of the paper is to present work which suggests that, irrespective of the severity of the impact of global warming, there will be very little to be lost by delaying for a decade the commencement of emissions reductions.

This does not imply we need do nothing, but it suggests that the science allows us to tackle the issue in a way which suits our habits of thought and behaviour. One advantage is that we can undertake further research. A second, perhaps greater one, is that we can gradually begin to do now those things which are relatively painless and which will have pay-offs whatever the outcome of the global warming debate. We have, surely, a strong sense that industries and societies can adapt to most changes, provided they are slow. We hope against hope that global warming's impacts will emerge gradually, if we must endure them at all. But we also hope that a gradual response by man will be sufficient because - if for no other reason - that will allow a new generation of technologies to emerge without our having to junk existing technologies or rush into untried ones.

This line was expressed most clearly by the late David Thomas, the Financial Times' environment correspondent until his death in Kuwait in 1991. Thomas argued against action on greenhouse emissions which could not be justified on other grounds, at least until the scientific research became more certain. [[cxxxii]]

Thomas was writing at a time when governments around the world were being pressed to say what they would do about the phenomenon. President Bush was almost alone amongst the Western leaders in pronouncing himself a sceptic on global warming. Yet he followed a line set by his science adviser, Allan Bromley, who was a hard-line doubter but even so acknowledged that action was justified provided it made sense on other grounds. Bromley called this "insurance " action. [[cxxxiii]] In fact, the US's very public caution on the theory of global warming, and limited acceptance that action was justified if it helped other problems, was not extraordinarily different in effect to what was happening - or not happening - elsewhere. Margaret Thatcher was extremely vocal on the significance of the global warming theory, and made a famous speech in October 1988 describing global warming as a giant and unwitting experiment with the world's atmosphere. She was using a description which had first been used of the phenomenon by researchers in 1957. [[cxxxiv]] Thirty years after the problem had first been mooted, and in spite of her admiration for the science, Mrs Thatcher showed no appetite for the policies which would have been required to combat the problem, nor even for limited "insurance" action which could be justified on other grounds.

When the issue came to a head at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, with a different premiership in Britain, it was agreed to aim at stablising global CO2 emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000. According to the consensus view, such a target still commits the world to considerable continuing warming caused by man. President Bush refused to sign the agreement, though President Clinton and his environmentalist vice president, Al Gore, have signaled their intention to join the EU, Japan and the others in doing so. It is an open question whether Mrs Thatcher would have signed or not. John Major, her successor, did.

It is hard, of course, to translate a generalised concern into firm regulatory action. Politicians are, naturally, reluctant to ask electorates to take very extreme steps unless there are obvious and certain benefits to be had. The trouble for policy-makers is that they cannot point to a sure problem and easy solution in the case of global warming. It is a much harder case than acid rain or smog, and harder even than ozone depletion.

The upshot has been fairly gentle action which can be characterised as being worthwhile whatever is eventually believed about global warming. The measures, generally no more than small taxes on energy use, will encourage energy efficiency and so slow the rate at which we will run out of fossil fuels. They will reduce acidification and photochemical smog. And they will - if they reduce the attractiveness of private motor vehicles - encourage public transport and thus ease both congestion and pollution in cities. These are all worthwhile in their own right, and so fulfill the requirement of not leaning too much on a global warming hypothesis which has yet to attract the public or even universal acceptance amongst serious scientists. They are also controversial. A tax on warmth is presented to electorates as inflicting hypothermia and new expense on the elderly and poor.

Anyway, around the world, treasuries are discussing or introducing energy taxes. These need not disturb our economies, even at levels much greater than envisaged at the moment. There is an emerging view that energy taxes are a less distorting way of raising government revenue than sales, corporation or income tax. [[cxxxv], [cxxxvi]] Energy taxes may not inhibit economic growth and may even promote it (see Chapter Eleven for further discussion on this point). They need not be inflationary, provided they replace other taxes.

Equally, however, we should not be beguiled into thinking that very light taxes will produce emissions-limitations. High levels of energy taxes, or other strict controls, will be needed to produce the degree of energy-sipping the world probably requires. There is no sign that these are likely to be quickly forthcoming.

Because of the persistence of greenhouse gases, action now will not produce any benefit in global warming terms for many years. So we need to start soon if we want to see our actions produce an effect within, say, two or three generations. Granted that our descendants may be glad we took quite intense action, and yet that we want the necessary policies to be brought in gradually, we need to give serious thought to a programme which demonstrates commitment to continuous, gradually intensified action. If we delay, we risk not only condemning future generations to severe climate effects, but also condemning them to rapid and catastrophic adjustments to avoid a worsening situation for their descendents.

Action will have to be internationally co-ordinated. All the rich countries will need to penalise greenhouse emissions in harmony, or those that do so will suffer unfair competition from laggards. It will help if the rich countries see themselves as needing in any case to invest in industries which use brainpower rather than large quantities of energy. Their willingness to do so will be helped by the awareness that that they cannot compete with heavy industry in the third world.

It is only about five years since we saw the first very unavoidable indications that global warming might be a serious problem. Politically speaking, events have moved at astonishing speed. The climate issue has so far followed the recent benign pattern of scientific information turning into ministerial policy, and often without much serious electoral interest. We find it hard to shake off the conventional view which says that politicians are lazy and self-centred. Yet it seems that on the big environmental matters, regulations and policies get formulated regardless of whether the public is pressing for them. Acid rain, smog and the ozone hole have at times broken out of the green ghetto and seemed of general concern. But global warming, whose existence has emerged mostly because of publicly-funded research, attracted governments' attention without setting the public alight. It is an issue - and not the only one - where government has slightly outpaced the public.

The good thing about all this is that it need not much hurt governments to do the right thing. The Marshall Plan, which was designed to help Europe after the Second World War, cost the US taxpayer about two percent of GDP. That kind of effort, repeated now, might be about what is required to help the poor world develop with the best, rather than the worst, technology. Al Gore is surely right to argue that we need to consider such a plan for the poor countries of the world as they seek technology transfer. [[cxxxvii]]

It is extremely unlikely that the poor countries of the world will agree to anything which causes them difficulties unless the rich demonstrate their willingness to undertake great changes as well. What is more, unless the West undertakes those changes, the technology will not be there to be spread around the world.

This account of the global warming issue - that "insurance" action is worth taking - seems robust. It should stand the test of any good news that the phenomenon is not as severe as was thought, and it would only be strengthened by further bad news. It is an argument worth pursuing with policy-makers, with or without more evidence.

We need to begin with gradual action now. The pain will be very slight and the benefits very various. If we find that new understandings about greenhouse issue reduce our concern, we will have done little which we will have cause to regret, and a good deal we were glad of anyway.

Section ii Energy crisis: what energy crisis?

Fossil fuels will, sooner or later, become scarce. Before then, global warming requires us to turn to other sources of energy. Having to do so may pose very much less of a problem than is commonly supposed.

In 1991, I went to Golden, Colorado to meet researchers at the US Government's leading renewable energy centre. I met a man who was very thrilled by a tank of water which was full of swirling green algae. It looked unprepossessing, with its little paddle keeping straggly sort of seaweed stuff on the move. But the US Government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Chris Rivard was practically breathless in its praise. Imagine a dirty pond which eats carbon dioxide and produces oil at the same time. That is what NREL's Aquatic Species Programme thinks it can achieve with microalgae. The researchers were within sight of helping solve the Greenhouse and the Gulf Effects at a stroke of their paddle.

Of course, it will not happen tomorrow. In 1991 Dr Rivard put the remaining problem simply:

There are species of microalgae which grow very fast, and convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into biomass at least five times faster than ordinary plants. And there are others which produce terrific quantities of oil. To make a buck, we have to find a species which does both.

In 1993, when I revisited the laboratory, John Sheehan, a NREL ethanol worker, told me

We've been isolating strains of algae which can grow in such a way that 60 per cent of their bodyweight is in the form of oil. Algae can take C02, which is low in calorific value, and turn it into something with a very high calorific value. That's a pretty neat thing. We're targeting a use of algae now: to recover C02 from power plant stack gases. Literally, that is just bubbling the gas through the algae. We have a whole programme working on these lipids [fats]. We're tweaking the metabolism of bugs to help us. We have now demonstrated that we can produce about a barrel of oil per acre of algae a week: we need to get it up to about five.

In another technology, the NREL researchers are hoping to produce ethanol from cellulose from trees, instead of from the starch from various cereal plants which is used now. [[cxxxviii]] Researchers believe they will soon be able commercially to produce the gas from woody material, by the use of bugs genetically engineered from a bacterium found in a hot spring in Yellowstone National Park.

There have been several breakthroughs already, enough to suggest that if only the cropland expected to be idled in the US to prevent costly food mountains were put to this use, 15 per cent of the projected total energy demand of US in 2030 could be met from this source. There is an ecological neatness about burning biomass, or the exhalations of biomass (like methane). When we dig up coal the carbon contained in it makes a one-way trip into the global warming greenhouse. When we burn biomass, the biomass production needed to replace our consumption itself locks up new quantities of carbon, in what is a recycling process. The NREL researchers are also pretty sure they can make good progress in fermenting municipal waste. There is progress well away from ultra-sophisticated Colorado. In Mauritius, thousands of homes are using "green gas": bottled gas made from fermented chicken droppings.

New tricks like these will use the sun's energy - there is no other - but in ways far more elegant than those we have deployed so far. Oil is only what bugs have made of rotting forests. Coal is even less clever stuff: just anaerobically decomposed and compressed forest. Modern technologies promise vastly to improve on them.

The US Department of Energy in February 1991 published a National Energy Strategy which rather disappointingly suggested that alternative sources might provide about 16 per cent of electricity needs by 2010. This was a good deal less dramatic than the contribution NREL and four other agencies had told the department was possible. The agencies conservatively suggested that if solar energy was explored with vigour (they posited a doubling of research effort) solar would become competitive enough with other sources to provide nearly a third of the US's energy needs by 2030. [[cxxxix]]

NREL's energy policy director, Tom Bath, thinks that even that number is too low. In 1991, he told me

I'm convinced that if we made it a national objective to increase the contribution renewables could make, by 2030 we could get 50 per cent of our energy from them without any major change in the way we live.

In 1993, he said the estimate held good. There had been no big technological breakthroughs, but progress was coming along well enough. Again and again, researchers said that improved engineering, and above all cost reduction, was the key.

The optimism that solar energies can make a large contribution to replacing fossil fuels does not have to assume there is draconian change towards a dirigiste, command and control society. It survives an assumption that the full, normal, foot-on-the-floorboards attitude to power survives. There is certainly no need to assume that we will have to become cavemen or hippies.

Indeed, some of the renewables are close enough to price-competitiveness, for NREL to reckon that a doubling or trebling of the research budget would put solar energy into the marketplace quicker - and with far less chance of upsetting politicians - than would an artificial punishment of fossil fuels or government-imposed premiums gifted to the suppliers of solar energies. Of course, NREL staff also believe that if oil and coal were to bear their full environmental cost, renewables would break through even quicker.

By the end of the century, oil from microalgae should be competing on price with oil from the bugs of millions of years ago.

Soon after the turn of the century, an even more spectacular technology should be commonplace. We could be on the brink of running a hydrogen - rather than a mostly oil and coal - economy. There several ways of obtaining hydrogen. One could take a patch of desert and a very small percentage of the water which falls on it and add photovoltaic (PV) power, of the kind which runs calculators now. According to the World resources Institute

A photovoltaic-hydrogen system would consist of four major parts. It would have an array of solar modules that would collect sunlight and convert it into DC electricity, an elecrolyser that would use this electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, a compressor that would bring the produced hydrogen up to the required pressure, and a hydrogen storage unit. If the hydrogen production exceeded on site demand, the system would also include a pipeline that would carry the excess hydrogen to remote users.

Where should the PV hydrogen systems be located? Would it be better to produce the electricity locally, thereby avoiding the expense of long-distance transport? Or should the electricity be produced primarily in the sunniest areas, making it possible to extract more useful energy from a given solar cell and thereby reducing the cost of PV electricity?

The choice is not a difficult one. Even for PV DC (direct current) electricity production costs in the $0.020 to $0.035 per kWh expected for sunny areas near the turn of the century, electricity production for electrolysis would still account for 60 to 70 percent of the cost of hydrogen delivered to consumers a thousand miles from the production site.[[cxl]]

So, luckily for sunless British interests, transporting hydrogen long distances is quite cheap. In any case, the gas can be produced using any source of electricity. Hydro power might be ideal. Nuclear power is a possibility, and confers the advantage that the high-risk end of the process could be located in secure sophisticated societies, but the energy consumed in poor and even unstable ones. The hydrogen gas could be burned in cars or power stations, to choice. It could be bottled and shipped wherever it was needed, or piped there.

Hydrogen can be chemically reacted in clever fuel cells to produce electricity with at least twice the efficiency with which coal can be burned. Hydrogen would be a fuel used without any carbon emission - so no global warming would result from it. There need be little or no smog or acid rain contributions from it, either. Combustion of hydrogen does produce nitrogen oxides, but these can be catalysed quite easily.

Photovoltaic arrays could be pressed into service without being used for hydrogen manufacture. One could build arrays, and then use cables to move the resultant electricity where it was needed. At the present stage of development, 23,000 square kilometres of land would need to be under sun-farm to provide the US's current electricity supply. According to NREL researchers, the area demanded could well halve as technologies improve. In any case, even the larger figure is only about the area of water in false lakes behind Canada's hydro-electricity dams. There is a bombing range owned by the US Air Force in Nevada which could alone provide two-thirds of the larger figure.

PV can be used on a very small scale at remote sites. It may well be cheaper to give consumers an array of PV cells than to build the power station and long power lines we have always used so far in rural districts.

Cost will be a serious constraint, at least at first. Hydrogen is likely to remain a more expensive fuel than gasolene. But, according to Bob McConnell, in charge of the PV programme at NREL, progress may be swift. "Today, PV generated electricity is five times the price of your ordinary electricity at home. But we may be well be able to halve the price is 5 or 10 years: we're getting to an exciting stage when something like that could happen. Manufacturers are still finding ways to build manufacturing plants."

Even so, it may well be that all the renewables will remain uncompetitive with fossil fuels, at least if the consumers of the latter continue to buy and use them without paying a penalty for the pollution they cause.

We could make the fossil fuels pay a penalty to take account of our view of their ecological costs, and then watch renewables emerge strongly. Another approach would be to achieve our consumption of energy, but use less heat as we do so. We waste so much of the heat we turn into energy, and then waste so much of the energy, that the costs of being more careful almost always repay themselves time and time again.

The idea of energy conservation chills the blood of many Westerners, who fear it to be the preserve of wooly-hats and nay-sayers. We should perhaps think of energy efficiency rather than energy conservation. Either way, we could hugely reduce our energy demand without changing our way of life. A couple of hundred miles West of Golden, there is the Rocky Mountain Research Institute, at Old Snowmass. Here, Amory Lovins - ex-Friends of the Earth, and now as much a consultant to electricity utilities and corporate America as a hero to the eco-freaks - tirelessly assembles the data.

"In all, we know how to run the present US economy on one-fifth of the oil we are now using", he wrote in the New York Times in December 1990, when preparations for the Gulf war were concentrating Americans' interest in oil. Mr Lovins' scenario assumes that existing technology is applied to cars, industrial and office kit, and households. It assumes, for instance, that windows are fitted with a newish super glass (in the UK, it is made by Pilkington). Fitted in double glazing, this glass improves insulation by six times. It means that a north-facing window in winter Colorado produces a positive, passive, heat gain in the building it lights. "If fully used in the US, these windows would save as much oil and gas as the North Sea produces, or twice the Alaskan fields", Mr Lovins says.

Amory Lovins was speaking in a solar house a mile and a half above sea level, which, he says, "could tentatively claim the world altitude record for passive solar bananas". He has a micro-rainforest for an office. Most days he has no need to light the wood-burning stove, even in winter.

It is true that, Lovins is a near-fanatic. He has put huge amounts of time and talent into designing his house so that it hardly uses fossil fuel for space and water heating and about a tenth of the normal amount of electricity. But his research is impeccable and routinely bought-in by very hard-nosed people. When he says that US cars could improve their fuel consumption by five times (and European cars perhaps by three times), and be safer and nippier than existing cars, he is only citing manufacturers' information. When he says that there are showers which use a quarter of the hot water more commonly used - "but get you just as wet" - he is pointing at one which can be bought off the shelf. The glory of it is that we can take Lovins' scenarios with a pinch of salt, and still come out ahead. We will not need his devotion to the cause to follow where he has pioneered.

Of course, the majority of people are suspicious of being eccentric. Hardly any of us likes spending money upfront, say to improve insulation, even if the long-term savings will pay back the increased investment in a year or so, as they often do. We beware buying the first generation of new whizz-bang technology when we know the scene is changing fast, and next year's will be better, and far cheaper.

Even so, in the States, renewables now supply more electricity than nuclear power does. Super-windows took 60 percent of the double-glazing market in the three years to 1991. Sales of light bulbs which sip electricity, and whose increased cost in the shops is easily paid for over their lifetime, used to double every year. In 1990/1991, in the States, they leapt sevenfold.

The message is that the market will take us toward solar power, slowly. To some degree not yet clear, perceptions of pollution problems, the greenhouse effect, diminution of finite supplies and their problematic security, may make us want to go further, faster. But it will be our political decisions, not technological barriers, which will decide how fast we take our place in the sun.

Section iii: Beauty or Beast? Nuclear power

Feelings against nuclear power run very deep, and support for it comes almost exclusively from the small army of scientists and specialists who have dared to think the unthinkable. [[cxli]] Most of them earn a living in the industry or know it well as regulators or politicians in sponsoring ministries. They have signally failed to communicate their enthusiasm to most of the rest of us.

It is very difficult to make a cool assessment of the economic and ecological costs and benefits of the existing nuclear technologies. The industry has been so nannied economically by governments around the world, and so bullied by environmentalists and regulators, that its true costs and benefits are seldom known. Public concern forces up the price of engineering nuclear facilities to satisfy nervous outsiders and politicians. In some countries, such as the UK, the state then finds ways of meeting the bill. Luckily, in some, such as Finland, there is a nuclear sector which controls the entire process from power-station to waste disposal: the solid profitability of its stations shows that nuclear power can actually supply energy to its customers at a discount against conventional fuels. [[cxlii]]

We know the fossil fuel technologies with which nuclear power is in competition are flawed and probably ought to be penalised. As burners of fossil fuels begin to be charged and taxed to reduce the pollution they cause, that will militate in favour of alternatives such as nuclear power, especially if our fear of radiation is to some extent replaced by our fear of global warming. Oddly, it may well be the stubbornness and narrowness of view of the environmentalists which holds us up here. The Greens call for transformations, but do not like to have to undergo them.

The public does not yet share and may never share the industry's feeling that nuclear waste can be stored fairly easily, even without the heavily engineered disposal sites which are planned.

Everyone is concerned, and some people are positively alarmed, by the suggestion that men employed in the industry have a raised chance of having children who develop leukemia. [[cxliii]] It is hard to grasp that this association has not been shown to have been caused by nuclear radiation, and may not be more significant than similar connections between occupations as varied as farmwork, coal mining and the chemicals industry and the formation of cancers. [[cxliv]] The suggestion is in any case contradicted by later evidence. [[cxlv]] There is a general and false belief that connects the fact that human foetuses can be damaged by high doses of radiation with the impression that there must be generation upon generation of mutation following radiation doses such as those experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [[cxlvi]] In fact, though we know that high doses of radiation do produce mutations in mice, by far the worst exposure to radiation experienced by humans so far, that in Japan, did not produce measurably different levels of birth defects. This does not mean humans are different to mice in this respect. The mice were given continuous, very high doses, rather than a single "blast" of radiation.

The anxiety amongst some of the public about nuclear power was real enough before the industry produced an accident which seemed to match the chemical disaster at Bhopal, India. The fire at Chernobyl seemed to fulfill the green anxiety that nuclear might or might not be tolerable when it works, but when it goes wrong it is cataclysmic. Many people probably believe, contrary to all the evidence, that tens of thousands of people died as result of the Chernobyl accident in April, 1986. They believe this not least because respectable newspapers, journals [[cxlvii]] and television stations gave credence to the view - hotly disputed by Western experts - of a handful of scientists from what was the Soviet Union. On the fifth anniversary of the accident in April 1991, the media stoked the fires of anxiety in spite of surely knowing - and certainly not mentioning - that a small but authoritative British team [[cxlviii]] and a much larger international team of specialists [[cxlix]] were about to report with a very different and much happier message. One knowledgeable team had already reported with a view sufficiently authoritative and different to the Russians' version that it deserved to be taken into account. [[cl]]

As pulled together in the International Chernobyl Project, the facts of the Chernobyl accident seem to be that 31 people very closely involved at the station, and very heavily contaminated, did indeed die, as the conventional account of the effects of high doses of radiation would have predicted. This order of deaths puts the accident in the league of mining or oil production disasters, which have often produced far greater tolls, and sympathy for the victims, but no comparable outcry.

Our present knowledge of the health effects of radiation suggests that decades after the accident there will be a rise in cancers, perhaps in the range of thousands, in the contaminated population. But expert opinion mostly believes that these cancers will probably not be so numerous as even to be noticeable in the general cancers which would be found in any population.

There is the additional difficulty that medical investigation and epidemiology is weak in the ex-Soviet Union, so the background level of cancer-formation is unclear, and so, therefore, will be the assessment of Chernobyl's effects.

There has been a view that a hundred or so children have thyroid cancer over and above the number which would be expected in a normal population. Researchers on the spot have attributed these to the Chernobyl accident. [[cli]] But other researchers, from Japan and the UK, have strongly challenged the likelihood of such cancer developments. A series of letters in Nature, the journal which first published the new claim, has suggested explanations other than the Chernobyl accident. [[clii]]

Beyond the human misery it caused, there are several ways in which Chernobyl is important as a case. One is that it provides a textbook example of how not to run a nuclear power station, and thus should reinforce most of the messages which are already familiar to people working in, and regulating, the industry. If Chernobyl usefully stiffened the resolve of the Western nuclear industry to remember that accidents can happen, it is also a comfort to know that the nuclear industry of old Soviet bloc is now receiving a good deal of help from the West in improving its technology and operating standards.

A second useful outcome of the Chernobyl accident is the degree to which discussing nuclear risk is bedeviled by the prejudiced reporting of the media. A third is that one of the very attractive results of our increasing epidemiological knowledge is that whilst it reveals some very complicated issues about what causes illness in a population, it increasingly holds out the prospect that we will know both the good and the bad news about the effects of much human activity. The prompt publication of news of those thyroid cancers speaks not only about the relative smallness of the effects of the radiation from Chernobyl, but also about the readiness of the scientific world to discuss them.

It is anyone's guess whether increased understanding about radiation and human health will contribute to making nuclear power more or less acceptable. In the wake of the Chernobyl accident and its own dismal experience in persuading people to like the idea of living near storage sites for various pretty innocuous sorts of radioactive wastes, the British government in 1989 decided that these were issues whose political acceptability might be improved by a spell on the back burner.

Over four years later ministers are, in March 1994, on the brink of announcing a promised fundamental review of the prospects for the nuclear industry. The political difficulty remains, as it has always been, that the public thinks of this technology as an affront to nature. It seems anti-green. Yet, one can argue tentatively that the industry's processes are quite natural, and that some natural comparisons make the industry both more comprehensible and rather less frightening.

"Eighteen hundred million years ago, there was an entirely natural, spontaneous nuclear power station in the earth's crust", says Dr Ron Flowers, now retired from his work at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, but still an important figure in the small world of nuclear power. Nuclear scientists are pleased that creation made its own reactor at Oklo, in Africa's Gabon, partly because it shows man did not introduce the splitting of atoms in a chain reaction to this planet. Still less did he invent this fission process. And part of the industry's pleasure flows from the way the radioactive "wastes" (by-products would be as good a word) from that natural reaction seem to have stayed conveniently in place ever since, just as the scientists hope to persuade us that modern nuclear wastes can be made to stay where they are put by man.

Oklo was a reactor for thousands of years, and reminds us of our origins. We and our planet are wastes from a fusion reactor, the sun. Nuclear fusion is the collision and combination of lighter elements, as opposed to fission which is the fragmentation of heavier elements. Both release some of the prodigious energy contained in atoms. "The fusion process produces both stable and unstable elements or isotopes. These unstable elements from our origins in the sun form the basis of the present nuclear industry and contribute to the natural background of radioactivity", says Dr Sue Ion, technical director of British Nuclear Fuels.

The radioactivity of the earth's elements is decaying, but at different rates (expressed in half-lives), with different intensities of energy, and by a number of different routes, including electron-like fragments called beta-particles and the heavier alpha-particles; and gamma rays. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation have ascending powers to penetrate materials, including human tissue, but all can damage cells (and not merely in proportion to their penetrative powers).

Plantlife on earth is now dependent, as is our climate, on the heat of the sun's continuing fusion reaction, and the discussion of how that heat passes through lifeforms is the very heart of the fashionable science of ecology. Yet the widely distrusted technology of nuclear physics is doing something elegant, too. Scientists have found ways of restoring to its former vigour some of the dying radiation from the nuclear explosion which formed our world, so that it can reproduce the Oklo process. As a power-generating technique, it has the merit over traditional fossil-fuel burning that it adds very little to atmospheric pollution.

There is good and bad news about the radioactive wastes and emissions from the nuclear industry. Even during its relatively unsophisticated infancy, they did not add significantly to the amount of radiation the average citizen received from the radioactive rocks beneath his or her feet and from continued bombardment from outer space. Hospitals and surgeries contributed far more to the average dose. More recently, the industry's discharges have been reduced, in some cases tenfold, and in the case of Sellafield's emissions to the sea, a hundredfold.

In any case, because we know a good deal about man's response to really large extra doses of radiation, we can be fairly confident that radiation doses have to be a hundred or hundreds of times average background levels to cause us measurable harm. This strong guess is in part derived from the effects of the radiation from atomic bombs used at the end of the second world war. The bombs' radiation - about a hundred times background - caused about an eighth more people to die of cancer than would been expected in an equivalent non-exposed population. In the Japanese case, 42,000 people were exposed to an average dose of 300 mSv (average UK exposure 2.5 mSv). By 1986, 3291 of that population died of cancer, about 400 more than would have been expected in a non-exposed population. [[cliii]] But it is important to remember that the nuclear industry does not multiply the dose most people receive by tens or hundreds, but only increases them by a few thousandths. [[cliv]]

Even to the 1000 nuclear workers most exposed (with doses about ten times average background), the industry poses little more exposure to radiation than Concorde's flight crews experience by spending their working lives high enough in the atmosphere to be less shielded from cosmic radiation than the rest of us. [[clv]] Nuclear workers in general do not have elevated cancer rates, though there is some very recent evidence that some of them may have been exposed to radioactive dust which has produced elevated rates of cancer of the prostate gland. [[clvi] and [clvii]] There is epidemiological - in effect, circumstantial - evidence that the children of the most exposed nuclear workers are, like workers in a wide range of industries, slightly more than usually prone to leukemia. Some non-nuclear cause makes more obvious sense than that these cases overturn our understanding about radiation, about which we are nonetheless right to be deeply cautious.

The debate about "clusters" of elevated risk is densely complicated and it is probably best not to pretend to much confidence about where it will end. The difficulties centre on two quite different issues: are the clusters real (that is, do they truly reveal an increased local likelihood of illness); and are they the actual creation of some candidate cause (such as a nuclear installation)?

Radiation is in any case a killer which usually leaves no fingerprints. People downwind of Chernobyl will die, just as people from Hiroshima and Nagasaki have died, because of the radiation they received. But it will be impossible to identify the individuals concerned, partly because it will be impossible to separate them from the roughly quarter of the population that die from naturally-caused cancers. Nonetheless, man's accidental and routine discharges of radioactive material must be assumed to kill people - real individuals, not statistical phantasms - and it makes the matter more odd and troublesome, not less, to point out that people are dying the whole time from the effects of very similar but quite natural radiation. [[clviii]]

Against those anxieties, it is worth positing a very different line of argument. Radiation from the nuclear industry, like other carcinogenic agents, may be well operate cumulatively and jointly with other causes of cancer. In other words, it may be something of a necessary statistical fiction to imagine that a source of radiation must always be thought of as producing any particular number of deaths. It may well be better to think of it as one of many cancerous factors afflicting victims, and to remember that the majority ingredients in the cocktail, by far, are wholly natural.

Anyway, it is clearly right both to assume that people should be shielded from all avoidable radiation, whilst at the same time remembering that we all face a wide range of life-threatening risks and - so far as we know - the overwhelming majority of us will, quite rightly, not have the nuclear industry stamped on our death certificates as the cause of death.

Whilst nuclear fission is in principle natural, it creates local concentrations of radioactivity not seen on earth for billions of years. The process of turning uranium into fuel does not create more radiation than man began with, but it does concentrate the radiation in a much smaller bulk. The real difficulty is that using the fuel in a reactor produces very much more problematic radioactivity than was in the original uranium. If this were not so, reactor waste could, in principle, simply be returned to the mines whence it came, and the earth's crust would be no more radioactive than before. Instead, nuclear reactors produce the most potent and long-lasting radioactive materials we know. This material must be stored, dumped or reprocessed.

We have gone further than creation. Man has developed chemical techniques for recycling the spent fuel from nuclear reactors into new fuels: a form of uranium, and plutonium. The latter is useful for bomb-makers, and its potential value to terrorists means that it has to be accounted for very carefully (though the plutonium from dismantled Soviet ballistic missile warheads would make a far more likely source of mischief).

Reprocessing is a way of recovering unused uranium from the spent fuel discharged from nuclear power stations for reuse, having been recycled into fresh fuel. In addition, reprocessing can also recover the plutonium which has been created in the fuel as it was "burned" in the reactor. This plutonium might be able to be used in fresh fuel elements. The remainder is highly active fission products, which are the useless ash from the nuclear combustion, and contain the majority of the radioactive waste from the process.

The recovery process redistributes some of the radioactivity of spent fuel into bulkier, though much less potent, radioactive wastes. But it also creates a very small amount of highly active, "high" level waste of which it is the only source. The point is that just as nuclear power stations produce very difficult wastes, so too, in their own way, do reprocessing plants.

The prize the latter offer is the prospect that the recovered materials may one day provide a fuel source for fast breeder reactors, which have the advantage of generating their own fuel. However, their development is stalled partly because uranium is cheap. The recovered fuel can also be, and is, treated for use in conventional reactors.

In Britain, recycling of spent fuel is done at Sellafield, where a new reprocessing plant, THORP, some of it paid for by Japanese customers, and with contracts already signed for its working life, in 1994 finally cleared all the required regulatory and legal hurdles. The opposition to the plant was unusually divergent, including The Economist [[clix]] and Greenpeace. The industry insists the profit from the operation more than justifies the marginal increase in radioactivity emissions it will involve. But critics point out that the industry is prone to large economic misjudgments and at least significant technical ones: not much would have to go wrong for the profit to disappear. It is clear that the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel would not now be embarked on by the contemporary nuclear industry. The low price of uranium has meant that recovering plutonium as fuel is not - for the moment - economic. Only contracts signed in times of high uranium prices make Sellafield's THORP worthwhile. All the same, many nuclear scientists believe the recycling-plus-fast breeder route is the ecologically sound future.

In Finland and Sweden, the nuclear industry decided years ago against reprocessing. The Finns and Swedes have been planning - with much greater success than the British - for the deep disposal of their nuclear waste in its unreprocessed, but carefully treated, state. Both countries have built repositories 50-70 metres down in crystalline rock. [[clx]] These are the final resting place of fairly short-lived radioactive wastes, whose radiation will fall to that of the background radiation in the host rock in about 500 years. The Finns and Swedes are already well advanced in building underground laboratories to research the very much deeper disposal of very long-lived wastes. [[clxi]] Because both the Finns and Swedes will be disposing of unreprocessed spent fuel rods, which are very highly radioactive, the waste will be in containers of thick copper (at about £20,000 a time for containers a couple of metres tall). [[clxii]]

It is of course right to take nuclear waste very seriously. However, the immense precautions taken with waste may lead some people to believe that that it is even more problematic than they imagined. Why else go to such lengths? Asked to describe a no-frills approach to the various wastes of the British nuclear industry, Dr Flowers suggests that the vast bulk of them (most of what the industry categorises as "low" level wastes) are such that a dustbin load would be no more problem to have around the house than a dustbin of domestic waste. "You wouldn't handle it and then lick your fingers, but you wouldn't need a shield", he says. "A couple of dustbin loads in your house wouldn't approach the natural background levels of radiation. There is a smaller quantity of wastes, called 'intermediate' level, which require a sealed container and a few inches of concrete shielding to protect us against exposure to gamma radiation and ingestion of toxic dust. Only about a thousandth of the radioactive wastes is what is called 'high' level and it is this material which must be treated as a very toxic substance requiring several feet of concrete to protect us from the intense gamma radiation".

There is a double-decker load of high level waste in the UK, and its danger comes from its very active decay processes, which lead to the relatively short period of its intense radioactivity (in other words, its short half-life). As Dr Bob Holmes, head of BNFL's Company Research Laboratory says, "The activity in our high level waste will fall over, say, 500 years, to a thousandth of its present level and be equivalent to our intermediate level waste." High level waste will become as radioactive as low level waste in 10 million years, or as radioactive as the original uranium from the earth's crust, in about a million years. However, we can draw some comfort from the fact that highly penetrating radioactivity will substantially reduce much quicker. After less than a thousand years a sheet of paper would stand as sufficient barrier between our skin and the emission of the waste's radioactivity. But we would still have to guard very closely against eating or inhaling it: it would, in other words, be exceedingly dangerous in air or water.

The British disposal plan, for which permission is currently being sought by the industry, is to bury the low and intermediate nuclear wastes 650 metres deep in the earth's crust. If this sounds like, and is, dumping, one should remember that the waste will be in containers designed to delay corrosion, and these will be sealed in caverns backfilled with material chosen to have a benign chemical effect on the waste. The whole will then be housed in an area which will have to pass tough tests as to the likelihood of any radioactivity getting into water which could reach the biosphere.

Even so, it is proposed to delay the disposal of the high level wastes. They generate heat, so it is deemed wise to store them above ground for a generation, until they have cooled and decayed somewhat, before some sort of deep burial.

There is fierce controversy surrounding the plans of NIREX, the state-owned company charged with exploring deep disposal. One newspaper report, by a respected science correspondent, lent credence to the view of a retired British nuclear scientist that it was at least theoretically possible that the proposed site, at Sellafield, might develop an Oklo-like nuclear reaction. [[clxiii]] The odds against this are almost vanishingly small, and suppose that water in the rock disposal site might bring the very small and scattered quantities of plutonium in the waste together, and thus create the conditions for a reaction to set up. The suggestion has strengthened calls for the site's geology and hydrology to be closely investigated (as they will in any case be). It may be that the final view is that Sellafield's convenience as a site already dealing with waste, and the source of much the country's waste, is outweighed by the geological and hydrological claims of other places in Britain.

Nuclear technology involves dangerous material and processes. So do the coal and oil technologies, which have killed and diseased far more employees and customers in accidents, smogs and mines. Even a very bad nuclear accident, such as extreme folly induced at Chernobyl, did not kill nearly as many people as died in the Piper Alpha oil field accident, whose death toll was 167. However, there will be hundreds and perhaps thousands of cancers because of Chernobyl: radiation doses kill most of their victims after a delay of a couple of decades.

Why take the risks associated with even well-managed nuclear power? Sometime half way through the next century, and barring accident, there will be 10 billion energy-hungry people in the world. Of these, many will live on bits of the earth's crust which are rich in coal and to a much lesser extent oil. Both these are the product of the arrested and modified decay of plantlife originally fueled by the heat of the sun's fusion reactions. Neither will last indefinitely, and in any case their use is expensive if limiting or adjusting to their pollution is taken into account. If global warming becomes a prime factor, we will have an additional motive to shift towards non-fossil fuels. True, solar power technologies can do a good deal with the present warmth of the sun, but they are expensive.

We may yet be very glad that we know how to use the radioactivity which remains from the earth's creation.

I suspect that we will find the nuclear industry less frightening, and perhaps more valuable, as we go on. Nuclear power is not widely challenged by the uncommitted public for all that it has always proved a potent rallying issue for campaigners. It creates unease. But we need not overdo the sense of difficulty. There is every chance that the present generation of Western children will grow into adults with a more relaxed attitude to nuclear power than their parents, not least because the youngsters have lived alongside it without obvious or serious mishap for all their lives. It may well be that in twenty-five or fifty years, the relative value of atoms for energy will look distinctly favourable.

PART TWO: THE CONSUMER, THE CAMPAIGNERS AND CHEMOPHOBIA.

Chapter Five. The Myth of Ecological Disaster: Apocalypse not yet

Introduction

Section i. Oil slicks: the campaigners' classic "ecological disaster"

Section ii. Water contamination: the media's favourite disaster

Introduction

The media and the environmental campaigners have enjoyed twenty years of "environmental disasters". This is a uniquely modern phenomenon which makes exciting broadcasting, sells newspapers, and attracts membership to campaign groups. But it is a largely invented idea. This chapter looks behind two classic types of "disaster" and finds cock-up and misfortune, but little evidence that the technosphere is out of control.

Section i. Oil slicks: the media's classic "ecological disaster"

On the morning of Tuesday, 5th January 1993, Britain woke to dramatic news. The Liberian-registered tanker Braer was drifting, without power, in heavy seas ten miles off the rocky Shetland coast, way up where Scotland's offshore islands become sub-arctic in their remoteness. The ship was reported to have been powerless since 5.20am. On board were about 85,000 tonnes of light Norwegian crude oil, a crew of 34 of three nationalities, amongst them a radio operator who reported that the ship was in trouble, but the cargo was not.

At 10 am it seemed likely that the ship would hit the southern tip of islands. "Shetland is now expecting a major environmental disaster", said BBC Radio 4's news. At 11 am there were new, slight hopes that the ship might miss the islands. Tugs were on their way. The weather was atrocious, with winds blowing 60 or 70 miles per hour. But perhaps, even if the ship did hit, said the news, a major environmental disaster might be averted if the ship went aground on sandy beaches.

At noon, it was reported that the worst had happened. The ship - now unmanned - was impaled on rocks on Garth's Ness, near Quendale Bay at the southern tip of the islands, and oil was thought to be spilling. It was repeated that the oil was light crude which breaks up easily in heavy seas. It was said to be one of the worst parts of the coast for the ship to have grounded. "There are fears that it will soon begin to break up in the heavy seas and cause a major environmental disaster", said the announcer.

The story was top of the lunchtime bulletin for Radio 4's "The World at One" . Oil was definitely leaking into the sea, "raising fears of a major pollution disaster." A leading naturalist was billed as being about to tell listeners that the incident could be a disaster for local wildlife.

The news bulletin repeated the bare bones of the incident, and asserted that "some experts" were forecasting an environmental disaster in what is one of the most important places for wildlife in the North east Atlantic.

Minutes later, the presenter said: "It is feared that this could be an ecological disaster", and introduced the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds' Dr Nancy Harrison who told us of the area's international importance for birds in the summer. Luckily many species were away, but all the same there were eider duck, shag, and auk at risk. Dr Harrison said it was hard to do anything for oil-struck birds: "The only answer is to keep these incidents from happening in the first place and it's very hard to see how anything but a disaster can take place now".

The presenter introduced Greenpeace's Paul Horsman, who told us:

The potential consequences are quite severe. That area is well known as a very sensitive marine environment; as everyone knows, it's a beautiful area. There are birds nesting on the cliffs and there are seals which will have pupped last year on the beaches and it's a well known fishery area. Now, fortunately most of the birds are at sea and so perhaps we shouldn't have such a severe effect on birds as we might at another time of year, but certainly the fisheries and seals are at risk, and once the oil gets on beaches, and particularly on soft sedimentary beaches, certainly that oil is going to be around for a very long time.

But had we learned anything over the years, inquired the presenter? Mr Horsman went on:

.... although technology has improved in some ways and lessons have been learned over the decades we have been plying oil around ... it still is a fact that with the best technology available you recover less than 10 per cent of the oil which gets into the seas. So, ... particularly with the conditions we have here, very little oil is going to be recovered.

Yes, said the presenter, but had we not often been at this point in an incident and found there were anxieties which were not actually fulfilled in the event? Mr Horsman replied:

It depends on who you talk to. Certainly the oil industry makes a massive effort to try to downplay the effects on the environment of an oil spill, but the reality of it is that when you go back, months, years after an oil spill the environment has been damaged ... The oil industry is out of control at the moment ... they can use whatever ships they like ... Accidents are increasingly happening.

At that point, on the first day, only one thing was certain. There would be an enormous amount of media attention surrounding the event. It was also noticeable from the start, and fulfilled another of the few good bets, that Greenpeace did extremely well out of the affair. Indeed the group has something of the eerie charisma which attaches to international salvage companies as they gather around shipwrecks.

Something odd is going on. Do we not recognise in ourselves and others, as modern citizens of the world, a curious appetite for the view that something - perhaps nearly everything - is amiss? We are uncomfortable with material progress, and feel we must pay some unspecified price for it. Disasters almost seem heaven-sent. They appease our sense that our misbehaviour will earn some divine retribution.

The media is alert to this subconscious desire and is very grateful to Greenpeace for helping to tell the story. A Greenpeace comment seems to have several prime journalistic merits. It stresses the possibility of ecological disaster. It comes from the heart. It is short and understandable. It comes from people who are not part of "the establishment". The media and Greenpeace share an understanding of the world. Things go wrong because vested interests are careless, and they stay wrong because of the cover-ups which vested interests go in for. Neither the media nor Greenpeace ever admit that they too are vested interests, with readers and supporters to keep amused and excited. Nor does the media admit that it seldom challenges Greenpeace in the way journalists challenge other campaign groups on other subjects. Greenpeace, in the media's eyes, and the public's eyes, bears witness to an unease which cannot be named, let alone disputed.

From the start, the news media reported the Braer incident using four main players, amongst which Greenpeace was very important. All the media's chosen voices had natural and necessary biases, and some of them had quite clear motives not to be entirely honest.

For the first couple of days, the Government fielded a junior minister - Lord Caithness - who did his best to show concern for the locals and wildlife whilst defending the record of the regulatory framework but also suggesting that the official world would try to learn from the tragedy. He was required to bat an unattractive wicket: defensive and yet cautiously open-minded. He did not go out of his way to remark that it had been known for years that shipping regulations needed a thorough overhaul, though any likely reform might well not have averted this shipwreck. Only the shipping experts dared to say that this accident might be the one which would have escaped the best regulations.

Because this was the Shetland Islands, and therefore the scene for years of very big oil industry developments and many tanker movements, there was every sign of preparedness both technically and even politically. The Braer was only incidentally a Shetland disaster. The oil she was carrying did not originate from and was not going to the local Sullom Voe terminal. So the Braer incident was not precisely the one for which Shetland had been waiting for years. Nonetheless, this was a place which had already thought a good deal about how one responds to oil accidents.

Even early on in the crisis, the media could broadcast competent-sounding local managers who were able to point out that this was highly evaporative crude which would largely break up in the gale-driven seas. The managers looked convincing when they said they had resources and skills to deploy, once the weather allowed. Local politicians and the constituency's member of parliament were heard telling of their frequent badgering of the Government about this or that element of regulation which they had thought inadequate.

The media sought out a handful of scientific experts. These tended to stress that this was as convenient a type of oil as could very well be spilled, and that the gales would do a good deal of the clean-up work. One stressed that it would be handy if the oil came ashore on sandy beaches, because these were easily cleaned by heavy machinery. Another pointed out, a little later in the crisis, that very little oil was coming ashore. There were one or two opportunities for scientists from institutes partly or mostly funded by government to describe the effects of oil on particular species.

The final players were the environmentalists. By and large, the campaigners from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds restricted themselves to describing the effects of the spill on particular birds or bird species. There was, however, a good deal of reference by RSPB and others to threats to sea otters, especially if the oil were to find its way round to the east and north of the islands (rather than the West where it tended to go, in the event).

It was Greenpeace, though, which from the start was the favoured source of opinion on the environmental aspects of the accident, and their view was at most points that, of all possible outcomes, the worst was possible or probable. When the oil was thought to threaten sandy beaches, the group said that if it landed there it would stay for a very long time (whilst the professional experts pointed out how easy it would be to remove it). When oil dispersant was used for a while, in order to try to reduce the spread of the slick, Greenpeace was there to say that dispersant-use should be abandoned (though an RSPB spokesman thought that limiting the spread of the slick was the one action which was worth trying).

Later, there was to be a good deal of Greenpeace activity around the risks posed by hydrocarbons in the vapours which were blowing ashore from the wreck.

On Friday January 8, the fourth day of the drama, Radio 4's PM programme started its coverage of the Braer with this introduction:

R4: Pollution experts are tonight warning that an air-borne slick, the so-called sheen of oil, carried on the wind, could prove more hazardous to humans and livestock than the oil in the sea. The sheen is much more than the fumes from the tanker's cargo, that cling immediately round the wreck and according to local people is contaminating literally everything. But what is it exactly? Well, one man who knows is Dr Paul Johnston of the Earth Resources Centre at Exeter University..

Paul Johnston: When the sea is made rough by the wind and when it beats against the coast a spray is formed which can be carried inland, well normally of course that consists of salt water but in this case it's consisting of droplets of oil and these droplets of oil are coming ashore and being deposited on the land and deposited on people's crops and being breathed in by people and generally a unpleasant and as far as I'm aware an unprecedented situation

R4 Unpleasant, but how toxic?

PJ Well that is the open question. We do know that crude oil inhalation can cause problems by upsetting the delicate balance of the lungs; we do know that certain components in crude oil are carcinogenic [capable of causing cancer] and mutagenic [capable of causing genetic changes in offspring]. What we really don't know in this case is how much of a health hazard it poses either in the short term or the long term

R4. Is there no precedent?

PJ: Only the experience we have of industrial accidents where workers have been exposed to oil sprays from say ruptured pipelines and under these circumstances there is evidence of central nervous system suppression, dizziness, nausea, vomiting and in some cases eye problems and skin problems following long exposure where tumours can actually form on the skin.

The news report then went on to cover locals and their experience of the "poisonous sheen" on animals. Dr Johnston was asked to comment on these problems, and in particular whether the islanders would have to go so far as to wear face-masks:

PJ: Masks will provide a certain degree of protection against the droplets but unfortunately these are not going to be effective against the volatile hydrocarbons which are of the most toxicological concern. [There was some discussion of effects on animals here.] There are two real solutions to avoid exposure, one is of course to remove the oilslick which everyone is trying to do. The other way is to, obviously, to remove the people from the island and I think that's a solution which would have to be considered

The presenter asked about long term effects, other than immediate nausea and so on.

PJ The effects could be a lot more serious than that. Benzene, for example, which is a fairly large component of light crude, is an agent that causes leukaemia and of course children particularly can be very susceptible and so there could be long term implications and some longterm monitoring is going to be required to monitor the oil that's present in the soil, the crops, the livestock, and some sort of follow-up health study is most certainly going to be needed in my view.

Dr Johnston's remarks were classic environmentalist stuff. The trick was to mention carcinogencity, or cancer-formation, accurately enough, but to avoid mentioning that almost all cancer-formation is a matter of amount of dose and length of exposure. Light exposure for short periods is hardly likely to be a problem in the case of oil droplets. Another important trick is to say something "could" be a major long term problem. The "could" lets one off ever being called to account for non-appearance of problems. The accentuation of the long-term allows that nothing much is happening now (and, it is true, reflects the long maturation period of most cancers). Campaigners like to imply that we have no experience of the latest problem, so that the impression can be planted that industry has put us in a situation where we have no guide, only fear.

Radio 4's broadcasters must have known they would get material like this from Dr Johnston. They billed him as someone who had particular knowledge of the issue but they did not point out that he is a scientist who is well known to the media and whose opinions are profoundly at odds with those of most of the conventional scientists in the fields on which he most often comments. He is, for instance, well-known for arguing publicly that high-temperature incineration of toxic wastes should be halted because of the risks posed by the burners' emissions, a view which is not shared by any official regulatory body in the Western world [See Chapters Seven and Eight for incineration]. Announced as Dr Paul Johnston of Exeter University's Earth Resources Centre, there was no indication that he is a Greenpeace International employee running Greenpeace's unit at the University. Dr Johnston apparently made clear to the programme's researchers exactly who he was. [[clxiv]] The broadcasters for their part were happy with presenting his evidence as neutral and expert, rather than quite possibly expert but also certainly committed and, I suggest, thoroughly partisan.

Dr Johnston insists that, as an honorary research fellow at Exeter University, he is a scientist and not a campaigner, and also that passionate conviction is no crime. [[clxv]] For him, Greenpeace's views are required to balance debate and the views of the vested interests. Fine. But one's environmental views will be seriously skewed if Dr Johnston's is the only or major voice attended to (there was no other that evening on Radio 4).

There is an important sub-text here about the impartiality of scientists, even those who can boast the imprimatur of a university affiliation. It is a pity that a university should give house room to a campaigning organisation with a long record of being cavalier with evidence (See Chapter Seven). Dr Johnston of course strongly disagrees, and pointed out to me, "There are many scientists from industry who are sponsored by corporations to be in universities". [[clxvi]] From his perspective, it is no odder that there should be a Greenpeace scientist at a university than that there should be researchers from industry. The arrangement is convenient to both parties. University insiders suggest that Greenpeace likes the credibility which is conferred by association with a university, whilst the university enjoys the recruitment glamour that the campaigners bring to the campus.

There was really no need for Radio 4 to ask Dr Johnston for his opinion, and no justification for leaving his opinion unbalanced by a more conventional view. Leaving aside for the moment that the Health and Safety Executive or the Department of the Environment would have information on the toxicology of hydrocarbons, a phone call to the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington (which co-ordinate a specialist team to consider the effects of hydrocarbon pollution during the Kuwait oil fires) or to the World Health Organisation in Geneva would have yielded either information or informed sources.

Very near to the incident, where there were several BBC people, the islanders' health was in the care of Martin Hall, the Shetlands Islands Council's director of environmental services, and Dr Derek Cox, the director of public health. Martin Hall called on the services of scientists working for BP early in the incident, and later Dr Paul Leinster, a specialist in hydrocarbon pollution, arrived to augment the monitoring work. Soon on the scene was Dr Gerald Forbes, the director of the Scottish national statutory authority, the Environmental Health (Scotland) Unit, based at the Ruchill Hospital, Glasgow.

Dr Forbes gives me this account of the public health implications of the hydrocarbon emissions from the Braer, and of his run-in with Greenpeace activists on the island (they and Dr Johnston, seemed to be saying substantially the same thing [[clxvii]]):

I know that disaster is always good news and I made it quite clear that there was no health risk and there was no need for evacuation and that what Greenpeace was saying was quite unacceptable. There was a showdown with them in the end, in Sumborough. I've written a paper on this. [[clxviii]]

What I was concerned about was basically the effect this [the circus surrounding the incident] was having on the population. The problem was that the number of reporters equaled the population. There was a reporter for every person, and they had to find a story. In press conferences we were able to put our story across to the press quite easily, and they in general were very responsible, and we were able to sort things out with them, but it was this sideways movement from Greenpeace that was difficult.

If you take Shetland and the middle of London you've got two different atmospheres. We've got the odd car and that's about it. The average smell you were getting from Braer was not much worse than you get on the forecourt of a garage. Droplets [of oil] were being blown about 3 miles inland. It was the worse weather that had ever been recorded in Orkney. The majority of people were inside, they didn't get out. The children were taken about in cars.

I was sent up there on the Thursday [January 7th] and [had to decide] whether it was or it wasn't a major health problem. [He decided it was not a long term hazard, and said so immediately, the day before Paul Johnston's remarks.] I've been at this game for forty years, it's what I get paid for. People were getting irritation of their eyes. You could smell it: it didn't smell strong; a smell not to make you feel ill. Throat irritation, headache, eye irritation, that's all. In the first three days, that was when the volatiles were getting blown about. The population was at least half a mile away from the source. The nearest hamlet was over two miles away.

We know the occupational exposure levels for these things. The levels found were well within occupational exposure levels. The first day they couldn't detect any. Only later did they detect benzene, zylene, toluene: all these volatile hydrocarbons were all well below occupational exposure levels.[[clxix]]

Occupational exposure limits are calculated by the Health and Safety Executive, under the direction of the Health and Safety Commission (on which employers and employees sit). The HSE limit for all hydrocarbons together is 100 parts per million, accumulated over a working week.]

Dr Forbes went on a platform and said categorically that there would no long term risks. His account continued:

The night the Braer broke up we got a good feel - on the 11th - and at the wreck sites we had six parts per million (ppm) total hydrocarbon, and in residential areas we had less than 1 ppm. Your normal London street at rush hour is at about 11 ppm total hydrocarbon.

Our own director of public health, Dr Cox, had the same opinion as Dr Forbes. Dr Cox said at a public meeting he felt that Greenpeace were putting the public at greater health risk than the oil. We never wanted to play down the cancer risk. We did tell people there was a problem, and to wear a mask [if they faced contamination outdoors]. We got in touch with the people who provide these masks and we got the right masks for droplets and vapour.

The occupational health people were comfortable with it [the information and risk assessment], the doctors were comfortable with it, and that put my mind at ease. Yes, evacuation was a possibility. But moving 600 people in the middle of winter? Somebody's going to die in my opinion: an old lady of eighty, or a road accident, or a heart attack.

I think that Dr Forbes was too generous about most of the media: but we will come to that. He was also wrong if he told people simply that there was no health risk from the oil. There was almost certainly some elevated risk, however slight, from breathing oil-contaminated air rather than fresh air. But the professional, on-the-spot, official advice and view was far less wrong and was far more based on evidence than Dr Johnston's and that of the Greenpeace campaigners on the ground.

Most people receive their impressions of dramatic events from television. This is a pity, since in the Braer incident the "heavy" newspapers did pay at least some attention to calmer opinion from knowledgeable people. The TV reporters mostly seemed content breathlessly to press any interviewee into expressing just how bad things were or might become and then to voice their own sense of the tragedy which was unfolding. Through the hail of their wind-tossed questioning, one sometimes detected an informant trying quietly to suggest that things might not be going quite as badly as it seemed. Only Alex Kirby, the BBC's environment correspondent, presented his brief reports with anything like indifference to the blizzard of cliche and prejudice which was flying around.

Early on, it was clear that the overwhelming assumption by journalists was that Big Oil had perpetrated one of its characteristic assaults on the environment. Reporter after reporter breathlessly shouted the required mantra about how environmental or ecological disaster, usually billed as major, had already arrived, or soon would, or was inevitable, or very likely indeed. Sometimes the idea of an economic or a human health disaster joined the environmental or ecological predictions.

The electric media were happy to broadcast the campaigners' speculation about the problems the accident would bring, and perhaps did so because they had the idea that we had seen this situation before. The Amoco Cadiz, Torrey Canyon and Exxon Valdez shipwrecks had all been ecological disasters and this could not be a lesser event. The media felt it was safe and necessary to reach for words like "major ecological disaster". Actually the journalists were reusing adjectives and attitudes which were wrong when they were first used twenty years ago, but had been gathering credibility since.

The previous famous incidents were not ecological disasters, or indeed any sort of disaster at all except to the creatures they killed. These casualties were usually small in number and in ecological significance. Beyond the suffering caused to the tens, hundreds, thousands or in a very few cases thousands upon thousands of animals of particular species, we have no evidence of long term serious damage from oil slicks [clxx].

The incidents did not involve a loss of human life, unlike many shipwrecks. So far as one can tell, no-one lost his living as a result of the accident. Local people suffer disruption and make money as a result of tanker accidents.

All this information could be had from people who have visited the sites of previous oil spills. Indeed, when I set out in 1991 to find scientists who had visited oil spill sites in the years following incidents, it was striking that not one had any other sort of environmental story to tell. Most of these scientists work for quangos (quasi-autonomous governmental organisations) or universities which, unlike campaign organisations, often have very weak or diffident relations with the media. Another factor is distrust. Because many of the best-informed sources are official or semi-official, the journalists bracket them as establishment and part of the enemy.

Dr Roger Mitchell is the senior marine specialist with the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC). [[clxxi]] He told me, in 1991:

I went to the Roscoff coastline in the days after the Amoco Cadiz spill. It was pretty horrific at the time, oil is so visual and it smells, and the poor French squaddies were being sick as they cleaned it up. But the next year, it was a very different picture.

Dr Mitchell described a process of a return to near normality - both aesthetically and in conservation terms - which saw rapid progress after the spill in 1978, with the last of the noticeable damage restored in three years or so. A skilled biologist could detect impacts from spills like this many years afterwards. But these amount to slightly skewed species distribution, and are very different from aesthetic or ecological blight. None of the scientists I have spoken to about follow-ups to spills is complacent, but all of them were anxious to get away from talk of ecological disaster, and on to a subtler sense of loss. Slicks join many other human activities and accidents which erode the value and beauty of the world's shorelines. For Dr Andrew Price, a tropical coast expert, it was the way tar pavements join litter, debris and land reclamation in producing whole coasts which are ugly and less useful for wildlife. For Dr Pat Doody, the senior coastal specialist of the JNCC, it was the way man is "taking bits out of the environment", with no sense of the cumulative effect. Marinas and seaside promenades in tropical paradises may matter more than slicks.

Exxon Valdez, the Gulf, Torrey Canyon, Amoco Cadiz, the Haven, constitute the ranks of incidents which mattered less than we at first thought. Their proper lesson is that every scrap of variety lost, every creature and plant which dies, is part of an accumulation of damage which does not by a long chalk spell ecological collapse, but which erodes the amount of beauty and naturalness in the world.

Experts who have visited the site of the Exxon Valdez grounding and spill as recently as the summer of 1992 have a view of the scene there which could not be more at odds with the standard hunch about what such a place would now look like. They made their visits annually for three years, in 1990, 1991 and 1992. They did so as consultants to Exxon itself, and therefore cynics might say that their word was fatally tainted by their fee. We need not agree with the cynics.

In 1991, two conflicting accounts of the after-effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill were released in the States. One, rather gloomy, was written for the US Department of Justice as part of the legal proceedings which wrap American accidents in litigation practically as hazardous as oil tankers. It pointed to high - and disputed - losses to various populations, and especially of murres (which we call guillemots). The report suggested that perhaps 300,000 of the 1,400,000 murres in the Gulf of Alaska died, and that studies in 1991 would reveal the population status of the remaining birds. Similarly, it suggested that only studies later in 1991 would reveal the population losses - if any - amongst wild salmon which were larvae at the time of the spill. Certainly many of them were damaged. Some whales were missing. Sea otters died miserably during the spill, and even two years later showed lower survival rates in areas which were oiled. Sea lions and harbour seals were in decline before the spill, confounding attempts to asses the total damage, though the seals appeared to be suffering more in the aftermath of the spill.

Much of the report's unease flowed from insisting that the present position was hard to assess, and that answers must await further research. [[clxxii]] A very different sense emerged from Robert Clark, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at Newcastle University, and then editor of the Marine Pollution Bulletin. He was one of many scientists paid by Exxon to research the impacts of the spill from its ship, and one of the authors cited in Exxon's own upbeat report on the damage. [[clxxiii]] Returning from a trip to the disaster area a fortnight previously, he said: "The place is absolutely marvelous. You wouldn't know it had happened. The winter storms have polished most of the beaches. You have to look for signs of oil". [[clxxiv]] He reported tourism as booming in 1990. People talked of the damage to the murres as severe, but Clark's observation of the colonies was that "zillions of birds fly off when you approach". He reported oiled beaches as being "very healthy-looking". The area's beauty was not long blighted by the spill, and aesthetics matter. So does being seen to do something: the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had just reported that much of the $2 billion clean-up in Alaska delayed nature's own recovery. [[clxxv]]

Clark was much more bullish about the likelihood of nature repairing itself than is fashionable amongst those who hype nature's fragility. "Since the twenties, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands guillemots a year have been oiled in the North East Atlantic. That's been going on for 50 or 60 years, and when we started thinking about it in the 1950s and 1960s no-one - me included - could believe the populations could sustain the losses. But the populations have actually exploded in recent decades". He was equally certain that fish populations in the Gulf of Alaska would stay high as they did throughout the spill and have since. Yes, there were abnormalities in the larvae of some fish. But, according to Clark, "these are observed after pretty well any spill, and have never affected commercial fisheries later". Guillemots and salmon are very different creatures: but their breeding habits are usually well able to accommodate big yearly losses of individuals." [[clxxvi]]

It is possible that there is a conspiracy or old boy network which keeps the reputations of people like Dr Clark safe as they publish rubbish at the behest of sponsoring industries. Some scientists whose views are unorthodox do allege that in the mutually back-scratching world of small scientific specialisms, just these mutual support clubs do exist.

Actually, no seriously contentious scientific argument would go unchallenged by the science press (in the UK, the various medical journals, and Nature and the New Scientist in particular) whose mission includes the airing of controversy. These journals are a delight because they enjoy publishing material which includes the sometimes informal but usually well-informed inspection of shibboleths, myths and any other twaddle which needs exposing. I have come to respect the process of science not because I trust the opinion of each and every accredited scientist; but because those who publish in the journals operate in a crucible of testing opinion. And yet, there is sometimes the doubt that scientific consensuses can be at least temporarily as powerful as any other crowd-effect. We are on a knife edge when we try to balance the individual maverick against the conformist gang.

Still, when Dr Jenifer Baker, Professor Robert Clark and Dr Paul Kingston (the latter two are academics at British universities) write in robustly cheering terms about the recovery that has happened on sites oiled by the Valdez accident, I am inclined to believe them even though I know Exxon paid for their studies. And I comfort myself that even if they were so careless of their own reputations as to write rubbish, many other marine scientists would enjoy making their own reputations by exposing them as nincompoops, and plenty of editors would be delighted to give both sides a deal of space for their row.

On this analysis, one would expect Greenpeace's scientists to be challenged more often by their conventional, mainstream colleagues. They are not, and often that is because the most distinct and powerful of Greenpeace's remarks are made on the hoof to the media and are matters of policy and opinion rather than pinpointed risk assessment or strict science. The scientific specialists in the field seem to think there is not much point in trying to engage Greenpeace in an ordinarily scientific conversation because that is not what Greenpeace is about.

The outcome of the Braer incident was not predictable in detail. But right from the start it was fair to say, as I and one other journalist, Matt Ridley, did, that the Braer incident would not amount to a large disaster if it was no worse than previous such shipwrecks.

As I write this, late in June 1993, it is still too early to say what the final effects of the Braer shipwreck will be. Dr Forbes refers in his forthcoming paper to misgivings about some of the dispersants which were briefly used. It may turn out that tighter regulations are required there. The gales did very swiftly the job which all along the experts had said would probably get done. The wind-lashed waves pounded the slick into so many bits that it could sink into the sea. The Ecological Steering Group of independent experts set up by the Scottish Office reported in May that much of the oil appeared to submerged in sediments in two main locations of the sea near Shetland. Its final fate remains a matter of some speculation. Fish landings are still monitored and some salmon farms and shell fish harvesting remain restricted. Controls on harvesting and sheep grazing have mostly been lifted. [[clxxvii]] With luck most of the oil still in the sea will be consumed as food by the enormous range of organisms opportunistically waiting in the ocean.

The chances of the Braer incident now turning into an ecological disaster are even more slight than they were at the outset.

Section ii: Camelford: Something in the Water

In 1988, 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate was tipped into the drinking water supply of Camelford, a small town in Cornwall. The public was given confused information, including scattered reassurances that the water was safe to drink. Naturally enough, there was nationwide concern that the local people would be poisoned by this incident. Almost as predictably, various local people took it upon themselves to campaign on the issues. They focussed firstly on the water undertaking's manifest failure to safeguard the water supply (and accused it of much else besides), and then drew attention to the various illnesses which were said to have flourished in the population in the weeks, months - and eventually, years - after the event.

If people believe they are ill it is very difficult to say they are not. If people say they are ill because they were poisoned following what was clearly an incident involving contamination, then it is also not obvious how one would go about persuading them otherwise.

Various players in the Camelford incident certainly made mistakes. The water company did not properly manage the way water-cleaning chemicals (the aluminium sulphate) were handled at one of its pumping stations. The water company and the health authorities broke a cardinal rule. If people are worried about any problem in something they might eat or drink, tell them to avoid it until some investigations are made. In this case, the water which came out of many people's taps looked and tasted odd and should clearly have been avoided.

But the authorities did one thing right, eventually, and have been reviled for it ever since. The government appointed four distinguished scientists to think long and hard about the notorious incident. They came out with a report in 1989 [[clxxviii]] which suggested that there was no scientific reason to suppose that people would come to any harm from the aluminium sulphate they drank following the incident. The group explained why the public's exposure to the chemical was not of the kind to worry about. They gave chapter and verse about the evidence and said that the public's worries had been whipped up by campaigners and the media and that the scientific evidence did not support the scare. This view has never been disputed, so far as I know, in any peer-reviewed academic journal.

Of course, the scare did not die down. People in Camelford and some others who had been there at the time, complained of mysterious illnesses, some of them quite like ME, whilst others reported that they or their children had behavioural or memory problems. Because the scare showed no signs of abating, the government reappointed the original team and augmented it with a researcher versed in psychological investigation.

In the wake of the announcement that the Clayton committee had been asked to take later evidence under review, and had been augmented by a clinical psychologist there was a further spate of media commentary. In October 1990 The Guardian published a piece by Melanie Phillips which will stand as good example of how even the quality press handled the issue. She wrote:

"The Camelford scandal deepens. It is hardly surprising that the sick and bewildered residents have passed a motion of no confidence in the inquiry team that investigated the health effects of the poisoning of the area's water supply in 1988."

She went on to describe the reconvening the Clayton committee a "further morsel of surrealism", given the "mounting evidence" that the committee had got its first investigation "so wrong". At various points in her article she listed a range of illnesses reported amongst the residents, included memory and speech problems, problems in peoples' joints, and toe-and finger-nails dropping out.

In part the article is based on a simple misreading of the report. Ms Phillip at one point says that inquiry's findings were "breathtaking" because they "categorically dismissed" the suggestion that the incident might have long-term effects. In fact the inquiry team wrote:

We consider it unlikely in the extreme that long-term effects from copper, sulphate, zinc or lead would result from exposures of the degree and short duration that occurred after this incident. Although the possibility of effects due to the interaction of these chemicals cannot be wholly excluded, we can find no supportive evidence. Increased absorption of aluminium may have occurred in some individuals who persisted in drinking the heavily-contaminated water.......[W]e have concluded .....that delayed or persistent effects following [the brief exposures experienced] are unlikely.

Ms Phillips goes on to complain that the expert committee conducted no clinical research amongst the population, a point which the reconvened inquiry group addressed in the second of their reports (as, I am almost certain, the team also did on the publication of the first report). A curious feature of Ms Phillips' article is that she says the inquiry group was chaired by Dame Barbara Clayton. There is no mention that Dame Barbara is Honorary Research Professor in Metabolism at the University of Southampton and Honorary Consultant in Chemical Pathology at Southampton and South West Hampshire District Health Authority.

In late 1991 the reconstituted inquiry group reported [[clxxix]], declaring that the passing of a couple of years since their last report had produced no new evidence which required them to change their view that the citizens of the area were not suffering from aluminiun poisoning. The group added that the emergence of future long-term effects could not categorically be ruled out, though they repeated their previous assertion that it was unlikely.

Indeed, the scientists cited a long list of inaccurate or sensationalist media reports (including Ms Phillips') which they said played a large part in exacerbating the shock and anxiety which the incident would have generated anyway, and contributed to the occurrence of those mysterious illnesses which are increasingly accepted as following frightening incidents. Though the Guardian was particularly taken to task, the Times and the Independent got some stick too.

It is worth understanding something of the backgrounds of the members of the Lowermoor Incident Health Advisory group. Its chairman is, as we have seen, clearly distinguished. She sits on the Royal Commission for Environmental Pollution and was an early proponent of the view that exposure to high levels of lead might be a problem for children. Also on the group is Professor Jim Edwardson, a senior Medical Research Council worker at Newcastle University. He is one of the few scientific people who for years has believed that long-term exposure to aluminium may be a factor in Alzheimer's disease and is an established expert in the field. Both these people have held and promoted unfashionable views when they felt the science justified them, both have held and hold views which have turned out or might turn out to be inconvenient to industry and the regulators. They are not obviously stooges for some convenient, whitewashing, establishment tendencies.

True, there was one member of the team, Dr Ron Packham, who for years was a senior man in the main water industry research body. But even if that taints him, it might be remembered that for many years he sat on World Health Organisation committees which set the pace in water clean-ups.

If she has a failing, Dame Barbara might be accused of a certain naivety about the media. Yet she was well within her rights to be very shocked by what was - even by their standards - thoughtless and yet contrived scare-mongering by the media in the Camelford case. Anyway, Dame Barbara always writes and speaks of the media mis-reporting as much in sorrow as in anger, but mostly with surprise and distress. She apparently has not become inured to the cynicism of journalists as they uncritically promote the views of a handful of scientists, however biased, who seem committed to exaggerating any and all ill effects of industry. What she obviously found odd was the way the media drenched in scepticism anyone who suggested that there were good reasons to suppose that the aluminium sulphate at Camelford simply could not have had the effects claimed for it, unless our understanding of several biological pathways and processes is seriously flawed.

Even if the general understanding is flawed, it would be surprising if people at Camelford provided the proof. We have good evidence that we understand fairly well why the Camelford incident should not have been damaging. True, it is mostly circumstantial. So far as is known, very few people have ever been contaminated by aluminium sulphate in the way some people in Camelford were. Only Professor Edwardson has deliberately contaminated himself in the way they were, and he did it experimentally to see if he could reproduce any of the claimed effects (without success). In general, we can only deduce what the effects of aluminium sulphate in water at quite high doses for a very short time are likely to be and likely not to be. But the committee's deductions were from serious and fairly plentiful evidence about the toxicology of aluminium and other metals and were not disputed by scientists at large.

The committee's case was quite discursive and quite inclusive. For working purposes it took the worst possible case at all points to see what might have happened in the incident. It tried to work out what would be the effects of a dose of acidity, copper and aluminium (all involved at Camelford) which was more potent than any experienced at Camelford. It took at face value people's claims that they had drunk large quantities of water which was highly contaminated, even though to do so would have required considerable fortitude granted that water so contaminated would have tasted and looked foul.

The committee also took at face value the physical and mental effects people claimed from the contamination. It could make no connection between such effects and the contamination. Moreover, it pointed out: local GPs did not complain of excessive or lengthened patient lists in their waiting rooms immediately following the incident, and did not do so even following the media scares. In other words, a few people claimed effects, some severe, some trivial, but their neighbours seemed totally unaffected. The hospitals did not report any unusual occurrence of illness. The inquiry team, so often painted as aloof and maverick, received evidence from 80 experts (listed in the second report) and knew well the views of the medical practitioners on the ground.

For the second report, the committee looked additionally at possible mental effects following contamination and could think of none of chemical origin. There was, indeed, a separate process - culminating in a conference in February 1990 - in which some local people and some psychologists pressed their claim that children in the district had suffered behavioural and learning difficulties following the incident. The transcript of this meeting [[clxxx]] is at first sight worrying and remains faintly disturbing. Proving that a child is behaving slightly less well or learning rather more slowly than he or she might is never particularly easy. Moreover, the interpretation of such data as can be generated is very much a matter of taste. In Melanie Phillips' Guardian article of October 1990, a good deal is made of the papers presented to the conference, but only of the views which support the gloomy case. The full proceedings of the event show that there is a good deal of room for doubt as to whether there were any real - as opposed to psychosomatic or actually illusory - effects from the poisoning of the water.

Perhaps needless to say, the psychology experts could not agree. Some who were involved with the parents claimed that the behavioural and learning difficulties were clear for any fair person to see. Others said they were equally clearly as unmeasurable in degree and type as they were physically unlikely granted the contamination involved. At least for the time being, it is almost certain that we do not know enough about the average performance of non-Camelford children and young adults to be able absolutely to claim that Camelford children and young adults are under-performing, or that they are completely average, or - come to that - a bit better than average.

Minor mental or behavioural impairment of all sorts, a little like some forms of minor immuno-suppression and various mystery diseases, all claimed at Camelford, are very difficult to deal with. In the case of the reported cases of immuno-suppression and mystery diseases, one can at least say that these are increasingly being claimed to occur all over the Western world, and variously believed to be complete nonsense, of neurotic or emotional origin, or due to the widespread use of man-made materials. The Camelford victims can at least take comfort that plenty of their fellow affluent citizens of the West are reporting similar problems without having first to drink aluminium sulphate.

In the case of the behaviour and learning difficulties, the available evidence is that the people reporting them, and the investigators who support their claims, are finding extremely small deviations from the norm, if anything at all.

It is difficult to see how the media came mostly to regard the group's work as a whitewash. They were not merely "apparently" distinguished as the Guardian had it. They were actually distinguished. The five scientists were working in a world of vigorous academic argument. They trawled every source they could for wisdom about the empirically-discovered or hypothetically possible effects of people being exposed to aluminium sulphate and the bunch of other metals likely to be consumed as a result of the water and chemical industries' mistakes that day in Cornwall. The group sought out the people who most disagreed with the first report and asked for chapter and verse, which they then discussed, point by point. The group published its findings at length and cited its sources.

Throughout the episode, I kept wondering how one could have found a better group to conduct an inquiry, or how it could have gone about its work in any different way. Final truths and certainties are hard to come by in this sort of business, but it seems fair to say that one stands a smaller chance of being wrong in the company of the likes of the inquiry team than with its vociferous critics.

As this book prepares for press [March 1994], there is still no evidence that flaws have been found in the reports. The pages of Nature, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal have not been full of rebuttals of the arguments in the reports. The stack of peer-reviewed science journals, which would have loved to engage in controversy, have not.

Undeterred by Dame Barbara's strictures against sloppy reporting, the Independent's account of the 1991 report of the official group began: "Victims of Britain's worst water pollution incident received a new set-back yesterday after a second official report in 28 months concluded that their loss of memory and skin diseases were not caused by the poisoning". The report was not written by the paper's usual environmental, science or health staff, and perhaps is merely a case of a general reporter's lack of background knowledge colouring coverage.

The attitude of the Independent's news report was that the residents' claims are beyond dispute. The report also assumes that we accept that it is a set-back for people to be told there is good evidence that they have not been poisoned.

Yet one can see the reporter's point of view. The possibility of the award of damages turns good news about the likely absence of long term effects of the incident into bad news for those who claim - however falsely or wrong-headedly - to be its victims. Some of the residents who think they have been poisoned, and the experts who support and oppose their claim, will soon be putting their case in front of a judge as claims for damages are pursued against South West Water (the inheritor of the water authority which made the original mistakes). So the strengths of the opposing cases will be assessed in direct and head-on competition.

There is a good case for saying the aggrieved residents should also sue the media for the harm done by its dreary fascination with anything it can dress up as a scandal, however partial it has to be in the process. After all, lots of people made mistakes in Camelford, but it was the media which spread fear, and played ducks and drakes with the evidence as it did so. And if fear, however unfounded, hurts and causes illness, as it is increasingly claimed, then the media should head the queue into the dock.

It will be very exciting, about the time this book appears, to see how these arguments unfold in court.

Chapter Seven The Story of Chlorine: Devil's Element or Hard Working Member of Society?

Introduction

Section i The Chemicals industry and Greenpeace on the Cote D'Azur

Section ii The beginnings of the chlorine story

Section iii Chlorine in disasters

Section iv. Organochlorines: dangerous and indestructible?

Section v. The nature of organochlorines

Section vi. So should we ban chlorine production?

Introduction

Bhopal, Seveso, dioxins, DDT, PCBs, PVC: these are all names and acronyms to raise the hackles of the modern observer. They are all important players in the chlorine story, and help explain why this long chapter is central to this book.

Chemicals and the chemicals industry are feared in the modern world, not least because of their association with warfare and disasters. We explore a wide range of issues surrounding chlorine, a chemical which several national Greenpeace groups argue should be banned. In extraordinary developments in the US, it even appears that the official Environmental Protection Agency has come close to endorsing this line.

The chapter argues that chlorine is useful but not indispensable, and that the public can fairly well trust the regulators who advise politicians about how to control this and other chemicals.

Section i. The Chemicals industry and Greenpeace on the Cote D'Azur

The chief of police looked as a Mediterranean crook-chaser should. Round, short, with his hair brushed dashingly back. There was a gold bracelet. There was no radio: an even shorter, but younger and thinner junior officer, held that. The autumn sun was warming all our backs as we stood at the quayside. Non-one quite knew what to say to the Greenpeace crew member aboard the brightly-painted Sirius, a converted trawler of some sort. The ship looked odd - happy, childish almost, in its playroom primary colours (green predominated), but with workmanlike undertones - alongside the gleaming white gin-palaces of the harbour of Monte Carlo. It looked awfully out of place.

As I opened my mouth to speak, the chief's henchman held up his hand to signal me to stop, and the chief - with a self-deprecating half smile of apology to me - addressed the man at the top of the gangplank. "You are most welcome here", said the policeman. "But, if you please, no....no manifestations". The crew member seemed to prevaricate in his response, and the chief of police repeated his demand, indifferent, perhaps, to whether the younger man would make - or not make - an easily-broken promise.

There were no manifestations. Greenpeace had come to the Cote D'Azur in its most reasonable guise, to bear witness to the hopes of a generation of people who love nature. The campaigners had come to run up banners in the harbour hard by a conference of 500 men (mostly men), gathered for the 1992 Third Global Chlor-Alkali Symposium, whose special theme was to be Chlorine in Perspective. For their part, the executives had gathered to defend their business from the worldwide assault of environmental campaigners, and Greenpeace in particular.

The industry was trying to promote the virtues of firms whose processes or products have definitely damaged the planet's defence against ultra violet radiation (in the case of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs), have contaminated seals (in the case of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs), and generally been believed, sometimes on good evidence, to be behind more than their fair share of environmental scandal. Greenpeace had come with what the world at large would probably accept as a couple of damning reports on the poisonousness of this industry. [[clxxxiii], [clxxxiv]] Greenpeace had a scientist in the hall of the Loew's Hotel as a delegate. She did not attend all the sessions, but she was as respectable a presence amongst all the grey suits as could be hoped for.

Greenpeace's presence at the chlorine industry's conference was conformist enough for anyone's taste. Its ambitions, however, are profoundly not to the taste of the chlorine industry, which Greenpeace outfits in several countries - not the UK as yet - seek to outlaw, lock stock and barrel.

This is an aim of a different class to Greenpeace's normal declarations. When it campaigns against the nuclear industry, it is up against a single, obvious danger which everyone recognises and whose value and risks are disputed but at least focused. When it fights nuclear radiation it does so within a well-developed framework of argument, and even some agreed data. When it campaigns against whaling, it is fighting against a single activity of marginal importance to the economies which sponsor it. Again, whaling is a focused activity, and even has an agreed forum in which scientists, campaigners and politicians have been meeting for years.

When Greenpeace campaigns against chlorine it argues against a chemical which is rather seldom used in its pure form, but which turns up in various guises in dozens - hundreds - of uses, and as a part of the production of hundreds more. Chlorine's derivatives also turn up as impurities in otherwise desirable products. Chlorine is involved in about half the output of the entire chemical industry.

Greenpeace are amongst several campaign groups which appear to have taken their language and attitude deep into the consciousness of several Western nations, and perhaps especially the US. In February 1994, President Clinton announced that his administration was to revamp the Clean water Act 1972:

The EPA's immediate intention is simply to study the impact of chlorine use. But what incurred the wrath of the chemical industry is the proposal's premise that in order to protect human health and the environment "the Administration will develop a national strategy for substituting, reducing or prohibiting the use of chlorine and chlorinated substances". [[clxxxv]]

In the realpolitik of the US, it often happens that Politically Correct pronouncements such as this are watered down in practice by intensive industry and regional lobbying. The chemicals industry everywhere generally accepts that is has nothing to lose from rigorous scientific investigation. Yet something dramatic has happened when a chemical can go from seeming a saviour to near pariah status.

Section ii. The beginnings of the chlorine story

In the eighteenth century, Runcorn, on Merseyside, was a spa town, famous for the invigorating qualities of its salt and fresh waters, and set in what was an overwhelmingly rural setting. But it was equidistant from the great salt plains of Cheshire and the coal-fields of Lancashire, and a natural place - being close to the port of Liverpool - for a salt-based chemicals industry to set up. Soap-making was just the right sort of industry. Demand was increasing because of textile-making and the hygiene revolutions which were to improve so many lives. [[clxxxvi]] People were increasingly able to keep themselves and their immediate environment clean.

There had been soap-making in more or less haphazard processes (increasingly less haphazard) for centuries. It required animal fat, some source of an alkaline substance (stale urine, seaweed ashes and many other materials were used) and heat. By the nineteenth century, salt became the preferred source of the alkali required.

Runcorn, Liverpool and Widnes rapidly became and the area has continued to be the seat of the British alkali industry. The process required lead (for the chamber in which the process took place), sulphuric acid (the demand for which increased dramatically), coal (for heat and carbon), and lime (from Derbyshire limestone).[[clxxxvii]] The alkali it produced was necessary to soap and glass manufacture. There was also sodium carbonate, also known as caustic soda. [[clxxxviii]] And there was chlorine, too, which was useful in the textile and paper industries as a bleach.

Right from the start, the environmental revolution in people's lives was attended by environmental problems in the industry's surroundings. The Muspratt family, one of three big players, had to close one factory because of persistent legal action by a local landowner claiming crop and tree damage from its pollutants. By 1862, the pollution was worrying enough for the House of Lords to hold an inquiry into Injury from Noxious Vapours, which led to the first Alkali Act of 1863.

One of the late nineteenth century players in the chlor-alkali business who was to become enormously successful because of his innovativeness was Ludwig Mond, a German Jewish chemist and manufacturer who made his home in Britain and was the very model of an industrious, public-spirited, tough entrepreneur. In 1926, Mond's son Alfred took his late father's chlor-alkali firm into ICI, whose formation he largely engineered, and Britain's chemical giant has remained a major chlor-alkali producer. Partly for this act of industrial empire-building, Alfred Mond was ennobled, as the first baron Melchett. Ironically, his great grandson, the fourth baron, Lord Melchett usually known as Peter Melchett, now leads Greenpeace, UK as its executive director.

In 1873 John Brunner and Ludwig Mond, who had both worked at Widnes, established a works at Winnington near Northwich to produce alkali. Ammonia from gasworks and brine (salt and water) from the Cheshire saltfields were the starting points for the new Solvay process [which Brunner and Mond had under license from the Belgian giant]. [[clxxxix]]

The Solvay process had the advantage of being less polluting than the main process it displaced, but it was not at first a producer of chlorine, which was then in increasing demand for use as bleach and germicide. The process eventually became a chlorine producer in an elegant way, as explained by the Times in October 1862:

In the ammonia-soda [Mond's] process the chlorine of the salt, which is the raw material of both processes, is run down the sewers [not nowadays] in the form of chloride of calcium. Regarded merely as a waste-product, this salt has the enormous advantage over the foul-smelling alkali waste of the Leblanc process [which Mond's was competing with] that it is odourless and soluble. But waste of this kind is an offence to the soul of a chemist like Mr Mond, even though his works pay in spite of it a dividend of 50 per cent. He has accordingly turned his attention to the problem of utilising the chlorine as well as the sodium of the Cheshire brine wells, and by combinations of the most striking boldness and ingenuity the problem has been solved. Chloride of lime made by the new process is actually upon the market, a large and efficient installation is at work, and the increase of the output to any required extent is a mere question of time and plant. The new chlorine process has been made to dovetail in the most beautiful manner with the old ammonia-soda process, and the combination does its work with ideal completeness. The raw materials are salt, consisting of chlorine and sodium; chalk, consisting of lime and carbonic acid; and coal. The products are soda-ash, consisting of sodium and carbonic acid; bleaching-powder, consisting of lime and chlorine; and energy derived from the combustion of the coal and employed to effect the new grouping of the four substances in question. [[cxc]]

If we pause here for a moment, we can see several elements which might surprise a late twentieth century observer. First, there was environmental pressure on the chemicals industry from the very first. Landowners successfully litigated against its pollution. Secondly, it was inquired into and legislated against right from the first. The House of Lords' inquiry was extensive and deep. The Alkali Acts were world-leaders in legislation. Thirdly, chemical engineers from the very first wanted both profit and elegant, waste-free processes. Fourthly, there was, at least at first, an appreciation by lively journalists that chemical engineering was exciting, creative and capable of elegance.

The Brunner-Mond success story continued in spite of the emergence of a challenge.

In 1897 a new competitor entered the market when the Castner-Kellner Alkali Company started production at Runcorn. Taking its name from the two chemists who founded it, the company exploited an efficient method of producing chlorine and alkali by passing an electric current through brine (salt and water), a process known as electrolysis. By 1920 Brunner and Mond had a controlling interest in the company and in 1926 it became part of the newly-formed ICI. [[cxci]]

Brunner-Mond faced considerable pressure in the 1880s from the emerging labour movement, whose investigators infiltrated chlor-alkali plant and exposed the working conditions of some of the men. Brunner and Mond became pioneers of better working conditions. Driven by Mond's fierce devotion to high educational standards and to the science end of his business, the firm acquired a reputation for a certain gentlemanliness and even scholarliness of style and operation. [[cxcii]] ICI was to inherit something of that mantle. Its manner of dealing with the outside world has over the years shown a complacency which grew partly from a tremendous sense of the competence of its scientists and technologists. This attitude did not and does not help it deal with what it thinks is irrational Green protest.

To return to the chlor-alkali world. The commercial and the chemical aspects of the chlor-alkali industry are hard to disentangle. Firstly, different processes emphasise the production of either the alkali or the chlorine side of the equation in different quantities and purities. It is a common accusation, hotly denied by the industry [[cxciii]], that in the preferred modern process chlorine became an embarrassing by-product of the production of alkali, and that some of the uses found for chlorine followed production of the chemical, rather than motivated it. Either way,

In 1900 the market for bleaching powder [the main previous use for chlorine, along with drinking water purification] was saturated. Therefore CK [Castner Kellner [one of the main producers, and later to be a part of ICI] sought new outlets for chlorine products. This led to the development of ... dry cleaning fluid and [the ubiquitous plastic] PVC (polyvinylchloride). [[cxciv]]

It is at this point that we see a crucial development in chlorine's history. It was being combined with carbon molecules to make organochlorines. These gave both the chlorine and the carbon parts of the new compounds properties which were wonderfully useful and sometimes wonderfully dangerous.

Section ii. Chlorine in disasters

From the start, the chemical industry was dangerous to work in, and the chlor-alkali business was no exception, with workers at great risk from breathing in chlorine gas, lime, or their combination as bleaching powder.

The story is told in a masterly way by V C Marshall in his Major Chemical Hazards. [[cxcv]]

Marshall says, of the early days:

....major chemical hazards, as we know them today, were in their infancy, except for a few incidents involving the manufacture and storage of explosives. The reason for this was the small scale on which chemicals were produced and the low pressures which were technically feasible in operating chemical plant. [[cxcvi]]

Chlor-alkali production was noticed, as it remains noticed, for the toxicity of chlorine and its derivatives, sometimes following mass exposure to them as a result of cataclysm, and sometimes in routine manufacture. (The industry attracted attention, as well, for the caustic properties of its materials, which burned people, animals and vegetation).

So before we move on to the more modern sort of worry, about insidious, often routine, contamination by toxic materials, and chlorine-based materials in particular, we ought to follow the track which would have been more familiar historically, and look at chlorine's role in disasters, whether accidental or deliberate.

First, here is Marshall's background to the chemical:

Chlorine is a greenish yellow gas which is 2.5 times as dense as air...it is an intensely irritating gas...Chlorine attacks the lungs, producing oedema, ie a copious secretion of fluid. This fluid is abstracted from the bloodstream and leads to thickening of the blood....Legge (1934) in a review of accidents reported to the factory inspectors in the UK between 1908 and 1931, records that there were 177 cases of gassing by chlorine but only 1 fatality...[A recent assessment] said that UK production of chlorine was currently [1981] running at 1 million tonnes per annum and 7 million tonnes per annum for the remainder of Western Europe out of a world total of 30 million tonnes per annum. During the past 25 years in Western Europe, there have been 8 fatalities out of 550 million man hours worked. [V]ery approximately, this works out at about 1 fatality for every 12 million tonnes of chlorine produced in Western Europe. This is much better than the record of the coal industry expressed in fatalities per million tonnes which is, for the UK today, about 1 fatality by death or disease per million tonnes.[[cxcvii]]

Chlorine's poisonousness has been used deliberately, most famously by the German army on April 22, 1915 when 168 tonnes of the gas were deployed and killed several thousand (the precise figure is unknown, but it is not likely to be less than 1,000 nor more than 5,500), and perhaps three times that number were affected to a lesser degree. Not until the accident in a plant producing chlorine-derivatives at Bhopal, Central India, was the chemical again implicated even indirectly in killing on anything like this scale. Accidental releases tend to be very much smaller, and of those which run into tonnes rather than kilograms, Marshall lists 20 between 1939 and 1981. The majority of the listed releases run from a couple of tonnes all the way up to 30 tonnes, with only one above that, at 90 tonnes. The fatalities do not run proportionate to the quantity of the releases and are mostly nil or small, though a couple of accidents killed 19 people each, and one killed 60.

But it is not for the release of the chemical in its pure form that chlorine has a bad name in modern times. At Bhopal in December 1984, methyl isocyanate (MIC), a chemical used in the manufacture of Sevin, a pesticide, killed around 3,000 people and injured perhaps a quarter of a million more. MIC does not contain chlorine, and the victims of the accident were not exposed to chlorine in any form. However, the plant's process involved two chlorine derivatives, and so it follows that a ban on chlorine chemistry would have avoided a Bhopal.

The non-use of MIC because its "parent" chlorine was banned might well be a mixed blessing, however. Bhopal was an accident in a pesticide plant which involved chlorine (though MIC is not an organochlorine). Suppose that we had instead relied on organophosphates, the other main category of pesticide? Though he does not discuss this issue, Marshall in another context makes the point that

Sevin [the main product for which Bhopal's MIC was a precursor] is much less toxic to humans and animals than is, for example, parathion [a leading organophosphate] and it is much less persistent than DDT [an organochlorine which as we shall see has proven trickily persistent, for all its great usefulness in some of its applications].

I have seen no discussion of the ecological balance to be struck between a pesticide which is benign in use but hazardous in manufacture as against one whose properties are the reverse. Indeed, I have seen no discussion on whether the manufacture of MIC is inherently more dangerous than the production of any other pesticide. Worse, one has to face a very real difficulty in this sort of discussion. Bhopal's killing of 3,000 people is a clear disaster, but it does not necessarily at all militate against the manufacture of MIC. The disaster at Bhopal depended far more on poor management, under-investment and bad urban planning than it did on the inherent hazardousness of MIC plant. [[cxcviii]]

However, MIC has been known to be extremely toxic for years, and Marshall - a markedly unhysterical author - criticises the plant's owners, Union Carbide India Ltd., for not knowing more about their product. He points out that a good deal was known about MIC before the disaster and that MIC, "is now known to cause prompt deaths by pulmonary oedema, and to injure the eyes, the stomach, the liver and the skin". Marshall suggests that until more is known, it would be wise to rate MIC as 25-30 times as toxic as chlorine, which makes it more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, one of the most feared substances on earth.

I come to the Seveso accident after Bhopal, though it happened in July 1976, several years before the Indian disaster, because it leads out into a debate which has continued to dominate the chlorine issue until now, and will for years yet. The reason is that at Seveso, there was a release of chemicals which are known informally as dioxins (and more properly as PCDDs, or polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins), which have a fearsome reputation amongst the public and environment campaigners, though they are viewed much more ambiguously amongst scientists at large.

One particular dioxin has caused tremendous controversy. It is known as the most toxic substance on earth because it is quite extraordinarily toxic to guinea pigs, though much less so to hamsters and human beings. From now on, I shall refer to it as dioxin 2,3,7,8 (more properly 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin).

Dioxin 2,3,7,8 is 1000 times more toxic to some species than the least toxic dioxin, (octachlorodibenzodioxin). That might lead one to think that dioxin 2,3,7,8 is the compound in the dioxin group which gives the greatest risk. In fact if the analysis of, say, a soil is looked at, it is quite likely that dioxin 2,3,7,8 will contribute only 1 to 2 percent of the total toxicity for which the dioxin family is responsible in that soil sample. Indeed, it is quite likely that the sum of the of all the dioxins will contribute less than 10 percent of the total toxicity as measured by the TEQ (TEQs are "toxic equivalents" and are units of measurements by which toxic substances are reckoned to be toxic in relation to some known substance which is taken as a standard).

It is fair to see dioxin 2,3,7,8 as a very toxic substance, but necessary to remember that a part of its significance for us is that it is a marker of a whole group of chemicals, various of whose members are likely to be present when dioxin 2,3,7,8 is present.

Chlorine-derived itself, dioxin 2,3,7,8 is found as an impurity in a chlorine-based herbicide 2,4,5-T (trichlorophenoxyacetic acid) which was a component in Agent Orange, and sprayed as a defoliant in Vietnam [[cxcix]] in the 1960s. There have been persistent allegations that Agent Orange caused cancer in personnel who came into contact with it, and they have been as stoutly denied. [[cc]]

The dioxin group is not known to cause cancer in humans and it is not known to be mutagenic (to cause genetic change in offspring) in humans. This does not mean that it is known not to cause cancer or birth defects in humans; only that the scientific consensus is that it has not been proved to. All we know about its carcinogenicity (its ability to form cancers) is from animal evidence. Campaigners, then, are within their rights to say that dioxin is very, very carcinogenic, but only if they add that has not been shown to be so to humans.

We do know that, amongst humans, dioxin 2,3,7,8 causes chloracne, a skin disease which is curable (though severe cases lead to permanent scarring). We know the chloracne connection because all major exposures to dioxin 2,3,7,8 have led to this problem, and to no other definite results in humans.

This is reassuring because we have had plenty of experience of high-dose exposure to dioxins. If they had major or even reckonable effects, we would know about it.

Marshall lists six cases (there have probably been a few more than that) of large-scale exposure to large doses of the dioxin group. They were spread more or less at random across the years 1949 to 1976. They all involved the manufacture of the disinfectant TCP, or 2,4,5-trichlorophenol, going wrong, and the scale of numbers of people affected ranges from 17 to 1000 (in the case of Seveso). One classic and important event occurred at the Coalite coal-to-chemicals plant at Bolsover, South Yorkshire in 1968. Followers of environmental stories are interested in this occurrence because the firm's incinerator smoke-stack is heavily implicated in recent (now abated) dioxin contamination of cow pastures. A stream, the Doe Lea, has even more recently been found to be contaminated by dioxins downstream of the firm's liquid outfall. [[cci]] Back in 1968, a person was killed in the Coalite explosion, but from falling masonry, not chemical exposure. To give the flavour of the outcome, here is Marshall's review of the evidence:

May (1973) comments on treatment of 79 cases of chloracne arising from the Coalite accident. The great majority of cases made an almost complete recovery in four to six months. Ten men recovered only after steam bathing followed by ultraviolet treatment. No other illness attributable to dioxin 2,3,7,8 made its appearance. In March 1969, there were two further cases of chloracne among contractors' men, one of whom had a son who also showed symptoms. Hay reports that there was no evidence of chromosome damage [which might indicate potential for birth defects in future] but some evidence of damage to the immune system. Another worker claimed that there was evidence of impaired liver function in some subjects. [[ccii]]

In the Seveso case, Marshall's review of the research into the outcome suggests that "only relatively few cases of chloracne made their appearance, most of them mild...". The outcome of the Seveso accident is very different to what one might expect of an accident which has assumed epic proportions in the disaster industry's demonology:

Seveso (1978) [the report of the official inquiry] deals extensively with medical follow-up which included analyses of death rates, birth rates and abortion rates. No clear picture emerges however. Homberger et al claim that, broadly speaking nothing abnormal was disclosed. "So far the pathology related to these parameters has remained within the range which is current for the population of this region and could not correlate with the exposure to dioxin".

A very detailed study by Bruzzi which forms part of Coulston and Pocchiari (1983), gives an account of the difficulties involved in setting up a sound epidemiological study in the area of Seveso. The study agrees with the conclusion that there is nothing in the mortality pattern which correlates with exposure. With regard to abortions, matters are different. In the period immediately following the incident, the rate of induced abortions was higher by a statistically significant amount. It is believed that these were caused by fears of foetal damage arising from exposure to dioxin. The rate of induced abortions fell after 1978. There seems no clear indication of correlation of birth defects with exposure though there is some suggestion that this may be the case in a few instances. As to cancer incidence, the latency period is generally too long for study to reach any conclusions yet. Bruzzi agrees with the finding that there is a statistically significant correlation between some neurological symptoms and exposure to dioxin. [[cciii]]

So, it is a little too early to be sure that the heavy exposure of workers at Seveso has led to no additional cancers. Most cancers have a development period of between 10 and twenty years from even heavy exposure to a carcinogen. But it would be surprising if it did, granted that in all the previous cases of dioxin 2,3,7,8 exposure, cancer has not only not been proved, but not seriously suggested by researchers.

If we return to the only known certain and serious human effect of heavy dioxin 2,3,7,8 contamination, we can quote at length again from Marshall's summary of the chloracne effects in the wake of Seveso:

during September and October, 44 cases of chloracne were identified...a further 6 cases were diagnosed in November and December...Further screening of 7,077 patients at the dermatological outpatients department with some 44,000 school children brought to light a further 79 cases .... There were further cases identified elsewhere making a total of 135. Later still ... further screening identified 52 further cases making 179 in all. It might be inferred that the cases brought to light by screening represented only cases so mild that medical attention had not been sought. The Report [of the official inquiry] ... suggests that in early 1977, only 9 patients could be classified as serious and that by the beginning of 1978 there were no cases classified in that category. [[cciv]]

In other words the known medium-term (two-year) human upshot of the Seveso was that there remained no serious cases of the only illness it was known to cause. The above accounts also allow that there are one or two shadows to this picture. There is the possibility, improbable, perhaps, but possible, of cancer-formation; some suspected liver damage, suspected birth defects and some suspected neurological damage, but none so certain or serious that they have been pursued by a medical profession voraciously interested in this sort of issue.

What about environmental effects? Marshall's review of the Seveso accident says that large numbers of animals died because of the explosion, many from chemical burns not directly associated with the dioxins present.

It was only in the immediate vicinity of the factory that there was obvious damage to vegetation. This must have been due to phenolic and caustic effects as dioxin 2,3,7,8 has never been shown to injure vegetation.

iii. Chlorine: "killing in small doses"?[[ccv]]

We have looked at some famous disasters, in which people were exposed to big doses of dioxin 2,3,7,8. A further concern involves the same group of chemicals but a quite different sort of exposure to them. This is relevant not least because the chemicals' reputation for toxicity depends on their being extremely toxic in small doses, and to two other factors which are usually mentioned in the same breath: they are persistent and they bioaccumulate.

Dioxins are a part of a wider family of chlorinated organic substances. The family is made up of molecules which are basically made from coal or oil but which have molecules of chlorine-derived material attached to them at various points. The arrangements and amount of the various different points at which the chlorine molecules are stuck to the hydrocarbons are distinctive to each chemical, and are crucial to the way they work when they meet human, animal or plant cells. We are dealing with dioxins, whose proper name is polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins; furans, whose proper name is polychlorinated dibenzofurans; and PCBs, whose proper name is polychlorinated biphenyls. Sometimes the most potent of the dioxins, dioxin 2,3,7,8, is referred to as TCDD.

The account that follows is culled exclusively from a paper given by Ms Frances Pollitt, a toxicological specialist at the UK Department of Health. She was speaking at a seminar arranged by Pamela Shimell, an environmental consultant who runs Industry and Environment Associates and who wanted the official and "orthodox" scientists and the scientists and campaigners from Greenpeace and one or two other groups to discuss things in a relaxed atmosphere.

Ms Pollitt's review begins with a discussion of the toxic effects of various chemicals. By this is meant the power of chemicals to poison organisms. This is their power to interfere with the healthy workings of the organs or metabolisms of creatures. (It usually excludes the idea of cancer-formation, which is seen as a special capacity to make cells reproduce in an unhealthy way.)

The reputation that TCDD [dioxin 2,3,7,8] has gained of being "the most toxic chemical known to man" is due to the fact that a single very low dose can be fatal in certain animal species. That is, it has a high acute toxicity. Acute toxicity has traditionally been measured by the LD50 [the "lethal dose" 50 percent, the dose of chemical required to kill half of a group of animals in a test population]. The oral LD50 of TCDD in the most sensitive species, the guinea pig, is only 2 micrograms per kilogram of bodyweight (ug/kg bw). In the rat TCDD also shows high acute toxicity, with an LD50 of only 50 ug/kg bw. This can be compared with the LD50 of [the extremely poisonous] sodium cyanide in the rat, which is over 6000 ug/kg bw). However, there is considerable variation in the susceptibility of different animal species to this acute lethal effect of TCDD: the least susceptible of the species tested - the hamster - is more than 5,000 times less sensitive than the guinea pig. [[ccvi]]

The account then goes on to say that other dioxins are much less toxic even to the extremely sensitive guinea pig. The next less toxic dioxin is 100 times less potent, and the one after that is at least 1000 times less. Many other dioxins are even less toxic:

These compounds - the vast majority of the PCDDs [dioxins] and PCDFs [furans] - are generally of negligible biological activity and are not important in terms of health concerns.

Repeating the insight that the chemicals show no acute lethal effect in humans, even after quite high exposures, Ms Pollitt turns to the effects on animals of long, low exposure. She says that there are a wide range of effects, with some animals showing chloracne effects, and others liver effects, and effects on the development of the immune function in some.

Even scientifically illiterate people now know far more about the human immune system than any previous generation because we hear so much about the AIDS virus and its power to make people fatally prone to diseases which the body can normally activate defences against. However, in the case of dioxins and furans, Ms Pollitt's review suggests that the animal evidence about immunity suppression does not seem to carry over into a human concern. Non-human primates - which are assumed to be quite like people in their biology - are less susceptible to the chemicals' damage than other animal species. Besides, evidence suggests that the chemicals would have other more obvious effects before immune suppression became a factor.

Ms Pollitt's review then turns to another concern, and this is again worth repeating in some detail because it goes to the heart of a major concern in Western society: that even in tiny quantities, dioxins cause birth defects. Ms Pollitt says the research is far from trustworthy, but it suggests that female rats' reproductive performance is adversely affected at very low doses of dioxin 2,3,7,8. The chemical can make pregnant mice produce deformed offspring.