Nation Topics - Environment | The Nation

A few years back, critics of postmodernism, both left and right, chuckled at the academic sting pulled on the journal Social Text when it published Alan Sokal's bogus article on the socially constructed nature of nature. For conservatives, that the journal ran Sokal's fuzzy call for a progressive postmodern science confirmed the fundamental divide between the politicized humanities and the objective sciences--proof positive of cultural studies run amok. In all the discussion that followed, however, little notice was paid to the origins of post-World War II radical critiques of science. In the shadow of Hitler and Stalin and in the wake of the Vietnam War, theorists from Theodor Adorno to Donna Haraway have been concerned with the ways in which science has colluded with acts of barbarism.

Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado examines the tragic consequences of medical and social science research on the Venezuelan Yanomami and reminds us why scientific practices and theories should indeed be the domain of social critics. White scientists in the jungle have long been central characters in the stories the West tells about itself. Alongside Humboldt and Mengele, Tierney's book now adds to the tropical pantheon James Neel, founder of the University of Michigan's human genetics department, and Napoleon Chagnon, perhaps the world's most infamous living anthropologist.

Well before Darkness's publication, Tierney's most damning charge--that Neel and Chagnon provoked, perhaps knowingly, a fatal 1968 measles epidemic responsible for "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of deaths--has created a scandal that threatens to distract from the real significance of his research. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the book may create a crisis "unparalleled in the history of anthropology." At a special American Anthropological Association forum in mid-November, defenders of Neel charged libel and politicized agendas. One panelist proclaimed that Tierney's "anti-science views" would jeopardize future vaccine efforts and lead to more deaths from disease. Chagnon, evoking the terms of the Sokal affair, has responded that only "cultural anthropologists from the Academic Left" who "despise the words 'empirical evidence' would take Tierney's claims seriously."

Empirical evidence is not lacking in Tierney's copiously footnoted book. Like all good chronicles of Western rationalists who lose their mind among primitives, Darkness in El Dorado is filled with absurd and disgraceful behavior: a French anthropologist who loses himself for decades in a sexual Eden; the world's wealthy holding a tuxedo dinner catered by helicopters on a jungle mountain; researchers who try to kill one another with machetes or commit suicide after being spurned by a Yanomami lover. But aside from his Joseph Conrad-like musings as to what it is about the Yanomami that made white people crazy, Tierney has written a fascinating, but also frustrating, ethnography of the practices and beliefs of cold war medical and social science researchers.

Tierney focuses primarily on the long and strange career of Napoleon Chagnon, who originated the myth of Yanomami aggression in his book The Fierce People, the all-time-bestselling ethnography. Chagnon portrayed the Yanomami as one of the most violent cultures on earth, where villages went to war to procure women and serial murderers bred at a higher rate than men who did not kill.

Tierney convincingly demonstrates his charge that unethical methodology and false science produced this myth. He also describes its often fatal consequences.

Most cultural anthropologists now believe that the wars Chagnon witnessed were provoked by Chagnon himself. He offered axes, machetes, fishhooks and pots in exchange for ethnographic information, creating tensions among villages that vied for monopoly control of his wares. Within months of Chagnon's arrival in 1964, three different fights broke out between villages that had previously been at peace for decades. Anthropologist Brian Ferguson reports that Chagnon was "very much involved in the fighting and the wars. Chagnon becomes a central figure in determining battles over trade goods and machetes."A Yanomami reports that Chagnon offered him an outboard motor in exchange for help, including the procurement of a Yanomami wife. Shotguns, a seemingly unlimited supply of trade goods and willingness to don feathers, face paint and a loincloth allowed Chagnon to transform himself from an "impoverished Ph.D. student at the bottom of the totem pole to being a figure of preternatural power."

Tierney argues that many of Chagnon's data are simply false. The Yanomami do not have a particularly high murder rate, nor do men who kill reproduce more than those who don't. Neither are the Yanomami particularly well-nourished--a claim that Chagnon uses to argue that men fight over women and not food.

In the United States, Chagnon and his sociobiologist allies continue to portray the Yanomami as an untainted relic of our past--a handy control group used to prove the biological basis of a range of aggressive human traits. In Latin America, the endurance of the myth of Yanomami aggression has reinforced racism and justified indifference. Both the Venezuelan and Brazilian governments have used unfavorable images of the Yanomami to justify their failure to protect them from migrants, who, starting in the late 1980s, increasingly entered the region, resulting in the death from disease and violence of untold numbers of Yanomami.

Tierney is at his best when he discusses Chagnon's career within the cultural history of the cold war. Born poor in Michigan, Chagnon used the expanding university system to climb out of poverty. Like many at the time who through discipline and hard work improved their class standing, Chagnon developed a visceral antipathy toward communism. It manifested itself in an intense masculine persona that earned Chagnon a reputation for barfighting and academic brawling. One of Tierney's insights is that Chagnon's theories had their "genesis during the Vietnam War and its cultural equivalent on the University of Michigan's Ann Arbor campus, where hippies in tepees chanted slogans like 'Make love, not war.' The whole point...was that you had to make war in order to make love--that violence was part of the natural order.... As a cold war metaphor, the Yanomami's 'ceaseless warfare' over women proved, that even in a society without property, hierarchies prevailed."

Tierney is on to something important here. The Fierce People was published in 1968, a particularly tough year for the United States abroad. American officials justified counterinsurgency campaigns that were taking place in the jungles of Latin America, Africa and Asia in decidedly Chagnonian terms. As one 1968 dissenting State Department memo put it: "We have condoned counter-terror.... We suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that... murder, torture, and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are communists. After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our people."

Tierney rightly reads The Fierce People as a piece of home-front propaganda. To counter those who argued that war was caused by struggles over resources (a central claim of New Left interpretations of both the cold war and the Vietnam War), Chagnon "engineered a bold creation myth, a ferocious Garden of Eden, where the healthy, well-fed Yanomami fought for... sexual pleasure.... It was not the Yanomami but Chagnon's fellow Americans who belonged, in reality, to one of the best-fed, healthiest societies in history. America enjoyed abundance so delirious that it seemed, for a short time in the 1960s, that its citizens would not agree to the stress of world combat against Communism.... At that critical moment, The Fierce People... came to reverse a dangerous complacency, proof that the battle is never won, that the fight can never be abandoned."

By the late 1980s Chagnon was in trouble. Tierney misses an important opportunity to discuss how the decline in Chagnon's fortunes was tied to the end of superpower tensions. At home, a generation of anthropologists critical of its discipline's role in justifying US foreign policy came into professional power. In Venezuela his former research subjects were demanding that he be barred from entering their territory. And reflecting the post-cold war extension of economic activity into areas previously off-limits, gold miners poured into the Amazon, causing widespread ecological destruction and social dislocation. Challenged by his liberal colleagues, harangued by feminists, threatened by dark-skinned peoples and adrift in the new post-cold war economy, Chagnon became an international version of the angry white man.

Chagnon did what many did at the end of the cold war--he went private. He teamed up with a flamboyant Venezuelan industrial gold miner, who turned "tracts of forest into mud soup," and the mistress of the Venezuelan president, who has since fled the country following indictments for corruption and fraud. The three came close to establishing a private biosphere in Yanomami territory that would have given them political authority over the Yanomami and monopoly rights over mineral and scientific claims. In order to muster international support for their scheme, they shuttled journalists and scientists in and out of remote Yanomami communities on lightning helicopter tours, without providing protection against possible contagion. Newspapers and television news ran stories of recently discovered "lost villages," while "foreign scientists carried out huge amounts of plant and animal samples."

When Venezuelan and international opposition scuttled his plan to set up a fiefdom in his former field site, Chagnon, now largely shut out of anthropology journals, stepped up efforts to disseminate his theories in the popular press. Although Chagnon often casts himself as an embattled truth-seeker--the preferred role of most biological determinists, no matter how much funding or open access to the media they have--Tierney points out the "abject admiration many male journalists apparently felt for the great anthropologist." He cites a fax that Matt Ridley, the science reporter at The Economist, sent to Chagnon apologizing for not writing a more sympathetic piece: "I have written it in the way that the International Editor wanted, which means 'impartially.' (She is a bit PC, herself.) So you may find it less unambiguously sympathetic to you than you might have hoped, but it is about as far as I dare go.... I do hope you like it."

What will make and, unfortunately, probably break Darkness in El Dorado is its description of the deadly 1968 outbreak of measles that coincided with the arrival of an expedition, funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and headed by Neel and Chagnon, to collect Yanomami blood samples.

Tierney's speculation that Neel may have been responsible for the epidemic is based on Neel's decision to use what was by 1968 an antiquated vaccine, Edmonston B, which was contraindicated for isolated populations such as the Yanomami. Tierney suggests that Neel chose this vaccine to prove that American Indians were not genetically vulnerable to European germs. Since Edmonston B produced the same level of antibodies as an infection of real measles, follow-up antibody tests would allow for a comparison of European and Yanomami immune systems. This may be why, according to Tierney, Neel opted for Edmonston B even though it was known to cause measleslike symptoms among isolated groups and even though a cheaper, safer vaccine (but one that did not produce antibodies comparable to the disease) was available. Tierney argues that because Edmonston B produces symptoms similar to measles, its use may have ignited the outbreak; he goes even further by proxy, citing a medical historian who ventures that Neel may have intentionally started the epidemic.

Tierney unfortunately has presented his case in a way that allows for easy dismissal. He provides compelling evidence that Neel and Chagnon did indeed treat the vaccination campaign as an experiment. For instance, by Neel's own telling, in the first village, before the epidemic, the team inexplicably vaccinated only forty Yanomami out of a total population of seventy-six, even though it had enough doses for all. Combined with the fact that most in this village had been tested for measles antibodies two years earlier, the inoculation of half the village created a fortuitous control group for Neel's published findings. It also seems that the vaccine did induce fevers and rashes in many Yanomami. Nevertheless, the fact that Tierney gives no direct evidence to back up his most serious conjecture--that the measles epidemic was caused by the vaccine--threatens to discredit his entire study. (Also, in response to the pre-publication controversy, most medical experts insist that it is impossible for a vaccine, no matter what symptoms it may bring on in the inoculated, to spread as an epidemic.)

Tierney's missteps here speak to a larger problem with his book, which draws its inspiration more from The X-Files than from the Frankfurt School. Tierney tries too hard to link the actions and motives of the individuals involved in a tight net of intrigue, misrepresenting cold war social science as a secret society of an elected few.

Of course, for many, the actions of the United States during the cold war don't make sense any other way. Consider this history: Neel, who did research on Hiroshima survivors, was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission to collect thousands of samples of Yanomami blood because it was thought it could be used as a baseline to measure degrees of genetic mutation. In 1958 the AEC, which in other instances engaged in deadly human radiation experiments, paid Marcel Roche, a Venezuelan doctor who worked on Neel's 1968 expedition, to inject the Yanomami, without their knowledge, of course, with radioactive iodine to study why they did not suffer from goiters. Tierney should not be entirely blamed if he didn't have a theory, other than conspiracy, to explain this.

Darkness in El Dorado unconvincingly attempts to trace this shameful history directly to Neel ("I felt that Neel was the key"), unfairly describing him as an extreme eugenicist. This is unfortunate, for Tierney could have written a more powerful book by demonstrating how the cold war produced acts of barbarism regardless of individual motive.

This is not to let Neel and Chagnon off the hook. They were instrumental in the creation of a body of knowledge that valued the Yanomami not for their own sake but for what they could provide cold war science. Their blood was believed to contain answers to questions raised by the new post-Hiroshima world, while their culture was thought to be a distilled version of what the West once was and, for some, should be again.

In the documentary made of the 1968 expedition, Neel and others are shown professionally inoculating Yanomami, who are presented as pictures of vibrant health. Sound outtakes reveal a different story. The team was exhausted, sick and panicked as the epidemic escaped their control and ravaged the Yanomami. Neel can be heard ordering the cameraman to stop filming a sick Yanomami. Whatever the cause of the measles outbreak, it is probable that the research team exposed the Yanomami to respiratory infections and other illnesses. The outtakes also reveal that Neel and Chagnon were much more concerned with making the documentary and collecting blood samples than with containing the epidemic. They broke quarantine lines to procure donors and quickly abandoned the area so that their blood would not be ruined in the tropical heat.

Tierney's effort to pin the tragic history of the Yanomami on Neel speaks to a larger problem, both in his book and in current ways of thinking about colonialism. With the failure of socialism and the discrediting of revolutionary movements and governments, many First World activists have thrown their energy into advocating on behalf of the cultural rights of native peoples. Much of this work is profoundly apolitical, justified more by appeals to Indian virtue than by critical analysis. This kind of activism too easily sets itself up for dismissal when it is revealed that Indians may have their own interests and may not be as innocent as portrayed.

This problem is reproduced in Tierney's book. It speaks to the poverty of our political culture that Tierney, an experienced investigative reporter, refuses, either out of ignorance or bias, to discuss the history of the Amazon in reference to colonialism, capitalism or racism. Instead, he searches for the mastermind behind the mayhem. Tierney creates a kitschy Heart of Darkness-like tale and casts himself as Marlow and Chagnon as Kurtz (Neel, perhaps, could be King Leopold). Well before we hear any Yanomami voices, we learn of Tierney's battles against jungle thieves and malaria, heroically rescuing Yanomami children and fending off evil gold miners.

Tierney's narrative rightly demonstrates how objective scientists can be implicated in a history of atrocity--and his gaffes should not distract from this history--but it can't account for the fact that while the AEC was paying for Neel's and Chagnon's jungle excursions, it was also funding the work of Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, along with other progressive scientists and anthropologists. These scholars became powerful critics of how the supposed objective research of their colleagues served not-so-objective agendas and had not-so-benign consequences. These politicized scholars have served science well--proof positive that Adorno was right, that "science needs those who disobey it."

So it all came out right in the end: gridlock on the Hill and Nader blamed for sabotaging Al Gore.

First a word about gridlock. We like it. No bold initiatives, like privatizing Social Security or shoving through vouchers. No ultra-right-wingers making it onto the Supreme Court. Ah, you protest, but what about the bold plans that a Democratic-controlled Congress and Gore would have pushed through? Relax. There were no such plans. These days gridlock is the best we can hope for.

Now for blaming Nader. Fine by me if all that people look at are those 97,000 Green votes for Ralph in Florida. That's good news in itself. Who would have thought the Sunshine State had that many progressives in it, with steel in their spine and the spunk to throw Eric Alterman's columns into the trash can?

And they had plenty of reason to dump Gore. What were the big issues for Greens in Florida? The Everglades. Back in 1993 the hope was that Clinton/Gore would push through a cleanup bill to prevent toxic runoff from the sugar plantations south of Lake Okeechobee from destroying the swamp that covers much of south-central Florida. Such hopes foundered on a "win-win" solution brokered by sugar barons and the real estate industry.

Another issue sent some of those 97,000 defiantly voting for Nader: the Homestead Air Force Base, which sits between Biscayne National Park and the Everglades. The old Air Force base had been scheduled for shutdown, but then Cuban-American real estate interests concocted a scheme to turn the base into a commercial airport. Despite repeated pleas from biologists inside the Interior Department as well as from Florida's Greens, Gore refused to intervene, cowed by the Canosa family, which represented the big money behind the airport's boosters. Just to make sure there would be no significant Green defections back to the Democratic standard, Joe Lieberman made a last-minute pilgrimage to the grave of Jorge Mas Canosa.

You want another reason for the Nader voter in Florida? Try the death penalty, which Gore stridently supported in that final debate. Florida runs third, after Texas and Virginia, as a killing machine, and for many progressives there it is an issue of principle. Incidentally, about half a million ex-felons, having served sentence and probation, are permanently disfranchised in Florida. Tough-on-crime drug-war zealot Gore probably lost crucial votes there.

Other reasons many Greens nationally refused to knuckle under and sneak back to the Gore column? You want an explanation of why Gore lost Ohio by four points and New Hampshire by one? Try the WTI hazardous-waste incinerator (world's largest) in East Liverpool, Ohio. Gore promised voters in 1992 that a Democratic administration would kill it. It was a double lie. First, Carol Browner's EPA almost immediately gave the incinerator a permit. When confronted on his broken pledge, Gore said the decision had been pre-empted by the outgoing Bush crowd. This too was a lie, as voters in Ohio discovered a week before Election 2000. William Reilly, Bush's EPA chief, finally testified this fall that Gore's environmental aide Katie McGinty told him in the 1992 transition period that "it was the wishes of the new incoming administration to get the trial-burn permit granted.... The Vice President-elect would be grateful if I simply made that decision before leaving office."

Don't think this was a picayune issue with no larger consequences. Citizens of East Liverpool, notably Terri Swearingen, have been campaigning across the country on this scandal for years, haunting Gore. So too, to its credit, has Greenpeace. They were active in the Northeast in the primaries. You can certainly argue that the last-minute disclosure of Gore's WTI lies prompted enough Greens to stay firm and cost him New Hampshire, a state that, with Oregon, would have given Gore the necessary 270 votes.

And why didn't Gore easily sweep Oregon? A good chunk of the people on the streets of Seattle last November come from Oregon. They care about NAFTA, the WTO and the ancient forests that Gore has been pledging to save since 1992. The spotted owl is now scheduled to go extinct on the Olympic Peninsula within the next decade. Another huge environmental issue in Oregon has been the fate of the salmon runs, wrecked by the Snake River dams. Gore thought he'd finessed that one by pretending that, unlike Bush, he would leave the decision to the scientists. Then, a week before the election, his scientists released a report saying they thought the salmon could be saved without breaching the four dams. Nader got 5 percent in Oregon, an amazing result given the carpet-bombing by flacks for Gore like Gloria Steinem.

Yes, Nader didn't break 5 percent nationally, but he should feel great, and so should the Greens who voted for him. Their message to the Democrats is clear. Address our issues, or you'll pay the same penalty next time around. Nader should draw up a short list of nonnegotiable Green issues and nail it to the doors of the Democratic National Committee.

By all means credit Nader, but of course Gore has only himself to blame. He's a product of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose pro-business stance was designed to regain the South for the Democrats. Look at the map. Bush swept the entire South, with the possible exception of Florida. Gore's electoral votes came from the two coasts and the old industrial Midwest. The states Gore did win mostly came courtesy of labor and blacks.

Take Tennessee, where voters know Gore best. He would have won the election if he'd carried his home state. Gore is good with liberals earning $100,000-$200,000. He can barely talk to rural people, and he made another fatal somersault, reversing his position on handguns after telling Tennessee voters for years that he was solid on the gun issue. Guns were a big factor in Ohio and West Virginia, too. You can't blame Nader for that, but it's OK with us if you do. As for Nader holding the country to ransom, what's wrong with a hostage-taker with a national backing of 2.7 million people? The election came alive because of Nader. Let's hope he and the Greens keep it up through the next four years. Not one vote for Nader, Mr. Alterman? He got them where it counted, and now the Democrats are going to have to deal with it.

In the final triumph of free-market capitalism, farmers will become serfs.

When members of the Arab League gathered for an emergency summit in Cairo on October 21 to discuss "the grave situation in the Palestinian Territories and its impact on the peace process," hopes were high among ordinary Arabs that their leaders would reflect popular opinion and at least call on the states having ties with Israel to cut them forthwith. They were to be disappointed. When Libya's Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, reflecting that feeling, saw the draft communiqué prepared by the league's foreign ministers, which merely said that member states that had diplomatic relations with Israel might consider severing them, he was so angered that he leaked the document to the press and left the conference.

No other leader followed his example, though--not even Izzat Ibrahim, the representative of Iraq, which is technically at war with Israel. Having been excluded from Arab League summits for ten years because of its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq could hardly afford the luxury of a walkout. As it was, taking into account the threat posed by Israel's hawkish actions, the conference's Egyptian host, President Hosni Mubarak--working closely with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah--had decided to close the chapter on Arab divisions caused by Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and invite President Saddam Hussein to the summit. Ibrahim, vice chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, the country's supreme authority, served as Saddam's stand-in.

Iraq's re-emergence as a player in the Arab world came at a time when many countries were already moving to restore normal relations with Baghdad. In recent months, dozens of flights from several Arab capitals, as well as Paris, Moscow and New Delhi have landed at the newly reopened Saddam International Airport near Baghdad. None of them were cleared in advance with the United Nations 661 Sanctions Committee, which is charged with overseeing the embargo on Iraq. The defiance of the UN came after President Clinton's softening toward Iraq because of the tight market in oil and its rising price. Clinton's behavior had been forecast earlier by James Akins, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "When the oil price rises above $30 a barrel," he said, "Saddam Hussein will be treated like Mother Teresa."

There is an indisputable link between the high price of petroleum, Iraq's endowment with the second-largest oil reserves in the world and US policy on Saddam. With Iraq producing some 3 million barrels a day, its highest output ever, the removal of a UN ceiling on its petroleum sales in January and US oil corporations buying a third of its oil exports, Saddam is now a major player in the market. Adding to his weight is the fact that Iraq has been exempted from OPEC's quota system because of its dire economic state.

Little wonder that Madeleine Albright announced in early September that the United States would not use force to compel Iraq to accept inspectors of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), formed in December under Security Council Resolution 1284, who had just finished their training. Following his testimony to the Security Council on September 2, UNMOVIC chief Hans Blix said that it was a good guess "that not much might happen before the American elections." After all, who would be so foolhardy as to upset the dictator, who might turn off his oil tap and cause a spurt in gasoline prices during the run-up to the November 7 poll, thereby ruining Al Gore's chances?

What started as a token defiance of a UN ban on flights to Iraq by Russia's Vnukovo Airlines with the Kremlin's backing in mid-August has snowballed into an international challenge to the 661 Sanctions Committee. The dozens of flights to Baghdad from Arab as well as European and Asian capitals were not cleared in advance with the sanctions committee. A large number of Arab countries have sent their aircraft, loaded with prestigious delegations of cabinet ministers, legislators, trade union leaders, businessmen, doctors, engineers, actors and entertainers--and token humanitarian aid. It is easier to name the exceptions: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Both allow the use of their air bases by the Pentagon to enforce an air-exclusion zone in southern Iraq.

Touching on the larger issue of sanctions against Iraq, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a close US ally, said at the Arab summit, "Our [Arab] nation can no longer stand the continuation of this suffering, and our people no longer accept what is committed against the Iraqi people from the [UN] embargo."

On the central issue before the summit, Izzat Ibrahim was hawkish: "Iraq is calling [for] and working to liberate Palestine through jihad because only jihad is capable of liberating Palestine and other Arab lands [from Israel]." To show that Iraq's sympathy meant more than words, Saddam immediately dispatched a convoy of forty trucks loaded with food and medicine to the Palestinian territories via Amman. This kind of gesture should boost Saddam's already high standing among young Palestinians and accelerate his rehabilitation among Arabs, creating a symbiosis between him and the Arab street.

Every five years the psychologist Judith Wallerstein updates her ongoing
study of 131 children whose parents were going through divorce in Marin
County, California, in 1971, and every five years her warnings about the
dire effects of divorce on children make the headlines, the covers and
the talk shows. Her new book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,
ups the ante: She now believes that parents should grit their teeth and
stay together, so traumatized were her interviewees even into their 20s,
contending with drugs and drink, bad boy-friends, unsatisfactory jobs,
low self-esteem and lack of trust in relationships. Before you young
cynics out there say welcome to the club, remember: This is not a
moralistic sermon dreamed up by Dr. Laura, the Pope, your relatives or
even Judith Wallerstein. This is science.

But what if it isn't? Scholars have long been critical of Wallerstein's
methods: She had no control group--kids just like the ones in her study
but whose unhappily married parents stayed together. (In her new book
she has attempted to get around this flaw by interviewing a "comparison
sample" of people from intact families who went to high school with her
subjects, but the two groups are not carefully matched.) She generalizes
too quickly: Can sixty Marin County families really stand in for all
America? Are the seventies us? Doesn't it make a difference that fathers
today are more involved with their kids both before and after divorce,
that mothers are better educated and better able to support themselves,
that divorce is no longer a badge of immorality and failure? It never
occurs to Wallerstein, either, that the very process of being
interviewed and reinterviewed about the effects of parental divorce for
a quarter-century by a warm, empathetic and kindly professional would
encourage her subjects to see their lives through that lens. "Karen" may
really believe divorce explains why she spent her early 20s living with
a layabout--blaming your parents is never a hard sell in America--but
that doesn't mean it's true.

The media tend to treat such objections rather lightly. Wallerstein's
critics "don't want to hear the bad news," wrote Walter Kirn in
Time's recent cover story. The real bad news, though, is the way
Wallerstein has come to omit from her writings crucial information she
herself presented in her first book about her research, Surviving the
Breakup, published in 1980.

How did Wallerstein find her divorcing couples, and what sort of people
were they? In her new book, she writes that they were referred by their
lawyers "on the basis of their willingness to participate." Surviving
the Breakup gives quite a different picture: "The sixty families who
participated in this study came initially for a six-week divorce
counseling service. The service was conceptualized and advertised as a
preventive program and was offered free of charge to all families in the
midst of divorce. Parents learned of the service through attorneys,
school teachers, counselors, social agencies, ministers, friends, and
newspaper articles." In other words, Wallerstein was not just offering
people a chance to advance the cause of knowledge, she was offering free
therapy--something she today vehemently denies ("Naturally I wanted to
be sure that any problem we saw did not predate the divorce. Neither
they [the kids] nor their parents were ever my patients"). Obviously,
people who sign up for therapy, not to mention volunteering their kids
for continuing contact, have problems; by choosing only therapy-seekers,
Wallerstein essentially excluded divorcing couples who were coping well.

Today, Wallerstein provides no information about the psychological
well-being of the parents before divorce, but in her 1980 book, she is
very clear about how troubled they were. Only one-third displayed
"generally adequate psychological functioning." Fifty percent of the men
and almost as many women were "moderately troubled"--"chronically
depressed, sometimes suicidal individuals...with severe neurotic
difficulties or with handicaps in relating to another person, or those
with longstanding problems in controlling their rage or sexual
impulses." Fifteen percent of the men and 20 percent of the women "had
histories of mental illness, including paranoid thinking, bizarre
behavior, manic-depressive illnesses, and generally fragile or
unsuccessful attempts to cope with the demands of life, marriage, and
family." Some underwent "hospitalization for severe mental illness,
suicide attempts, severe psychosomatic illnesses, work histories ridden
with unsatisfactory performance, or arrests for assault." It's not for
me to say whether a sample in which two-thirds of the participants range
from chronically depressed to outright insane represents the general
public--but attributing all their children's struggles to divorce is
patently absurd.

The way Wallerstein describes her sample has changed also. In a table in
her 1980 book, she places 28 percent of the families in the two lowest
of five social-class rankings, as defined by the Hollingshead index, and
23 percent in the highest. In the new book, these figures are mentioned
in passing, but at the same time she calls all the families "middle
class"--including a famous wife-beating TV executive and his former
spouse, a wealthy travel agent who spent her life globe-trotting. All
are now "educated," as well, including the substantial percentage of
parents (24 percent of the mothers and 18 percent of the fathers at
initial contact in 1971) who hadn't been to college. Gone too are such
relevant facts from the earlier book as that one-third of the couples
had "rushed into a precipitous marriage because of an unplanned
pregnancy" and that half the wives, "because of their age and lack of
job experience, were viewed realistically as unemployable."

In short, what we have here are not generic white suburbanites who threw
away workable marriages in order to actualize their human potential in a
Marin County hot tub. We have sixty disastrous families, featuring crazy
parents, economic insecurity, trapped wives and, as Wallerstein does
discuss, lots of violence (one-quarter of the fathers beat their wives;
out of the 131 children, thirty-two had witnessed such attacks). How on
earth can she claim that divorce is what made her young people's lives
difficult? The wonder is that they are doing as well as they are.

The old politics of oil has resurfaced to add a nervous flutter to Election 2000 and also to revive an enduring question of modern industrial life--what is the right price for oil? The media's New Economy cheerleaders scolded Clinton/Gore for tampering with the answer, but those pundits are under an illusion that the market, not governments and international politics, determines the price of crude oil. Their rage at Clinton for unleashing a little extra crude from the government's strategic reserve is an amusing non sequitur. For the past thirty years, the world price of oil has been "managed" by governments, albeit with haphazard results. The price was maintained by the OPEC cartel of oil-producing nations, with discreet consultations from the United States and other industrial powers. Before OPEC, the world price of oil had been managed since the thirties by the fabled Seven Sisters, global oil corporations that still have an influential voice in the conversations. Oil-price diplomacy, for obvious reasons, is mostly done in deep privacy.

Indeed, Riyadh and Washington are at this moment attempting once again to get the price right, that is, to steer crude oil back down to a mutually acceptable zone, centered on $25 a barrel. That's what Saudi Arabia, the largest producer, says it wants--a target range between $22 and $28 a barrel--and what Bill Clinton has called "a reasonable range" acceptable to Washington. Oil at $25 a barrel would be a lot cheaper than the recent peak of $38, but also a lot higher than the $10 bottom that oil hit in 1998, when prices were severely depressed by collapsing demand triggered by the Asian financial crisis the year before. Splitting the difference is a better solution than continued crisis, especially for Europe, because stability helps sustain everyone's economic growth.

So is $25 the right price? Maybe not. Because $25 is still cheap oil--too cheap to allow the producer nations to recapture their massive revenue losses and possibly too cheap to force US consumers and companies to undertake serious, self-interested industrial conversions away from petroleum. Since oil is traded worldwide in dollars, its real price declines automatically from US inflation. Thus, measured in constant dollars, $25 oil is really only about $13 in historical terms--right where it was in the mid-seventies. This level would be modestly above the average real price of the past fifteen years but still far below what OPEC initially gained after its two dramatic spikes in the seventies. Because of the interaction of currency values, Europe is taking a much more severe hit this time. The euro is down and the dollar is strong, so the real price of imported oil is much higher for European economies.

Texas oil guy George W. Bush is making the same retrograde noises Republicans always make--Drill for more oil! Open up the Alaskan wilderness! Drill offshore! Whatever! Bush's nostalgic notion that the United States can drill its way out of its petroleum problem is out of touch by about twenty-five years. The world isn't running out of oil--the undiscovered reserves are probably good for another century--but the United States is running out of its own oil. The proposition that we should pump and burn our remaining reserves first is completely backward, both as energy policy and for long-term national security. Al Gore, in his best moments, understands all this and has long championed a fundamental shift to alternative fuels, but he has lacked the courage to force the issue. The Clinton Administration provided gorgeous subsidies to the Big Three auto companies to develop electric cars and then allowed the industry to backslide by not increasing the government's fuel-efficiency requirements. Maybe the price crisis will prompt Gore to reread Earth in the Balance.

Oil politics is many-layered and so paradoxical that public opinion is not only confused but frequently led in the wrong direction. "Bad news" may actually be good news; the "villains" are sometimes actually victims. In real terms, OPEC's oil revenues peaked two decades ago--$493 billion in 1980 (in 1990 dollars)--and have declined unevenly since then. OPEC's oil income hit bottom in 1998, at $80 billion in real terms. So they regard the recent price run-up as a justifiable attempt to get well, to recover some of their losses. It's hard to muster much sympathy for oil potentates, but their national budgets have been severely squeezed--especially Saudi Arabia's, which absorbs more than its share of the production cutbacks because that country is the biggest and least aggressive player.

OPEC, on the other hand, has been a clumsy, hapless manager of world oil prices. Twice, it wrong-footed emerging economic conditions by increasing production just as global demand was about to swoon--inadvertently feeding the severe price collapses in 1986 and 1997. This time, they overshot again but on the upside --cutting oil supply just as the world's economies were gaining momentum. With the rising demand, prices were driven higher than the Saudis, at least, intended. Among the present dangers, the tight supply still threatens to stall out economic growth, especially for Europe, and it also gives temporary leverage to Iraq. If Iraq were to halt its exports, prices might soar again, just as Saudi Arabia and the United States are pulling in the opposite direction.

But here's some good news. Extreme price gyrations in oil promote fundamental change in US industrial structure. The seventies stimulated major shifts toward energy conservation and persuaded some sectors, like electrical generation, to decouple entirely from the vulnerability of unpredictable price shocks. Electric companies converted to natural gas and other fuels so that a major US user of petroleum was permanently lost as a market for OPEC exporters. Some authorities think this new mini-crisis is likely to encourage similar movements, especially in transportation. The auto industry, for instance, has toyed for years with available technologies like fuel cells, which liberate cars from oil, but they never moved seriously. Now Japanese manufacturers are making electric hybrids with far greater fuel efficiency. In other words, if high oil prices linger awhile, the permanent market for oil might shrink. Detroit could once again lose market share to Japan, but Americans and the environment would benefit enormously.

Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's former oil minister and a founding architect of OPEC, already fears this--another round of innovations that drastically reduce gasoline and oil consumption. "Technology is a real enemy for OPEC," Yamani warned in a Reuters interview. "Technology will reduce consumption and increase production from areas outside OPEC. The real victims will be countries like Saudi Arabia with huge reserves which they can do nothing with--the oil will stay in the ground forever."

OPEC, the sheik predicted, "will pay a very heavy price for not acting in 1999 to control oil prices. Now it is too late. The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil." His forecast may be a bit premature, but it's a lot more cheerful than the oil chatter in American politics.

What an odd presidential race! So long as George W. Bush keeps his mouth shut and remains in seclusion he floats up in the polls. His best strategy would be to bag the debates, take Laura on an extended vacation and come back a couple of days before the election. Meanwhile, Gore reinvents himself on an almost daily basis. Nothing has been more comical than his "populist" posturings about the Republicans being the ticket of Big Oil and himself and Lieberman being the champions of the little people.

This is the man whose education and Tennessee homestead came to him in part via the patronage of Armand Hammer, one of the great oil bandits of the twentieth century, in whose Occidental oil company the Gore family still has investments valued between $500,000 and $1 million.

At the LA convention the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee was on the 42nd floor of the Arco building, and the symbolism was apt. In 1992 Arco (recently merged with BP Amoco) loaned the Clinton/Gore inaugural committee $100,000. In that same year it gave the DNC $268,000. In the 1993-94 election cycle it gave the DNC $274,000. In the 1995-96 cycle it ponied up $496,000 and has kept up the same tempo ever since.

Was there a quid for the quo? You bet there was. Early in Clinton-time, the President overturned the longstanding ban on the export of Alaskan crude oil. Why that ban? When Congress OK'd the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the seventies, the legislation triumphed by a single vote only after solemn pledges were made that the North Slope oil would always be reserved for domestic markets, available to hold prices down. Congress had on its mind precisely such emergencies as this year's hike in prices and consequent suffering of poor people, soon to be trembling with cold for lack of cheap home-heating oil.

With the help of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, Arco was also, at the start of the Clinton era, in the process of building refineries in China. Hence Clinton's overturn of the export ban was an immense boon to the company, whose CEO at the time, Lodwrick Cook, was given a White House birthday party in 1994. The birthday presents to the favorite oil company of the Clinton/Gore era have continued ever since.

While the Democrats and mainstream Greens fulminate about Bush and Cheney's threat to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nary a word has been mentioned about one of the biggest giveaways in the nation's history, the opening of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. Back at the start of the nineties Arco's Prudhoe Bay reserves on Alaska's North Slope were dwindling. Now Arco will be foremost among the oil companies exploiting a potential $36 billion worth of crude oil.

Gore's "populism" is comical, yet one more facet of a larger mendacity. What suppressed psychic tumult drives him to those stretchers that litter his career, the lies large and small about his life and achievements? You'd think that a man exposed to as much public derision as was Gore after claiming he and Tipper were the model for the couple in Love Story, or after saying he'd invented the Internet, would by now be more prudent in his vauntings. But no. Just as a klepto's fingers inevitably stray toward the cash register, so too does Gore persist in his fabrications.

Recently he's claimed to have been at the center of the action when the strategic oil reserve, in Texas and Louisiana, was established. In fact, the reserve's tanks were filling in 1977, when Gore was barely in Congress, a very junior member of the relevant energy committee. The legislation creating the reserve had been passed in 1975. At around the same time as this pretense, the VP claimed to have heard his mother crooning "Look for the union label" over his cradle. It rapidly emerged that this jingle was made up by an ad man in the seventies, when Al was in his late 20s.

As a clue to why Al misremembers and exaggerates, the lullaby story has its relevance as a sad little essay in wish fulfillment. Gore's mother, Pauline, was a tough character, far more interested in advancing Albert Sr.'s career than in warbling over Gore's cot. Both parents were demanding. Gore is brittle, often the mark of the overly well-behaved, perfect child. Who can forget the panicked performance when his image of moral rectitude shattered at the impact of the fundraising scandals associated with the Buddhist temple in Los Angeles?

"He was an easy child; he always wanted to please us," Pauline once said of him. The child's desire to please, to get the attention of often-absent parents, is probably what sparked Gore's penchant for tall tales about himself.

Gore's official CV is sprinkled with "epiphanies" and claims to having achieved a higher level of moral awareness. In interviews, in his book Earth in the Balance and, famously, in his acceptance speech at the 1992 Democratic convention, Gore has shamelessly milked the accident in which his 6-year-old son was badly hurt after being struck by a car. Gore described how, amid his anguish beside the boy's hospital bed, he peered into his own soul and reproached himself for being an absentee dad. He narrated his entry into family therapy. But Tipper and the children didn't see more of him as a consequence. Despite that dark night of the soul beside Al III's bed, Gore plunged even deeper into Senate business and spent his hours of leisure away from the family, writing Earth in the Balance while holed up in his parents' old penthouse in the Fairfax Hotel. Soon after, he accepted Clinton's invitation to run for Vice President.

Gore's a fibber through and through, just like Bill. A sad experience in the closing weeks of the campaign is to encounter liberals desperately trying delude themselves that there is some political decency or promise in the Democratic ticket. There isn't. Why talk about the lesser of two evils, when Gore is easily as bad as Bush and in many ways worse? The "lesser of two evils" is by definition a matter of restricted choice, like a man on a raft facing the decision of whether to drink seawater or his own urine. But in this election there are other choices, starting with Nader and the Greens. It isn't just a matter of facing seawater or piss.

The contrasting environmental records of Vice President Gore and Governor George W. Bush will be hotly debated during the presidential campaign, but the potential impact of their appointments to the Supreme Court should be of equal, if not greater, concern. If, as President, Bush were to appoint Justices with views similar to those of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the scope and strength of federal environmental law could be gravely weakened.

To date, the Rehnquist Court's environmental record has been mixed. While no darling of the greens, neither has it been consistently "brown." As evidence of the Court's lack of a clear environmental vision, consider two nineties cases brought under the same law--the Endangered Species Act. In Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon (1995), the Court strengthened the act by broadly interpreting the requirement of "harm" necessary to trigger its protections. Although a lower court had interpreted "harm" to mean actions causing the direct injury or death of an endangered species, the Supreme Court broadened the meaning to include indirect actions that impair its essential behavior patterns. In the Sweet Home case, the Court prohibited logging of old-growth forests not because it killed spotted owls but because it destroyed their habitat, jeopardizing their long-term survival. As a result, the Endangered Species Act's reach was significantly extended to cover not only actions likely to cause the injury of a species but the range of actions that adversely modify its habitat. In Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, however (see below), the same Court erected significant obstacles to citizens' suits that seek to enforce the act.

The lack of a consistent pro- or anti-environment stance for the Court as a whole, however, does not mean that particular Justices' decisions in environmental cases have been random. In a recent analysis of the Supreme Court's environmental decisions over the past three decades, Georgetown law professor Richard Lazarus found two current Justices with consistent anti-environmental voting records: Scalia and Thomas. Their anti-environmental votes and the voting patterns of other current (and future) Justices can best be explained by focusing not on their views toward environmental protection per se but rather toward two distinct political issues--separation of powers and the protection of private property rights. As a general matter, Justices who believe in vigorous checks and balances between the branches of government (such as a strong role for the judiciary in reviewing agency action) and the right of government to restrict uses of private property will be more likely to decide in favor of environmental protections. These two predictors become most evident in reviewing the two major fault lines currently running through the law--citizens' access to courts and the scope of private property rights.

Virtually all of our major environmental laws contain citizen-suit provisions, providing a legion of private attorneys general to supplement the government's role in enforcing environmental laws. For citizen suits to vindicate the protections promised by those laws, however, private parties must be able to get into court in the first place. And to do so they must satisfy the requirements of "standing." They must demonstrate (1) that they have suffered an injury in fact; (2) that the injury is the result of an act forbidden under the law; and (3) that the court can provide redress. Primarily because of its narrow view of what constitutes an injury, the Rehnquist Court has until recently made it increasingly difficult for environmental plaintiffs to meet the requirements of standing.

In two of the Court's most significant decisions of the nineties, the Lujan cases, Justice Scalia wrote that plaintiffs must demonstrate specific links of causation between the challenged act and the claimed harm to the plaintiffs. In the case of actions alleged to threaten endangered species, the Court required plaintiffs to show that they had a particular economic or physical connection to the species, expressly ruling out aesthetic or recreational injuries. The net effect was to restrict citizens' access to the courts. Some lower courts have since denied standing to plaintiffs unable to show particularized harm from a polluter's specific discharge. Proving this is well nigh impossible, because it is unusual that a harm resulting from pollution can be traced back to a single source. Usually, the degradation of air and water quality occurs over a long period of extended pollution from multiple sources.

The underlying logic for closing the doors of courts to many environmental concerns lies in separation of powers. Justice Scalia argues that the executive branch, not the public or the courts, is responsible for seeing that the laws are faithfully executed. If citizens are concerned about agencies' poor compliance with statutory mandates they should go to Congress for a legislative fix or to the executive branch for a political resolution. The problem with this pat answer, of course, is that Congress provided for citizen suits expressly to insure that the executive branch did enforce the laws. Recall how Reagan Administration appointee Anne Gorsuch neutered the Environmental Protection Agency.

Recently the Court reversed its holdings on environmental standing in midstride. In Friends of the Earth v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (2000), the Court breathed life into citizen suits, holding that plaintiffs do not have to show an actual physical injury to the environment. Eliminating the need for precise tracing of cause and physical effect, the Court stated that the plaintiff's reasonable concern about the effects of toxic pollutants released by the Laidlaw company on recreational, aesthetic or economic interests was sufficient for standing. This makes it much easier for a plaintiff to demonstrate injury. Justices Scalia and Thomas, it should be noted, strongly dissented.

The second major fault line--protection of private property rights--runs through what are called "takings" cases. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides that private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation. Housing construction along the coastline, for example, can adversely affect the environment by increasing beach erosion. Such use of private property may be restricted for the public benefit of coastal conservation. Yet if the government had to compensate every landowner whose property value diminished as a result of such zoning, the cost of enforcing such restrictions would be prohibitive. The problem for the courts lies in determining when restrictions are so complete and unfair that they constitute a "taking" for which the property owner must be compensated.

The Rehnquist Court has applied the takings clause aggressively and shifted the balance toward greater compensation for property owners. In the important decision Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council (written by Justice Scalia in 1992), for example, the Court required compensation for regulations that deprive the property owner of all economically valuable use of the land unless the government can prove the restriction is necessary to prevent what has traditionally been recognized as a common law nuisance. This not only switched the burden of proof onto the government but, in another part of the opinion, left the door open for lower courts to require compensation for less than total diminution (and some have done so). The net result has been expanded protections for private property owners and cost constraints on legislatures seeking to protect public resources. The case had a slim majority, so new appointments will surely be important in determining the trajectory of takings jurisprudence.

If Governor Bush appoints Justices who share the views of Scalia and Thomas on rigid separation of powers and strong protection of private property rights, the remarkable gains of environmental law over the past three decades will very likely be slowed or even reversed.

London

In Europe this September protest went populist with a vengeance. The truckers and farmers clogging roads and blockading fuel depots across the continent to protest petrol prices were no rainbow brigade of the disaffected but solid citoyens: middle-aged men with mortgages and beer bellies, deck chairs and thermos flasks. Their avatar, if they have one, is Monsieur Poujade, the conservative French bookseller who led a tax revolt of shopkeepers in the fifties and came to represent the political muscle of capitalism's squeezed middlemen. Leaderless, decentralized, linked by Internet and mobile phone, they have borrowed their tactics from the environmental and anticorporate movements of the past few years; so far, their impact has been much more dramatic. In France, where it all began, they quickly secured the promise of a 15 percent cut in fuel duty from Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In Britain they took government and media by surprise, threatened to paralyze the economy and the health service, and pushed the Labour Party down below the Tories in the polls for the first time since 1992.

This strange solidarity of the self-employed produced a rash of political paradoxes. Tabloids that have denounced every demonstration since Cromwell discovered the exhilaration of direct action ("Protest," said the Daily Mail, "is the lifeblood of democracy"). While Margaret Thatcher once demonized striking miners as the enemy within, her young ward William Hague hailed the truckers who stalled the country as "fine, upstanding citizens." And Prime Minister Tony Blair found that strikebusting laws passed by the Iron Lady and gratefully kept on the books were useless in this case, because the men picketing the oil refineries were not unionized. Mechanisms devised to control dissent as the old, industrial Britain was being dismantled are of limited use in the new world of virtual networks and unstable work. The oil refinery pickets numbered less than 2,500 across the country, and at some depots looked more like picnickers than protesters. They were able to bring the system to a halt in part because the tanker drivers who were meant to defy them are themselves contract workers with no fixed loyalties.

Of course, if the oil companies had wanted to break the protest, they would have found a way to do it before you could say Texaco. (Imagine if it had been Greenpeace or striking refinery workers at their gates.) Truckers demanding fuel tax cuts are allies, not enemies, of the oilmen, to whom less tax means more sales and a bigger margin for profits. In fact, the price of fuel has risen by 50 percent over the past eighteen months because the oil-producing countries have pushed up the price of crude; oil company profits have doubled. But though the "Dump the Pump" campaign began in Britain as a movement to boycott BP, it quickly veered right and turned its sights on the government, which claims 76 pence in duty and tax--the highest in Europe--on every pound spent on petrol. (In the States the car lobby won this battle before it was even joined: Americans pay 23 cents on the dollar in tax.) The truckers' crusade is partly an explosion of resentment by middle England against a government that wooed it, promised it the Earth--and now sits smugly in Westminster listening to focus groups and spouting homilies instead of making real improvements in the services everybody uses.

For Tony Blair the fuel crisis was truly the stuff of nightmare, calling up ghoulish memories of 1978's winter of discontent, when industrial action filled city streets with garbage and morgues (they say) with the unburied dead, ushering in the reign of Margaret Thatcher. For one ghastly week, New Labour's chief control freak watched helplessly as the country slid toward chaos and public sympathy flooded to the instigators. The tabloids he had courted cheered on the protesters; the corporate leaders he had buttered up smiled sweetly and averred there was nothing they could do. The mirage of Third Way consensus went up in a puff of diesel. Only Labour's traditional stalwarts, the trade union leaders, came through, helping to negotiate an end to the protest. Perhaps there's a lesson here.

The high tax on fuel (put in place initially by the Conservatives) serves a dual purpose: to raise revenue and to protect the environment. Indirect taxes are rarely progressive; this one falls disproportionately on the rural poor. Contrary to the impression fostered by the government's supporters, not all the fuel protesters are selfish, gas-guzzling throwbacks greedy for a bigger TV. If New Labour could stop pretending that the new Jerusalem can be built without taxing the rich; if it could stop thinking of the environment as an issue for sissies and make the green case for petrol tax (there is a golden opportunity in November's international climate change forum in the Hague); if it could even put real money into public transport and renewable energy, some good might come of this bizarre political moment. Otherwise, a warning has been served. Societies dependent on one privately hoarded commodity are vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail, and the new politics of protest is no longer the exclusive province of the anticorporate left.

NPR's Living On Earth program broadcast a radio version of this story over the weekend of
September 1-3, 2000. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of
the Nation Institute.