Travels on a Dirty Planet

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Traveling east, I began my global tour in Europe. After two months in Holland, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden, I went to what was still the Soviet Union. I continued on to Czechoslovakia, Greece, Turkey, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Thailand, and Brazil, where I visited the Amazon and attended the U.N. Earth Summit in June 1992. I returned to Europe and the United States before concluding my travels in China. I financed my wanderings by traveling light, living low on the food chain, and writing occasional magazine articles from the road.

Scientists have long studied whether various animals are heading for extinction. I wanted to shift the gaze onto my fellow humans and investigate whether we too might be an endangered speices.

"The main piece of bad news at the end of the 20th century is that we humans can now destroy ourselves, in either of two ways," Hubert Reeves told me in Paris near the start of my global journey. "We can destroy ourselves quickly, through nuclear weapons, or slowly, through environmental degradation." Reeves is a cosmologist and best-selling author--a sort of French Carl Sagan--as well as the director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the French government's main science institute. With the Cold War over, Reeves told me he was optimistic that humanity can avoid nuclear self-destruction. He was less sure, however, about the threat posed by global warming, excessive population growth, and other more gradual forms of environmental overload. "This problem will be much more difficult to solve," Reeves said, "because it is so much more complex. You can't just have two men sit down at a table and agree to stop being stupid."

Indeed, many modern environmental hazards are rooted in activities and choices that bring pleasure, profits, paychecks, or simple survival to millions: the production and use of automobiles, the felling of rainforests by landless people, the relentless advertising and consumerism that boost sales figures the world over. Human activity has always taxed the earth's ecosystem. But the scale and technological power of 20th-century civilization are many times greater than those of earlier times, and so are the environmental side effects.

I had spent the hours before my talk with Reeves strolling across Paris, visiting favorite spots. By the time I reached his apartment, the setting sun was casting the city's pale stone facades and black window grilles into late afternoon shadow, and the light had attained that sparkling depth and clarity filmmakers revere as the "magic hour." Amid such testimony to the complementary beauties of the natural and human worlds, Reeves' comments about the two types of self-destruction humanity was courting seemed almost blasphemous to me. But not at all, he replied. For there was a third possibility as well: that humans will learn to live in balance with the natural systems that make our existence possible. Which path we take is an open question, he added, which makes the late 20th century an exciting time to be alive. "The fact that the summit of complexity in the known universe is now threatening itself with extinction is a cosmic drama of enormous proportion!" he exclaimed.

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