Travels on a Dirty Planet

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It was that drama I hoped to observe during my travels. I wanted to see for myself the tropical rainforests that were said to be disappearing at such an alarming rate. I wanted to talk with the people whose farmland was supposedly turning to desert or highways before their very eyes. I wanted to walk through cities whose pollutants were threatening atmospheric disaster. I wanted to interview the scientists, activists, businesspeople, and government officials who were researching these issues and fighting out their policy implications.

I especially wondered what average people around the world think about environmental problems. How much, for example, did residents of Prague, the capital of the most polluted country in Europe, know about ecological threats? In a world overflowing with ethnic conflict and war, not to mention everyday issues like taxes, jobs, and crime, how much urgency do people anywhere feel for ecological damage that might not affect them for decades, if ever? And are things really as bad as environmentalists claim? Is the environmental story a litany of gloom and doom, or is there good news as well?

Of course, none of the ecological hazards in question threatens to end all earthly life--just human life. Modern humans have inhabited the planet for only 200,000 of its estimated 5 billion years; the earth could exist perfectly well without us. The real question is whether we will act quickly enough to save ourselves.

On my way to Brazil from Asia, I stopped off in San Francisco for a few days to visit friends and recover my health (I had been hospitalized for a week in Bangkok after most of my white blood cells abruptly vanished, the victims of contaminated water). After a year of travel, mainly in poor countries, seeing my hometown again was disorienting; I felt like a stranger in a familiar land. The sheer wealth of the place was staggering. With their leather jackets, designer eyeglasses, and stylish haircuts, many San Franciscans were wearing more money than African and Chinese peasants would earn in a lifetime. "Oh, look, peach shoes!" one prosperous shopper cooed to her companion outside a store window on Union Square. "Do you need peach shoes?"

Compare that to life among the Dinka in southern Sudan, where war had propelled the underlying causes of the region's chronic poverty into full-scale famine, and more than once I watched skeletal young children breathe their last. I had left on my journey wondering whether the human species would survive the next hundred years, but in Africa I encountered huge numbers of people for whom surviving the next hundred days was no sure thing. The Dinka were, in fact, a living reminder of the enormous environmental challenges that most humans have faced for untold thousands of years. At the end of the 20th century, the Dinka still live the way that virtually all of us used to live--as hunter-gatherers and small-scale agriculturalists on the edge of survival, with little access to the technologies that have given modern humans the comfortable lives we blithely take for granted.

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