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SPAN The Prophet Faulkner

By Larry Levil1ger

Publisher Hilary Olsin-Windecker

Troubled Waters

By Sandra Postel

Editor Lea Terhw1e

Indian Industry Takes the Initiative

By N. Habibulla

Associate Editor A. Venkata Narayana Editorial Assistant K. Muthukwnar

Planet of Weeds

By David Quammen

Art Director Suhas Nimbalkar Deputy Art Director Hemam Bhatnagar Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services AIRC Documentation Services, American Information Resource Center

Polar Meltdown

By Charles W. Petit

High & Dry

By Jim Doberty

A Cyber Gateway to Indian Agriculture

By Dinesh C. Shatma

U.S. Election 2000 Do it on the WebA Netizen's Guide Front cover: American scientists dig for evidence of microbacteria in icebergs of the Antarctic Peninsula. See story on page 25.

Photograph by Jim Lo Scalzo.

Making the Chips that Run the World

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Published by the Public Affairs Section, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 11000 I (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. No part of this magazine lllay be reproduced without the prior permission of the Editor. For permission write to the Editor.

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By Jake Page

A Century of Political Cartoons n. Marschall

By Richard

Consular Focus

By Amit Cbandra

A LETTER

FROM

onsoon

is ending and the invigorating

season

lies ahead. This issue's cover story

M

takes us

THE

cool

first president

the effects

Meltdown."

of

The

Quammen,

climate

change

companion

piece

Jim Lo

degradation

David

from a different

angle, positing

Political Cartoons"

dut enliven our existence are gone, leaving only the hearty

influenced

American

Republican

presidential

are hard to con-

that d1ey are contemplated,

if we are to salvage the beauties of our planet from what may consummate weed, Homo Japiells," according to Quammen.

"'Bert' lit,

toonist

Herblock's

while discussing (:OIll.,S

to elections.

by Richard

"weeds." These realities and probabilities

be "the

sites

hi.story, me political parties,

on the block when it comes ways the cartoonist,

but it is imperative

and find out

me candidates, me issues. High tech is me new kid of

what life will be like when the many plant and animal species

template

ovember.

"Do it on me Web" discusses useful Internet _ mat explain it all-me

"Planet of Weeds," tackles the implications

environmental

I

about how the American political machine operates,

in "Polar by

this

out d1e charges and counter-charges,

Scalzo follow scientists in their search for me trum about

of the millennium

The question is, who will it be? If you want to sort

to a major source of cool, d1e Antarctic.

Aud10r Charles W Petit and photographer

EDITOR

"A Century

E. Marschall

recounts

mat astute political commentator, politics.

When

nominee

Richard

has

Nixon

was

he felt me sting of car-

pen so keenly dut¡ he reportedly campaign

ow"

of me

said,

strategy, "I have to erase the

Herblock image." If true, note cartoon historians Hess and Kaplan in

always brings water

meir study The Ullgmtiemall!y Art, "it

into focus. And, with each successive

was me first time since 1884 mat a

year, me problems

candidate ran for President

The monsoon

with water seem

to dominate me news more frequent-

cartoonist."

ly. Water will be among d1e biggest

doomed

issues

James G. Blaine in 1884.)

of

d1e coming

century.

already is. Water management subject

of

"Troubled

It

is d1e

Waters,"

(A notorious

d1e Republican

Keeping

by

"Making

against a cartoon candidate

apace wid1 technology, the

Chips

that

Run

me

Sandra Postel, who examines the his-

World," by Jake Page, gets us inside

tory of water management,

Intel to see what those folks in high-

me glob-

al water crisis we all face, and offers

tech boiler suits who gyrate in the

some solutions. "The fact that water

Intel ads actually do for a living. Still

is essential

with

to life lends an ethical

the

eyber

scene,

Dinesh

C.

dimension to every decision we make

Sharma writes of a project to bring

about how it is used, managed

information

distributed,"

she

says.

In

and

India,

Internet

USAID is collaborating wid1 the government

and the private

bring a revolutionary

sector

to

tells me story in "Indian

Industry Takes the Initiative."

Gateway

to

Indian Agriculture."

For me literary, we offer a reassess-

\vater manage-

ment project into being at Tirupur.

I . Habibulla

to Indian farmers via the

in ''A Cyber

â&#x20AC;˘.n-or-~~';; ----Herblock's 1954 cartoon of Nixon appeared in the Washington Post.

From me gelid and wet we move

ment

of

Faulker writes

\vriter William

by Larry Levinger, in "The

Prophet

mat d10ugh considered when

to me hot and arid in "High & Dry," by Jim Doherty, illus-

Southern

published,

"

'\vho

Faulkner" outrageous

owadays

the

dark and extreme world he portrayed is commonplace."

This

trated wim stunning photos of one of America's natural trea-

profile may make you want to head to me bookshelf

and

sures. The Staircase-Escalante

revisit Yoknapatawpha

Monument

in Utah is a study

in what me passage of aeons in a land swept by wind and

Rounding out me issue is our new regular feature "Consular Focus." W/e hope our autumn offerings please you.

water can do.

2000 is a leap year, and every leap year is a presidential election year in the United States. Americans

Coumy.

will elect the

4~~ /

The

Prophet

ullmer

He was ignored for f~. much of his own time) \\ though at last acknowle楼ged with a Nobel Prize. Reassessed in the present) William Faulkner speaks of the ills of our time with an authority and penetration that few contemporary writers can match.

nMosquitoes (1927), William Faulkner wrote, " 'I think he was crazy. Not dangerous: just crazy.' " 'What was his name? Did he tell you?' '" Yes. It was ....Wait.. ..Oh, yes: I remember-Faulkner, that was it.' " That was it all right. When Faulkner died, 35 years later, William Styron, riding in the funeral cOliege, reckoned with just how fierce and probing the novelist's craziness could be. The whole of Faulkner's "maddened, miraculous vision of life wrested ...out of nothingness" came "swarming" into Styron's mind with a "sense of utter reality." Marshall Frady described the experience of reading Faulkner as "turning to find oneself looking full into the face ofthe sun ....Faulkner is an experience that a lot of Southern boys spend the rest of their lives trying to recover from." Southern girls, too. Flannery O'Connor wrote, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."

What is it about Faulkner that so arouses writers, chafes and teases critics (some 1,300 books have been written about him), and moves even casual readers to love or hate his work? Toward what betterment can his ferocious imagination tempt us, and how is it that 38 years after his death and almost 50 years after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he is more than ever a writer for today?

When Faulkner's disturbing novels surfaced in the 1930s, he was considered dark and extreme. Nowadays the dark and extreme world he portrayed路 is commonplace. E.M. Forster wrote that a prophetic author raises "human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them." By such expansion and amplification the prophetic Faulkner took his "little postage stamp of native soil"-Oxford, Mississippiand turned it into a mirror of the modern age.

Faulkner's native soil has today been commandeered by upscale boutiques and shopping malls, but in his youth Oxford, a university town in the hill country of Lafayette County, llO kilometers southeast of Memphis, Tennessee, was a village of unpaved streets with a population of about 1,500. If you stepped off the town square, you were in the woods. Faulkner played and later hunted in those woods, attended local schools, worked as an apprentice in his father's livery store and as a bookkeeper in his grandfather's bank. He joined the Royal Air Force in Canada during World War 1. After the war he returned to Oxford, where he studied at the University of Mississippi, wrote poems, and worked as a carpenter and a house painter (swinging out precariously from ropes, friends recall, when he painted the steeple of the university's geology

I

building). When a friend got him a job as a clerk at the Doubleday bookshop in New York, for $11 a week, Faulkner went north, delighted to be a vagabond. "Hell," said his uncle, an Oxford judge, "he ain't ever going to amount to a damn-not a damn."

At first the 24-year-old Faulkner was a good book salesman who charmed his customers; soon, however, he was advising them not to read the "trash" they had selected. Unhappy with the job, he returned to Oxford, where he was offered a place as fourth-class postmaster at the University of Mississippi, at a salary of $1 ,500 a year. He failed at this, too: he was forced to resign for throwing away mail, failing to deliver holiday hams on time (they spoiled), keeping magazines until he'd read them, or closing down the post office early to drive out in his yellow Model T Ford for a round of golf.

Relieved of his postmasterjob, Faulkner made his way to New Orleans, where in time he was introduced to Sherwood Anderson, who warned him, "You've got too much talent.

You can do it too easy, in too many different ways. If you're not careful, you'll never write anything."

Anderson, a writer of poetFaulkner captured the ry, essays, short-story colmind of the modern sociopath lections (Winesburg, Ohio), and novels (Dark Laughter), long beftre his deeds encouraged Faulkner to try became the awful stuff his hand at fiction. Faulkner moved into Anderson's of the 11 o)clock news. apartment on the Vieux Carre. There he wrote sketches for the TimesPicayune and labored at his fiction. Visitors to Anderson's apartment were impressed by Faulkner's "beautiful manners, his soft speech, his controlled intensity and his astonishing capacity for hard drink."

When Faulkner produced his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), Anderson arranged to have the book published, after which Faulkner left New Orleans on a freighter bound for Italy. He tramped through Europe for six months, eventually returning to Oxford. Soldiers' Pay was printed and it would soon be forgotten. He was 28, and about as unemployable as a man could be.

But he was working on two novels, Sartoris (1929) and The Sound and the Fury (I 929), that would transform him as an artist, and American literature with him. The Sound and the Fury would give him his language and his sense of time; Sartor is would give him his terrain.

The Sound and the Fury is the story of the dissolution of an old southern family told from multiple points of view, its characters drifting through layers of time . It was the beginning of the Faulkner of simultaneity, the creator of characters captured by unclear divisions between remembered time and present time. It was, too, the beginning of the Faulknerian obsessions: pride, lust, incest, greed, violence, endurance. And it was the beginning of a devotion to the craft of writing that would sustain the novelist through rejection, misinterpretation and poverty. The

Sound and the Fury taught Faulkner to approach language "with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite," and it taught him to write for the sake of writing itself: "One day it suddenly seemed as if a door had clamped silently and forever. ..between me and all publishers' addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write."

Sartoris was the first of Faulkner's interconnecting novels about life in a fictional Mississippi county he called Yoknapatawpha and its central town, Jefferson. Yoknapatawpha, pronounced Yak-nuh-pa- TAR-fah or Yat-nuh-pa- TAH-fah and, Faulkner said, meaning "water runs slow through flat land," embodied a South once ruled by baron planters, aristocrats like the Sartoris clan. They had developed a society and an economy based on territory stolen from the Indians and on slavery, which put a curse upon the land. The baron planters lived by principles that led them into secession and civil war, and lost them everything. When the war was over, they tried to restore their way of life, but carpetbaggers, landless whites, and the collapse of the slave-based economic system made. that impossible.

Faulkner's post-Civil War South was populated by Snopeses, unscrupulous, materialistic self-seekers with a disregard for the worthy values of the Old South-politeness, family ties, honor, Jove of the land. The result was moral confusion and social decay, with the old families adrift in the past, rendered impotent, and with the Snopeses made hard by ambition and knee-deep in corruption. Yoknapatawpha supplied Faulkner's novels with a big canvas on which to explore what he called the human heart's "driving complexity," and made of his South a universal setting. uring some twenty years with the Oxford Eagle (eventually as its owner and editor), Nina Goolsby had occasion to see William Faulkner, whom she felt was "a beautiful man, soft-spoken, never in a hurry, kind and considerate."

Nina's husband, J.C., was the service manager of the East Motor Company Garage, where he repaired Faulkner's Ford. Faulkner was not a reliable customer. "He ran up a bill," Nina told me when I visited Oxford some years ago. "Around fifteen hundred dollars' worth. And J.e. had to go on up to his home and try to get paid on the car. He ran up a pile of bills down at Neilson's department store, too, and at McCall's spol1ing goods. He wrote on one of them, 'I can't pay this now but someday this signature'll be worth more than I owe you.' He was right, but nobody would have dreamed it at the time. People around here didn't know what a Nobel Prize was until he won it."

Faulkner, Nina told me, came down to the Eagle office some afternoons and watched the children exit the Oxford Grammar School, across the street. "No notes," she remembered, "just watching those children." Faulkner, it is said, related better to children (and horses) than to adults. And he often used children he observed as characters in his stories. The illliocent child character Benjy, in The Sound and the Fury, is thought to have been modeled on a mentally retarded boy who lived nearby.

"Watch people," Faulkner advised young writers, "never judge ...watch what they do, without intolerance ... learn."

D

But this took a particular kind of sight.

Tennessee Williams said of an encounter with Faulkner, "He looked slowly up, and his eyes were so incredibly sad that I, being a somewhat emotional person, began to cry uncontrollably.

I have never seen such sad eyes on a human face." A friend of Faulkner's described the novelist's eyes as burning "through the flesh and bone of everybody in front of him, seeing clearly down into the ultimate emptiness that is in most of us."

People who went to grammar school with Faulkner remember that he stood around during recess and lunch hour watching the other kids play. "He would stand for long periods of time and just concentrate without saying anything to anyone," a former classmate recalls. Faulkner employed this talent for survey and detection to create, and store for later use, scenes-glimpses, reallyof a powerfully evocative nature, which he often used as openings to his novels. The Sound and the Fury "began with a mental picture," Faulkner wrote in an introduction to the novel, "of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother's funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below."

He explained, "There's always a moment, an incident...I work away from it, finding out how people act after that moment."

Faulkner was a master at presenting a common incident with an uncommon image, and this-along with the publication of his powerful sixth novel, Sanctuary-accounts for Hollywood's interest in him. Faulkner was invited out to Hollywood to write for the screen, but he was so broke he asked to borrow five dollars from his uncle in order to wire Hollywood that he would come. He worked on dialogue and scenes for The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and other movies.

Hollywood wasn't exactly a fit for Faulkner. "I've got an idea for Mickey Mouse," he told his boss, and he once asked Clark Gable what he did for a living. When he turned in his first scene for The Big Sleep, it was two pages long, single-spaced, for one character to speak. "Impossible," Lauren Bacalliater remarked, "totally impossible on the screen .... Howard [Hawks} kind of chuckled, and Bogey kind of chuckled." Faulkner, rumors were, once asked his producer if he could work at home. The producer agreed. A few weeks went by with no word from Faulkner. He had checked out of his hotel. For Faulkner, home was Mississippi. n average, a movie consists of 132 scenes. A skilled filmmaker carefully selects scenes that will invite the viewer into the role of a collaborator to complete the story. Film addresses the viewer's eye-the way the eye supplies what isn't in the story. But writing is about the writer:S eye-the way it supplies what is in the story. Faulkner's eye saw life as a

O

river running in the dark, and he felt that the best he could do was shine a light on its veering surface. Faulkner held the light unflinchingly until the "complex and troubled hearts" carried along by the river revealed that there was "no such thing as was ...no such thing as will be." Consequently, life "must be before itself' while "in advance of itself." The novelist's jobthe one Faulkner designed for himself-was to "arrest motion," to capture time in an "inconclusive and inconcludable" sentence, one in which "human experience" is "reduced to literature." This was impossible, he knew, but he was compelled to try it anyway.

It was his ambition to put everything into one sentence-"not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present second by second." Thus, famously, in his 1942 story "The Bear," Faulkner conceived an I,800-word sentence.

But there was peril in such floods of language: that they could

turn swiftly to "talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words." Or it could, as Faulkner thought it did in the work of James Joyce, consume a writer in the "divine fire" of his own talent out of control. The language had to rise naturally from the thoughts and actions of characters who suffer, usually by their own hand, but suffer for the sake of, and in the rectifYing light of, a universal conscience that intrudes on the present and sustains, for better or worse, human nobility. To accomplish this task Faulkner entered so deeply into his characters that he passed through them, leaving them bare for absorption by the reader.

The monk and writer Thomas Merton said of Faulkner's characters that as they become "worthy by suffering," the reader realizes "That's me"-realizes it because he remembers it. What kind of memory is this? One that "believes before knowing remembers," Faulkner wrote in Light in August. "Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders." Not memory as we think of it-a data bank-but what Melton called a wisdom not our own. Not selective recall but the sense of union

with which we enter the world and with which, perhaps, we'll leave it.

How a self-taught and compulsive experimenter with words who lived in a backwater southern town in the 1930s could become the century's herald of such mysteries is a mystery in itself. Faulkner himself regarded his gift as both a curse and a blessing. He had "discovered," he wrote, "that my doom, my fate, was to keep on writing the books." He agreed to that fate because he realized that he had to get the books written while "the demon" that drove him still considered him "worthy of, or deserving of, the anguish of being driven."

Faulkner was a high school dropout who dabbled in college courses at the University of Mississippi. He was given a D in English there, and a university literary society rejected him for membership.

Even after he began to write in earnest, delivering brooding, complex and shocking stories and novels, he remained no more interested in the literary locals than they were in him. Not until 1947, when Faulkner was nearing 50, did the university invite him to give a series of lectures to creativewriting students. He agreed, but asked that no faculty members be present. When some faculty members arrived to chat after one of the lectures, Faulkner said, "Gentlemen, I have a cow to let out ofthe pasture," and left. A few years later the university voted against awarding him an honorary degree. It reconsidered when he received the Nobel Prize, but never got around to actually awarding it.

So Faulkner worked without a literary community, without support, even without a dictionary. He often made up words as he went along~joining unassociated ones, eliminating apostrophes, changing nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. If he had to know a word, he'd go down to the Gathright-Reed drugstore, on the town square, and ask the proprietor, Mac Reed, to look up the word for him in the dictionary that Reed kept at the store.

Sometimes Faulkner would approach children, saying, "I'm looking for a word. It means the same as 'running fast' but I don't want to use 'running fast.' " He taught himself what to do with words outside the confines of formal education, because inside them he could learn only what not to do with words. If he wanted to create characters who "stood up on their hind legs and cast a shadow," he wasn't going to do it in a setting where writing was a device for measuring task-worthiness. He learned literature in isolation. Some say his isolation begat the unique writing he produced. That's true, but it is also true that his independence, inventiveness and creative gifts were prodigious. And he read. Without apparent cohesion or direction, he read the Old Testament, Dickens, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Balzac, Joyce, Melville, Spencer, Homer, Swinburne, Shelley, Keats, Housman, Conrad. aulkner learned especially from Conrad, though what he learned he made uniquely his own. Like the protagonist of Conrad's Lord Jim, Faulkner's characters violate the rules of decency and honor. Like Jim, many of them are deluded and disgraced; many are obsessed with notions about naming or claiming something in this life, and are shattered when fate overtakes them. In their uncertainty, unpredictability, violence and narcissism, his characters struggle with what Faulkner called "the old verities and truths of the hearL.love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Without such a struggle, Faulkner believed, one is divorced from the "edifice on which the whole history of man has been founded" and by means of which "as a race he has endured." As such, one is dangerous to the American ideal: "That's what I am talking about: responsibility," Faulkner remarked in a speech to his fellow Mississippians, "not just the right, but the duty of man to be responsible .. .if he wishes to remain free ... responsible for the consequences of his own acts ... lacking which, freedom and liberty and independence cannot even exist."

Motee Daniels, who was Faulkner's bootlegger, never read any of his customer's books. "Hell," Daniels told me during one of my visits to Oxford, "you can't eat a book. Faulkner liked to starve from writing. We all thought him a damn fool here. He's worth more now that he's dead than when he was alive."

Chester McLarty, who was Faulkner's physician, told me that most people in Oxford didn't understand Faulkner's books, didn't agree with them, or didn't read them. "You see," McLarty said, "people in Oxford never figured out William. Sometimes he spoke, most times not. And country folk set great store in speaking on the street."

F

For Faulkner, speaking on the street, or at all, depended on whether he was in Yoknapatawpha County, which he invented, or Lafayette County, where he lived; in Jefferson, his fictional town, or in Oxford, the real town it represented. He lived in the world ofYoknapatawpha during the creation of 17 interconnecting books, whose settings ranged from the days of the Indians to World War II and beyond. Faulkner went so deep into that world that he had trouble leaving it. Often he had to drink himself out.

And going into that would cost him in other ways. Most of the time he couldn't pay his grocery bill, and the grocer, among other local businessmen, was forever sending somebody out to his house to hunt him down. Faulkner was used to this, and to other unannounced visitors, so when one drove up the driveway, he began sweeping it like a workhand.

"Where's Faulkner?" the visitor would inquire.

And Faulkner, in overalls and a straw hat, head down, following the swish and swoop of his broom along the driveway, would answer, "Ain't seen 'im. Been here sweepin' all dayan' I ain't seen 'im a-tall."

Faulkner was regarded by his fellow townsmen as "Count 0 Count," a man often overdrawn at the bank and often in debt (the local sporting-goods store refused his check for three dollars), regarded as a man who wrote books all but one of which were by 1944 out of print in his own country. When, after as long a stretch of writing as 12 hours, Faulkner walked to town for his mail, his Borkum-Edgeworth tobacco, and a copy of the MemphiS Commercial Appeal, he was reckoned a loser, a drunk, a man self-absorbed to the point of haughtiness, who failed to perform the most minor couliesies-a nod or a "Good afternoon." And those books he had written-they were inspired by stories common to the region, stories Daddy had told by firelight in the cool of winter. And here Faulkner had gone and exposed those stories to outsiders, exposed Oxford in his mythical Yoknapatawpha, his mythical Jefferson-"publ icized their lives," one resident put it. Worse, he'd made of the South, of southerners, made of his own, a scandalous, fallacious portrait.

And as if that weren't enough, on his small and unsuccessful farm he provided food for Negro families and the right to profit from the land they worked.

Chester McLarty told me, "See, Bill was a shy man. A great man can be shy. But he was peculiar, eccentric-went to a Jot of trouble to be eccentric. Now, you get a pot boiling here, like the kind Bill Faulkner was heating up with his books, and the town is going to take offense."

The writer Elizabeth Spencer described Faulkner as "one of us," yet one exposing us to people elsewhere with story after story, drawn from the South's own private skeleton c1oset...the hushed-up family secret, the nice girl who wound up in the Memphis whorehouse, the suicides, the idiot brother kept at home, the miserable poveliy and ignorance of the poor whites ...the revenge shootings, the occasional lynchings, the real life of the blacks. What was this man trying to do?

He was trying to do his "duty." In his Nobel speech Faulkner made clear his beliefthat the writer's obligation was to help man "endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past." Anything less than this was no reason to write. And there was plenty of writing without reason around. "The young man or woman writing today," Faulkner said in that speech, "has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about.. ..He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid ... leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the he31i...lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed ....Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope ....His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the he31i but of the glands."

Faulkner liked sausage and biscuits, country-cured (Paulkner liked to starve ham, "tubfuls" of turnip from writing. 1# all greens, fried cornmeal with thought him a damn fool butter and molasses-and here. He)s worth more collards and coon, too. He liked to hunt raccoons (and now that he)s dead than also frogs and water mocwhen he was alive.)) casins) with a .22 rifle. He'd go out into Big Woods at night, alone, with his compass and his gun. Or he'd ride the river in a boat and shoot raccoons while they fed on clams. For breakfast ~aulkner liked fruit, eggs and broiled steak.

He'd rise early, eat his hearty breakfast, and drink great quantities of coffee; then he'd gather his tobacco and pipe and go to his writing room, with its big windows and its hearth, where he would remove the doorknob and carry it inside with him. There he wrote by hand on large sheets of paper that had ample margins for revisions. When he had what he wanted, he typed it with two fingers on an old Underwood pOliable. It is remarkable that he produced so much material by this method. In a mere four years he published Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932). It is remarkable, too, that he produced what he did without either much success or literary support, writing for nearly 11 years with little recognition or money. How was this possible?

By "writing the books for the sake of writing the books."

When he was broke, when nearly all his novels were out of print, when he was down, doubtful, he kept on writing, Not, he confessed, "for any exterior or ulterior purpose." It was his ambition, he avowed, "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books ...that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died."

Once, at a dinner party Faulkner was attendin!S, a polite man pulled a dining chair out for one 9f the women, who, talking with another guest, was unawaretliatThe had done so. She fell to the floor, surprised and chagrined. "Faulkner sat down on the floor with her. The gesture-noble, tender, humane-was much in character. Faulkner could not abide harm or diminislm1ent. He preferred to get down on the floor with the fallen. That's where he found his muse.

The fallen South of Faulkner's fictiou is, Chestei' McLarty assured me, an accurate picture, though McLarty neVer heard of anybody's getting raped with a corncob, as happens in Sanctuary. A scathing depiction of dehumanized modern man, Sanctuary sold more copies in three weeks than The Sound and the FUlY sold in two years. SanctuGly was intended to shock readers, and it succeeded. Upon reading the manuscript, Faulkner's publisherremarked.

"Good God, I can't publish this.

We'd both be in jail.'~ Ads for Sanctumy descri bed it as "a mosaic of furious evil, of cold brutality, of human viciousness and human hopelessness."

George Raft, a veteran actor in gangster roles, declined a part in the movie on the grounds that it would mean "professional suicide." Critics were divided. One called Sanctuary a work of ""prodigious genius"; another called it a "devastating, inhuman monstrosity.;' The New York Tirifes Teviewed the book in a piece titled "Dostoevsky's Shadow in the Detp South." A few

Once considered trashy and

months after the review, when Bennett Cerf, at Random House, asked

extreme) Sancruaryreads today like realism ra}her th6MJFaulkner to contribute Southern gothic 'Which is why Sanctuary to The Modern . .) .

Library series.

Faulkner some cntz,cs are re-evaluattng asked CeTf to "send me what it) placing it among Dostoyefsky [sic] you have FauZkner)s greatest works. in the list...l will appreciate-it

velY much. J have seen several reviews of my books in which a Dostoyefsky influence was found. I have never read Dostoyefsky, and so I would like to see the animaL" Sanctuaty was the talk of Oxford, and although few of Faulkner's townsmen bought his books, the ones who did sent their servants down to Mac Reed's dru&s,tore for copies, or had them wrapped in plain paper before they left the store. In the story a college student, TempleDrake, a tease and a troublemaker, is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. Nine mm,del'S are mentioned, along with voyeurism, incest and sadism.

Faulkner wrote Sanctuary after having "made a thorough and methodical study of everything on the list of best-sellers. When I thought I knew whatthe publicwanted," he said, "I decided to give them a little more. than they"had been getting."

That decision set the tone for much of what Faulkner wrote from then on. In fact, one friend remarked that Faulkner was writing Sanctuary over and over again. If so, it was because he

was seeing the story over and over again-a story of violence, corruption, obsession, abuse. "Billy looks around him," Faulkner's mother once said of him, "and he is heartsick at what he sees." In effect, what Faulkner decided to give the public, the public was already giving him.

The origins of Sanetumy are two stories Faulkner had heard, one about an impotent gangster named Popeye Pumphrey who had raped a woman with a freakish device and held her hostage in a Memphis bordello. The other was about a popular University of Mississippi coed who, while traveling by train to an out-oftown ball game, left the train and was sexually defiled. Faulkner pieced in other characters and plot lines, and conjoined the whole. He tried more than a hundn~d pages at different places in the story, and tried 16 of 27 chapters in different arrangements.

When the galleys arrived, Faulkner still felt the book was "cheaply approached" and "badly written.'~ So he tore it apart again. What had started out as a potboiler became a haunting meditation on the nature of evil.

"It's hOlTible," Faulkner's wife t01d him. "It's meant to be," he replied. He was convinced that the novel mirrored society-a society under "the power of darkness," as one critic put it. In an introduction to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner called on southern writers not "to draw a savage indictment of the contemporary scene or to escape from it into a make':believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds" but to speak of modern life with "that cold intellect which can write with calm and complete detachment." In Sanetumy he was able to do just that.

Sanctumy put Faulkner on the map. It didn't make him a household name, but the book made a buzz in the publishing industry, and it got Hollywood's attention. The money he made in Hollywood allowed him to make repairs on the two hectares and the much-neglected 1840s colonial house he had bought for $6,000 (nothing down, $75 a month). Neveltheless, he brooded on the nature and the origins of SanctuGI)'. as he had some years earlier when he began writing what would become th~novel's ending. Back then (1925) he had wondered, "Did that ugly rattylooking face, that mixture of childiS'bness and unreliability and sublime vanity, imagine that? But r did ... J listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right. Sometimes I don't like what the voices say, but J don't change it." aulkner was hardly alone in his uneasiness about wlIat the voices had told him to say. For decades after its publication Sanctuary was considered" trashy and extreme. Lately, though, critical opinion has shifted, as the world has. Sanctuary reads today like realism rather tban Southern gothic, which is why, perhaps, some critics are re-evaluating it, placing it among Faulkner's greatest works.

"From beyond the screen of bushes which surrounded the spring," the novel begins, "Popeye watched the man drinking ...the drinking man leaned his face to the broken and myriad reflection of his own drinking. When he rose up he saw among them the shattered reflection of Popeye's straw hat, though he had heard no sound." This is classic Faulkner-an

F

image captured as if on film, and packed with the menacing and the tranquil: with the tension between the soundlessness of Popeye's presence and the bubbling water, between sunlight broken by the foliage of cypress, gum and beech trees and Popeye's face, "a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light."

The two men face each otl:J.er,the stream oetween them-an image that echoes throughout,Sanctua;j,;1'iveryone in the novel faces someone else across a stream of some kind. Popeye is cold, sadistic and murderous, his violence a manifestation of his impotence; the other man, Horace Benbow, is charitable, benign, principled, even respectable-and these are manifestations of his impotence, though he knows it. "You see," says BenbO\'I, a lawyer, a man on the run from a marriage, a man sexually drawn to his sister and young stepdaughter, "1 lack courage: that was left out of me. The machiJ;lery is all here, but it wont run."

Popeye squats, facing the kneeling Benbow across the stream.

Something in Popeye's coat pocket sags "compactly against his flank." It is a pistol. Faulkner tells us that the pistol is like a body part. You can "feel it on him."

"Look here," Benbow says. "My name is Horace Benbow ....you can keep mebere like this ....Suppose 1 break and run."

Popeye peers at Benbow, the features ofbis face intermittently disappearing, "like the face of·a wax doll set too near a hot fIre." He peers with "viciQuS cringing," through eyes like "two knobs of soft black rubber." His face has the "depthless quality of stamped tin."

The two men leave the stream and walk, Popeye with a silent, menacing power over Benbow; for Popeye never draws the pistol. The men arrive at a broken-down antebellum plantation house, where a man named Lee Goodwin and his woman, Ruby Lamar, assisted by Popeye, a feeble-minded man named Tommy, an old man both blind and deaf, and two gangsters, run a bootlegging operation. Ruby, who once whored to get Goodwin freed from prison, keeps a listless, sickly baby in a box near the kitchen stbve, No small challenge to ~humanize these hard cases, but Faulkner did so. Not, however, before he had his say about them.

And it is not a pretty say.

TempleDrake and her companion, Gowan Stevens, potential lovers on their way to a college ball game and a pat1y weekend, head for the old plantation house to buy booze. On the way Gowan, who is drunk, crashes into a tree that Popeye has felled in order to block the road. At the house Temple stops, sensing evil. (In Light in August, Faulkner wrote of the female's "spontaneous comprehension of eviL") "I don't want to go there," she says, but she goes anyway, exploring the house with a hysteria so complete that the reader is overwhelmed by her duality-her resistance to and infatuation with the depravity she intuits.

When Temple meets Popeye, she, like Horace Benbow at the stream, instantly senses his menace. Popeye is always "lurking," his presence a "black and nameless threat." He is deviated nature, the balance and interaction of its opposites mutant, combined. Faulkner created a character both ice and fire, inelt and

combustible. Sensing Popeye's nearness, Temple runs in panic; then she whirls, stops, runs again, but returns to the house. She will be delivered to llopeye on the momentum of her alienation, obstinacy and rebeJIion.

Before Temple is raped, Ruby Lamar wams-her'to leave the plantation house, but she won't go. "Something is going to happen to me," Temele says. But she says it to the old, man who is blind and deaf. When Tommy tries to protect Temple, Popeye kills him. With Tommy out of the way, Popeye rapes Temple with the cOlUcob. Later he imprisons her in a brothel, where he brings a gangster to have sex with her so tbat he, Popeye, can watch. Temple tells Popeye that the gangster is a real man, Popeye then kills the gangster. Temple's defiance and Popeye's evil are extensions of each other. Connected by the victimizations of their pasts, which assign them tbe familiar roles of victim and victimizer'vsthey performl their parts with unconscious and escalating precision. nSanctuary, FaulkneL captured tl).e mind of the modern sociopath long Defore his deeds-a form of relationship to the community-became the awful stuff of the 11 o'clock news. Faulkner saw in the perverse relations between Popeye and Temple a twisted substitute for connection in the modern world, a world in which everyon.e was hostage to someone or ' something: hostage jobs, maniages, religions; hostage notions about race and gendel~ self and' w~lth, prerogative and power; social and sexual hostages; child hOstages in hOmes or communities; but mostly people held hostage by the past, individual and cultural, their behavior determined by both, creating new hostages with new pasts that hold both them and others captive.

Faulkner meant SanctuaJ)! as a metaphor not just for the South but for the American century during which he lived. He saw a crippled, unjust, morally and communally conupt society, sexually confused and obsessed, as cool and cut off as its cold machines. In such a society everyone is on the v€\rge of violence-and this was something h,e knew a lot about.

In 1849 Faulkner's great-grandfather, ColonelWilJiam Clark Falkner (who dropped the u), was attacked by a man named Robert Hindman. Refused membership in the local chapter of the Knights ofTemperauce, Hindman believed that the co lone was responsible, and pulled a revolver on him. There was a struggle, the revolver misfired, and Falkner killed Hindman with a bowje knife.

Some called it murder. The jury called it self-defense. Two years later Falkner was confronted by "a friend of Hindman's, Erasmus Morris. Tbe ,folonel shqfil'and killed Morris, and was"' again acquitted.

Forty years later Falkner was killed by Richard Thurmond, a disgruntled former partner in his railroad business. Passing by Thurmond's office, the colonel stopped and, some say, peered through Thurmond's window, and reached into his pocket.

Thurmond didn't wait to fmd out why. He fired his .44 point-blank.

Faulkner's father, Murry, embroiled in a set-to between a girl

I

(Continued

on page 17)

TROUBlED

I

nJune 1991, after a leisurely lunch in the fashionable Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Dupont Circle, Alexei Yablokov, then a Soviet parliamentarian, told me something shocking. Some years back he had had a map hanging on his office wall depicting Soviet central Asia without the vast Aral Sea. Cartographers had drawn it in the 1960s, when the Aral was still the world's fourth-largest inland body of water.

I felt for a moment like a cold war spy to whom a critical secret had just been revealed. The Aral Sea, as I knew well, was drying up. The existence of such a map implied that its ongoing destruction was no accident. Moscow's central planners had decided to sacrifice the sea, judging that the two rivers feeding it could be put to more valuable use irrigating cotton in the central Asian desert. Such a planned elimination of an ecosystem nearly the size of Ireland was surely one of humanity's more arrogant acts.

Four years later, when I traveled to the Aral Sea region, the Soviet Union was no more; the central Asian republics were now independent. But the legacy of Moscow's policies lived on: 35 years of siphoning the region's rivers had decreased the Aral's volume by nearly two-thirds and its surface area by half I stood on what had once been a seaside bluff outside the former port town of Muynak, but I could see no water. The sea was 40 kilometers away. A graveyard of ships lay before me, rotting and rusting in the dried-up seabed. Sixty thousand fishing

David Goldes, Vortex #1, 1995, gelatin silver print.

jobs had vanished, and thousands of people had left the area. Many of those who remained suffered from a variety of cancers, respiratory ailments and other diseases.

Winds ripping across the desert were lifting tens of millions of tons of a toxic salt-dust chemical residue from the exposed seabed each year and dumping it on surrounding croplands and villages. Dust storms and polluted rivers made it hazardous to breathe the air and drink the water.

The tragedy of the Aral Sea is by no means unique. Around the world countless rivers, lakes and wetlands are succumbing to dams, river diversions, rampant pollution and other pressures. Collectively they

underscore what is rapidly emerging as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the decades to come: how to satisfy the thirst of a world population pushing nine billion by the year 2050, while protecting the health of the aquatic environment that sustains all terrestrial life.

The problem, though daunting, is not insurmountable. A number of technologies and management practices are available that could substantially reduce the amount of water used by agriculture, industry and households. But the sad reality is that the rules and policies that drive water-related decisions have not adequately promoted them. We have the ability to provide both people and ecosystems with the water they need for good health, but those goals need to be elevated on the political agenda. bserved from space, our planet seems wealthy in water beyond measure. Yet most of the earth's vast blueness is ocean, far too salty to drink or to irrigate most crops. Only about 2.5 percent of all the water on earth is freshwater, and two-thirds of that is locked away in glaciers and ice caps. A minuscule share of the world's water-less than one-hundredth of 1 percent-is both drinkable and renewed each year through rainfall and other precipitation.

And though that freshwater supply is renewable, it is also finite. The quantity available today is the same that was available when civilizations first arose thousands of years ago, and so the amount of water that should

O

This article is reprinted by permission of The Sciences and is from the Marchi April 2000 issue.

Individual subscriptions are $28 per year. Write to: The Sciences, 2 East 63rd Street, New York, NY 10021.

While deserts bloom, rivers and aquifers run dry. Meeting the demands of a thirsty world will call for squeezing every drop out of a severely limited resource. be allotted to each person has declined steadily with time. It has dropped by 58 percent since 1950, as the population climbed from 2.5 billion to six billion, and will fall an additional 33 percent within 50 years if our numbers reach 8.9 billion, the middle of the projected range.

Because rainfall and river flows are not distributed evenly throughout the year or across the continents, the task of adapting water to human use is not an easy one.

Many rivers are tempestuous and erratic, running high when water is needed least and low when it is needed most. Every year two-thirds of the water in the earth's rivers rushes untapped to the sea in floods.

An additional one-fifth flows in remote areas such as the Amazon basin and the Arctic tundra. In many developing countries monsoons bring between 70 and 80 percent of the year's rainfall in just three months, greatly complicating water management. When it comes to water, it seems, nature has dealt a difficult hand.

As a result, the history of water manage-

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ment has. largely been one of striving to capture, control and deliver water to cities and farms when and where they need it.

Engineers have built massive canal networks to irrigate regions that are otherwise too dry to support the cultivation and growth of crops. The area of irrigated land worldwide has increased more than thirtyfold in the past two centuries, turning neardeserts such as Southern California and Egypt into fOOd baskets. Artificial oasis cities have bloomed. In Phoenix, Arizona, which gets about 17 centimeters of rain a year, seemingly abundant water pours from taps. With a swimming pool, lawn and an array of modem appliances, a Phoenix household can readily consume 2,500 liters of water a day.

But while the affluent enjoy desert swimming pools, more than a billion of the world's people lack a safe supply of drinking water, and 2.8 billion do not have even minimal sanitation. The World Health Organization estimates that 250 million cases of water-related diseases such as

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cholera arise annually, resulting in between five and 10 million deaths. Intestinal worms infect some 1.5 billion people, killing as many as 100,000 a year.

Outbreaks of parasitic diseases have sometimes followed the construction of large dams and irrigation systems, which create standing bodies of water where the parasites' hosts can breed. In sub-Saharan Africa, many women and girls walk several miles a day just to collect water for their families. Tens of millions of poor farm families cannot afford to irrigate their land, which lowers their crop productivity and leaves them vulnerable to droughts.

Even in countries in which water and sanitation are taken for granted, there are disturbing trends. Much of the earth's stable year-round water supply resides underground in geologic formations called aquifers. Some aquifers are nonrenewable-the bulk of their water accumulated thousands of years ago and they get little or no replenishment from precipitation today.

And though most aquifers are replenished by rainwater seeping into the ground, in a number of the world's most important food-producing regions farmers are pumping water from aquifers faster than nature can replace it. Aquifers are overdrawn in several key regions of the United States, including California's Central Valley, which supplies half of America's fruits and vegetables, and the southern Great Plains, where grain and cotton farmers are steadily depleting the Ogallala, one of the planet's greatest aquifers.

The problem is particularly severe in India, where a national assessment commissioned in 1996 found that water tables in critical farming regions were dropping at an alarming rate, jeopardizing perhaps as much as one-fourth of the country's grain harvest. In China's north plain, where 40 percent of that nation's food is grown, water tables are plunging by more than a meter a Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Sixth Lagoon (detail), 1976.

Indian IndustryTakes the Initiative T

he cycle of floods and drought is not new to India. It's been happening for centuries. What is new, however, is that drought conditions are appearing much earlier in the year.

For the past 10 years, parts ofIndia have been facing extreme water shortages in December and January~something that never happened before with the summer months only being counted from April onwards.

These are waming signals that cannot be ignored. In January this year, for the first time ever, there were water riots in India~in Saurashtra, a region which receives an acceptable rainfall at 50 centimeters a year.

What can be done about India's real rural and urban water problems? Anupam Mishra of the Gandhi Peace Foundation has been involved in several nongovernmental initiatives on water. He says, "Water plann~ng needs to be decentralized. The government is spending several millions of rupees on floods every year, but the area and intensity of floods is only increasing. Similarly, it is spending on drought area development, but is unable to wipe out drought. A rethinking of the water policy is necessary." Mishra favors age-old methods of dealing with water problems and encourages community effort. "Society has always arranged its own water in the past," he says. "And there is no reason why it cannot do the same even now."

There are heartening success stories. In the Alwar district of Rajasthan one effort has been so successful that the President ofTndia and several ministers went there to witness how five rivers have been recharged by traditional methods. Thirteen years ago, this area was classified as a "dark" zone where the groundwater was depleted. The rivers of the area were dly except in the monsoon months when they would overflow.

Tarun Bharat Sangh, a nongovernment organization, mobilized villagers to build 300 small check dams over the past five years in a bid to harvest the rainwater.

The results have been impressive, beyond expectations.

Now the rivers flow plentifully all year. Other states are attempting to replicate this remarkable exercise in watershed management. And much of the initiative is being taken by NGOs with community participation.

Relatively low-cost efforts such as these remain restricted to rural areas with wide-open spaces. Water for urban areas is a different ball game altogether. Water is in ShOlt supply in most

year across a wide area.

On the basis of the best available data, I estimate that global groundwater overpumping totals at least 160 billion cubic meters a year, an amount equal to the annual flow of two Nile rivers. Because it takes roughly 1,000 cubic meters of water to produce one ton of grain, some 160 million tons of grain~nearly 10 percent of the global food supply-depend on the unsustainable

cities. With increasing population and pollution, the demand is growing while existing sources near settlements dry up or become unusable.

"Cities need to go deeper and further to source water~ sometimes 50 to 60 kilometers away!" says Usha Raghupati, associate professor of infrastructure and urban development at the National Institute of Urban Affairs at New Delhi. But the supply-side scarcity and the formidable expense of getting fresh water to cities is only patt of the problem. There is also improper utilization of existing supply.

Water has been highly subsidized in the past, so Indians don't want to pay for water. "We need to change mind sets," says Raghupati. "The price has to be affordable," but she adds, "water should be metered, at least to recover operational costs." More care must be taken to tutTI off public taps~and even private ones~that are now wastefully left running.

Government bodies are attempting to implement several demand-side measures in urban .areas. These include: costeffective tariffs on water; private sector participation in water projects; regulating the use of groundwater through licenses for tubewells; sOlting out water sharing problems between states; recycling water; and improving maintenance efficiency.

Says Raghupati: "Leakages mean unaccounted-for water.

Acceptable water loss due to leakage is 10 percent. But in reality, 20 to 30 percent is wasted."

The costs are formidable, but there is hope. With the huge amount of foreign and other investment flowing in for infrastructure development in India, private sector pat1icipation in water supply~until now solely a government domain~looks like a reality. Already, 10 cities in India have projects with private sector parti.cipation in water supply and sanitation. The first of its kind is the Tirupur project for which negotiations started six years ago.

Tirupur is an industrial town in northern Tamil Nadu with a population of 600,000. With about 800 knitwear units, the town accounts for 90 percent oflndia's knitwear exports, contributing $1 billion to the export earnings of the country. EXpOlts from this area have been growing at a rapid pace of 30 percent per annum. This is remarkable considering the lack of infrastructure. In fact, water, which is essential in the cotton knitwem production process, is barely supplied by the Tirupur Municipal

practice of depleting groundwater. That raises an unsettling question: If hHmanity is operating under such an enormous deficit today, where are we going to fmd the additional water to satisfY future needs?

Another harbinger of trouble is that many major rivers now tUll dty for large patts of the year. Five of Asia's great rivers~the Indus and the Ganges in southem Asia, the Yellow in China and the Amu Darya and Syr

Datya in the Aral Sea basin~no longer reach the sea for months at a time. The Chinese call the Yellow River their mother river, reflecting its role as the cradle of Chinese civilization. Today the Yellow River supplies water to 140 million people and 7.2 million hectares of fatmland. Yet it has run dry in its lower reaches almost evety year of this past decade, and the dry section often stretches nearly 650 kilometers upstream

Corporation. Industrial users depend almost completely on private tankers which bring water from 50 kilometers away and supply at the rate ofRs 22 per kiloliter. This is opposed to Rs. 2 per kiloliter for the nearly nonexistent municipal supply.

So here was an industrial city that demanded water and had the economic base to pay for it. And it was ready to pay for the quantity and quality of supply. The Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA) took this issue to the Tamil Nadu Government which then appointed the Tamil Nadu Corporation for Infrastructure Development (TACID) as its representative. They evolved an integrated Tirupur Area Development Programme (TADP) which, over a period of time, would supply water, wastewater management, roads, telecommunications, etc.

The Tamil adu Government did not have the finances for such a project, so the private sector was invited to patiicipate.

On August 25, 1994, TACID and TEA signed a memorandum of understanding with Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Limited (TLFS) for developing the project on a commercial basis. The FIRE-D (Financial Institutions Reform and Expansion-Debt and Infrastructure) project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was an external consultant in the development of this program.

Hari Sankaran, CEO and executive director of ILFS, says, "Tirupur is India's first integrated water and wastewater project to be implemented on a commercial format. It clearly establishes a viable approach to addressing some of India's urban infrastructure requirements. For instance, it demonstrates that if projects are well structured and are built upon sound contractual documentation, then it is feasible to mobilize the requisite financial resources." He adds that "the Tirupur project also includes extensive consultations with the local community, government, lenders, investors, etc., on a transparent basis."

According to Sankaran the idea is to make the project more sustainable as well as more responsive to all stakeholders. He says the project "demonstrates that it is feasible to develop costeffective solutions to meet the requirements of both the economically empowered and unempowered segments of society."

Bids for the project were accepted from international competitors. The final consortia of private players in the $250 million project include the American fim1 Bechtel, United Utilities of the U.K., and Mahindra & Mahindra.

fi'om the river's mouth. In 1997 the dry spell lasted a record 226 days. ot surprisingly, as water becomes scarce, competition for it is intensifying. Cities are beginning to divert water from farms in north-central China, southern India, the Middle East and the western United States. Moreover, the world's urban population is expected to double to five billion by 2025, which will fwiher increase

N

The project will pick up water from a tributary of the Cauvery River, Bhawani, about 50 kilometers away, and increase the town supply from the current 54 mId (million liters a day) to 239 mId, serving industries, households and villages en route. While industrial users will be supplied water at commercial rates, domestic users will be billed at lower, residential rates by the municipal body. A sewer system with five pumping stations and two treatment plants of 50 mid capacity are also planned.

The project is financed through both equity and long-term loan. This includes a ILFS World Bank line of credit and a US AID-FIRE guarantee program. The Indian Government is also kicking in funds. Once fmancial closure is achieved, USAlD will collaborate with two U.S. private firms- TCG International and its partner PADCO Inc.-to implement the project. Construction will take three years.

Six years later, however, the project is yet to achieve fmancial closure. "It'll happen any time now," says James 1. Stein, director of urban development office for South Asia at USAID. "All sources of financing have been identified, and we are only waiting for the final clearances on the loan documentation."

Construction work, he says, is expected to begin in September.

What happens to the project if the global knitwear industry sees a downturn and Tirupur's industrial users aren't willing to pick up the amount of water they had agreed to? Lee E. Baker, chief of party, FIRE-D, TCGT & PADCO, agrees that this is a "one-industry risk. But the risk assessment has been done. And a good reliable water and sanitation service would attract other industrial users to move into the city." Sankaran seconds this: "The prospects of the hosiery industry have been analyzed by all investors and lenders and the assessment i.s that Tirupur is an extremely competitive center for knitware exports. In addition, Tirupur has made plans to invest close to $1 billion over the next three to four years to upgrade and expand its facilities to compete in the international market."

All eyes are turned on this pioneering urban development project. Stein is optimistic. "The first time is always difficult.

But it will have a positive impact on the development of the water sector in India," he says.

Tirupur could well be the first drop in the mighty ocean to follow.

0

the pressure to shift water away from agriculture. How such a shift will affect food production, employment in rural areas, rural-to-urban migration and social stability are critical questions that have hardly been asked, much less analyzed.

Competition for water is also building in international river basins: 261 of the world's rivers flow through two or more countries. In the vast majority of those

cases there are no treaties governing how the river water should be shared. As demands tax the supply in those regions, tensions are mounting. In five water hot spots-the Aral Sea region, the Ganges, the Jordan, the Ni Ie and the TigrisEuphrates-the population of the nations in each basin will probably increase by at least 30 percent and possibly by as much as 70 percent by 2025.

The plight of the Nile basin seems par- year. As a result, the large dams and river amount of water to maintain good health, ticularly worrisome. Last in line for Nile diversions upstream now drain so much so do ecosystems~as the Aral Sea, the water that virtually nothing flows through water, Egypt is almost entirely dependent Colorado delta and numerous other areas on the river and currently uses two-thirds painfully demonstrate. As the human use the delta and out to the Gulf of California. of its annual flow. About 85 percent of the As in the Aral Sea basin, the Colorado of water nears the limits of the supply in Nile's flow originates in Ethiopia, which to predicament has caused more than an envimany places, we must ensure the contindate has used little of that supply but is now ronmental tragedy. The Cocopa Indians ued functioning of ecosystems and the have fished and farmed in the delta for invaluable constructing small dams to begin tapping services they perform. the upper headwaters. Meanwhile, Egypt is more than 1,000 years. Now their culture Providing that assurance will entail a pursuing two large irrigation projects that faces extinction because too little river major scientific initiative, aimed at deterhave put it on a collision course with water makes it to the delta. mining safe limits of water usage from Ethiopia. Although Nile-basin countries What was gained by despoiling such aquifers, rivers, lakes and other aquatic have been meeting regularly to discuss cultural and biological riches, by driving systems. Laws and regulations, guaranteehow they can share the river, no treaty that long-settled people from their homes and ing continued health of those ecosystems, includes all the parties yet exists. Shortly wildlife from its habitats? The answer must also be put in place.

Australia and South Africa are now leadafter signing the historic peace accords seems to be more swimming pools in Los with Israel in 1979, Egyptian President Angeles, more golf courses in Arizona and ing the way in such efforts. Officials in Anwar Sadat said that only water could more desert agriculture. To be sure, the Australia's Murray-Darling River basin make Egypt wage war again. He was refer- trade-off helped boost the U.S. gross have placed a cap on water extractions~a ring not to another potential conflict with national product, but at the untallied cost of bold move aimed at reversing the decline in irreplaceable natural and cultural diversity. the health of the aquatic environment.

Israel but to the possibility of hostilities with Ethiopia over the Nile.

South AiTica'snew water laws call for iven the challenges that lie ahead, how The story of the shrinking Aral Sea water managers to allocate water for the underscores another form of competition: can the needs of an increasingly thirsty protection of ecological functions as well as world be satisfied, without further the conflict between the use of water in fOJ human needs. destroying aquatic ecosystems? In my view, The United States is also making efforts agriculture and industry, on the one hand, and its ecological role as the basis of life the solution hinges on three major compoto heal some of its damaged aquatic enviand sustainer of ecosystem health, on the nents: allocating water to maintain the ronments. A joint federal-state initiative is other. After I returned from the Aral Sea, I health of natural ecosystems, doubling the working to restore the health of California's was tempted to view the sea and the comproductivity of the water allocated to San Francisco Bay delta, which is home to munities around it as tragic victims of human activities, and extending access to a more than 120 species of fish and supports communist central planning. A year later, ready supply of water to the poor.

80 percent of the state's commercial fishhowever, in May 1996, I visited the delta Just as people require a minimum eries. In Florida an $8 billion federal-state project is attempting to repair the of the Colorado River and found a Vernon Fisher, Inscribing the World with Water, 1994, treasured Everglades, the famed depressingly similar story.

180 x 194 x 15 ems. "river of grass," which has shrunk in .~half in the past century alone. And he Colorado delta had once been ::2' lush, supporting as many as 400 ~ across the country a number of dams ci'l are slated for removal in an effort to plant species and numerous birds, c ~ restore fisheries and other benefits fish and mammals. The great natural('l ~ of river systems. ist Aldo Leopold, who canoed through the delta in 1922, called it "a The second essential component in meeting water needs for the milk and honey wilderness," a land of ~ future will be to maximize the "a hundred green lagoons." As I 8 use of every gallon we extract. walked amid salt flats, mud-cracked Because agriculture accounts for earth and murky pools, I could hardly 70 percent of the world's water believe I was in the same place that usage, raising water productivity in Leopold had described. The treaties farming regions is a top priority. that divide the Colorado River among seven U.S. states and Mexico had set The bad news is that today less than half the water removed from aside nothing to protect the river sysrivers and aquifers for irrigation tem itself. More water was promised actually benefits a crop. The good to the eight treaty parties than the news is that there is substantial river actually carries in an average

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room for improvement.

Drip irrigation ranks near the top of measures that offer great untapped potential. A drip system is essentially a network of perforated plastic tubing, installed on or below the soil surface, that delivers water at low volumes directly to the roots of plants. The loss to evaporation or runoff is minimal. When drip irrigation is combined with the monitoring of soil moisture and other ways of assessing a crop's water needs, the system delivers 95 percent of its water to the plant, compared with between 50 and 70 percent for the more conventional flood or furrow irrigation systems.

Besides saving water, dri p irrigation usually boosts crop yield and quality, simply because it enables the farmer to maintain a nearly ideal moisture environment for the plants. In countries as diverse as India, Israel, Jordan, Spain and the United States, studies have consistently shown that drip irrigation not only cuts water use by between 30 and 70 percent, but also increases crop yields by between 20 and

90 percent. Those improvements are often Chuek Forsman, Feather River, 1992, oil on panel, l45 x 213 ems. enough to double the water productivity.

Lands watered by drip irrigation now account for a little more than 1 percent of .

As urban populations continue expandall irrigated land worldwide. The potening in the decades ahead, household contial, however, is far greater. sumption of water will also need to be made more efficient. As part of the he information revolution that is transNational Energy Policy Act, which was forming so many facets of society also signed into law in late 1992, the United States now has federal water standards for promises to playa vital role in transforming the efficiency of water use. The basic household plumbing fixtures-toistate of California operates a network of lets, faucets and showerheads. The regulamore than a hundred automated and comtions require that manufacturers of the fixputerized weather stations that collect tures meet certain standards of efficienlocal climate data, including solar radiacy-thereby building conservation into tion, wind speed, relative humidity, rainurban infrastructure. Water usage with fall and air and soil temperature, and then those fixtures will be about a third less in transmit the data to a central computer in 2025 than it would have been without the Sacramento. For each remote site, the new standards. Similar laws could also help rapidly growing Third World cities computer calculates an evapotranspiration stretch their scarce water supplies. rate, from which farmers can then calculate the rate at which their crops are conOne of the most obvious ways to raise suming water. In that way they can deterwater productivity is to use water more mine, quite accurately, how much water to than once. The Israelis, for instance, reuse apply at any given time throughout the two-thirds of their municipal wastewater for crop production. Because both municgrowing season.

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ipal and agricultural wastewater can carry toxic substances, reuse must be carefully monitored. But by matching appropriate water quality to various kinds of use, much more benefit can be derived from the freshwater already under human control. And that implies that more can remain in its natural state.

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he third component of the solution to water security for the future is perhaps also the greatest challenge: extending water and sanitation services to the poor.

Ensuring safe drinking water is one of the surest ways to reduce disease and death in developing countries. Likewise, the most direct way of reducing hunger among the rural poor is to raise their productive capacities directly. Like trickle-down economics, trickle-down food security does not work well for the poor. Greater corn production in Iowa will not alleviate hunger among the poor in India or subSaharan Africa. With access to affordable irrigation, however, millions of poor farmers who have largely been bypassed by the modem irrigation age can raise their productivity and incomes directly, reducing hunger and poverty at the same time.

In many cases the problem is not that the poor cannot afford to pay for water but that they are paying unfair pricesoften more than do residents of developed nations. It is not uncommon for poor families to spend more than a quarter of their income on water. Lacking piped-in water, many must buy from vendors who charge outrageous prices, often for poor-quality water.

In Istanbul, Turkey, for instance, vendors charge ten times the rate paid by those who enjoy publicly supplied water; in Mumbai, the overcharge is a factor of twenty. A survey of households in Port-auPrince, Haiti, found that people connected to the water system pay about a dollar per cubic meter, whereas the unconnected must buy water from vendors for between $5.50 and $16.50 per cubic meter-abollt twenty times the price typically paid by urban residents in the United States.

Cost estimates for providing universal access to water and sanitation valY widely.

But even the higher-end estimates-some

$50 billion a year-amount to only 7 percent of global military expenditures. A relatively minor reordering of social priorities and investments-and a more comprehensive definition of security--eould enable evelyone to share the benefits of clean water and adequate sanitation.

Equally modest expenditures could improve the lot of poor farmers. In recent years, for instance, large areas of Bangladesh have been transformed by a humanpowered device called a treadle pwnp (see "Farmer's Friend-A Low-Tech Boon," SPAN, September! October 1999). When I first saw the pump in action on a trip to Bangladesh in 1998, it reminded me of a Stairmaster exercise machine, and it is operated in much the same way. The operator pedals up and down on two long poles, or treadles, each attached to a cylinder. The upward stroke sucks shallow groundwater into one of the cylinders, while the downward stroke of the opposite pedal expels water from the other cylinder (that was sucked in on the preceding upward stroke) into a field channel.

The pump costs just $35, and with that purchase, farm families that previously were forced to let their land lie fallow during the dly season-and go hungry for part of the year-can grow an extra crop of rice and vegetables and take the surplus to market. Each pump irrigates about half an acre, which is appropriate for the small plots that poor farmers generally cultivate. The average net annual return on the investment has been more than $100 per pump, enabling families to recoup their total outlay in less than a year.

So far the Bangladeshi fanllers have purchased 1.2 million treadle pumps, thereby raising the productivity of more than 240,000 hectares of fmmland and injecting an additional $325 million a year into the poorest parts of the Bangladeshi economy.

A private-sector network of70 manufacturers, 830 dealers and 2,500 installers supports the technology, creating jobs and raising incomes in urban areas as well.

The treadle pump is just one of many exanlples of small-scale, affordable in'igation technologies that can help raise the productivity and the income of poor farm families. In areas with no perennial source of

water, as in the dlylands of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, a variety of so-called water-hm-vesting techniques hold promise for capturing and channeling more rainwater into the soil. In parts of India, for instance, some fmmers collect rainwater from the monsoon season in emih-walled embankments, then drain the stored water during the dly season. The method, known as have/i, enables fmmers to grow crops when their fields would otherwise be barren.

Israeli investigators have found that another simple practice--eovering the soil between rows of plants with polyethylene sheetshelps keep rainwater in the soil by cutting down on evaporation. The method has doubled the yields of some crops. o avert much misery in this new century, the ways water is priced, supplied and allocated must be changed.

Large government subsidies for irrigation, an estimated $33 billion a year worldwide, keep prices artificially low-and so fail to penalize fanners for wasting water.

Inflexible laws and regulations discourage the marketing of water, leading to inefficient distribution and use. Without rules to regulate groundwater extractions, the depletion of aquifers persists. And the failure to place a value on freshwater ecosystems-their role in maintaining water quality, controlling floods and providing wildlife habitats-has left far too little water in natural systems.

Will we make the right choices in the coming age of water scarcity? Our actions must ultimately be guided by more than technology or economics. The fact that water is essential to life lends an ethical dimension to every decision we make about how it is used, managed and distributed. We need new technologies, to be sure, but we also need a new ethic: All living things must get enough water before some get more than enough.

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About the Author: Sandra Postel directs the Global Water Policy Project in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is a senior fellow with Worldwatch Institute and a visiting senior lecturer in environmental studies af Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is the author of Last Oasis and

Pillar of Sand: Can the IrrigationMiracle Last?

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Prophet

Eulkner

continued pam page 9

of his liking and a seamstress named Mollie Walker, was shot and nearly killed by Mollie's brother Elias, a gambler and a grocer. While Murry sat on a stool at a drugstore fountain, Elias blew a hole in his back with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Then, while Murry was on the floor, Elias shot him in the mouth with a pistol. Murry's father found Elias hiding in the local hardware store. He pulled his revolver, stuck it in Elias's belly, and fired six times. But it misfired every time. Elias pulled his own gun and shot Faulkner's grandfather in the hand.

Hair-trigger violence like this, though not limited to the South, has been its signature. Southerners, Marshall Frady wrote, tend to "believe with their blood," a manner of reasoning that Faulkner used well in many of his novels, stacking up one violent act after another to convey the intensity that linked them-an intensity that people substitute for communication, for community. Sanctuary transmits just such an intensity. Evetyone is on the verge of violence because evetyone is trapped in personal history in the form of fear or ferocious indifference, cynical realism (another fOlm of indifference) or manipulative, self-serving respectability.

0 one creates, nothing is fetiile, everything is consumed. et the nature of evil in this story is subtler than the sum of its violence and perversion. The corruption of Faulkner's characters in Sanctuary is so unconscious, so automatic, so complete in itself, that it has about it a tragic innocence, as if the characters were simply standing too close to the fire and got sucked into the flames. Faulkner's point, I think, is that evil exists not by will but by possession. Therefore, something greater than evil allows it a brief blossoming and then snatches it away, leaving the characters not blameless or harmless but destroyed, and in the very destruction, humanized. Of his characters Faulkner remarked, "That they go down doesn't matter. ..the pity is in the human striving against its own nature, against its own conscience."

In 1958 Faulkner, as writer in residence at the University of Virginia, fielded questions from members of the Depatiment of Psychiatry. The exchange, collected in a book called Faulkner in the University, begins this way: "Mr. Faulkner, could you say a few words about what you might consider. ..irrational human behavior?"

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A: No. I couldn't...all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty...and ...the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's ...all itTational....

Q: You don't have any idea of [where you learned psychology]?

A: No sir, I don't....What little of psychology I know the characters 1 have invented and playing poker have taught me....

Q: Most of your characters are certainly highly individualized human beings. Do you have any particular ideas on the so-called trend toward confOlmity, the loss of individualization in our current society?

A: Yes, I have velY definite ideas about that....l'm against belonging to anything ....

Q: Why is that?

A: ...1think that one man may be first-rate but if you get one man and two second-rate men together, then he's not going to be first-rate any longer, because the voice of that majority will be a second-rate voice, the behavior of that majority will be second-rate ....

Q: Can you go further and say how you rate people like that-first and second-rate?

A: Well, sir...l would say that a first-rate man ...is a man that did the best he could with what talents he had to make something which wasn't here yesterday ...that [he]...never harmed the weak, practiced honesty and courtesy, and tried to be as brave as he wanted to be whether he always was that brave or not. 1 think that a man that held to those tenets wouldn't get very far if he were involved in a group of people that had relinquished their individualities to some one voice ...

On one of my visits to Faulkner's Mississippi hill country, I was out driving under dark, humid, weather-threatened skies. I passed tumbledown cabins and neglected houses, broken-down cotton gins, decomposing tractors, crumbling Cadillacs, punctured sofas divested of stuffing on sagging porches. Faulkner countty: whites and blacks clustered around shacks with leaning chimneys, girdled by woods, by bottomland barely ahead of the menacing kudzu vines ghosting in the trees.

As 1 drove, I recalled something Chester McLarty had said to me: he had spent 17 years traveling throughout the world, and had discovered that most people, when they found out he was from Mississippi, identified the state with Elvis Presley. "I've hardly ever heard of anyone [who] ever heard of Faulkner," McLarty observed, "and he's had more study than any writer except Shakespeare. B.ut we're a popular culture. Anyone in the world will bore you to death talking about Elvis Presley."

I drove on and then stopped the car on an empty red-clay road and read a comment by Robeti Penn Warren from the text of an educational-television documentary on Faulkner.

"I don't know why a person should read anything ....1 mean maybe we're doomed to a world where nobody will read ....Maybe we're doomed to be animals and go back to the caves. I think a person who wants to be human should read Faulkner. Now, if you're satisfied with your degree of humanity and your understanding of human nature, don't read him.

But if you have any discontent or any aspiration to be more human than you are, read him."

A chain saw caught hold somewhere and fired itself up, sending blue smoke and a language all its own from the thickets and tree~. I shut the car window as the machine ground into something back there in Faulkner's woods, hooting and wailing and shrieking as it ran.

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About the Author: Larry Levinge/; a former contributing editor of Oeo, is a ji-eelance writer and a marketing and communications consultant.

opeis a duty from which paleontologists are exempt. Their job is to take the long view, the cold and stony view, oftriumphs and catastrophes in the history of life. They study the fossil record, that elTatic selection of petrified shells, carapaces, bones, teeth, tree trunks, leaves, pollen, and other biological relics, and from it they attempt to discern the lost secrets of time, the big patterns of stasis and change, the trends of innovation and adaptation and refinement and decline that have blown like sea winds among ancient creatures in ancient ecosystems. Although life is their subject, death and burial supply all their data. They're the coroners of biology. This gives to paleontologists a celtain distance, a hyperopic perspective beyond the reach of anxiety over outcomes of the struggles they chronicle. If hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson said, then it's good to remember that feathers don't generally fossilize well. In lieu of hope and despair, paleontologists have a highly developed sense of cyclicity. That's why I recently went to Chicago, with a handful of urgently grim questions, and called on a paleontologist named David Jablonski. I wanted answers unvarnished with obligatOly hope.

Jablonski is a big-pattern man, a macroevolutionist, who works fastidiously from the pmticular to the very broad. He's an expert on the morphology and distribution of marine bivalves and gastropods-or clams and snails, as he calls them when speaking casually. He sifts through the record of those mollusk lineages, preserved in rock and later harvested into museum drawers, to extract ideas about the origin of novelty. His attention roams back through 600 million years of time. His special skill involves fi'aming large, resonant questions that can be answered with small, lithified clamshells. For instance: By what combinations of causal factor and sheer chance have the great evolutionmy innovations arisen? How quickly have those innovations taken hold? How long have they abided? He's also interested in extinction, the converse ofabidance, the yang to evolution's yin. Why do some species survive for a long time, he wonders, whereas others die out much sooner? And why has the rate of extinction-low throughout most of Earth's histOly-spiked upward cataclysmically on just a few occasions? How do those cataclysmic episodes, known in the trade as mass extinctions, differ in kind as well as degree fi'om the gradual process of species extinction during the millions of years between? Can what struck in the past strike again?

The concept of mass extinction implies a biological crisis that spanned large pmts of the planet and, in a relatively short time, eradicated a sizable number of species from a variety of groups.

There's no absolute threshold of magnitude, and dozens of differ-

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ent episodes in geologic history might qualify, but five big ones stand out: Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous.

The Ordovician extinction, 439 million years ago, entailed the disappearance of roughly 85 percent of marine animal species-and that was before there were any animals on land. The Devonian extinction, 367 milJion years ago, seems to have been almost as severe. About 245 million ye~~ ago came the Permian extinction, the ' worst ever, claiming 95 percent of all known animal species and therefore almost wiping out the animal kingdom altogether. The Triassic, 208 million years ago, was bad again, though not nearly so bad as the Pennian. The most recent was the Cretaceous extinction (sometimes called the K-T event because it defines the boundary between two geologic periods, with K for Cretaceous, never mind why, and T for Teltiary), familiar even to schoolchildren because it ended the age of dinosaurs. Less familiarly, the K-T event also brought extinction of the marine repti les and the ammonites, as well as major losses of species among fish, mammals, amphibians, sea urchins and other groups, totaling 76 percent of all species. In between these five episodes occurred some lesser mass extinctions, and throughout the intervening lulls extinction continued, too-but at a much slower pace, known as the background rate, claiming only about one species in any major group evelY million years. At the background rate, extinction is infrequent enough to be counterbalanced by the evolution of new species.

Each of the five major episodes, in contrast, represents a drastic net

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Tallying the losses of Earth's animals and plants

loss of species diversity, a deep trough of biological impoverishment from which EaLih only slowly recovered. How slowly? How long is the lag between a nadir of impoverishment and a recovery to ecological fullness? That's another of Jablonski's research interests. His rough estimates run to 5 to 10 million years. What drew me to this man's work, and then to his doorstep, were his special competence on mass extinctions and his willingness to discuss the notion that a sixth one is in progress now.

Some people will tell you that we as a species, Homo sapiens, the savvy ape, all 5.9 billion of us in our collective impact, are destroying the world. Me, 1 won't tell you that, because "the world" is so vague, whereas what we are or aren't destroying is quite specific. Some people will tell you that we are rampaging suicidally toward a degree of global wreckage that will result in our own extinction. I won't tell you that either. Some people say that the environment will be the paramount political and social concern of the 21st century, but what they mean by "the environment" is anyone's guess. Polluted air? Polluted water? Acid rain? A frayed skein of

ozone over Antarctica? Greenhouse gases emitted by smokestacks and cars? Toxic wastes? None of these concerns is the big one, paleontological in scope, though some are more closely entangled with it than others. If the world's air is clean for humans to breathe but supports no birds or butterflies, if the world's waters are pure for humans to drink but contain no fish or crustaceans or diatoms, have we solved our environmental problems? Well, I suppose so, at least as environmentalism is commonly construed. That clumsy, confused and presumptuous formulation "the environment" implies viewing air, water, soil, forests, rivers, swamps, deselis and oceans as merely a milieu within which something important is set: human life, human history. But what's at issue in fact is not an environment; it's a living world.

Here instead is what I'd like to tell you: The consensus among conscientious biologists is that we're headed into another mass extinction, a vale of biological impoverishment commensurate with the big five. Many experts remain hopeful that we can brake that descent, but my own view is that we're likely to go all the way down. I visited David Jablonski to ask what we might see at the bottom.

On a hot sununer morning, Jablonski is busy in his office on the second floor of the Hinds Geophysical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. It's a large open room furnished in tall bookshelves, tables piled high with books, stacks of paper standing knee-high off the floor. The walls are mostly bare, aside from a chart of the geologic time scale, a clipped cartoon of dancing tyrannosaurs in red sneakers, and a poster from a Rodin exhibition, quietly appropriate to the overall theme of eloquent stone.

Jablonski is a lean 45-year-old man with a dark full beard.

Educated at Columbia and Yale, he came to Chicago in 1985 and has helped make its paleontology program perhaps the country's best. Although in not many hours he'll be leaving on a trip to Alaska, he has been cordial about agreeing to this chat. Stepping carefully, we move among the piled journals, reprints and photocopies. Every pile represents a different research question, he tells me. "I juggle a lot ofthese things all at once because they feed into one another." That's exactly why I've come: for a little rigorous intellectual synergy.

Let's talk about mass extinctions, I say. When did someone first realize that the concept might apply to CUITentevents, not just to the Permian or the Cretaceous?

He begins sOliing through memory, back to the early 1970s, when the full scope of the cun"ent extinction problem was barely recognized. Before then, some writers wamed about "vanishing

Centinela Ridge in a cloud-forest zone of westwildlife" and "endangered species," but generally ern Ecuador, where in 1978 the botanist Alwyn the wamings were framed around individual species Gentry and a colleague found 38 species of narwith popular appeal, such as the whooping crane, rowly endemic plants, including several with the tiger, the blue whale, the peregrine falcon. mysteriously black leaves. Before Gentry could During the 1970s a new form of concern broke get back, Centinela Ridge had been completely fOlih--eall it wholesale concern-from the awaredeforested, the native plants replaced by cacao ness that unnumbered millions of narrowly endemic and other crops. As for inferential evidence gen(that is, unique and localized) species inhabit the tropical forests and that those forests were quickly The Earth has undergone erally, we might do well to remember what it contributes to our conviction that approximately being cut. In 1976, a Nairobi-based biologist named five major extinction 105,000 Japanese civilians died in the atomic Norman Myers published a paper in Science on that periods, each requiring bombing of Hiroshima. The city's population subject; in passing, he also compared CUiTentextincmillions of years fell abruptly on August 6, 1945, but there was tions with the rate during what he loosely called "the of recovery. no one-by-one identification of 105,000 bodies. 'great dying' of the dinosaurs." David Jablonski, Nowadays a few younger writers have taken then a graduate student, read Myers' paper and tucked a copy into his files. This was the first time, as Jablonski re- Simon's line, pooh-poohing the concern over extinction. As for Simon himself, who died in 1998, perhaps the truest sentence he calls, that anyone tried to quantify the rate of present-day extincleft behind was, "We must also try to get more reliable information tions. "Norman was a pretty lonely guy, for a long time, on that," he says. In 1979, Myers published The Sinking Ark, explaining the about the number of species that might be lost with various problem and offering some rough projections. Between the years changes in the forests." No one could argue.

But it isn't easy to get such information. Field biologists tend to 1600 and 1900, by his tally, humanity had caused the extinction of avoid investing their precious research time in doomed tracts of about 75 known species, almost all of them mammals and birds. forest. Beyond that, our culture offers little institutional suppOli for Between 1900 and 1979, humans had extinguished about another 75 known species, representing a rate well above the rate of known the study of narrowly endemic species in order to register their existence before their habitats are destroyed. Despite these obstacles, losses during the Cretaceous extinction. But even more won'isome was the inferable rate of unrecorded extinctions, recent and now recent effOlis to quantify rates of extinction have supplanted the old warnings. These new estimates use satellite imaging and imimpending, among plants and animals still unidentified by science.

Myers guessed that 25,000 plant species presently stood jeoparproved on-the-ground data about deforestation, records of the many human-caused extinctions on islands, and a branch of ecodized, and maybe hundreds of thousands of insects. "By the time human communities establish ecologically sound lifestyles, the logical theory called island biogeography, which connects docufallout of species could total several million." Rereading that senmented island cases with the mainland problem of forest fragmentation. These efforts differ in particulars, reflecting how tence now, I'm struck by the reckless optimism of his assumption much uncertainty is still involved, but their varied tones form a that human communities eventually will establish "ecologically sound lifestyles." chorus of consensus. I'll mention three of the most credible. w.v. Reid, of the World Resources Institute, in 1992 gathered Although this early stab at quantification helped to galvanize numbers on the average annual deforestation in each of63 tropical public concem, it also became a target for a handful of critics, who used the inexactitude ofthe numbers to cast doubt on the reality of countries during the 1980s and from them charted three different the problem. Most conspicuous of the naysayers was Julian Simon, scenarios (low, middle, high) of presumable forest loss by the year 2040. He chose a standard mathematical model of the relationship an economist at the University of Maryland, who argued bullishly between decreasing habitat area and decreasing species diversity, that human resourcefulness would solve all problems worth solvmade conservative assumptions about the crucial constant, and ran ing, of which a decline in diversity of tropical insects wasn't one. his various deforestation estimates through the model. Reid's calculations suggest that by the year 2040, between 17 and 35 percent na 1986 issue of New Scientist, Simon rebutted Norman of tropical forest species will be extinct or doomed to be. Either at Myers, arguing from his own construal of select data that the high or the low end ofthis range, it would amount to a bad loss, there was "no obvious recent downward trend in world though not as bad as the K-T event. Then again, 2040 won't mark forests-no obvious 'losses' at all, and celiainly no 'near catathe end of human pressures on biological diversity or landscape. strophic' loss." He later co-authored an op-ed piece in the New Robert M. May, an ecologist at Oxford, co-authored a similar York Times under the headline "Facts, Not Species, Are Periled." effort in 1995. May and his colleagues noted the five causal facAgain he went after Myers, asserting a "complete absence of evidence for the claim that the extinction of species is going up tors that account for most extinctions: habitat destruction, habitat rapidly-or even going up at all." Simon's worst disservice to fragmentation, overkill, invasive species and secondary effects cascading through an ecosystem from other extinctions. Each of logic in that statement and others was the denial that inferential evidence of wholesale extinction counts for anything. Of infer en- those five is more intricate than it sounds. For instance, habitat tial evidence there was an abundance-for example, from the fragmentation dooms species by consigning them to small,

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island-like parcels of habitat surrounded by an ocean of human worked by slash-and-burn farmers at low density; 3) intensively impact and by then subjecting them to the same jeopardies (small used areas, meaning crop fields, plantations, village commons, travel corridors, urban and industrial zones; and finally 4) depopulation size, acted upon by environmental fluctuation, catastrophe, inbreeding, bad luck and cascading effects) that make is- graded land, f0l111erlyuseful but now abused beyond value to anybody. Madagascar, again, would be a good place to see all four land species especially vulnerable to extinction. May's team stages, especially the terminal one. Along a thin road that leads inconcluded that most extant bird and mammal species can expect average life spans of between 200 and 400 years. That's equivaland from a town called Mahajanga, on the west coast, you can gaze out over a vista of degraded land-ehalky red hills and gullent to saying that about a third of one percent will go extinct lies, bare of forest, bUl11edtoo often by graziers wanting a shorteach year until some unimaginable end point is reached. "Much of the diversity we inherited," May and his co-authors wrote, term burst of pasturage, sparsely covered in dry grass and scrubby "will be gone before humanity sorts itself out." fan palms, eroded starkly, draining red mud into the Betsiboka The most recent estimate comes from Stuart L. Pimm and River, supporting almost no human presence. Another showcase of Thomas M. Brooks, ecologists at the University of Tennessee. degraded land-attributable to fuelwood gathering, overgrazing, Using a combination of published data on bird species lost from population density and decades of apartheid-is the Ciskei homeland in South Africa. Or you might look at overirrigated crop fields forest fragments and field data gathered themselves, Pimm and Brooks concluded that 50 percent of the world's forest-bird species left ruinously salinized in the Central Valley of California. will be doomed to extinction by deforestation occurring over the next half century. And birds won't be the sole victims. "How many mong all forms of landscape conversion, pushing tropical species will be lost if CUlTenttrends continue?" the two scientists forest from the wildlands category to the intensively used category has the greatest impact on biological diversity. asked. "Somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of all species-easily making this event as large as the previous five You can see it in western India, where a spectacular deciduous mass extinctions the planet has experienced." ecosystem known as the Gir forest (home to the last surviving population of the Asiatic lion, Panthera lea persica) is yielding Jablonski, who started down this line of thought in 1978, offers me a reminder about the conceptual machinety behind such esti- along its ragged edges to new mango orchards, peanut fields and lime quarries for cement. You can see it in the central Amazon, mates. "All mathematical models," he says cheerily, "are wrong.

They are approximations. And the question is: Are they usefully where big tracts of rain forest have been felled and burned, in a wrong, or are they meaninglessly wrong?" Models projecting prelargely futile attempt (encomaged by misguided government insent and future species loss are useful, he suggests, if they help centives, now revoked) to pasture cattle on sun-hardened clay. ations Food and Agriculture people realize that Homo sapiens is petturbing Earth's biosphere to According to the United a degree it hasn't often been perturbed before. In other words, that Organization (FAa), the rate of deforestation in tropical countries this is a drastic experiment in biological drawdown we're engaged has increased (contrary to Julian Simon's claim) since the 1970s, when Myers made his t<stimates. During the 1980s, as the FAa rein, not a continuation of routine. ported in 1993, that rate reached 15.4 million hectares annually.

Behind the projections of species loss lurk a number of crucial South America was losing 6.2 million hectares a year. Southeast but hard-to-plot variables, among which two are especially weighty: continuing landscape conversion and the growth curve of Asia was losing less in area but more propOltionally: 1.6 percent of its forests yearly. In terms of cumulative loss, as reported by human population. other observers, the Atlantic coastal forest of Brazil is at least 95 Landscape conversion can mean many things: draining wetpercent gone. The Philippines, once nearly covlands to build roads and airports, tuming tall grass ered with rain forest, has lost 92 percent. Costa prairies under the plow, fencing savanna and overBiologists believe that Rica has continued to lose forest, despite that grazing it with domestic stock, cutting secondcountry's famous concern for its biological regrowth forest in Vermont and consigning the land we are entering another sources. The richest of old-growth lowland forests to ski resorts or vacation suburbs, slash-and-burn mass extinction, in West Africa, India, the Greater Antilles, clearing of Madagascar's rain forest to grow rice a vale of biological Madagascar and elsewhere have been reduced to on wet hillsides, industrial logging in Borneo to impoverishment. less than a tenth of their original areas. By the midmeet Japanese plywood demands. The ecologist dle of this century, if those trends continue, tropiJohn Terborgh and a colleague, Carel P. van cal forest will exist vittually nowhere outside of Schaik, have described a four-stage process of protected areas-that is, national parks, wildlife landscape conversion that they call the land-use refuges and other official reserves. cascade ..The successive stages are: I) wildlands, How many protected areas will there be? The encompassing native floral and faunal communipresent worldwide total is about 9,800, encompassties altered little or not at all by human impact; 2) ing 6.3 percent of the planet's land area. Will those extensively used areas, such as natmal grasslands parks and reserves retain their full biological diverlightly grazed, savanna kept open for prey animals sity? o. Species with large ten'itorial needs will be by infi'equent human-set fires, or forests sparsely

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unable to maintain viable population levels within small reserves, and as those species die away their absence will affect others. The disappearance of big predators, for instance, can release limits on medium-size predators and scavengers, whose overabundance can drive still other species (such as ground-nesting birds) to extinction. This has already happened in some habitat fragments, such as Panama's Barro Colorado Island, and been well documented in the literature of island biogeography. The lesson of fragmented habitats is Yeatsian: Things fall apal1.

Human population growth will make a bad situation worse by putting ever more pressure on all available land.

Population growth rates have declined in many countries within the past several decades, it's true. But world population is still increasing, and even ifaverage fel1ility suddenly, magically, dropped to 2.0 children per female, population would continue to increase (on the momentum ofbit1h rate exceeding death rate among a generally younger and healthier populace) for some time. The annual increase is now 80 million people, with most of that increment coming in less-developed countries. The latest long-range projections from the Population Division of the United Nations, released two years ago, are slightly down from previous long-term projections in 1992 but still point toward a problematic future. According to the U.N.'s middle estimate (and most probable? hard to know) among seven fet1ility scenarios, human population will rise from the present 5.9 billion to 9.4 billion by the year 2050, then to 10.8 billion by 2150, before leveling off there at the end of the 22nd Even by conservative century. If it happens that way, about 9.7 estimates, huge billion people will inhabit the countries inpercentages of Earth's cluded within Africa, Latin America, the animals and plants will Caribbean and Asia. The total population of those countries-most of which are in the simply disappear. low latitudes, many of which are less developed, and which together encompass a large pOt1ion of Eat1h's remaining tropical forest-will be more than twice what it is today. Those 9.7 billion people, crowded together in hot places, forming the ocean within which tropical nature reserves are insularized, will constitute 90 percent of humanity. Anyone interested in the future of biological diversity needs to think about the pressures these people will face, and the pressures they will exert in return.

We also need to remember that the impact of Homo sapiens on the biosphere can't be measured simply in population figures. As the population expert Paul Harrison pointed out in his book The Third Revolution. that impact is a product of three variables: population size, consumption level and technology. Although population growth is highest in less-developed countries, consumption levels are generally far higher in the developed world (for instance, the average American consumes about ten times as much energy as the average Chilean, and about a hundred times

as much as the average Angolan), and also higher among the affluent minority in any country than among the rural poor. High consumption exacerbates the impact of a given population, whereas technological developments may either exacerbate it further (think of the automobile, the air conditioner, the chainsaw) or mitigate it (as when a technological innovation improves efficiency for an established function). All three variables playa role in every case, but a directional change in one form of human impact-upon air pollution from fossil-fuel burning, say, or fish harvest from the seas-can be mainly attributable to a change in one variable, with only minor influence from the other two.

Sulfur-dioxide emissions in developed countries fell dramatically during the I 970s and '80s, due to technological improvements in papermaking and other industrial processes; those emissions would have fallen still farther ifnot for increased population (accounting for 25 percent of the upward vector) and increased consumption (accounting for 75 percent). Deforestation, in contrast, is a directional change that has been mostly attributable to population growth. ccording to Harrison's calculations, population growth accounted for 79 percent of the deforestation in lessdeveloped countries between 1973 and 1988. Some experts would argue with those calculations, no doubt, and insist On redirecting our concern toward the role that distant consumers, wood-products buyers among slow-growing but affluent populations of the developed nations, play in driving the destruction of Borneo's dipterocarp forests or the hardwoods of West Africa.

Still, Harrison's figures point toward an undeniable reality: more total people will need more total land. By his estimate, the minimum land necessary for food growing and other human needs (such as water supply and waste dumping) amounts to one-fifth of a hectare per person. Given the U.N.'s projected increase of 4.9 billion souls before the human population finally levels off, that comes to another billion hectares of human-claimed landscape, a billion hectares less forest-even without allowing for any further deforestation by the current human population, or for any further loss of agricultural land to degradation. A billion hectares-in other words, 10 million square kilometers-is, by a conservative estimate, well more than half the remaining forest area in Africa, Latin America and Asia. This raises the vision of a very exigent human population pressing snugly around whatever patches of natural landscape remain.

Add to that vision the extra, incendiary aggravation of povet1y.

According to a recent World Bank estimate, about 30 percent of the total population of less-developed countries lives in poverty.

Alan Durning, in his 1992 book How Much Is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Fate of Earth, puts it in a broarder perspective when he says that the world's human population is divided among three "ecological classes": the consumers, the middle-income and the poor. His consumer class includes those 1.1 billion fot1unate people whose annual income per family member is more than $7,500. At the other extreme, the world's poor also number about 1.1. billion people-all from households with

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less than $700 annually per member. "They are mostly rural Africans, Indians and other South Asians," Durning writes. "They eat almost exclusively grains, root crops, beans and other legumes, and they drink mostly unclean water. They live in huts and shanties, they travel by foot, and most oftheir possessions are constructed of stone, wood and other substances avai lable from the local environment." He calls them the "absolute poor." It's only reasonable to assume that another billion people will be added to that class, mostly in what are now the less-developed countries, before population growth stabilizes. How will those additional billion, deprived of education and other advantages, interact with the tropical landscape? Not likely by entering information-intensive jobs in the service sector of the new global economy. Julian Simon argued that human ingenuity-and by extension, human population itself-is "the ultimate resource" for solving Earth's problems, transcending Earth's limits, and turning scarcity into abundance. But if all the bright ideas generated by a human population of 5.9 billion haven't yet relieved the desperate needfulness of 1.1 billion absolute poor, why should we expect that human ingenuity will do any better for roughly 2 billion poor in the future? ther writers besides Durning have warned about this deepening class rift. Tom Athanasiou, in Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and POOl;sees population growth only exacerbating the division, and notes that governments often promote destructive schemes oftransmigration and rain-forest colonization as safety valves for the pressures of land hunger and discontent. A young Canadian policy analyst named Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, author of several calm-voiced but frightening articles on the linkage between what he terms "environmental scarcity" and global sociopolitical instability, reports that the amount of cropland available per person is falling in the lessdeveloped countries because of population growth and because millions of hectares "are being lost each year to a combination of problems, including encroachment by cities, erosion, depletion of nutrients, acidification, compacting and salinization and waterlogging from overirrigation." In the cropland pinch and other forms of environmental scarcity, Homer-Dixon foresees potential for "a widening gap" of two SOlis-between demands on the state and its ability to deliver, and more basically between rich and poor. In conversation with the journalist Robeli D. Kaplan, as quoted in Kaplan's book The Ends of the Earth, Homer-Dixon said it more vividly: "Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the airconditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."

That direction, necessarily, will Qe toward ever more desperate exploitation of landscape. When you think of Homer-Dixon's stretch limo on those potholed urban streets, don't assume there wiII be room inside for tropical forests. Even oah's ark only managed to rescue paired animals, not large parcels of habitat. The jeopardy of the ecological fragments that we presently cherish as

parks, refuges and reserves is already severe, due to both internal and external forces: internal, because insularity itself leads to ecological unraveling; and external, because those areas are still under siege by needy and covetous people. Projected forward into a future of 10.8 billion humans, of which perhaps 2 billion are starving at the periphery ofthose areas, while another 2 billion are living in a fool's paradise maintained by unremitting exploitation of whatever resources remain, that jeopardy increases to the point of impossibility.ln addition, any form of climate change in the mid-term future, whether caused by greenhouse gases or by a natural flipflop of climatic forces, is liable to change habitat conditions within a given protected area beyond the tolerance range for many species. Ifsuch creatures can't migrate beyond the park or reserve boundaries in order to chase their habitat needs, they may be "protected" from guns and chainsaws within their little island, but they'll still die.

We shouldn't take comfoli in assuming that at least Yellowstone National Park will still harbor grizzly bears in the year 2150, that at least Royal Chitwan in Nepal will still harbor tigers, that at least Serengeti in Tanzania and Gir in India will still harbor lions. Those predator populations, and other species down the cascade, are likely to disappear. "Wildness" will be a word applicable only to urban turmoil. Lions, tigers and bears will exist in zoos, period.

Nature won't come to an end, but it will look very different.

The most obvious differences will be those I've already mentioned: tropical forests and other terrestrial ecosystems will be drastically reduced in area, and the fragmented remnants will stand tiny and isolated. Because of those two factors, plus the cascading secondary effects, plus an additional dire factor ['llmention in a moment, much of Eatih's biological diversity will be gone. How much? That's impossible to predict confidently, but the careful guesses of Robert May, Stumi Pimm and other biologists suggest losses reaching half to two-thirds of all species. In the oceans, deepwater fish and shellfish populations will be drastically depleted by overharvesting, if not to the point of extinction then at least enough to cause more cascading consequences. Coral reefs and other shallow-water ecosystems wi II be badly stressed, if not devastated, by In the next 50 years, erosion and chem ical runoff from the deforestation will doom land. The additional dire factor is inone half of the world's vasive species, fifth ofthe five factors forest-bird species. contributing to our current experiment in mass extinction.

That factor, even more than habitat destruction and fragmentation, is a symptom of modernity. Maybe you haven't heard much about invasive species, but in coming years you will. The ecologist Daniel Simberloff takes it so seriously that he recently committed himself to founding an institute on invasive biology at the University of Tennessee, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt sounded the alarm in ] 998 in a speech to a weed-management

symposium in Denver. The spectacle of a cabinet secretary denouncing an alien plant called purple loosestrife struck some observers as droll, but it wasn't as silly as it seemed. Forty years ago, the British ecologist Charles Elton warned prophetically in a little book titled The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants that "we are living in a period of the world's history when the mingling of thousands of kinds of organisms from different parts of the world is setting up ten'ific dislocations in nature." Elton's word "dislocations" was nicely chosen to ring with a double meaning: species are being moved fi-om one location to another, and as a result ecosystems are being tm'own into disorder.

these human-mediated transfers were unintentional, sometimes merely shortsighted. Nostalgic sportsmen in New Zealand imported British red deer; European brown trout and Coastal rainbows were planted in disregard of the native cutthroats of Rocky Mountain rivers. Prickly-pear cactus rabbits and cane toads were inadvisedly welcomed to AustraEa. Goats went wild in the Galapagos. The bacterium that causes bubonic plague journeyed from China to California by way of a flea, a rat and a ship. The Atlantic sea lamprey found its own way up into Lake Erie, but only after the Weiland Canal gave it a bypass around Niagara Falls.

Unintentional or otherwise, all these transfers had unforeseen consequences, which in many cases included the extinction of less he problem dates back to when people began using inge- competitive, less opportunistic native species. The rosy wolfsnail, nious new modes of conveyance (the horse, the camel, the a small creature introduced onto Oahu for the purpose of controlcanoe) to travel quickly across mountains, deserts and ling a larger and more obviously noxious species of snail, which oceans, bringing with them rats, lice, disease microbes, burrs, was itself invasive, proved to be medicine worse than the disease; dogs, pigs, goats, cats, cows and other forms of parasitic, commenit became a fearsome predator upon native snails, of which 20 sal or domesticated creature. One immediate result of those travels species are now gone. The Nile perch, a big predatory fish introwas a wave of island-bird extinctions, claiming more than a thouduced into Lake Victoria in 1962 because it promised good eating, sand species, that followed oceangoing canoes across the Pacific seems to have extelminated at least 80 species of smaller cichlid and elsewhere. Having evolved in insular ecosystems free of fishes that were native to the lake's Mwanza Gulf. predators, many of those species were flightless, unequipped to deThe problem is vastly amplified by modem shipping and air fend themselves or their eggs against ravenous mammals. Raphus transport, which are quick and capacious enough to allow many cucullatus, a giant cousin of the pigeon lineage, endemic to more kinds of organism to get themselves transplanted into zones Mauritius in the Indian Ocean and better known as the dodo, was of habitat they never could have reached on their own. The brown only the most easily caricatured representative of this much larger tree snake, having hitchhiked aboard military planes from the ew pattern. Dutch sailors killed and ate dodos during the 17th century, Guinea region near the end of World War II, has eaten most of the but probably what guaranteed the extinction of Raphus cucullatus native forest birds of Guam. Hanta virus, first identified in Korea, burbles quietly in the deer mice of Arizona. Ebola will next appear is that the European ships put ashore rats, pigs, and Macacafascicularis, an opportunistic species of Asian monkey. Although comwho knows where. Apart from the frightening epidemiological monly known as the crab-eating macaque, M fascicularis will eat possibilities, agricultural damages are the most conspicuous form of impact. One study, by the congressional Office of Technology almost anything. The monkeys are still pestilential on Mauritius, hungry and daring and always ready to grab what they can, includAssessment (OTA), reports that in the United States 4,500 nonnaing raw eggs. But the dodo hasn't been seen since 1662. tive species have established free-living populations, of which The European age of discovery and conquest was also the great about 15 percent cause severe harm; looking at just 79 of those age of biogeography~that is, the study of what creatures live species, the OTA documented $97 billion in damages. The lost where, a branch of biology practiced by attentive travelers such as value in Hawaiian snail species or cichlid diversity is harder to Carolus Linnaeus, Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin and measure. But another report, from the U.N. Environmental Program, declares that almost 20 percent of the world's endanAlfred Russel Wallace. Darwin and Wallace even made biogeography the basis of their discovery that species, gered vertebrates suffer from pressures (competition, predation, habitat transfOlmation) created by rather than being created and plopped onto Emth by divine magic, evolve in particular locales by exotic interlopers. Michael Soule, a biologist The lesson to be learned the process of natural selection. Ironically, the from fragmented, isolated much respected for his work on landscape conversame trend of far-flung human travel that gave sion and extinction, has said that invasive species habitats is Yeatsian: may soon surpass habitat loss and fragmentation biogeographers their data also began to muddle things fall apart. as the major cause of "ecological disintegration." and nullify those data, by transplanting the 1110st ready and roguish species to new places and Having exterminated Guam's avifauna, the thereby delivering misery unto death for many brown tree snake has lately been spotted in Hawaii. other species. Rats and cats went everywhere, causing havoc in what for millions of years had Is there a larger pattern to these invasions?

What do fire ants, zebra mussels, Asian gypsy been sheltered, less competitive ecosystems. The Asiatic chestnut blight and the European starling moths, tamarisk trees, maleleuca trees, kudzu, came to America; the American muskrat and the Mediterranean fruit flies, boll weevils and water hyacinths have in common with crab-eating Chinese mitten crab got to Europe. Sometimes ,

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(Continued on page 57)

Exploring inside an Antarctic ice cave.

POLAR

MELTDO Text by CHARLES W. PETIT Photographs by JIM LO SCALZO

Is the heat wave on the Antarctic Peninsula a harbinger of global climate change?

Scientists search for answers.

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almer Station, Antarctica-One doesn't need a PhD to see that things are changing fast around here. "That's Dead Seal Point up there," says Ross Hein, 27, director of boating operations at this remote American research base. On a sunny January day-midsummer in Antarctica-he points the Zodiac inflated motorboat toward a low, rocky islet a kilometer or so east of the base. The tough, flexible bow bumps slowly through a shoal of ice chunks-some the size of golf balls, others as big as a refrigerator-shoved near shore by the wind and current. The hard ice gives the boat a ride like an old truck on a bad road. It leads into

Adelie penguins are in decline.

Chief scientist Bill Fraser checks on petrel chicks.

a startlingly beautiful passage several hundred meters long and 45 meters wide. "Two years ago," Hein marvels, "this wasn't even here."

The point is that Dead Seal Point has no point, for we clearly are passing behind an island. To the right is a long wall of extravagantly fractured ice high as a 10story building. It is the leading edge of Marr Ice Piedmont, a glacial cap that reaches a depth of 60 meters on 61-kilometer-long Anvers Island, Palmer's home 190 kilometers outside the Antarctic Circle. Hein, to minimize hazards from falling ice, keeps well to the left, along a miniature, melting ice cap atop Deal Seal Point.

The spot's name stems, first, from the now vanished elephant seal that died on its seaward side a few years ago. But what is more significant, the rock was once believed to be a peninsular point peeking from under the glacier's foot. Since the 1960s, Anvers Island's glacial mantle has pulled its skirts in by about 10 meters annually. The point turned out to be an island, one of many emerging along the shore. Thirty years ago, the then new Palmer Station was about 50 meters from the same retreating glacial front. Now it is a quarter-kilometer walk. An eerily beautiful ice cave nearby, today about 40 meters long and formed by a drainage channel along the glacier's base, was twice as long a decade ago.

If you think a few degrees of global warming would not mean much in your neighborhood, the word from Palmer Station is: Think again. While hardly warm here, what with icebergs like ivory cathedrals turning majestically in adjacent Arthur Harbor, it may be the most warmed-up place on the planet. It provides lessons for us all if, as many scientists believe, Earth is unstoppably entering a heat wave that could last centuries.

The Antarctic Peninsula is an S-shaped projection of mountains, geologically related to the Andes, that reaches 1,200 kilometers north from the main continent toward South America. The computerized climate models used to forecast global warming reveal no reason for this place to be warming more rapidly than the rest of the planet. But since the mid-1940s, the average yearround temperature on the peninsula has gone up three to four degrees Fahrenheit, and in the early winter (June in the Southern Hemisphere) it is up a startling seven to nine degrees. While it still snows year-round, with summer temperatures averaging a few degrees above freezing and the middle of winter running in the teens, the rate of warming is 10 times the global average.

On ice. The bulk of the continent ,has only warmed a degree or so in the same time. Even this is enough to make some climate scientists worry that a significant part of its ice cap could someday melt, raising sea levels precariously. But there is no sign of that yet, and the

South Pole itself, atop a three-kilometer-thick layer of ice where temperatures stay well below zero, may actually have cooled a bit. Such inconsistency is among reasons skeptics assert that global warming is too uncertain to merit costly programs to contain it.

But here warming is no mere hypothesis. And one senses how high the stakes are if the skeptics are wrong.

The local warm-up is already in the same ballpark as that which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changeset up in 1988 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization to advise politiciansexpects for the rest of the world during the next century.

The changes aren't subtle. One hundred fifty kilometers to the east, on the other side of the Antarctic Peninsula, the immense and supposedly permanent Larsen Ice Shelf began to disintegrate in 1995. Nearly 1,500 square kilometers of shelf have collapsed just in the past two years, with thousands of square kilometers more appearing ready to go. "Climate change showed up on the radar screen 30 years ago or so, but most people back then never thought we'd really have to worry about it," says Bill Fraser, a tall, rangy ecologist and penguin specialist from Montana State University. He is the station's chief scientist and has been coming down here for two decades. "Now, right here, we're basically confirming what the models back then said would happen if climate changed. The species most vulnerable, those at the edges of their natural ranges, would be affected first. And that is what is happening."

In recent years, hints of wildlife migrations and local extinctions have been picked up around the world-butterflies moving to new ranges, for instance, or plants moving to higher altitudes on "mountains. But the picture here is simpler and starker. Not only is warming greater but, except for the occasional scientist or carefully monitored tourist, direct human impact is scant. So one cannot blame wildlife changes on factors like toxic pollution, agriculture or urbanization.

And wildlife shifts are unmistakable. Around Palmer and elsewhere on the western side of the peninsula there is not only less ice but a new set of residents. Southern elephant seals-the males are massive, sluglike beasts that can reach 4,000 kilograms-usually raise their young farther north in more temperate climes like the Falkland Islands. But one day this summer 254 elephant seals, including many pups, were seen on just two islands near Palmer, with uncounted others presumably living up and down the coast. More hospitable weather is the only explanation scientists have for this sudden migration southward.

New colonies. Fur seals, too, were not reported here before midcentury. But five years ago, a research vessel counted 2,000 of them onjust one island farther south.

If you think a few degrees of global warming would not mean much in your neighborhood, the word from Palmer Station is: Think again.

The icebergs off the Antarctic Peninsula are slowly melting.

Similarly, gentoo penguins and chinstrap penguins, species common closer to South America but virtually absent in fossil deposits around Palmer, are establishing new colonies on the peninsula. And while nobody expects forests to appear on these icy plains, low grass, tiny shrubs and mosses are thickening rapidly in many areas of the peninsula.

NSF manages the $200 million-per-year U.S. Antarctic program, and Palmer is one of the agency's premier sites for studying long-term ecological change.

At a glance the region looks much as it did to American seal hunter Nathaniel Palmer and other explorers who saw this part of the world in the 1820s.

Palmer Station's small cluster of blue, corrugated steel buildings perch upon a rocky shore. Behind them the glacier extends as far as the eye can see. Inside the friendly base are laboratories, warm bunks, a good kitchen and the "Penguin Pub" bar. Over the pool table is an old whale's rib, and above the fridge is an orange life preserver from the Argentine ship Bahia Paraiso, which sank after hitting nearby rocks in 1989. Its hulk is still visible from the station at low tide, and it still smells ofthe oil that wiped out a cormorant colony in the weeks after the wreck. Outside, gale-force winds can pour down the glacier without warning, sucking the warmth from anybody caught outside and not bundled up.

To see what such rapid heating does to a landscape and its wildlife, a us. News team visited Palmer in January, the height of austral summer. The peninsula has no airstrip, so it takes four days from Punta Arenas, Chile, across the Drake Passage aboard the Laurence M. Gould, an oceanographic research and resupply vessel under charter to the National Science Foundation.

No passports. Palmer, with a maximum population of around 40 and an annual cost of $12 million, is one of three U.S. Antarctic stations and the only one on the peninsula. The main U.S. headquarters is McMurdo Station, nearly 4,000 kilometers away on the Ross Sea, where the population can exceed 1,000 people, and the other station is at the South Pole. Like all of Antarctica, the peninsula is a utopia of international cooperation.

No one needs a passport to be here. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty suspended all territorial claims and reserved the great white continent for scientific research.

Fraser, 49, came here as a grad student and soon after did a 14-month sojourn. He makes no secret of the fact that he loves Adelie penguins. Changes here are not limited to new species moving in. Indeed, the Adelies are dying off, and fast.

Imagine a flock of turkeys trying to bleat like sheep, amplify it a few times, and that is the sound of a colony of Adelies. They are packed into nests of small pebbles stained pink with guano, and one often smells their raucous colonies before hearing them. Analysis of debris under nesting sites indicates that Adelies have dominated bird life around here for at least 600 years. And, to a first-time visitor during nesting season, Adelies seem to be waddling comically everywhere on the small offshore islands or slicing swiftly through the waves and dodging fierce leopard seals that prey upon them.

But 25 years ago more than 15,000 pairs of the penguins nested yearly within about three kilometers of the base. This year, there are about 7,700 of the handsome, formal-clad couples raising young. The population is down 10 percent in just the past two years. One soon learns to recognize the silent expanses of pebbles that mark extinct colonies.

The Antarctic Peninsula is a utopia of international cooperation.

Nobody knew that Adelies depend on sea ice to get through the winter, feeding on krill around its edges.

In recent years, ice has become scarcer.

On Torgersen Island, about a kilometer west of Palmer, Fraser quietly watches and counts the birds as they come and go or tend their nests and their chicks.

The chicks are about two-thirds the size of an adult and covered in gray down. But in addition to taking a census of the Adelies, Fraser wants to know what the birds are eating. "You know how the old-timers did this?" he asks. He takes aim down an imaginary rifle barrel.

"Plink! I just don't think I could ever do that. No way."

Instead, he and co-researcher Donna Patterson select five of the 50-centimeter-high Adelies as they hop across the rocks, tummies plump from foraging at sea.

After a short chase, they drop a net over each bird, pick it up by the base of a flipper, and carefully measure its skull and beak size. While Fraser grips the bird's torso between his knees, Patterson gets behind him to hold its calloused, sharp-nailed feet. Field assistant and graduate student Erik Chapman dips a clear, flexible tube in olive oil. He passes the tube to Fraser, who with a look of apology on his face, slides it down the penguin's throat. Turning a hand crank, Chapman pumps warm salt water into the bird's stomach. In a moment, the bird regurgitates the water, along with its recent meal.

Stoics. Bird by bird, the researchers fill small plastic bags with disgorged krill, the shrimp like plankton that are the near-exclusive fare of penguins here. Except for a slight pink color from exposure to digestive enzymes and acids, the limp crustaceans look fresh. A pair of brown skuas-powerful predatory relatives of gulls that fly like eagles and often consume stray penguin chicks-alight nearby. They know they'll get some leftovers tossed to the ground by the scientists. As far as can be told, the procedure does the penguins no harm.

They endure it with impressive equanimity. Upon release, each scrambles away, flippers flapping, then resumes a deliberate walk back to the colony where mate and offspring wait.

An hour or so later, Bill, Donna and Erik are back at a lab bench on Palmer's ground floor, picking through the erstwhile penguin meals with tweezers, measuring each of the krill against a ruler. To the untrained eye they don't look ominous-fat and near the six-centimeter maximum length that these krill reach. But Fraser sees something else. "This looks bad," he says, laying a few krill upon the lab bench's black surface. Such big krill are at least three years old. Young krill depend in their first winter on shelter under the solid ice that forms on the sea surface. The absence of young krill in these Adelies' diet reinforces Fraser's fear that this food source could collapse if winters around here remain as warm and ice free as they have become. Recently, winter ice is getting rarer. At midcentury four out of every five winters here produced extensive sea ice. Now, just

two in five bring the heavy winter ice necessary to shelter the young krill.

As early as the mid-1980s, researchers at Palmer could see the local Adelie population dropping. At the same time, chinstrap penguins, almost unknown here before the late 1950s, were (and are) prospering, sometimes walking right into Adelie rookeries and setting up housekeeping flipper to flipper with their cousin species. And while krill may be down, both penguins eat them, so a food shortage seemed an unlikely way to explain their differing fates. Except for a dark line under their beaks, chinstraps look a lot like Adelies.

And for a long time scientists knew of no significant behavioral differences between the species that would explain why one might do better than the other. A big clue came in the coldest, darkest months of 1988. That year the U.S.-chartered research vessel Polar Duke explored the Weddell Sea on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The expedition, with Fraser on board, found the winter ice pack swarming with Adelie penguins. By contrast, the open sea glittered with chinstraps. Until then nobody knew that Adelies depend on sea ice to get through the winter, feeding on krill around its edges. In recent years, as sea ice has become scarcer around Palmer, it became apparent why the region's Adelies were struggling while the chinstraps flourished.

But that's not the Adelies' only problem. By nature, Adelies are hard-wired for a narrow and inflexible range of behavior, as an anecdote from several winters ago illustrates. The icebreaker encountered perhaps 2,000 Adelies marching along single file. As the ship pulled even with the marchers, the lead bird reached a gap in the ice perhaps a foot across. It hesitated, hopped over, tripped on a small bump, fell flat on its face, popped up and kept going. "Damned if every single penguin didn't jump at exactly the same place and do a face plant exactly like the first one," Fraser recalls.

"Barn, barn, barn." Not one Adelie thought to cross just 10 centimeters to the left or right. "That says something about the intelligence of Adelies," Fraser said.

This is more than a humorous story to Fraser. It demonstrates that, even more than many other penguins, this species has evolved very inflexible habits.

"That is a boon in a fragile and tough environment where, once one finds a good niche, it pays off to stick with it," Fraser explains. "But it is a behavioral flaw in times of climate change."

Creatures of habit. Around Palmer, he sees evidence on every visit to the rookeries of the Adelies' inability to adjust to surprises. The birds live a dozen years or longer and mate for life. Once a pair establishes a nesting site-most commonly on the same island where they were born and often in the same colony-

the couple usually returns to the exact same nesting place year after year.

But warmer air holds more moisture, and in this stillcold place, that means more snow. Prevailing winds here pile snow deepest on the southwest-facing sides of the small islands where the penguins nest. The birds there seem incapable of recognizing, in the deepening snow, that it is time to set up housekeeping somewhere else. When spring arrives in September and October, the Adelies often-and stubbornly-pile pebbles atop snow 60 centimeters thick or more to build their nests.

Later, frigid meltwater kills eggs and newborn chicks by the score. By contrast, chinstraps seem a bit more flexible in where they nest, choosing sites based more on their immediate suitability.

During a penguin-counting survey on Cormorant Island, Patterson points to a tiny remnant Adelie outpost. It has two nests, surrounded by a penumbra of smoothed pebbles where hundreds of penguins raised their young 10 years ago. And standing about insolently are half a dozen brown skuas, waiting for a chance to grab a lightly defended baby penguin. Maps of Adelie colonies consistently show that most of the failed colonies are located where snows have become deepest.

The chicks born in these places are hatched later and are smaller. Chicks from colonies on northern-facing shores weigh an average of nearly three kilograms; those on snowier south shores are half a kilogram lighter. "Lightweight chicks won't survive their first winter," Fraser says.

Every failed penguin colony could be just one more local chapter in the pitiless pageant of nature. Certainly, there are no endangered species here. Adelies are flourishing at the southern end oftheir range in the Ross Sea. And that fits the cl imate-change model, too. The Ross Sea historically has been so bitterly cold that a little warming there makes it more, not less, hospitable to the Adelies. "Their whole range," Fraser observes, "seems to be shifting south."

But in most of the world, the natural ranges of species cannot move as easily as they can in this vast, unspoiled continent. If warmer weather drives a species to the edge of a city, or to the top of a mountain, that may be the end of it. And that's why the lessons from the Adelies here should demand attention elsewhere.

Palmer is one of several sites in the Long-Term Ecological Research program, sponsored by NSF to keep track of how wildlife in specific areas is doing.

While Fraser has been there longest, other Palmerbased scientists track the richness of the bottom of the food chain, including marine algae and other plankton in the sea, the krill that feed on plankton, and microbes living in the water, ice and thin soil.

Man with a plan. Temperature and snowfall are not the only changing environmental factors here, either.

The famed ozone hole, a loss of ultraviolet-absorbing ozone molecules in the stratosphere over Antarctica, affects the Palmer area in October and ovember each year. Ultraviolet radiation levels soar. University of Texas graduate student Jarah Meador found so many bacteria living in the glacier fragments floating in the harbor that she e-mailed Wade Jeffrey of the University of West Florida, principal investigator on a program to monitor the effects of ultraviolet radiation on Antarctic microbes. He had a plan.

One sumy day, after some training in rappelling down ice cliffs with the base search-and-rescue team, Meador hiked up the glacier behind the base and lowered herself on a rope down a narrow crevasse that extended 30 meters into the ice. "It's great down there," she exulted on the way back out. [n the deep blue light filtering through the ice, she dug into the vertical wall of ice at intervals, carefully preventing contamination while she gathered samples. If the microbes at great depth tUI11out to be different from those near the surface, it could mean that evolution is already retul11ing the microbes to tolerate increased levels of ultraviolet radiation. o one yet knows how or whether the ozone hole is a major threat to the region's biology. But there is little doubt about warming and penguins. After a few decades watching the same population of birds-he is now studying great-grandchicks of some of his first onesFraser says he is beginning to feel, in his bones, what he calls ecological time: the decades to centuries over which populations ebb, flow and sometimes vanish. At one of the station's evening science seminars, physicist Dan Lubin of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at Palmer to study how ice and open sea reflect sunlight, notes that climate change does not appear or disappear quickly. The atmosphere's carbon dioxide and other solar-energy-trapping gases won't return to preindustrial levels for 200 years or more, even if humans could somehow stop their emissions right now. "Two hundred years!" Fraser says. "Even in ecological time, that is enough to really screw things up."

As this account goes to press, Fraser reports bye-mail from Palmer that this year's chicks, so fuzzy and hapless in mid-January, have already changed into juvenile plumage and are going for their first swims. In a couple of weeks, if you can imagine this, the islands will be silent, as the penguins head out to sea for winter. And next year, he and Donna Patterson wi II be back to greet them when they return to raise another generation-and to count how many made it to another spring.

D About the Author: Charles W Petit is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report.

The atmosphere's gases won't return to preindustrial levels for 200 years or more, even if humans could somehow stop their elnissions right now.

A slot canyon at Round Valley Draw in the Grand Staircase was made not by a river but by floods from storms and snowmelt.

At Moody Canyon and other cliffs ides in and around the monument, the sky's reflection often looks more like paint than light.

Some of the most haunting and challenging terrain in the United States is in the Grand StaircaseEscalante National Monument in Utah. The author explores its rich natural resources and a bit of its human history.

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HIGHDDRY

nyone who has spent much time recreating in the wild knows there are a number of discomforts with which the human organism can cope-biting insects, cold, hunger. Then there's thirst.

There is no coping with thirst. If you are thirsty, you do not say, "Oh, wellmaybe we'll find water tomorrow."

Forget tomorrow. Thirst does not mess around. Either you drink or your engine light goes on and you start acting stupid.

Your muscles cramp, you hallucinate, your throat dries out. In a worst-case scenario, you can expire.

My backpacking partner and I got a taste of this, so to speak, as we made our way out of a blistering desert wash in southern Utah one afternoon last fall.

The day before, we had stopped off in Escalante (population 900) for supplies and advice.

Beauti ful downtown Escalante consists of a few restaurants, a handful of motels, an outfitter and a grocery store. Sneeze while you drive by and you'll miss it.

The same cannot be said, however, for the country Escalante is in. On one side, the fabulous jumble of mountains, streams and grasslands known as the Aquarius Plateau heaves its immense bulk to elevations well over 3,000 meters. On the other side, sprawling clear down to Arizona more than 80 kilometers away, reposes one of the most formidable chunks of intact wilderness left in the continental United States, the tortured topography of escarpments and high-desert canyon lands now known as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. That was our destination.

Until President Bill Clinton conferred monument status on the 680,000-hectare area in 1996, most people had never heard of it. But even before the Grand StaircaseEscalante became famous, the region it occupies and the several ranching communities that stick to it like ticks had begun to change in ways familiar throughout the West-tourism, new homes, vacation getaways, the works. I figured if I was ever going to see the place while it was still a genuine remnant of the old frontier, I'd better get at it before WalMart

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and Howard Johnson moved next door.

People in Escalante confirmed that the part of the monument we were thinking about exploring over the next few days, a wash near Big Horn canyon 16 kilometers south of town, did indeed meet the criteria we stipulated. It had been visited by a contingent of John Wesley Powell's second Colorado River expedition, whose overland route we were retracing; it was scenic, and it had plenty of water.

They were right about scenic. Each time we rounded a bend, some new astonishment brought us to a gaping halt: soaring Navajo sandstone, towering hoodoos, ornate minarets, fantastic side canyons and brilliant banks of yellow and purple wildflowers.

They were wrong about water. The meager rivulet we stepped across when we started out expired soon thereafter. The clay of the wash was so cracked and curled it felt like we were walking over shards of broken pottery. We saw no springs; there were no creeks, no seeps.

By the time I realized the fix we were in, the water we had brought with us was half gone. At that point, we had no choice but to make camp and turn back the next morning. While we were unpacking, the sun went down and the air cooled noticeably. The towers and bluffs to the east. were glowing with a fierce incandescence. Beyond them, somewhere up ahead, the Escalante River snaked through a maze of buttes and canyons on its way to the Colorado. It was very quiet.

Nothing moved until a falcon dropped out of the sky like a sickle blade and tucked into a nearby cliffside. Coming in we had seen lizards, jackrabbits, enormous beetles. Early on we had encountered cattle, and all day we kept coming across their trails. Now we were far from livestock, far from civilization.

We built a small blaze atop a fire pan I made by stacking several flat rocks. We could tell from the smoke-it smelled like incense-that the dry wood we had gathered was mostly pill0n and juniper.

We enjoyed some wine, wolfed down a sandwich and watched needles of light prick tiny holes in the darkening sky. It was great fun-but not easy to resist tak-

ing a long pull on the old canteen.

The sun was up before we got under way in the morning. A few hours later, [ heard a strange croaking sound. It was me.

I was trying to say, "Slow down," but all that came out was croak. We had run out of water and were drenched in sweat. Her calf muscles and hands were cramping up.

I was daydreaming about glasses of lemonade ...32-ounce Big Gulps ... Niagara Falls ... Antarctica. As we inched along, a suitable working title for the posthumous movie that would be based on our unfortunate little excursion flashed before my eyes: "Two Dopes From the East Learn About the West the Hard Way." Not that there's an easy way. We were, after all, in the heart of the Colorado Plateau, a notoriously arid territory that owes its rugged contours mainly to erosion, of all things. The monument itself is made up ofthree different sections. It was the geologist Clarence Dutton who coined the term "Grand Staircase" for the western section, an ascending series of cliffs and plateaus. The canyons associated with the Escalante River make up the eastern section. The wedge-shaped Kaiparowits Plateau occupies middle ground. Its vast network of benches, flats and canyons are walled off from Escalante country by the Straight Cliffs, and from the Staircase by the bizarre fins of the Cockscomb formation. It is, as has often been remarked, a helluva place to lose a cow.

The ten men who set out on horseback from a raw Mormon settlement called Kanab in late May 1872 were not looking for cattle. They were looking for a boat.

Over the next three weeks, they inscribed a 400-kilometer arc in the general vicinity of the monument, ending up at the confluence of the Dirty Devil River and the Colorado. They were led by Almon Harris Thompson, a 32-year-old educator, naturalist and geographer who was matTied to Powell's sister Ellen. Their objective was Facing page, top: Carved by the wind, an arch in Southern Utah Fames the Kaiparowits Plateau. Far right: Autumnal hues enliven Coyote Gulch not far downriver from the monument, in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Right: Calf Creek Falls invites hikers to cool off

to recover the Canonita, a vessel the expedition had cached near the mouth of the Dirty Devil the previous fall. Several of the men would take it on downriver; the others would go back the same way they had come.

At that time, southern Utah was still part of an enormous blank space on the map of America that the novelist and Powell biographer Wallace Stegner, a great admirer of redrock country, once described as "a chain of canyons more than 1,600 kilometers long ...entrenched up to 2,000 meters deep in an unknown desolation as big as Texas." Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran who would one day become the director of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnography and, later on, head of the U.S. Geological Survey, was determined to find out what was in that terra incognita. After his first harrowing run down the Colorado in 1869, he hired Thompson to accompany him on the second passage and to undertake the mapping of the entire region, a high job. As it turned out, Powell absented himself much of the time on personal business and politicking back in Washington, leaving his brother-in-law in charge.

"The Prof," as Thompson was known to his associates, had a steady gaze, a prominent nose and an enormous mustache that flopped over his mouth like a bushy doormat. Resolute, pragmatic and unflappable, he kept a meticulous trip diary in which he noted that he was disinclined to "gush." It was true. He downplayed hardships, accomplishments and his occasional impatience with Powell.

Even his comments on malingerers were succinct: "He was a 'quitter' every time there was any hard thing to do."

After leaving Kanab and heading notih up Johnson Canyon, Thompson and his companions followed old Indian trails along much the same route that is taken today by a bumpy din road called Skutumpah. Skining the White Cliffs in the Staircase, they struggled across Bizarre sandstone pinnacles glow at sundown amidst the sparse grass and scrawny pii'ion of Escalante Canyon country.

Thompson and his cohorts had endured seemingly impassable badlands to reach the Paria River. Along the way, they the kinds of hardships explorers are supfound the scattered remains of a young posed to endure: brutal terrain, ice, rain, Mormon who had been killed several illness, mosquitoes, thirst and even the years earlier by Paiutes. They took a fork intolerable snoring of one of their fellow east from the Paria above the upper travelers. Then, on the return trip, the reaches of the Kaiparowits Plateau, implacable man in charge had to do it all eventually coming into a valley where over again. It was a fitting introduction to the formidable terrain he and his they happened upon a river they believed to be the Dirty Devil. They realized they hardy crews would be mapping for the were mistaken after Thompson and next six years.

In 1879, the Prof joined the U.S. another member of the patiy clambered up a ridge in a wash about 15 kilometers Geological Survey in Washington, where southeast of Escalante's future town site. he became chief geographer and From that vantage point, the two men remained until his death in 1906.

Attempts to tame the wilderness he surcould make out the snow-streaked summits of the several mountai ns Powell veyed never got much past go. Some later named the Henrys for one of his earliest supporters, Joseph The Grand Staircase-Escalante Henry, the Smithsonian's first secretary. They knew the Dirty Devil extends across 680,000 hectares of ran east of those mountains, which Utah public lands. The Escalante meant that the river they had discovered was a new one altogether.

River winds through a 1,600-kilometer It was, in fact, the last unknown of interconnected canyons. river in the United States.

Thompson decided it should be impressive parks and monuments were called the Escalante, after a Spanish established, including Grand Canyon, priest who explored pati of the Colorado Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Plateau in the I770s.

Arches. The damming of the Colorado at . Glen Canyon led to the designation of the immense Glen Canyon National hey couldn't make a beeline for the Dirty Devil. " 0 animal Recreation Area. without wings could cross the As for the stupendous lands in the middeep gulches in the sandstone dle of all that, they remained mostly in the public domain but well out of the spotbasin at our feet," Thompson observed. light. Prospectors, cattlemen, hunters and So they had to go around. The men sniffed other recreationists were able to do more out a way up the Aquarius Plateau, then or less as they pleased. Oil companies and rode east across its shoulder through coal-mining concerns filed a number of stands of aspen, pine and fir. They forded leases. On the conservationist side, severstreams, encountered a number of emeral schemes were cooked up over the years ald lakes and surprised a band of to form a national park, monument or Indians-friendly ones, it turned out.

After thus bypassing the worst of the recreation area, but they were shot down, one after another, by ranchers and others canyon lands, they descended into Dirty who did not welcome the restrictions such Devil country and eventually reached the initiatives would entail.

Colorado, where they found the Canonita.

Then three years ago the President "We had at last traversed the unknown to issued the proclamation establishing the the unknown," a member of the group Grand Staircase-Escalante National named Frederick Dellenbaugh later exultMonument. H is announcement caught ed. "If it had ever been done before by white men there was no knowledge of it." almost everyone by surprise, including the individual who would be in charge of the Blazing a new trail to the Colorado,

maze"

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new reserve. A 20-year veteran of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Jerry Meredith had only recently been appointed the agency's district manager in southwestem Utah. As Bill Clinton spoke during a ceremony on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Meredith was hearing the news for the first time on his car radio. He shook his head and said, "Well, I'll be damed."

Utah's politicians and many of its citizens were outraged. It was clear, however, that in drafting the proclamation the President's advisers had shrewdly defused the likely opposition by leaving the monument in the hands of the BLM, rather than transferring it to the less userfriendly Park Service, and by explicitly directing that grazing, as well as "valid existing rights," would be continued.

The monument spans five different life zones from Sonoran desert to coniferous forests and represents a unique combination of archaeological, historical, paleontological, geological and biological resources.

Politics aside, the case for the monument is a compelling one: it's the biggest museum you ever saw. It has no walls, halls, curators or archives-but such exhibits! And nothing is left out.

Geology? There are 270 million years of it. Ocean beds striped like layered cake and hard candy were thrust thousands of meters skyward here to be scoured by winds, contorted by quakes, washed away by rivers, stripped to the core and left exposed in all their naked majesty for geologists, paleontologists and the rest of us latecomers to ponder, study and admire.

Natural history? In one corner of the monument, scientists recently discovered hundreds of 45-centimeter-long, threetoed dinosaur tracks that were stomped into wet sand 165 million years ago. At the other extreme, consider the diminutive pack rat, which is actually a vole.

This obsessive character is so named because it spends its life collecting junk it uses to build mounds, or "middens," over its nests. Pack rats often occupy the same nests for generations, each one adding layer after layer of grass, twigs, leaves, seeds, thorns and other stuff.

Preserved for centuries in the dry desett air, the middens become time capsules researchers can study for clues to plant and climate changes going all the way back to antiquity.

Pack rats eat grass. Many other creatures in the monument eat them. Although it doesn't look like the kind of place that might support much wildlife, the monument's size, isolation and surprising plant diversity make it attractive to hundreds of species, from elk, coyotes and mule deer to snakes, raptors and lizards.

hen it comes to human histoly, it's as hard to separate the real West fi'om the imagined West in the monument as it is in the rest of this hugely mythologized pmt of the countly. The imagined West originated here, as elsewhere, in the feverish importunings of the 19th-century boomers who tempted homesteaders with promises of free land, fettile soil and rain that followed the plow. It was further embroidered by popular writers like Zane Grey, who set many of his adventures in the tablelands of the monument, and by the Hollywood fabulists who filmed dozens of westerns in and around these precincts, and by their counterpmts in television, including the crew that churned out some of the old Gunsmoke series in the frontier "town" now moldering away on Johnson Canyon Road.

Many real-life stories have ended the same way-prospectors abandoning claims, ranchers going under, failed grocers boarding up their store windows. Yet others have put down roots and survived.

The MOlmons were the first white settlers and remain a vital presence in places like Kanab, Escalante and Boulder, a hamlet so remote that it was still receiving mail by packmule in the I930s.

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The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy holed up hereabouts. For several centuries, before drought and the Lord only knows what else drove them away, the Anasazi and Fremont peoples lived here, too. One hot afternoon, Craig Sorensen, a BLM outdoor recreation planner, took us for a hike beside a bluff along the Escalante River, pointing out wicker granaries and footholds in the rocks.

Thompson's contribution to all this history, though significant, is little known. 1 first heard about him from another BLM operative, botanist Tom Leatherman. At Leatherman's urging, I obtained a copy of Thompson's diary from the Utah Historical Society. As I read it, it occurred to me that going where he went and doing some of what he did would be good way to recapture the excitement of discovery that even his laconic notes cannot disguise.

Although it's possible to duplicate much of Thompson's route in a car, the best way to get a feeling for the area is to go in on the ground. When you do, you'll probably wonder, as we did at first, how he (or anyone else, for that matter) could keep his bearings in such an overwhelming place. It didn't take us long to figure it out. Whenever we got lost, we crawled up something high and took a good look around.

One morning we set out to scale a cinder cone in the Pink Cliffs known locally as Powell's Point because one of the explorer's crews-Thompson's, actually-supposedly did some survey work on it. The real Powell Point, a 3, I00meter landmark Thompson and his cohOlts called "Table Mountain," is farther nOltheast. This one is located a shOlt distance below Bryce.

Somehow we undershot Powell's Point and ended up on a neighboring peak instead, but the effect was the same.

The entire monument and the lands beyond stretched out before us like a vast relief map. We could see all the way across the Kaiparowits, past the Waterpocket Fold in Capitol Reef National Park to the Henrys; nOlth to the Aquarius Plateau, and southeast to the looming hulk of Navajo Mountain on the

far side of Lake Powell.

The wind was howling through the junipers and scrub oaks clinging to that rocky summit. Watching a golden eagle wheel directly overhead, I had the sense that this is what history feels like. We had worked hard to get up there. On the way, we had come across mountain lion tracks impressed on the dusty trail. Now I was seeing what Thompson saw, hearing what he heard.

After making a U-turn in that wash near the Escalante River, the Prof and his men went up the Aquarius mainly by way of Pine Creek. According to Jerry Roundy, a local historian, their first campsite was probably on the creek about 32 kilometers north of Escalante in what is now the Dixie National Forest.

Thompson came very close to gushing that night. "We are camped by a little brook," he wrote in his diary, "that leaps from rock to rock down the mountain side....The water is pure, clear and cold."

As far as we could tell when we bedded down in that same vicinity one night, Pine Creek hadn't changed much. It still ran clear and cold, leaping from rock to rock between grassy banks bristling with fir, spruce and ponderosa. It was a noisy little thing, a brook that roared. In the morning, our drinking water was frozen solid and the bushes along the creek were hung with sparkling pendants. Negotiating the passage from canyons to high country, we, like Thompson, had gone from one extreme to another-from fire to ice.

The arid lands have always held a special fascination for curmudgeons and loners. They seem to exert a special pull on older people, too. Rummaging around our dry camp in the Escalante wash after our long hike that first thirsty day, I got an inkling why.

All afternoon we had been trudging past walls that looked like rhinoceros skin, pitted where the fossils of little critters once had been, studded with encrustations where others remained. Both of us were grouchy by the time we called it quits. I went off in search of firewood and ended up in Erosion Central.

Everywhere I looked: landslides, gullies, piles of rocks, columns of layered sand-

stone slumped over like crooked decks of playing cards.

wondered: Are geezers like me drawn to places like this because we find something oddly beautifulconsoling, even-about the spectacle of deterioration and decline? Or is it just that human fossils prefer to hang out in neighborhoods where other fossils live? Whatever, I felt strangely at home there, surrounded by the rubble of the ages. It was nearly dark by the time I picked up my armful of sticks and 'stumbled back toward camp.

My partner and I managed to complete our grueling trek out of the wash the next day. The gallon jug of water we had stashed in the backseat of the car was still cool from the night before. We drank from it until we could drink no more, then poured the rest over each other in an orgy of conspicuous consumption. After that, we found it necessary to spend some time rehydrating more systematically in Boulder, which is still an authentic cowboy town of the sort where only a tourist would be seen wearing an Earth First! T-shirt.

Folks in Boulder, still riled, politely informed us that President Clinton's monument proclamation was, in so many words, the most despicable sneak attack on an American outpost since Pearl Harbor.

We heard similar views expressed everywhere we went. Among the complaints usually enumerated: the monument was established in secrecy without local input; it is too big; it will lead to cutbacks in grazing and other traditional uses. Elaine Roundy (there are a lot of Roundys in southern Utah) grew up in Boulder, left and came back. "If you're a rancher or someone like me who liked it here the way it was," she said, "then you probably don't care for the monument because you know it's going to change this place."

Maybe it won't change all that much.

When the final management plan comes out in the fall, Jerry Meredith told me, it will maximize protection and minimize road improvements and other tourist-

I

related development. Ranchers, prospectors and hunters will be able to continue doing pretty much what they've been doing all along. But if the communities themselves opt for the kind of commercialization outside the monument that has recently transformed other gateway towns in the area-Moab, near Arches, for example, and Torrey at Capitol Reefthere isn't much Meredith can do about it.

Although it may be more difficult, now, to build a coal mine or drill for oil in the monument, other impacts are already being felt. The number of visitors has more than doubled since 1996 at the monument's Escalante welcome center alone. Boulder's growing population (currently about 220 residents) has forced the community to build a bigger elementary school. There are two new restaurants in town, a new B&B, a new store. In the Kanab area, the value of land near the monument has soared.

Much of this probably would have happened anyway, but nobody denies that, at the very least, the designation of the monument made it happen faster.

It's hard to say what the Prof would have thought about all this. My guess is that he would have approved of the monument not only because he was a natural. ist with a keen interest in geology but also because he knew from firsthand experience that the land wasn't good for much anyhow except wildlife and scenery. Reading his diary, you come to understand that he was a man who appreciated the character of the land he was exploring, in his own quiet way, and who realized he was lucky to have seen it in something close to its pristine state.

Inasmuch as a very considerable part of it has now been preserved for all time, generations of his countrymen will be able to do likewise. Which reminds me: if you plan on heading out there anytime soon, take it from one who learned the hard way. Bring plenty of water.

0 About the Author and Photographers: Jim Doherty is a Smithsonian edit07~ Photographer David Muench:S recent book, Plateau Light, celebrates the Colorado Plateau.

Tom Till, a Utahn, takes pictures all over the world.

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ant to know weather forecast for the day with a satellite picture? Or calculate water and soil conditions in your field or just want some information on the latest agricultural implements available? Or the address of the nearest Krishi Vigyan Kendra? Maybe you are looking for a suitable agricultural educational course for your son or daughter? All these and many more bits of useful information can now be found at one place, right on your desk. That is what a new portal called Agricultural Gateway to India promises to be-a one-stop cyber window for all agricultural information from India.

Thanks to the advent of the Internet technology and the World Wide Web, getting information on any subject has become simpler.

But getting right information at one place is still a difficult task. It holds good for the agriculture sector as well. A number of Indian government organizations, educational institutions, universities dealing with agriculture have set up websites on the net. The information is scattered and it is often time-consuming and cumbersome to get relevant information from different sources. Portals aim at providing all the information and links relating to a particular subject at one place. The Agricultural Gateway to India (AGI) is a new website designed to satisfy the information needs for agriculture in India. The site (web.aces.uiuc.eduJaim/diglib/india) is a work-inprogress and its target users include scientists, researchers, extension personnel, students, farmers, policy-makers, media, consumer groups and agribusiness professionals.

The agricultural portal is unique in more than one way. It has been created in the U.S. by an agriculture scientist from India, and is jointly managed by the Indian scientist and the U.S. laboratory.

The idea of creating the website germinated during the threemonth-long visit of Dr. . Sandhya Shenoy, senior scientist with the National Academy of Agricultural Research Management (NAARM) in Hyderabad, to the Agricultural InstructionaJ Media Laboratory (AIM Lab) at the College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana last year. Dr. Shenoy was the first international fellow at the AIM Lab and her visit was sponsored by the Indian

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Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

"Given the infrastructural facilities, the web seems to offer excellent possibilities in providing the online information. I also realized that in India there are comparatively very few websites in the field of agriculture, and most of these sites are about the organizations themselves. Very few have useful links for the agricultural information in the related fields," says Dr. Shenoy. "After searching extensively and studying existing websites, I felt that developing an agricultural website that serves the information needs of people here is paramount, and that makes my website one of its kind in India." The inspiration also came from her own experience as an agricultural student, an extension worker and as faculty-when she felt the dire need for keeping pace with technological improvements. Extension workers take the new technology developed in varsities and national research institutions to the grass roots level.

"Web-based outreach offers the best hope in America and in India of reaching broader audiences and better serving these audiences," says Dr. John Schmitz who has taught web technology and distance learning at the AIM Laboratory and has managed a "Web Lab" for the past six years. He worked with Dr. Shenoy one-to-one to give her a crash course in web technology. Then the two worked side by side on the website with lab designer Mary Connors and some student programmers.

AIM Lab provided a perfect setting for Dr. Shenoy's work. The lab was founded in 1992 to support faculty use of computers in instruction. In late 1993, the facility focused exclusively on webbased development and became a pioneer in uses of the web for instruction and outreach. Projects such as the Discovery System and the Cyberfarm came much before the explosive growth of the web. The lab is credited with innovative developments such as the Virtual Classroom Interface (VCI), which is a web-based instructional environment now used campus-wide by 500 classes. AIM Lab's new focus is on next-generation web design through a major project called the Morrill r. Digital Library. Morrill I is a prototype for an eventual state-of-the-art digital Jibrary that will

be anchored in a $21 million Agriculture Library Building to be completed in 200l.

"We want the AGI site to reach individual farmers, agribusiness professionals and other clients in India with practical and up-todate information," says Dr. Schmitz. The AGI cUlTently has information and links under various heads like animal sciences, crop sciences, agribusiness, extension, natural resources, weather, human resources, horticulture and maps. It has a hyperlinked map ofIndia, where one can click on any state and information relating to agricultural extension in that state pops up, along with other links like cultural and tourism information. Then there are quick links to a host of agriculture information resources available on the Internet.

"It is still a prototype. We have much to do to finalize the site, especially with plans for including district-specific information," points out Dr. Schmitz. Recently 50 new pages on Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) were added.

MaIy Connors-who spent a lot of time in India touring various places during her trips to the country in the I970s-developed an instant rapp0l1 with Dr. Shenoy. "When [ met Dr. Shenoy I felt as though she were a sister. Having lived in India I could visualize where she was from, and some of the social, economic and political issues that she was facing. So empathy was there from the start," recalls Connors, who was the co-creator of the Virtual Classroom Interface. She helped Dr. Shenoy become familiar with the Photoshop graphics software program and the VCI. They discussed possibilities and special needs for educating the isolated rural girls and women, who often pal1icipate in farming across India.

"I helped with the web architecture or structure, created some of the links, suggested some content, and created an icon bank of colorful agriculture-related graphics that anyone can use for free.

I hope to have the chance to work more on this project by adding lesson plans to the website. I helped Dr. Shenoy explore the potential of using Internet technology for distance learning in India," recounts Connors.

One concern that is being raised is effectiveness or accessibility of new information technologies, pal1icularly the Internet, in rural environment. Some of these fears may be unfounded because computers and Internet are invading the Indian agricultural sector as never before. Most of the state agricultural universities and the ICAR institutes have computer facilities, networking and Internet connections even now. Some of the state governments like Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are making efforts to computerize all departments, including agriculture. Most of the extension personnel are graduates in agriculture and need only basic training to use the computer and Internet for their information needs. This could help reduce the time lag in communication of agricultural information and the loss of crucial information when it travels from the agricultural experts in research institutes to grassroots-Ievel extension workers. Once the basic infrastructure framing is done, it should not be vety difficult to teach the extension workers or farmers how to access the infonnation.

In India, the extension workers-along with NGOs and private companies-are the main agents of technology transfer for the farmers. Scientists at Krishi Vigyan Kendras provide need-based training to small and marginal farmers. AGI will be a tool in the

hands of K VK scientists as well as extension workers. Extension workers can also take printouts of the information, make necessary modifications and make it available for ready reference to the farmers. Extension workers are being trained in accessing information from websites like AGI. Eventually, when the number of community PCs grows in villages and content becomes available in local languages and in audio format, farmers will be in a position to log on directly to websites like AGI. The "farmer-friendly" web project, Dr. Shenoy says, will help to get information more quickly to those who need it. Also, by speeding the flow of knowledge, it is hoped that more people, especially women, will want to pursue careers in agricultural extension. "This is a velY modest attempt to bridge the gap on technology transfer," she says. "There have been no proper incentives to be in extension.

There has been very little teclmology transfer information for extension agents. Many times progressive farmers know more than the extension agents do." nitiatives like AGI assume great relevance in the context of the World Bank-funded National Agricultural Technology Project (NATP) to be launched by the ICAR next year. It has a provision for setting up Agricultural Technology Information Centres (ATlCs) for increasing the efficiency of technology transfer. State agricultural universities and select [CAR research institutes would maintain these centers. The development of websites to satisfy online agricultural communication and information needs of extension workers and literate fanners would then have a direct relevance.

"As a part of my training at the University of Illinois, I also developed a model site for an ATIC and a proposal for information technology component which I did for Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh with the help of my adviser. But, effort has to be made by the agricultural institutions to develop agricultural information to be posted in website in vernacular languages for easy access of information by the farmers," says Dr. Shenoy, a doctorate in agriculture extension. Dr. Shenoy is currently developing content files in audio in Telugu and Hindi regarding some high-yield varieties of rice for hosting on AGI. The response for the site till now had been very good, as there has been nothing like that in the agricultural field before, says Dr. Shenoy. Right now, the website gets the most hits per month on the AIM web server on which it is hosted, though the number is only in hundreds. Now there are plans to send the website's URL (Universal Resource Locator) to all agricultural universities and ICAR institutes to invite their suggestions and comments.

There will also be a forum on the website for discussion of agricultural issues to increase interactivity. The FAQ (frequently asked questions) section in the ATIC website provides direct impact from the expert and the extension workers/farmers. Based on the feedback received, proposals are now being considered to add sections in Indian languages and ensure frequent updating of the information.

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About the Author: Dinesh C. Sharma is a Feelance journalist and columnist based in New Delhi. He specializes in science and technology issues.

Do it on the Web A Netizen's Guide

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t's that time again. Americans everywhere are contemplating Election 2000. And thanks to international cable news channels, you don't even have to live in the United States to faU victim to campaign fatigue. You don't even have to be an American. Those Americans who live abroad and can vote by absentee ballot have one advantage: we can tune out early, because we vote before anyone else. I am lucky to be a legal resident of California, a state that permits absentee voting-not all states do. Conducting polls, like the function of the judiciary, comes under state rather than federal jurisdiction. My grandfather, son of Polish immigrants, used to say, "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain." So with that civic directive impressed upon my consciousness, and my right to complain dearly held and often exercised, I knew it was time for action. Four years have come and gone since the last presidential election. I couldn't remember if 1 needed to re-register, but I did know that I had to get things underway well in advance, because the ballot must be Stateside no later than election day.

In past election years, getting information and the right forms has usually involved some kind of hassle: letter writing to government agencies, or asking someone there to pick up forms and send them. Usually it took a lot of time. Not anymore. This year I went to the Internet for information, and I was not disappointed. Anyone who wants to know anything about the U.S. Election 2000 will find it there-much more than they want to know, probably.

Four years have brought vast changes in terms of where and how people find information. Because of the growing importance of new media, some compare the coming presidential election with that of 1948, the first in which television had a role in the political process. After that election, the TV room increasingly became the place the electorate went to be informed. Oh, the morning paper was still delivered, but watching the six o'clock and 11 o'clock news evolved into a daily routine in most households. During the big political conventions, where the Democrats and Republicans meet to confirm selection oftheir presidential and vice-presidential candidates and hammer out a viable platform, TV

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aired long election specials, with extended coverage on election nights. CNN was born and so was wall-to-wall news coverage of such events. Any time, day or night, it was there. It was about that time when conventions lost most of their charm.

They moved from last-minute wrangles between foot-stomping caucuses from states whose votes could tip the scales, to fait accompli nominations determined entirely by primary polls. The conventions became streamlined, made for TV, Las Vegas-style hypes. Rather than television having a role in the process, the processat least the political convention-became a television production. There have been shouts and murmurs in the press about this recently-often on television, ironically.

In my family, in the old days as it were, watching conventions was sort of like watchjng the Superbowl. The news anchors were eminent and intelligent-not just good-looking and chatty. Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and Walter Cronkite spoke with sterling authority about things that mattered. They were sober with a dash of WIY wit. As a kid I recall being entertained when BC's senior correspondent John Chancellor was arrested on the convention floor, giving first person coverage on camera as he was led away. Then there was the unforgettable 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where some of the loudest voices of my generation were teargassed and swept away into police vans. There seems to be a renaissance of that SOliof behavior, reminiscent of the Yippies (Youth International Paliy), but nothing as rivetting as the Chicago Seven and their subsequent looney tunes-genre trial. Pol itics seemed more exciting and less depressing then, when it wasn't so slick.

But wait a minute. Now there's the functioning anarchy of the Internet.

Today, in the year 2000, the information seeker, the armchair politics junkie and the desktop crusader simply go onl ine.

This fits conveniently into a busy work schedule: the Internet is open 24 hours a day. It is not boring like continuous-loop 24-hour news channels that repeat the same tired video clips and fatiguing commercial brainwash. There is sparring in chat rooms. The Internet is chock full of

valuable stuff. When I wanted to find out about voter registration, I logged on, called up my favorite search engine Google, and typed "League of Women Voters," which is the oldest and probably the best organized network for electoral education, registration and consultation in the United States. When the home page at <www.lwv.org> came up, bang! Voter information was right there on top. A few clicks got me to a link that displayed my local registration office in California. But there are other items of interest on the home page, free even if you are not a League member. Their Democracy Net <www.dnet.org> provides excellent public interest information. By typing in a postal zip code, you can find out what candidates are running for public office in any state and learn where they stand on issues.

One thing the League highlights is current legislation under consideration by the U.S. Congress, alerting concerned citizens so they can write their representatives to express their views before the deed is done. Writing to the district or state politician who is spending your tax money in Washington is something that the Internet has made much easier, thanks to e-mail.

Constituents can find e-mail addresses of members of the House of Representatives and the Senate on the U.S. Congressional website and send opinions in a flash of fiber optics.

If anyone wants to get the lowdown on the presidential candidates, there are several ways to go. For the official party line, go directly to the Democratic National Committee site <www.democrat.org> to find out about AI Gore or the Republican National Committee site <W\vw.rnc.org> for George W. Bush. Both sites provide links to state and district offices and other bells and whistles. And of course, each candidate has his own home page: <www.algore2000.com> and <georgewbush.com>. Or just type in their names and see what you come up with. There is one site, Skeleton Closet, that repolis the dirt that candidates would rather sweep under the carpet. Be advised, the information on such sites, while enteliaining, may not be entirely accurate. But there are a multitude of sources to cross-check.

A stop at the State Department website Elections 2000 <usinfo.state.gov/ topical/elect2000> is wOlihwhile. It targets the overseas audience and provides a wide range of balanced, bipartisan materials that explain the U.S. elections to interested observers or students around the world. It is available in English, French and Spanish. It spotl ights new developments, including texts and transcripts from the campaigns. It has a section on historical background and the electoral process in the U.S. that includes a political lexicon. If you are stumped by what a "Blue Dog Democrat," "bounce," or a "swing voter" is, go there. It also features links to other resources. It is stunningly user-friendly: minimal graphics and the absence offl:ashing ads make for quick access.

Another site of interest to those overseas is maintained by the Council on Foreign Relations <www.foreignpolicy2000.org>. Its brief is "to foster serious public debate bet\짜een the paliies and between their candidates about America's foreign policy, international economic policy and national security policy." It provides information on foreign policy issues facing the next president, candidate positions on foreign policy, and a database of expert opinions, analysis, foreign affairs articles, and poll results. It has been ranked among the best political websites.

"Welcome to the future of democracy," is the Publius invitation <www. publius.org>. This website focuses on online civic resources: "Our goal is to develop ethics that help navigate technological advances, and to help people take advantage of new methods of citizen/government interaction." VoteNet is another electronic forum that provides a consultancy service for political professionals, policy-makers and organizations. It also offers information to the average voter.

But it's a business. It even features an estore where campaign bumper stickers, Tshirts and other paraphernalia may be purchased online. Controversy has arisen in recent years over just how much business is involved in voting. Now some elections are conducted by outside contractors who design and sell electronic voting sys-

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tems, but the lack of standards and government regulation of this new industry rings alarm bells. Many feel the vendors are given too much power, and want more accountability to protect the voter's constitutional rights and avoid corrupt practices.

Such debate about the feasibility of Internet voting is naturally reflected in cyberspace. A recent repOJi by the State of California Internet Voting Task Force gives an interesting summary of its possibilities and drawbacks. The entire report and appendices may be downloaded from <www.ss.ca.gov>. I found it through a link from another site. All the above-mentioned sites have useful links to follow if you have the time and interest to do so.

But back to the actual political scrum.

There are still more sites to check out.

Politics I.com <www.politicsl.com> runs a "Presidency 2000" site with thumbnail information and some good links. Project VoteSmart <www.vote-smart.org> is another good source for bipaliisan information about candidates, background and issues. Interested in politics out of the mainstream? Try Ballot Access ews <www.ballot-access.org> which tracks how "third party" and independent candidates get into the arena. America may not have the multiplicity of paliies that India has, but small parties are there, and

ince the 1800s the Democrats have been represented by a donkey and the Republicans by an elephant. An elephant mascot may be understandable, but a donkey?Why this symbol of ridicule? Andrew Jackson was labeled a jackass by bis opponents for his populist plat£onn when he ran for president in 1828. Jackson decided to use the slur constructively and put a donkey on his campaign posters. He won. The donkey was again applied to him in a political cartoon during his presidency to represent his stubbornness. It was carioonist Thomas Nast who caused the donkey to become a symbol attached to the Democrats by his use o£it in several carioons in the 1870s.. Nast also gave the Republicans their elephant in another series ofcalioons, the first of which had an elephant tagged "Republican vote" running away £i'om a donkey in a lion's skin. The cartoon depicted a controversy over a possible thirdpresidential term for Republican Ulysses S. Grant. The Democratic Party has never officially adopted the donkey as their symbol, although, like Andrew Jackson, they'use it on publications sometimes. The Republicans have adopted the elephant as their official symbol and use it fi·equenHy.in campaigns. They are often refelTed to as the GOP, whicb stands for "Grand Old Pariy." 0

can determine an election. Right now Democrats are concerned that the Green Party, for which consumer activist Ralph ader is contesting for president, could grab votes from environmentally friendly Al Gore. If you want a search engine for political news and policy, try <www.politicalinformation.com> which features more than 5,000 selected political/policy websites. For those who are seriously keen 01} the election, type "Congressional Research Service Report" into the search engine. A cumbersome site will appear that eventually can give you exhaustive information on the U.S. election-and other areas of U.S. policy-though you may become exhausted in the process of retrieving it. One of the best sites 1've seen on the history of U.S. presidential elections and politics is run by Grolier at <gi.grolier.com/presidents/ea/genconts.html#POLITICS>.

It is simple and to the point.

Campaign finances? Most of the above sites have something to offer on the subject, since it is an issue that has been up for intense scrutiny. One of the best sites is Open Secrets <www.opensecrets.org>, a nonprofit, bipariisan site that tracks the money to the candidates. It tells where the money comes from, how much of it there is, and who contributes. The day 1 checked in, George W. Bush had earned and spent ap-

proximately double what Al Gore had, but another page revealed that Bush had disclosed more of his funds than Gore or any other candidate. It's fascinating when it comes to who contributes to whom. We have top contributors MB A America Bank (Bush) squaring off against Citygroup Inc. (Gore). Ernst & Young evenhandedly contributed to both candidates.

Another reliable site for hard documentation is the Federal Election Commission <www.fec.gov> which gives chapter and verse on campaign finance law, among other things. It features navigational guides for citizens, media and politicians. Then, of course, there are the news media sites: ABCNews.com, the ubiquitous CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor ar'e all good sources for stories on all aspects of the campaign, sublime to ridiculous.

Well, it was fun Net surfing, but when it came right down to it, 1 found out I have to re-register whenever I want to vote by absentee ballot, and I couldn't do that online, Why? It is still deemed too risky because Internet fraud is too easy. So what to do? I simply e-mai led my mother, who did the rest over the old-tech telephone. The forms are in the mail.

0

u.s. Election Quirks Electoral College. A vestige of 18thcentury political style that survives in the constitution, it is regularly challenged.

But the electoral college, and not popular vote, still elects the President of the United States. Each state is assigned a number of electors corresponding to its population, and equal to the number of its senators and representatives. Electors, of whom there are 538 in total, are nominated in primary elections, party conventions or by party organizations.

They are pledged to one of the candidates and are themselves elected on election day. The electors usually vote according to popular vote. A candidate needs at least 270 electoral votes to win. Ifthird party candidates so divide the vote that no one receives 270, the House of Representatives chooses the next president from the three top candidates in a vote. Each state casts one vote, determined from the majority vote of its representatives.

Primary Elections. Unique to the United States, the primary election has become the accepted means by which political parties choose their candidates.

Originally candidates were chosen by a caucus, a group of policy-makers representing the party at a town, district or state level. Abuses crept in when vested interests began having too much say in nominations, employing unscrupulous methods when necessary. After the secret ballot was introduced in 1888, citizens were truly free to vote for the candidates of their choice without fear of coercion.

People were fed up with corrupt patty bosses calling the shots in the caucuses and conventions, and the primary was seen as a solution. By the early 20th century most states had mandatory primary elections. Most of the corrupt political machines which dominated patty caucuses and conventions were put out of business by the primary, but primaries didn't eliminate abuses entirely. Expensive primary campaigns can put patrons from special interest groups in politically influential positions, analogous to party bosses of the past. But there is far less leeway for

abuse now than there was in the days of backroom decision-making.

Democrats and Republicans. These two main palties have dominated the American political scene for nearly 200 years. The Democrats-who called themselves "Republicans" in the eat'ly 19th century-are the oldest patty and originated with Thomas Jefferson, who led the opposition to the Federalists. Federalists were in power during the terms of the first two Presidellts, Washington and Adatns. During Thomas Jefferson's administration the Federalist Party faded away. After being billed as Jeffersonians and Democratic Republicans, Jefferson's pmty decided on the official name "Democratic Pmty" at their 1840 convention. Factionalism resulted in divisions into new parties, and slavety was the issue that had the most force. The Republican Pmty was founded in 1854 in reaction to a bill that proposed extension of slavely into new territories in the Midwest. It attracted members of some of the short-lived pmties such as the Whigs and other anti-slavery groups. Amund this time the Whigs and another pmty, the "Know Nothings," disappeared, bolstering the Republicans. The Democrats were deeply divided over slavety. In 1860 the second Republican candidate to run for president, Abraham Lincoln, won a decisive majority of electoral votes in a four-way race. The Civil War promptly followed. Butfrom that time forward, presidential elections have been decided between these two parties. Within each party there is a range from conservatism to liberal, and factionalism is a fact of political life. Today the Democrats are viewed generally as representing liberal views and the Republicans more conservative views. Democrats are seen as the people's party while Republicans appeal to the more affluent.

Third Parties and Independents.

United States has a long tradition of "third party" and independent candidates, some of whom have done vety well. Recently fonner wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota on the RefOtID Patty ticket and Audie Bock won a seat in

California's legislature as a Green Party candidate. The most important role of minor patties, which are usually issuebased, is to raise and highlight specific public concerns. They may also introduce grass roots innovations that challenge stodginess in the Big Two. They may not win an election, but minor patties can influence the outcome of a close election.

Third party and independent candidates have a tough path even to get ballot access in some states, and election laws are not in their favor. Running a campaign can be prohibitively expensive for these small parties. Added to that, they face ridicule in the media and are dismissed by the Democrats and Republicans as being beneath notice.

But in American politics there is always a chance that circumstances will transform a minor patty into a major pmty. That is just what happened in the case of the Republicans when Abe Lincoln won the 1860 election. Some of the better-known third patties are the Green Party, the Reform Party, the Libettarian Party, the Socialist Patty, the Communist Patty, the Pacifist Party and the Natural Law Party.

And this election has a first: an Intemet patty called the Timesizing.com Patty. This [u'st dot-com political party plwnps for a shotter work week, maintaining that as technology gets bettel~ quality of life should improve and labor spread amund more equitably. Its slogan: "Timesizing, not Downsizing."

Campaign Finance. The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) governs public disclosure of funds raised and spent, restrictions on contributions and expenditures and public funding of Catnpaigns. There are limits on contributions by individuals and organizations, and a prohibition on contributions from corporations, labor organizations, federal government contractors and foreign nationals.

Corporations and labor unions may form political action committees to raise money for candidates, however. Candidates may receive public money from a fund maintained by the U.S. Treasury for voluntary donations of U.S. taxpayers.

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Put 9V2 million transistors in a space the size of your thumbnail and allow zero contamination. But that's just part of the Intel recipe.

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ike uncounted millions of people in the world, I have Intel inside. It says so right in front of me on a silvery sticker glued to my laptop.

But I also have Intel outside.

Three kilometers west and a bit south of my house as the crow flies, looming on the edge of a high sandy mesa overlooking the Rio Grande in New Mexico, is a 90-hectare installation that includes three Intel fabrication plants, or Fabs. Up there they make the microprocessors, the chips that run the show, that Intel has inside laptops like mine.

All I knew about any of this until recently was that microprocessors, the very core of our computers, are so complicated that they defy common understanding. I also knew from the local media that the newest Intel Fab in New Mexico was a huge room the size of about five football fields, and it cost more than $40,000 a square meter.

I got curious about such extremes of scale and, having talked my way inside, T soon had my first hands-on experience of the magic of this new engine powering the global village. I assisted in constructing a chip from variously colored bits of Play-Doh. Yes, kindergarten is in store for newbies at fntel. It is called a Functional Area Macro Overview Class or, in a place just as ebulliently awash in acronyms as the Department of Defense, a FAM. Among my classmates was Terry McDermott, a linebackersize gent with twinkly eyes who was once a local TV sportscaster and, prior to that, a catcher and infielder in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization. Now one of his chores in life is to shepherd people like me through the Intel chip-making labyrinth.

From the FAM, I learned first that chips, none any larger than my thumbnail, may be made of some 20 infinitesimally thin layers, and that they are produced on wafers of silicon 20 centimeters in diameter, with anywhere from 100 to 600 chips to a wafer.

When the industry began in 1960, the wafers were about the same size as communion wafers, hence the name. Think of a wafer as a pizza, Terry said, in a more secular vein. The bigger the pizza, the more pepperoni you can get on it. And of course,

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Rosemwy Gerald checks the temperature of a finished crystal while Gary Burgess works the fi/rnace controls.

the smaller the pepperoni slices, the more you can get on it, too.

Smaller is better: cheaper and faster.

We were slow. It took the better part of two hours for us to make the first few layers of a chip with our Play-Doh, cutting out shapes with stencils they call masks, placing them carefully one upon the prior one, making little holes through several layers like elevators between floors so the layers could communicate with each other. During the process, we were interrupted by Intel's musical cue over a loudspeaker that meant it was time for everyone to stop whatever they were doing and begin five to 10 minutes of stretching exercises. They really mean everybody,

whether you're a technician in the Fab or a "carpetdweller" (office worker) in a cubicle.

Life in an Intel Fab begins and ends with these wafers, now 20 centimeters but before long 30 centimeters (more room for pepperoni). The wafers arrive at the plant in cassettes of 25 and months later go forth much altered but still in cassettes of 25.

The wafers are made of almost pure silicon, the second most plentiful element in the earth's crust and what is known as a semiconductor: it can easily be persuaded to be a conductor or an insulator, which means that it can conduct electricity or not. Each transistor that will be built into the finished chip is an electrical switch that can be on or off. A positive charge fed into a transistor's gate opens it, in a sense, and a negative charge closes it. In the many layers of a Penti um III chip they can install as many as 9Y2 million transistors.

A bit shell-shocked by so many zeros, I naively asked where the wafers came from and soon enough found myself at the approximate beginnings of the entire chip-making flow in one of the plants that grows silicon crystals and makes wafers out of them~a place in Phoenix, Arizona, called Sumitomo Sitix.

Silicon arrives at Sitix in a form so pure that only one atom of impurity is permitted in 10 billion atoms of silicon. In an atmosphere of inert argon gas, the si Iicon is melted at 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit in disposable 52,000 crucibles placed in a soldierly row of large blue ovens. Boron atoms are added to increase its electrical conductivity. Into this broth, a needlelike apparatus lowers a tiny silicon seed crystal, which is then pulled ever so slowly upward as it revolves. If all goes well in the next 72 hours, as the silicon freezes onto the crystal, each silicon atom will line up in the proper position, creating a huge single silicon crystal one meter long that looks for all the world like a 100-kilogram chromium-plated salami. he giant cylindrical crystals are then robotically hauled off to be ground down to the proper diameter (20 centimeters), X-rayed, and given thermal and other stresses to simulate whatever conditions the customer may later subject them to.

Then they are whisked off, again automatically, to be sawed into chunks and then wafers by what Sitix chief operating officer Robeti Gill likens to a giant bread slicer. The saw consists of high-tension steel wires, each about the thickness of a human hair, wrapped around three drums, taut as the rows of wire in a piano. The "blades" move back and forth, dragging a mix of oil and Carborundum through the silicon crystal, and in seven hours the big crystal chunks have been neatly sliced into wafers, I/\S of a centimeter thick.

A major criterion for a wafer is that it be flat, so that electrons will have uniform pathways to follow. On average, its elevation does not vary more than one micron~l/lo,oOO of a centimeter (a human hair is about 100 microns in diameter). Bob Gill explained the degree of accuracy this way: suppose instead of a 20-centimeter wafer you have a road grader and you are told to grade a circular area that is three kilometers in diameter. The terrain cannot vary in elevation from one place to another by more

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than two centimeters.

Back in micronland, it takes a lot of grinding, polishing, heating and cleaning to achieve this sort of tolerance. All of this is done without the touch of the human hand, the hand being far too gross an implement for this kind of work. Within glassed-in stations, little metal arms thrust forward and pull backward like the beaks of mechanical herons, feeding wafers into each successive operation while other mechanical arms seem to be saluting with Prussian precision. After each process, the wafers move along in special cassettes that are often kept submerged in water, the better to protect their surfaces from unwanted intrusions.

A big container of wafers in water is very heavy, and a robot that looks like a high-tech laundry bin bustles along a track, picking them up and depositing them at their next station. The robot (which has evidently been sexed and is referred to in the third person as "he") plays the Beatles' "Let It Be," one of 1,001 songs in his repetioire, to warn of his approach. If a visitor unwittingly stands in his track, he will stop a few centimeters away and politely ask the interloper to get out of the way.

Thousands of readings are taken for each wafer, to monitor thickness, bow, warp, taper and flatness. The wafers are cleaned chemically and mechanically, visually inspected under exceedingly bright lights~a particle half a micron across on the highly polished surface will light up like a beacon~and reinspected路 by laser for particles that are only two-tenths of a micron. The wafers are sorted into four bins: "reclean," "repolish," "scrap" or "good." Selected good ones are then rechecked by X-ray, atomic absorption spectrograph and scanning electron microscope for the likes of unwanted ions and metals. Those judged pristine go f01ih (in special shipping boxes, of course) to the places where microprocessors and other chips are made.

The most crucial steps in wafer making (that is, the trickiest steps) are growing the giant crystals and polishing the wafers, but if there is a higher power in all this, cleanliness is right next to it. Much of wafer-making takes place in what are called clean rooms. Such rooms are even more important to the actual making of microprocessors on these wafers, so we will interrupt the product flow here to rehearse the precise nature of the most fanatically clean, most thoroughly sanitized places on the planet.

Technically speaking, they are called laminar flow clean rooms, and they were invented by Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, happily at just about the time they came to be required for making microprocessors. Laminar flow means that particles ofa fluid or gas all move in parallel tiers or rows, and in this case it means that the air in a clean room all moves continuously from the ceiling down to the floor, where it vanishes through grates. Then it flows through large fans back into the room via the ceiling, which is made up of a huge array of filters. In this manner, all the air in a given room can be changed at least six times a minute~even in a Fab the size of five football fields. (By comparison, the average home air-conditioning system changes the air in a house about twice a day.) In a clean room, the flowing air carries away with it all the nasty stuff that most air and most rooms are filled with, a process aided

by the fact that the air pressure inside is greater than that outside, keeping most dirty air from entering in the first place.

A cubic foot of the air you are currently breathing likely contains several hundred grains of pollen and fungal spores, as well as carbon monoxide, radon gas, scent molecules, spider legs, fragments of soil, fur, a bit of carbon from a faraway fire, dust mites from your carpet, flakes of your skin, hair, lint, bacteria and viruses and 15-micron-wide droplets from when you sneezed. In all, that cubic foot of air typically contains about a million specks half a micron or larger of one thing or another (ten million ifthere's a smoker present), and one of which could wreck a microprocessor.

Intel's Fab II is a Class One clean room, meaning among other things that anything more than one half-micron particle in a cubic meter of air is strictly verboten, but in practice Intel folk take beady-eyed notice if the sensors located all over the place note any particles at all.

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o understand why chips require such extraordinary degrees of cleanliness, think of a chip in terms of the Manhattan metaphor. To wit: imagine a detailed map of Manhattan, with every street, every alley, showing. Then reduce that map down to a piece of paper a half-centimeter by a half-centimeter.

If you stuck a pin in the map now, it would create a pothole from Times Square practically to Harlem. One obvious result is that traffic would come to an everlasting half. Even a mere flake of Godzilla skin would short out the entire city by lying across four or five north-south avenues.

So how do clean rooms cope with us slovenly types? Clothes, they like to say, by Omar the Tentmaker.

Or in other words, the "bunny suit." Intel "employees" in multicolored bunny suits danced on the TV screen in whimsical company ads not long ago. Subsequently, many real Intel employees requested pastel bunny suits-each costs about $800-but they only have white.

It took me about 15 minutes, with a lot of instruction and patient assistance, to put on a bunny suit. (I had been told that 1 wasn't allowed to wear any makeup, hair spray, gel, perfume or aftershave.) The outfit includes blue booties over the shoes, like those worn by the cast of ER. A floppy snoodlike affair over the hair, and another one around the lower face for those with facial hair. Soft white gloves. A helmet with a hood to be rigged with two rVC-type pipes fixed inside near the opening for the face and extruding out the back of the hood. Donning of the actual suit (which opens at the top) involves inserting the feet first and then the arms. I note as I sit on a bench struggling into the suit that the regulars can do the whole procedure standing up.

Cinch a belt around the waist, and then put on the helmet. The hood needs to be stuffed under the shoulders of the suit, and the suit zipped up across the shoulders. A clear plastic spit shield is affixed over the lower part of the face opening. Then the pipes from the helmet are attached to an air-filtration system in a box that hooks onto the belt, along with a battery pack. The pipes

begin sucking exhalations away amid a slightly breathy hum.

Then I put on more booties, which reach almost to the knees and fasten tightly around the legs with snaps. Finally, yellow latex gloves carefully tucked under the cuffs of the suit go on and a pair of clear plastic safety glasses. At this point, bundled up like a birthday present and standing in the steady room temperature of 72 degrees F, I wished I had worn something cooler, such as a pair of shOlis and a T-shirt, like most clean room employees.

On first entering a Fab, a newbie will be forgiven for imagining he or she has entered a 21st-century James Bond movie. The vastly large structure is broken up into long corridors and shorter cross-corridors. It is here that newly arrived pure silicon wafers will undergo a process not completely unlike what the FAM did with Play-Doh. I knew that much, of course, but the Fab had an eerie look. It is mostly white, though down some corridors one sees areas lit by a lemony yellow light. The floors are all made of grating for the air circulation. Here and there, rods about 75 centimeters long with little cylindrical nubbins on the end hang down from the high ceiling, looking like devices to listen in for sedition. Also overhead, plastic boxes filled with wafers zip around silently on tracks, veering off into one or another cross-corridor where people in white bunny suits, standing alone or in small groups, are desultorily watching large and mostly motionless machines behind glass. It's as if, on some command by a titanically ambitious Dr. No, the place will suddenly burst into action and the world will abruptly end. But no ...

Ann Tiao, whose title is Inline Defect Engineer and who acted as our guide, explained that the little bugs hanging from the ceiling are "ionizers." In the course of being worked on by all the machines, the chips-to-be (called dice, plural of "die") collect ions, and a buildup of negative or positive ions could lead to an electrostatic discharge. that would in turn blow apart circuits on the dice. So the ionizers pump great quantities of both positive and negative ions into the superclean air to neutralize any ion buildup on any surface.

The bunny-suited troops, Tiao assured me, were in fact extremely busy monitoring the behavior of the "tools," the huge machines that accomplish one or another process along the flow and that, at a cost of some $5 million apiece, give new meaning to that humble term. And these multimillion-dollar tools can misbehave, it seems. A technician's job is to know the idiosyncrasies of his or her tool and make the proper adjustments when it strays.

So there is craft here, too, and artisanship.

Tiao led us around to each of the tools needed to make a layer of transistors on a wafer. The entire process is, of course, based on a design drawn up long before, a complicated three-dimensional map of a microprocessor.

Part of the process is not unlike lithography, the means of printing by which this magazine is produced. In the Fab this stage is called "litho," and its numerous steps take place in those areas bathed in yellow light. On top of an insulating layer of silicon dioxide, the wafer is coated with a substance called photoresist. A stencil is placed over the photoresist layer and is exposed to ultraviolet light (UV). The portions of photoresist

that are struck by the UV become soluble and are washed away, leaving a photoresist pattern on top of the silicon dioxide. Each chip on a wafer. is exposed in this manner, and from there the wafer goes to a scanning electron microscope, where a technician makes sure the patterns are the right width and that everything is properly aligned. Ifnot, the wafer will be stripped down to the insulating layer and redone.

From here, the wafers are shuttled off to have the circuits etched so they become vertical-sided channels only a quartermicron across. Etching can be a bit messy, however, creating paliicles and such, so the wafers go immediately to be cleaned in sulfuric acid, which removes the remaining photoresist and any particles. The acid is then rinsed off by water so pure it becomes an even stronger solvent than it naturally is.

After this step (and virtually all the others) the wafers are subjected to an optical inspection to detect imperfections that can be fixed-practical when a few dice are involved but not in a "white out," in which many are spoiled. It is far better to junk a spoiled wafer earlier rather than later, since each step is expensive. Even with the astounding economies of scale involved in producing millions of these little chips a week, those that are microprocessors will represent more than 10 percent of the cost of a personal computer.

The litho and etch processes are repeated again and again.

Workers monitor furnaces in which a layer of silicon dioxide is added to wafers. ':Ouns" read bar codes on the boats.

Right: At Intel, stretching sessions are scheduled twice during every 12-hour shift, in addition to the three breaks allowed.

Thus, a chip is built up of layers of different materials, using different patterns. If a layer is too thick, or if electricity can't be sent through it, the chip is tossed. The final test is called "sort."

A tool with needlelike probes taps test points one each chip's surface-l0,000 taps, or tests, a second. Any chip that fails any of the tests is adorned with a drop of ink, the Black Spot, the stigma of shame, meaning, of course, doom.

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he tour over, Terry McDermott and I followed Tiao down a half-kilometer-long corridor like a couple of tired ballplayers headed for the showers. We shed our bunny suits and were taken in hand by Bill Westmoreland, site environmental manager. He insisted that we go through what is called the Subfab, the place where 80 percent of the working part of the tools reside. It is really the basement, but unlike any basement I had ever imagined.

In the Subfab of Fab 11, one could eat one's oatmeal off the floor. It is a vast, high-ceilinged place with no loose wires drooping, no dark spiderwebbed corners, no leaking pipes or dank

spots where the sump pump fails to function. Here instead is the place where there are surely more miles of overhead pipes, tubes and lines than anywhere else on earth. Each of these thousands upon thousands of conduits is labeled so one can tell which chemical or gas or what voltage it is carrying to the tools upstairs or out of the Fab. Here is a place packed with giant compressors, chillers, heaters, a single pipeline that is well over two meters in diameter, and gigantic, looming scrubbers.

A plant like this has the potential for an enormous environmental impact. In an arid land, it uses 15 million liters of water a dayas much as nine of Albuquerque's golf courses. But 85 percent of the water is eventually discharged to the Rio Grande. Acids and bases are neutralized. The nasty part of hydrofluoric acid, for example, is precipitated out into inert calcium fluoride "cakes."

Many people whose job it is to see that the machines do their work never see what happens next to their handiwork-the tasks of cutting the chips from each wafer and "packaging" them. In the so-called packaging process, diamond-blade saws cut out each individual chip from the wafers, and each one is glued with a thermal-cure adhesive onto a square plastic or ceramic substrate anywhere from 1.5 to 3.5 centimeters across. Looking at a chip now attached to a green plastic square put me in mind of looking down on a tennis stadium, with the chip perhaps as center court.

To see how it's done. I went to an Intel development lab in

Chandler, Arizona, where a new chip design called for a lot of tinkering with the tools. It was a smaller, faster chip-produced, I assumed, in accordance with what the semiconductor industry calls, in tones of awe, Moore's Law. Moore's Law is named for Gordon Moore, one of the original brains behind Intel. His law, enunciated in the 1960s, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every year.

For the new chip, some 500 gold wires-the electrical leads-had to be attached to the chip and then to the substrate in three layers, a task done by an astonishingly complex and fastmoving "sewing machine" according to a carefully worked out mapline blueprint fed into the sewing machine's brain. The process is called thermal sonic bonding. The gold thread is 11/5 mils thick (one mil is 1/400 centimeter), or oneseventh the thickness of the average human hair. The sewing machine (technically, a wirebonding machine) forms a tiny gold ball on the end of the thread, taps it onto the proper aluminum spot on the chip and bonds it there with a blast of ultrasound. It then draws the wire I over to the plastic substrate and repeats the ~ process. It will place from four to seven such ~, ~ leads per second, a frantic business indeed ~,u /' ~~ ~ when peered at through a microscope.

7 .~:ยง The chip and its filigree of gold are too frag'W.~~ ile to be left unprotected. The whole thing is covered over with an epoxy seal, never to see the light again. Its destiny is to be placed on a circuit board and shipped off to somewhere in the world where it might be put inside a laptop like mine with a silvery label affixed that says "Intel Inside."

Later on, I asked Gordon Moore, Intel chairman emeritus, if there was really much need for chips with exponentially more transistors, more power, more speed. He said, "Think of a personal computer that recognized your face, your voice, and understood well enough to know if you were saying 'too,' 'to,' or 'two.' That would take a lot more power. It's maybe two generations away." In Silicon Valley-speak, two generations is about four years. There will always be a need for greater power and speed, Moore added. The software programmers can always use it. "We have a saying: Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away."

Asked how he had come up with Moore's Law, he said that it was very early in the semiconductor industry and many people didn't recognize the industry's possibilities. He simply wanted to startle the world into seeing its importance, so he announced the doubling law. With a beatific smile, he said modestly that he was surprised and delighted to find that it had, in fact, worked out that way.

0 About the Author: Jake Page reported on a unique ranchers' group on the Mexico-New Mexico-Arizona

border in June 1997.

A Century of

POLITICAL CARTOONS An election is a cartoonist's playground, and the coming U.S. presidential election kicks off a new century of politicking and commentary. Yet today's visual lampoons draw on rich aesthetic and intellectual traditions.

e was God's gift to cartoonists. Theodore

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Roosevelt, with his toothy grin and macho exuberance, helped usher in the new Age of the Political Cartoon when he became President in 190 I. A decade later, almost every major newspaper in the U.S. had at least one full-time political cartoonist. In 1922, only five years after the Pulitzer Prizes were established, the political cartoon was added to the list of categories.

The portfolio on these pages features the most talented and influential calioonists of the past hundred years. Not all the artists are household names, even in journalism history courses. But in their day, these artists moved mountains: inciting public debate, dramatizing major issues, afflicting the comfortable.

Political cartoons have a rich history. The New York Daily Graphic published them from its first issue in 1873-some front page, some full-page.

Pennsylvania, California, Indiana, Alabama and New York all introduced anti-cartoon censorship bills in their legislatures around the turn of the century.

Cartoons constitute a journalistic form that has its roots in the powerful art of satirists like Thomas Nast, Joseph Keppler, and Bernhard Gillam in the 19th century. (Nast claimed that

"Yes, Willie, this is Papa's exercising machine.

Papa can twist it to beat the band."

Frederick Burr Opper, 1901: Among Opper's most memorable-and devastating-cartoons was a series dubbed "Willie and His Papa." Willie was President William McKinley and Papa was America's big business and monopolies, usually labeled The Trusts.

Tammany Hall once offered him more than $100,000 to stop drawing.) Those pioneers, with their often ferocious attacks on politicians and policies, mostly caricatured congressional leaders, unelected bosses, and assorted demagogues.

Familiar icons included Uncle Sam, the Democrat donkey, the Republican elephant, the Tammany tiger, Old Man Prohibition.

Then came the Era of Personality. After Theodore Roosevelt, a President's job description included being a lightning rod for artists' satire, leading to a hundred-year gallery of eminently caricaturable faces: Coolidge, FDR, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. The political cartoon as a component of daily American journalism is a 20th century phenomenon.

Technology is one major reason for that. A hundred years ago, printing techniques made feasible photoengraved lineal1 mass-produced by letterpress. In 1900, some newspaper artists still scratched their drawings on chalkplates, and the printed cartoons were a confusion of awkward, angular lines. Thereafter, penand-ink drawing dominated, as photoengraving became standard in the industry. In the 'teens, many artists shifted to the lithographer's crayon on textured paper, a look that was near-universal until mechanical shading (tones applied chemically to the original cal1oon) came along in the late 1960s.

Three cat100nists have been the major stylistic inspirations to political cartoonists over the past hundred years. Robel1 Minor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and later, the radical press); "Herblock" (Herbert Block) of the Washington Post; and Pat Oliphant of Universal Press Syndicate. Minor was one of the first American cartoonists to employ grease crayon on paper. On his family tree are cal100nists who aped his style or used his tools or both: Daniel Fitzpatrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Rollin Kirby of the New York World, Boardman Robinson of The Masses and the New York Tribune, Edmund DuffY of the Baltimore Sun. R.A. Lewis of the Milwaukee Journal, Ollie

Harrington of the Pittsburgh Couriel; Tom Little of the Nashville Tennessean, and Jacob Burck of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Homer Davenport of the New York Journal often drew a dour President McKinley as a lap dog of his handler, industrialist Mark Hanna, and of venal, rapacious figures representing monopolies.

The New York Evening Journal's Frederick Burr Opper sketched Theodore Roosevelt as a manic, infantile Rough Rider on a wooden stick horse. (Edith Roosevelt collected a scrapbook of these drawings to keep her husband humble.)

Jolm McCutcheon ofthe Chicago Tribune was gentler than his fellows and frequently labeled his figures, even when the likenesses were dead on. The Hearst papers' Winsor McCay-the cartooning genius who also created the Little Nemo in Slumber/and comic strip and virtually invented the American animated cartoondrew as if his cartoons were thundering Old Testament prophecies.

The Masses cartoonists-those of the

Daniel Fitzpatrick, circa 1938: Midwest liberalism was "Fitz"s stock in trade. In his sparse artwork, he usually depicted objects and icons rather than human figures. and seldom caricatured well-known people. This anti-war drawing appeared in the St. Louis PostDispatch.

Boardma/l Robinson, 1916: Perhaps the most effective disciple of MinO/; Robinson had a varied carea He went to Europe during World War 1 with John Reed, chronicler of the Russian revolution He drew for the left-wing Masses, for the conservative New York Tribune, andfi'eelanced to the humor magazine Puck and Harper's Weekly. This cartoon. depicting Christ as war victim. ran in The Masses.

Army recruiting sergeant: "At last! The perfect soldier!"

Robert Millor, 1916: He began his career at Joseph Pulitzer s St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but later in New York drew for radical publications like the socialist daily Call, and the freewheeling. Fee-thinking The Masses.

Dozens of artists adopted his style. Minor eventually abandoned cartooning, became an official of the Us. Communist party, and ran for the Us. Senate.

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"1945-46-47-48-49-50-5152-53-54-" Herbert R. Block, 1954: No cartoonist has been as influential-on readers and on his profession-as Herblock. This year marks his 70th anniversary as a political cartoonist. Still active, he turns out four drawings a week for his home papel; The Washington Post, and is syndicated to 200 papers in the Us. and abroad.

legendary radical magazine of the 'teens, and journals in its leftist tradition-were stylists in the Robert Minor vein, but clearly were inspired by the iconoclasm (and grease crayons) of European publications like L 'Assiette au Beurre and its cartoonists Steinlen, Caran d' Ache, Forain and others. The Chicago Tribune spawned a "school" of artistically consanguine artists (Carey Orr, Joseph Parish, Ed Holland, S.J. Ray, Calvin Sohmdal) who were invariably as right-wing as The Masses cartoonists were leftists.

When Herblock emerged in the late 1920s with a style borrowed from Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling (Des Moines Register) and Vaughn Shoemaker (Chicago Daily News), a majority of the profession flocked to his "look." The remarkable Herblock, truly an American institution, is a cmtoonists' c3ltoonist. His style begot an army of imitators. His conceptualizations consistently have ranged from prescient to devastating. And his career-I929 to the present-has encompassed most of this crowded century.

Australian immigrant Pat Oliphant offered a style totally his own and revolutionary in the field. The Oliphant look- long-faced characters, sparse use of icons and labels, arresting "camera angles"-still dominates the field, at least in the minds of cartoonists who aspire to Oliphant's unflagging brilliance.

Today, amid Oliphant's dark perorations, Jeff MacNelly's (Chicago Tribune) elaborate ironies, Mike Peters's (Dayton Daily News) absurd reductios, Jim Borgman's (Cincinnati Enquirer) cynical barbs and Tony Auth's (Philadelphia Inquirer) mini-murals, the at1 of political cartooning is changing before our eyes.

Contemporary artists often employ central-casting suburbanites (now more common than Uncle Sam, donkeys or elephants); a television set (with couch potatoes talking back to pols and anchorpersons); and talking heads (the comic strip form, versus the single-panel format, has burgeoned).

Skilled political cartoons can be devilishly funny. But Thomas Nast was at his weakest when he strayed into humor.

Joseph Keppler, founder and chief cartoonist of the 19th century Puck magazine, used righteous indignation far more than humor. The great Homer Davenport (San Francisco Examiner and New York Journal) wielded a cleaver, not a tickler's feather. He was a bad artist but a great cartoonist: he poorly grasped anatomy and composition, but his ideas often were incendiary bombs. The Masses cartoonists (called "them asses cmtoonists" by detractors)-Minor, Robinson, John Sloan, George Bellows, William Gropper-chose to make readers cry, growl, moan and cheer, but usually not laugh.

Today, however, a pantheon of artists has made humor their main weapon. The tradition in America begins with Benjamin Franklin. Both Franklin and Paul Revere drew cartoons. Revere, a silversmith, engraved pictorial propaganda. In this century, John McCutcheon-for years called the dean of American cartooning-purveyed humor-laced commentary from his Olympian perch, a wood-paneled studio atop Chicago's Tribune Towers. Also employing the Trojan horse of chuckles were "Ding" Darling and a list of brilliant but mostly forgotten names: James Donahey of Cleveland's Plain Dealer, Billy Ireland of the Columbus Journal-Dispatch, L.D. Warren of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Currently, Steve Kelley of the San Diego Union-Tribune specializes in balloon-dialogues and multiple-panel, comic strip-style cartoons. Some students of the art see contemporary political cartooning as illustrated stand-up comedy. Kelley would find the charge hard to refute: he's a stand-up comic on the side, having appeared on latenight network TV shows ..

Some cartoonists, including Tom Toles (Buffalo News), Dan Wasserman (The Boston Globe), and to an extent Jim Morin (The Miami Herald) usually draw comic pages-style multi-panel strips in the manner of Jules Feiffer, a major voice in social/political comment since the 1950s.

Since Feiffer began his weekly strips in The Village Voice in the 1950s, he has written novels, plays and screenplays, but remains proudly a cartoonist. His breakthe-mold work paved the way for free-

"I'm beginning to feel like a fugitive from tb' law of averages."

Bill Mauldill: As a young army sergeant in World War II, Mauldin incurred the wrath of General George S. Patton and many other military bigwigs for his depiction of unkempt, warweary, cynical foot soldiers like Willie and Joe. Millions offolks on the home front came to love Mauldin s characters.

lance artists like Edward Sorel, David Levine and Robert Grossman, whose styles thrive outside of newspaper editorial pages.

Prominent among the few who deal in good old-fashioned outrage is Oliphant, the most consistent of today's artists of the slash-and-burn school. Humor often creeps in but mostly his visions are apocalyptic, his thematic preoccupations somber. In the next wave are partisans like Don Wright (West Palm Beach Post) and Wayne Stayskal (Tampa Tribune), artists of the left and right respectively who specialize in demonizations oftheir targets.

Among the influential masters of this century is Art Young, a denizen of The Masses, The Liberato/; New Masses and many obscure leftist publications, who also drew for The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post and the original Life. Even when his fellows drew the seamy side of American life in grease crayon, Young's studies line drawings always exuded amiability. His cartoons got him indicted by the federal government under the Espionage Act during World War 1. He indifferently slept through some of the two trials, which ended in hung ju-

ries. The challenge to describe the quiddity of his cartoons is illustrated by two of his most famous captions. In one drawing, two young lovers in a slum alley look up at the night sky: "Chee, Annie, look at de stars-thick as bedbugs!" In another, an exhausted laborer sinks into his kitchen chair: "I Gorry, I'm tired!" and his wife shoots back: "There you go! You're tired!

Here I be a-standin' over a hot stove all day, and you workin' in a nice cool sewer!"

Several cartoonists throughout the century have had lives beyond the drawing board. "Ding" Darling, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, served as director of the U.S. Biological Survey in the 1930s. John McCutcheon went on safaris and cruises to research articles and books. He wrote novels, and was a correspondent in the SpanishAmerican War and World War 1. Bill Mauldin, the brilliant young artist of World War rr (his Willie and Joe spoke for millions of GIs) ran unsuccessfully for Congress after the war, and even pursued an acting career briefly when he appeared with war hero Audie Murphy in John Huston's celebrated film, The Red Badge

Blind man's buff, or Adlai didn't see a communist Joe Parrish, 1952: In the first half of the 20th centUly, conservative cartoonists were as numerous as liberal ones. Today they are in the minority. Parrish, of The Chicago Tribune, was a clear leader among the right-ofcenter artists. He depicted Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson surrounded by accused communists in government.

Pat Oliphant, 1984: His art has the rare ability to merge outrage and Intmol: Oliphant turned the cartooning world on its head when he arrived in America from Australia in 1964. He has inspired a generation of cartoonists to imitate his techniques. but nobody has matched his assured graphic sense or the quality of his insights.

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Jules Feiffer, 1974: Also an autho/; pldywright, and screenwriter, Feiffer uses the comic-strip form for bitingly satiric commentary on politics and social issues. For years, his home was The Village Voice; now it is through syndication in 50 papers and magazines.

Jeff MacNelly, 1978: Drawing /i'om a generally right-ol-center perspective, MacNelly (home paper, The Chicago Tribune) is one of the few contemporary political cartoonists who can use humor to accentuate, not vitiate, his points. He also produces a comic strip, the popular Shoe, and has illustrated books and columns.

of Courage. He was lured back to cartooning in 1958 to succeed Dan Fitzpatrick on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he immediately won a Pulitzer Prize; later he worked at the Chicago Sun- Times.

Syndication is a plinth of the cartoon trade as the century draws to a close, but it's a mixed blessing. Many artists' work is distributed nationwide and even worldwide, expanding its influence. Yet the prevalence of the syndication systemwhich allows editors to pay as little as $40 a week for as many as five cartoons, instead of anteing up a staff cartoonist's hefty salary-curtails the growth of jobs in the profession. Just as bad, from tlie reader's point of view, is the pick-andchoose impl ication: staff cartoonists' views, appearing regularly, can generate the same serial impact as editorials or inhouse columns. But editors cherry-picking from a pile a syndicated cartoons may choose ones that merely validate their own prejudices rather than allowing a toughminded, discriminating cartoonist to speak for himself or herself.

"Himself or herself." After a century, the percentage of women and blacks in political cartooning has changed hardly at all. In the 'teens, Lou Rogers (Judge magazine) and Edwina Dumm (Columbus, Ohio, Monitor) were two of the few prominent female cartoonists.

Today, Signe Wilkinson (Philadelphia Daily News) and Etta Hulme (Fort Worth StarTelegram) are respected descendants.

Black cartoonists over the century have

mainly appeared in minority joumalsOllie Harrington and Chester Commodore, for example, in the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, respectively.

As the century began, cartoonists benefited from a string of technological breakthroughs: from woodcuts to stonelithography to chalk-plate to photoengraving to letterpress line cuts. Tn the mid-1970s, Bill Mauldin-partly for convenience, partly to cope with failing eyesight-shifted to drawings with heavy, thick, simple lines that would survive being faxed to his office in Chicago from his studio in Santa Fe. This pioneering method of delivery was received nervously by his editors. Today, some artists compose their art on computers, and many transmit them by e-mail attachments. The cartoon musewns of the future will have diskettes hung on the wall between Nast sketches and Rollin Kirby pen-and-crayon originals.

As the last century ended, cartoonists' role as advocates, critics, gadflies and tormentors is up for reappraisal. There's little argument that cartoons of earlier centuries often had far greater impact-triggering revolutions, toppling political machines, and generally turning public opinion upside down. The cartoons ofNast, Keppler, Davenport and Opper are the gold standard for generating action. In our mediasaturated century, however, with all its torrent of opinionizing on cable, broadcasting and the Internet, many political cartoonists can only dream of having that much clout.

Still, contemporary cartoonists should consider caricaturist Henry Major's admonition uttered in the 1930s that cartoonists sometimes were thrown in jail for things they drew. "American political cartoonists," he added, "should be arrested for things they don't draw."

D About the Author: Richard E. Marschall is president of the National Foundation of Caricature and Cartoon Art, and editor-inchief of Hogan's Alley, the Journal of the Cartoon Arts. He wrote the 269 political cartoonist entries for The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons.

macaques or ile perch? Answer: They're weedy species, in the everywhere, pOltending a near-term future in which Eatth's landsense that animals as well as plants can be weedy. What that im- scape is threadbare, leached of diversity, heavy with humans, and plies is a constellation of characteristics: They reproduce quickly, "enriched" in weedy species. That's an ugly vision, but 1 find it disperse widely when given a chance, tolerate a fairly broad range vivid. Wildlife will consist of the pigeons and the coyotes and the of habitat conditions, take hold in strange places, succeed espewhite-tails, the black rats (Rattus rattus) and brown rats (Rattus cially in disturbed ecosystems, and resist eradication once they're norvegicus) and a few other species of worldly rodent, the crabestablished. They are scrappers, generalists, opportunists. They eating macaques and the cockroaches (though, as with the rats, not tend to thrive in human-dominated terrain because in crucial ways every species-some are narrowly endemic, like the giant they resemble Homo sapiens: aggressive, versatile, prolific and Madagascar hissing cockroach) and the mongooses, the house ready to travel. The city pigeon, a cosmopolitan creature derived SpatTOWSand the house geckos and the houseflies and the barn cats from wild ancestry as a Eurasian rock dove and the skinny brown feral dogs and a shott list of (Columba livia) by way of centuries of pigeon The species that survive will additional species that play by our rules. Forests fanciers whose coop-bred birds occasionally be like weeds, reproducing will be tiny insular patches existing on bare sufwent AWOL, is a weed. So are those species that, ferance, much of their biological diversity (the quickly and surviving almost big predators, the migratory birds, the shy creabenefiting from human impacts upon landscape, anywhere. Wildlife will have increased grossly in abundance or expanded tures that can't tolerate edges, and many other consist of pigeons, coyotes, species linked inextricably with those) long since their geographical scope without having to cross an ocean by plane or by boat-for instance, the decayed away. They'll essentially be tall woody rats, roaches, house coyote in New York, the raccoon in Montana, the gardens, not forests in the richer sense. Elsewhere sparrows, crows, feral dogs white-tailed deer in northern Wisconsin or westthe landscape will have its strips and swatches of and Homo sapiens, the ern Connecticut. The brown-headed cowbird, green, but except on much-poisoned lawns and consummate weed. also weedy, has enlarged its range from the eastgolf courses the foliage will be infested with ern United States into the agricultural Midwest at cheat-grass and European buckthorn and spotted the expense of migratory songbirds. In gardening usage the word knapweed and Russian thistle and leafY spurge and salt meadow "weed" may be utterly subjective, indicating any plant you don't cordgrass and Bruce Babbitt's purple loose-strife. Having recently happen to like, but in ecological usage it has these firmer meanpassed the great age of biogeography, we will have entered the age ings. Biologists frequently talk of weedy species, meaning animals after biogeography, in that vittually everything will live vittually as well as plants. everywhere, though the list of species that constitute "everything" will be small. I see this world implicitly foretold in the U.N. popualeontologists, too, embrace the idea and even the term. lation projections, the FAO reports on deforestation, the nOlthward Jablonski himself, ina 1991 paper published in Science, ex- advance into Texas of Afi'icanized honeybees, the rhesus monkeys trapolated from past mass extinctions to our CUITentone that haunt the parapets of public buildings in New Delhi, and every and suggested that human activities are likely to take their heaviest fat gray squirrel on a bird feeder in England. Eatth will be a differtoll on nan'owly endemic species, while causing fewer extinctions ent sort of place-soon, in just five or six human generations. My among those species that are broadly adapted and broadly distriblabel for that place, that time, that apparently unavoidable uted. "In the face of ongoing habitat alteration and fragmentation," prospect, is the Planet of Weeds. Its main consoling felicity, as far he wrote, "this implies a biota increasingly enriched in widespread, as I can imagine, is that there will be no shortage of crows. weedy species-rats, ragweed and cockroaches-relative to the Now we come to the question of human smvival, a matter of larger number of species that are more vulnerable and potentially some interest to many. We come to a certain fretful leap of logic more useful to humans as food, medicines and genetic resources." that otherwise thoughtful observers seem willing, even eager, to ow, as we sit in his office, he repeats: "It's just a question of how make: that the ultimate consequence will be the extinction of us. much the world becomes enriched in these weedy species." Both By seizing such a huge share ofEatth's landscape, by imposing so in print and in talk he uses "enriched" somewhat caustically, knowwantonly on its providence and presuming so recklessly on its foring that the actual direction of the h'end is toward impoverishment. givingness, by killing off so many species, they say, we will doom Regarding impoverishment, let's note another dark, interesting our own species to extinction. This is a commonplace among the irony: that the two converse trends I've described-partitioning environmentally exercised. My quibbles with the idea are that it the world's landscape by habitat fragmentation, and unifying the seems ecologically improbable and too optimistic. But it bears exworld's landscape by global transport of weedy species-produce atnining, because it's frequently offered as the ultimate argument not converse results but one redoubled result, the further loss ofbiagainst proceeding as we are. ological diversity. Immersing myself in the literature of extincJablonski also has his doubts. Do you see Homo sapiens as a tions, and making dilettantish excursions across India, likely survivor, I ask him, or as a casualty? "Oh, we've got to be Madagascar, New Guinea, Indonesia, Brazil, Guam, Australia, one of the most bomb-proof species on the planet," he says. "We're New Zealand, Wyoming, the hills of Burbank and other semi-wild geographically widespread, we have a pretty remarkable reproducplaces over the past decade, I've seen those redoubling trends tive rate, we're incredibly good at co-opting and monopolizing re-

P

Ragtag mobs of desperate souls will cling to its sources. I think it would take really serious, concerted effort to wipe out the human species." The bumpers, like groupies on Elvis' final Cadillac.

The absolute poor will suffer their lack of ecologipoint he's making is one that has probably alcal privilege in the form of lowered life exready dawned on you: Homo sapiens itself is the pectancy, bad health, absence of education, consummate weed. Why shouldn't we survive, corrosive want and anger. Maybe in time they'll then, on the Planet of Weeds? But there's a wide find ways to gather themselves in localized revolt range of possible circumstances, Jablonski reWe confront a vision of a minds me, between the extinction of our species human population pressing against the affluent class. Not likely, though, as long as affluence buys guns. In any case, well beand the continued growth of human population, snugly around whatever consumption and comfort. "I think we'll be one fore that they will have burned the last stick of natural landscape remains. Bornean dipterocarp for firewood and roasted the of the survivors," he says, "sort of picking What will happen after through the rubble." Besides losing all the pharlast lemur, the last grizzly bear, the last elephant maceutical and genetic resources that lay hidden left unprotected outside a zoo. we destroy two-thirds of within those extinguished species, and all the Jablonski has a hundred things to do before all living species? leaving for Alaska, so after two hours I clear out. spiritual and aesthetic values they offered, he The heat on the sidewalk is fierce, though not foresees unpredictable levels of loss in many physical and biochemical functions that ordinarily come as bene- nearly as fierce as this summer's heat in New Delhi or Dallas, fits from diverse, robust ecosystems-functions such as cleaning where people are dying. Since my flight doesn't leave until early and recirculating air and water, mitigating droughts and floods, de- evening, I cab downtown and take refuge in a nouveau-Cajun composing wastes, controlling erosion, creating new soil, pollinatrestaurant near the river. Over a beer and jambalaya, I glance again at Jablonski's 1991 Science paper, titled "Extinctions: A ing crops, capturing and transporting nutrients, damping short-term temperature extremes and longer-term fluctuations of Paleontological Perspective." I also play back the tape of our conclimate, restraining outbreaks of pestiferous species, and shielding versation, pressing my ear against the little recorder to hear it over Earth's surface from the full brunt of ultraviolet radiation. Strip the lunch-crowd noise.

Among the last questions I asked Jablonski was, What will hapaway the ecosystems that perform those services, Jablonski says, and you can expect grievous detriment of the reality we inhabit. "A pen after this mass extinction, assuming it proceeds to a worst-case lot of things are going to happen that will make this a crummier scenario? Ifwe destroy half or two-thirds of all living species, how long will it take for evolution to fill the planet back up? "I don't place to live-a more stressful place to live, a more difficult place to live, a less resilient place to live-before the human species is at know the answer to that," he said. "I'd rather not bottom out and any risk at all." And maybe some of the new difficulties, he adds, see what happens next." In the journal paper he had hazarded that, will serve as incentive for major changes in the trajectory along based on fossil evidence in rock laid down atop the K-T event and which we pursue our aggregate self-interests. Maybe we'll pull others, the time required for full recovery might be 5 or 10 million back before our current episode matches the Triassic extinction or years. From a paleontological perspective, that's fast. "Biotic rethe K-T event. Maybe it will turn out to be no worse than the coveries after mass extinctions are geologically rapid but immensely prolonged on human time scales," he wrote. There was Eocene extinction, with a 35 percent loss of species.

"Are you hopeful?" I ask. also the proviso, cited from another expert, that recovery might not Given that hope is a duty from which paleontologists are begin until after the extinction-causing circumstances have disapexempt, I'm surprised when he answers, "Yes, I am." peared. But in this case, of course, the circumstances won't likely I'm not. My own guess about the mid-term future, excused by disappear until we do. no exemption, is that our Planet of Weeds will indeed be a crumStill, evolution never rests. It's happening right now, in weed patches all over the planet. I'm not presuming to alert you to the end mier place, a lonelier and uglier place, and a particularly wretched of the world, the end of evolution, or the end of nature. What I've. place for the 2 billion people comprising Alan Durning's absolute poor. What will increase most dramatically as time proceeds, I sus- tried to describe here is not an absolute end but a very deep dip, a repect, won't be generalized misery or futuristic modes of consumppeat point within a long, violent cycle. Species die, species arise.

The relative pace of those two processes is what matters. Even rats tion but the gulf between two global classes experiencing those extremes. Progressive failure of ecosystem functions? Yes, but hu- and cockroaches are capable-given the requisite conditions; namely, habitat diversity and time--{)f speciation. And speciation man resourcefulness ofthe sort Julian Simon so admired will probably find stopgap technological remedies, to be available for a brings new diversity. So we might reasonably imagine an Earth price. So the world's privileged class-that's your class and my upon which, 10 million years after the extinction (or, alternatively, the drastic transformation) of Homo sapiens, wondrous forests are class-will probably still manage to maintain themselves inside Homer-Dixon's stretch limo, drinking bottled water and breathing again filled with wondrous beasts. That's the good news.

D bottled air and eating reasonably healthy food that has become incredibly precious, while the potholes on the road outside grow ever About the Author: David Quammen is the author of eight books. including The Song of the Dodo and Wild Thoughts from Wild Places. deeper. Eventually the limo will look more like a lunar rover.

Reprinted by permission of The Saturday Evening Past.

All rights reserved. © The New Yorker collection 2000 Danny Shanahan from Canoonbank.com.

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ON THE LIGH·TER SIDE

\

.~\ "Once, I tried to change the laces, and the Landmarks Commission came down on me like a ton of bricks. " Reprinted by permission of The Saturday Evening Post.

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© The New Yorker collection 2000 Alex Gregory from Canoonbank.com.

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Cansu1a~ Focus enator 1. Will iam Fulbright once said, "Exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations .... " One of the most prestigious exchange programs run by U.S. embassies around the world is the Intemational Visitor (LV) Program. The program nominates mid-career professionals and sponsors a visit to the United States to meet their counterparts and experience American culture. International visitors are not determined by application: the various departments operating within U.S. missions nominate candidates.

They must have demonstrated their potential within their fields, but still be young enough to use their experiences to benefit their future work. Over 100,000 visitors have participated in this program over the past 60 years. Past participants include President K.R. Narayanan, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, former Prime Ministers Moralji Desai and Indira Gandhi, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Margaret Thatcher, Willy Brandt and Anwar Sadat.

The goal of the International Visitor Program is to foster mutual understanding through personal and professional exchange. Each IV program is thematically organized to focus on one of the following topics: Regional Security and Diplomacy, Finance and Economics, Democracy Building, Human Rights, and Health and Environment.

Participants who visit the U.S. meet with state and federal government officials, heads ofNGOs, and local commwlity leaders.

Past Indian participants have included leaders in politics, economics, Amit Chandra is an American student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was recently an intern with the public affairs section of the Us. Embassy in New Delhi.

journalism, medicine, finance, education and activism.

Their attitudes toward the U.S. Government reflect the changing climate of IndoAmerican relations. In the past, such a program would have been perceived by colleagues as some sort of secret CIA training camp. Today's pa11icipants, however, look forward to the oppOlwnity to represent India, and to gain an intimate understanding of the United States, vis-a-vis their occupations.

Every Indian international visitor arrives to face changing perceptions of their mysterious and exotic home country. Discussions range from nuclear testing after Pokhran II to overpopulation as India swells to one billion.

International Visitor Program participants often are invited to dinner with an ordinary American family.

This aspect of the program offers a break from official interactions and gives the participant unique insights into how average Americans live.

American hosts volunteer their time so that they can learn about life in other countries, and perhaps to retum the hospitality they received while traveling abroad. These visits often dispel misconceptions regarding Americans.

One Indian visitor remarked on how surprised he was to see the respect Americans have for their ancestors. Another fondly remembered how his hostess prepared a typical Thanksgiving meal for him, though Thanksgiving Day was months earlier. The bonds established between these American hosts and their guests capture the spirit of the IV program, adding an intimate facet to the experience.

Participants return to India having enriched the lives of their American contacts and ready to make use of their experiences at home. An editor of a widely distributed vernacular newspaper, for example, had so many ideas during his trip that he is considering his candidacy for political

office. The head of an environmental NGO based in Delhi gained valuable knowledge regarding project proposals, which she used to develop conservation projects. A regular contributor to the Economic Times developed an online network of contacts to whom he circulates his articles, seeking their comments. A professor of marketing in a globalization program developed case studies for presentation to his students.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the IV Program.

For six decades, the program has fostered Indo-American understanding tlu'ough firsthand experiences.

It has also helped to promote reform and institutional development within pat1icipating nations.

As U.S. embassies around the world strive to redefine their post-cold-war roles, the International Visitor Program remains an important public outreach tool, cultivating both understanding and

0

friendship.

Change in Visa Fee Reflecting the current exchange rate, the U.S Embassy announced recently that the visa application and issuance fee for all categories of visas has been revised with effect from August 14. The following is the revised visa fees, category-wise Non-immigrant visa application fee issuance fee:

Rs 2,070 Rs. 3,450

Immigrant visa application fee: issuance fee:

Rs.11,960 Rs 2,990

Returning residents lee:

Rs. 2,300

Beginning August 31, the U.S. Embassy shall close the non-immigrant visa unit in New Delhi on the last working day of every month.

Non-immigrant visas include tourist, business, student and temporary work permit visas. Immigrant visa applications and the American Citizen Services operations will not .be affected by this change.