January 1982

INDIA DAY IN NEW YORK

It could have been any street in an Indian metropolis. Madison Avenue, New York, was the scene of a memorable Indian experience-an India Day parade to mark India's Independence Day, 1981. Zubin Mehta, conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and New York City mayor Edward I. Koch led the parade (bottom, left), at the head of which were two Indian youths holding aloft the flags of India and the United States. (right).

For the Indians, the parade held nostalgic memories of another annual historic celebration-the January 26 Republic Day parade in New Delhi. For

the style of the New York parade was similar-pageants depicting facets of life from various states of India. For the watching New York crowd, it offered several fascinating glimpses of India. Sikhs dressed in colorful regional costumes (above) sang and danced their way through the parade, the boisterous bhangra contrasting with the folk songs sung by the Keralites, whose float depicted a typical boat race of the region (above, right). The Sindhi community of New York presented "Mother India," in a pageant full of flowers, music and dance (far right).

An American opera based on 21 years of the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi--with a libretto in Sanskrit consisting of quotations from the Bhagavad-Gita--has achieved smashing success in the United States. Satya gra ha , by the eminent composer Philip IGlass), (below), is the latest evidence of the pervasive influence of Indian music on American chassical, jazz and rock music during the pa st 15 years or so.

The 41-year-old Glass has composed to the beat of a different drummer (or tabla player) since his first visit to India in 1966; he has been fa scinated by the rhythmic structures of the East. He ha s arranged and conducted works by Ravi Shankar and studied with the Indian tabla player Allah Rakha, whom he credits for his knowledge of the additive principles of Indian music.

Composing serious music demands dedication: Glass had to support himself for many years by working a s a taxi driver, a plumber, a furniture mover and carpenter.

He continued to perform with a small musica 1 ensemble (mainly electronic keyboards and woodwinds) that he had formed to play his music. Music critics have noted that like Duke Ellington, Glass' band is his "instrument."

The reason the Duke maintained an orchestra during hard times wa s to assure that his music would continue to be heard.

Since his triumphs in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany with Satyaqraha « Glass has expressed eagerness to produce the opera in India, perhaps with Indian performers.

We hope his ambition will be realized, so readers whose appetites are whetted by the article on page 5 can see and hear for themselves this extraordinary musical work.

Glass' opera demonstrates how ideas that once seemed radical, such as Gandhi's concepts of equality, often becolpe accepted as part of the fabric of society. When Betty Friedan (below) wrote The Fem~ine Mystique in 1963, she was denounced in many quarters as a ~=:teminist troublemaker.

She seemed to accept the role of revolutionary i\rith zeal. One of her avowed goals was to raise public consciousness .J about what she perceived to be the wrongs systematically inflicted a:- upon women« often in a spirit of blithe ignorance.

I nl Today many of the abuses against which Ms. Friedan inveighed have N'been corrected in the United States by law. She is seen as a radical ~by far fewer people. Perhaps as a result, she seems to take a less ~contentious approach to the problems confronting working women who also want to enjoy marriage and family. Now that women have won the right to be treated fairly in the world of business, they should not be forced to enter that world. In her article on page 14, she says: "Women must now confront anew their own needs for love and comfort and caring support, as well as the needs of children a~d men, for whom, I believe, we cannot .esca pe bedrock human responsibility. " The kind of loving and sharing relationship that Betty Frie'dan advocates was epitomized by Will and Ariel Durant (right), the Americaln historians who died this fall. He was 96 and she was 83; they. had worked as a team since their marriage in 1913. Together they wrote the monumental The St'ory of Civilization, a lO-volume work of 9,074 pages that spanned some 110 centuries of history. Naturally, any scholars working with so broad a brush are likely to be accused of being superficial popularizers.

The Durants were defended by the prominent educator and philosopher John Dewey, who said, "This is not popularization.

It's humanization."

Readers with long memories will recall that SPAN published an excerpt of the Durants' chapter on Hindu science in its October 1968 issue. An accompanying article pointed out that although Will did the actual "SS -h 'O.sS -l o~ writing, Ariel was the bulwark of organization, research and criticism.

She described the secret of their partnership: "Will is ISO warm, so giving," she said. "He loves everyone.

I'm the detestable part of this partnership.

I've kept the world away from our door so' we could accomplish fifty years of work."

Will Durant died less than a week after his wife. Because of his frail health, he had not been told that a remarkable collaboration in life had ended.

--M •P .

0

~~WeCould 'Together Reducethe Threat of Nuclear War"

by PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN

In a recent major U.S. foreign policy speech, President Reagan made an impassioned plea to the Soviet Union to join 'the United States in a "mutual reduction of conventional, intermediate-range nuclear and strategic forces." The President concluded: "There is no reason why people in any part of the world should have to live in permanent fear of war or its specter."

Back in April while in the hospital I had, as you can readily understand, a lot of time for reflection.

One day I decided to send a personal, handwritten letter to Soviet President, Leonid Brezhnev reminding him that we had met about 10 years ago in San Clemente, California, as he and President Richard Nixon were concluding a series of meetings that had brought hope to all the world. Never had peace and good will seemed closer at hand. I would like to read you a few paragraphs from that letter.

"Mr. President: When we met I asked if you were aware that the hopes and aspirations of millions of people throughout the world were dependent on the decisions that would be reached in your meetings. You took my hand in both of yours and assured me that you were aware of that and that you were dedicated with all your heart and mind to fulfilling those hopes and dreams."

I went on in my letter to say: "The people of the world still share that hope.

Indeed, the peoples of the world, despite differences in racial and ethnic origin, have very much in common. They want ~ the dignity of having some control over their individual destiny. They want to -work at the craft or trade of their own

choosing and to be fairly rewarded. They risk to itself, made no effort whatsoever want to raise their families in peace to do so. without harming anyone or suffering "When World tWar II ended, the harm themselves. Government exists for United States had the only undamaged their convenience, not the other way industrial power in the world. Our military might was at its peak-and we alone around.

"If they are incapable, as some would had the ultimate weapon, the nuclear have us believe, of self-government, then weapon, with the unquestioned ability to where among them do we find any who deliver it anywhere in the world. If we had sought world domination then, who are capable of governing others? could have opposed us?

"Is it possible that we have permitted "But the United States followed a ideology, political and economic philosunique in all the ophies, and governmental policies to different course-one keep us from considering the very real, history of mankind. We used our power everyday problems of our peoples? Will and wealth to rebuild 'the war-ravaged the average Soviet family be better off or economies of the world, including those even aware that the Soviet Union has nations who had been our enemies. May I imposed a government of its own choice say there is absolutely no substance to on the people of Afghanistan? Is life charges that the United States is guilty of better for the people of Cuba because the imperialism or attempts to impose its will Cuban military dictate who shall govern on other countries by use of force."

I concluded my letter by saying: "Mr. the people of Angola?

"It is often implied that such things President, should we not be concerned have been made necessary because of with eliminating the obstacles which preyou and I repreterritorial ambitions of the United States; vent our people-those achieving their most cherthat we have imperialistic designs and sent-from thus constitute a threat to your own ished goals?"

It is in the same spirit that I want to security and that of the newly emerging nations. There not only is no evidence to speak today to this audience, and the support such a charge, there is solid people of the world, about America's evidence that the United States, when it program for pea~e. Specifically, I want to could have dominated the world with no present our program for preserving peace

in Europe, and our wider program for reason and experience. Our policies have arms control. resulted in the longest European peace in , Twice in my lifetime I have seen tht this century. Would not a rash departure peoples of Europe plunged into the from these policies, as some now suggest, tragedy of war. Twice in my lifetime endanger that peace?

Europe has suffered destruction and From its founding, the Atlantic Allimilitary occupation in wars that states- ance has preserved the peace through men proved powerless to prevent, sol- unity, deterrence and dialogue. diers unable to contain, and ordinary • First, we and our Allies have stood citizens unable to escape. And twice in united by the firm commitment that an my lifetime, young Americans have bled attack upon anyone of us would be their lives into the soil of those bat- considered an attack upon us all. tlefields-not to enrich or enlarge our • Second, we and our Allies have domain, but to restore the peace and .deterred aggression by maintaining forces independence of our friends and Allies. strong enough to ensure that any aggresAll of us who lived through those sor would lose more from an attack than troubled times share a common resolve he could possibly gain. that they must never come again. And • And third, we and our Allies have most of us share a common appreciation engaged the Soviets in a dialogue about of the Atlantic Alliance that has made a mutual restraint and arms limitations, peaceful, free and prosperous Western hoping to reduce the risk of war and the Europe in the postwar era possible. burden of armaments, and to lower the But today a new generation is emerg- barriers that divide East from West.

These three elements of our policy ing on both sides of the' Atlantic. Its have preserved the peace in Europe for members were not present at the creation of the North Atlantic Alliance. Many of more than a third of a century. They can them do not fully understand its roots in preserve it for generations to come, so defending freedom and rebuilding a war- long as we pursue them with sufficient torn continent. Some young people ques- will and vigor.

Today, I wish to reaffirm America's tion why we need weapons-particularly nuclear weapons-to deter war and to commitment to the Atlantic Alliance and assure peaceful development. They fear our resolve to sustain the peace. And that the accumulation of weapons itself from my conversations with Allied leadmay lead to conflagration. Some even ers, I know that they also remain true to propose unilateral disarmament. this tried and proven course.

The NATO [North Atlantic Treaty I understand their concerns. Their questions deserve to be answered. But we Organization] policy of peace is based have an obligation to answer their queson restraint and balance. No NATO' tions on the basis of judgment and weapons, conventional or nuclear, will ever be used in Europe except in response to attack. NATO's defense plans have been responsible and restrained. "... It is time for serious The Allies remain strong, united and resolute. But the momentum of the connegotiations to reduce tinuing Soviet military build-up threatens realistically the numbers of both the conventional and nuclear balethal nuclear weapons now lance. Consider the facts. Over the past extant. It is to be earnestly decade: hoped that the Soviet • The United States reduced the size of leaders take President its armed forces and decreased its military spending. The Soviets steadily inReagan's proposal creased the number of men under arms. seriously. Otherwise, their They now number more than double protestations for world those of the United States~ Over the same peace will appear to be so period the Soviets expanded their real much sham. " military spending by about one-third.

-THE HINDUSTANTIMES, • The Soviet Union increased its invenNew Delhi, India tory of tanks to some 50,000, compared to our 11,000. Historically a land-power, it transformed its navy from a coastal

defense force to an open ocean fleet, while the United States, a sea-power with transoceanic alliances, cut its fleet in half.

• During a period when NATO deployed no new intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and actually withdrew 1,000 nuclear warheads, the Soviet Union deployed more than 750 nuclear warheads on the new SS-20 missiles alone.

Our response to this relentless build-up of Soviet military power has been restrained but" firm. We have made deci-

"Reagan's (Zero Option' proposal was understandably designed to liberate East and West Europeans from nuclear horror.'

This indicates U.S. initiative to adjust the U.S. strategy toward Europe."

-KYUNGHYANG

SIIINMUN,

Seoul, South Korea

sions to strengthen all three legs of the strategio triad-sea-, land- and air-based.

We have proposed a defense program in the United States for the next five years which will remedy the neglect of the past decade and restore the eroding balance on which our security depends.

I would like to discuss more specifically the growing threat to Western Europe which is posed by the continuing deployment of certain Soviet intermediaterange nuclear missiles.

The Soviet Union has three different missile systems-the SS-20, the SS-4, and the SS-5-all with a range capable of reaching virtually all 0t Western Europe.

There are other Soviet weapons systems which also represent a major threat. The only answer to these systems is a comparable threat to Soviet targets-in other words, a deterrent preventing the use of these Soviet weapons by the counterthreat of a like response against their own territory.

At present, however, there is no equivalent deterrent to these Soviet intermediate missiles. And the Soviets continue to add one new SS-20 a week. To counter this the Allies agreed in 1979, as part of a two-track decision, to deploy as a deterrent land-based cruise missiles and Pershing II missiles capable of reaching targets in the Soviet Union. These mis-

siles are to be deployed in several countries of Western Europe.

This relatively limited force in no way serves as a substitute for the much larger strategic umbrella spread over our NATO Allies. Rather, it provides a vital link between conventional, shorter-range nuclear forces in Europe and intercontinental forces in the United States.

Deployment of these systems will demonstrate to the Soviet Union that this link cannot be broken.

Deterring war depends on the perceived ability¡ of our forces to perform effectively. The more effective our forces are, the less likely it is that we will have to use them. So, we and our Allies are proceeding to modernize¡ NATO's nuclear forces of intermediate range-to meet increased Soviet deployments of nuclear systems threatening Western Europe.

Let me turn now to our hopes for arms cOntrol negotiations. There is a tendency to make this entire subject overly complex. I want to be clear and concise.

paring for these negotiations through close consultation with our NATO partners. We are now ready to set forth our proposal. I have informed President Brezhnev that when our delegation travels to the negotiations on intermediate-range, land-based nuclear missiles in Geneva on the 30th of this month [Editor: President Reagan made this speech a few days before the Geneva negotiations began on November 30, 19811, my representatives will present the following proposal: The United States is prepared to cancel its deployment of Pershing II and ground launch cruise missiles if the Soviets will dismantle their SS-20, SS-4, and SS-5 missiles. This would be an historic step. With Soviet agreement, we could together substantially reduce the dread threat of nuclear war which hangs over the people of Europe. This, like the first footstep on the moon, would be a giant step for mankind.

We intend to negotiate in good faith and go to Geneva willing to listen to and consider the proposals of our Soviet counterparts. But let me call to your attention the background against which our proposal is made. During the past six "The ball is now in years, while the United ,States deployed Moscow's camp. The no new intermediate-range missiles and withdrew 1,000 nuclear warheads from proposals which President Europe, the Soviet Union deployed 750 Reagan formulated ... can warheads on mobile, accurate ballistic be called fundamental. missiles. They now have 1,100 warheads If Moscow accepts, a large on the SS-20, SS-4, and SS-5 missiles, and part of Europe will be on the United States has no comparable its way toward becoming a missiles. Indeed, the United States dismantled the last such missile in Europe nuclear free zone.

-HET LAATSTENIEUWS, over 15 years ago.

Brussels, Belgium As we look to the future of the negotiations, it is also important to address certain Soviet claims which, left I told you of the letter I wrote to unrefuted, could become critical barriers President Brezhnev last April. Well, I to real progress in arms control. have just sent another message to the The Soviets assert that a balance of nuclear forces alSoviet leadership. It's a simple, straight- intermediate-range forward, yet historic message: The United ready exists. That assertion is wrong.

States proposes the mutual reduction of By any objective measure, the Soviet conventional, intermediate-range nu- Union has an overwhelming advantage, clear, and strategic forces. on the order of six-to-one.

Specifically, I have proposed a fourSoviet spokesmen have suggested that point agenda to achieve this objective in moving their SS-20s beyond the Ural my letter to President Brezhnev. mountains will remove the threat to The first, and most important, point Europe. The SS-20s, even if deployed concerns the Geneva negotiations. As behind the Urals, will have a range that part of the 1979 two-track decision, places almost all of Western Europe, the NATO made a commitment to seek arms great cities-Rome, Athens, Paris, control negotiations with the Soviet London, Br.ussels, Amsterdam, Berlin Union on intermediate-range nuclear and so many more-all Scandinavian forces. The United States has been pre- countries, the Middle East and Northern

Africa, all within range of these missiles, which incidentally are mobile and can b~ moved on short notice.

The second proposal I have made to President Brezhnev concerns strategic weapons. The United States proposes to open negotiations on strategic arms as soon as possible [in 1982]. I have instructed Secretary Haig to discuss the timing of such meetings with Soviet representatives.

Substance, however, is far more important than timing. As our proposal for the Geneva talks illustrates, we can make proposals for genuinely serious reductions but only if we take the time to prepare carefully. The United States has been preparing carefully for resumption

"The speech given by President Ronald Reagan served not only to bring out the truth of u.s. defense policy, but also to blunt a powerful propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin which tried to paint Brezhnev as defender of peace and Reagan as favoring war. " -EL

SIGLO,

Bogota, Colombia

of strategic arms negotiatIOns, because we do not want a repetition of past disappointments. We do not want an arms control process that sends hopes soaring only to end in dashed expectations.

I have informed President Brezhnev that we will seek to negotiate substantial reductions in nuclear arms which would result in levels that are equal and verifiable. Our approach to verification will be to emphasize openness and creativity-rather th<;lnthe secrecy and suspicion which have undermined confidence in arms control in the past.

While we can hope to benefit from work done over the past decade in strategic arms negotiations, let us agree to do more than simply begin where these efforts previously left off. We can and should attempt major qualitative and (Text continued on page 47)

OPERA ON MAHATMA GANDHI

A famous American composer's second major opera is based upon Mahatma Gandhi's years in South Africa. Sung in Sanskrit, its music has a melodic flow bearing elements of the Indian system.

C

lose on the heels of an international film on Mahatma Gandhi comes an opera on him - by no less a composer than Philip Glass. Satyagraha had its American premiere 100 meters inside the United States-at Artpark on the Niagara river about 11 kilometers downstream from the falls, closer to Canada than the American town of Buffalo. The three-act opera played in New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music in November to great critical acclaim and audience enthusiasm.

A cult figure in American music, Philip Glass was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1937. As a boy he often minded his father's record shop and took back home what he could not sell-mostly chamber music. At the age of eight, he entered the Peabody conservatory and studied the flute and the piccolo, later playing both instruments in local orchestras. Then he went on to study composition at the Juillard School of Music in New York. Yet, after collecting many awards in what he calls "Americanclassical, Coplandesque music," Glass grew tired of this imitative academicism. He wandered restlessly for some years in Europe, Africa and Asia, and came home to write

music that was neither classical nor popular but had a language and appeal of its own. Eastern rhythmic structures, with their additive character, became one with Western harmony and instrumentation in Glass' work, giving it a new fluidity and freshness.

And no wonder-because in the winter of 1965-66, Glass met Ravi Shankar in Paris when Glass was hired to conduct, arrange and perform for the film Chappaqua, for which Shankar wrote the music. Glass also studied with tabla maestro AlIa Rakha and later traveled extensively in India. "Ravi, not drugs, was my acid trip," he records. "It was like totally clearing all my decks, and overnight I began to write a completely different kind of music."

The first outcome of this n~w outlook was not Satyagraha but the opera Einstein on the Beach, which became a prestige success, yielding, 32 performances in seven countries. But it lost so much.-money that Glass had to go back to his old job, driving a taxi in New York. With Satyagraha, he has climbed new heights, and now has the prosI?ects of a considerable success.

(Text continued on page 8)

The three acts and. seven scenes of Satyagraha telescope the formative years of Mahatma Gandhi's life (1893-1914) in South Africa into one~ day-morning, noon, and night. Sitting high above the action in each act is a personality-Leo Tolstoy in the first, Rabindranath Tagore in the second, and Martin Luther King in the third. The libretto is entirely in Sanskrit and consists of excerpts from the Bhagwad Gita. The action is also cast in the context of the Gita; the two armies are assembled as if on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, but gradually the light reveals that they are, instead of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, Indians and white South Africans. The opera unfolds in a series of tableaux of confrontations and political actions-burning the restrictive identity cards, building the Tolstoy farm commune, printing the paper Indian Opinion, and culminating in the protest march and strike in the mining town of New Castle in 1913. Much of the "action" is a procession, a visual metaphor for man's journey across the earth, not a strictly realistic or chronological account of events and people. Gandhi is more of a mythic figure than a historical personality around whom the music weaves its hypnotic web. As far as realism goes, Satyagraha is even less of an opera than usual; it is more like an oratorio with tableaux to provide a visual anchor.

In Einstein on the Beach, Glass had collaborated with Robert Wilson, a leading figure in avant-garde theater who has produced The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and the 12-hour-Iong Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. In Satyagraha, Glass worked with novelist Constance Dejong, who shares his interest in Eastern cultures. Apart from working on the theatrical organization of the scenes, reducing them from 21 to 7, she chose the Sanskrit passages after studying the text in phonetic transliteration and translation. Glass, Dejong, and Robert Israel, set designer and aficionado of Glass' music, traveled together to India in January 1978. From this came impressions of the functional elegance of Gandhi's ashram and the opulence of South India's Kathakali theater-the two polarities Israel subtly uses to provide the opera's visual frame. The chorus is costumed in beige for the Indians, pastels for the Europeans; Krishna and Arjuna have the brilliant colors of Kathakali. Gandhi is in white. Although the stage is seen all' the time, it is seen through two scrims-off-white in front and cloud-sky at the back, "making the opera flow through an aquarium of diaphanous light."

Projected by a chorus of 40 and a 51-piece orchestra consisting solely of woodwinds and strings (no percussion or brass) and a discreet electric organ, the music is all breath and flow. Super-romantic melodic¡ lines surface and submerge in cyclical variation. "The individual voices disappear into the music as do the individual instruments," says one critic, "there are solos, but they remain part of the overall weave. In the third act, the tenor playing Gandhi (Douglas Perry) is required to sing 30 consecutive E-minor scales-his voice, like the entire opera, seems to be subsumed into one timelessly sustained breath of spirit."

If that sounds very. Indian, it is. As Glass himself

explains, instead of dividing time into half-notes and quarter-notes as in Western music, he borrows the Indian method of forming rhythmic structures by adding small units-five or six notes-together to create large cycles of 30, 40 and even more beats. One long scene is based on 143 repeats of a simple four-chord progression. A slight variation produces an electrifying effect. "You join cycles of different beats, like wheels within wheels, everything going at the same time and always changing. The result is a gradually shifting, dreamlike landscape of sound"-a melodic and lyric flow reminiscent of Indian music.

While some critics find Glass' chord repetitions boring, serious musical appreciation of his work is growing. So is his popularity. Some time ago, Glass signed the first exclusive composer's contract with Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) Masterworks since Aaron Copland.

The only one to have this distinction before Copland had been Stravinsky. "Glass' music bridges gaps thought to be unbridgeable until recently," says John Rockwell of The Times. "His music is both intellectually rigorous and accessible, appealing to audiences that normally have little use for each other's music. And he does all this not by the creation of an artificial 'fusion music' but by the evolution of a style that partakes unself-consciously of classical, popular and ethnic traditions."

Glass himself is pleased with the reception to his opera about an Indian seeker's struggles in remote South Africa a long time ago. "That was no cult crowd out there," he said with some amazement the morning after the Artpark performance. "Those were ordinary people-not an opera audience with certain tastes to defend." Glass is undoubtedly a part of the biggest transition in Western music in some three-quarters of a century-from 12-tone modernism, which is judged solely by its internal organization, to music that has a broad appeal. It also marks his own transition from a minimalist modernist attitude to what we might call post modern music with a fresh blend of the classical and the popular. It is an attempt, as it were, to re-create the days when every coffee shop hummed with arias from Mozart's operas.

Douglas Perry's singing of the role of Gandhi, according to The New York Times critic, "often seemed to transcend the mythic, becoming touchingly human." The Time magazine critic says: "The score glows with a spiritual luminosity rarely encountered in this secular, anxious age." The action, like the music, is a celebration of nonviolence, not a sermon. It is ecstatic, not didactic.

By relating Gandhi not only to Tolstoy and Tagore but also to the violent end of Martin Luther King, the' opera makes us conscious of the state of the world; it raises the level of our consciousness, but never p~eaches.

"I'm attracted to Satyagraha as a social ideal," says Glass. "In an age of terrorism, we would like very much to make nonviolence a part of the dialogue again. Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, demonstrated his ideals, which takes far more courage than terrorism .... What is interesting about Gandhi is that there were no models for what he did. He was a man who lived out his ideals and turned a vivid inner life into an exterior form. That is what is admirable about him."

-CDG

lIeasariDglaelear Bisks In 1972, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) asked Norman Rasmussen, professor of nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to direct a study on the safety of nuclear reactors. The study was funded by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and took three years and about $4 million to complete.

The multivolume "Rasmussen Report" -a document that is about a foot thick-was released in draft form in August 1974, then emended and published in October 1975, as The Reactor Safety Study-An Assessment of Accident Risks in United States Commercial Power Plants (WASH-1400). Though not the first study of its kind, WASH-1400 is to date the most

What were the aims of the WASH-1400 report?

RASMUSSEN: Our goal was to assess the risks to the public of the operation of nuclear power plants in the United States. In this case, risk means both the likelihood or probability of an accidental occurrence, and the magnitude of its consequences.

The most commonly used conception of risk is straight probability. For examQUESTION:

comprehensive inquiry, into the safety of nuclear power plants ¡ever sponsored by the AEC. It has received numerous reviews, among them the critique of a committee appointed especially for that purpose by the NRC, the Risk Assessment Review Group.

Since WASH-1400, Dr. Rasmussen has continued to work in the field of probabilistic risk assessment and reactor safety. One of his most recent publications deals with the application of risk assessment techniques to other energy technologies. In this interview with Michael Crandell, executive editor of The Center Magazine, Rasmussen discusses in detail how risks related to the operation of nuclear reactors are quantified, and how they compare with the risks of alternative energy sources.

pIe, the risk of being killed in a car in the United States today includes the probability of an accident and the number of deaths per accident. If there are two million accidents, and there is a fatality in one out of twenty accidents, then you multiply them together and you get the risk ratio. Those are not the right numbers for the United States, but they illustrate the kind of calculation used in the study.

from The Center Magazine. Copyright

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Š

It is then important for us to understand that there. is a difference between the probability of an event occurring and its

ks.s

U<;:' IL1\ \ L-O~ Reprinted

The assessment of risk required that we assume certain magnitudes of release of radioactivity, and calculate the effects on public health. But the other part of the problem was to estimate the probability that this release would occur. So, there were two parts to our study.

1981 The Fund for the Republic. Inc.

~.

consequences, and that they each need to be considered in order to assess the risk.

For example, there might be a high probability of a minor nuclear accident occurring, which would not enter significantly into a decision about the desirability of nuclear energy, because its consequences are minor.

That is exactly right. But if we define risk as the product of the probability of an event and the consequence, you could get two very different events with the same risk. Suppose we have a probability of 10 accidents per year, and the probability of a consequent death from the accident is .1. That would lead to a risk of one death per year, because .1 times 10 equals 1. Now, suppose the probability of an accident were one in a million, but it is likely that one million people would be killed as a consequence of that single event. Multiply those together and you also get a risk of one death per year. By the simple definition of risk, both events are equally risky. But they are really not the same risk in people's minds. The big event that is rare is judged to be more severe than the common event that is small, even though, by this measurement, they both produce the same risk. That discrepancy has to be taken into account in assessing risk.

WASH·1400 has been perceived variously as a near-Bible on the safety of nuclear reactors; as an early pioneering effort; and as seriously flawed. What is your own assessment of that study today, six years later?

It was a good first step toward applying the methodology of quantitative risk assessment, with lots of room for improvement. We have since developed techniques that improve upon those used in WASH-1400. But by and large, it has held up well, given the fact that for six years people have been searching for things that we overlooked.

Nothing has been found that would change the answer we got. Our report predicted events like the Three Mile Island accident accurately, in the sense that the probabilities we calculated were consistent with having seen such an event by this time. We had identified the chain of events that occurred at Three Mile Island (TMI) as one path toward trouble.

Most members of the technical community, and especially the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)-although

apprehensive and even highly critical at first-have now embraced quantitative risk assessment strongly and insist on people doing it for all kinds of problems.

It has been mainly since Three Mile Island that the NRC has taken that attitude. So, I am proud of that work today. I think it is still solid.

it blowing toward a high-population center? All these things have important bearing on the consequences of the accident. WASH-1400 gives a spectrum of possible results. The ones with smaller consequences are more likely, and the ones with larger consequences are less likely.

One of the most quoted calculations of your report was that the chances of a core melt are about one in twenty thousand per year of reactor operation. Thus, with 72 reactors operating full time in tlie United States, the odds are that we would have one such meltdown every 277 years. Have you since revised this estimate? What are the consequences associated with such a meltdown?

The numbers you have cited are correct, except for one consideration that we strongly emphasize in the report. We should not say that if we run 70 reactors

Professor Harold Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara has stated that he thinks the question, "How safe are nuclear reactors?" Is na1ve, for exactly some of the reasons that you have just specified. He argues that rather than asking whether or not nuclear reactors are safe, one must ask specifically about probabilities associated with events of particular consequences. Given that point of view, can you calculate the probability of a core melt that ruptures a containment building and causes significant loss of life, say, the deaths of hundreds of people?

We found that you would begin to get significant off-site health impacts in about one out of twenty core melts. So, you are down in the range of something like one in a million per year of reactor operation.

We calculated one in a billion for extremely serious health effects off-site.

Professor Lewis is correct. The typical opponent of nuclear power says, "Nuclear power plants have some new risks; I do not want to accept those risks; so I do not want nuclear power." I claim that society should not behave in what I consider that illogical way. Rather, we should say, "Here we are in time: we can get electricity in the future from nuclear power, from coal, from the remaining oil reserves, or we can go without." Maybe you can think of some other path, but those are all the alternatives that I can think of.

Now you examine those four alternatives, and you choose the best. They all have risks. They all have benefits. You have to weigh each one against the others. In that way we can reach the conclusion that is in the best interest of society. To single one out and reject it because it has risks means that you may accept much bigger risks because you have forced yourself down some other pathway you, have not even thought about. The knee-jerk emotional response of the antinuclear position does just that.

It forces you down some other path that I believe is in fact riskier, and can be shown to be riskier. People should be

"Nuclear plants will be much safer 40 years from now than they are today, just as airplanes today are much safer than they were 40 years ago." for some x hundreds of years, we will get a certain number of meltdowns. We have learned from other technologies that you can reduce the likelihood of accidents by paying attention to safety factors. And we expect to do that with nuclear power plants. So, it is unfair to project far into the future, because we believe that the probability numbers will change. Just as you should not use the airlines accident statistics for 1942 to make projections for 1982, you would be foolish to predict the future on the basis of current statistics for nuclear operations. ·We expect that nu· clear plants will be much safer 40 years from now than they are today, just as airplanes today are much safer than they were 40 years ago. With that caveat, what you say about WASH-l400 is correct.

Now, what would the consequences be of a core melt? They can vary from very small to quite large, depending on what happens after the core melt. For example, does the containment building fail?

What are the prevailing weather conditions? Is the wind blowing out to sea, or is

¡ fully aware of the consequences of going down each path. If they then decide to follow it, fine.

Why do you see the other path-or paths-as riskier?

Oil is not a realistic option to consider.

There are two really realistic options in the short term, for the next few decades at least. One is conservation. You just stop building any more power plants, and live with what we have now. That is forced conservation, and it would have a serious impact on our society, which depends for a third of its energy on electricity. Electricity is not a luxury; it is an absolute necessity for the functioning of our complex society. Unemployment would be affected by reduction in electrical supply. The standard of living would be affected. Our ability to deliver goods and services, including health care, would be affected. All these things lead to risks to the members of societybigger risks, in my opinion, than those associated with nuclear power. Of course, people can argue about which risks are bigger, because they are sometimes hard to compare.

Coal, which is another obvious choice, is a dirty business. It is damaging to the environment to recover the quantities of coal needed to meet our energy requirements. One large coal plant requires three million tons of coal a year. That means a lot of mining. When you bum coal it releases all the products of combustion into the atmosphere, roughly eight million tons of carbon dioxide per year-a big block of dry ice. We know that there may be significant impact on world climate from so much CO2, Also, solutions emitted in the burning process are inhaled by residents around the coal plant. Most studies project serious impacts on public health in the regions surrounding coal plants. The sulfur dioxide produced during combustion can combine with water to make sulfuric acid, which can lead to acid rain, with significant environmental impact.

The negative impact of all those byproducts is enormous compared to the impact of nuclear energy. Nuclear reactors emit nothing during the process of making electricity, and all the ashes and all the products are contained after the process is over, because they are so small in volume. Instead of the three million tons of fuel a year required for a coal

plant, a nuclear reactor takes 50 tons of fuel a year. And you can contain all that and shut it away without a problem. It is nasty; it is radioactive; it takes care and attention to manage properly. But it does not create as big a problem as does coal.

To return to the calculations of accident probabilities that you did in your report, the crucial one key element-perhaps one-in the event-and fault-free methods that you used is the assignment of a number between zero and one to any given event. How do you arrive at such numbers? How would one, for instance, assign the probability of failure of the electromagnetic relief valve whose malfunction contributed to the accident at Three Mile Island? How reliable are such calculations compared to, say, statistical predictions of the likelihood of a traffic accident, if one drives so many kilometers per day on a given freeway?

Those two accidents are not as different as you might think. There are a lot of electromagnetic relief valves in nuclear

"We have experienced 800 reactor-years in power plants, and we have not yet had a core melt accident." power plants around the country. They are exercised-either by test or because they are needed-quite often in the course of a year. So we have accumulated a fair amount of history about how these valves work when asked to perform, either in tests or in real conditions.

Are records of their performance kept?

Records are kept, and every failure is required by law to be noted, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission notified. The NRC keeps 'a data base on how many failures of these valves have occurred in the industry, and at which plants. We use that data to tell us how likely the failure of such a valve is. Of course, because there are several different valve manufacturers, and other variables, we assign a substantial uncertainty to the number we put down. But we can verify that the probability-of-failure number is in the right range by experience with a lot of valves.

Now, in the case of the traffic accident you ask about, we can assess the probability fairly well because of the large number of statistics available. Every day, 140 or so people are killed in the United States in automobile accidents. Fifty thousand die every year. You can calculate the probabilities here accurately, except that the number can vary by about a factor of 10 between a careful driver and a careless driver. So, the traffic accident and the failure of the electromagnetic relief valve are similar in many ways, although you probably would have to assign a bigger uncertainty to the electromagnetic valve failure than to the traffic accident.

Harold Lewis, who was the chairman of the NRC Risk Assessment Review Group that reviewed your report, in an articlewhich, by the way, seemed to me quite complimentary in, its appraisal of the report-wrote in reference to WASH-1400 that "the uncertainty of the calculation [of a major reactor accident] was far greater than had been stated in the Rasmussen report. This is not a particularly helpful conclusion, but it describes the true state of affairs." Despite the uncertainty, Professor Lewis still believes that nuclear power is safe enough to supply a large part of America's energy needs. Do you share his view? And would you comment on the uncertainty that he thought was greater than had been stated in the Rasmussen report?

I believe that nuclear plants as built today are safe enough to be used as part of the solution to the energy problem that we face. And I believe today that the uncertainty in the WASH-1400 results is greater than we assigned in that report.

We have done more work and identified other factors. But I disagree somewhat with Professor Lewis as to how uncertain our results were. He does not say in his article how much more uncertain they might be than we stated. I think he should have said something about that.

We said that the probability of a core melt was one in twenty thousand. In WASH-1400, we assigned an uncertainty of plus or minus a factor of five to that calculation. So we said that there is a 90 percent chance that the probability is between one in four thousand and one in a hundred thousand. (Five into twenty thousand; five times twenty thousand.) I have testified before the U.S. Congress

that I would double that uncertainty factor knowing what I know today, and make it 10. I would say the chances of a core melt are between one in two thousand and one in two hundred thousand, with a best estimate of one in twenty thousand. If Professor Lewis means "much greater" to be a factor of two, then we agree.

But I would not agree with the Lewis report that the uncertainty was greatly understated. I don't think that it can be greatly understated in the more-likely-tofail direction, because we have already experienced some 800 reactor-years in power plants, and we have not yet had a core melt accident. That tells us that the chances are probably less than one in eight hundred. We have also had 2,000 years of naval reactor experience. The U.S. Navy does not use the same kind of reactor, so their experience is not directly applicable, but it is a reassuring statistic.

So, we have enough data to make me comfortable that the probability of failure is less than one in a thousand now.

And the upper value in WASH-1400 was one in four thousand. That is not a great difference.

Where Lewis could be absolutely correct, however, is that the chances of a core melt could be much lower than we said. We were conservative in our calculations. The uncertainty may be greatly understated in that it might be a factor of substantially less than what we said. In fact, Lewis himself has said that he thinks we loaded our estimates on the conservative side. My problem with the conclusions of the Lewis committee report is that they were widely interpreted as suggesting that reactors are much riskier than we had estimated.

Another kind of assessment that was made with regard to nuclear reactors had to do with short-term and long-term effects of radiation on human beings. What is the controversial linearity hypothesis which was used in a modified form in your report, and what is your opinion of it?

The linearity hypothesis says that if a high dose of radiation-say, a thousand units given to a thousand people-leads to a hundted cancers (a 10 percent rate of cancer), then if you cut the dose by a factor of 10 and give it to the same population, you cut the number of cancers by a factor of 10. In other words, the effect is in linear proportion to the dosage. Even with very low dosages, the linearity hypothesis predicts that there

will still be some cancers. Thus, even if you give a million people a tenth of a unit, you still predict something like one extra cancer among those million people.

Now, there is a lot of evidence in other cases that disease experts have studied that the human body repairs insults below a certain level of severity faster than the damage can be done, and there is no effect. So, there is another theory that says there is a critical threshold under which radiation or poison has no effect.

Above the threshold level of exposure, you start to see effects. The linearity hypothesis does not allow for that threshold effect. Since we do not know whether or not that threshold effect exists for radiation, we took a conservative hypothesis. We used a modified version of the linearity hypothesis in WASH1400. The cause/effect ratio is still linear, but the linear line has a different flow at lower dosage exposures to approximate the threshold effect. We use this modified version on the basis of a lot of accumulated evidence that low doses do not

Nuclear waste "is nasty; it is radioactive; it takes care to manage properly.

But it does not create as big a problem as does coal." produce as big an effect as large doses.

The latest report of the U.S. National Academy of Science Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations (BEIR) states that the majority of committee members felt that the linearity hypothesis was overly pessimistic, and that some other curve-like a quadratic curve-might better approximate the evidence that lower effects are found at lower doses.

A recently published book by Mark Stephens, the public information specialist on President Carter's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, concludes that the major problem WiTh Three Mile Island had to do not with the technical equipment in the plant, but with human decisions that affected the operation of the plant. In fact, Stephens concludes that if the operators had taken a nap at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, and let the automatic systems work, the accident would have been far ess severe than it was. Do you

think that the greatest threat to the safety of nuclear reactors lies with human behavior? Also, what kinds of measures are¡ being taken-within the industry or through governmental regulation-to try to improve that side of nuclear energy?

I agree that more than half of the risk is associated with the failures of humans to perform their functions as intended. That is the dominant contributor to risk in nuclear power plants.

What has been done to correct this?

The industry has become much more sensitive to the human interaction with the machine. There has been a dramatic improvement in the simulation technique used to train the operators. Today, there is a wider spectrum of simulated events.

For example, some of the events that happened at Three Mile Island could not have been simulated before the accident, because the simulator that those operators were trained on was not that sophisticated. Those computer programs are much more sophisticated, and the operators are trained better, as a result of what was learned from Three Mile Island.

That is sort of a quick-fix solution.

There is another approach to improving operator reactions now being worked on that I think will pay big dividends. One of the reasons that the operators did not perform as well as they might have at TMI is that when that event occurred, some hundred or more lights lit up, and panels flashed, indicating that something was wrong. Well, when a hundred things say there is something wrong here, there is not much the operator can do. He does not know which of the hundred problems to pay attention to. We know how to process large amounts of information pretty efficiently with modern techniques. We are using that ability to try to put together a damage control center in the reactor. When an emergency arises, you ignore this fistful of panels, which are needed during normal operations to monitor equipment individually, and you go to the damage control panel, which tells you key things: how much heat is being produced, how it is moving, are you getting- it out, are the temperatures changing, etc. The important thing is to keep the reC\ctor cool. You need only a limited number of readings to know whether the heat is being' taken out or not.

We believe a lot can be done so that one can focus on the key things happening in the reactor, get them straightened

out, and then go back and worry about the hundred lights on the panel.

What do you think of the 200 point remedial action plan that the NRC instituted after TMI? As an engineer, I just cannot believe that there are 200 things that need to be done. I think there are some 15 or 20 very important things that need to be done. To dilute that list with 180 much less important things troubles me.

The same thing troubles me about regulatory processes in the United States for the last four or five years. There seems to have been a lack of priority setting, of distinguishing what is really important from what is nice but not important in the overall safety of the machine.

That is due, in part, to the fact that the NRC is a highly fragmented organization.

One person is responsible for fire control, another for security, another for loss of coolant-type action, another for transient-type action; and each one wants to make sure that, if the reactor ever has a pr<?blem, it is not his fault. But there has not been sufficient emphasis on keeping a balanced approach in the NRC. By and large, the NRC has done a good job. But there are a lot of ways in which it could improve.

There seems to have been a great erosion of confidence in authority, and in the veracity of statements made by those in positions of authority-witness the many conflicting or ambiguous announcements about the accident at TMI as it was unfolding, the confusion among the representatives of the utility and the NRC, the different conclusions of different research groups about the danger of a hydrogen bubble exploding in the pressure vessel.

One consequence of that has been a growing perception that the risks associated with nuclear energy are qualitatively different from other risks. What is your reaCtion to that position?

My reaction is that it is wrong. Those who take that position have not thought about the problem in detail, and their lack of knowledge of the details of the problem has made them think it is an entirely different problem. Nuclear radiation is known to be carcinogenic; it can cause cancer. It is known to be mutagenic; at a certain level it can cause genetic defects. But that is no different from many chemical agents which are known to be carcinogens, and which are

known to be mutagens. And a lot of radiation comes, from sources other than nuclear reactors. Nuclear power reactors do not create any different kinds of disease than already exist. They may simply cause changes in certain diseases that are already quite common in the population. So, in that sense, I do not think that risks associated with nuclear reactors are different, although they are perceived to be different, as with every new technology.

You mentioned the long half-life of radioactive elements. What is the half-life of the pollution emitted by a coal plant?

Well, it is not radioactive, which means

"If we wait until we convince everybody, we won't have nuclear power-nor would we have had ,the light bulb, or the automobile, or most of the things that we think are beneficial to our living today .'~ that its half-life is infinite. Certainly it is not better to have toxic chemical agents that will last forever.

All those kinds of problems normally do not get thought through. When you begin to think of them in detail, they make the alternatives seem more similar than you might suppose. Chemical waste disposal is an issue that is real and pressing today, and not very different from nuclear waste disposal. One could argue, and at first sight it looks plausible, that a coal plant cannot have a big accident and wipe out a lot of people, while a nuclear accident could kill up to a thousand or a few thousand people in the worst case.

If you look at it in a little bigger perspective, though, you realize-as I said earlier-that the coal plant puts out eight million tons of carbon dioxide a year, and that the carbon dioxide may, according to some people's theories, lead to a warming of the high latitudes and thus to a shrinking of the polar ice caps.

That process is self-perpetuating because the more the ice caps melt, the less they reflect heat from the sun, and the warmer it gets, and so on. It was that cycle that caused the, glacial age. Well, if you melted the entire polar ice caps of the earth, it would raise the ocean level about one hundred meters. That would be dis-

astrous to Santa Barbara, where you come from, and to Boston, where I come from.

You asked about radioactive waste disposal. Most people do not realize that tl'ere is just about as much radioactive waste with a life of a thousand years or longer in the ash pile from one year's generation of a large coal plant as in the ash pile from one year's generation of a nuclear plant. The three million tons of coal that a coal plant must burn to generate as much electricity as a nuclear plant has a small amount of uranium in it.

Yet we don't talk about burying a quarter of a million tons of coal waste deep underground every year . We cannot afford to take it all and put it in glass and bury it underground, as we can with nuclear waste. So, if you tell me -you do not -want nuclear ,PpW.er because of long-term radioactive wastes, and you want coal instead, I think that you don't understand the problem.What would it take either to convince the antinuclear activists that nuclear energy is safe enough to be worth pursuing, or vice versa, to convince proponents of nuclear energy that it should not be pursued?

A string of serious accidents would clearly convince us that we should not use nuclear energy, at least in its present form. If you had a Three Mile Island-or worse-every year for the next two or three years, that might be enough to create serious doubt about whether or not we should use nuclear power.

How. would you convince the people who are emotionally against it? Well, you should not hope to-you should not even try ..We do not need to have 100 percent of the people supporting nuclear power, just a reasonable majority. And we have a reasonable majority that support it today, by most polls in the United States.

Every new technology has had a vocal antigroup trying to stop it, and we have to expect that on nuclear power. If we wait until we convince everybody, we won't have nuclear power-nor would we have had the light bulb, or the automobile, or most of the things that¡ we think are beneficial to our standard of living today.

So, you have to give up trying to convince everybody. But you can-and I believe with reasonable argument-surely con-. vince a substantial fraction of the public that it is in their best interest to use nuclear power for part of the solution to 0 the energy problem we face.

Famil, and Feminism "We are finding that it's not so easy to live with-or without-men and children solely on the basis of the first feminist agenda," says a pioneer of the women's lib movement.

The new program must recognize the need for both professional success and a family life.

----------------------

nthe state of California recently, I went into the office of a televisi~n producer who prides himself on being an "equal oppor,tumty. employer." His new "executiv.e assistant" was waiting for me. She wanted to talk to me alone before her boss came in. Lovely, in her late 20s or maybe 30-ish, "dressed for success" like a model in the latest Vogue advertisement, she was not just a glorified secretary with a fancy title in a dead-end job: The woman she replaced had just been promoted to the position of "creative vice-president."

"I know I'm lucky to have this job," she said. "But you people who fought for these thin,gs had your families. You already had your men and children. What are we supposed to do?"

She complained that the older woman vice-president, an early radical feminist who had vowed never to marry or have children, didn't understand her quandary. "All she wants," the executive assistant said, "is more power ~n the company .... " A young woman in her third year of Harvard Medical School told me, "I'm going to be a surgeon. I'll never be a trapped housewife like my mother. I would like to get married and have children, I think. They say we can have it all. But how? I work 36 hours in the hospital, 12 off. How am I going to have a relationship, much less kids, with hours like that? I'm not sure I can be a superwoman."

In New York, a woman in her 30s who has just been promotea says, "I'm up against the clock, you might say. If I don't have a child now, it will be too late. But it's an agonizing choice. I've been supporting my husband while he gets his Ph.D. We don't know what kind of job he'll be able to get.

There's no pay when you take off to have a baby in my company. They don't guarantee you'll get your job back. If I don't have a baby, will I miss out on life somehow? Will I really be fulfilled as a woman?"

An older woman in Ohio reflects, "I was the first woman manager here. I gave everything to the job. It was exciting at first, breaking in where women never were before. Now, it's just a job. But it's the devastating loneliness that's the worst. I can't stand coming back to this apartment alone every night. I'd

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like a house, maybe a garden. Maybe I should have a kid, even without a father. At least tnen I'd have a family. There has to be some better way to live. A woman alone .... " With the same mix of shock and relief with which the women's movement began in the 1960s, feminists at the end of the 1970s started moving to a new frontier: the family.

It's hardly new for women to be concerned with the family.

But aren't feminists supposed to be liberating themselves from the family? Isn't the women's movement, according to its critics, supposed to be trying to destroy the family with the Equal Rights Amendment? And isn't the family, after all, the last bastion of conservatism? Is the women's movement surrendering, then, to the forces of reaction by retreating to the family? Or is feminism truly entering a new stage?

I think, in fact, that the women's movement has come just about as far as it can in terms of women alone. When I think back to the explosion of the women's movement at the opening of the last decade-thousands of women marching down New York's Fifth Avenue on August 26, 1970, on that first nationwide women's strike for equality, carrying banners for "Equal Rights to Jobs and Education," "The Right to Abortion," "24-Hour Child Care" and "Political Power to the Women"-our agenda then seems so simple and straightforward.

More than 10 years later, though the women's movement has changed all our lives and our daughters take their own personhoorl and equality for granted, they-and we-are finding that it's not so easy to live with-or without-men and children solely on the basis of that first feminist agenda. The great challenge we face in the 1980s is to frame a new agenda that makes it possible for women to be able to work and love in equality with men-and to choose, if they so desire, to have children. Even the measure of equality we have already achieved is not secure until we face these unanticipated conflicts between the demands of the workplace and professional success on the one hand, and the demands of the family on the other.

These conflicts seem insoluble because of the way the family and workplace have been structured in the United States.

The second feminist agenda, the agenda for the 1980s, must call for the restructuring of the institutions of home and work.

But to confront the American family as it actually is todayinstead of hysterically defending or attacking the family that is no more-means shattering an image that is still sacred to both church and state, to politicians on the right and left. And dispelling the mystique of the family may be even more threatening to some than unmasking the feminine mystique was a decade ago.

According to government statistics, only 17 percent of American households include a father who is the sole wage earner, a mother who is a full-time homemaker, and one or more children. (And one study found that one-third of all such full-time housewives planned to look for jobs.) â&#x20AC;˘ 28 percent of American households consist of both a father and a mother who are wage earners, with one or more children living at home . â&#x20AC;˘ 32.4 percent of American households consist of married couples with no children, or none living at home.

With more American women going to work, child care facilities have expanded; many, like California's Nurtury (left), are managed by men.

• 6.6 percent of American households are headed by women who are single parents with one or more children at home.

• 0.7 percent are headed by men who are single parents with one or more children at home.

• 3.1 percent consist of unrelated persons living together.

• 5.3 percent are headed by a single parent and include relatives other than spouses and children.

• 22 percent of American households consist of one person living alone (a third of these are women over 65).

As Muriel Fox, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Legal Defense and Education Fund, put it in her charge to discussion leaders at the National Assembly for the Future of the Family held in 1979: "Our assembly will accept-rather than deny-the fact that 93 percent of American families today fit patterns other than the traditional one of a breadwinning father, a homemaking mother and two or more dependent children.

"We do not share the frequently voiced opinion that American families are in a state of hopeless collapse. People are living together in new combinations for the intimacy and support that constitute a family-unmarried adults with or without children, single-parent families, multigenerational communes, various new groupings of the elderly.

"The future of the family is an overriding feminist issue."

When feminists proclaimed "the right to choose" a decade ago, we meant the right for a woman to decide whether or when to have a child and to control her own reproductive process-a more basic right, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, than many of those spelled out in the Bill of Rights by and for men.

But what is beginning to concern me even more today are the conflicts women now suffer as they reach age 30 or 35 and cannot choose to have a child. I don't envy young women who are facing or denying that agonizing choice we won for them.

Beca\lse it isn't really a free choice when their paycheck is needed to cover the family bills each month, when women must look to their jobs and professions for the security and status their mothers once sought in marriage alone, and when these professions are not structured for people who give birth to children and take responsibility for their upbringing.

My own feminism began in outrage at the either/or choice that the feminine mystique imposed on my generation. I was fired from my job as a reporter when I became pregnant. Most of us let ourselves be seduced into giving up our careers in order to embrace motherhood, and it wasn't ·easy to resume them. We told our daughters that they could-and shouldhave it all. Why not? After all, men do. But the "superwomen" who are trying to "have it all," combining full-time careers and "stretch-time" motherhood, are enduring such relentless pressure that their younger sisters may not even dare to think about having children.

The many women struggling with the conflict between careers and children cannot be dismissed as victims of their mothers' expectations, of the feminine mystique. Motherhood, the profound human impulse to have children, is more than a mystique. At the same time, more women than ever before hold jobs not just because they want to "find themselves" and assert their independence, but because they must. They are single and responsible for their own support, divorced and often responsible for their children's support as well, or married and still partly responsible for their families' support because one paycheck is not enough in this era of inflation. In all 43 percent

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The feminist no longer fits the popular image of a career superwoman agitating against marriage, motherhood and femininity. A restructuring of the institutions of home and work can reconcile the modern woman's demands for a family and a profession. of American wives with children under the age of six are working today, and by 1990 it is estimated that 64 percent will have jobs-only one out of three mothers, approximately, will be a housewife at home.

Yet the United States is one of the few advanced nations with no national policy of leave for maternity, paternity or parenting, no national policy encouraging flexible working arrangements and part-time and shared employment, and no national policy to provide child care for those who need it.

Dr. Sheila B. Kamerman, professor of social policy and social planning at the Columbia University School of Social Work, investigated the child care arrangements of 200 white and black mothers, half of them professional or executive women, the other half low-paid, unskilled workers, all of them working full-time, with at least one child under the age of five to care for. According to Kamerman, their children "may experience three, four or even more kinds of care in an average week, as they spend a part of the day in nursery school, another part

with a family day-care mother (or two different such women) and are brought to and from these services by a parent, a neighbor or some other person.

"Aside from the difficulty of obtaining good child care, the greatest difficulty for these women is the rigidity and unresponsiveness of the workplace. Beginning hours at a job often conflict with conventional school opening times; the lack of any benefits for maternity leave, or for sick leave to care for an ill child, creates financial and emotional stress for families dependent on the income of two wage earners."

Confronting the crisis in child care, concerned feminists are dispensing with rhetoric and theoretical arguments in favor of concrete proposals: new options, child care solutions that have worked in other countries, child care services that could be provided by a company or union in the actual workplace, home-based child care, commercial child care services. The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, for instance, has been writing into union contracts provisions for a well-run child care nursery on factory premises as a basic employee benefit. The Stride Rite Corporation has been running such a child care center at its Boston plant for 10 years now, and parents who live nearby but do not work at the plant can use the facility too.

More and more companies are finding that "flextime" actually increases productivity and profits while reducing absenteeism. "Flextime" is the new system whereby everyone works at the office or factory during a midday core of hours, but arranges starting, leaving and lunch times according to individual needs. Some mothers and fathers start work at 10 a.m., after dropping their children off at school; others skip lunch hour and leave at three to be home after school; others do a week's work in four days in order to have a long weekend for themselves. American Can Company, for instance, even provides "flexible benefits"-health-insurance, vacation and sick-leave packages tailored to individual family needs.

It seems clear to me that we will never bring about these changes in the workplace, so necessary for the welfare of children and the family, if their only supporters and beneficiaries are women. The need for such innovations becomes urgent as more and more mothers enter the workplace, but they will come about only because more and more fathers demand them too.

And men are beginning to demand them already. After all, they've long been subject to the same pressures that increasing numbers of women are experiencing.

A young man refuses an extra assignment, which would mean working nights and traveling weekends, on top of his regular job. It doesn't matter that it might lead to a big promotion. "We're having another child," he tells his boss, "and I'm committed to sharing the responsibilities at home because my wife's going to law school at night. It hasn't and won't interfere with my job-you were more than satisfied with my last report. But I'm not taking on anything extra. My family is more important to me."

As we move ahead in the 1980s, it becomes clearer that the women's movement has been merely the beginning of something much more basic than a few women getting good (men's) jobs. Paradoxically, as more women enter the workplace and share the breadwinning, their family bonds and values-human values as opposed to material ones-seem to strengthen. The harassed working mothers and their husbands in Kamerman's

study of families place more importance and reliance on these bonds, not only with each other apd their own children but with their own parents and other relatives, than do comparable families conforming to the traditional housewife-breadwinner image. The increasing tendency for' young men to refuse corporate transfers and to put more emphasis on their self-fulfillment and "family time" as opposed to "getting ahead" has been reported by several writers.

When his wife is also earning money and his identity and standard of living do not depend entirely on his paycheck, a husband is something more than just a company man. Such a man has more freedom and opportunity to develop human values and to share the reality and responsibility of parenting.

The Wall Street Journal reports that of 300 recently relocated executives surveyed by a Chicago management-consulting firm, the great majority said that their most important consideration was not the job itself but "winning family consent."

"Tomorrow Begins Today," a study issued by the Security Pacific National Bank of Los Angeles, states, "Currently, 80 percent of all families earning $20,000 or more are two-wageearner families .... Two-wage earners place less emphasis on careers and increased value on leisure activities, child care and household services. Career roles are less instrumental than the search for self-identity and good health."

Ah, yes--":'good health. One of the most remarkable results of the women's movement has been the unprecedented new vitality and growth experienced by millions of women who have defied the deterioration, depression and despair that used to be considered "normal" symptoms of aging in women.

Twenty years ago the mental health and general well-being of women were much worse than those of men in every age group after age 20. Today, however, studies show that women no longer deteriorate in middle age. Indeed, women aged 40 and 50 are just as healthy as they were in their 20s and 30s, and much healthier than middle-aged women were 20 years ago.

But such improvement has not been noted among men. The scientists who conducted these studies suspect that a crucial factor was the women's movement. It seems to have been a fountain of youth for women as we have moved to our new self-respect and put new energies and new talents to use, directing our aggression outward, even when the obstacles have been tough, instead of inward, against our own bodies, as despairing women used to do after their early peak Of marriage and childbearing.

The widening discrepancy between men's life expectancy and women's-now roughly 77 years for women, 69 for men-makes it urgent that men break through their conventional sex roles as so many women have. Some men are already doing so, and the increasing awareness of men's midlife crises may be a harbinger of more changes to come. Furthermore, the discrepancy should alert women to the dangers of adopting too closely the obsessive careerism that has made so many men die prematurely of stress-induced heart attacks and strokes.

Unfortunately, according to Dr. Alexander Leaf, chief of medical services at Massachusetts General Hospital, more young women than ever before are being admitted there with heart attacks, though hard data are not yet available nationally.

And cancer experts have been noticing' lately that as more young men stop smoking, more young women are starting. A repeat of a massive mental-health survey originally conducted 17 years ago by the National Center for Health Statistics shows

that today more women in their 20s and 30s are suffering from stress. Women's equality will have been for nothing if its beneficiaries, by trying to beat men at their own old power games and imitating their strenuous climb onto and up the corporate ladder, fall into the traps men are beginning to escape.

The young men of the "counterculture" of the 1960s and 1970s were rebelling against the great pressures to devote their whole lives to money-making careers-just as women in the feminist movement rebelled against the great pressures to devote their whole lives to husbands and children and to forego personal advancement. But to substitute one half of a loaf for the other is not an improvement. Why should women simply replace the glorification of domesticity with the glorification of work as their life and identity? Simply to reverse the roles of breadwinner and homemaker is no progress at all, not for women and not for men. The challenge of the 1980s is to transcend these polarities by creating new family patterns based on equality and full human identity for both sexes.

The willingness, finally, of the modern women's movement to come to grips with the practical problems of the family has inestimable historical significance. Reviewing the history of the original feminist movement and why it failed to alter the lives of most American women, historian William O'Neill in his book, Everyone Was Brave, concluded that the trouble was rooted in the movement's unwillingness to tackle the problems of the family. Most of the early American feminists were either young single women opposed to marriage and the family or else married professional women who didn't have children or preferred to concentrate on loftier issues, such as the vote.

They assumed that winning suffrage would automatically usher in equality and purify society. Yet, wrote O'Neill, since the masses of American women were married or wanted to be, the only way that equality between the sexes could have been achieved was through a "revolution in domestic life" reconciling the demands of family and career-a revolution that the first feminists never attempted-which is why they fizzled out after the vote was won in 1920.

A few years ago, it looked as if the same thing might happen again. The popular (and unpopular) image of the modern feminist was that of a career "superwoman" hell-bent on beating men at their own game, or of young "Ms. Libber," agitating against marriage, motherhood, sexual intimacy with men, and any and all of the traits with which women in the past pleased or attracted men.

But the nine founding mothers of NOW who participated in the Assembly on the Future of the Family preached a feminism that was always rooted in person.al truth. For us to have ignored or attacked men and families would have been a lie. We averaged more than two children apiece. Men were members of NOW from the very beginning.

It¡seems to me you can trust feminists-or any other "-ists," for that matter-only when they speak from personal truth in all its complexity. Such truth is never black or white. The image of "women's lib" as being opposed to the family was encouraged by women locked in violent reaction against their own families and identities. Their anger was real enough, but their rhetoric denied other elements of their personal truth.

None of us can depend throughout our new, long lives on the "family of Western nostalgia" to meet our needs for nurture

The new urge of women and men for meaning in their work and life, for love, roots and family is a powerful force for change. and support, but all of us still have those needs. The answer is not to deny them, but to recognize and strengthen new family forms that can sustain us now.

My personal concern for the 1980s is the possibility of and need for new patterns of intimacy and growth, love and work in the third of life that most women~but not yet most men-can now hope to enjoy after age 50. What social policies and institutional innovations will enable us more easily to enjoy vital, integrative lives after childbearing, making our own professional and personal choices, and receiving as well as giving family support to each other and our children? As our population becomes proportionately older, the dominant social revolution of the 1980s will almost certainly be made by men

and women in this new third of life. For they will be us, demanding our own voice and participation in society instead of the diminished opportunities, low status, dehumanizing discri-

and longer than men because they forge more human and familylike connections even after childbearing. As more men share that early nurturing, will they also develop new survival . skills?

To some it may sound strange for a feminist like myself to be arguing so passionately for the importance of families. Such arguments have even been dismissed by some radical feminists as "reactionary family chauvinism." But it may very well be that the family, which has always been considered the bastion of conservatism, is already somehow being transformed by women's equality into a progressive political force. For when men start assigning a higher priority to their families and self-fulfillment, and women a higher priority to independence and active participation in "man's world," what happens to the supremacy of the corporate, bureaucratic system?

Some recent management studies, for instance, indicate that the corporate policy of frequently transferring executives and demanding that they work nights and weekends is not really necessary for the work of the corporation, but that, by estranging them from their communities and families, it serves to make executives corporate creatures, "company men." Will women renounce their bonds and their power within the family in order to become "company women"? Some already have, but, in most instances, women's equality, in the home and in the workplace, strengthens the family and enables it better to resist dehumanization. Families are easier to control when women are passive and dependent. One of the first acts of the Nazis when they took over Germany was to take away some of the rights of women.

Can American capitalism accommodate a strengthened, evolving American family? Why not? Despite the rhetoric, the family has never ranked high on the American political and economic agenda, except as a unit to which to sell things. The business of America, proverbially, is business, and until recently it's been man's business. Now that women are beginning to have an active voice in the economy and politics, the nation's agenda may begin truly to include the family. Not just because women insist-they don't have that much power yet-but because men have a new stake in the family. The new sharing of parenting and the envy many men are beginning to express now of women's liberation suggest that the family, instead of being enemy territory to feminists, is really the underground through which secretly they reach into every man's life. The new urge of

mination and passive roles as patients that our society now

both women and men far meaning in their wofk ~nd life, fof

imposes on the aging.

For instance, the Family Assembly asked architects to come up with new kinds of communal housing for people who live alone and for older couples living in drafty houses too big to keep up with the children gone-housing which provides everyone with her or his own private living space but also offers new kinds of shared space, for eating, socializing and doing chores. There are also proposals for the same kind of mortgage financing now available only to young families, and for re-education loans for the new third of life after age 50.

Robert N. Butler, director of the National Institute on Aging, has been complaining for some time that most of our policies on aging are based on research conducted on menand men in pathological decline, outside the family settingwhereas most of the people actually living in old age are women. There is some speculation that women survive better

love, roots and family-even though it may not resemble the ideal family that maybe never was-is a powerful force for change.

I'm not even sure that the women's movement as such will be the main agent of this next stage of human liberation. But if we don't want to retreat-with women and men withdrawing into tired, lonely disillusionment and backlash-we must somehow turn this new corner toward the family of the future.

Women must now confront anew their own needs for love and comfort and caring support, as well as the needs of children and men, for whom, I believe, we cannot escape bedrock human responsibility.

0 About the Author: Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women, is the author of The Feminine Mystique, It Changed My Life, and The Second Stage.

new oil rush is on in the United States. Approximately 60,000 wells were drilled in 1980, and more fhan 3,000 drilling rigs were in operation by the end of the year, breaking records that had stood since 1956.

The impetus for this activity was the U.S. Government's decision in 1979 to begin a phased removal of federal price controls on domestically produced oil. (Soon after taking office in January 1981, President Reagan removed the controls completely and instantly. This had a salutary impact on world oil prices.)

The withdrawal of controls has led crude oil prices to double, to $40 a barrel. "With higher prices," says an oil prospector, "we can now afford to drill deeper and for smaller targets," What has resulted is the mushrooming of a large number of small wells; some Americans have drilled wells in their backyards that produce as little as one barrel of oil a day. But each adds to the total. Overall, the United States produces slightly more than 8.5 million barrels per day from 527,000 wells, and has ahother 166,000 wells producing only natural gas.

There are several reasons for the great number of such wells in the United States. Foremost among them is geology: American fields are not as rich and concentrated as those, say, in the Middle East. Also, the United States has stringent conservation laws to prevent overproduction, an abuse that

A

means higher output in the short run, but reduces the final yield of an oil reservoir. Finally, much of the oil-bearing land in the United States consists of relatively small parcels of land owned by private citizens.

Helping this oil rush are a number of oil-drilling companies, the biggest of which is the Loffland Brothers Company of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The world's largest drilling firm, it has more than 120 rigs operating on six continents. (Photographs appearing on the following pages show Loffland's Rig 114, one of the latest and most sophisticated, being erected in St. Landry Parish in south cen~ tral Louisiana.)

Set up in ¡1906 by two brothers- Thomas and Jack Loffland-the company, whose motto is "Drilling Is Our Business World-Wide," won its first foreign contract in Canada in 1943. Two. years later, Loffland began drilling in Venezuela.

In 1958, a Loffland drill was used to sink the first major discovery well in the Zelten field in Libya, which set off the oil search in North Africa.

Seven years later, the company drilled the first wells from a fixed platform in the North Sea, off the coast of England. Shortly after-1967-Loffland drilled one of history's great oil finds: the Prudhoe Bay discovery well on the north slope of Alaska. In 1974, Loffland broke its own record for the world's deepest well by sinking an Oklahoma well to 9,583 meters.

Loffland is one of the companies helping in the search and production of oil. Another business firm, whose new concept of a guyed tower for use in deep water may help revolutionize offshore oil and gas production the world over, is Exxon Company.

In 1965, a senior research specialist, Robert Beck, with Exxon Production Research Company (EPR) in Houston, Texas, proposed that a guyed tower-an offshore drilling platform secured to the seabed by a cable-and-anchor system-be used to extract oil and gas from beneath the seafloor. (Seventyone years earlier, in 1904, an English coal miner named Alfred W. Palmer had secured a U.S. patent for his cablesupported, or guyed, tower as a new way to drill coal deposits below the seafloor in Scotland's Firth of Forth.)

The major consideration in an offshore structure's design is its resistance to overturning in heavy and rough seas. The only way to make a conventional structure suitable for deeper water is to make it bigger. This means a taller ,heavier unit with a wider base, which must be firmly secured to the seafloor by strong pilings driven into the seabed. Also, a massive structhough it could be ture-even installed in sections-required mammoth equipment to carry it out to sea and fix it in place.

The theory behind the guyed tower is that such a structure does not have¡ to be as massive

Right: No matter how modern the equipment, erecting an oil rig is sweaty, dirty work. and rigid, if it can comply with wind, wave and current forces.

When these forces press against the compliant guyed tower, it moves slightly-only five to seven centimeters, unless storm conditions exist. When these forces subside, the tower returns to its vertical position.

"Up to a point, you can always build a bigger structure," says Lyle Finn, the project leader, who joined the EPR guyed tower team in 1971.

"The challenge," he continues, "is to build a different kind of platform, one whose bulk, and consequently its cost, does not have to increase so dramatically as production operations move into deeper water. That's what the guyed tower gives us. It's designed for water 300 to 600 meters deep."

The guyed tower concept will become a reality in 1983, when Exxon Company, U.S.A., places in the Gulf of Mexico the first operational unit designed by its engineers with assistance from EPR. It will be installed at an Exxon discovery called Lena, 105 kilometers southeast of Grand Isle, Louisiana. Beneath Lena's 300 meters of water and hundreds of meters of seabed lie an estimated 50 million barrels of recoverable oil.

But before the guyed tower could become a "reality," the concept underwent rigorous (Text continued on page 24)

'\\-L- <2j ~I :::It President Reagan's decision last January to decontrol oil prices in the United States at once has had a remarkable double effect: Oil drilling in the country has increased as never before, and world oil pri~es have started "to fall.

~J: ~i~

.

Right: A worker operates valves in Rig 114's blowout prevention system. One of the most sophisticated, Rig 114 can run 24 hours a day, and reach depths of 8,000 meters.

Top: The mast of the oil derrick lies horizontal prior to being ,raised. Lumber is used around the site to keep the heavy equipment from sinking into the soggy earth.

Above: Exxon's guyed tower for deepwater oil and gas production. Even in storm conditions, the tower moves only two degrees off its vertical position.

Above: A new drill bit is lowered into the hole.

Bits must be changed every 12-36 hours, less often when they are drilling through soft materials.

tests. "When we develop a new concept like the guyed tower," notes Finn, "we do it in several stages. First, we check out the structure mathematically on paper. Then we test a miniature of it, which is about a meter high at most. After that, we conduct a scale-model test.

When each stage of testing is completed, we analyze the data and then modify the structure to correct any problems the tests have identified."

The final test of the guyed tower for the Lena site, after preliminary tests were satisfactory, began in the fall of 1975, when a one-fifth-scale test tower was installed in 90 meters of water in the Bay of Mexico, near Grand Isle.

In. the next three and onehalf years, the $3.3 million test tower yielded information that

confirmed the project team's belief that the guyed tower was an excellent basic design for a deepwater production platform.

The guyed tower being fabricated for the Lena site is a 6,975-square-meter deck that will accommodate production drilling-a maximum of 54 wells can be drilled from the tower-and producing operations. The platform will be equipped with living quarters for about 90 people while drilling and 40 people during production operations.

Topside, the guyed tower will resemble the standard production platform in that it projects from the water, carrying three working decks about 30 meters above the water's surface.

However, below the waterline, the structure, unlike the con-

ventional tower, does not attached to a .flexible 180-ton widen toward the base. clump weight resembling a Because of its comparatively bicycle chain. The clump is lightweight construction, the attached by 365 meters of guyed tower itself will require anchor chain to an anchor pile about one-half the steel that driven 30 to 45 meters into the would be used in a conventional seabed. As the tower is moved platform of the same height. by wind or water forces, the But the metal required for cable lifts or lowers one or the cable-and-weight anchoring more segments in the clump.

"We're excited about the system brings the new tower's total tonnage up to about 85 guyed tower," says Finn. "It's percent of the amount needed been a long haul, but the profor a conventional structure. ject -is nearing realization. We A major design difference are confident that it will perbetween a conventional plat- form well and cost less to build form and the guyed tower is, of and install than the present type course, the system of guylines of unit. I think it's going to see that secure the new tower. The wide service in the energy inguyed tower for the Lena site dustry over the next decade or has 20 12-centimeter bridge two, whether it's used in the cables that radiate symmetricalGulf of Mexico, the North Sea ly from the tower at a point 24 or one of the newer areas of meters below the water's sur- deepwater petroleum producface. At its end, each guyline is tion around the world."

0

Below the Rings. The unlit side of Saturn's Bring, left_ is captured in a Voyager 2 view taken from 3.4 million kilometers as the craft was leaving the planet.

"Reddening" of the Bring is visible..in color renditions.

Seasonal Changes. The photos above, taken by Voyager 1 (left) in October 1980 and Voyager 2 (right) in July 1981, show how features in Saturn's northern hemisphere and the brightness of its rings have changed in only nine months between visits by the two craft.

After a four-year, 1,600,OOO,Ooo-kilometer almost flawless cosmic odyssey, Voyager.2 kept its date-within 3.1 seconds of schedule-with Saturn on August 25, 1981.

The spacecraft swooped within 100,800 kilometers of the second largest planet in the solar system-7oo times the size of Earth-sending back pictures and other scientific data about the planet's honey-colored surface, its battered moons and awesome rings.

Moving Parts. Taken from a distance of 14. 7 million kilometers, Voyager 2 view of Saturn at left shows the moons Enceladus (left) and Dione above the planet's northern hemisphere. American scientists note that the bright surface spot (left, center) moves eastward (downward) at a rate that allows it to pass the central spot (green in the false color image) in about 50 days.

Surprising Surroundings. The drawing above shows Saturn's rings, three of which are visible through telescopes. They are labeled A, Band C, from the outside in, with a dark Cassini Division between two of them. Voyager 1and 2 found many additional rings. New rings were labeled D (on the inside) and E through G (all on the outside). The F ring is made of several strands that appear to be braided.

Sister Moons. At top are Voyager 2 views of two of Saturn's moons, which number at least 17. Hyperion (right) is approximately 360 by 210 kilometers, and Tethys (left) is about 400 kilometers in diameter. All of Saturn's moons are heavily cratered from collisions with space debris, and they are believed to date back to the period immediately following formation of the planets.

Voyager's instruments revealed that the moon is only about 20 percent rock. The rest is ice.

The most spectacular and puzzling of all were the pictures of Saturn's rings. The pl~met's three main ring disks-labeled (from the surface outward) C, Band A-are clearly visible from earth even in small telescopes, appearing to be discrete structures. But Voyager's cameras revealed that the disks-extending into space some 80,000 kilometers--;-actually are made up of a thousand or more distinct necklaces of ice and rock, like grooves in a gigantic phonograph record.

At least four other smaller ring structures spin around the planet, one inside the three main rings (the D ring) and three outside (F, G and E). (The rings are labeled chronologically in order of discovery.) Voyager 1, a sister ship which flew past Saturn in November 1980, had discovered the Gring, and also detected another puzzling phenomenon: Three strands of material forming the F ring are intertwined for long stretches in a loosely braided fashion. "It defies the laws of pure orbital mechanics," said Brad Smith.

In pictures taken with special filters, some of the rings were deep blue and others glowed gold and yellow. There also were rings flawed with curious kinks of unknown causes. "We have strong clues of what is thOUgh it will take years be- happening, but we don't have a hint of what fore the Voyager 2 data about it means," noted Edward C. Stone, another ~ Saturn is fully analyzed and inter- Voyager project scientist. Earlier theoriesthat gaps in the rings were caused by preted, photos from the nuclear-powered moons" -have not been craft have already given scientists new in- "shepherding sights into-and raised new questions about proven. "We're now looking at other ex-that complex planet. planations," Stone added.

Perhaps the weirdest data received from The environment of Saturn, which is a swirling globe of hydrogen and helium for Voyager 2 was about Saturn's music. Scienthe most part, is so complex that it is tists converted the waves of energy from the producing phenomena that can't yet be planet's electromagnetic field into sounds, and what emerged was some kind of miniexplained. Puzzling forces on the planet symphony: deep gongs, chirps and ominous seem to keep its rings and moons in constant foment, producing unexplained gaps and hums, along with sounds like bright bursts of bells. spokes. Before the malfunction of a camera platform on August 26, 1981, Voyager 2 Voyager 2, the second of the Voyager had photographed golden clouds on the mission, was the third U.S. spacecraft to planet and found them whipped by 1,600- explore Saturn. Pioneer 11 flew by in kilometer-per-hour winds.

September 1979, and Voyager 1 swept past Equally puzzling are Saturn's moons, the giant planet in November 1980. Both which number at least 17, and scientists probes-Pioneer 11 and Voyager 1-are suspect there may be many others, some now headed out of the solar system, desinteracting with the planet's rings. tined to wander forever in intersteller space.

But, after its rendezvous with Saturn, Hyperion, a moon 360 kilometers WIde and 210 kilometers long, was described by Voyager 2 is speeding toward dose encounVoyager mission scientist Bradford Smith as ters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989. If it can take pictures of those two a "battered hockey puck" or a "hamburger." Another of Saturn's moons, Iapetus, distant planets, they will be the first c1osewas shown to be half black and half white. ups taken of those lonely outer worlds. D

¡NeWt Mtgran s A&rR.ural

rullerlca

BY NEAL R. PEIRCE AND JERRY HAGSTROM

A marked trend of population movement to the countryside in the United States may be due to the great improvement in economic opportunities and living conditions in rural America that has taken place in recent years. na. dramatic and unexpected reversal of 20th-century population trends in the United States, the 1970s saw a revival of population growth in nonmetropolitan areas and declining rates of growth-and sometimes actual population declines-in metropolitan areas. ( Nonmetropolitan counties, which lost more than 2.7 million people to migration during the 1960s, gained more than 2.8 million between 1970 and 1978, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated. By contrast, metropolitan counties, which gained more than 6 million people through migration in the 1960s, added to their population only 523,000 between 1970. and 1978.

Some of the non metropolitan increase merely represents a further sprawling of established cities. But by far the bulk of it constitutes a true dispersal of the population: The rate of population gain has been higher in counties that are not adjacent to metropolitan areas than in contiguous counties, and higher in unincorporated areas and open country than in small towns.

No one should expect an emptying of big cities, however.

The fact that 73 percent of Americans now live in such areas means that even if rural migration were to continue at current levels to the end of the century, the number of Americans living in rural areas would still be only 30 percent of the populatiolYlower than it was in 1950.

What simple population figures do not reveal is the growing diversity of the rural economy, the changing relationship between Washington and rural areas, the sophistication of rural lobbying groups-and the increasing political importance of rural voters. The U.S. Congressional Rural Caucus, organized in 1975, now has more than 100 members from 40 states. Every state and local interest group, with the

I

exception of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents the largest cities, has established a rural division. The National Governors' Association, for example, has hired a consultant with the title of senior fellow for rural affairs. Several organizations representing only smaller cities have also emerged.

The National Rural Coalition is composed of 50 national and regional public-interest groups that lobby for programs for poor rural people and work to improve the federal grantsmanship ability of rural governments and nonprofit organizations in different parts of the United States.

National private-sector lobbies in the United States are also becoming more involved in rural issues. The Congressional Rural Caucus' advisory team includes members as varied as the American Medical Association, Associated General Contractors of America, the League of Women Voters ofthe U.S., the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and the National Cable Television Association. And although most of the new development in rural America is nonagricultural, traditional

Eight months before this photograph was taken, Hendrikus Zanbergen and his family lived in San Francisco where he was in the advertising business. Now Zanbergen is painting and raising rabbits and chickens as caretaker of a California farm.

farm lobbies such as the National Farmers Union, the National Farmers Organization and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association are continuing to push for federal policies and programs for rural development.

Each of the rural lobbying organizations has its own agenda, but together they constitute a substantial force for diversifying rural economies, improving living conditions and helping small communities cope with growth.

As Jon Elam, a circuit-riding city manager who serves fiv~ small towns of 800 people or less in southwestern Minnesota, explains the phenomenon, small-town residents have become more sophisticated and are demanding the amenities they see in cities and the larger suburbs. "Just because they live in a small village of 500," Elam said in a recent interview, "should not

mean that they have to flush their toilets into a ditch, drink water from an inadequate well or not have fire protection services."

Polls have long shown that Americans, while they prefer country living, until recen years believed they had to move to a metropolitan area to find economic and social opportunities.

Demographers, who were unanimous in failing to predict the new trend toward country living, now have a long list of explanations.

The net increase in nonmetropolitan population through migration between 1970 and 1978 should be viewed as part of continuing American mobility. Between 1970 and 1975, for instance, slightly more than 5 million people moved from rural to urban areas while more than 6.2 million urbanites migrated to rural areas. (These figures exclude military relocations and very young children, and thus are not exactly comparable to the 1970-78 figures showing a net migration gain of 2.8 million.)

One cause of the relative population growth of rural areas is that fewer rural residents are leaving for the cities than in previous decades. But the migration of urban dwellers to the countryside and small towns is real enough, involving many more people than the much-publicized "back to the city" movement of suburbanites.

In many ways, economic prospects in rural areas have improved considerably. Superhighways have made long commutes to cities and suburban work sites feasible. People retire earlier and receive generous social security and private pension benefits that permit them to spend their retirement years in places that are not tied to a source of income. Manufacturers in search of cheap land and lower wage rates have moved to the countryside, creating jobs in locations that are not even adjacent to metropolitan areas. Recreation, service and trade jobs are also on the increase in rural areas.

But several studies also indicate that the prospect of a better job is diminishing as a reason for moving, while quality of life-reflected in either a preference for country living or a distaste for some aspect of city living-is increasingly important. Meanwhile, rural living conditions have improved. Such age-old scourges of rural life as mud roads and pellagra, isolation and brackish wells, have all but disappeared. In their place have come all-weather roads, electricity, telephones, modern health services, better schools and constant communication with the outside world through radio and television.

The people who choose to move to rural areas are, on the whole, somewhat younger, better educated and higher in income and industrial status than the average ¡iongtime residents of rural areas. But the image of migrants as predominantly wealthy, well-educated white-collar workers is wrong.

Government statistics show that 55 percent of the migrants are blue-collar workers.

Rural population growth is a widespread phenomenon, affecting every region of the United States, although not every county, the demographers report. Rural areas have grown even in the Northeast and Midwest, where the total population has declined in recent years. And small towns, which continued to export people in the early 19708, have now largely stabilized.

Rural population is considered likely to keep growing despite the sharp rise in the price of gasoline. It may well

The fastest growing non metropolitan aid. Local officials and leaders of rural counties are those with fewer than 2,500 nonprofit organizations are traveling to residents. These counties-there are about -Washington armed with their own grant be a sign of preference application writers, lobbyists and research 1,000 of them-are favored by retirees.

Most of these counties are in sunny for small towns and by such foundation and governmentthe quiet countryside. financed organizations as Rural America, Florida and the retirement cities of the Southwest, but some are in chilly the National Rural Center and the Center northern Michigan, the Ozarks, the hill '----------------' for Community Change. country of east central Texas and the Sierra Nevada foothills Sharp rises in gasoline prices raise questions of whether of California. rural growth-highly dependent on ,the internal combustion Younger Americans are resettling in all parts- of rural engine-will continue. Most analysts believe the trend toward America for a variety of reasons. The shift of manufacturing rural development is so strong that growth will continue, from big cities to outlying sites draws people to rural Idaho, though perhaps more slowly. This could, of course, be changed, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Tennessee, northern Alabama, either by increasing nervousness about gasoline supplies and northeastern Mississippi, western Kentucky and North prices or by an abrupt drop in gasoline availability. The latter Carolina. Energy boom towns and associated industrial activity could stop the rural population movement in its tracks. are pulling people to the mountain West, Kentucky and West But as energy costs rise, noted Robert Healy, a land Virginia. Recreation as an industry makes it possible for people economist with the Conservation Foundation, other rural to find employment in rural Michigan, New Hampshire, development costs, such as land, may go down. Western energy Vermont, Missouri, Arkansas, California, Oregon, Utah and boom towns are sure to continue their population growth Colorado. The lure of "alternative lifestyles" draws urbanites to because of energy shortages-and the same is probably true of rural New Mexico, Colorado and New England.

Appalachian coal counties.

What will the growth of rural power mean for the nation?

Furthermore, some economists are expecting an increase Quite simply, the rural population shift and recognition of in entrepreneurship as the baby-boom generation finds it . rural political power are too fresh to portray an accurate difficult to achieve promotions within large corporations bepicture. It is clear, however, that cliches about rural America cause ofthe increase in their numbers. These entrepreneurs, like should be cast aside. their predecessors, are expected to seek open land and an Because rural Americans have usually been more con- atmosphere of less government regulation. servative than urbanites, conventional political analysis might But even more important than economics may be the predict tough days ahead for liberal political causes. But an willingness of political and business leaders to cater to some analysis of polling data by Norval Glenn, a professor of Americans' stated preference for small towns and rural living. sociology at the University of Texas (Austin), reveals a more The Minneapolis (Minnesota) Citizens League, for example, complicated picture. has debated whether the organization should try to help curb While rural Americans are "across the board more gasoline use by encouraging mass transit or whether it should conservative" on social issues such as abortion and civil suggest to developers that they locate new plants and offices near liberties, Glenn said, attitudes toward abortion depend more on the growing exurban counties where people say they want to live. religion than location. Since most rural Americans are ProtesCalvin Beale, chief demographer for the U.S. Agriculture tant, there is more support in rural areas for freedom of choice Department, cites evidence that the trend toward rural popula-' in abortion than might be expected. Resistance to women tion growth is international among advanced nations. In Beale's working outside the home has also softened in rural areas in view, the United States will continue to be predominantly recent years, and U.S. Labor Department statistics show that metropolitan and urban, but with a smaller percentage of increasing numbers of rural women have outside jobs. people living in major centers.

Rural residents generally oppose big government more "The United States has all of the megascale urbanization vigorously than urban people, Glenn said, but-in the true that it needs to function as a modern society, and has probably populist tradition-are almost as negative about big business. exceeded the most desirable level in terms of its general social Polls also show that rural people tend to oppose government health," Beale said. intervention in the economy, except in farming, where they "The collective triumph of the layman and the business perceive a self-interest. community around the turn of the. 1970s was that they perceived There are not yet any statistics on the attitudes ot recent the situation. Through a host of individually made decisions, urban migrants, Glenn said. But federal studies of small towns they began to shift the net flow.of population and business indicate that the migrants, while they generally share conserva- before either the academic community or the government tive small-town social views, expect high levels of government understood what was going on."

0 services for the elderly and the young.

Whatever their views on national political issues, rural About the Authors: Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom are contributing editors of National Journal. people appear to have lost their long-standing aversion to federal

lli-JCA~

\-J

FIRE}

II I

ON 'THE LIGHTER SIDE

"Poor devil doesn't know we're paroling him next week."

Courtesy 1.0 Linkert.

'0 '0 \

;2,

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY

Naked And Kenneth Patchen in his "The Journal of Albion Moonlight," a classic of the American underground, writes:

A new wave of American poetry is cresting-"alternative" poetry that shares a sense of political responsibility and social community, in reaction to the self-absorbed, "confessional" poetry of the previous decades.

To a detached observer of the contemporary American poetic scene, it would appear that what is lacking is proportion and a sense of humor. Many American poets are gravely bardic and exalted and American readers are not satisfied until the poet has abused them, spat upon them and beaten them on the head. The American poet conceives of himself as a bard or prophet and being solemn about his role absolves himself from the responsibilities of being human. His is a "naked poetry" of dreams, visions and prophecies, a testament to the wilderness of unopened life that American poets, in a wide gamut of rhythmic styles, are exploring. Much of this poetry is exciting and challenging, but one should nevertheless ask if this egotistical enactment of extreme emotions is not a selling short of important and enduring poetic values of citizenship, civic consciousness and political responsibility. Being human means being judicious and fair-minded, but a prophet lives outside the pale of society in a sublime democracy where civilized values of dissent and criticism have no validity. A prophet drives out any possibility of self-criticism and leaves these human responsibilities to others.

But a poet can be a citizen as well, a man speaking to men, taking his place along with the scholar, the statesman and the learned divine, supporting the intellectual venture of humankind and nourishing and shaping culture. This is a role many American poets would appear to reject. The prophetic or bardic poet is essentially anarchic in his self-assertion, and it would appear that the dominant poetic impulse in America is anarchic and¡ subversive. "We have to get rid of the alien English element/' Robert Bly says. "We're a colony of England, and you can't speak the language of your conqueror."

I am

sick as a buggered pig with all this mess. [ can't go on with the farce. "Quality"I hope some smart fool tears this book apart and throws it in the toilet and then does his little function even as you and [.

The poem was written four years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Patchen's impassioned utterance set the tone and style for postwar poetry, whether confessional, deep-image, subjective or Beat. Much of this poetry attempts to repudiate the orientation of American life, its literary traditions as well as its political tendencies. Le Roi Jones symbolically becomes Imamu Amiri Baraka, churning out "assassin poems" that will assault White America. Allen Ginsberg howls at American hypocrisies: [ saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix¡ - HOWL

Philip Levine takes to radical politics; Bly gives expression to his anguish at "the cryof those being eaten by America,/others pale and soft being stored for later eating," and Adrienne Rich becomes the feminist poet railing against what she considers to be the oppressive patriarchal tradition of English and American poetry: I am an instrument in the shape of woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

-PLANETARIUM

Much of this poetry is genuine because deeply felt, but it is addressed to particular constituencies rather than the whole community. These American poets ,seem to be willing to sacrifice larger literary claims so long as they can express themselves in this provincial fashion. What these poets lack is the tone of the center. And in America, despite a general impression to the contrary, there is an alternative poetry which has this tone of the center.

This alternative poetry is part of a distinct and abiding tradition, where the poets show a keen civic consciousness, political responsibility and a sense of community. These poet-citizens conceive of poetry as being coexistent with (and therefore central to) life, not a beautiful alternative to it. They eschew extreme subjectivity, are not overly attracted to the surreal, do not confess nakedly to their sense of guilt, anxiety and inadequacy, do not project their experiences into a field of unrestrained experimental verse, and finally, are not "cop-outs" who from the periphery of society write a marginal verse.

Perhaps the strongest manifestation of their sense of community is to be found in their concern for form and in their attempt to keep the channels of poetic communication clear and free by the right choice of words and the apt handling of syntax.

They respect the conscious mind's intelligible processes, and their poetry has wit, symmetry and intellectual control. The momentum, force and energy of the urbane statements they make have a salutary effect on readers who are prevented from fuzzy thinking or flabbiness of thought. The tradition is academic but in a good sense. Merely academic poets are part of a guild and practice a kind of literary journeymanship. Not so the poets of this tradition. They strive for the significant poem, not the merely adequate one. They confront hunger, love, hatred and the other great problems of life in their essence, and since they know the world, not merely a locale (as many academicians do), their poetry is not blighted by intellectual malnutrition.

Richard Wilbur is a good example of a poet in this tradition. He believes that the poet is a citizen who has a certain critical and expressive office to perform in the community, and that the old posture of romantic defiance is irrelevant in a society which encourages poetry. This does not mean that the poet should become a defender of conventional pieties or an apologist for official policy, or a stingless gadfly. On the other hand, Wilbur's criticism of the cultural orientation of society becomes effective because he has a sense of proportion, and does not give way to hysteria. To the prophet who comes to "the streets of our city,!Mad-eyed from stating the obvious" Wilbur says in "Advice to a Prophet": Spare us all words of the long numbers that Our slow, unreckoning unable to fear what is

the weapons, their force and range, rocket the mind; hearts will be left behind, too strange.

The prophet cannot get his message across because he speaks in scientific jargon of strange and undreamt things. But a loving description of the changes to the landscape wrought by bombs can convey the contemporary fear of nuclear destruction effectively: Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters.

Wilbur believes in the world, but at the same time he accepts intuitions of the spirit, which are not abstracted, not dissociated and world-renouncing: .

Yet, as the Sun acknowledges with a warm look the world's hunks and colors, the soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body.

-LOVE

CALLS

us

TO THINGS

OF THIS WORLD

To Wilbur human beings are like "A toad the power mower caught,/chewed and clipped of a leg" and which "with a hobbling hop has gotfTo the garden edge." But the toad has a dignity in death, and this is suggested by the beautiful choice of language in "The Death of a Toad"; He lies As still as if he would return to stone, And soundlessly attending, dies Toward some deep monotone, Toward misted and ebullient seas And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia's emperies, Day dwindles, drowning, and at length is gone In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear To watch, across the castrate lawn, The haggard daylight steer.

The same facility with language enables Wilbur to speak of human love in "The Beautiful Changes": One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies On water; it glides So from the walker, it turns Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

With fine humor he tells the meek sparrow to pardon the vulture, who is daring like Noah, the builder of the biblical Ark, in a world of timidity and conformity: Thinking of Noah, childheart, try to forget How for so many bedlam hours his saw soured the song of birds with its wheezy gnaw, And the slam of his hammer all the day beset The people's ears.

-STILL.

CITIZEN, SPARROW

And the control over medium and materials enable~ Wilbur to bring off exquisite irony: "And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating! of dark habits,/keeping their difficult¡ balance."

Louis Simpson is in the Wilbur tradition. He feels that American poets have been writing almost exclusively of their private lives and of the present moment. They seem to have no sense of the past or of community. They are either like the confessional poets making notes in their personal diaries, or like some Beat poets attempting to expand their consciousness.

Simpson breaks out of the prison house of subjectivity and self as well as the shamanistic and Zen sensibility of his contemporaries and concentrates on the felt life of his community.

Ignoring the man "who spoke of the ancient Scottish poets," the radical "who said that everything is corrupt" and who "wanted to live in a pure world," the man from the insurance company "who said that I needed 'more protection,'" Simpson "walking in the foggy lane" tries to keep my attention fixed On the uneven, muddy surface ... the pools made by the rain, and wheel-ruts, and wet leaves, and the rustling of small animals.

-THE

FOGGY LANE

"The Foggy Lane" states Simpson's ideas about-poetry and its relation to life, which is "the uneven, muddy surface."

Simpson's poetry has the smell of the human, and in his kind. of poetry a sacrifice of the individual and his peculiar fantasies is

necessary. Life is an ongoing process, and Simpson's narrative syntax mimes it faithfully: Peter said, "I'd like some air."

"That's a good idea," said Marie's father.

"Why don't you young people go for a walk?"

Marie glanced at her mother.

Something passed between them. A warning.

-DINNER

AT THE SEA-VIEViINN

The conversational tone and prosaic diction is a mark of good, verse and mature poetry of wisdom. It displays a consciousness which is qualitatively different from that of underground poets, who seem never to have been in roads and supermarkets or had thoughts common to ordinary people, and who seem to be seeing with the eyes of the crow or listening with the ears of a beaver or imagining they are mooses. Simpson's poetry increases human understanding, because it is a poetry of feeling and is attentive to the subtle and mysterious truths of the human condition: They were lovers of reading in the family.

For instance, Cousin Deborah Who, they said, had read everything ...

The question was, which would she marry, Tolstoy, or Lermontov, or Pushkin?

But her family married her off to a man from Kiev, a timber merchant who came from Kiev with a team of horses.

On her wedding day she wept, and at night when they locked her in she kicked and beat on the door.

She screamed. So much for the wedding!

As soon as it was daylight, Brodskythat was his name-drove back to Kiev like a man pursued, with his horses.

-BARUCH

J.V. Cunningham's poems are passionately felt and repay repeated reading by becoming stronger and more compelling.

Cunningham thinks of poetry not as vision but as a special way of speaking about worthy subjects. As a poet he speaks in meter and sometimes in rhyme and in lines. A poem like "The Aged Lover Discourses in the Flat Style" talks modestly and quietly about sexual love: There are, perhaps, who fuse and part But that is not for Not with my bony

whom passion gives a grace, as dancers on the stage, me, not at my age, shoulders and fat face ..

But the aged lover does find a use for passion and feels no awkwardness in the absurd embrace. And then with characteristic irony the comment on love is made: It is a pact men make, and seal in flesh, To be so busy with their own desires Their loves may be as busy with their own, And not in union. Though the m:o enmesh Like gears in motion, each with each conspires To be at once together and alone.

What to a Beat poet would have been an occasion for hysteria becomes in Cunningham's hands a superb emotional and intellectual artefact, having behind it an awareness of other poems written on love. Form frees poets from dependence on personal resources of imagery, ideas and rhythms. It is public, and in a sense a formal poem writes itself.

Howard Nemerov writes with an awareness of the great voices of the past, and it is this awareness of tradition that allows Nemerov's individual talent to deal with a wide range of contemporary events and ideas in a voice varied and subtle.

Attentiveness and obedience to life are Nemerov's watchwords.

He sees life as fluid and dynamic, and in sarcastic outrage satirizes the way newspapers like the Daily Globe impose a false, historical immortality on the present and tend to confirm the mind in a habitual way of regarding the world: Headlines declare the ambiguous oracles, The comfortable old prophets mutter doom.

Man's greatest intellectual pleasure is To repeat himself, yet somehow the daily globe Rolls on.

Life is more like a stream, or a river, a waterfall, or a fountain, and in syntax which mimes the paradoxical nature of life, Nemerov describes the stream as follows: Running and standing still at once is the whole truth. Raveled or combed, wrinkled or clear, it gets its force from losing force. Going it stays.

-PAINTING

A MOUNTAIN STREAM

He replies to Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" in a poem called "The Companions," which is in the main tradition of English literature, though quite American in its colloquial tone, existential doubt and its sense of religious mystery. "There used to be gods in everything, and now they've gone," he writes.

These companions spoke to him and taught him, but was he simply fancying things?

And yet there came those voices up out of the ground And got into my head, until articulate sound Might speak them to themselves. We went a certain way Together on that road, and then I turned away.

I must have done, I guess, to have grown so abstract That all the lovely summer night's become but fact, That when the cricket signals I no longer listen, Nor read the glowworm's constellations when they glisten., -THE

COMPANIONS

Nemerov's poetry is influenced predominantly by Robert Frost, with whom he stayed and learned and found himself.

Frost has been an enduring voice whose influence is felt deeply by poets in this tradition. Peter Meinke speaks of a return to form in the late Seventies, but form was always there-only the formless poetry of the underground dominated. Actually, the alternative poetry has affected the underground for a poet like Muriel Rukeyser, who had developed a fine Whitmanesque line and now writes in formal order: Now that I am fifty-six come and celebrate with meWhat happens to song and sex Now that I am fifty-six?

They dance, but differently, Death and distance in the mix; Now that I'm fifty-six Come and celebrate with, me.

-BREAKING

OPEN

The poem retains the expansiveness of Whitman, but combines this quality with the intensity of Dickinson. Whitman's sense of the democratic en masse is a value ,this tradition would cherish, but it also values the formal perfection of Dickinson. Add to this combination a flavor of Frost, and we have a poetic tradition of enduring value. An audience fed on poetic fare like this develops a discriminating awareness of the possibilities of language; this gives life to language, and consequently preserves society.

0 About the Author: Mohan G. Ramanan is a lecturer in the department of English, University of Hyderabad.

The Plain Bnglish Revolotion

by ALAN SIEGEL

By turning 200-word sentences into crisp two-liners, propagators of Plain English in official documents are fighting for the people's right to understand. The "undersigned""I"-should know what is "hereby agreed upon," preferably without the "hereby."

DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULDLIANCOURT: Non, Sire, c'est une graniie revolution.

(When

the news arrived

at Versailles

of the Fall of the Bastille,

1789)

The American movement away from legalese toward forms and documents that can be understood by ordinary citizens started a few years ago with isolated revolts against legalistic gobbledygook 'and bureaucratese. A handful of business documents-mainly insurance policies and loan notes-were simplified by forward-looking companies.

Now the plain language movement in the United States is becoming a revolution. But the Bastille has not fallen, yet. Part of the legal community remains resistant to change. Some supposed practitioners of Plain English have confused simplicity with simplemindedness. And the greatest obstacle has yet to be. fully overcome-a misunderstanding of what Plain English is.

That misunderstanding was dramatized when New Jersey's

R~" â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘

Plain English Bill, passed by the legislature, expired in February 1980, through a pocket veto by Governor Brendan Byrne, who said: " ... although regulating the protection of consumers is a worthy goal, legislating the style of a society's prose is another thing."¡ But the movement has nothing to do with "legislating the style of a society's prose." We are not trying to turn English into one-syllable words, or to translate Saul Bellow into baby-talk.

We are not even trying to do away with professional jargon, though that is a tempting target. Let lawyers talk to lawyers, or accountants to accountants, as they please. So long as they understand one another, that is just fine.

Well, what is the Plain English movement all about? Its aim is to make functional documents function, whether they are put out by business or by government. If a consumer is expected to abide by a formal document-an insurance policy, a mortgage, a lease, a warranty, a tax form-then the consumer should be able to understand the document. Carl Felsenfeld, vicepresident and counsel for the banking firm Citicorp N .A., expresses the concept in legal terms: "There is growing dissatisfaction with contracts where con'sumers merely 'sign here' and can't, under any reputable system of contract law, be deemed to have agreed to all the printed verbiage." In social terms, I would say that people are learning a new right: the right to understand.

-R-e-w-ri-tt-en-an-d-r-e-in-tr-od-u-ce-d-m-' -J-u-ne-,-th-e-b-i-ll-w-a-s_pa_s_se_d_a_g_ai_n._Th_is_tim_eGovernor large"

Byrne signed it (on October

number

of sponsors-65

10), out of deference

of the assembly's

to its "unusually

80 members.

""m~~~:::~,~;~c..~~,~ Du.c~

"AN>ANUARY,m

37

Documents meant for consumers have been made much more difficult than they really need to be. Redressing the balance-making sure that the documents consumers are expected to understand are made understandable-is a matter of simple fairness, and simple efficiency. In the long run it's in the interests of business. as well as the consumer.

Five years' of experience have proved that consumer contracts and forms of all kinds can be made much more understandable without sacrificing legal effectiveness. The very first plain language loan note, which I helped write for Citibank of New York, was introduced in 1975. Since then, Citicorp counsel Felsenfeld notes, "We've lost no money and there has been no litigation as a result of simplification."

That loan note remains a good example of just what plain language means. Among other things: • A personal tone was used throughout-"I" and "me" rather than "the undersigned" or "Borrower," "you" and "yours" rather than "the Bank."

• Language was radically simplified. For example, "To repay my loan, I promise to pay you' ... " instead of "For value received, the undersigned (jointly and severally) hereby promise(s) to pay ... " • When unfamiliar terms couldn't be eliminated, we added explanatory phrases. For instance, " ... if this loan is refinanced-that is, replaced by a new note-you [the bank] will refund the unearned finance charge, figured by the rule of 78-a commonly used formula for figuring rebates on installment loans."

• We shortened the sentences wherever possible and even used contractions ("I'll pay this sum ... "). To enhance clarity, we chose active instead of passive verb forms where possible.

• Improvements in design included the use of larger (12-point) type printed in green on light brown stock. Compared with the previously intimidating format, this visually appealing approach suggests immediately that the document is supposed to be read.

The Citibank note taught us a fundamental lesson about simplifying language. Consumer contracts have traditionally been adapted from mercantile contracts, which feature verbose protective clauses accumulated over the years in an effort to cover all possible contingencies. Many of these provisions have no practical value in the consumer' marketplace. So the first task in simplifying a document is not rewriting it in Plain English, but identifying clauses taken from commercial contracts that can be eliminated from the consumer contract without jeopardizing its validity. The secret to doing this lies in analyzing actual business experience to see which provisions are really used.

In the case of the Citibank note, the provisions describing the lender's protections in case of default proved to be the biggest challenge. The traditional note listed a string of contingencies more than 180 words long:

In the event of default in the payment of this or any other Obligation or the performance or observance of any term or covenant contained herein or in any note or other contract or agreement evidencing or relating to any Obligation or any Collateral on the Borrower's part to be performed or observed; or the undersigned Borrower shall die; or any of the undersigned become insolvent or make an assignment for the benefit of creditors; or a petition shall be filed byor against any of the undersigned under any provision of the Bankruptcy Act; or any money, securities or property of the undersigned now or hereafter on deposit with or in the possession or under the control of the Bank shall be attached or become subject to distraint proceedings or any order or process of

any court; or the Bank shall deem itself to be insecure, then and in any such event, the Bank shall have the right (at its option), withemt demand or notice of any kind, to declare all or any part of the Obligations to be immediately due and payable ...

But analysis of Citibank's business experience disclosed that the typical consumer loan transaction needs only one event of default-failure to pay. With one additional protection added, the following replaced all the fine print above:

Default I'll be in default1. If I don't pay an installment on time, or 2. If any other creditor tries by legal process to take any money of mine in your possession.

A number of insurance companies, whose product, after all, is words on paper, continue to get good marks for simplification. In the Massachusetts Savings Bank Life Insurance (SBLI) Whole Life Policy the insurer's promise to pay the consumer used to be phrased in forbidding terms. In Plain English, policyholders can understand what they are buying:

Before The Bank Hereby Agrees upon Surrender of this Policy to Pay the Face Amount Specified ,Above, less any indebtedness on or secured hereunder ... upon receipt of due proof of the Insureo's death to the beneficiary named in the Application herefor or to such other beneficiary as may be entitled thereto under the provisions hereof, or if no such I?eneficiary survives the Insured, then to the Owner or to the estate of the Owner.

We will pay the face amount when we receive proof of the Insured's death. We will pay the named Beneficiary. If no Beneficiary survives the Insured, we'll pay the Owner of this policy, or the Owner's estate.

Any amount owed to us under this policy will be deducted. We'll refund any premiums paid beyond the month of death.

Perhaps the most ambitious simplification program in the United States so far has been that undertaken by the St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1975 they became one of the first large insurers to begin simplifying their policies. As a pilot project, the company produced an easy-to-read "personal liability catastrophe policy" that used personalized examples in colloquial English:

Before a.

Automobile and Watercraft Liability: 1. any Relative with respect to (i) an Automobile owned by the Named Insured or a Relative, or (ii) a Non-owned Automobile, provided his actual operation or (if he is not operating) the other actual use thereof is with the permission of the owner and is within the scope of such permission, or 2. any person while using an Automobile or Watercraft, owned by, loaned or hired for use in behalf of the Named Insured and any person or organization legally responsible for the use thereof is within the scope of such permission.

We'll also cover any person or organization legally responsible for the use of a car, if it's used by you or with your permission. But again, the use has to be for the intended purpose.

You loan your station wagon to a teacher to dr.ivea group of children to the zoo.

She and the school are covered by this policy if she actually drives to the zoo, but not if she lets the children off at the zoo and drives to her parents' farm 30 miles away. '

By 1978, St. Paul had reduced the number of policy forms in its commercial business package from 366 to 150. Plans now call for most of its commercial insurance policies to be rewritten and

reprinted in a more readable format by this year. The company has appointed a Manager of Forms Simplification, with his own staff and a detailed style manual, to oversee the effort.

The financial field is a particularly promising new area for Plain English efforts. A case in point: Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. is a New York broker-dealer advising clients on investments as well as trading for them. It is subject to various regulations which extend to every aspect of the firm's business, from the content of advertising and soliciting materials to client reports, statements, and the consents that must be obtained before the firm can effect certain types of transaction on clients' behalf. Nonetheless, the firm was able to replace jargon with Plain English, while satisfying legal and technical requirements.

It is the express intention of the undersigned to create an estate or account as joint tenants with rights of survivorship and not as tenants in common. In the event ofthe death of either of the undersigned, the entire interest in the joint account shall be vested in the survivor or survivors on the same terms and conditions as theretofore held, without in any manner releasing the decedent's estate from the liability provided for in the next preceding paragraph.

Other signers share your interest equally. If one of you dies, the account will continue and the other people who've signed the agreement will own the entire interest in it.

Where obscure terms could not be eliminated, the new forms explain them. And especially complex ideas are not only explained but accompanied by illustrative examples.

In the U.S. Government, the promise-and difficulty-of the Plain English movement is illustrated by the case of the Food Stamp program. That program, begun in 1961, was substantially revised by the Food Stamp Act of 1977. As a result, the forms that had been used by the states were made obsolete. There was a bewildering variety of these forms to begin with. Wisconsin's, for instance, was 37 pages long. To

Plain language scorecard • Thirty-four American states have laws or regulations setting standards for clear language in insurance policies. In 1978, New York became the first state to require that business contracts "primarily for personal, family, or household purposes" be plainly written in everyday language. Since then, New Jersey, Maine, Connecticut, and Hawaii have passed similar laws requiring consumer contracts to be understandable to the public, and a score of other states are considering such laws.

• Hundreds of corporations across the United States are simplifying their documents-employee benefit manuals, brokerage account agreements, trusts, the notes to financial statements, customer correspondence. and internal communications, ranging -from corporate policy manuals to the humble memo.

help the states design simple, client-oriented the changes in the law, the Food and Nutrition the Department of Agriculture commissioned up with new forms to offer to the states approach is illustrated by the new titles we

Notice of Eligibility, Denial or Pending Status Tax Dependency Form

forms reflecting Service (FNS) of my firm to come as models. Our gave our forms:

Continuing Your Food Stamps Action Taken on Your Food Stamp Case Student Tax Report

Significantly, the new forms ran into a special kind of opposition. First, we discovered that not all state governments agreed that the forms should help people to use the program, as the law intended. Food Stamp recipients are seen as one measure of a state's poverty, so some officials were reluctant to "encourage" their use by simplifying the paperwork. Some state officials also felt that the language of the new forms, which included words such as "please," "thank you," and "sincerely," was too nice to people wanting money from the government.

Second, we found that state caseworkers themselves often appeared threatened by new, simplified forms. Some felt that their authority was being undermined. For example, people whose applications for food stamps are turned down or who are cut off are allowed by law to request a fair hearing. We embodied this feature of the law in the forms themselves: letters bearing bad news to Food Stamp clients included a perforated tear-off portion that could be sent back to appeal the decision.

Some caseworkers objected heatedly: they felt the tear-offs would cast doubts on their competence and would generate "unnecessary" hearings, increasing their already heavy work load.

After more than two years, the objections seem to have been overcome. Our model forms are used now by about half the states, and one FNS official commented last year: "I've never heard a critical comment about the forms them-

• President Carter, following up a promise for "regulations in plain English for a change," issued two unprecedented Executive Orders to federal agencies telling them to simplify paperwork and eliminate gobbledygook from regulations.

• Some major law firms have launched programs to train their young lawyers in clear legal drafting.

• The Internal Revenue Service committed over $1 million in an all-out effort to simplify the federal income tax forms.

• The 1978 Amendments to the Constitution of the State of Hawaii include a provision that, "Insofar as practicable, all governmental writing meant for the public ... should be plainly worded, avoiding the use of technical terms."

• On April 15, 1980, Governor Hugh Carey of New York issuel;lan Executive Order directing all state agencies to

write their forms and regulations in plain language.

• Also, in 1980, New York City's Department of Consumer Affairs proposed simplified language for more than 40 of its regulations covering deceptive and unconscionable business practices.

• The prestigious Practicing Law Institute held a program and published a course book on "Drafting Documents in Plain Language."

• A lobbying group for the movement, Plain Talk, Inc., has been established in Washington, D.C. • The National Institute for Education, a federal research agency, has funded the Document Design Project, which is being run by the American Institutes of Research in conjunction with Siegel & Gale and CarnegieMellon University. The project's purpose is to study and encourage the use of simplified public documents. -A.S.

selves." In fact, as in other simplification projects, researchers got a strong impression that staff objections had as much to do with the fact the forms were new and unfamiliar as with their style or content.

Earlier in this piece I mentioned that some Plain English efforts have confused simplicity with simplemindedness. A major source of this confusion is the quick-and-dirty "readability . formula" that equates clarity with short words and sentences.

Some attempts at simplification produce a kind of black humor. One life insurance company offers a "simplified" policy requiring that, "The Insured must die while this policy is in force."

Another misuse of the movement is the way some lawyers are cynically using "simplified" language, notably in apartment leases, to misinform consumers and to mislead them by playing on their ignorance. The United States first plain language law went into effect in New York State in November 1978. One year later, the State Consumer Protection Board found that most revised lease forms "force tenants to surrender nearly every right they have under law." Rosemary S. Pooler, the board's executive director, referring to the lease prepared by the New York City Bar Association, commented: "It is ironic that tenants were in some respects better off with the 'legalese' of the 1965 lease since the ... 'plain language' lease seems to have taken almost every opportunity to resolve legal issues in favor of landlords, sometimes at the expense of existing statutory and decisional law."

To illustrate her point, Pooler gave, among others, the following example regarding Rent Payment Provision:

"The tenant will pay the rent as herein provided."

"Tenant will pay the rent without any deductions, even if permitted by law."

The new document flies in the face of several laws and recent court decisions, all of which give tenants the right to reduce or withhold rent under certain circumstances-for instance, when there are serious building code violations.

Though many lawyers in the United States have seen the light, some of them-and their corporate clients-misguidedly try to protect themselves by insisting on too-precise standards for compliance. Such traditionalists do not like the Plain English laws that have been passed in New York, Maine, and Hawaii.

Those laws simply require that each document for a residential lease or for a loan, property or services of less than $50,000 for personal, family or household purposes be:

Safe English The New York Times (August31, 1980) reported the first case under the Plain English Law on contracts: ."The New York State Attorney General was puzzled by this sentence: 'The liability of the¡ bank is expressly' limited to the exercise of ordinary diligence and care to prevent the opening of the within-mentioned safe deposit box during the within-mentioned term, or any extension or renewal thereof, by any person other than the lessee or his

1. written in a clear and coherent manner using words with common everyday meanings; 2. appropriately divided and captioned by its various sections.

Ironically, some lawyers and executives who are quick to decry regulatory minutiae in other areas object to this general approach to plain language legislation. They yearn for the false security of the simplistic "readability formula" approach, which ignores less easily quantified elements such as grammar, logic and organization. They fear that, without an exact definition of "clear, coherent, everyday language," compliance will elude them. Some lawyers direfully predicted that New York's law would create "upheaval" among businesses and an "absolutely staggering" burden on the courts.

But these fears were unfounded: there has been no flood of lawsuits. The arguments of the technically minded still have their appeal, however, as demonstrated by Connecticut's plain language law. It lists two alternate sets of criteria for plain language, with nine and eleven different tests respectively, including these: 1. the average number of words per sentence is less than 22; and 2. no sentence in the contract exceeds 50 words; and 3. the average number of words per paragraph is le$s than 75; and 4. no paragraph in the contract exceeds 150 words; and 5. the average number of syllables per word is less than 1.55; and ...

Cookbook detail like this only guarantees that the spirit of plain language legislation will be lost in attempts to follow it to the letter: The clarity of a sentence becomes less important than seeing that it has "less than 1.55" syllables per word. And what would happen to interstate commerce if one of Connecticut's neighbors were to require less than 20 words per sentence instead of 22, or 160 words per paragraph instead of .150?

Keeping plain language laws simple, like the law in New York State, is essential. The courts should be left free to judge particular cases according to a general standard, as they do now with the concept of the "reasonable man." Lawyers who hang back, in favor of the traditional approach to legal language, should remember the traditional result: As Harold Laski put it, in every revolution the lawyers lead the way to the guillotine 0 About the Author: Alan Siegel is president of Siegel & Gale, a firm specializing in language simplification. He also teaches the art of Plain English drafting at Fordham University Law School, New York.

duly authorized representative and failure to exercise such diligence or care shall not be inferable from any alleged loss, absence or disappearance of any of its contents, nor shall the bank be liable for permitting a co-lessee or an attorney in fact of the lessee to have access to and remove the contents of said safe deposit box after the lessee's death or disability and before the bank has written knowledge of such death or disability.'

"Saying, 'I defy anyone, lawyer or lay person, to understand or explain what that means,' Attorney General Robert

Abrams sued the Lincoln Savings Bank in New York City ... demanding that it simplify a customer agreement on safedeposit boxes.

"The case is settled .... The former 121-word sentence now says: 'Our liability with respect to property deposited in the box is limited to ordinary care by our employees in the performance of their duties in preventing the opening of the box during the term of the lease by anyone other than you, persons authorized by you or persons authorized by the law.'"

THE YEAR

REFLECTIONS OF A FUTURIST My two youngest children, Lisa and Michael, were born in 1960, members of that multitude which demographers have named "the baby boom." They came on the scene in a year when some 4.2 million babies were born in the United States, more than at any other time before or since.

In the 1960s the walls of the schools had to expand to accommodate them; in the 1970s they graduated en masse. Now, in the 1980s, they are on their own, entering the labor force and having children. When the year 2000 rolls around (do you feel old already?) they will be 40. By the middle of the next century, Lisa, Michael-and all of their cohorts who survive-will be 90 years old, fit and healthy, nearing the end of their life span. The moments of grandeur and achievement, of suffering and despair which will make up the next seven decades will be the time of these boom babies, Lisa and Michael included, and they have quite a life in store.

One of the most remarkable features of 2050 will be that most of the 1960 babies will still be alive.

Why do I think 'that more than 50 percent of the "boom babies" will survive to age 90 when ~oday only 18 percent do? Because of a biomedical revolution which is under way.

For the first half of the 20th century, life expectancy at birth increased tremendously, largely as a result of preventing or curing infectious diseases of childhood. In 1900, children died frequently; today in the United States, child deaths are relatively rare. In our time, virtually every person who survives the first weeks of life can be expected to live to at least 40 or 50, barring accidents. Then diseases of middle age and early old age-heart disease, cancer and stroke-begin to take their toll.

But in the last 20 years spectacular and unexpected changes have been taking place.

Deaths from major cardiovascular diseases have dropped. 20 percent; hypertensive deaths by two-thirds; stroke deaths by 20 percent and death due to rheumatic heart disease by 50 percent. Recent availability of drugs which offer control of hypertension explain ~part of the improvement, but not all. Whatever the reasons-availability of antibiotics, better health care, attention to diet, jogging, exercise-the effects in the United States are clear-cut and lasting.

Some forms of cancer are also coming under control or, for the first time, being cured. Lung cancer, however, is increasing.

Many researchers expect that we will understand the nature of the diseases we call cancer within the next 10 years or so; the betting today is that long-acting viruses cause some types of cancer, perhaps promoted by environmental and genetic factors. Research in the field of recombinant DNA may prove very productive here.

Recombinant DNA is the technology of splicing genes obtained from the nucleus of a cell of one species into another species.

Cells of the second species then exhibit the transferred genetic propf<rty as though it were an intrinsic trait. Scientists in this field have been able, for example, to transfer the human gene for producing the substance called interferon from a human cell to a bacterium, which can then organize chemicals into human interferon exactly as would human cells. This is a particularly interesting example of the new technology because interferon tends to inhibit cell division and increases the resistance of cells to viral invasion, including invasion by possible cancer-inducing viruses.

All of this suggests that, beginning now, life expectancy at middle age and early old age is going to grow. What is now called middle age will be young, and early old age, middle age. By the middle of the next

century the pattern will be a few deaths immediately after birth and during the first year, then most people will live to be 90 or 100 years of age, barring accidents, suicides and homicides. After that time mortality will accelerate and only a few individuals will live to be 110 years of age or so. The causes for death in those years between 90 and 100? The wearing out of organs, more or less at the same time. Any deaths before age 90 will be seen as premature and untimely.

It is also possible that by the middle of the 21st century some progress will have been made toward extending the human life span beyond 110 years. Here we are dealing with the control of aging. The truth is that while the symptoms of aging are oniy too well known to all of us, the reasons for aging and the relationship of aging to death are not well known. While inost researchers in the field of biomedicine are working to cure and eliminate disease, a few today are trying to discover the caUSeSfor aging and means for moderating the rate of aging.

Paul Segal and Paula Timiras of the University of California School of Medicine at Berkeley have recently experimented with a diet depriving rats of tryptophan, an amino acid. The rats became ill but lived a very long time; tryptophan-deficient rats were able to reproduce between 17 and 28 months of age; a 28-month-old rat reproducing is comparable to a woman in her 70s giving birth to a child. Other researchers have implicated abnormalities in cellular oxidation as in'the case of aging; the use of antioxidants such as BHT, Vitamin C and Vitamin E seem'to slow aging in laboratory animals. Researchers who have administered antioxidants to laboratory mice fou.nd that they could prolong life by about 26 percent; antioxidants also delayed the onset and incidence of tumors.

Biologist Leonard Hayflick has shown that cells can divide only a fixed number of times. Cancer cells, however, seem immortal and divide indefinitely. If Hayflick's idea proves to be correct, life span is determined by the biological clock controlling cell divisions, and any mechanism of control would have to be associated with the resetting of that clock. It would be ironic if cancer research produced the secret to the control of aging.

By the year 2050 control of aging will either be a~ hand or constitute a major area of research. Most likely the children of the boom babies, bein~ born between now and the year 2000, or their children, will take antiaging "treatment."

If increased life expectancy brought only increased years of sickness and dependency, changing mortality would sentence not only the aged to years of unhappy imprisonment, but also the productive portion of society, which would be dedicated to the upkeep of the disabled elderly. But decrepitude is an improbable state by 2050. First of all, older people will be healthier and more vigorous; a 90-year-old will be like a 65year-old today. That family of mental disease known as senile dementia will have been identified (possibly as a long-acting virus) and cured. Debilitating and crippling chronic diseases, such as arthritis, will be gone and only dimly remembered as we remember polio. Certainly accidents will incapacitate and cripple people, but somephisticated prosthetic devices-some chanical and some biological-will ease their burden.

But. increased longevity and improved health are likely to have several drawbacks: • World population will be larger than it might have been. The most optimistic forecasts of demographers would place world population in 2050 at about 10,000 million (as compared to our current 4,200 million); with increased longevity, population is likely to be about 12,000-13,000 million.

• Low birthrate and increased longevity combine to raise the average age of the population; In 1980 it was 30.1 years in the United States; by 2050 it will be almost 40.

• There is likely to be a period of difficult social adjustment as longevity increases. For example, most pension funds and annuities in the United States have been computed on the basis of higher death rates than we will achieve. This means that the funds will be paying out longer than expected, and this extra burden, added to other problems of pension funds, will undoubtedly put additional strains on them in the 1990's'and early in the next century.

The strained position of pension funds,

erosion of retirement income through continued inflation, occasional deep recessions, the innate desire to be useful and productive, the diminished number of young people, and better health, all suggest that people will retire later. Social Security will increase the age at which first benefits are paid, before 2000, in an attempt to stay self-funding. People will want to work at older ages. The pattern will be: work at a job until a first pension is available, and then with this economic underpinning, go on to do something more enjoyable. By the year 2050, the average age of retirement might be 70 or 75. Well before then, even the notion of retirement might be obsolete; perhaps retirement will occur gradually over time, a phasing out of working life and into retired life. Work will be much more a matter of choice.

With these 12,000-13,000 million people, the world of 2050 is apt to be much smaller than it is now: less space per person, more rapid spread of ideas through instantaneous,

inundating media.

Neo-Malthusians have watched the compounding growth of world population and wondered, with good cause, whether or not food production could keep pace. By the middle of the next century, world population will be leveling off, and the argument will finally be settled. Between now and then, the situation will be quite precarious.

On the "up" side are nascent technologies and infrastructural changes which improve distribution, reduce spoilage, bring new foods into wide use, improve productivity and increase the amount of arable acreage under cultivation. There is a really good chance that huge increases in food production can come from such developments as: • new plant varieties, obtained through genetic engineering, which are photosyn~ thetically efficient, use less water and tend to be self-fertilizing; • improved uses of the ocean, including domestication of sea animals and aquaculture; and,

Looking ahead to the next century, the energy outlook seems optimistic. The treasure of abundant energy which stimulated our previous industrial takeoff will again be the foundation of the next takeoff. â&#x20AC;˘ tropical agriculture, which will open to the world many billions of acres of land currently unusable. This requires development of fundamentally new farming techniques that utilize the patterns of heat and rain to advantage.

On the "down" side, adequate food production in the next century is likely to be impeded by many forces. Irrigation water is likely to be in short supply in many places.

Previously fertile land may become desert, as was the case recently in the sub-Sahara.

Fertile topsoil will be eroded. Prior gains in agricultural productivity resulting from increasing fertilizer use may be leveling off.

As population grows, cities expand, capturing formerly productive agricultural land.

The balance between the "up" and "down" forces is precarious. By the middle of the next century the technology of genetics may be well enough in hand to assure an adequate, nutritious food supply. Until that time, however, there will be food shortages, failed harvests and starvation, as always, a specter confronting the poorer nations of the world.

By 2050 or so, our conventional petroleum reserves will have been substantially exhausted. The price of what remains will be so high that it will be impractical to burn it.

Between now and the end of the 20th century, before non depletable alternatives are commercially developed, new synthetic fuel industries for the conversion of coal to gaseous and liquid fuels and the extraction of petroleum liquids from oil shale are likely to arise. The United States has potential synthetic fuel reserves equal to about one trillion barrels of oil, or about 15 times the currently proved domestic reserves of conventional oil and gas.

No one is sure, of course, how the energy picture will ultimately evolve, but the probability is an electricity scenario. All of the advanced energy technologies that we hear discussed today-solar, geothermal, wind power, fusion-are electricity producing.

Furthermore, the need to import petroleum for gasoline, diesel and other liquid fuels is a central Issue in America's energy dilemma;

liquid fuels are needed to mobilize, and mobility is the capstone of our lifestyle. But mobility can be preserved without increasing imports through the use of the electric automobile, since electricity, to a large extent, utilizes indigenous fuels-coal and uranium. Given a breakthrough or two, it seems to me that the time of the electric automobile is almost here, perhaps even in the 1990s.

These will be lightweight, plastic, streamlined, two-passenger, possibly with restricted range and restricted speed, but will be relatively inexpensive and fun to drive.

They may be hybrids, combining very low power but efficient internal combustion engines with electric motors which provide acceleration and an extra boost for hill climbing. In any event, when they are introduced they will not be directly competitive with automobiles as we know them, but rather will be second or third cars, used for short trips.

The .electric . car, if developed and accepted, will be part of a strong trend already under way toward conservation of energy and liquid fuels. Conservation will be a primary strategy for minimizing imports. Relative demand will drop as a result of higher prices, level of economic activity and changing attitudes. The next 40 years will be a time of conservation and transition.

This will not be a time of despair, a longing for the "good old days" when energy was cheap and abundant. Rather, I think we will come to feel conservation is right, proper and the appropriate way to live. Indeed, we will wonder how, in the 1950s and 1960s, society managed to be so profligate.

In short, I am arguing that we will use less

energy and enjoy it more. This will be a tirp.e of conspicuous conservation. We will not all escape to the woods and return to nature; we will still buy things and enjoy them. It is just that the things we buy will de. mand much less energy or, at least, less scarce fuels made from petroleum.

Furthermore, by the year 2050 we should be well along toward utilizing two virtually inexhaustible energy resources: solar electirc power and nuclear fusion. Today neither possibility is very far advanced-both are ex.pensive compared with existing systems; both requite a great deal of basic and applied scientific research development, large-scale engineering and capital. But given these systems, we will have supply, not only of electricity, but of transportation fuels as well, since their output is convertible to mobile energy sources via hydrogen or through the use of yet-to-come energy storage technologies.

The promise of these systems lies in providing means for generating power using essentially unending energy sources. Thus, they promise abundancy, if not low cost. Their cost, of course, depends on how the technologies evolve.

The energy installations we make between now and 2030 or so can be viewed as temporary, filling the gap until the new systems are available. I presume that the people living in the middlt< of the next century will be conserving energy and resources, but the treasure of abundant energy which stimulated our previous industrial "takeoff" and the affluence which followed will once again be in place, the foundation of the next "takeoff." And, as is characteristic of our socio/technical evolution, just in the nick of time.

Technology seems to come in waves. In the field of energy we are witnessing the plateau of the fossil wave; solar and fusion are to follow. Between now and 2050 there are, it seems to me, three other technology waves which will blossom, plateau and, to a large extent, determine what life will be like for the boom babies and their progeny.

These technologies are electronics, genetics and psychology.

Electronics is blossoming now and will plateau in the first or second decade of the SPAN JANUARY

1982

43

next century. The electronic developments which have already produced the hand-held calculator, the electronic watch and the micro-processor have another three or four decades to run. In particular, the trends are to smaller components, more densely packed; improved reliability; greater complexity on a single circuit; and diminishing cost.

These trends are unprecedented in technological development, and with three or four more decades to run, they promise improvements of between 100,000 and one million times over what we have now. This means that essentially anything we can conceive of doing electronically can be done: go-anywhere telephones; fingertip information on nearly any topic; machines which speak and listen; three-dimensional. lifesize television; complete automation of appliances.

But these are trivial examples, constrained by our present way of thinking and doing things; having electronics a million times more capable than that of today opens possibilities that we can now,only begin to conceive.

Well before 2050 progress in artificial intelligence will certainly have caused us to re-examine what it means to be human.

When machines which augmented human mechanical capability were first introduced at the onset of the industrial revolution, the Luddites, fearing the machine age, asked the question, "What's left for humans?"

The answer at that time was that the human role is intellectual. Now there is the real possibility that machines will be able to perform intellectual tasks as well. Take any measure of human intellectual performance-IQ, recall, attention span, creativity. By early in the next century machines will be available which perform better in these dimensions than human beings. The Luddites' question will be asked again.

Two possible answers occur to me. First, we might view the machine as a colleague, working with us to augment our own sensory and reasoning capacities. Second, we might view ourselves ultimately as the framers of appropriate questions, the organizers of automated intellectual capacity in the pursuit of, human needs, institutions and pleasures.

Genetics is a science about to become a technology. Early in the next century when developments in electronics are slowing, developments in genetics will be accelerating. This technology will lead to the ability to "design" plants and animals to perform human functions. In agriculture, scientists will be able to produce plants which have improved photosynthetic efficiency, mini-

mum water requirements, self-fertilizing characteristics and a desired spectrum of nutrient qualities. In mining, organisms will metabolize desired metals and thus concentrate them for later "harvesting." In the production of pharmaceuticals, microorganisms will be used as factory workers to produce chemicals normally found only in natural body and plant processes.

Finally, in medicine, scientists will intervene in the process by which genetic diseases-such as sickle cell anemia, Tay Sachs disease and mongolism-are passed from parents to progeny, to cure these diseases before conception. They will also address other diseases currently suspected of having a genetic origin, such as propensity to cancer or heart disease, and perhaps even the rate of aging itself. Ultimately, perhaps before 2050, this science of genetics, which will prove so important, will give us the 'ability to design animals, including ourselves.

Well before 2050, progress in artificial intelligence will have forced us to re-examine what it means to be human.

By 2050 the technology of psychology may be ready to take off. The "trigger" discovery will be understanding how memory is recorded and retrieved. Today there is no clear understanding about whether memory is chemical, electrical or physical.

Knowing how memory is stored and retrieved will improve education, persuasion, rehabilitation, personality development, knowledge itself, and open the huge and exciting possibility of expanding mental capacity closer to the limits of human potential.

Finally, by 2050, space may again offer several frontiers: in orbit, on the moon, and elsewhere beyond the earth. A small town may be in orbit to take advantage of the unique characteristics which the orbital environment offers: sterility, zero G, rapid synoptic coverage of the earth, short transportation time to earth, temperatures selectable over wide limits and rapid availability of an almost perfect vacuum. Cities have always been located where unique resources are found; building a city in orbit to use orbital resources is analogous to building a flour mill next to a river to make use of its energy to turn the stone.

Within this orbital city massive crystals can be grown at zero Gs; metals can be cast using the radiation sink of space and the

heat source of the sun; domestic crop production can be forecast. Perhaps by 2050, observers in the orbital city could follow world food supply and predict harvest size and crop disease. Fishery surveys could be conducted to determine the quantity and location of meat-fish herds. Plankton and other small organisms could be detected from orbit and hazard warnings issued to shipping and coastal cities. Weather observation and prediction may be a primary business in this orbital town: air pollution measurements and contamination warning systems can be operated from orbit.

By the next century it may be P9ssible to accomplish careful and limited weather manipulation from orbit. For example, largescale cloud feeding might utilize orbital bombing with silver iodide. An orbiting mirror might be used to heat certain portions of the atmosphere to deflect atmospheric currents and thus divert rain-laden clouds or storms. The mirror might also be used to illuminate portions of the earth to speed crop maturation, or perhaps to aid in nighttime rescue operations.

In the next century, space may provide an alternative to war. Space, after all, offers the potential for a nonwarlike political arena where polit,ical advantage may be obtained without killing. As it may permit nations to develop advanced technologies without building weapons, it could thus provide new chances for international cooperation.

Space discoveries will tend to place man in diminishing perspective with respect to the cosmos which surrounds him. This realization-coming over decades-may help to illustrate the futility and purposelessness of conflict on earth. And as the .earth becomes smaller as a result of its growing population, the limitless boundaries of space will begin to open to infuse in imaginations the spirit of exploration that otherwise would be denied all of the generations that come after ours.

The boom babies will face significant challenges in the years ahead. From our present perspective, 70 years is a very distant-time horizon, but from the perspective of history, it is a mere blink of an eye.

And yet the challenges and opportunities for the generation we spawned are staggering in their potential. Lisa and Michael, and all of your cohorts, I hope you are up to the job.

0 About the Author: Theodore J. Gordon is president of The Futures Group, Inc., of Glastonbury, Connecticut, a management consulting firm. He is the author of Life Extending Technologies.

INDO-U.S. RELATIONS: byHARRYG.BARNES,JR.

Forgtng ¡

At a recent ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. the new U.S. Ambassador to India presented his credentials to President SanjivaReddy (left). Later at Rajghat, Ambassador Barnes (right) paid homage to the Father of the Indian Nation. The Ambassador's speech at the credentials ceremony follows: I hope you will allow me to begin with a personal reflection. Thirty years ago my wife, our then only child and I arrived in Bombay, on our first trip outside the United States.

Our second child was born in Bombay. We left India two and a half years later, deeply impressed by the rich diversity of India and by its great aspirations. We visited India often again in the 1960s and were struck by the pace of change. Now you will understand that it means much to me as a Foreign Service Officer to return to the country where I began my career and which has had so profound an effect upon me.

India rightfully prides itself on its heritage of thousands of years. By comparison, we Americans are newcomers, though much of our vitality comes from the talents of people from every land including India-a diversity like that of India itself.

In another sense though, ours is an old country-as democratic societies go-for just last month [October] we celebrated the 200th anniversary of the victory which gave us our independence, the successful conclusion to the American Revolution. That revolution fostered an optimism which holds that nothing is impossible for the free human spirit and also has promoted a realism that we must constantly work to improve our society. It is only natural therefore that Americans should have supported India's struggle for independence and sympathize today with India's search for democratic ways to achieve its own aspirations. President Woodrow Wilson's efforts years ago to make a world safe for democracy clearly have a meaning for us as Americans now as then, namely that democratic countries must have a deep mutual interest in each other's survival and success. Therefore, I believe that what happens in India has to be important to us in the United States, and if India prospers .as a democratic society, that will be a success for all the other democracies.

Mr. President, our first and most famous diplomat was Benjamin Franklin-author, scientist and philosopher as well.

As Minister to France, Franklin once wrote to our Foreign Secretary that "We have no safety but in our independence.

With that we shall be respected and soon become great and happy." We in America are still involved in the pursuit of happiness, but we know from our own experience the value of independence, and therefore we respect that of others. It is this common mutual respect, combined with that mutual interest in each other's success of which I spoke earlier, that can form the solid enduring basis for good relations between the United States and India. Such a firm base can tolerate the inevitable difficulties that will affect those relations from time to time since, as the Prime Minister recently said, wherever there are human beings there are quarrels and differences. Of course, it would be good if the world's two largest democracies had fewer rather than more differences and we need to mitigate those that appear while working to reinforce our long-term shared goals.

Franklin also once said: "Appearances should be attended, . to as well as realities. "Mr. President, I intend to take Franklin's advice very seriously and do all I can to understand the realities of India and to explain as well the realities of America. I will also pay attention to appearances and look for ways of being both candid and constructive in building our mutual respect and interests. I trust I can count on similar regard for both realities and appearances from the Government of India.

Mr. President, I referred earlier to Americans as being both optimistic and realistic. You will understand therefore why in the course of my work as a student of Hindi I was attracted by a Hindi proverb which is similar in meaning to one of ours. In America when we say "Don't count your chickens before they are hatched," we are being realistic of course, but also . optimistic because we expect eventually that the chickens will hatch. In Hindi people say: "Delhi is still some distance away- Abhi Dilli dur hai." If I apply these proverbs to the relations between the two countries, I recognize that even' though I am in your presence here in Delhi, I must also be realistic enough to understand there is much to be done-there is considerable distance still to be traveled-to forge a firmer base for the relations between the United States and India. But I am also enough of an optimist to believe we will "get to Delhi" because it is so important for both our great countries tod9 so. 0

forms- of sealife feed; Locating vast areas of plankton could indicate fish concentrations for fishing fleets.

However, Columbia's most important mission was the testing of its Canadian-built robot arm-known as the Remote Manipulator System (far left)-in the weightlessness of space.

Television viewers were treated to science-fictionlike scenes when the robot arm was operated by the astronauts from the shuttle cabin. Moving at a top speed of 60 centimeters per second, the robot's elbow, wrist and handlike grasping unit slowly reached out at the command of astronaut Truly.

The lone exception to the arm's perfect performance was when Truly deliberately moved it in a "back-up mode." The robot's failure to accomplish one shoulder movement in that mode is being investigated by the scientists of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The IS-meter, computer-controlled arm is to be used on later shuttle flights to lift satellites from the cargo bay and place them in space, or to r~trieve orbiting satellites and put them into the shuttle for maintenance and repairs. The arm may also ~I~\". be used for unloading building materials from the shuttle for construction of space stations or other structures in orbit.

Although Columbia's second test flight was reduced to about one-half its originally planned five days for technical reasons, Chief Flight Director Charles R. Louis said that the When astronauts Joseph H. Engle and Richard H. Truly scientists who had set up experiments aboard the flight were flawlessly landed the space shuttle Columbia on a dry lake bed "ecstatic" over the results obtained.

Columbia's next planned orbital test flight is scheduled for in California on November 14, they brought back to earth a early March this year. The third flight, which will be in orbit for valuable store of scientific data.

While no scientific experiments were placed aboard seven days, will carry more experiments than did the second Columbia's maiden flight April 12-14, the second test flight mission. Horace E. Whitacre, the mission staff engineer for this incorporated a number of experiments to test prototype flight, said that the shuttle test program is following "a research equipment so that scientists could make necessary building-block approach" in which the demands on the shuttle changes in their designs for experiments on later shuttle are increased with each successive flight.

Among the many experiments prepared for the forthcommissions.

Five complex scientific instruments carried in the shuttle's ing shuttle flight is a plant lignification test, which will use cargo bay were in operation during Columbia's second flight. seedlings of peas, oats, pine and cucumbers to learn how the Each of the experiments had as its objective improved growth of woody components of plant tissues may be affected observation of the earth's resources. by weightlessness. Other experiments will check on electrical A radar unit was pointed from the shuttle at a sharp angle fields and atmospheric components surrounding the shuttle, on to obtain side views of geological formations. These maplike heat distribution inside the shuttle, and on some radiation and reproductions, when combined with the perpendicular observa- sun flares. tions from the automated LANDSAT spacecraft, are expected One of two industrial experiments aboard the third flight to help pinpoint regions on earth where oil or other mineral will explore the feasibility of separating biological substances in deposits may exist. weightlessness. The process, known as "electrophoresis," could A related sensor used 10 microwave bands to determIne lead to the manufacture of purer vaccines and more potent which would be the best for detecting from space the, medicines.

The date for the fourth-the final-test flight has not yet composition of earth rocks. This information will supplement been fixed, but it is hoped that the shuttle will become the findings of the radar.

Another sensor was designed to turn itself off when passing commercially operational by late this year. That will mark the over water, barren land, snow or ice, and to turn itself on again beginning of a new era of space exploration and travel.

The potential riches of space are not precious metals, when agricultural areas appeared below. If such a sensor can be developed for satellite use, it will help greatly in obtaining spices or other materials that prompted man to explore the earth in the past. The treasures of space, at least for some automated agricultural inventories from space.

Still another sensor sought to distinguish greenish colors on time to come, will be increased knowledge of how our universe 0 the ocean to indicate the presence of plankton, on which some works.

Columbia Soars Again

"The mission was a great success," said an excited Himmat Singh, as Columbia landed on November 14. His excitement was understandable, for as manager of Lockheed's engineering simulation development department at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, he played an important role in this¡ "success." When it was decided to cut short Columbia's mission due to a fault in one of the shuttle's three electricity generating fuel cells, it was left to Himmat Singh and his department to decide whether to carry out the tests

on the shuttle's robot. arm or to postpone them until the next flight.

This was a vital decision, because testing the arm was one of the primary objectives of the second shuttle flight. After quick calculations, Himmat Singh gave the go-ahead signal, and that "turned out to be very successful," he says.

Originally from Varanasi, Himmat Singh, who went to the United States 14 years ago, is one of more than 100 Indians who are helping the U.S. space program.

Mir Ali, from Madras, also works with Lockheed at the Johnson Center as a principal engineer. While the astronauts were actually testing the arm in space, Mir Ali created a mathematical model, using equations of motion and control laws, to "test" the arm under simulated conditions of zero gravity.

Among other Indians helping guide the U.S. space shuttle program are Serweshwar Mathur from Alwar, Malik S. Putcha from Andhra Pradesh, Girish Desai from Ahmedabad and Anand Saha from Calcutta.

quantitative progress. Only such progress can fulfill the hopes of our own people and the rest of the world. Let us see how far we can go in achieving truly substantial reductions in our strategic arsenals.

To symbolize this fundamental change in direction, we will call these negotiations START-Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.

The third proposal I have made to the Soviet Union is that we act to achieve equality at lower levels of conventional forces in Europe. The defense needs of the Soviet Union hardly call for maintaining more combat divisions in. East Germany today than were in the whole Allied invasion force that landed in Normandy on D-Day [June 6, 1944]. The Soviet Union could make no more convincing contribution to peace in Europe-and in the world-than by agreeing to reduce its conventional forces significantly and constrain the potential for sudden aggression.

Finally, I have pointed out to President Brezhnev that to maintain peace, we must reduce the risks of surprise attack,

"Some critics say that Reagan's proposal is unrealistic, since there is virtually no chance that the Russians will accept it. This overlooks the importance of clearing the air, of making the point that we are willing to halt the arms race in Europe if Moscow is."

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LOS ANGELES TIMES,

Los Angeles, U.S.A.

and the chance

of war arising out of

uncertainty or miscalculation. I am renewing our proposal for a conference to develop effective measures that would reduce these dangers. At the current Madrid meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, we are laying the foundation for a Westernproposed conference on disarmament in Europe. This conference would discuss new measures to enhance stability and security in Europe. Agreement on this conference is within reach. I urge the Soviet Union to join us and the many other nations who are ready to launch

"What the President did was to put the United States into a negotiating position on the critical issue of the military balance in Europe and, by extension, in East- West relations overall. This is more than a public relations stunt .... It is a serious effort to stabilize relations with the Soviet Union. " -

WASlilNGTON POST,

Washington, D.C., U.S.A.

this important enterprise.

All of these proposals are based on the same fair-minded principles: substantial, militarily-significant reductions in forces; equal ceilings for similar types of forces; and adequate provisions for verification.

My administration, my country and I are committed to achieving arms reductions agreement based on these principles. Today I have outlined the kinds of bold, equitable proposals which the world expects of us. But we cannot reduce arms unilaterally. Success can only come if the Soviet Union will share our commitment; if it will demonstrate that its often-repeated professions of concern for peace will be matched by positive action.

Preservation of peace in Europe. and the pursuit of arms reductions talks are of fundamental importance. But we must also help to bring peace and security to regions now torn by conflict, external intervention and war.

The American concept of peace goes well beyond the absence of war. We foresee a flowering of economic growth and individual liberty in a world at peace.

At the economic summit in Cancun, I met with the leaders of 21 nations and sketched out our approach to global economic growth. We want to eliminate the barriers to trade and investment which hinder these critical incentives to growth. And we are working to develop new programs to help the poorest nations achieve self-sustaining growth.

Terms like "peace" and "security" have little meaning for the oppressed and the destitute. They also mean little to the individual whose state has stripped him of

human freedom and dignity. Wherever there is oppression, we must strive for the peace and security of individuals as well as states. We must recognize that progress in the pursuit of liberty is a necessary complement to military security. Nowhere has this fundamental truth been more boldly and clearly stated than in the Helsinki Accords of 1975. These accords have not yet been translated into living reality.

Today I have announced an agenda that can help to achieve peace, security and freedom across the globe. In particular, I have made an important offer to forego entirely deployment of new American missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union is prepared to respond on an equal footing.

There is no reason why people in any part of the world should have to live in . permanent fear of war or its specter. I believe the time has come for all nations to act in a responsible spirit that does not threaten other states. I believe the time is right to move forward on arms control and the resolution of critical regional disputes at the conference table.

Nothing will have a higher priority for me and for the American people over the coming months and years.

"President Reagan's disarmament proposals for medium-range missiles in the European region are a bold challenge to Mr. Brezhnev to match the words of his 'Peace' propaganda with deeds on the missile sites .... " -DAILY

TELEGRAPH,

London, U.K.

Addressing the United Nations 20 years ago, another American President [John F. Kennedy] described the goal we still pursue today.

"If we all can plersevere," he said, "if we can ... Iook beyond our. own shores and ambitions, then surely the age will dawn in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved."

He did not live to see that goal achieved.

I invite all nations to join with America today in the quest for such a world. 0

Suhasini Mulay in Mrinal Sen's Bhuvan Shome.

CCINAMERICA

:Ii

Japanese cinema in the late Fifties, French new wave and Brazilian cinema nuovo in the Sixties, Australian films more recently, are among the national cinemas that have sent ripples through the ranks of film aficionados in the United States. But except for Satyajit Ray's work, Indian cinema, the world's biggest, was virtually unknown in the United States-until Filmlndia's presentation, specially Part III, comprising contemporary films.

Satyajit Ray, whose retrospective formed the first part of Filmlndia, had been wellknown in the United States for many years; the complete showing of his films only confirmed a long-standing American appreciation.

Part II, the historical retrospective (see SPAN December '81), gave students of cinema a rare opportunity to know some of the landmarks of Indian film history. While that area was unknown, it was not entirely unexpected in what it had to offer. But somehow, illogical as it sounds, America's arthouse audience had tended to see Ray as a unique figure, standing in lofty isolation above a morass of third-rate soap opera. Even Mrinal Sen and Shyam Benegal were known only to a relatively small group of film buffs.

Not until the Bangalore Filmotsav '80 did a large American contingent participate in an Indian film festival and take back impressions of new cinema, speciaUy presented there in the "Indian Panorama" program. Among them were Charles Michener of Newsweek, Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice, Eliott Stein of Film Comment, Gene Moskowitz of Variety, Adrienne Mancia from the Museum of Modem Art, and Muriel Peters of the Asia Society, New York. These people helped give shape to the Indo-U.S. Subcommission's idea of a Filmlndia project with the crucial cooperation of officials of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting and Raghunath Raina and Bindu Batra of the Indian Directorate of Film Festivals. Filmlndia thus became a product of Bangalore's gathering of the clan, fired by a new enthusiasm for India's new cinema.

By "new cinema," they understood the serious, creative films by directors other than Satyajit Ray, most of them socially conscious, low-budget films made with full professionalism but outside the mainstream of commercial .cinema. If this suggests that these newfangled films were shown to an audience which had no idea of what mainstream Indian cinema is like, one must remember that the historical retrospective provided background, and two

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compilation films, Krishna Shah's Cinema!

Cinema! and Shridhar Khirsagar's The Great Indian Film Bazaar had brought interested audiences almost up to date on the traditions of India's mass entertainment.

The catalogue brought out on the occasion is called The New Generation (although it includes Mrinal Sen, who began filmmaking before Satyajit Ray), and lists 22 films by 19 directors. The series opened in New York late in September and featured the biggest package of India's new cinema ever shown in the United States, perhaps anywhere abroad.

Among those present in New York, and certain other centers, were directors Mrinal Sen, Shyam Benegal, Kumar Shahani, Govind Nihalani, actor-director Girish Karnad, film critic Bikram Singh, and Smita Patil, the new cinema's leading actress. Although the showing of their films overlapped with the New York Film Festival and came after the Ray and historical films had run for more than two months, the contemporary exhibition provided effective exposure for India's new cinema: Attendance at the Museum of Modem Art's shows seemed to be evenly divided between Americans and resident Indians, and many in the audience stayed on after the shows to talk to the directors or to Smita Patil, who appears in seven of the 22 films. The response was still more enthusiastic at some university campuses. Benegal's Manthan and Bhumika evoked much interest at the University of Wisconsin. Kumar Shahani described the reception to his Maya Darpan at Harvard's Visual Art Center as "the kind of response I have hardly ever had anywhere."

The University of Texas, Austin, and the State Universtiy of New York at Buffalo were among other campuses where showings and discussions were held. Sen and Senegal were already somewhat known to film enthusiasts and a few Benegal films had played at local theaters; but newcomers like G. Aravindan (Kanchana Sita) Govind Nihalani (Aakrosh) and Ketan Mehta (Bhavni Bhavai) were hailed as discoveries both in the large cities and on the campuses. Whether it was Aravindan's poetry, Nihalani's anger or Mehta's irony, the films had crossed a difficult cultural barrier and set up sympathetic vibrations. The package as a whole presented a picture of India trying to understand and come to terms with her problems, her own being, as it were.

Some of the films reached a large audience, being shown nationally on television by the

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). These included Mrinal Sen's Aakaler Sandhaney, Basu Chatterjee's Sara Akash, and Girish Karnad's Kaadu.

The Indian delegation held a press conference which drew many acute questions and evoked interesting replies. Asked if the new cinema is primarily meant for the foreign market, Mrinal Sen replied: "I have found that the best way to interest foreign audiences is to be strictly national and really capture the national milieu." Americans found the sharp division between art films and commercial films hard to understand. Many pointed out that in every country soap opera is the popular thing, so why can't good films be made within its limitations, much as Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in iambic pentameter for the groundlings and the nobility alike? Alas, Shakespeares are hard to come by; Chaplin is the closest the cinema has come to producing one. Kumar Shahani, who had worked in France for a while, pointed out that in France as in many other countries, there is a marked difference between the art film and the mass entertainment product. Some Americans wondered if with all the government financing for the new cinema, there was government control over the content of the films. The filmmakers unanimously replied that the Indian Government never interferes in the making of the films it finances.

From the Indian point of view, the best outcome of Filmlndia is the commercial interest that the films have generated among noted U.S. distributors. Negotiations for a number of the new films started almost straightaway and are continuing. Shyam Benegal, who is also going to coproduce a film related to the Indian community in the United States, is convinced that if the impetus of Filmlndia is vigorously followed up-as the Australians have-the results for India's new cinema, in its American breakthrough, will be no less impressive.

Another, larger result, as Muriel Peters of the Asia Society repeatedly pointed out, is the better understanding not only of Indian cinema but India herself which serious Indian cinema is helping to develop. Smita Patil confirmed that impression: "America is a very modem and very rich country ... they don't need to know so much about India ... but through the films, they are coming to know India at many different levels. That's something important."

-C.D.G. THE FILMS, THEIR DIRECTORS Kanchana Sita (Malayalam); G. Aravindan. ;Mantitan, Bhumika (Hindi); Shyam Benegal.

Sara Ak_ash(Hindi); Basu' ¡Chatterji. Chakra (Hindi); Rabindra DharmaraJ. Ajantrik (Bengali); Ritwik Ghatak.

Kodiyettam (Malayalam); Adoor Gopalakrishnan. Kaadu; Ondanondu Kaladalli (Kannada); Girish Karnad. Ghatashraddha (Kannada); Girish Kasaravalli. 27 Down (Hindi); Awtar Kaul. Uski Roti (Hindi); Mani Kaul. Bhavni Bhavai (Gujarati); Ketan Mehta. Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai (Hindi); Saeed Mirza. Aakrosh (Hindi); Govind Nihalani.

Sarvasakshi (Marathi); Ramdas Phutane. Samskara (Kannada); Pattabhi Rama Reddy. Garm Hava (Hindi); M.S. Sathyu.Bhuvan Shome (Hindi); Aakaler Sandhaney (Bengali); Mrinal Sen. Maya Darpan (Hindi); Kumar Shah ani. Rikki Tikki Tavi (EnglishJRussian); Surinder Suri.

Below: Naseeruddin Shah, doyen of actors in the "parallel cinema," as the mad king in Ketan Mehta's Bhavni Bhavai.

Bottom: Anjali Paigankar as the harijan girl exchanges glances with cooperative worker Chandvarkar played by Anant Nag in Shyam Benegal's Manthan.

Left, top: Smita Patil, most frequently featured heroine of India's new cinema, as Amma in Rabindra Dharmaraja's Chakra.

Left, bottom: Equally popular in "parallel" and "commercial" cinema Shabana Azmi is seen here in ' Shyam Benegal's Junoon. Below: Geeta in M.S. Sathyu's Garm Hawa.