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[F>USA

March/April 1999

SPAN VOLUME

XL

NUMBER

2

Publisher Francis B. Ward

Bringing Some of it Back Home

Editor-in-Chief Donna J. Roginski

By Arun Bhanot

Editor Lea Terhune Associate Editor Amn Bhanot Copy Editor A. Venkata Narayana Editorial Assistant K. Muthukumar

Written on the Wind

Art Director Subas Nimbalkar

By Stewart Brand

Deputy Art Director Hemant Bharnagar

Hymn

By Emily Hiestand

Production/Circulation Manager Rakesh Agrawal Research Services USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library Front through

cover:

Water from Lake Mills Reservoir

a spillway

gate

in Glines

Elwha River in Washington's story on page 25.

Canyon

Olympic

is released Dam

on the

Mountains.

Environmental Advocacy in Government and Business

See

"The Law Needs to be Very Strict"

Photographs: Front cover--Glenn Oakley, Š 1999 Glenn Oakley. 4-5-sketches

by Suhas Nimbalkar.

6-7-Smithsonian InstitutionlRichard Strauss, SI. 8-illustration

by Suhas Nimbalkar.

IO-ll-illustration

by Robert GoJdstrom.

16-<:ourtesy Indian Chamber of Commerce, Calcutta. 17-Doranne Jacobson.

18-Hemant Bhatnagar.

19 top left-Doranoe Jacobson; below---courtesy Indian Chamber of Commerce, Calcutta. 21-Hemant Bhatnagar.

22-Doranne Jacobson.

25-28--Glenn Oakley, Š 1999 Glenn Oakley.

33-Rajeev Lochan.

34-35---courtesy Vivan Sundaram.

36 top--Pablo Bartholomew; belowcourtesy Chester and Davida Herwitz.

37-Hemant Bhatnagar, courtesy National Gallery of Modem Art, New Delh;.

42-43-Dorothea Lange, courtesy Library of CongresslBrown Brothers. 44---courtesy Brown Brothers.

5O---courtesy Library of Congress.

51-Dorothea Lange.

53---courtesy Brown Brothers.

54---courtesy Culver Pictures.

57---courtesy Lee Butler/The Bulletin of the

An Interview with Dr. D.K. Chadha

An Answer from Business

By Nazeeb Anf

The Battle of the Dams

By Patrick Joseph

Atomic Scientists.

STATEMENT FORM IV The following is a statement of ownership and other particulars about SPAN magazine as required under Section 19D(b) of the Press & Registration of Books Act, 1867, and under Rule 8 of the Registration of Newspaper (Central) Rules, 1956.

United States Information Service 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 11000 I 2. Periodicity of Publication Bimonthly 3. Printer's Name G.P. Todi Nationality Indian Address Ajanta Offset & Packaging Ltd. 95-B, Wazirpur Industrial Area Delhi 110 052 Francis B. Ward 4. Publisher's Name American Nationality 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg Address New Delhi 110001 Lea Terhune 5. Editor's Name American Nationality Address' 24, Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi llOOOI 6. Names and addresses of The Government of the United States of America individuals who own the newspaper and partners or shareholders balding more than one percent of the total capital I, Francis B. Ward, bereby declare that the particulars given above are true to the best of my knowledge and belief.

Date: January 20, 1999

(Signed) Francis B. Ward Signature of Publisher

Tracking the Indian Diaspora

By Thomas McEvilley

On the Lighter Side

"Hallelujah,

I'm a Bum"

By James R. Chiles

A Voice of Reason

By Lee Butler

A LETTER

W

FROM

ater is essential to life. Sadly, countries around the world are fighting a battle not only to maintain the purity of the earth's water, but to save it. Expanding populations, excessive and careless use of pesticides, unchecked industrial waste-all of these factors have contributed to the environmental crisis that threatens us today. The effects of some technologies were not fully understood when they first began to be used. Now, decades later, environmental consequences have come to light that pose serious problems in all parts of the globe. The developing world is particularly vulnerable because rapid industrial growth has far outstripped regulatory measures to protect the environment.

In this issue of SPAN we focus on activities that have a negative impact on the environment, what can be done and what people are doing to turn things around. "The Battle of the Dams" by Patrick Joseph looks at technology that was once the pride of hydroelectric engineers, the dam.

Large and small dams around the world have been a great help to many people, but there is also a less positive side. It seems that in many places in America dams have killed entire species of fish and blighted the environment, and there is a growing movement to remove these dams.

David Nelson is an expert on toxic-waste regulation, a consultant to companies that want to become more environmentally responsible. India is among the many Asian countries where he has worked, and in "No Time to Waste" he says it is in the interest of businesses to reduce poisonous emissions. His message to business is "Clean up your act."

Both government and business are addressing the problems. An interview with Central Ground Water

THE PUBLISHER

Authority Chairman Dr. D.K. Chadha outlines steps the government is taking to protect water resources. And Nazeeb Arif, in "An Answer from Business," describes the Environment Management Centre, a project undertaken by the Calcutta chapter of the Indian Chamber of Commerce to make managers more aware of problems and solutions.

Some nonresident Indian businessmen are contributing in a different way, by "Bringing Some of it Back Home." Arun Bhanot has the story on two Indian-born American philanthropists.

February is Black History Month in the United States, when African-Americans celebrate their rich history and culture. Emily Hiestand's "Hymn" is an unusual salute to African-American traditions.

The author is the only white member of her church, and has learned to appreciate another side of the racial divide and has found ways to bridge it.

With the American economy doing so well in the 1990s, we often forget the hardship of those who lived through the Great Depression. The America of the 1930s generated a new class of itinerants-men, and sometimes women and children-who rode the rails in search of jobs. James R. Chiles recounts hazards of life on the road in "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum." Other features include a short history of voting in the United States, an essay on the ephemeral nature of digital information by Stewart Brand, and retired Air Force General Lee Butler's account of how he moved from advocating nuclear deterrence to becoming an outspoken opponent.

We hope you enjoy this issue of SPAN.

Bringing Someofit BackHome One funds schools and colleges in his native village. The other runs a food bank in Delhi. SPAN profiles two NRI businessmen who want to share their wealth with the less privileged in India. no t's secret that most Indians who have immigrated to America have prospered; building thriving businesses, from computers to restaurant chains. A lesser known fact is that some of them have been sharing their wealth with the underprivileged in their native land. They may not be a Ted Turner, the media mogul who in September 1997 made the magnanimous gesture of donating $1 billion to the fund-starved United Nations, but philanthropy-thankfully-refuses to conform to anyone's ideas of how, when and where to give. So while Vinod Gupta and Varinder Kumar Bhalla may not have given billions, their generosity deserves our attention.

In 1967, Gupta a young engineering graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology (lIT), Kharagpur, arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska, to pursue a masters in agricultural engineering at the University of Nebraska. Coming from Rampur, a small village near Saharanpur, Gupta admits he had, so far, a mediocre academic record. When he landed he had $58 in his pocket and one suitcase of clothes. Since that humble beginning Gupta has gone on to amass a fortune with a net worth of $200 million.

Almost a decade ago, Gupta decided it was time to give something back to the educational institutions that he had attended. So in 1991 he gave $2 million to establish a business school at the lIT, Kharagpur. Named the Vinod Gupta School of Management, the school is modeled after the School of Management at the

I

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gupta has also donated money to build a new science block at his former village school, besides establishing a scholarship fund for the best students, an annual monetary citation for the best teacher, and giving money for the purchase of school buses.

Although a regular visitor to India, Gupta was most recently in New Delhi late last year to launch his next philanthropic project: a polytechnic college for women in Rampur.

"Rampur is a farming village. That's my childhood place. I studied there till my 10th grade. I grew up with the farm kids, and actually I used to do farming myself. We used to grow gram, sugarcane, wheat, rice," said Gupta. "Most of these people are Gujjars. It's bad enough that they don't send their kids to school.

But the girls, it's out of the question. They stay at home and when they're 16 or 17, they get married, and that's it. I think it's very important that these girls get employable education."

Although the area has a high school, Gupta said "after 11th or 12th grade education, they are still not employable. But if they are taught employable skills-nursing, medical technology, fashion design, secretarial work or data entry-they'll have something tangible. Then they can get jobs in their area."

Gupta's generosity is not confined to the land of his roots. In America, he donated $2 million to establish a curriculum for small business management at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. He gave the university an additional $500,000 to set up a scholarship fund for minority students. Gupta is also a regular donor to U.S. organizations like Planned Parenthood, Child Saving Institute and "other local charity organizations for old people, women and children. Anybody who needs help."

What motivated him to give in such an unprecedented way? In

"By giving generously to society, I can help improve the lives of my children and the future generations to come."

a word, America, said Gupta. "I must say in the United States everybody is so charitable," he explained. "I think the U.S. has the highest rate of charity-giving in the world. The whole philosophy in the United States is if we have made money from the society, we should give it back. Why should we give it to our kids and make them rich, and they're not going to respect it?

Let's put it back in society and make society better."

In all his years in the United States, first as an Indian student and later as a citizen (Gupta took citizenship in 1974), he was very impressed by how charitable Americans were. They supported their churches and their organizations locally, nationally and internationally. "So I always used to think that if I have some money I'd like to give it back," said Gupta. "I grew up poor in the village.

We had very little but at the same time, we were very happy. I believe that everyone comes into life with nothing, and leaves life with nothing. By giving generously to society, I can help improve the lives of my children and the future generations to come."

Gupta made his money by latching on to a clever idea and then converting it into a highly profitable enterprise. In 1971, after graduating at Lincoln, Gupta moved to Omaha working as a marketing research analyst with a company which manufactured mobile homes in factories located across the country. His job was to evaluate the performance of rival companies. The sales managers required lists of mobile home dealers in their region, and when Gupta tried to get this information from a brokerage firm, he found it was expensive. Also, the information was obsolete. He decided to consult the yellow pages, the specialized telephone directories of business services that are revised and published annually. With the help of the yellow pages, he decided to make the lists himself. Armed with thousands of yellow pages from across America, he began the task. When the list was completed, he offered to sell it to his employers for $9,000 with exclusive rights. As an alternative, he offered it free but with a rider that allowed him to sell it commercially. They, unwisely as it proved in course of time, opted for the latter option.

With the help of two part-time employees, Gupta launched American Business Information (ABI) and by the end of the first year, it made a modest profit of $22,000. These lists soon became the best cost-saving marketing tools for American small

businesses and the company took off. Today, these lists are available in a variety of formats: CD-ROM disks, on-line computer databases, instant telephone access if you want the information while traveling. Lately, Gupta has also embraced the Internet with brand-new services. InfoUSA, Inc. is the "leading provider of information on II million businesses and 110 million households," he said. The database is compiled from many sources including 5,200 yellow pages and business white pages. "Every ~usiness listing is verified with 16 million phone calls a year ...over 43,000 calls a day!"

But what Gupta is really excited about is the new service he has come up with. "It's called videoyellowpagesusa.com. What we're doing is getting videos of businesses. We just launched it in Omaha. The yellow pages do not give you any idea of the business. It could be a fly-by-night business with a big ad. Here, you can see the video and know what's it like."

But even as Gupta expands his business empire, he hasn't forgotten his Indian roots, nor his family, nor the humble village where he grew up. Besides his financial contributions, his generosity is manifest in other ways as well. In 1994 when Gupta was in India for the unveiling of the foundation stone of the management school at Kharagpur by the then President Shankar Dayal Sharma, he declined the President's invitation to travel with him from Delhi. Instead he invited 200 of his personal guests, most of them relatives and friends from his village, to accompany him from Delhi to Calcutta by a chartered plane.

Many of them had never flown before.

When Gupta rose to address the audience after the singing of the national anthem, his voice quivered as he said, "It gave me goose bumps. I am a citizen of the United States, but I have not forgotten my roots." He continued. "I came to lIT from a tiny village and I discovered a different India: Students spoke different languages, had different cultures, even ate different foods, but I realized we were all Indians. lIT changed me and that's why we former students must go into a partnership with the government to fulfill today's educational needs. It's essential for engineers to have a background in management and it's just as essential for managers to have an understanding of technology. I also want to thank my adopted country, the USA, for providing me with the opportunities and the wealth that make this gift possible." arinder Kumar Bhalla, an NRI businessman living in Albertson, New York, is engaged in nothing less than a war against hunger. He founded the AWB Food Bank in New Delhi with his Indian partner Dr. B.M. Abrol, a surgeon. It is the first organization that collects and redistributes surplus food in India. The food bank has operated since November 1992. It began by providing 50 meals a day and now provides nearly 3,000 meals. Inspired by his mother's generosity to the poor, Bhalla got the idea of conveying surplus hotel food to those who are not always able to get a square meal. He named the organization the Agya Wanti Bhalla (AWB) Food Bank, after his mother.

"After you have a house, education and a nice family, you

V

should devote yourself to something bigger than yourself, give something back," Bhalla told the New York Times in an interview. "If we keep choosing materialistic things in life there is no end to it. We have better inner feelings from what we are doing than from putting a million dollars in our bank account. With 40,000 children in the world dying of hunger and malnutrition every day I am willing to give my own life for this."

Since 1992 the AWB Food Bank has enlisted nearly all of Delhi's prestigious luxury hotels as donors. Also included are several four- and three-star hotels, and an airline kitchen. The food bank provides the businesses with refrigerated stainless steel containers to store the food. "By surplus food we mean food prepared in excess of needs, not that which has been left on plates or at tables," says Abrol who looks after the food bank's Delhi operations apart from his busy medical practice.

The bank has two refrigerated vans which collect the food from the donors and then bring it to the AWB office from where it is distributed to the recipients. The list of recipients too has grown from 12 in 1994 to 20 today. "We serve mostly institutions run by NGOs like the All India Federation of the

"What troubles me most is that society has the resources to end hunger all over the world, but doesn't have the will to do so."

-VAR1NDER

KUMAR BHALLA

Deaf, some schools for the blind, orphanages, etc." The bank is operated solely by volunteers and a paid staff of six.

Although the first of its kind in the country, the concept is not new. "We are merely copying the West," admits Abrol.

According to him the idea of starting a food bank originated with Bhalla's desire to provide a bhandara on the anniversary of his mother's death. The bhandara is a charitable meal traditionally offered to the poor to honor an ancestor's memory or a religious occasion. It had been her dying wish. He recalled her kindness to others, particularly in feeding those less fortunate than her family. About the same time Bhalla saw reports on TV about food banks in the United States that so inspired him that he began researching how they operated. The more he saw, the more determined he was to pursue this dream.

Bhalla came to India, spending a month showing videotapes

of American food banks to managers of five-star hotels in New Delhi, to enlist their help. He also met Abrol and found they shared the same desire to serve the society. Four months later, with pledges of support in hand, Bhalla returned to the capital, bought two vans and spent weeks hiring and training the staff, driving the van to collection and delivery points himself. "The goals that we set for ourselves are so powerful that nobody can say he can't support our cause," says Abrol.

Just like Vinod Gupta, Bhalla, who hails from an uppermiddle-class family in Amritsar, is an engineering graduate and came to the United States to pursue a masters in mechanical engineering at Washington State University with the help of a scholarship in 1971. "I was always very ambitious about coming to the United States," he recalled in an interview. "I was fascinated by how progressive the country is. The landing of man on the moon really put fire in my belly."

When he graduated he found himself thrust into a poor job market. But his persistence and foresight saw him through a successful career in nuclear energy. He became a private consultant, with more than 200 engineers working for him at the peak of his business in the 1980s. When the nuclear industry declined, Bhalla started a business recruiting and training foreign health professionals for American hospitals.

Bhalla echoes Vinod Gupta's words when he says "the American people are the most charitable in the world. Anywhere in the world there is a disaster, the Americans get there first.

What troubles me most is that society, and the world as a whole, has the resources to end hunger all over the world, but doesn't have the will to do so."

With the AWB Food Bank Bhalla and Abrol are contributing their bit. Not content with feeding needy children with surplus food from five-star hotels, Abrol now wants to begin mushti daan (mushti means handful) where the bank collects dry food and distributes to the recipients. "I want to take the concept to places where there are no luxurious hotels," said Abrol. "I want to start mushti daan in small towns and villages. Say, in a village there are 200 families, 150 are affluent and 50 are poor.

Now if each of the 150 families donated one handful of grain per day and then it is collected every month, it would be sufficient to feed the 50 poor families." Abrol stresses that the process is inexpensive. He gives the example of the Food Bank, for which the only expenditure they entail is on the collection and distribution of meals. "The hotels don't charge us and we don't charge the recipients. And the collection itself costs us just half a rupee per person."

As for Bhalla, the future holds out hope of more philanthropic activity. "We've already come much further than we originally intended. We see within our grasp a goal of feeding 15,000 persons every day in India and of supporting a lot of feeding programs in the United States." He is already assisting other food banks on Long Island and in New Jersey. Said Bhalla: "Just the thought of that, a vision of that, keeps me going and does away with all the frustrations. Once I have achieved that, if my mother is watching, I think it will mean a lot for her."

D

The

Vote that It was a bumpy road to ballot reform, with plenty of fiddles along the way. One of the more colorful stories is about the President toppled by fraudulent votes who in the end toppled the culprits.

y the gaudy standards of 19th-century American political ballots, it's not terribly impressive: a flimsy 3-by-13-inch oblong paper. Except for the typographical flourish at the top, the Smithsonian's 1888 Republican ballot from Hendricks County, Indiana, is a pretty ordinary version of the ballots Americans all over the country used to cast.

It lists the nominees for President and Vice President, followed by candidates for Indiana's 15 members of the Electoral College-the slightly arcane body that still actually elects our chief executivesand finally, the candidates for state and local offices. Indiana Democrats dealt with comparable tickets, each with its own distinctive graphics and design. Back then many ballots sported a more elaborate mix of slogans, typefaces, pictures and colors than the one shown here. Yet GOP ballots from Indiana in 1888 may be the most sig-

B

Republicans helped Harrison win Indiana in 1888 by hiring men to cast ballots illegally.

ed nificant in American politics. They were distributed wholesale to rascals who were divided into "blocks of five" and paid to cast them illegally. The public reaction to the scandal helped to change electoral history and establish the secret ballot.

In Colonial times Americans mostly declared their votes at the polls, out loud and in public. In 1888, voters in some states, notably Kentucky, still did so. The cerebral Pilgrims wrote their votes, a process that Rhode Islanders streamlined into what was known as a prox (or ticket) printed by each faction. By 1888 each party in each ward of most states produced its own ticket.

This method and the ward bosses who used it thrived because district ballot designs made secrecy impossible. In some states, politicos could buy votes confident of knowing whether the voters stayed bought; they could watch at the polls as their conspicuously marked ballots descended into glass-sided ballot boxes.

Sometimes voters handed their votes to election clerks for deposit, inviting further fiddling with the results. Apparently, ballot fraud was so common it developed its own vocabulary. "Colonizers" were groups of bought voters who moved en masse to turn the voting tide in doubtful wards.

"Floaters" flitted like honeybees wafting from party to party, casting ballots in response to the highest bidder. "Repeaters" voted early and, sometimes in disguise, often. In Indiana, the absence of any voter

Originally appeared in Smithsonian, November 1998.

Copyright Š 1998 S.l. Ackerman. All rights reserved.

registration especially invited such doings.

By September 1888, Indiana Republicans knew that native-son presidential nominee Benjamin Harrison was in trouble. Harrison was a Hoosier [nickname for a resident of Indiana] and a high-tariff man, the darling of big business. His party was rich, rich, rich, but to win in the Electoral College where it counted, he needed to carry New York, the home state of President Grover Cleveland, and, for insurance (and honor), his own state.

Both states looked bad for Harrison.

"Grover the Good" had won in 1884 despite sneers that he was a draft dodger and a womanizer. Famously charged with having had an illegitimate son several years earlier, the bachelor candidate did not deny it.

Cleveland's integrity and reform policies (promoting low tariffs and a civil service overhaul) impressed voters. The Republican campaign taunt "Ma! Ma! Where's my Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!" proved prophetic. Warned at various times that his stand on tariffs would cost him votes-in his day tariffs paid the government's bills (there was no income tax)-Cleveland eventually shot back, "What is the use of being elected or reelected unless you stand for something?"

Yet one of the most brilliant triumphs of his fIrst term was marrying his pretty 21year-old ward, Frances Folsom, the daughter of his late law partner. Poised yet unaffected, "Frank" became our fIrst stylesetting, superstar First Lady. Everywhere she went, she drew adoring crowds.

Women copied her hairdo and, on the mere rumor that she was against them, banished the bustles encumbering their dresses.

Cleveland, with a respectable record and a spectacular First Lady, became the fIrst Democrat renominated for President since 1840. Then the robber barons began flooding Republican coffers with campaign boodle. In New York, Republican National Chairman Matt Quay spent lavishly to buy the support of renegade Democratic bosses in the big cities. The Republicans, it would seem, managed to fInagle enough votes to control the election. Harrison was confIdent he would carry Cleveland's home state, where Cleveland was expected to run well be-

hind his party's victorious gubernatorial nominee. But Indiana still looked like a big problem.

For one thing, the state was already famous for ballot chicanery, which the Republican state platform roundly condemned. Ten years before, a U.S. marshal named W.W. Dudley had rounded up scores of Democrats accused of violating election laws. But at the time the special prosecutor, future presidential candidate Benjamin Harrison ("Little Ben"), managed to secure only one conviction.

Now, 10 years later, "Little Ben" was at the top of one ballot, running for President, with Dudley as treasurer of the Republican National Committee.

To Republican delegations trekking to Indianapolis, Harrison made honest voting-"a pure, free ballot...the jewel above price"-a leitmotif of his campaign. He exhorted one and all to free Indiana elections "from the taint of suspicion." But Dudley had other ideas. He was buying ballots wholesale. In a fabulously indiscreet circular on Republican National Committee stationery he instructed local leaders in Indiana: "Divide the floaters into blocks of five, and put a trusted man with necessary funds in charge," being sure to "make him responsible that none get away and all vote our ticket."

Near the campaign's close a suspicious Indiana railway postal agent intercepted one of the incriminating missives. Newspaper headlines followed. Dudley and Quay rallied to blast the Democratic "forgery," and Dudley slapped libel suits on the newspapers that printed it. The vote buying rolled on. Party faithful even brought voters over from Pennsylvania, which was safely in Harrison's column.

With the whole nation watching, Dudley brazenly bought blocks of votes in Indiana. But instead of going to prison, where his personal knowledge of Dudley's doings could have put him, Harrison went to Washington.

As President he boosted the already staggering protective tariff and depleted the U.S. Treasury with an orgy of pork barrel boon-doggies approved by what Democrats called his Billion Dollar Congress. He turned Cleveland's civil ser-

vice into a joke. Meanwhile, in defeat Cleveland flourished. He practiced law in New York. Frank gave birth to "Baby Ruth," a celebrated tyke whose name was bequeathed to a candy bar. Cleveland was content, save for a nagging sense of duty about balloting. Normally he dodged banquets and barbecues requesting "a few words," but when the Merchants' Association of Boston offered a forum, he rose to the occasion. In 1888, the city of Louisville, Kentucky, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had adopted the secret ballot system of New South Wales, then a territory in Australia. In a single year, 1889, nine states adopted the

In the 19th century, glasssided ballot boxes like this one,from Maryland, helped politicos see if bought voters stayed bought.

Australian method, including Indiana.

There was a chance that the reform would catch on nationwide.

The most celebrated martyr to ballot fraud and vote buying, Cleveland lashed out against the "vile, unsavory" forms of self-interest that "fatten upon corruption and debauched suffrage." He called upon good citizens everywhere, to rise above "lethargy and indifference," to "restore the purity of their suffrage."

And they did. A ballot-reform landslide swamped the nation's legislatures. By the 1892 elections, citizens in 38 states voted by secret ballot. That year, they also returned Grover Cleveland and Frank to the White House.

D About the Author: S1. Ackerman is a freelance writer and a collector of American political memorabilia.

T

he promise has been made: "Digital information is forever. It doesn't deteriorate and requires little in the way of material media." So said one of the chieftains of the emerging digital age, computer-chip maker Andy Grove, the head of the Intel Corporation. Another chieftain, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, has set about digitizing the world's largest library so that its contents can become accessible by anyone, from anywhere, forever.

But a shadow has fallen. "It is only slightly facetious," wrote RAND researcher Jeff Rothenberg in Scientific American, "to say that digital information lasts forever--or five years, whichever comes first."

Digitized media do have some attributes of immortality. They possess great clarity, great universality, great reliability and great economydigital storage is already so compact and cheap it is essentially free. Many people have found themselves surprised and embarrassed by the reemergence of perfectly preserved E-mail or online newsgroup comments they wrote nonchalantly years ago and forgot about.

Yet those same people discover that they cannot revisit their own word-processor files or computerized financial records from 10 years before. It turns out that what was so carefully stored was written with a now-obsolete application, in a now-obsolete operating system, on a long-vanished make of computer, using a now-antique storage medium (where do you flOd a drive for a 51,4-inch floppy disk?).

Fixing digital discontinuity sounds like exactly the kind of problem that fast-moving computer technology should be able to solve. But fast-moving computer technology is the problem: By constantly accelerating its own capabilities (making faster, cheaper, sharper tools that make ever faster, cheaper, sharper tools), the technology is just as constantly self-obsolescing. The great creator becomes the great eraser.

Behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies of extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling refers to our time as "the Golden Age of dead media, most of them with the working life span of a pack of Twinkies." On Reprinted from Civilization.

All rights reserved.

Copyright Š 1998 by Stewart Brand.

the Internet, Sterling is amassing a roll call of their once-honored personal computer names: Altair, Amiga, Amstrad, Apples I, II and III, Apple Lisa, Apricot, Atari, AT&T, Commodore, CompuPro, Cromemco, Epson, Franklin, Grid, IBM PCjr, IBM XT, Kaypro, Morrow, NEC PC8081, NorthStar, Osborne, Sinclair, Tandy, Wang, Xerox Star, Yamaha CX5M. Buried with them are whole clans of programming languages, operating systems, storage formats and countless rotting applications in an infinite variety of mutually incompatible versions. Everything written on them was written on the wind, leaving not a trace.

Computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that we have good raw data from previous ages written on clay, on stone, on parchment and paper, but from the 1950s to the present, recorded information increasingly disappears into a digital gap.

Historians will consider this a dark age.

Science historians can read Galileo's technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minsky's from the 1960s.

It's not just that file formats quickly become obsolete; the physical media themselves are short-lived. Magnetic media, such as disks and tape, lose their integrity in five to 10 years. Optically etched media, such as CD-ROMs, if used only once, last only five to 15 years before they degrade. And digital files do not degrade gracefully like analog audio tapes. When they fail, they fail utterly.

Beyond the evanescence of data formats and digital storage media lies a deeper problem. Computer systems of large scale are at the core of driving corporations, public institutions and indeed whole sectors of the economy. Over time, these gargantuan systems become dauntingly complex and unknowable, as new features are added, old bugs are worked around with layers of "patches," generations of programmers add new programming tools and styles, and portions of the system are repurposed to take on novel functions. With both respect and loathing, computer professionals call these monsters "legacy systems." Teasing a new function out of a legacy system is not done by command, but by conducting cautious alchemic experiments that, with luck, con-

verge toward the desired outcome.

And the larger fear looms: We are in the process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become the Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage-the system doesn't really work; it can't be fixed; no one understands it; no one is in charge of it; it can't be lived without; and it gets worse every year.

Today's bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow's broken legacy system. Commercial software is almost always written in enormous haste, at ever-accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an "upgrade path" to next year's version, but decades are -outside its scope. And societies live by decades, civilizations by centuries.

Digital archivists thus join an ancient lineage of copyists and translators. The process, now as always, can introduce copying errors and spurious "improvements," and can lose the equivalent of volumes of Aristotle. But the practice also builds the bridge between human language eras-from Greek to Latin, to English, to whatever's next.

Archivist Howard Besser points out that digital artifacts are increasingly complex to revive. First there is the viewing problem-a book displays itself, but the contents of a CD-ROM are invisible until opened on something. Then there's the scrambling problem-the innumerable ways that files are compressed and, increasingly, encrypted. There are interrelationship problems-hypertext or website links that were active in the original, now dead ends. And translation problems occur in the way different media behavejust as a photograph of a painting is not the same experience as the painting, looking through a screen is not the same as experiencing an immersion medium, watching a game is not the same as playing it.

Gradually a set of best practices is emerging for ensuring digital continuity: Use the most common file formats, avoid compression where possible, keep a log of changes to a file, employ standard metadata, make multiple copies and so forth.

Another approach is through core standards, like the DNA code in genes or written Chinese in Asia, readable through epochs while everything changes around

and through them. The platform-independent programming language called Java boasts the motto "Write Once, Run Anywhere." One of Java's creators, Bill Joy, asserts that the language "is so well specified that if you write a simple version of Java in Java, it becomes a Rosetta Stone.

Aliens, or a sufficiently smart human, could eventually figure it out because it's an implementation of itself." We'll see.

Exercise is always the best preserver.

Major religious works are impressively persistent because each age copies, analyzes and uses them. The books live and are kept contemporary by frequent use.

Since digital artifacts are quickly outnumbering all possible human users, Jaron Lanier recommends employing artificial intelligences to keep the artifacts exercised through centuries of forced contemporaneity. Still, even robot users might break continuity. Most reliable of all would be a two-path strategy: To keep a digital artifact perpetually accessible, record the current version of it on a physically permanent medium, such as silicon disks microetched

by Norsam Technologies in New Mexico, then go ahead and let users, robot or human, migrate the artifact through generations of versions and platforms, pausing from time to time to record the new manifestation on a Norsam disk. One path is slow, periodic and conservative; the other, fast, constant and adaptive. When the chain of use is eventually broken, it leaves a permanent record of the chain until then, so the artifact can be revived to begin the chain anew.

How can we invest in a future we know is structurally incapable of keeping faith with its past? The digital industries must shift from being the main source of society's ever-shortening attention span to becoming a reliable guarantor of long-term perspective. We'll know that shift has happened when programmers begin to anticipate the Year 10,000 Problem, and assign five digits instead of four to year dates. "01998" they'll write, at first frivolously, then seriously.

D About the Author: Stewart Brand is the founder of the original Whole Earth Catalog and director of the Global Business Network.

He is a contributing editor at Wired magazine.

After decades spent away from her Tennessee roots, the author heeded an old intuition and joined a black Baptist Church-"a jarringly pale face" in the congregation. Here she reflects on the meaning of race, religion and community in the light of her own experience.

The school for the spirit is everywhere and unofficial, but when I was a child, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the early 1950s, an awfullot of the formal spiritual education I received took place in a room in a cinder-block building called the Annex-a consecration of folding chairs, library paste and construction paper in assorted colors. In that school we learned the Ten Commandments, and how to be a shepherd in the Christmas pageant. We learned a phrase I have not forgotten-"the still, small voice"-and we learned hymns. Each week one or two children were asked to select the hymns for the children's seryice.

One week a timid towheaded boy sat by my side as we leafed through wafer-thin pages, and I chose "Wasn't That a Mighty Day," "Wade in the Water," and "Go Down, Moses." The hymn numbers were chalked on the board (we gave just the numbers, not the titles, to a teacher), there was a reading, and then we recited the prayer we were learning, being careful and proud to say, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors," in the Presbyterian way, rather than "trespasses" and "those who trespass against us," as my Southern Baptist relatives did. The problems posed in a child's mind by the two phrasings, both individually and in comparison (bankers? property lines?), are a detour of too great a magnitude to entertain here. When the time came to sing, we opened our hymnals to the numbers on the board. We sang the first song and were turning to the second when one of the teachers suddenly halted the proceedings,

searched our faces, and asked, "Who chose these hymns?"

The tone of the question was not admiring and not entirely accusatory either. It was not at all easy to interpret. The timid boy and I must have looked the most miserable of the miserable, for the teacher's eyes came to rest on us. I had not abandoned a slight hope that we were being singled out for praise, but after I had been identified as the active agent, I merely received a long, hard look. Those were the days when a look was stilf a full player in the house of manners. The teacher then selected other hymns (dull ones), and the morning went on in an ordinary way until we were released to run to our parents, in the fellowship hall of the church proper, where we squirmed until they finally stopped socializing and I could race to the family car, be driven home, take off my fancy clothes, and at last, over my mother's chicken and dumplings, and then the Knoxville NewsSentinel, return to the regular world. But I was changed.

For the rest of that day I hoped by mimicking nOlmalcy to paper over the gulf that had opened between myself and society. I had chosen bad hymns. Or not bad, exactly, because what would they be doing in the hymnal in the first place if they weren't good? Adults often gave a reason, however tenuous, for their rules: "Look both ways, because a car might be coming." "Eat your flan, because your mother made it specially." But no explanation was offered for why we should not want to sing what were then called Negro spirituals. I grasped that the matter, whatever it was, was not theological but rather a social nuance, and I suspected that it had to do with the spine-tingling quality of my chosen hymns-songs that were stately and high-toned with longing and sorrow, and also, curiously, with far more happiness than could be found in the regular grizzled psalmodies.

There was a good deal about the situation that a seven-year-old could not grasp. Most citizens of our town had come from other regions of the country-and even from other countries-to distill uranium and do atomic research. Oak Ridge was Atom City, hardly a typical southern town, and yet when Christine Barnes and I went to McCrory's five-and-dime, we passed two water fountains, one of them labeled with a hand-lettered cardboard sign. We had seen the Jim Crow sign for as long as we had been coming to the dime store, and we found it not exactly repulsivewe didn't have the consciousness for that-but in some way shabby. We didn't like it and we defied it. Many times Christine and I went to the "colored" water fountain and drank from it. Our act was a combination of scientific interest-calmly testing to see what would happen to us or to the five-and-dime if this curious division was breached-and a child's inborn antenna for the weak places in adult logic.

Tennessee in the early 1950s was a segregated state, although the mountainous, hardscrabble communities of Appalachia had never been conducive to the plantation and sharecropping systems, and many of the black citizens of Oak Ridge had migrated from the Deep South to labor in the secret bomb factories. Blacks in Oak Ridge during the war years discovered one of the most intentionally segregated communities in the country; Manhattan Project officials had set up the town's housing and even com mer-

cial districts to conform with prevailing racial customs of the region. By the late 1940s scientists and religious leaders had begun to object. Oak Ridge was to send white pastors to Selma with books for black churches, and to desegregate its pools, movie houses and restaurants more willingly, perhaps, than any other southern town. A group of white men in Oak Ridge guaranteed all their business to the first white barber to integrate his shop.

Black and white women created a day-care center and swim programs. But progressive Oak Ridge was layered over existing racist structures, and during the 1950s African-American citizens lived and went to elementary school in a segregated part of town.

It was in this unusual town, in a border state, in my parents' music cabinet, that I first discovered black gospel: a handful of recordings tucked among Charlie Parker's "Bird of Paradise," the operas Turandot and Der Rosenkavalier, and, surprisingly, a single of Rudy Vallee singing "As Time Goes By." My younger brothers and I had a small portable record player for listening to translucent orange records of "The Little Engine That Could" and the terrifying "Tale of the Grasshopper and the Ants." But after we had been trained to place the needle on the empty band at the beginning of a record, we were allowed to use the adult phonograph-quietly.

Sitting on the floor with my back against the cabinet, I listened over and over to several thick 78s, mostly of Mahalia Jackson (accompanied by Mildred Falls) rendering the slow poetry of "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," and the flattened sevenths of "If You See My Savior." These were the compositions of Thomas A. Dorsey-not Tommy Dorsey but the synthesizing genius first known as Georgia Tom, who superimposed blues tropes over religious hymns, migrated north to the steel mills, and began to create gospel blues at the Pilgrim Baptist Church of Chicago. Once I was a little older, I bstened to the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, to the 1929 recording of Blind Willie Johnson singing his eerie, strangled "Let Your Light Shine on Me," and to the mighty sound that came from Ira Tucker and the Dixie Hummingbirds.

I was listening, unawares, to recordings made in the wake of the success of the Mills Brothers-gospel songs arranged in jazz, boogie and blues styles that appealed to white as well as urban black audiences. Many years would pass before I found the independentlabel recordings of a more rural gospel tradition, of earlyDepression-era choirs, and of quartets from the black colleges singing "Get Right, Stay Right" and "I'm in a Strange Land."

Meanwhile, the few records I did know spun on the felt cushion of the record player in our living room, issuing the haunting, bent notes of the southern New World. As Mahalia went "sightseeing in Beulah," I sang with her, forgetting that my grandfather, a fine baritone, had declared, "Child, you cannot carry a tune in a basket. " No matter: Mahalia and I had feasted with the Rose of Sharon, had been on speaking tenns with the spirit. It was not only the words--each one a physical fact, each one opened up, entered into, and walked around in-but the majestic juice of the sound: the sweeping river of the woman's voice, bigger than any woman in our science town had ever allowed herself to sound, and the low, sweet solidity of the male voices. There was a moan at the center,

but even so, long after the record went tives traced the logic of their faith through This church is a place of back into its cardboard sleeve there was to its radically beautiful conclusions. And routine loveliness, an American gladness and buoyancy. It was a serious yet we understood in the early 1950s, sitplace whose respect for elders, sound, and it also jumped. This was more ting on a porch, going to a five-and-dime, than song, this was philosophy, for which singing in a Sunday school, that there exwhose gloved ushers and children are always on the alert-as they isted some line, ill-defined but strong, that afternoon collations, whose are for any evidence that adults are was not to be crossed. traditions' are all elements in a pleased to be alive.

Most of a century has passed since honed artistry that is itself a W.E.B. Du Bois named that line and called To try to explain fully why one loves form of sanctuary. what one does seems not only fruitless it the problem of the 20th century, but as but a little wrongheaded, on the order of the millennium arrives, the legacy of the dissection and with similar consecolor line is palpable in American life. One quences. "Who chose these hymns?" The of the times that line is still deeply inanswer, needless to say, was that the muscribed and observed is Sunday morning. sic had chosen me, and mercifully I was That hour on a porch in Alabama was yet too innocent to wonder whether I had decades in the past when, nearing 50 and any right to what was on that handful of having lived in New England for 20 years, 78s in my parents' music cabinet. By the I woke up one cold winter morning ready time I had grasped the irony of my rhapto heed an old intuition. sodizing to black gospel, and soon to the The Union Baptist Church, in CamDelta blues of Son House and Robert bridge, Massachusetts, sits between a Johnson, to the cri de coeur of Bessie U-Haul warehouse and a Shell service staSmith; by the time I understood that the tion. On Sundays its members may park in absence of some dignities that I took for the lot of a defunct nightclub across the granted was one provocation for African-American lyrics-by street. The church building is a handsome late-19th-century structure, shingle-clad, with a tower that was once struck by that time buses full of Freedom Riders were rolling south toward Anniston and Birmingham. lightning. The entrance doors are made of honey-colored wood But that was still a little in the future. I was perhaps eight the with a bas-relief cross on each panel. Inside, the congregation is summer in the early 1950s when I sat on Sunday afternoon with busy this morning getting children into their small red robes and relatives on a front porch in Alabama and saw a long line of black getting the four choirs of the Combined Choirs combined. folks coming down the dusty red shoulder of the road beating "Merry Christmas and welcome to Union!" calls a woman tambourines, shouting and singing in a celebration unlike any I bustling across the foyer. had ever witnessed in Atom City. "They've let out at Hurricane The sanctuary is up two flights of stairs, a great room with Baptist," my aunt Clara said. "Looks like somebody got saved rows of turned maple columns that support a wide mezzanine and this morning." I was ready to go to the road-to follow along or an organ loft. A rain forest of poinsettias stands on the altar, and to be closer, I didn't know-but my aunts said, Oh, no, that high in the chancel wall a diamond-shaped stained-glass window would be tacky, impolite, and not done. (Tackiness was, I knew, refracts the low winter sun into a beam of light. Over the length in a way worse than wickedness, which is rooted in original sin of the service (services at Union seem to fly but run to two-and-aand subject to forgiveness, because tackiness is something you half hours easily) the beam will slowly scan the room, surroundought to be able to avoid altogether.) "You stay right here on the ing one person after another in a violet nimbus. porch," they said.

The house is filled this morning: perhaps 400 people are in the Most, but not all, of my Alabama relatives spoke respectfully pews. I notice, of course, that 399 of us are chestnut- or chocoof their black neighbors, with whom they shared a God, speech late-brown, or the color of cafe au lait or toffee, or blue-black, or patterns, cuisine, Hurricane Creek, and the heat and wilting hu- ocher-brown-the great spectrum of hue we improbably collapse midity. At that time my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles into the single word "black"-and I am the shade that the were firmly embedded in the culture of segregation, but personJapanese call pink, that graphic designers specify as PMS 475, a ally, in that curious, oft-remarked doubleness of the South, they light beige improbably called "white." But I knew this would be were neighborly. They and their African-American neighbors so. And I confess that I, a lover of hats, am also noticing the hat had lived on adjacent lands for a long time, and their connection line. I am one of the few women present not wearing a great hat. was real: collard greens, peanuts, tools and sickbed courtesies Except for weddings, funerals and brief prayers in tiny, candle-lit were exchanged. A great-uncle did legal work gratis for his black chapels on Greek islands, this is my first morning inside a church neighbors, mostly routine matters; but once, his intervention with in three decades. Hat envy is not the first feeling the prodigal the court spared a man named Oscar Prince from an undeserved wants to have upon her return, but there it is. I could be wearing a and hideous fate. Over the course of their lives many of my relagreat hat too, I think-and without one I feel incompletely

widow I'll call Gladys Reed-through dressed. A woman nearby wears a ruddy turban with a single saffron plume that April and May, and in June of that year a heat wave settles over New England. moves gently in the air. A few rows ahead another woman is wearing a deep-red hat One sweltering Sunday the sanctuary is aflutter with paper fans donated by a lowith a wide brim. It looks sedate-until the cal funeral home-exactly the kind of wearer rises, revealing a small comet of fans that my great-aunts kept on their solid rhinestone on the underbrim. An elfront porches and in their parlors, printed derly woman wears a beret at the perfect in over-the-top Maxfield Parrish colors Parisian angle. Here are African wraps; a and stapled to flat wooden sticks that reMoroccan pillbox; hats with veils, netting semble giant tongue depressors. The serand beads; and a high-modernist hat that mon is under way, and the room is looks like the upswept roof of the terminal at Dulles Airport. growing warmer. As a young, whiteThe oldest women are the first gloved woman-officially, an "ushA number of years have passed since to extend a welcome, the first to erette"-passes our pew, Gladys Reed that December celebration, and I have had ask my name, where I live, cause to think in that great room about pantomimes that she requires a fan. The whether I am married, saying usherette whispers apologetically that more than hats. Everyone knows that the the fans have run out, whereupon Mrs. black church in America is a rock and a things like "Bless you, child, Reed fixes her with a look. It is swift and beacon, and others are far more steeped in come back and see us." momentary, and in another room it might its ways and history, more qualified to not even be noticed. But here, where elspeak of its nature, than a white woman ders are treasured, are attended, the younger woman fully abwhose beliefs do not rest within anyone system. But surely peosorbs its meaning: an elder wants a fan right this minute. ple of any faith or ancestry may feel the moral fire that has Scurrying, the usherette returns with an extra program that Mrs. moved in this church and others like it. And anyone may register the gravitas of its rooms. Anyone may notice that this church is a Reed might use in lieu of a fan. My seat mate barely glances at it, place of routine loveliness, an American place whose respect for dismissing the patently absurd idea of using a program as a fan. old and battered cardelders, whose gloved ushers and afternoon collations, whose tra- Next the top part of a fan is brought-an board lacking its wooden handle. Mrs. Reed sniffs, moving her dition of formal address and courtesy titles (Reverend, Deacon, hand in a minimalist gesture. Stricken, the usherette disappears.

Doctor, Brother and Sister), are all elements in a honed artistry-in the sheer comeliness of the community-that is it- Ten, 15 minutes pass, and the room grows warmer. And then the young woman reappears-out of breath, clearly having left the self a form of sanctuary.

The oldest women, the matriarchs of the church, are the first to church, driven many blocks to the funeral home, picked up new extend a welcome, the first to ask my name, where I live, whether fans, driven back, raced inside and upstairs to the sanctuary, and I am married. These women pat my hand, saying things like hurried down the aisle to present Mrs. Reed with the first from a stack of new, whole fans. Mrs. Reed accepts the fan with the "Bless you, child, come back and see us." I'm more pleased than I can say, not only to be so graciously received, but also to ob- faintest of nods.

This community of old-fashioned civilities is pastored by the serve a group of elderly women wielding their power to size Reverend Jeffrey L. Brown, a lean, brilliant man with a droll someone up. During the first months I attend this church, my pew neighbor is most often Doris Callender. ("Miss," she corrects me sense of humor and what one of his co-pastors calls an "on-fire when I say "Mrs. Callender"-''I'm Miss.") Miss Doris heart." Not yet 40, Brown was one of the founders of the Boston Callender is a small woman who often wears a blue felt hat and Ten Point Coalition, a group of progressive urban ministers always sits near a stained-glass window where, without eyewhose effect among our city's most disenfranchised young peoglasses, she follows Scripture in a tiny Bible printed in tiny ple has been so profound that the coalition's model is being transtype-a text that is to my younger eyes only a blur; lated to Tampa; Louisville; Philadelphia; Gary, Indiana; and Many mornings the message comes to me not only from the other urban centers. The Ten Point Coalition has caught the eye pulpit but also from Miss Callender, who has just turned 80. I of government policymakers, who are looking at the possibility know because a notice of her birthday offering of $80 was that faith-based institutions, specifically black churches, may printed in the bulletin. "One for every year the Lord has given have the know-how to renew the inner cities. And it has caught me," she told me. She is reserved but kindly, and one morning the eye of leaders in South Africa, Sri Lanka and Rio de Janeiro, discreetly slips me a tissue when she sees me dabbing my eyes. other places where children suffer from nihilism rooted in injusWhen I thank her, she whispers, "That's what we're here for, to tice, violence and poverty. Reverend Brown studied at Harvard, help each other," proposing an answer to life's most pressing but he learned to preach-we can be thankful-elsewhere, bequestion in nine soft words. ginning at the foot of some master in a hamlet of North Carolina.

I sit next to Miss Callender and another elderly woman-a (Continued on page 45)

Environmental Advocacy in Government and Business

lIThe Law Needs to be

Very Strict" -rwo

years ago, the Central Ground Authority was formed at the behest of the Supreme Court, after a public interest litigation (PIL) regarding water depletion and pollution was filed in the Court. Since then the organization, under the direction of Dr. D.K. Chadha, its chairman, has begun the enormous task of gathering the data necessary to undertake remedial action.

The problems are widespread and serious, says Chadha. "The first is the depletion of the groundwater sources in the country, because the demand is increasing and the surface water sources are fully committed. The second problem we are facing is the pollution problem. Because of industrial pollution, a lot of areas have been affected, and there is natural pollution also-high fluorides, high arsenic, high iron. We as a government authority are concerned with scientific investigations, then exploration, finding new sources of water, and then protecting the groundwater sources, also."

Increasing population, particularly in the cities, brings another challenge, he says. "The demand from the urban sector is increasing continuously. At present more than 50 percent of the water requirements are met with groundwater. More than 80 percent ofthe rural water supply is from groundwater. Also, more than 50

I Water

percent of the irrigation requirements are met with groundwater. At the start of the First Five Year Plan in India the irrigation potential created in groundwater was only 7.6 million hectares. This has increased at the end of the Eighth Five Year Plan period to 45 million hectares. Now the total irrigation potential which we have calculated is 65 million hectares. Forty-five million hectares are already utilized."

Different parts of the country have uneven utilization and different problems. In the canal-fed north there is trouble from waterlogging. On the coast there is influx of saline water into the aquifer. As Chadha says, "We have a country stretching from the desert area to the snow-covered mountains. The coastal area production is becoming another problem, because most of the industries have shifted to the coastal area and are utilizing the groundwater, with the result that even the good drinking water-potable, safe drinking water-is not available to the poor in cities there." It was the PIL about coastal pollution that brought about the creation of the Central Ground Water Authority. Chadha feels it was not a moment too soon. Assessing the situation now will help get safe water to people in the next century.

It is not the lack of water so much as geographic distribution, he says. "Water sources are plenty, but the cost to harness

them will be very heavy. India is a little different from other countries. When the Himalayas got lifted, a crust formed that filled up with water. Up to 2,500 meters it is full of water. But our southern states do not have that advantage. So this is the right time to start with conservation, with artificial recharging of the system, or whatever else is available." Artificial recharging is a method of restoring groundwater after it has been taken out by farmers or industries.

Another method is to utilize flood runoff and store it underground for later use. Such conservation is necessary, Chadha says, because "Distribution is not uniform. Many metropolitan areas are developing very fast. Delhi is one example.

Water level has gone down. Around the Delhi water area are brackish water pockets. One-fourth is freshwater, threefourths brackish." Delhi, luckily, has a floodplain because of the Yamuna River, which can aid in reclamation of monsoon water. But the plan faces a big obstacle.

"Here, also, the problem is pollution from drains. Most Delhi drains are channeled into the Yamuna itself and the water flow is not there to wash it off, so the Yamuna becomes polluted. We must prevent this and utilize the floodplain in rainy season to conserve groundwater."

Pollution laws must be enforced and

An Answer from Business Nazeeb Arif is secretary-general of the Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in Calcutta, which is the leading association of business and industry in the eastern region. The ICC has long been active in development there and has worked closely with state governments in promoting investment. Together with the Asian Development Bank, they initiated a major projectfor subregional economic cooperation which covers Bangladesh, Nepal, Eastern India and Bhutan.

In the past few years, the ICC has evolved a program to promote awareness in industry on the need to adopt better environment management practices.

They set up the Environment Management Centre (EMC) in 1998, through which they strive to provide information on clean technologies, processes, equipment and other related areas. They also bring in consultants to help in application and implementation of environmentally sound practices.

They have narrowed the information gap by hosting seminars and workshops, creating a computer database and website, setting up a Focus Environment Library and putting out Environment Watch, a newsletter to update managers on new environment management tools, issues and legislation. They plan to develop programs for direct action in specific industries and foster dialogue among industry, government, academia and nongovernment organizations.

A

s a leading Chamber, we have been concerned about the environmental challenges that have become significantly daunting, as we approach the new millennium. Characterized by low incomes, a large population and system inefficiencies, developing nations have been hard

pressed for resources that can be devoted to issues such as environment protection.

So what does a developing nation do to protect and preserve its environment? The response has been, more or less, to put in place regulations that control emissions, eftluent and the like. The focus has been more on "end of pipe" solutions which ensure that pollutants are reduced to some extent and we comply with a set of regulations. While this response to environmental protection is not without its benefits, we seem to have missed the big issue in the bargain. While compliance to regulations is necessary and imperative, it does not necessarily ensure that we are using resources efficiently. This implies that we have not looked at environment management as a tool to improve efficiency and reduce wastes, but more as a statutory duty, which needs to be, at best, tolerated.

Extending this concept, it is also apparent that less emphasis on environmental management is also leading to losing out on competitiveness in a world where increasing efficiency is the mantra for success.

The Indian Chamber's goal in setting up the Enviromnent Management Centre was focused primarily on the issue of promoting environment management as an important tool for enhancing efficiency and competitiveness of economic activity. Our mission is to help business and industry understand that environment is not just an issue about regulatory compliance. We believe that better management of the environment can actually add to the bottom lines of companies. The bigger picture is that if you are environmentally sound, you are reducing wastes, increasing efficiency and adding to competitiveness. In the process, you are creating a better ecosystem for the generations to come and helping development to be more sustainable. The ICC-EMC would

like to take environment out of the realm of intangibles, and show that further economic progress would require us to give far more importance to issues relating to better environment management. This importance has to be at par with that given to issues such as technological advancements, financial strategies or a nondiscriminatory multilateral trade framework.

We do not, for a moment, live in an illusion that the ICC-EMC will be able to provide all the solutions to resolve the problems in the environment. But we believe that we can make a difference. We have faith in our commitment that we will be able to help facilitate business and industry adopt practices which will contribute to the bigger mosaic. As a responsible corporate citizen, we are aware that these small drops of effort will help shape the ocean of development that we wish to shape and leave for future generations to reap benefits from.

In the short period since its inception, the ICC-EMC has been able to cover significant ground. ICC's commitment has been strengthened by the participation of a large number of industries which are taking stronger interest in the EMC. Initially, when we started this project, environment was still considered a low-priority area, and we hardly had enough companies participating in our programs. Today, there is a sea change, and we see a growing interest from corporations. We realize that there are miles to go.

However, we are confident that the ICC-EMC will be able to contribute, in whatever small way, toward greater corporate responsibility for environment protection and we will also be able to promote the fact that good environment means good business.

people educated about the seriousness of the situation, says Chadha: "The Supreme Court has already given guidelines that all effluent to be discharged should be treated up to a certain standard so that groundwater doesn't get polluted.

But, as you know, this really never happens on the ground. Many industries are still discharging untreated effluent. So the law needs to be very strict in handling such a situation. We have also found, in many areas, the industries are getting a certificate stating that their effluent is treated, but it is not so. The system needs to be further strengthened and take very strict measures against all this.

"Taking measures against private indus-

try is possible, but taking measures against private individuals is more difficult. So we are going for a lot of mass awareness programs, going to the common man with literature in the local language, just to make people understand how serious the problem is. Once they understand, we will be better able to protect our water." Part of this work, ideally, involves nongovernmental organizations. Says Chadha: "We work with NGOs, and we are making the information accessible to anyone who wants it. We are also trying to put all the information on the Internet so that anyone can download the information from the website." And there is a great deal of information. "We know everything about the

groundwater because we have 15,000 network stations in the country. We are monitoring those networks four times a year.

And then two times a year we do analysis of samples. We are interested that this data should get to the public and NGOs, and then they should react accordingly."

The Ground Water Authority wants to cooperate with NGOs, he says. "Working with NGOs becomes very important also because government machinery is limited.

It cannot go to all the areas and do it within the necessary time frame. So NGOs are most welcome for that ability, and their understanding of the subject.

Their involvement helps a lot."

Chadha says the Authority wants to spread the word about ways to protect the water supply. "Use the water, but recharge it also during the rainy season." And it offers advice on how to do this. "We found in India there are many private contractors who take their machinery, just drill and install a tubewell. They are not backed up by any technical organization, no technical man with them. They are illiterate people, most of them, and that is their trade. So we want to create a technical cell as well, so they can be advised on the designs of the tubewell so our underground system does not get destroyed."

Government commitment is strong, but there are many considerations that make the going slow. Water is a sensitive subject. "If you do something that affects agriculture, you cannot operate because the farm lobby is very strong. So slowly we have to make them understand the problems that come out of carelessness."

Chadha continues, "In places where toxins and effluent are discharged into rivers, when people take this water they are taking poison. When there is such a situation we must control it, and be determined. A lot of effort is required.

Because big industries can have a political influence, people are getting involved. They must work with industry and not leave it all to the government.

But people are helping now. This is very encouraging, that people on their own want the government to notify affected areas and stop the industry from polluting the groundwater."

D

sible situation because the waste dumping is happening at such a in the Calcutta and West Bengal area for a lot of reasons. When rate that they can't even keep up with the major problems." you add industrial pollution on top of arsenic contamination, of Managing waste is an art that must be mastered in India, and course, it makes it even worse. quickly, according to Nelson. But there are complications: "The other problem in Delhi and several other cities is high "Waste is being generated inside and outside of India, and the levels of pesticides. Those are at alarming levels. And those are dumping of both is happening in India. India is also importing in very shallow groundwater supplies where the average person hazardous waste, in many cases. But it is importing it not for dis- can hand-dig a well, put in a very simple tubewell and pull out posal, but for waste recovery. India imports lead batteries from the groundwater by hand on a daily basis. There are endless stoother countries in order to remove the lead from them, but that in ries throughout India, across all sectors, about smelly water, colturn will generate other waste problems that Indian industry is of- ored water, toxic-tasting water. And that's just from an intuition ten not geared to handle. I'll also say that there are varying efforts point of view, let alone the chemistry that comes along, done later on a state-by-state basis to construct hazardous waste landfills by the pollution control boards, that confirms in fact the levels of that are controlled, engineered and designed properly. And those pollution usually exceed by far the World Health Organization's efforts are everything from state-of-the-art, very aggressive, as in standards for drinking water. Yet millions of people drink this the case of Andhra Pradesh, to states that are yet to wake up to water. They literally have no choice." the seriousness of the problem."

What can be done? It is a question he is in the business of anThe United States is still battling its own swering for multinational corporations and environmental demons decades after protec-路 governments, but Nelson nevertheless calls it tion legislation was passed. Prominent in the a frustrating question. Open access to infor"Let me start out news during the past year were stories about mation is vital, he says. by describing mistakes new diseases arising from pig farm effluent "Part of the problem is institutional and part of it is technical. There are many excellent that is killing freshwater fish along the Eastern we've made in the Seaboard. Some of these problems are things scientists, engineers and researchers in India, U.S., and, by the way, that were not envisioned a decade ago. What but they are in different organizations, and you are making the same about places like India, which are just coming they have collected different kinds of inforto terms with the environmental impact of inmation.

Frequently, that information isn't mistakes that we've dustrial waste? shared. And some agencies are trying to reinmade. So let's learn vent the wheel. We did that in our country.

"Certainly, from a personal standpoint, from this." this is one thing that connects me to India. My That's a bureaucratic kind of thing. But given the nature of the emergency situation of firm worked with groundwater problems in the U.S. for a number of years, and we have groundwater contamination, India should act seen how bad it was and still is. Taking those lessons that we've in an emergency fashion to coordinate these agencies that have learned the hard way in the U.S.-lessons we continue to learnthis different information. applying them in other countries, that's attractive to me. It's a tie "For example, state pollution control boards have some sets of that binds. I'm that kind of person who didn't come to India to information. The Central Pollution Control Board does its own point my finger at people and say, 'You're making these mistakes.' studies. The Ministry of Environment has its own studies. The acaWhat I've done is say, 'Let me start out by describing mistakes demic institutions have their own studies. And you can go around we've made in the U.S., and, by the way, you are making the same on a state-by-state basis and find out about some of these studies. mistakes that we've made. So let's learn from this.' Water is a nat- Or you might ask if work has been done in such-and-such an area ural resource in all countries, and increasingly it will become a and they will say no, very little. But by happenstance you can find strategic national resource." somebody else a few days later who has spent five years on this problem and has lots of information. And that needs to be put into a Determining where to start is the first problem, and David national information system that is accessible."

Nelson advocates starting with the hardest environmental chalA great tool for change, Nelson believes, are the people themlenges. He also says that getting information out there, and to selves, who want and need information. everyone, is one of the most important initial steps.

"Even rural people who are contaminated know there is a prob"India has particular problems that are known in some sectors in India: by academia, by NGOs, by government agencies. These are lem. They may not be literate, they may not be able to read about it, the highest-risk kinds of contamination, and starting there is the they may not be able to understand what mercury in groundwater correct way to approach it. Start with what is the worst. We have means, but they know they don't feel well, and they know that they very serious problems here with certain heavy metals, such as cad- are getting sick. Although they are not the sector that is marching into pollution control boards and demanding copies of environmium and mercury. Those are very bad. And those are industrial pollutants. The other pollutant in Eastern India, which is naturally mental reports, there is an increasingly vocal nongovernmental occurring, is arsenic. Arsenic poisoning is well known in and public sector in India that is demanding environmental inforBangladesh and much of Calcutta, and the situation is worsening mation. Some agencies are very open with information, for

example, again, in Andhra Pradesh, where they have brought in NGOs as true partners in environmental improvement. But in other states they are very fearful ofNGO activity. Worldwide, the public is demanding a right to know about a variety of things, environment is just one. If the public is empowered, in an aboveboard and in a genuine way, my belief and experience is that they become true partners for environmental change and they are not the adversaries that they are perceived to be."

Nelson has great admiration for the work of some Indian NGOs, particularly their dedication in the face of daunting challenges.

"There are fantastic NGOs in India, world class. They are known outside of India. Shristi has done good things on medical waste. PUBLIC (People United for Better Living In Calcutta) has incredible success stories on a wide range of issues, not only environment, but other kinds of change. They are well-organized, well-respected by West Bengal authorities. The Centre for Environmental Education, which is throughout India and in Delhi and Bangalore, pulls together groups who need to be pulled together in the same room: the public, government, academia and industry. And there's an art to that. Then there are NGOs that are very activist, that alienate the other stakeholders. That just happens to be their style, and they have some very successful wins.

Greenpeace does that. They alienate particular constituents, but that's an avowed strategy.

"The NGOs in India have to be some of the most courageous, persistent and visionary NGOs in all the world, because they fight against almost impossible conditions, and they have to get out of bed every morning and fight the same fight, and they are doing that. That takes a lot, given the kinds of environmental conditions that India experiences. You move from one serious problem to the next. You can talk about the bad air, or the bad groundwater, or the bad drinking water. And it's not even chemical contamination, it's the garden variety diseases that so wrack India. It's malaria and dysentery. I was struck by this in Calcutta, being there for a month when we had very bad rains. It used to flood badly, but it's unusual that the streets of Calcutta flood now because the pumping system that they have developed is quite re-

markable. The city of Calcutta has done some remarkable things environmentally.

What struck me was that papers reported snakebite deaths, diarrhea deaths, and so these kinds of garden variety risks are still there. Yet the country is also well on its way to set itself up for long- term industrial contamination, against which funding will need to be put up and other solutions developed. The NGOs have to fight this on a day-to-day basis.

"One of the most impressive organizations I've worked with on this trip is the Indian Chamber of Commerce, in Calcutta.

Nazeeb Arif, the secretary-general, is a true visionary. He is remarkable in that he has developed an Environment Management Centre, in the Chamber, as a resource for its industrial members.

It has not been without wailing and gnashing of teeth; there are those in the Chamber who felt that the Chamber had no business in environmental matters, but he has slowly won their confidence. That is a seed of important change. And it shows what can be done when someone stands up and says this is what we are going to do. That particular Chamber has worked closely with Cll (Confederation of Indian Industry) and with FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) in developing programs India-wide with other Chambers of Commerce" (see page 16).

David Nelson has high hopes that industry will lead the way, pointing out that he is not alone in believing that if there is another environmental revolution, it will have to come from industry.

"This continuing adversarial relationship between the public and governments against industry is not good for economics. It's not good because it creates perceptions of corruption or perceptions of lack of cooperation. Often these are more than perceptions, it is reality. And industry has more resources. Big companies have a track record of innovation, their shareholders are demanding that they lead change, and governments are beginning to believe that industry can do things in a different way. And if industrialists are smart, they will understand that. Especially in a global economy, in an Internetted world, you just don't get to run and hide anymore with environmental mischief. Your disaster will be scanned into the Internet by the end of the day."

This is another important avenue of change, according to elson-the Information Highway. He is not an expert in it, but an enthusiastic proponent: he sees Internet as a great leveler in environmental matters because of the transparency it enables.

"I can speak for some of our multinational clients in the U.S. with whom we do work in the U.S. and internationally. The use of the Internet and transfer of information about their environmental operations in the U.S. and worldwide is of great interest and concern to them. The smart ones understand that it's a different world, and information technology will fundamentally change how American multinationals will be viewed. It can't happen anymore

for any company, in any country, to have an environmental disaster in a country and then make some corporate claim contrary to what actually took place. When the Canadian mining company Cambior lost a cyanide tailings dam in South America and made certain public statements about its effects, they were challenged on the Internet within hours by NGOs who went to the site and took pictures with their digital cameras and put them onto the Internet. It completely wiped out the public statement that the Canadian company made. And that's beginning to alter the behavior of multinational companies, no question about it.

"There is an Internet site that is Delhi-based called Corporate Watch. Corporate Watch helps its constituents-who are anyone who wants to go onto the site-investigate a wide range and growing number of multinational companies' corpprate and human rights behavior. It is putting this information on its public record as well as links to the company, and-of course, this would have to come from an Indian-based NGO-at the bottom of the page is a little icon that says 'Remember Bhopal.' And you can click on that and see freshly scanned pictures of victims in Bhopal who continue to suffer to this day. This NGO is making sure that isn't lost before the eyes of the world.

"Anybody in the world with access to the Internet can download from the USEPA the enforcement profile of any American company with the click of the mouse. So a company going to Ecuador had better understand that an Ecuadoran NGO can easily look at its track record in its host country."

The Basel convention and other standards of accountability are out there, and often talked about, but the question is, do they really have any effect? Nelson explains that new international environmental criteria have been developed by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva, but the standards are voluntary. Some governments-including the U.S. Governmentand NGOs are critical of these because they do not require compliance with laws, only a statement of good intentions.

"NGOs say that any time a multinational company puts up a flag and argues that it has become certified in some international accountability standard, unless it is looked at rigorously by an independent third party, it is a form of 'greenwashing,' to coin a phrase. In that sense there is some skepticism. However, there are some international standards, like the social accountability standard SA 8000, which is mostly aimed at the worker rights, child labor and exploitation of labor in developing countries, which is becoming the procurement standard now. So there's a growing movement whereby a large company will require of its suppliers that they become certified to a particular standard. When that web of influence spreads, then that's where industry begins to police itself. And that is definitely happening, no question about it. And, again, the Internet has something to do with that."

Nelson maintains it is in the interest of business to follow these guidelines, because they lose when employees are ill, or when shareholders desert them for inhumane business practices.

Addressing the problem effectively is more difficult where there are hundreds of millions of poor, illiterate people who are easily exploited. "The lowliest person working in a factory that is essen-

tially killing its employees is as concerned as anyone else in the world, literate or illiterate, but they can't do much about it. What the companies need to do, and more than the companies, the governments need to understand the social costs of environmental contamination in a broader sense, the social and the health costs.

"All too often industry-speaking with someone like me about how to improve-veers toward a technological fix, and they expense their technological fix in terms of their own realm of procurement. And I understand that. They want to know how much a wastewater treatment plant is going to cost. Even in the U.S. industry does that, and it's a common issue worldwide, and correctly so, for industry to find out what the cost of the fix is going to be. But the correct way to measure it is the cost of the absence of implementing that technology. That is a role that academia and the government can play and need to play, because the broader health costs of a spiraling contamination problem are much greater than we are able to understand, even now, even with the best science.

We are just putting a lot of people in the hospital. The workers themselves have short lives and short productivity in many factories here because of this diabolical circle of problems. That is not sustainable for very long. It will sustain higWy polluting, inefficient industries only until the inefficient industries have to change for economic reasons. What happens when they need to change to cleaner production, either to meet regulatory requirements or public requirements or, more importantly, global competitiveness?

And these industries don't have a set of workers who are highly skilled or who are protected. They have workers who are dropping dead, and who can't move with the technology, who are not longlived even in a management sense within the company. Then the real impact will hit, and hit hard. There will be people in India angry at me for saying that, but that's the way it is.

"There are large-scale economic incentives to change. If India does not respond to them, it will be left further behind in globalization of its industry. Large sectors of Indian industry are industrially inefficient, and they are the highest polluters. In order for them to compete, gain the economic incentives that they are becoming aware of, they need to produce something cleaner, that will be

more efficient for them. In terms of the local incentives, I would they will object to it, and they won't want it in their backyard-a suggest that in certain states where the NOOs are active, NOOs syndrome that is as alive and well in India as it is in the U.S. And and the public are providing the incentives." there was a day and a half of being fearful of the public, and then Dr. T. Chatterjee, member secretary for the pollution control Nelson says he has seen people in all the states he visited putting tremendous pressure on offending companies: "In some board in Andhra Pradesh, stood up and gave a very courageous cases, similar to other Asian countries where it has gotten so bad presentation about the siting of their hazardous waste landfill. He that the public has lost faith in corrupt enforcement agencies, the said we've approached this entirely differently, and the public is general public have taken things in their own hands and they a fair and equal shareholder, and NOOs sit at the decision-makhave shut the factories down. They have cut the telephone poles, ing table. And that is why we are able to site a hazardous waste lines of the power supply, or they dig the roads up, and they just landfill, because they are partners in the process. It is transparent, take the factory down." He cites an example in China where vil- everybody knows what's going on. I was very interested in his lagers got so fed up they dug a moat around a factory and put it presentation, as I think others were, because it's different than out of business. This touches on the primary incentive for what a lot of states have been able to do. change, beyond economics-the well-being of the people. But "In writing, Indian laws and regulations allow a public process. there are challenges, even for well-meaning In practice, that doesn't happen. It's largely an agencies. adversarial relationship between government "The other incentive to change is that and industry. There's no question that India "If the public is things are so bad. But the pollution control will end up with more of a public-private partempowered, in an boards are under-staffed. Many of them are nership on environmental matters, because it aboveboard and in a slowed down because they are too entrenched has to. The environment can galvanize the in the system that has become familiar, but it's public into saying we're going to do somegenuine way, my belief and thing different. It happened in Czechoslonot doing the job that needs to be done. It has experience is that they vakia, where this kind of distance directly led been my experience that the younger engibecome true partners for to the overthrow of the government. It hapneers and scientists coming into the pollution control boards are more aggressive; they tend pened in Poland and in other countries. I've environmental change to be the ones who have access to the Internet, even seen change from my earlier visit here and they are not the not through the desktop PC because they and now. Being here six months later and adversaries that they are don't have that kind of basic stuff at the ofworking with the NOOs and working with the fice. Rather, they go home at night, on their agencies," he says he has felt increasing tenperceived to be." own Internet account, on their own computer, sion in India about these issues with each visit, "but I've also worked with the pollution conat their own expense, and they search out technology or enforcement trends, and see trol boards and other government agencies, what's going on elsewhere in the world. They come back the next and feel that they understand that they have to have a different remorning with the understanding that things are different in other lationship. So we'll see what happens. countries and that things can be done here, too, in a different way.

"I also want to acknowledge there are cities that are trying to Or they find out that toxic pollution has a much greater cost at a make important changes. Many people in India wouldn't believe particular factory than they realize. So those kinds of changes are that Calcutta had made substantial progress in its hospital-waste happening. But those are self-generated, by courageous individumanagement programs, and yet my experience is, as a city, not as an institution but as a city-the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, als, on their own initiative, rather than a wider spread institutional, homogenized national plan. through the work of Asim Barman, who is a well-known comkind of "Having said that, I will say that after meeting with the missioner and a stand-up, 'we're-going-to-get-it-done' Environment Minister in Delhi, and what he said to us, it is clear guy, has passed very tough regulations geared at getting hospital he understands there are national institutional changes that are waste out of every hospital in Calcutta, shutting the incinerators not optional, they have to take place. The pollution control down and getting that waste out of the city. And he's done it. I've boards have to work together, and the academic institutions have seen it. He's absolutely done what other cities in India have been to share information, and this information has to be made accesunable to do. They are trying to solve the problem at the other end now. They have gathered the waste and now they are landfillsible to the public. The public is straining for the release of government -held environmental information. India is one of the few ing it. That's a problem, but they are working toward solving countries in the world I have seen that has such an adversarial re- that. But he's really sent a clear message to the health-care industry, and he's got them to buy into it." lationship with the public, generally speaking.

"Some states are very open, as in the case of Andhra Pradesh, Disposal of medical and other waste brings up the issue of comas I mentioned. At a recent hazardous waste conference, many panies outside India off-loading obsolete disposal technology with speakers stood up and said we are going to site a hazardous waste a convincing sales pitch. Nelson affirms this: "Yes. Western landfill but we want to keep the public out of it because we know salesmen are very active out here selling banned technology. It's

embarrassing. It's outrageous, it's scandalous, but it is definitely go- laboratories. There isn't a strong enough national laboratory certifiing on. Care should be taken. It's a warning that I have sung loudly cation program that insures the quality of environmental data that comes out of academic institutions, the pollution control boards, throughout Asia and in India as well, that as technology regulations become more strict in Western countries-and that's happening all and especially with industry. There is nothing wrong with industry over, not just in the U.S.-the engineers and proprietors of this old generating its own environmental data from its laboratories, but it should be data that can be trusted by the public and by the governstuff are very active out here. I call it industrial neo-colonialism.

And they are very good at it. They come out here, frequently with ment agencies. And that's a fundamental problem that India has the refrain that these poor, developing countries can't afford any- right now, and until it gets that program in place, there's still too thing other than this old kind of technology. And many of us who much suspicious data out there that has lost its credibility from too many stakeholders, even within industry itself. are working in these countries, including the indigenous people, "Secondly, I think India could benefit by professionalizing entake the opposite view. They may have scarce funds, but they can ill afford older stuff that's going to give them problems five or ten vironmental managers in industry, especially through the development of a professional environmental auditing association. years from now. Investments need to be put up front into the correct This is something that has happened in the U.S. and has hapchoices. I've suggested the creation of a national environmental pened in the rest of the world. I've just finished writing a book on technology review committee, where environmental technologies are reviewed on a national level, comprised of partnerships from the environmental auditing, so I'm fairly up on this subject. The Central Pollution Control Board, the ministries, NGOs, academia book looks at the trends worldwide. India is behind in that. There and industry. Often industry itself gets picked on, and they are so are environmental auditors working in some companies like Tata and Steel Authority of India. They're very pushed by the public or by a government good. They know how important auditing is to agency for a quick resolution, in desperation "The broader health they will go out and buy outdated technology industry, because it gives industry a way to benchmark its progress. And if environmental without being able to properly evaluate it. And costs of a spiraling auditors become a professional society in it's bad if industry gets forced into that corner. contamination problem India, that's a way India can lead its own "There are too many companies from the are much greater than benchmarking and its own path forward.

West, and unfortunately from the U.S., who "The third thing that needs improvement is come out here with brochures that tout we are able to something I mentioned earlier: public access to USEPA-approved technology. In fact, USEPA understand, even now, environmental information. The public has the does not approve technology. That is an incoreven with the best right to know. I must say that I am stunned by rect statement, and it outrages the USEPA. how little the Internet is used in India. I will There is nothing anyone can do to stop that. make a strong statement here. After all my work What the literature could say is 'meets current in Asia, including China, I can say the Internet is USEPA standards,' and it behooves those who purchase the equipment to investigate the claims and verify the more used in China for environmental reasons than it is here for the references. They can call EPA. They can search it out on the transfer of information, the gathering of technologies, commenting Internet. There are ways to do this. I don't want to give the im- publicly-I was taken aback by that on my first visit. I figured that India would be one of the most wired countries on the Internet, espression that all these technologies from the West are bad. There pecially environmentally, and it is not. A lot of that is largely due to are superb technologies. Therein lies the conundrum. The good the telecom industry and its rules and regulations. It has more to do technologies have a special competition with the bad technolowith the state of the infrastructure than a lack of willingness to get gies, because they are both saying the same thing. The bad technologies say, 'Oh, we can meet your standards, this is so on the Internet. It is quite the opposite. The pollution control boards wonderful. This is so inexpensive.' And the good technology peo- don't have access to it, and it's sad that people at the pollution control boards with whom I worked have asked me questions, which ple are saying this will meet your standards, too, and sometimes are 20-year-old questions, and the answers are so readily available it's more expensive, but not always. But it's difficult for the buyer by the click of a mouse on USEPA or another agency's website. to know who is telling the truth in these matters."

David Nelson is concerned about India, about every place he And they don't have the equipment on their desks to access that. It's visits and the organizations that ask him for advice. His sense of sad, in that they could be implementing rapid change through the Internet if they could just have a little bit of access to that. The responsibility is global, because he has seen the global outreach of critical environmental pollution. After his detailed, on-site pipeline just isn't big enough.

"When that demand is met, a tidal wave of environmental view of the India picture, he has a number of recommendations: "There are three things that I have observed and tried to emphaInternet that's coming, that's sitting out in the Bay of Bengal, is size to those in India who have asked my opinion on how change just going to sweep over India. Once that's unleashed and the can come about and what needs to be changed. There are really NGOs, the public, the academics and the pollution control boards three necessary underpinnings that I've seen that can be fortified. have access to the information, there is going to be real movement toward change."

-L.T. One is the strengthening of the analytical institutions: the chemical

the n shadow of Washington's Olympic Mountains, Elwha Dam sits, mossy and ponderous, its stairstep foundation deeply pitted by erosion. Finished in 1912 and already rebuilt by 1914, after it collapsed, the structure looks much older and yet, somehow modem. It's a jungle ruin with Machine Age appendages: giant penstocks feeding into a powerhouse, electrical wires crackling in the drizzle.

Pacing atop the dam, Buck Adarnire, a big man in dungarees and a lumberjack plaid shirt, talks distractedly about the history of the place, pointing out features both bygone and extant. "Over there was the old hatchery building," he says, indicating an overgrown hillside, "and there used to be a bridge right up there."

Stopping to hook a hand through the chain link, Adarnire suddenly peers down into the river as it reforms below us. Catch the light just right, he tells me, and you can make out some fish. Sure enough, there they are: a few shadowy formschinook salmon and steelhead trout-

I

home from sea and nosing around at this dead end just eight kilometers upstream from where the river, flowing green and milky with glacial flour, enters the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

It's a scene that has repeated itself, albeit in diminishing numbers, every year since the dam was built. Contrary to the laws of that time, the structure did not include fish passage. Hatchery programs have managed to keep harvestable numbers of some fish in the river, but the remaining stocks-both wild and artificially propagated-are in steady decline. The few fish below' us are a mere remnant of the river's former bounty. Whereas an estimated 380,000 adult salmon and steelhead annually returned to the Elwha before any dam was built, today that number has fallen below 3,000.

While not among the West's storied rivers, the pre-dam Elwha did have its claims to fame. The river was once host to all 10 of the Pacific Northwest's native anadromous salmon and trout species-

that is, fish that spawn and are reared in fresh water but spend most of their hie in the ocean. It also boasted the largest salmon on record: legendary 100-pound chinooks.

Today, salmon that size are unheard of here, and at least two native Elwha salmon runs are extinct. According to Pat Crain, fisheries manager for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, others may soon follow.

"We're in a race against time with chinook.

We're in a race with time with chum. And we lost with pink salmon," he says grimly.

"Last year we counted 50 in the river. In 1977, there were 50,000."

The Elwha is not alone in defeat. One hundred and six native salmon and trout stocks in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho are now extinct. Another 214 are at risk of vanishing. While the causes of the dechne vary, dams rank high on the list of contributing factors. That realization has helped drive the decision, pending government funding, to "restore" the Elwha by removing lOs-foot-high Elwha Dam and its upstream counterpart, 210-

foot Glines Canyon Dam. It's a proposal that Buck Adamire, former president of a group called Rescue Elwha Area Lakes, or REAL, fought against for years. A logger by trade and a trapper by avocation, Adamire's resistance to removal of the dams has complex roots, including a genuine affection for the reservoirs. Looking out across the emerald reflection of Lake Aldwell, he says simply, "I love it." Adamire has lately relented, however. "If the dams have got to go," he says, tugging a loose-fitting ball cap down over

his thinning hair, "then O.K., let's do it.

Let's get fish back in the upper river. But I'm through with all the controversy."

Of course, the idea of removing dams is nothing if not controversial. Only recently has the notion been discussed outside those environmentalist en craves so often consigned to the "lunatic fringe." For many, no matter what their views, the mere mention of it calls to mind Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, its merry band of saboteurs hell-bent on blowing up Arizona's 710-foot-tall Glen Canyon Dam.

Buck Adamire fought for years to keep the reservoirs, but is willing to see them removed if it means fish will return to the upper stretches of the riVe!:

Edwards Dam, on the Kennebec River in Maine, is to be demolished.

So, when Congress held a joint hearing in 1997 to consider a proposal by the Sierra Club and the Glen Canyon Institute to pull the plug on that very dam, the news spread like floodwaters.

Not that Congress was keen on the idea.

To the contrary, many of the legislators who spoke at the hearing did not conceal their contempt.

Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado declared the notion a "certifiable nut idea," while Representative Chris Cannon of Utah likened it to removing the Statue of Liberty and reclaiming Liberty Island. But in a New York Times oped piece, a senior vice president of the National Audubon Society, Daniel Beard, declared the event momentous nonetheless.

"There was no mistaking the intent of the hearing," he wrote. ''The Western lawmakers on the panel wanted to use the forum to embarrass those who support restoration of the canyon ....But by holding the hearing in

Seen through the rock canyon sculpted by water over millennia, Arizona:S Glen Canyon Dam holds back the waters of Lake Powell. The towers to the left carl}' power transmission lines.

the first place, the panel gave legitimacy to the option of removing dams because it tacitly admitted that dams are not permanent fixtures of the landscape. They are there because we made a political decision to build them. And they won't last forever."

Considering that Beard was a recent commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Reclamation-the agency that built and operates Glen Canyon Dam-the statement was nothing short of revolutionary.

Indeed, even as China endeavors to build the world's largest dam on the Yangtze River, there are indications that the United States may be moving in the

opposite direction. There is little argument that the age of big dam projects in America is over. The best sites have already been developed and the handful of new proposals under serious consideration face significant roadblocks, from high costs to strict environmental laws. At the same time, a number of sizable dams are being considered for removal, and many small ones have already come out. In August 1996, a controversial dam on the Clyde River in Vermont was dynamited after a spring freshet washed out an embankment. Quaker Neck Dam, on the Neuse River in North Carolina, was re-

moved in December 1997 after blocking the passage of striped bass, shad and other migratory fish for nearly half a century.

And finding that removal could be onethird to one-fifth the cost of repairing obsolete dams, Wisconsin has quietly pulled a number of aging structures from the state's rivers for economic as well as environmental and safety reasons.

Certainly, the latter is a looming concern. A quarter of the dams in the U.S. are at least 50 years old, and many are in dire need of repair. Nearly one in ten of America's dams are rated as high-hazard, meaning failure would likely result in loss of life. Elwha Dam is one such structure, and like many dams, it leaks. As much as 450 gallons of water per second bubbles up from the patchwork foundation, a reminder of the catastrophic breach that emptied the reservoir on Halloween night 1912.

Beatrice Charles is recalling stories handed down from the long-ago disaster at her home near the river's mouth. An elder in the Lower Elwha band of the Klallam Tribe, Aunty Bea, as she is known on the reservation, sits in front of a pink-curtained window looking out upon the broad green V of the Elwha Valley and the craggy Olympic peaks beyond. "Nobody warned the Indians that the water was coming," she says with hardly a trace of bitterness.

Alarmed by the sound of snapping tree trunks, her family simply fled to high ground. Miraculously, no one was killed.

"In the morning," she says, laughing a little, "they were pulling chickens out of the trees."

As unorthodox as it sounds now, Elwha Dam was not built upon bedrock, so the river was able to channel under the dam's bottom, eventually blowing out the foundation to a depth of 80 feet. By one account, the reservoir, which had taken two weeks to fill, took just two hours to empty.

The dam has been deemed safe by government inspectors, even though the leaks are plainly visible. Pointing to a boil of water at the base of the dam, Adarnire says, (Continued on page 39)

HORMONE MIMICS THEY'RE IN OUR FOOD; SHOULD WE WORRY? Mounting evidence suggests endocrine disrupters may upset normal physiological processes.

Products of combustion, these chemicals pass into soil, water and air. Some have been banned in the U.S. Others lurk in things as innocuous-seeming as plastic food wrap.

Consumers Reports offers its analysis.

There has been a scattering of disturbing news reports in the last year or so about abnormalities in animals~male fish with female sex organs, for instance, and frogs with extra legs. In their search for a cause, scientists are focusing on a class of chemicals called endocrine disrupters. Such chemicals seem to interfere with or mimic the action of hormones and thus may upset the normal growth, behavior and reproduction of wildlife.

If these compounds are harming animals, scientists ask, are they harming people, too? Some researchers have concluded that they might be.

In the past two years, dozens of conferences have focused on the effects of endocrine disrupters. The debate will only get louder with the release of the National Academy of Sciences' longawaited report on endocrine disrupters. Congress has already mandated that the Environmental Protection Agency present recommendations for screening tens of thousands of chemicals for endocrine-disruptive activity and limiting human exposure to those that pose a problem. More than a dozen federal agencies and institutes are planning nearly 400 research projects on endocrine disrupters. The chemical industry is funding studies, too.

Are endocrine disrupters something to worry about or just another false alarm, like those warnings about a killer asteroid?

Here's what scientists know so far, plus our tests of two types of product in which suspected endocrine disrupters are apt to hide~plastic wraps and baby foods.

The ABCs of IDs Some endocrine disrupters, such as dioxins, PCBs and various relatives of DDT, are already infamous for the other problems they've created. PCBs and DDT were banned in the U.S. in the 1970s, but dioxins are still being released~they're by-products of combustion and other processes. All these compounds persist at low levels virtually everywhere~in air, water and soil. From there, they can enter the food chain, working their way into animals and, eventually, people. They accumulate in fatty tissue, from which they are released very slowly. Other hormone mimics, less well known, are found in some plastics.

To understand how these chemicals work their mischief, it helps to know a bit about the endocrine system, which has the same basic function in animals and humans. It's a complex network of glands (the thyroid, the ovaries or testes and others) and organ tissues (the intestines) that secrete hormones. Hormones act as chemical messengers, traveling through the bloodstream to affect growth, metabolism, reproduction and other functions elsewhere in the body.

The endocrine system is finely tuned through delicate checks and balances. Disrupters can throw off the system by sending the wrong signals or blocking the right signals. The effect is often temporary in adults, whose systems are fully developed and fairly stable. Babies and small children are more vulnerable. And there can be permanent effects on a fetus, whose normal development requires certain amounts of hormones at precise times.

Change the amount or the timing, and the individual may suffer problems in behavior, immune function, neurological development or gender development.

As a link between endocrine disrupters and humans is being debated, evidence of a connection between disrupters and animals is mounting.

Copyright 1998 by Consumers Union of U.s., Inc., Yonkers, NY 10703-1057.

Reprinted by permission from Consumers Reports, June 1998.

Animal Evidence Here are some of the bizarre things that have happened to animals: â&#x20AC;˘ In a 1981 laboratory study done at the University of California, Davis, male gulls with a feminized reproductive tract emerged from eggs exposed to levels ofDDT and other synthetic chemicals similar to levels found in the wild. Similar genderbending oddities are today being found in terns off Massachusetts and are likely due, researchers say, to as-yetunidentified pollutants. â&#x20AC;˘ In 1992, 12 years after the DDT relative dicofol spilled into Florida's Lake Apopka, testosterone levels in the lake's male alligators were just one-quarter to one-half their normal level, and the alligators had shrunken genitals, according to a research team led by Louis Guillette, a University of Florida zoologist.

What's more, the lake's female alligators had higher-than-average estrogen levels.

"Their eggs were weird looking," says Guillette, "and they didn't hatch, or the young died within the first two weeks."

Guillette's team has found a new abnormality in alligators from lakes Apopka and Okeechobee-an alteration in thyroid hormones, which are linked to growth and metabolism. Guillette considers the findings important because scientists think of alligators as a "sentinel" species: Their health reflects the health of their ecosystem. â&#x20AC;˘ In 1995, schoolchildren in nature-studies class discovered frogs with five legs and other deformities in a pond near Henderson, Minnesota. Because frogs are another sentinel species, scientists around the country took notice. Subsequent searches turned up frogs with extra or missing legs and grossly deformed webbing elsewhere in Minnesota and in several other states. In Anacortes, Washington, a frog had an eye sprouting from behind its front leg.

Endocrine-disrupting pesticides may be the culprit-or, as some researchers have suggested, the defects might have resulted from exposure to excessive amounts of retinoids, vitamin Alike chemicals that might have come from a natural source like plants in the lake.

Of Mice-and

Men?

Given the similarities between animal and human endocrine systems, it's tempting to think that what seems to be harming animals may harm people. "We have to bite the bullet," says Ana Soto, associate professor in cellular biology at the Tufts University School of Medicine. "Whatever we're finding in animals, I think we have to assume that it's

very relevant to what is going on in humans."

Others are much more skeptical. "I'm not saying let's dismiss everything," Texas A&M toxicologist Stephen Safe told our reporter. ''I'm saying, hey, let's back up. The evidence isn't there.

Should we do more work? Sure, but let's not go bananas."

Indeed, there's no proof yet that routine exposure to these chemicals is disrupting the human endocrine system. And conclusive proof may not come. Because people aren't lab rats, researchers may never be able to rule out other possible explanations for any effects they observe. But researchers must keep asking questions. Among them: Do endocrine disrupters affect intelligence? When we spoke to scientists and others who believe chemicals are disrupting the human endocrine system, they often cited the work of Joseph and Sandra Jacobson, psychologists at Wayne State University. The Jacobsons have been tracking the developmental and intellectual performance of children whose mothers regularly consumed Lake Michigan fish before and during pregnancy. Those fish contain elevated levels of PCBs and other contaminants.

In September 1996, the Jacobsons reported that the children offish-eaters showed persistent, measurable intellectual impairment.

This finding was highlighted in Our Stolen Future, the 1996 best-seller that helped kick off public interest in endocrine disruption. But Joseph Jacobson has drawn no conclusion about what particular mechanism might have caused the impairment. In an interview, he called the idea that PCBs disrupted hormone function in the brain before birth "pure speculation." Early brain development, he said, is "such a complex process, and so many things could go wrong, that we just don't have any basis for concluding that it's endocrine related."

Do endocrine disrupters cause genital birth defects?

Quite possibly, say researchers at the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They reported in November 1997 that hypospadias, a birth defect in males in which the urinary opening is mislocated-on the underside of the penis or even on the scrotum-doubled between 1968 and 1993, and now afflicts nearly 1 of 100 newborn boys nationwide. "That makes it the most common specific type of birth defect among males," says lead researcher Len Paulozzi. The defect is thought to result from an inadequate surge ofthe male hormone testosterone between nine and 12 weeks after conception. "As you block the fetus's own testosterone, the fetus cannot masculinize itself," Paulozzi explains, "and you wind up getting these various states of feminization of the fetus, of which hypospadias is a mild form."

Suspected causes include a fungicide and DDE, a breakdown product of DDT. Also possible, Paulozzi says, is that doctors have simply become better trained at recog-

nizing and reporting less severe forms of the defect.

Do endocrine disrupters cause prostate problems?

Frederick vom Saal, of the University of Missouri, Columbia, exposed mouse fetuses to tiny doses of the estrogen-like chemical bisphenol A, found in plastic dental sealants and food-can linings. The mice that emerged had enlarged prostates overburdened with receptors for testosterone as well as testes that produced fewer sperm than usual. Based on these studies, vom Saal hypothesizes that a corresponding overload in men could lead to increased vulnerability to prostate enlargement and perhaps to a decline in sperm count.

Do endocrine disrupters lower sperm counts? In 1992, Danish endocrinologist Niels Skakkebaek determined that sperm counts had declined by 50 percent worldwide from 1938 to 1990. He later suggested that PCBs and pesticides, including DDT, may have been the cause. But sperm counts are not down everywhere, said Harry Fisch of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1996. They varied greatly in different areas, and hadn't declined at all in 25 years in the three U.S. cities he analyzed. Yet when Shanna Swan of the California Department of Health Services recently reanalyzed Skakkebaek's data, adjusting for regional variations including the type Fisch had found, she discovered an even steeper global decline.

Of all the explanations offered so far, Swan says, endocrine disruption seems the "most coherent and best supported by animal data." Over the next few years, Swan, with researchers in Europe and Africa, will be analyzing regional differences in semen quality. They will compare the sperm count of fathers-tobe with their level of sex hormones, steroids and the time it took their wives to conceive, a sensitive mark"er of fertility. Stay tuned.

Do endocrine disrupters increase the risk of breast cancer? In 1995, British investigators reported that some plasticizers, called phthalates, acted as estrogens, enhancing the growth of breast-cancer cells in lab studies.

Two years earlier, Mary Wolff, a professor at New York City's Mount Sinai School of Medicine, had studied 58 women and found that the higher the levels of DDE in the blood, the greater a woman's risk of breast cancer. But follow-up studies failed to find such strong correlation. In 1997, Wolff teamed up with Harvard researchers to examine DDE and PCB levels in a larger sample of women. This time, she found no evidence that exposure to those chemicals increased the risk of breast cancer. Now a study has come out suggesting an association between PCBs and breast cancer-but only for women who have never lactated.

Wolff's reaction: "I don't know. Nature's never, never simple."

In Search of Better Data The conflicting reports may mean that these compounds don't harm people. More plausibly, they may mean that the scientific tools available are too crude to see any harm that's there. Indeed, the several studies that have looked for broad, populationwide

effects have a built-in limitation: Even people in remote locations, such as Canada's Baffin Island, harbor traces of PCBs, DDT and dioxins. There are no unexposed "controls" to help highlight the effects of exposure.

But research, especially on possible effects in humans, continues. Soto of Tufts is joining researchers at the University of Granada in Spain to develop precise ways to measure patients' blood and fat for total estrogens, including those originating outside the body, such as from chemical pesticides and plastics.

Her team is testing two groups of patients-boys with undescended testes and women with breast cancer-to see whether exposure to environmental estrogens correlates with birth defects or disease.

The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hope to begin clinical tests that would help them estimate how many Americans harbor traces of chemicals that could mimic hormones.

What's more, the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) is investing some $4 million to study endocrine disrupters. "We're taking this very seriously," says Jon Holtzman, CMA's vice president for communications. "When a plausible theory is proposed and consumers are depending on the safety of the products we produce, we can't walk away."

More work lies ahead-rigorous research on everything from how endocrine disrupters affect individual cells to whether they affect groups of people. Because science progresses by the slow accretion of innumerable facts, a tidy explanation is not likely anytime soon.

Recommendations Although research indicates that man-made chemicals may be causing problems in wildlife, at least in localized areas, it's too soon to tell whether hormone mimics pose health risks for people. But should we ignore warning signs and simply hope the news will eventually be good? It makes more sense for government, industry and individuals to take reasonable steps to limit exposure.

The EPA and industry should modify processes that release dioxins, for instance, and the FDA and industry should phase out the use of plasticizers suspected of causing endocrine problems.

Such a phaseout is certainly possible: Some plastic wraps already contain no plasticizers.

If in the face of all that is still uncertain, you want to reduce your ingestion of the suspect compounds, here are several lowcost strategies that may help: Consider using alternatives to pesticides and insecticides on lawn and pets. Wash fruits and vegetables thoroughly or, better yet, buy organic foods. Limit your ingestion of fatty foods (where the compounds can accumulate). Heed official advisories about fish contamination. And if you reheat food wrapped in plastic, make sure the wrap does not touch the food. The attitude that may serve us all best is one of prudent caution, not blissful ignorance.

D

Tracking the Indian Diaspora Contemporary Indian art is being appreciated more and more outside of India, partly due to the presence of Indian artists settled abroad. The author uses a recent exhibition of 26 artists from the subcontinent at the Queens Museum in New York, to assess the important contribution of the Indian diaspora. hen the art market was booming in the yen-drunk 1980s it seemed to have an appetite big enough for everything--even things that it couldn't quite identify. The moment for multiculturalism had apparently dawned.

But in less than a decade the yen has fallen, the market has dried up, and the multicultural tendency appears to be petering out. After the Pompidou Center's pivotal 1989 exhibition "Magiciens de la terre," Cheri Samba's paintings were briefly everywhere; do you recall seeing one lately? Once the market crashed, the brief burst of "Magiciens" -inspired tokenism abated. Western markets returned to protecting their own.

Still, the fact remains that many of the most interesting developments in contemporary art are happening outside of Western Europe and the United States, in what would be regarded by traditional modem ist criteria as off the beaten track. In Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, complex and subtle installation art characterizes energetic and spirited art scenes. On the periphery of Western Europe, in Estonia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia and other nations once part of the socialist East, neoconceptual sculpture and photography, video installation and perforn1ance art are thriving. In Senegal, Zaire, the Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe, contemporary modes of painting and sculpture vigorously engage

W

both the aesthetic and the social. Cuba, Columbia and Venezuela have lately emerged at the forefront of Latin American art. In these and other artistic centers in the previously colonized world influence from the West is felt but not slavishly pursued; artworks involve bidirectionality, addressing the cultural roots of the artist and his or her audience at home, while simultaneously engaging the international community through global issues.

In New York, unfortunately, evidence of this global ferment in the visual arts too rarely passes our way, and almost never in major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. So far, it's mostly been left to smaller museums to fill in the gaps. In 1997, for instance, the Asia Society presented "Traditions/ Tensions," an important exhibition of contemporary art from five Asian nations curated by Apinian Poshyananda.

Another, more recent, such exhibition was the Queens Museum's "Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora." Curated by the museum's director of exhibitions, Jane Farver, it brought together work by 26 artists of South Asian origin. The show included artists who live in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as others who live and work abroad. Interestingly, even the emigrant artists make work which comes largely from India culturally-theirs is a

diaspora community which still acutely feels cultural ties with the motherland.

"Out of India" was a truly exciting and beautiful exhibition which any New York art-lover would have felt honored to see.

While one must congratulate the Queens Museum for mounting the show, it's also necessary to ask why, 15 years after "Primitivism" and its discontents and 20 years after Edward Said's critique of "orientalist" attitudes, New York's bigger and better-known museums remain so hesitant to open their doors to contemporary art of non- Western nations. It's not enough to mount shows of historic, traditional art, as the Guggenheim has recently done with its China blockbuster. If we don't more fully engage the contemporary art of Asia, Africa and Latin America, we risk waking up one of these days to find that the art history of our time was happening elsewhere and we failed to notice.

Indian art since 1947 seems to fall into three stages. The generation of the Progressives, painters such as Syed Haider Raza and Maqbool Fida Husain, who were emerging and maturing in the I940s, has now become classical and was not represented in "Out of India," which focused on contemporary art. From the next great generation, mostly born in the 1940s and until very recently dominating Western shows of current Indian art, only two artists were included, Nalini Malani

Ravinder G. Reddy: Krishna Veni; 1997; polyester-resin fiberglass, gilt and paint; 19J

X

19J

X

J 88 ems.

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THE INDIAN DIASPORA continued

and Vivan Sundaram. Instead, the exhibition concentrated on the third phase, a younger generation of artists who have recently become prominent, most of them born in the 1950s and '60s.

As in "Traditionsffensions," much of the work in "Out of India" is installation art, a genre which, in the last decade, has become an intercultural visual language of historic importance. Installation art is suited to this role because it does not unambiguously proclaim any particular cultural hegemony. A generation or two ago, gestural abstraction (primarily Abstract Expressionism) and its successor, Color

Field painting, were globally available styles disseminated chiefly from New York. Their claim to global relevance was based on the metaphysical universals that were held to inform and support the paintings. As numerous scholars have pointed out, these styles were actively advanced during the Cold War period through a series of overseas exhibitions that were initiated by United States government agencies. While this policy was primarily aimed at Europe, it was secondarily directed toward Asia. In India it left an imprint on the work of the Progressives.

Somewhat later, a certain influence of

Color Field painting was felt in NeoTantric painting, the Indian abstract style named for its relationship to Hindu Tantric art of the 18th century.

The practice of gestural abstraction seems to have been one useful cultural instrument among others in newly independent India's drive to develop a sense of an expressive individual selfhood not based on religious tradition. However, in India and elsewhere it subsequently became clear that Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting were irrevocably associated with the formalism of Western hegemonists to whose advantage, ulti-

N.N. Rimzon: Far Away from One Hundred and Eight Feet; 1995; 108 terra-cotta pots, straw and ropes; dimensions variable.

Opposite page: Vivan Sundaram: House; 1996; handmade paper, steel, glass, wood, cement, water, oil, pigment, television; approx. 183 X 183 X 183 ems.

mately, a claim for universalism worked.

These were genres whose expressions of abstract order and depersonalized feeling fitted comfortably into the lobbies and offices of corporate headquarters. The style spread around the world in a manner that felt disconcertingly like the spread of multinational capitalism.

Installation art comes differently contextualized. Much of it is rooted in the ritual environments of cultures outside the industrialized West. Although installation art has sometimes involved Western artists adopting or appropriating cultural forms from the Third World, its cultural signature is often non-Western and nonmodern. It is natural for it to allude to the universal or the timeless not through emblems of abstract order but through invocations of a quasi-neolithjc substratum of peasant village culture that is still visible in much of the Third World.

It's no surprise, then, that installation as a medium has been more congenial to counter-hegemonic outsider statements

than to demonstrations of Western hegemony. In addition, the fact that installation art involves real objects from the artist's environment is of crucial importance. Each artist tends to incorporate into ms or her installations actual objects from the everyday level of ms or her cultural heritage, so the work remains rooted in the actual life-world of the community it came from, even wmle it may be addressing a wider audience.

Mdcentury abstract painting was based on an idea of internationalism that obliterated the details of the artist's personal background. This was a part of the point of its claim to universality: a viewer was not supposed to be able to determine, merely by loobng at the artwork, the nationality, race or gender of the artist. This concept of universality involved the assumption that all humans are really the same underneath superficial local differences.

Postmodern globalism is based on a recognition of differences rather than on an assumption of sameness. The artist today is supposed to honestly acknowledge ms or her heritage and background by incorporating them into the work; at the same time the work, wmle rooted in its local differences, is supposed to direct itself toward the world at large. The process is a reversal of colonial souvenirism: instead of members of one culture tabng things from another without comprehension of their meaning, members of each culture send tmngs to oth-

ers as expl ications of their meanings.

These observations are visually embodied in the "Out of India" installation House (1996) by Vivan Sundaram of New Delhi. Thjs artist, who lives with the special karma of being a nephew of the famous artist and cultural icon of modern India, Arnrita Sher-Gil (1913-41), began as a painter. In canvases such as Thinking about Themselves (1981), The Sher-Gil Family (1983-84) and Easel Painting (1989-90), Sundaram reflects on the mysteries of his own heritage through domestic scenes to which touches of magical realism lend an aura of haunting strangeness. His work of this genre (which was not represented in "Out of India") reached a plateau of maturity combinjng a broad pjctorial feeling with a deep sense of content; the pajntings draw one into a magjcal space whose hidden depths, paradoxically, seem to open out in all directions.

Then came the dawn of the era of multicultural installation, which seems to have been a liberating advent for Sundaram as for many artists worldwide. House is actually half of an installation called House/Boat: Sculptures in Paper, Steel, Glass and Video, in wmch one element, the "house," expresses the sedentary aspect of life and the other, the "boat," expresses a nomadic imperative that threatens it.

Simply put, House represents one's home or one's heritage, Boat, which was not included in the show, represents the forces that will draw one away from home and heritage into a broader world. House is an approximately six-foot cubical structure which one can lean into and inspect but not wholly enter. Built of a rusty metal frame, handmade, embossed paper walls and a glass ceiling, the hutlike piece contains various objects including a video monitor displaying flames seemingly heating a real bowl of water placed above it. In Sundaram's inspired use of materials, an extreme delicacy cohabits with a structural awkwardness to suggest the assembled fabric of India, a composite nation which still wonders if it will continue to hold together.

Rina Banerjee, who was born in Calcutta and lives now in Brooklyn, showed Home within a Harem (1997), a room installation related in theme to Sundaram's but pre-

sented from a woman's point of view.

Situated around a bed which was suspended off the floor were a number of sculptural assemblages representing female presences.

The installation combined silk sari cloths and powdered pigments, such as are used both for ritual and cosmetic purposes, with domestic detritus that included old light bulbs and fumiture stuffing. The diverse materials seemed to defy unifying categorization, yet they effectively evoked the lives of women and the duality of immigrant life.

Far Away from One Hundred and Eight Feet (1995) was an installation by N.N. Rimzon, who lives in Trivandrum. The work consisted of 108 rough terra-cotta vases standing in a row, with a length of handmade rope and a straw broom protruding from each vessel. The work refers to a traditional practice in the city of Pune of forcing Untouchables to carry a pot to spit in and to sweep up after themselves so as to leave no footprints; more broadly it refers to the general ambience of old-fashioned village life, which is to be inferred atmospherically, as it were, from the sheer repeated presence of the terra-cotta vases and ancient-looking earthy materials issuing from them. The work's broader, international reference lies in the installation genre itself, with its associations of nonverbal intercultural communication. This series of expanding contexts-specific location, region, international network-allows it to remain rooted in its own location while still reaching out to the rest of the world.

In addition to installations, "Out of India" was surprisingly rich in photography, a medium that has not been regarded as a signature of Indian art. The range of examples on view, however, was enormous, from the classic photojournalism of the 1930s and '40s by Homai Vyarawalla (based in the state of Gujarat, the 85-yearold Vyarawalla was India's first professional woman photographer) to the ironic variations on it by New Delhi's Satish Sharma in the last decade; from New Delhi's Dayanita Singh's photographs of wealthy and largely Westernized Indian families to the elegant conceptual project Album Pacifica (1997) by Mohini Chandra, who lives in London. While Vyarawalla's photographs of national lead-

Pablo Bartholomew:

South Asian Muslims Pray during Id at Corona Park, Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York; 1988; color photograph; 41 X 51 ems.

Nalini Malani: Control; 1993; watercolor on paper; 57 x 89 ems.

ers and political events such as Gandhi's funeral were involved with the formation of national identity, Sharma's tend to question that identity through somewhat ironic contextualizations of political posters and effigies of politicians. Singh's wealthy Indians viewed enfamille at self-conscious leisure open a new lens on the culture, depicting an Indianness that is both despiritualized and without pathos, displaying neither mystical exaltation nor social tragedy. Chandra traveled the path of the diaspora, seeking out family members from Fiji to the United States and collecting old family photographs from them; these are exhibited with their backs outward, showing not the pictures but the notations, such as names and dates and occasional re-

marks, which someone who cared added to them once. They simultaneously trace the dispersion of family members in the diaspara and the persistence of family feelings, with the nostalgic poignancy of the pressed flower from long ago.

Much of the work in the show, especially the photography, deals directly with the theme of diaspora. London resident Shaheen Merali's Going Native (1992) consists in part of slide projections of Indians adopting the ways of a new environment in England; the transition is seen as a perilous one, an act of daring self-abandonment that is metaphorically represented in a photograph of a young Indian boy standing, apparently frightened and hesitant, on the edge of a high-diving platform. Pablo

Vijay Kumar: India Portfolio; 1993; one of 18 photo-etchings; 30 x 41 ems.

Bartholomew, who lives in New Delhi, shows diaspora Indians not abandoning but clinging to their inherited ways in the haunting photograph South Asian Muslims Pray during Id at Corona Park, Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York (1988). Here, the global icon of the unisphere from the 1939 World's Fair presides over the nonWestern practice of prostration, implying at once the global scale of the Indian diaspora, the persistence of cultural conditioning among far-separated diasporic groups, and the traditional hollowness of Western pretensions toward globalism, as in the concept of a "world's" fair.

New York resident Zarina documents her own diaspora experience through nine etchings-collectively titled Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines (1997)-portraying the floor plans of the nine apartments she has lived in as she has moved from India to Thailand, Japan, Germany, France and the U.S. While straightforward in their autobiographical factuality and their avoidance of sentimental idealization of home, the floor plans radiate a melancholy that crystallizes the idea of diaspora-the idea of leaving a bit of yourself in each place, and taking away a bit of a new self.

Another of the broad themes that run through much of the work is concern over the Hindu nationalism that has been rising steadily in the wake of the riots that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid in

Ayodhya in 1992.

In the enlightened Indian art community there is understandable concern lest the nation's secular ideal be endangered. In one of the etchings III his India Portfolio (1993) Brooklyn resident Vijay Kumar transforms the New York Times coverage of the destruction of the mosque by superimposing etched images of death and interment. Atul Dodiya, who lives in Mumbai, depicts Gandhi's birthday celebration in Mumbai in his painting 2nd October (1993); the strangely ominous image refers to the fact that not only did much of Gandhi's activity take place there, but also the worst of the Ayodhyarelated riots. Mumbai resident Nalini Malani's disturbing watercolor depiction of unidentified scenes of struggle and violence in Control (1993) may also involve such a reference.

Still other works deal more directly with Indian tradition in itself. Ravinder G. Reddy, who teaches at the department of fine arts in Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, has penetrated a rich lode ofvisuality in Family (1997), his 3Y2-foothigh, polyester-resin fiberglass sculpture of a naked man, woman and child. The three smooth, curvaceous figures are deep blue. Associated with the deities Krishna and Kali, the blue skin color bears implications of traditional rural Hinduism, as does the domestic scene based on low-caste or Untouchable village life.

Simultaneously grandiose and cartoonish, Reddy's works elevate those at the bottom of the social hierarchy to "high art" status atop the cultural pyramid.

The watercolor miniatures of Pakistani-

born Shahzia Sikander, a Houston resident who was in 1997's Whitney Biennial, refer directly to the Moghul tradition and indirectly, perhaps, to recent uses of that tradition by Western artists such as Francesco Clemente. Uprooted Order Series 3, no. 1 (1997) demonstrates Sikander's virtuosity with a symbolic metalanguage that discombobulates Indian tradition at the same time that it pays homage to it. Female figures reminiscent of traditional Hindu temple sculptures of goddesses float enigmatically amid mandala-like shapes and floral foliage. While the internal elements of the work are, or could be, all Indian, the structural recombination of them suggests various Western tendencies from Surrealism to postmodern pastiche. Compact and delicate, the works have their way with Indian visual tradition without a sense of transgressive intervention.

Despite the persisting Western view of India as a backward society plagued by such practices as bride murder and widow burning, this exhibition revealed a contemporary art world that is socially progressive and enlightened, perhaps more so than ours. The fact, for example, that 14 of the 26 artists in the exhibition are women no doubt results from curatorial choice, but it also reflects the unusual openness of the Indian art world toward women artists, critics and curators. While this proportion would be unusual in a Western show, it apparently does not seem strange in context of contemporary Indian art. In an essay in the catalog, curator Jane Farver cites the assertion by Indian critic Geeta Kapoor that today on the subcontinent the icon of the male Modernist has been "stripped bare by the brides, even."

All the work in the exhibition, including work of the artists not mentioned in this brief recapitulation, was outstanding in quality, intelligence and thoughtfulness. Never pedantic, it nevertheless teaches; never reductive, it nevertheless analyzes. The strength and diversity of the Indian tradition seem to hold good, unbroken yet not rigid in confrontation with the rest of the world.

D About the Author: Thomas McEvilley, a well-known art critic, recently wrote Sculpture in the Age of Doubt.

Copyright © 1997 the New Yorker Collection Peter Steiner from Cartoonbank.com.

All rights reserved.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE You eM

(X) TWO

Drawing by Cole. Reprinted with permission from the Saturday Evening Post Society, a division of BFL and MS, Inc. © 1998.

YEARS

FOR ,AX FRAUD, OR CHOOSE: VJf-\AT~ BfHfN[) pG(R M.M8ER 3, \..

~l

u.JJiil

,J ,:~TIrl ~~~~ Drawing by Eric & Bill; © 1998 Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

"It is thornlike in appearance, but I need to order a battery of tests. " Copyright © 1998 the ew Yorker Collection Leo Cullum from Canoonbank.com. All rights reserved.

THE

BATTLE OF THE DAMS

continued from page 28

"You can see for yourself where it comes through. So, I guess for public safety reasons, if nothing else, it oughta come down."

For Aunty Bea, the reasons go deeper.

Able to laugh at the flood that nearly swept away her family, she waxes grave when the subject turns to the issue of declining salmon. "The salmon was our food," she says, with a righteousness that seems to inflate her small stature. 'The salmon was our culture. The salmon was our life."

On the Elwha River and elsewhere, the debate has focused mainly on the environmental consequences of dams. While dams have been touted in the name of water conservation and clean, renewable energy, environmentalists have long challenged the claim that dams are "green" technology. The deleterious ecological impacts of dams, they insist, have been profound. Rivers that once flowed according to the seasons are now regulated for human needs-namely, power, irrigation and flood control-causing unnatural fluctuations in water levels that confound many of the organisms adapted to the old rhythms. Additionally, reservoirs alter the thermal characteristics of rivers, with unpredictable consequences.

Solar-heated water taken from the tops of reservoirs or cold water drawn from deep below the surface may make dammed rivers less livable for some species and better for others. Dams also change the character of rivers by trapping sediments and debris that would otherwise flow freely downstream: charged with excess energy, sediment-poor rivers dig deeper channels or cut away at their banks. In turn, estuaries, beaches and wetlands shrink, altering the landscape and diminishing wildlife habitat.

Dam removal is not a black-and-white issue. Will Graf, a fluvial geomorphologist at Arizona State University, is not alone in hesitating to condemn dams. "To argue all of a sudden that all dams are bad is, I think, revisionist history," he says. Dams provide the country with 10 percent of its electricity and about 50 percent of its renewable energy. Graf, who is investigating the downstream impacts of high dams, thinks the

shift in attitudes toward dams reflects a larger social change in the United States in which development of natural resources is weighed against protection of the environment. As the nation looks for ways to balance those competing needs, "dam removal is simply a reasonable and feasible alternative," says Margaret Bowman, director of hydropower programs at American Rivers.

"Clearly, the dams that are the first to come down will be the ones that don't make sense anymore."

To many, Edwards Dam, on the Kennebec River in Maine, is a perfect example of such a dam. The 160-year-old, 30foot-tall, timber-and-concrete structure today generates only 0.1 percent of Maine's total power supply while blocking the river below the so-called head-of-tide, in the part of the river still subject to the ocean's diur-

mental and angling organizations that led the fight to decommission the dam. A slight, congenial man who some say deserves singular credit for the outcome of the Edwards case, Brooke has anchored his Boston Whaler below the dam and looks across the tail water. He disagrees that the water running beneath us is free.

"They're making a profit off our river while disregarding the effect they have on the resource. Is that the way we want to manage our rivers?"

The problem of who pays for the cost of removal is indeed a thorny one. Unlike nuclear power plants, whose operators are required to set aside funds to pay for decommissioning, dams were built on the assumption of permanence. Observers like Margaret Bowman worry that as dams become uneconomical, many owners may

Dam removal is not a black-and-white issue.

Dams provide the U.S. with 10 percent of its electricity and 50 percent of its renewable energy. This must be balanced against environmental protection. nal tug. Ten species of migratory fish, including alewife and shad, Atlantic salmon and snub-nosed sturgeon, are thus cut off from 27 kilometers of preferred spawning habitat. In light of these facts, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) , which oversees more than 2,600 nonfederal hydroelectric dams, denied a license for the continued operation of Edwards and ordered the structure removed. The decision marked the first time that the commission had taken such a step. "No dam owner has ever relinquished a productive hydro project willingly," explains Mark Isaacson, vice president of Edwards Manufacturing Company, which runs the dam. 'They're simply too valuable." He stands next to the powerhouse, the old turbines churning noisily inside. "And the reason is easy to understand: after the initial capital investment, the costs of operation are relatively low-three or four employees, simple upkeep, and the water flowing over the dam is free."

That's an attitude that irks Steve Brooke, project coordinator of the Kennebec Coalition, a group of environ-

simply walk away from the projects, leaving the public to deal with the problem.

"Deadbeat dams," she calls them.

On the Kennebec, a settlement was reached in May 1998 whereby other industries on the river agreed to put up the $7.5 million required for demolition of Edwards Dam and associated restoration measures in exchange for certain concessions. Owners of dams upstream, for instance, were granted a delay in installing fish passages.

For its part, Edwards Manufacturing, no longer saddled with removal costs, agreed to hand over the site to the state.

Whether that arrangement can serve as a model for resolving other such conflicts remains to be seen. The Elwha River, for example, presents a very different scenario. There, ostensibly to resolve a dispute between the U.S. Department of the Interior and FERC over the licensing of Glines Canyon Dam (located within Olympic National Park), Congress enacted legislation in 1992 to restore the Elwha ecosystem. When the Department of the Interior later endorsed removal of

both Elwha and Glines Canyon dams as its preferred alternative for restoration, many thought it was a fait accompli. As yet, however, not a single dollar has been made available for demolition.

Fearing that removal of the Elwha dams would set a dangerous precedent for the hydropower-dependent Northwest, Senator Slade Gorton of Washington has conditioned his support on guarantees that no dams on the Snake and Columbia river systems would be removed or significantly altered without congressional approval. As chairman of the Interior Appropriations subcommittee, Gorton is a key figure in the future of the Elwha dams.

A plan to restore Florida's Ocklawaha River, a I25-kilometer-Iong tributary to the St. Johns River, has become similarly politicized. Even though the late Governor Lawton Chiles and the Florida Cabinet (a board of top elected officials) voted unanimously in 1992 to remove Rodman Dam from the river, no money has been forthcoming. Some put the blame on State Senator George Kirkpatrick of Gainesville, who helped defeat an appropriations measure in March 1998 that would have set aside $5 million to initiate restoration. Part of the dam and reservoir are on U.S. Forest Service land, and the permit allowing that use expired on December 31, 1998. The dam operators will now be compelled to remove the dam unless the Forest Service issues another permit.

In the meantime, Kirkpatrick's colleagues passed a bill renaming the structure after him. Kirkpatrick (formerly Rodman) Dam has long known controversy. Activist MaIjorie Carr, founder of Florida Defenders of the Environment, first led the fight against it in the early 1960s. The dam and reservoir are a vestige of a proposed cross-state barge canal abandoned by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1977. And although today the dam serves no real function, the reservoir does boast decent bass fishing. "Of course, so does the river," notes David White at Florida Defenders of the Environment. To White, a lawyer with a background in wildlife biology, the 3,600-hectare reservoir is an abhorrence, "a weed-choked, declining ecosystem smack in the middle of a beautiful river." Touring the reservoir in his bass

boat, it's hard to argue with that assessment.

Here and there as we navigate the drowned river channel, rotting logs float like corpses amid the hydrilla. The trunks of dying cabbage palms and cypresses stand like so many listing power poles, the last holdouts of a moribund forest.

The river, by contrast, is teeming. All along the Ocklawaha's serpentine course, a profusion of trees drape the riverbanks.

Ash and elm commingle with palm and cypress, hammock gives way to floodplain forest. As we round each bend, turtles and alligators slide off logs, fish pop the surface. Anglers ply the tea-colored

Grand Canyon. One fact about the river, however, suggests an altogether different reality: dammed and diverted at more than 30 points, the Colorado no longer reaches the sea except in especially wet years. The rest of the time it ends as a few salty puddles evaporating in the Sonoran Desert, leaving the once-vast wetlands of the Colorado River delta to wither and die. For David Brower, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, that alone is reason enough to drain Lake Powell, the second-largest manmade lake in America. "Think of what that water could do for the area," he says wistfully. "And all you have to do is let it flow

Time would not appear to be on the side of salmon in Idaho, where the fish have to contend with eight federal dams on their way to and from the ocean. Endangered sockeye salmon are no longer able to make the trip to their spawning grounds. water. The bird life is rich and varied. At one point, White kills the engine and hands me the binoculars. "Swallow-tailed kite," he says proudly, pointing to the bird wheeling overhead. "Now that's the kind of critter we're protecting habitat for."

Not everyone sees the river and reservoir with the same eyes, however. Mike Murtha, a legislative aide to Senator Kirkpatrick, speaks of the reservoir as a beautiful place and a vibrant ecosystem.

For him, all the attention paid to a small Florida river is something of a mystery.

"Let's face it, we're not talking about the Yellowstone here," he says. "We're not even talking about the Suwannee. We're talking about the Ocklawaha." Still, he says he respects the positions of those with different views. "They had something they loved back in the 1960s and some bastards came and took it away from them. Well, now we have something that we love and some bastards are trying to take it away from us."

Three thousand two hundred kilometers away on the Colorado River, the same tensions-between reservoirs and rivers, managed ecosystem and wilderness-are at work. Say the words "raging river" and people will undoubtedly think of the Colorado, surging on its muddy course through the

downstream."

Viewed from space, 296-kilometerlong Lake Powell looks less like a lake than an object lesson in fractals, its myriad channels snaking up side canyons like so many watery dendrites. Up close, the visitor relies on facts and figures to get some idea of the immensity. The reservoir has more shoreline than the West Coast and took 17 years to fill. Glen Canyon Dam alone consists of 10 million tons of concrete. And yet, for all that, some insist the dam and Lake Powell were never needed.

The project was designed primarily to store water for the future development of the Upper Basin States- Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. Thirty-five years after its completion, only two "straws" draw off the reservoir, both in Arizona. One supplies the lakeside town of Page (pop. 8,500); the other goes to the Navajo Generating Station, a nearby coalfired plant. Meanwhile, critics eagerly point out, the lake loses roughly a 400,000 hectare-feet of water annually to evaporation and seepage into the surrounding sandstone. It's enough water to sustain Los Angeles for a year.

But whether it is possible to restore the delta-to say nothing of the Grand

Canyon and Glen Canyon-is a matter of contentious debate. To be sure, there is no shortage of questions. One is how to deal with the accumulated sediment behind the dam, much of which may be contaminated by heavy metals. More fundamentally, what is restoration, anyway?

For Dave Wegner, who spent 14 years studying the environmental impacts of Glen Canyon Dam, the answer to that last question is simple: "long-term ecological sustain ability." And, continues Wegner, "the easiest, most cost-efficient way to achieve that, if indeed you are serious about restoring our environment and our endangered species, is by decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam." To Larry Tarp, a Page resident since 1997 and president of Friends of Lake Powell, tearing down the dam is a prescription for economic and environmental disaster. To appreciate the economic effects, says Tarp, a retiree who keeps his 20-meter houseboat on the lake, all you have to do is consider the nearly three million visitors a year who come to Lake Powell for recreation. As for the environment, he says, returning a free-flowing river through the Grand Canyon would wreak havoc, killing or displacing species that have adapted to the regulated river, such as trout and bald eagles. "Has the lake changed Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon and the Southwest?" he asks. "The answer is yes, forever."

But hydrologists will tell you that time is ultimately on the side of the river.

Centuries hence, the reservoir will inevitably fill with silt and the river will flow over the dam. Do nothing, and Glen Canyon Dam will one day become Glen Canyon Falls. "And we all know that rivers level mountains," David Brower says, grinning at the thought.

Time would not appear to be on the side of salmon in Idaho, however, where the fish have to contend with eight federal dams on their way to and from the ocean.

No longer resembling the great rushing torrents they once were, the heavily exploited Columbia and Lower Snake rivers have been turned into a connected series of long, narrow lakes, stairstepping to the Pacific. And while the hydro-system has

turned the hills of Eastern Washington green, given the Northwest the cheapest electric rates in the country and allowed barge traffic to penetrate as far inland as Lewiston, Idaho, it has also pushed the salmon to the brink.

It is no small problem. Today, the government annually spends hundreds of millions of dollars attempting to rectify the situation. While upstream fish passage works reasonably well, juvenile salmon migrating downstream face a lethal gauntlet of turbines and some 650 kilometers of predator-filled slack water. In an attempt to mitigate those hazards, the Army Corps of Engineers has been barging and trucking salmon smolts downstream of Bonneville Dam, the last dam on the Columbia. Even with all the effort, returns have been dismal. Snake River chinook salmon and steelhead trout have recently been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act; sockeye salmon were listed as endangered in 1991. In 1994, only one mature sockeye salmon successfully made the 1,440-kilometer journey from the ocean to its natal spawning grounds in Redfish Lake. In 1995, none did.

Steve Pettit, a biologist and fish passage specialist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, remembers floating down the river the day they closed the gates on Lower Granite Dam, the uppermost obstruction on the Lower Snake, in 1975. "It was the saddest day of my life," he says. "I cried like a baby." Now he and many others hope to see the dams mothballed and the Lower Snake reopened, a decision that the National Marine Fisheries Service will have to face this year. Restoring the river is the surest and quickest way, Pettit maintains, to reach the two- to six-percent return rate (that is, two to six returning adults for every 100 juveniles migrating to the ocean) fisheries biologists agree is necessary for recovery.

Under barging, he notes, the return rate has been consistently less than one percent and as little as 0.2 percent.

If the debates are complex and heated, one thing is clear: no matter what the outcome on the Lower Snake, the Colorado or any other river, dams can no longer be taken for granted. Perhaps nowhere has

the fact been as clearly heralded as on the banks of the Kennebec when the Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, delivered a speech at the signing ceremony for the agreement on Edwards Dam. "This is not a call to remove all, most, or even many dams," the secretary said. "But this is a challenge to dam owners and operators to defend themselves-to demonstrate by hard facts that the continued operation of a dam is in the public interest, economically and environmentally."

Meanwhile, the dams on the Elwha continue to generate less than half the electricity needed to run a single Port Angeles pulp and paper mill, and the fate of the river's salmon hangs in the balance. By early August, the snowmelt is nearly gone and the temperature in the lower river, exacerbated by the heat-trapping reservoirs, has climbed to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Worried that a potentially lethal gill parasite of the genus Dermocystidium will proliferate in the warm water, state Department of Fish and Wildlife employees, aided by volunteers, gather each morning to haul fish out of the river and transfer them to the controlled conditions of the hatchery. It's a stopgap measure, according to volunteer Dick Goin.

A retired rnillworker and homegrown expert on salmon, Goin was a young boy when he moved to the area with his family in 1937, fleeing a drought in Iowa. He says his concern for the fish stems from simple gratitude: "Those salmon sustained us when I was a kid, and I guess I figure I owe it to them to keep 'em around." Now approaching 70, Goin reckons he still logs some 320 kilometers per year walking local rivers.

When asked what he thinks about the chances for the Elwha's restoration, Goin answers readily. "People ask me all the time what's wrong with our rivers and I always say to 'em, 'Show me a river.' Most of them have so many things wrong with 'em, see, it's hard to know where to start. But the Elwha's unique: it's only got one thing wrong with it." He pauses. "Remove the dams, and I don't see how it can't work." 0 About the Author: Patrick Joseph is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He contributes to Outside, Audubon and Smithsonian, among others.

II

HALLELUJAH, I'M A IUM"

They took to the road in jobless thousands to escape failure, seek work-or find a kind of freedom.

B

ob Logan's job was to furrow his family's cotton fields. One day Logan, 16 years old and with nothing but cotton and more cotton in sight, obeyed an impulse and jumped into an empty boxcar on a train passing through his Texas town. On the floor of the car, he found a piece of board, and cut this message into it: "Bob Logan Gone West." As the train got under way, he tossed the board out at a road crossing in the hope that someone would see it and tell his mother.

It was fitting: a message in a metaphorical bottle, from a man gone adrift. This was the spring of 1933 and all across the country, desperate young men were reaching for the grab irons of boxcars. For a time during the Great Depression, more than a million men entered the world of the American hobo.

There were thousands of boys, and some girls and women, too. They flipped An unknown hobo demonstrates how to ride two of the parallel truss rods underneath a boxcar. It could be made easier, at times, by laying a board across them. Either way, it was a dangerous perch.

freights, rode the rods, decked rattlers and ditched bulls.

Their dusty epic forms the final chapter to the story of that peculiarly American figure, the rail-hopping hobo.

He's part documented history, part legend, part clown. Americans prize success, so it might be tempting to write all hoboes off as losers who couldn't find a place in the national dream, simply another addition in the lexicon of America's outcasts, whom we know as bums and drifters, as vagrants and the homeless. Yet the ranks of hoboes and of railriding laborers during the lean years included such future notables as novelist Louis L'Amour, TV host Art Linkletter, oil billionaire H.L. Hunt, journalist Eric Sevareid and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, to name a few.

Whether celebrities or among the forgotten, old-time hoboes deserve our thanks as the men (and women) who cut the wheat in Nebraska and Kansas, raised railroad beds in Utah, felled timber in Washington, worked as roughnecks in Texas oil fields, picked fruit in California, built the raw towns, and moved on. They did it for very little pay,

at great danger to themselves and for virtually no recognition.

Much of the information that comes down to us about hoboes in casual reading is a caricature of the good and the bad, like the twin masks of joy and sorrow that symbolize the theater. In Preston Sturges's classic 1941 film Sullivan's Travels, a lightweight film director played by Joel McCrea suffers a brief but brutal experience as a hobo. Once again warm, safe and fed, he wistfully tells those gathered around him why laughter is so important: "Did you know that's all some people have?" And in fact it is the shoe-sole-flapping, dog-evading hobo that we laugh at, as portrayed in the old film comedies.

I'll show you the bees in the cigarette trees, And the soda waterfountain And the lemonade springs where the blue bird sings In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

While I don't rank myself as an exhobo, I did briefly ride the freights in Montana and western Canada in 1976 to see what it was like, and what I saw persuaded me out of many of these stereo-

Hoboes rarely rode atop cars; they were too exposed to weather and detection.

But on short stretches before the train picked up speed, they might risk it.

types. I was a 21-year-old, traveling with my two brothers and three friends. We encountered hoboes along the w~y who called themselves "fruit bums," after the harvests they worked. We saw the danger ofthe life; we huddled out ofthe mountain wind that whipped through the big doors and we gagged in a blue haze of diesel fumes trapped inside long tunnels. We enjoyed the panoramic view. Such travel is grimy; each day on the road left us coated with a fine brown dust from the boxcar floors, as if we had been bronzed en route.

Rail riding is not one of my finest achievements-it's against the law and I don't endorse it to my children-but those days made vivid memories.

Even with a little firsthand experience, I still had to jettison plenty of wrong notions during my months of digging into what it was really like to take the hobo road during the darkest years of the 1930s.

Depression-era men like Bob Logan spent months and even years on the road, looking not for the Big Rock Candy Mountains

but for just a decent job that would get them out of the jungle. Far from dissolute and depraved, these hoboes relied on courage and unimaginable fortitude to face danger, hardship and humiliation.

Most were just trying to get along and get by in the grim backdrop of a depressed economy. They used their wits to find work, stay one step ahead of the law and fight off the constant stabs of hunger.

The image of the hobo as a happy-golucky, fancy-free bum emerged long after hoboes first hit the rails. Rail-borne transient men first appeared on the American scene in the 1870s. They were footloose veterans of the Civil War, and they scratched a bare existence out of the shortterm labor market of the West. They also scared the breath out of many law-abiding citizens. It was all made possible by the growth of the railroads; by 1870, some 85,000 kilometers of track laced across the nation. This grew to 320,000 kilometers in 1890, and hit 368,000 kilometers by 1930. The railroads hauled cattle to Chicago, wheat to Eastern bakers and cereal makers, coal to feed the furnaces of Michigan's mighty River Rouge auto plant, and crude out ofthe East Texas oil patch.

Hoboes took to the rails the way itinerant rafts men took to the rivers before the Civil War and hitchhikers would take to the highways after World War II. The origin of the term "hobo" remains obscure and disputed; some say it's a corruption of homo bonus, Latin for good man. If so, most Americans had little tolerance of these good men, who looked to be ablebodied beggars living off the fat of the land. As the hobo ranks doubled and doubled again, when the economic panics of 1873 and 1893 threw hundreds of thousands out of regular jobs, the public's fear of these nameless, hollow-eyed men grew in proportion. And rightly so, as many gave up on finding work, becoming instead tramps and bums and yeggs, that is, those who traveled, those who didn't and those who preyed on the honest traveling laborers. A dean of the Yale Law School dismissed them all as "depraved savages"; short stories painted these men as symbols (Continued on page 50)

HYMNcontinued

frompage14

Brown is at ease penning op-ed pieces for the Boston Globe, leading a prayer protest in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, delivering a scholarly paper, negotiating a midnight peace with gang members, or visiting a Unitarian pulpit across town. In his own pulpit he can, as he puts it, "cut loose."

In America more black women than white are in the pulpit, although until recently most of them ministered to small congregations in storefront and home-based churches. Following traditions brought to America by Africans, women in mainstream black churches have considerable authority as worship leaders, prayer warriors and teachers. Officially, however, the major black Christian denominations have been as slow as their white counterparts to ordain women. Significantly, Jeffrey Brown shares the pulpit at Union Baptist with two distinguished women: the Reverend Dr. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, a scholar of African-American studies and the sociology of religion; and the Reverend Zina JacqueBell, a devoted teacher of biblical texts and a luminous innovator.

About this trio I feel what everyone else in the congregation must-lucky in the way we feel when, say, a couple of planets and a full moon make a rare conjunction in the evening sky. Each week the pulpit at Union is alive with story and exegesis of text, with cultural diagnosis and calls to action, with counsel for souls and flashing wit-all interwoven in the best tradition of black sacred oratory. "God's trombones," the author James Weldon Johnson called the men and women who inhabit the black pulpit. Lucid and subtle on the significance of Job's suffering, bracing on the nature of courage, passionate on the supreme importance of nurturing children, Jeffrey Brown usually manages to work into his remarks how fine someone looks-or how fine everyone looks-and the fact that Bible study is at 6:30 on Wednesday night.

This sanctuary is also a home to the sounds that have spoken to me from the beginning, that inexplicable alchemy of longing and joy. Here a middle-aged woman in sunglasses sings a bluesy version of "Can't Nobody Do Me Like Jesus" that could qualify as one of the proofs. Here the congregation stands each week to sing choruses of "Glad to be in the service, glad to be in the service, glad to be in the service one more time"-several hundred people on their feet giving every human indication of gladness. "God is good," an elderly man declares. "ALL the time!" responds a chorus. Here, as a pastor makes an especially nice point, a young man shouts, "Tell the world!" A woman in a trim business suit stands. "Teach!" she calls, in a penetrating voice that zings through the air and lands on the pulpit like a flower thrown to an opera star. The woman raises one arm and waves it slowly back and forth above her head. More women stand, and the air is full of graceful waving arms. Four men begin an antiphonal exchange with the preacher, elongating "well" into a two-syllable word that rises at the end like an encouraging question.

"There is one more thing ...," Reverend Brown says.

"Weh-ell?" the men say.

"The Christmas message came from someone inparticular. .."

"Weh-ell?"

"From someone who could not stay at the hotel..."

"Weh-ell ?"

Here pastors often begin in a whisper, and slowly, with the sermon as one text and the voices of the congregation another, build voice until the room is a sea of "Say that!," "Fix it! Fix it!, " and "Preach!" -a call-and-response tradition whose template must be the creative play and reciprocity of life itself. On any morning the air is rich in metaphor: living water, the tender hand that lifted me, friend and comforter, redeemer, mighty maker, the lamb, the lily, the love divine. And yet on many days Brown must stand back at last from the pulpit and shake his head, having arrived at the border of silence, a depth of feeling where no words may go.

Among the traditions of this church are the testimonials given before the official service begins. Every Sunday morning someone will stand up to give thanks because "He woke me up in my right mind this morning!" An octogenarian will rise to say ''I'm breathing today, I have a roof over my head, and I'm satisfied!"

Listening to the clarified voices of one church, I, too, remember to be glad that I woke up in my right mind, glad for the roof, glad for breath. How simple it is, but it is, of course, the shift, the turn, the conversion from a constant whine to the bass note of gratitude. The turn is not an easy one for anyone in this culture, which treats all its citizens to the cruel premise that there is no such thing as enough. It could not have been easy for these elders, who have had more reason than most Americans to doubt Providence. What a subtle thing is going on here: at the same time that this community is steadily helping its members to gain a fair share of the nation's goods, it is steadily infusing material reality with another idea of wealth altogether.

Like other black churches in America, this one is both an oasis and a center of community life: meals for the homeless, fashion shows, Kwanzaa celebrations, career-day fairs, scholarship awards, tribute dinners, lectures and the purely social gatherings that Union refers to as "having a good time in the Lord." Once, the membership would have come largely from the immediate neighborhood, but because many African-American families have migrated to the suburbs, members now return from all points on the metropolitan and socioeconomic maps.

One morning the theme from the pulpit is inclusion-meant to address cultural diversity within the black community: the Caribbean, Afro-Latin, Euro-African and African-American heritages represented in the congregation. Some of the things said: That we cannot be judging one another, for we don't know who might be an angel come into our midst. That cliques are forming in the church, and Reverend Brown does not like that. That the church is not the building, not the pastors, not the officials. The church is not the choirs, great and fine as they are. No, the church is love. And another thing-the pastor does not want to hear about anyone not coming to church because of not having the right thing to wear. He recalls being a small boy sent into church to secure a pew for the family, remembers rushing in without his coat, being stopped, and being told he could not come into church without a coat. "That brother didn't know if maybe I didn't own a coat," Brown fumes. "I will never forget that.

Couldn't come into the church because I didn't have a coat! As

long as I am pastor," he declares, "anybody can come in here in anything. If some raggedy person outside wants to come in, I'll go out and bring him in-personally set him down."

He means it, and the church describes itself as having "the widest doors in the city." This is a place that aspires to communitas, where society's distinctions are softened. So I, too, am welcomed. All visitors are warmly welcomed. But when it seems that I might become something more than an ephemeral visitor, a great tentativeness comes upon me. The church has long been black America's most precious institution, the institution that African-Americans control completely, a nurturing place of leaders, of artistry and mind-the place where a microcosm of sanity and goodness can be conjured. I can only imagine that many members must cherish one realm free of whites. ("Of white control," Reverend Brown later writes on a draft of this essay.)

Given history, and given the chosen apartness of many blacks in the post-civil-rights era, what the journalist Clarence Page has called the "social apartheid," does my presence diminish the creative refuge of this sanctuary? I don't yet know anyone in the congregation well enough to ask outright, and my smattering of African-American friends are either amused or appalled to learn that I am going to any church. Like me, these friends left organized religion long ago, and either are still getting over it or have taken refuge in the Buddha or in their art, spending many Sundays, as I have also done, in one of nature's cathedrals, or in what Wallace Stevens memorably called the "complacencies of the peignoir."

The dearest of these friends looks at me earnestly. "You want to know what the members of that church are thinking about you? They're thinking, 'Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood!'"

He holds his serious face a moment longer and then bursts out laughing. "I couldn't resist," he says. "Actually," he continues, now truly serious, "I have no idea what they're thinking. And you know better than to ask me that." He wags his finger at me.

"Why do you assume I'll know what other black folk are thinking? You need to realize that your church is very different from the one I grew up in. We were never hallelujah people, except for my aunt Ethel. I grew up just like you did, in a Presbyterian church. And we were quiet. We were God's frozen people."

"One more thing," he adds firmly. "Don't get any ideas about me coming with you."

Another friend also levels with me. "Don't hope for a welcome from everyone," she says. "But remember, your spiritual life isn't about other people's approval." She pauses. "Now, if you don't mind me asking, girl, why are you going?"

My reasons can be traced back very far, but as it happens, I began to attend this church named Union during the years when black and white Americans were beginning to say out loud that for all the gains we have made, we still do not know each other well, do not frequent each other's social worlds, and that the line may even be congealing again. In my life I have only rarely been in predominantly black gatherings, and almost never incidentally. Now, in Union's rooms, I am doing just a little of what African-Americans have done a good deal of for three centuries-sojourning in institutions dominated by another group,

adapting, becoming adept at style switching. Crossing the color line is different, of course, for the historical oppressor than for the historically oppressed, and though I gain a keener sense of how it feels, viscerally, to be radically in the minority and to lack insider knowledge, assuming this status voluntarily, for a few hours each week among people of good will, is hardly a parallel to black America's experience.

Less agile at the crossing than are members of this community, in the beginning I am also hyperaware, ever mindful to present a positive face of whitedom-a self-conscious, walking-oneggshells politesse that can make me clumsy. One morning, as I stand for a responsive reading, the hymnal in my hand grazes the head of an elderly man in the pew in front. Holy moley, I have hit an elderly black man on the head with a hymnal! I lean down to apologize, and as I do, the man turns his head to look at his wife, possibly thinking it was she who touched his head. He now receives a second shock-an unfamiliar white face looming just inches from his own-and he starts. He visibly jumps in the pew.

His startle startles me, and Ijump too, and no one near us fails to see this scene. Most manage to keep a straight face, but the small boy next to me begins to giggle. His mother frowns at him and then at me, too, and as soon as possible the boy and I slink down in our pew, silently, side by side, both of us, for our own reasons, trying to contain ourselves.

In another church I might volunteer for something as a gesture of good intentions, but here I grasp that the most respectful thing is to do nothing. Is to wait. (And to try not to hit anyone else with a hymnal.) There is no quick, easy way to override the long accumulation of meaning that America has ascribed to color, and here there will be only personal answers to the matter of my presence, across the usual vagaries of human chemistry. A few members are cool at first, but the great majority are entirely gracious, and some-a retired professor, several of the deaconesses and pastors, and Union's great tenor, Emma Nance-go out of their way to give me clues and actual things to do, including proposal writing for the social-action committee. One day, after a meeting, I am in conversation with a woman who has become overworked at the church. She's going to take a break, she says, to take stock.

I applaud her decision, and then observe that I am in the opposite situation, that my participation is limited-by history, I say.

"Well," she replies, "some people do get stuck in the history. Oh, my, yes, the history is there-but it doesn't have to define us."

James Baldwin was thinking about how to negotiate this history when he predicted that any real dialogue between blacks and whites would require a personal confession from whites that is "a cry for help and healing," and a personal confession from blacks "which, fatally, contains an accusation." One Sunday not long after I find that passage, the Reverend Dr. Gilkes is in the pulpit. "I am talking about our men this morning," she says. "Our men can be paid to be entertainers and basketball stars, but the enemy will not open the doors of higher education! The enemy will not let our men become educated! And if one of us gets over, the enemy changes the rules!"

She catalogs the effects of the enemy's ways-the number of

black men in prison, the number likely to who have long observed the debasing effect die before the age of 2 I-and she likens of racism on whites, may know a moral refinement that an oppressor cannot. But America's black men to Samson, who something more original than inversion is at when shorn, blind and imprisoned could work, a move that slips the knot of reaction. yet summon a divine strength to crumble the house of his captivity. "We will tear African-American spirituality comes in many varieties, of course, but the several down the enemy's walls," she says-her voice is blazing now, her arms are outChristian forms have common themes.

Listening to the clarified Scholars in today's seminaries understand stretched. The woman has reached with voices of one church, I, too, black theology as a distinctive interpretation her voice down into the torment of cenremember to be glad that of Christianity. Building on African metaturies, and seems to be speaking for all I woke up in my right mind, that time. The other pastors stand and go physics, on a view of the universe as inglad for the roof, glad to her, gathering around close, as if to formed by benevolence, black American Christians have drawn especially on the sohold and bank her cathartic fire. The for breath. How simple it is, wooden floor of Union begins to rumble cial-justice teachings of Amos, Isaiah, the conversion from a Hosea and Micah, on Christ's love for the under a slow stamping of feet, and the constant whine to the bass whole room is weeping. neglected, and on the exodus into a note of gratitude. promised land. The symbolic narrative of Afterward, as I remain seated, black Christianity is one of survival and resobered, Grainger Browning, the head of the social-action committee, comes up, greets me in his usual sistance-and creativity. The story is told in highly allusive language that moves easily between stately and earthy tones, between ebullient manner, and lingers to ask, "What was that like for you, redemption and fish fries-language that presents the temporal to hear that sermon-what I'd call a completely black sermon?" and the spiritual as inseparable.

He pauses. "I mean," he continues, "it happens to us all the time, Many have agreed with Martin Luther King Jr. that the Africanto be the only one in a crowd, hearing something from a comAmerican saga transcends its historical particulars to speak to pletely white point of view, but what is it like for you to hear that kind of sermon?" common human hopes. For generations the black church has been A retired professor of sociology, Dr. Browning is curious, and at the heart of that saga, and Reverend Brown now speaks of his he is also being kind, guessing that I might feel, as of course I do, a spiritual tradition as a body of thought that offers "correctives" to the dominant culture-a moral and intellectual discourse that ismingling of implication and empathy. I form some words about solidarity, but my friend interrupts. "I know your politics," he says. sues a steady call for America to fulfill its promise.

We might think that a place that can do that-a place that fu"You probably agree with the sister more than I do. What I am asking is how did it feel to hear a sermon from a completely black eled one of the great transformations of this society, and has prepoint of view?" Before I can muster an answer, he continues. "You served real community through the 20th century-is a place that know, I don't think in terms of black or white much anymore. I re- has some clues not only for its core members but for the larger ally don't. Of course I notice. I'm not color-blind; I'm not that far community of the nation. yet. But I do not let it affect my actions. I check myself. And as a Entering slowly into the life of one church, I begin to grasp teacher, I made sure that I was fair to all my students. I think that a how many of my hopes for America, and even the style of my percentage of us now-not the majority, but maybe 20 percent of generation, can be traced to rooms like this one. "Oh, yes," people, both black and white-will not divide along racial lines, Reverend Gilkes says one day in conversation. "Whites have alwill not let that happen again to our country. We are the people ways liberally borrowed elements of black spirituality and style. standing in the gap, just wanting to solve it."

And white people love our spirituals, our music. But traditionally Much of what happens in this great room happens in other they have never accepted black leadership."

One morning, as we are singing "We'll walk in the light, beaurooms where people gather to think about meaning and to give tiful light, Come where the dewdrops of mercy are bright," my thanks for the blooming universe. But some of what takes place eye happens to land on the mirror above the organ loft. A great here is unique to the black church tradition. One of the pastors swath of the congregation appears in the reflection, and among us makes an allusion to that uniqueness one day. She is praying. is one jarringly pale face. "Who can that be?" I think, and am sur"Lord," she says, "we are the descendants of a people who chose to survive. We are your people, and we have come together this prised, seconds later, to realize the answer. The wish to belong, to know and be known, is deep in us. And the wish to travel, to exmorning to worship you in a special way-for we have a special history, and a special way of knowing you." pand into the unknown, to carry messages across borders, is also The special world inside these walls is not an inversion of the deep. Both instincts are probably linked with survival, though the pathology outside-that is, it is not a world of presumed black traveler is sometimes viewed with wariness. Hermes, the ancient supremacy. The temptation to imagine such a place must be god of travelers, is not only a guide but also a trickster, very like great, if only as poetic justice. And certainly African-Americans, Eshu Elegbara, the African guardian of the crossroads, another of

other racial and ethnic communities," those changeful figures that show up in the critic bell hooks said recently, "and every culture. we need to speak about what happens Old pagan emanations like Hermes when we do, including what makes it and Eshu are probably not often admithard." But hooks excoriates whites ted to the church basements of who appropriate black culture in an exChristendom, but some kind of shapeploitative fashion, and once nearly vashifter hovers there the first time I cook for a church supper. Thave made a large porized Camille Paglia, who imported some of her sassy style from gay black pot of Portuguese kale soup, a hearty, queens and has gone about enthusing fragrant soup that people have loved at over her rapport with Africanmy table for 20 years. I am attending my Americans. "Whooo!" Paglia once soup, which sits between a bubbling "Turn to your neighbor," gushed. "It's like I feel totally myself" macaroni-and-cheese casserole and a That was too much for hooks, who huge bowl of rice and peas, from behind Reverend Brown says when he wrote in response, "Naturally, all the buffet table, ladle in hand. The first steps into the pulpit. "Say, black Americans were more than people through the buffet line look at the 'Neighbor-'" "Neighbor-" the pleased to have Miss Camille give us unfamiliar soup skeptically. word swells up from several this vote of confidence, since we live "What is it?" one hungry teenage lad hundred congregants. to make it possible for white girls like asks. herself to have a place where they can "Portuguese kale soup," I say proudly, be 'totally' themselves." Similarly, ladle raised for action.

Ward Churchill, a Native American writer, is furious that Euro"I'll have the macaroni casserole, thank you."

Americans have presumed to take up Native beliefs. (First you Nine or 10 more people in line give the soup one look and pass it up. My debut is not going well. take our land, and now you want our spiritual treasure, too.)

Neither hooks nor Churchill is lamenting the influences Finally someone comes along and asks, "Is it collard greens?" that peoples have on one another, which, they well know, can " 0, it's kale greens." be stopped about as easily as the wind. Rather, they are distressed "No, thanks," he replies. But he has given me a clue. by the ways in which power imbalances distort exchanges "It's greens and beans," I say, truthfully, to the next person between peoples. who asks-the choir director, Brother Philip.

Closely following the debates about identity within multiracial "Oh, I'll have some," he says, and upon tasting this greens and beans, adds loudly, "It works for me." and African-American communities engages me in thinking not Brother Philip's endorsement gets me two more takers, and only about how (and how much, and if, and where, and why) I then a young lady comes along and peers with interest at the may participate in elements of other identities, but also about how these social constructions may fare in an emerging transsoup.

"This looks like Italian minestrone," she says hopefully. racial society. I find myself seeking out and listening to others "Well, yes," I say. "It's a lot like minestrone-almost exactly." grappling with the possibilities of more-permeable identities. In The young woman has two helpings, and her girlfriend asks for Notes of a White Black Woman, Judy Scales-Trent proposes that the recipe. Hovering near the line, but not in it, is a young man "the difficulty in understanding the notion of ethnicity comes who has obviously overheard the several names already given to from asking the wrong question all along. The question should not be 'Where did your people come from?' but rather 'What this soup. Now he steps up to the buffet table with a sly grin. countries did your people travel through on their way here from "I wonder if your soup could be ajambalaya?"

Africa?' " And then, recalling the notorious "single drop" rule in "Yes," I say without hesitation or shame. "It's jambalaya."

America, by which any African ancestry rendered a citizen "Oh, this is my lucky day," he says, chuckling. "So, if you will, legally black, Scales-Trent offers a disarming proposal: 'Those please put that jambalaya over the rice and peas. Not too much Americans who call themselves white," she says, "are all presauce," he adds, showing me how to make the concoction. tending to be something else-'passing.' ...For Mother Africa is Tasting the melange, he says, "That's bugl" mother to us all." ow all this young man's friends want the bug jambalaya During a conference given by the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at spooned over rice and peas-all except one young man with Harvard, a widely traveled anthropologist stood in the audience braids, who says he thinks my soup looks more like North to recount, with amusement, the chameleon nature of her idenAfrican food. tity. "In America," she says, "color-coded identities are the norm, "Isn't that orth African beans?" he asks. so here I am a black woman. But to the South Sea Tsland tribe I "North Africa is very near Portugal," Tsay. study, all outsiders are other, and all others are identified by the Anyone with my tendency toward travel does well to take word for 'white.' Visually, I am close to the islanders' color, but I stock of cautionary advisories. "We need to go over into those

am an outsider-therefore I am white! In Brazil I am seen as a member of cultura branca, white Western culture, as opposed to Afro-Brazilian culture, whereas in Europe I am perceived, first and foremost, not as black but as an American, second as a woman, third or fourth as a person of African descent. What color am I?" she asked the assemblage.

We try all our lives to be human, to know what kind we are. It is not an easy job, and it can be encouraging to gather with those who seem like us. It can also be terrifically dangerous-so say the Eastern European poets and writers who have witnessed the power of the group to silence the individual conscience, who are trying to warn Americans about investing too much of our identity in any kind of ethnic or cultural tribalism. (Thinking about the recent savagery in the former Yugoslavia, the poet Charles Simic writes, "Here is something we can all count on. Sooner or later our tribe always comes to ask us to agree to murder.")

Even for those of us with just the ordinary amount of displacement and assimilation, identity is a shifting thing these days. As the journalist Jim Sleeper has written, "We are all being 'abducted' from our ancient mythical wellsprings and moorings by forces we no longer control and do not fully comprehend." What we will become is unknown, but many who are proud of their origins also value the freedom to claim the elective affinities of which Goethe spoke. Those who feel that matters of realpolitik power and control underlie and sculpt many aspects of identity are undeniably right. Even political and physical survival can sometimes be at stake in maintaining strong group identity.

Plainly, though, for a learning species like ours, which has moved slowly over the globe, gleaning from others is not a denial of native identity but a true and fundamental part of it. The writer Richard Rodriguez surprised and delighted an audience in Miami one winter by saying that it is the Maya Indian in him that loves Shakespeare, that likes to wear Milanese suits, that is nimble and adventurous enough to say, "Yo soy chino," "Yo soy italiano," "Yo soy inglis" (which, Rodriguez, puckishly noted, he was saying in the language of the conquistadors).

I am thinking about these matters when Roots Day is announced-that day each year in late spring when, as Reverend Brown merrily phrases it, worshippers are invited to come "wearing as much African garb as you have Africa in your heart." This comment is meant to set people with different stylistic preferences at ease, but it might have caused me considerable wardrobe deliberation that first year had 1 not forgotten which Sunday was Roots Day and arrived in my usual 1940s-styJe graysilk suit. But many others wear their regular outfits too, including one mainstay of the church, a tall, elegant man in his late fifties, who arrives wearing his standard double-breasted charcoal suit, and is greeted by a woman in the lobby. "Deacon, is that old suit how much Africa you have in your heart?"

"My sister," he replies easily, "I wore dashikis all through the 1970s, and to tell you the truth, 1 am just about dashikied out. " More difficult than the wardrobe question is the label on which I am to write the name of my root place-"the place you come from," a little sign on the table says. How should my label

read? Where is that place? A man next to me writes "Georgia" in felt-tip pen, peels away the backing, and presses the label to his chest. Others are writing "Jamaica," "Gambia," "CongoAngola." All the tags point to history's diasporas and migrations. I stand at the table, pen in hand. Members rustle around the table in an array of African robes, kente cloth, turbans, dashikis-the sisters presenting themselves in what the scholar Cornel West has described as a rich stylization. Deaconess Lillian Allen approaches the table, stands next to me, and writes on her label, "West Africa and Massachusetts." As she peels off the backing and taps the label onto her dress, she notices my hesitation. She touches my arm lightly, looks me in the eyes, and says, "You're home now."

Once, for a few weeks, I was completely at home in a place called Aphrodite's Rooms-To-Let. I have been at home walking among Brancusi's polished bronze eggs, hunched over tide pools at the edge of several seas, in red-clay fields, and on the eastern shore of Chincoteague, eating blue crabs that my father had caught with a string. Like so many other homes, the one 1 have found in this community is comforting, quickening, haunting, exquisite, and thorny-sometimes all at once. With one hand 1 take communion with a congregation, and we are the body together.

Meanwhile, my other hand is caught in stubborn patterns no individual gesture can undo, most especially the myriad built-in affirmative-action programs for white America, all those privileges so nearly invisible to many whites. Doubtless, too, there are inscapes of understanding that pass me by in these rooms, but on Roots Day, as we stand by the folding card table, Deaconess Lillian leaves her hand on my arm a moment longer. "Some things transcend," she says.

Then she must hurry to join the choir, which is readying for its entrance procession-a procession made in a slow, syncopated step, led by a grandmother, a line that can send you into a long meditation on the one and the many. Nearby, Dr. Browning is buttonholing people to buy space in the Men's Fellowship calendar. "For five dollars," he says, "you can put up to five names, birthdays and anni versaries, in the calendar. How many may I put you down for?" Three children run up the carpeted stairs with tambourines in hand.

"Turn to your neighbor," Reverend Brown says when he steps into the pulpit. "Your neighbor is the one next to you," he adds, deadpan. "Say, 'Neighbor-' " "Neighbor-" the word swells up from several hundred congregants, amused by their pastor's playful side.

"Neighbor, you look maaahvelous this morning."

The Reverend Zina Jacque-Bell comes to the pulpit. "And now," she says, "please turn with me to that great old hymn of the church, number 222 in your books. But you won't need your books; you know the words: 'We've come this far by faith ...OhCan't turn around.' No, we can't turn around.

"Everyone who can stand, please stand."

D About the Author: Emily Hiestand is a writer and artist. She is the author of Angela the Upside-Down Girl, a collection of essays.

" HALLELWAH, I'M A BUM" continued

from page 44

of primltive evil. Popular magazines warned that demented vagrants were derailing trains and commandeering locomotives. Yet many people did help them.

The rural communities of America, as elsewhere, had relied on the itinerant for generations to bring much-needed skills, news and gossip, and extra hands during harvest time. A familiar sight was the mush fakir, a hobo who repaired umbrel-

las. But, instead of a handful of vagrants passing through, their numbers kept growing. Little towns could be overrun when freight trains pulled in.

Public alarm hit a peak aboLlt 1914 as Europe descended into world war. Press reports portrayed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as a rebellion in the making, a subversive tide that threatened cherished American freedoms. IWW

A hobo downs some coffee on the back porch as the housewife who offered it watches through the screen doOl: Thousands of men traded work for food.

Facing page: Dorothea Lange photographed these two hoboes waiting for a ride in California, 1939.

Ranks of hoboes and rail-hopping laborers included future notables: authors,TV personalities, oil billionaire H.L. Hunt and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. members, or Wobblies, often rode the rails in a campaign to organize and recruit hoboes and downtrodden workingmen into their dream of the One Big Union.

The Little Red Song Book, filled with Wobbly labor songs, included the hobo favorite, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," which became something of an IWW anthem. Its decidedly anti-work lyrics did little to help the Wobblies' cause. The IWW faded, a casualty of over-patriotic zeal that came about after the United States got involved in the war.

By the 1920s the scary image was changing. The public had learned that some pretty famous literary folk had ridden the freights~like Jack London and Carl Sandburg, for instance~and they turned out all right. Now the message coming across was that hoboes weren't all that bad; and neither was life on the open road. Maybe they were just grown-up Huck Finns, defiantly independent. The upgraded image got help from Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp and from master clown Emmett Kelly. Kelly created Weary Willie, a figure who, with his sad face, ratty clothing and melancholy worldview, appeared in the Ringling Brothers ci rcus and in cartoons, fil ms, on Broadway and, later, television. Hoboes had newspaper comics, tuneful ballads, vaudeville skits and movie melodramas on their side. The New Hobo was becoming a romantic rogue, unchained and unkempt. "Freedom is the one God I worship," hobo poet Harry Kemp wrote.

Brutes no longer, now they were rebelling against fate, if haplessly.

Do you know how a hobo feels?

Life is a series of dirty deals.

This is the song of the wheels.

This freedom came at a cost. Rather than spending their days alternating between filched-pie feeds and harumscarum misadventures with railroad cops,

real hoboes of the Depression spent long days searching and begging for scraps of food and scraps of work made doubly scarce by the fact that many thousands of others were out scouring for the same thing. Hoboes sometimes went days without food. A good job might offer a week of l2-hour days of hard labor, at a wage of one or two dollars a day, or might pay nothing more than a place in a bug-ridden bunkhouse and meals boiled out of spoiled food. Bob Logan of Texas spent his months on the road digging potatoes in Idaho, harvesting Dakota grain and picking fruit in New Mexico. A couple of days' work, then more days looking for the next wage; that was as much as hoboes could expect.

While the drifting and desperate army of Depression-era young men may have looked like so much slag off the melting pot, the appearance was deceptive.

Actually, they were more promising than unemployed men of similar age back at home. Gen. Pelham Glassford, chief of police in the District of Columbia in 1932 when the Bonus Marchers arrived to pressure Herbert Hoover for their longawaited WWI bonuses, reported to Congress the next year that young men who were idling back in their hometowns lacked the "intelligence, resourcefulness, and the spirit ofthe boys on the road."

Before the Depression, the average hobo was an older man who didn't want permanent employment; but with the upheaval, these old pros were far outnumbered by young men with no prospects, and others who had held good jobs but lost them. The old hoboes adapted by teaching the newcomers about survival on the road.

These young men fell into a subculture, fashioned by several generations of railhopping hoboes, replete with its own lingo, poetry, code of ethics and honor.

The hub of hobo life was the camps, or "jungles," which had much in common wherever they were located. Thomas

Minehan, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota who visited many hobo camps while studying juvenile transients of the Depression, said they usually were on the sunny sides of hills, near a source of water, and within walking distance of switchyards and coal bunkers. Trees and brush offered shelter from cold winds. A town dump for scavenging made the happy picture complete.

Hoboes living in jungles didn't offer their real names and didn't ask yours; it was enough to travel under monikers such as Toledo Red, Boxcar Bertha or Fry Pan Jack. An unspoken set of rules governed hobo gatherings. The pots were to be left clean; no hobo was to rob a fellow hobo in camp. In the same way that guerrillas must cultivate the generosity of the locals, hoboes lived under a powerful code outside the jungle as well, to avoid angering the townspeople who were the source of odd jobs and handouts. Thievery was to be avoided or at least kept to a minimum: perhaps a pie lifted here and there, some vegetables snitched from a garden, or a clean shirt hurriedly unclipped from a clothesline. But breaking into a house or threatening the local people was an extremely serious offense among the hobo fraternity, and might well bring death.

Walking in on a jungle, a visitor would find fires lapping at old pots or tin cans while hoboes whittled knickknacks and swapped information about good eats and bad railroad police, known as bulls.

Everyone was expected to contribute to dinner, most often a Mulligan stew.

According to young Graydon Horath, who watched an old hand one day in 1937, preparing such a dinner was as simple as putting water to a boil in a can, dumping in some cornmeal and slices of bologna, salt meat, onions and potatoes, and tending the fire for several hours to keep the food cooking at a low simmer.

Mingling in with the hoboes in the jungles were other kinds of wanderers. While

the distinctions between them often were blurry to outsiders, the differences were clear enough to jungle residents. "Bums loafs and sits," explained one hobo to hobo chronicler Godfrey Irwin. "Tramps loafs and walks. But a hobo moves and works, and he's clean." William O. Douglas never had any intentions of bumming. "I rode the rails," he said, "not as a sightseer," but to get to places where he hoped to find work. Douglas liked to find a dark comer in a boxcar where he could protect his back. Mixed in with the hardworking stiffs, and indistinguishable at a glance, was a sprinkling of fugitives and hardened criminals ever alert for any whiff of cash. During the boom years of manual labor in grain harvesting, robbers, called yeggs, had formed gangs to reap money from hoboes who were departing jobs in the wheat fields, and they stole thousands of dollars a season. Art Linkletter recalled that two such men held him and a friend up in a boxcar in Washington State, and came within a trig-

ger-pull of killing both of them.

Most important among a hobo's survival skills was learning the finer points of how to "flip" a train-boarding a train, riding it safely, and staying on by avoiding bulls. Hoboes stole rides on both passenger trains and freight trains. And although they would have preferred to board their chosen cars at leisure in the yards, railroad police tried to keep them off any property bounded by the "yard limit" signs. That left hoboes to jog alongside a train as it pulled out, then swing aboard while trying not to slip under the wheels. Of the 216 trespassers who died on the Missouri Pacific's property in 1931-32, most were men who met with accidents getting off and on the trains. Hobo author Tom Kromer describes sprinting along the track to catch a train, reaching for the side of the car, and feeling a step hit his fingers. "I grab it as tight as 1 can. 1 think my arms will be jerked out of their sockets.

My ribs feel like they are smashed. I hang on. I make it."

On a long ride in a boxcar, hoboes played cards or slept. Even in the open country and during hot summer, they learned to keep boxcar doors shut for safety.

Jack London describes a time at the turn of the century when a friend didn't make it. He and a fellow teenager flipped a 10:20 p.m. Southern Pacific going east out of Sacramento.

London jumped and pulled himself aboard. His buddy "French Kid" stumbled, and fell under the train, and the wheels took both his legs off. Not aware of his friend's tragic mishap, London decked a "rattler," riding flat and spread-eagled atop one of the cars on an eastbound train. "Only a young and vigorous tramp is able to deck a passenger train," he would later write. "The young and vigorous tramp must have his nerve with him as well."

While passenger trains were fast, they offered few perching possibilities. Some daring hoboes scrunched atop part of the brake assembly that was built into the

Railroad police, or "bulls, " drag a hobo out of a boxcar in the Texas & Pacific yards in the 1920s. Railway bulls were feared: some even had reputations for beating hapless hoboes to death.

wheel trucks of passenger coaches, ending up with their heads just inches from. the spinning steel wheels. In one variation of rod riding, hoboes seized on the iron truss rods used to strengthen wooden railroad cars. The rods hung about two feet apart, 18 inches underneath the car and only about 10 inches from the ground. "The trick," confided William O. Douglas, "was to get a couple of boards and lay them across the rods to form a small platform.

We'd lie on the boards, on our stomachs,

our heads on our arms and our eyes tightly closed. It was a miserable place to ride because the suction of the train kept dust and cinders constantly swirling." Falling asleep, even for a moment, could-and often did-mean an instant and gruesome death. Carl Sandburg and Art Linkletter both fell asleep while riding on couplings and the tops of cars, and came within a breath offalling beneath the wheels.

Over the years hoboes could be found on or in just about every location aboard a freight train. At various times they were reported riding on the cowcatcher, hiding under coal in the tender, standing on the couplings, hanging on the grab irons that served as ladders, sitting on top of the cars and nestled in gondolas of scrap iron.

Boxcars got a 'Bo out of the wind and were hard to beat for all-around comfort, but they held dangers just like anyplace else on a freight train. When my friends and I rode the boxcars, hoboes and rail workers warned us not to sit on the edge of the doorway and dangle our legs out the side; it was bad form not just because it drew the law's attention but because the massive side doors could roll shut in a sudden stop and lop off our legs. Hoboes in boxcars also ran the risk of being crushed under poorly secured cargo, dying in train wrecks or asphyxiating in insulated "reefer" (refrigerator) cars, which were sometimes locked from the outside after an unsuspecting hobo had climbed aboard. At the peak of the

Depression, 6,500 illegal railroad riders were killed or injured in a single year.

Accidents might or might not befall, but bad weather was a certainty for hoboes long enough on the road. The triple factors of traveling through the winter, being broke and risking jail are what earn people the right to say they have truly lived the hobo life. Amateurs like me, sometimes called scenery bums, had money to avoid begging, didn't stay long and got off the road well before frigid weather. "It is a very serious thing for a tender individual not properly clothed, to ride outside in winter weather. I do not see how they can escape pneumonia," R.S. Mitchell, chief special agent for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, told a congressional hearing in 1933. The obvious solution of running south for the winter could be dangerous because Cotton Belt police chiefs and sheriffs were alert against penniless snowbirds looking to roost until the arrival of spring. Beatings, chain gangs and often death awaited the hobo who strayed into the wrong small town.

Of course hoboes' campfire stories cast hoboes as Davids up against so many iron-fisted railroad bulls. Among the Goliaths, a few loomed over the rest. Jeff Carr of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was ranked as one of the roughest, toughest railroad bulls around. By the early 1920s, Carr was a legend from Texas to Maine, writer Glen Mullin reported in his book of hobo travels. A drifter nicknamed Runt described Carr this way: "A big goof he was, wid a slouch-down mustash, cowboy hat, coupia guns strapped on im." He said he had seen Carr gallop alongside a freight, and reach out and grab a hobo off the train and sling him across the horse's neck, like a prize deer. The real T. Jefferson Carr, a Cheyenne lawman and railroad detective, had been rough on hoboes and tramps in the 1890s. According to legend, he was beaten to death by hoboes with a coupling pin, but in fact, he died of a lingering illness in 1916 at age 73.

Railroads often did have legitimate gripes against hoboes. In 1932 railroads were hopping mad about riders who would pick out refrigerator cars full of vegetables and fruit; if the car was too

cold they'd open up the ventilator doors wide to warm it up, ruining the food.

Hoboes were known to build fires inside boxcars during winter, and occasionally the blazes got loose and burned up the cars. Even so, the accidents caused by the hoboes didn't seem to warrant the violence unleashed upon them by many bulls.

One railroad bull explained that some yeggs had once started a gunfight during an arrest and shot his pal. "Since then I club all hoboes on general principles," he reported. Other bulls learned to flush out hoboes riding the rods by lowering a piece of iron tied to a rope from between two cars. The bull would payout the rope and let the iron whip about underneath the car, killing any hobo unlucky enough to be riding below.

Though some policemen kept up the old brutal ways throughout the Depression, no amount of clubbing and shooting could have kept all the hoboes off the trains. The chief special agent of the Missouri Pacific said that by 1930 most railroads had given up even trying to pinch them, explaining at a hearing why hoboes laughed when threatened with arrest: jail would give them a warm place to rest up.

You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

By early 1933 the nation was in deep economic trouble, with one out of five able-bodied workers jobless. In the years from 1929 to 1931, the Missouri Pacific's hobo count rose from 13,000 per year to 200,000. As public schools were shuttered for lack of money and banks went bust, even cities with a history of earlier charity to tramps and hoboes before the Crash cut way back on free lodgings and soup lines. Each winter month, the total number of hoboes and highway tramps passing through Deming, New Mexico, equaled the resident population. It would be easy to paint tightfisted cities as just so many Scroogevilles, but officials felt honor-bound to conserve any spare change and available jobs for needy local

people rather than a crowd of grimy strangers dumped off by arriving freight trains. Hoboes called such unfriendly towns hostile, which they pronounced "horse-style."

A survey of transients during the Great Depression suggested that perhaps 8,000 women were on the road as hoboes. One woman told a sociologist that the toughest thing was staying clean. Constant hunger she didn't mind so much, she said: "You don't stay hungry after the second day anyhow." Not all women took to the road out of economic desperation. "Boxcar Bertha" Thompson, probably the bestknown woman hobo of the era, said it was restlessness and love of variety that put her on the road at age 15.

Perhaps 200,000 children were loose on American railroads and highways at the peak of the national misery. Sociologist Thomas Minehan lived among them during 1932 and 1933. He found that the boys and girls tended to gather in gangs for safety. Many kept notebooks of their travds. Minehan jotted down this pointed comment from a boy's diary after the writer had visited a mission house:" 0 use standing up for Jesus ....Nothing but beans and misery."

Young people who traveled alone were in real danger from sexual predators.

Particularly in the confines of a boxcar cut off from escape or help, hoboes and other transients lived in a strip of land as lawless as the wild frontier. Assaults had always been a problem in the womanstarved hobo life, and well before the turn of the century they had entered the regular hobo lexicon. "Jockers," or male homosexuals, took on boys. Sometimes the relationship required the boys to beg in towns for food or money. Usually it would begin with the older man assisting the boy with advice or food, and then turned into slavery that could last months or years.

Some hobo versions of "The Big Rock Candy Mountains" song describe this predator-prey relationship.

And thus another nostalgic image tumbles, that of the noble life of the road. If you spent long enough on the road, you were sure to experience the duality of humankind: some rail workers were brutal,

nalmen, car inspectors, repairmen, brakemen, firemen and engineers.

In 1934, at age 9, Pat Windus lived with his mother and two siblings in a frame house about two blocks from the rail yard. Windus's father had just died, and his mother fed the family by taking in 0 > GO MUST WORK TO ~ washing, cooking meals for NICE EAT WOMAN others and baking 35 to 50 pies every night for a local ./V\AA restaurant called the Pig-n~ ~ DOG WELL GUARDED ALL RIGHT Whistle. All that took a lot of HOUSE stove wood, Windus said, reGJ <->~ calling that they always had DANGER SAFE CAMP GOOD PLACE four or five long rows of wood stacked up and needing to be split. It was too much BE SmONG ALL RIGHT MEAN MAN GENTLEMAN D~ for the children; enter the ("y0 = hoboes, who could earn a FOOD BE QUIET FIERCE DOG HALT MONEY good meal by stopping by Ma Windus's house to split stove wood for a couple of WOMEN ONLY TELL PITIFUL STORY DISHONEST MAN hours. "They started splitting HOBO CODE OF THE ROAD wood at 5 o'clock most every morning," Wind us recalled, Lore of the Road: Hoboes developed signs to communicate pausing like he could hear to other like-minded travelers. Notations such as those the "ker-chunk" once more. above might be sketched on a fence or post to warn the next The transients lived at a itinerant about what to expect at the house nearby. jungle a few hundred feet away, on the other side of the rail yard in a grove of trees by Mud and again in hobo accounts and it matches Lake. "On our birthdays," Windus said, my experience on the road; our group only started riding freights after a railroad em- "they'd bring us some book or toy." Some evenings, the hoboes gathered on the ployee told us how to manage it.

Winduses' porch to listen to the radio.

Take the Santa Fe Railroad's yardmasBy the start of World War II, the hobo ter at Belen, New Mexico; around 1932 this official ran a water pipe from his era was fading fast. While the war's end did turn loose large numbers of veterans, a house out to the two-acre hobo jungle next prosperous economy and the G.I. Bill, door so the dozens of men living there could have clean water to drink and to which offered them free education, kept most young men from hitting the rails. wash with. Certainly his family was tired of them always knocking on the door, but Nothing like the earlier booms developed. it was a kinder act than finding enough po- Where once detectives on the Santa Fe might find 500 transients on a freight lice to run them out of town. train, by the early 1950s a thorough search To see how familiarity bred friendship would turn up fewer than 10. All the dribetween some trainmen and hoboes, I visited Portage, Wisconsin, the hometown of ving forces had run out of steam. The demand for transient harvest work all across Pat K. Windus, a retired locomotive engithe West dropped off to little more than neer. During the Depression this central isolated fruit and vegetable picking, and Wisconsin city was a terminal of the migrant workers in beat-up automobiles Milwaukee Road rail line and therefore had hundreds of people on the payroll as could work that market better. Towns and icehouse workers, baggage handlers, sig- farms didn't offer the odd jobs and fill-in

but most were willing to give hoboes a break of some kind. Rail workers' aiding and abetting of hoboes was a quirk of humanity that drove rai lroad executives wild. Still, it's a pattern that surfaces again

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work so essential to the hobo economy.

There were jobs for young men now, but employers needed people willing to stay around and learn technical skills, not footloose drifters. And the 1950s saw railroads shift from steam to diesel, which hit hobo lifestyles hard. The simpler operation of diesels cost them the outbuildings they used to shelter in, the friendly railroad families who provided handouts, and lumps of coal that fueled jungle fires.

There were fewer trains and they took longer runs, with fewer stops where a hobo could get himself aboard.

In the end, you'll have to reach your own conclusions about the real life of hoboes back when they covered the landscape. Statistics show that for thousands of men it was the way to a dusty death and a nameless grave at trackside. But after his hobo trek, Carl Sandburg noted, "Away deep in my heart now 1 had hope as never before. Struggles lay ahead, I was sure, but whatever they were I would not be afraid of them." Jack London credited his "realism" and success as a storyteller to his time as a hobo. Perhaps his hobo days colored William O. Douglas's decisions as he sat on the Supreme Court years later and battled for the constitutional rights of all Americans, regardless of their status, wealth or power. Certainly the countless stories from railriding hoboes inspired writer Jack Kerouac and the members of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and 1960s.

As for me, I prefer to think of Ma Windus's back porch in Portage, Wisconsin, on a summer evening in 1934.

There's a group of men there, weatherbeaten but resourceful transients who couldn't fit in, sipping iced tea and listening to the Chicago Cubs on the radio. The whistle of the Milwaukee Road's train No. 263 is sounding in the yards two blocks away. Maybe they'll bid adieu and hop the train for parts unknown; maybe they'll miss the train and catch another one tomorrow. As Pat Windus told me, "It didn't matter. Their ticket was always good."

D About the Author: James R. Chiles is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine.

How America's top nuclear warrior came to champion abolition.

or many people, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy, and of legitimacy that justifies their existence well into the future in some number, however small. This faith in nuclear weapons was inspired and sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades by a priesthood who spoke with assurance and authority. I was for many years among the most avid of these keepers of the faith, and for that I make no apology.

Like my contemporaries, I was moved by fears inspired by beliefs that date back to the earliest days of the atomic era. For us, nuclear weapons were the savior that brought an implacable foe to his knees in 1945 and held another at bay for nearly half a century. We believed that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant stronger security, and that the ends of containment justified whatever means were necessary to achieve them.

These are powerful, deeply rooted beliefs. They cannot and should not be lightly dismissed. Strong arguments can be made on their behalf. Throughout my professional military career I shared them, I professed them, and I put them into operational practice. Nevertheless, these beliefs served us extremely ill.

They accounted for the most severe risks and most extravagant costs of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. They intensified and pro-

F

Reprinted by permission of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, copyright Š 1998 by the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 6042 South Kimbark, Chicago Illinois 60637, USA. All rights reserved.

General Lee Butler retired in 1994 after 33 years in the u.s. Air Force.

A fonner B-52 pilot, Butler was director of the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, commander-in-chief of the Strategic Air Command and commander-in-chief of its successor; Strategic Command.

longed an already acute ideological animosity. They spawned successive generations of new and more destructive devices and delivery systems. They gave rise to mammoth bureaucracies with gargantuan appetites and global agendas. They incited primal emotions, stirred zealotry and demagoguery, and set in motion forces of ungovernable scope and power.

Most important, these enduring beliefs-and the fears that underlie them-perpetuate Cold War policies and practices that make no strategic sense today. They continue to entail enor-

mous costs and expose all mankind to unconscionable dangers.

I find that intolerable. And thus I cannot remain silent. I know too much of these matters-the frailties, the flaws, the failures of policy and practice.

At the same time, I cannot overstate the difficulty this poses for me personally. No one who ever entered the nuclear arena left it with a fuller understanding of its complexity, nor with greater respect for those who served the nation. I struggle constantly with the task of articulating the evolution of my convictions without denigrating or diminishing the motives and sacrifices of colleagues with whom I lived the drama of the Cold War. My purpose is not to accuse but to assess-to understand and to propound the forces that birthed the grotesque excesses and hazards of the nuclear age. For me, that assessment meant first coming to grips with my experience and then coming to terms with my conclusions.

Messianic Beliefs he moment I entered the nuclear arena, I knew I had been thrust into a world beset with tidal forces, towering egos, maddening contradictions, alien constructs and insane risks. Its arcane vocabulary and apocalyptic calculus defied comprehension. Its stage was global and its antagonists locked in a deadly spiral of deepening rivalry. In every respect, it was a modem-day holy war.

The opposing forces created vast enterprises that gave rise to a culture of messianic believers infused with a sense of historic mission and schooled in unshakable articles of faith. As my career progressed, I was immersed in the work of all these cultures, either directly in those of the Western world or through the study of communist organizations, teachings and practices.

My responsibilities ranged from the highly subjective, such as assessing the values and motivations of Soviet leadership, to the critically objective, such as preparing weapons for operational launch. I became steeped in the art of intelligence estimates, the psychology of negotiations, the interplay of bureaucracies and the impulses of industry.

I was engaged in the labyrinthine conjecture of the strategist, the exacting routines of the target planner, and the demanding skills of the air crew and the missileer. I was a party to their history, shared their triumphs and tragedies, witnessed heroic sacrifice and catastrophic failure of both men and machines. And in the end, I came away from it all with profound misgivings.

Ultimately, as I examined the course of this journey, I came to these unsettling judgments: • From the earliest days of the nuclear era, the risks and consequences of nuclear war have never been properly weighed by those who brandish them.

• The stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the antagonists but the fate of mankind.

• The likely consequences of nuclear war have no political, military or moral justification.

• The threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible.

T

Deceptive Deterrence fter three decades in the nuclear arena, I have reached two fundamental conclusions: First, I have no other way to understand the willingness to condone nuclear weapons except to believe they are the natural accomplice of visceral enmities. They thrive in the emotional climate born of utter alienation and isolation.

Their unbounded effects, if used, are a perfect companion to the urge to destroy completely. They play on our deepest fears and pander to our darkest instincts. They corrode our sense of humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage and make thinkable the unimaginable.

These fears and enmities are no respecter of political systems or values. They prey on democracies and totalitarian societies alike, shrinking the norms of civilized behavior and dimming the prospects for escaping the savagery so powerfully imprinted on our genetic code. That should give us pause as we imagine the task of abolition in a world that gives daily witness to acts of unspeakable barbarism. So should it compound our resolve.

For much of my life, I saw the Nuclear Age differently. From the early years of my childhood and through much of military service, I saw the Soviet Union and its allies as a demonic threat, an evil empire bent on global domination.

This was a desperate time that evoked on both sides extreme responses in policy, in technology and in force postures; bloody purges and political inquisitions; covert intelligence schemes that squandered lives and subverted governments; atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons with little understanding or regard for the long-term effects; threats of massive nuclear retaliation to an illdefined scope of potential provocations; the forced march of inventive genius that ushered in the missile age, arm in arm with the capacity for spontaneous global destruction; reconnaissance aircraft that probed or violated sovereign air space; the menacing practice of airborne-alert bombers loaded with nuclear weapons.

By the early 1960s, the superpower nuclear arms race was under way that would lead to a ceaseless amassing of destructive capability. Central Europe became a powder keg, trembling under the shadow of Armageddon, hostage to a bizarre strategy that required the prospect of nuclear devastation as the price of alliance.

The entire world became a stage for the U.S.-Soviet rivalry.

International organizations were paralyzed by its grip. East-West confrontation dominated the nation-state system. Every quarrel and conflict was fraught with potential for global war.

Like millions of others, I was caught up in the holy war, inured to its costs and consequences, trusting in the wisdom of succeeding generations of military and civilian leaders. The first requirement of unconditional belief in the efficacy of nuclear weapons was early and perfectly met for us. Our homeland was the target of a consuming evil poised to strike without warning and without mercy.

What remained for me, as my career took its particular course, was to master the intellectual underpinning of America's response-the strategic foundation that still stands as the central precept of the nuclear catechism. Reassessing its pervasive impact on attitudes toward nuclear weapons goes directly to my

A

second conclusion regarding the willingness to tolerate still the risks of the nuclear age.

For all of my years as a nuclear strategist, operational commander and public spokesman, I justified America's massive nuclear arsenal as a consequence of deterrence. Bound up in this singular term-this familiar touchstone of security dating back to antiquity-was the deceptively simple justification for taking the most extreme risks and for spending trillions of dollars.

Deterrence was our shield and, by extension, our sword. The nuclear priesthood extolled its virtues and bowed to its demands.

Allies yielded to its dictates, even while decrying its risks and costs. We brandished it at our enemies and presumed they embraced its suicidal corollary of mutual assured destruction.

We ignored, discounted or dismissed its flaws and even today we cling to the belief that it remains relevant in a world whose security architecture has been transformed.

A Dialogue of the Blind with the Deaf ow is it that we subscribed to a deterrence strategy that required near-perfect understanding of an enemy from whom we were deeply alienated and largely isolated? How could we pretend to understand the motivations and intentions of the Soviet leadership, absent any substantive personal association?

Why did we imagine a nation that had survived successive invasions and mind-numbing losses would accede to a strategy premised on fear of nuclear war? Little wonder that intentions and motives were consistently misread.

While we clung to the notion that nuclear war could be reliably deterred, Soviet leaders became convinced that such a war might be thrust upon them and, if so, it must not be lost. Driven by fear, they took Herculean measures to fight and survive no matter the odds or the cost. Deterrence was a dialogue of the blind with the deaf. It was largely a bargain we in the West made with ourselves.

Deterrence was also flawed in that the consequences of its failure were intolerable. While the price of undeterred aggression in the age of uniquely conventional weaponry could be severe, his-

H

tory teaches that nations can survive and even prosper in the aftermath of unconditional defeat. Not so in the nuclear age.

Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generations. They leave us without defense, expunge all hope for meaningful survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations but the very meaning of civilization.

Deterrence failed completely as a guide for settling rational limits on the size and composition of military forces. The appetite of deterrence theory was voracious, its capacity to justify new weapons and large stocks unrestrained.

Nuclear deterrence hinges on the ability to mount a devastating retaliation under the most extreme conditions of war initiation. Perversely, the redundant and survivable forces required to meet this exacting test were readily perceived by a darkly suspicious adversary as capable of executing a disarming first strike.

Such advantage can never be conceded between nuclear rivals. It must be answered, reduced, nullified.

Fears were fanned. The rivalry intensified. New technology was inspired. New systems rolled from production lines. The bar of deterrence was ratcheted higher, igniting new cycles of trepidation, worst-case assumptions and ever-mounting levels of destructive capability. The treacherous axioms of deterrence made nuclear weapon stockpiles numbering in the tens of thousands seem reasonable.

A succession of leaders on both sides of the East-West divide directed a reckless proliferation of nuclear devices tailored for delivery by a vast array of vehicles to a stupefying array of targets. They nurtured, richly rewarded, even reveled in the industrial base required to support production at such levels.

I was part of that. I was present at the creation of many of these systems, directly responsible for prescribing and justifying the requirements in technology that made them possible. I saw the arms race from the inside, watched as intercontinental ballistic missiles ushered in mutual assured destruction and multiple-warhead missiles introduced genuine fear of nuclear first strike. I was responsi-

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ble for nuclear war plans with more than 12,000 targets, many of which would have been struck with repeated nuclear blows.

Deterrence is a slippery conceptual slope. It is neither stable nor static. Its wiles cannot be contained. It is both master and slave. It seduces the scientist yet bends to his creation. It serves the ends of evil as well as those of noble intent.

It holds guilty the innocent as well as the culpable. It gives easy semantic cover to nuclear weapons, masking the horrors of employment with veils of infallibility. At best, it is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. At worst, it invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the creator.

We Cannot Remain Silent its any wonder that at the end of my journey I am moved so strongly to retrace its path, to examine more closely the evidence I would not or could not see? I hear now the voices long ignored, the warnings muffled by the still-lingering animosities of the Cold War. I see with painful clarity that from the very beginnings of the nuclear era, the objective scrutiny and searching debate essential to adequate comprehension and responsible oversight of its vast enterprises were foreshortened or foregone. The cold light of dispassionate scrutiny was shuttered in the name of security, doubts dismissed in the name of an acute and unrelenting threat, objections overruled by the incantations of the nuclear priesthood.

Vitally important decisions were routinely taken without adequate understanding. Assertions too often prevailed over analysis.

"Requirements" took on organizational biases. Technological opportunity and corporate profit drove levels and capabilities. And political opportunism intruded on calculations of military necessity.

Authority and accountability were severed, policy dissociated from planning, and theory invalidated by practice. Over time, planning was increasingly distanced and ultimately disconnected from any sense of scientific or military reality. In the end, the nuclear powers, great or small, created astronomically expensive infrastructures, monolithic bureaucracies and complex

I

processes that defied control or comprehension.

Only now are the dimensions, the costs and the risks of these nuclear nether worlds coming to light. What must now be better understood are the root causes and the belief systems that brought them into existence. They must be challenged, refuted.

But most important, they must be let go. The era that gave them credence, accepted their dominion, and yielded to their excesses is fast receding.

But it is not yet over. The Cold War lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs and the enmities born of the nuclear age. They cling to deterrence and shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones.

What better illustration of misplaced faith in nuclear deterrence is there than the persistent belief that retaliation with nuclear weapons is a legitimate and appropriate response to post-Cold War threats posed by weapons of mass destruction?

What could possibly justify our resort to the very means we properly abhor and condemn?

Who can imagine our joining in shattering the precedent of non-use that has held for more than 50 years? How could America's irreplaceable role as leader of the campaign against nuclear proliferation ever be rejustified? What target would warrant such retaliation? Would we hold an entire society accountable for the decision of a single demented leader?

How would the physical effects of the nuclear explosion be contained, not to mention the political and moral consequences?

In a singular act, we would martyr our enemies, alienate our friends, give comfort to the non-declared nuclear states and impetus to states who seek such weapons covertly.

We cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it. We cannot hold hostage to sovereign gridlock the keys to final deliverance from the nuclear nightmare. We cannot withhold the resources essential to break its grip, to reduce its dangers. We cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded homilies of the nuclear priesthood.

It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason, and the rightful interests of humanity.

D

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