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May 1981

SPAN 2 Land Reform: EI Salvador's Hope for Stability

by William C. Doherty, Jr.

5 "The Poet Remembers"

by Richard Lourie

8 . Laura Dean-Spin

and Pulse

by Ellen W. Jacobs

14 Telepresence

by Marvin Minsky

18 The Quality of Work Life

by Robert Guest

21 Saving the Siberian Crane

by Ronald Sauey

26 Oral History in Their Own Words Tales From a Peacock Garden As Told to Anees Jung

What It Was Like in Vermont As Told to Leonard Schonberg

32

It's a Wide Wide World

36 The United States and South Asia

40 The Return of Homeopathy

by Deborah Larned Romano

42 Exit Throwaway, Enter Recycling

44 On the Lighter Side

45

u.s. Will Continue

Foreign Aid

by M. Peter McPherson

46 Political Violence in the U.S.: Myth or Reality?

by Henry Fairlie

Editorial Staff

Photo Editor

Art Staff Chief of Production Circulation Manager Photographic Services

Aruna Dasgupta, Manu Sahi, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes Avinash Pasricha

B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy Awtar S. Marwaha A.K. Mitra

Ie A Photographic Services Unit

Photographs: Front cover-Lois Greenfield. Inside front cover-courtesy The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York. 8-9-Craven. 10-1I-Lois Greenfield. l4-l7-Dan McCoy, Rainbow.

18-l9-Illustration by Cameron Gerlach. 2l,22-Rajesh Bedi. 23-25-Ronald Sauey. 27 leftRonald Harris; right-Suraj N. Sharma. 28-Avinash Pasricha. 29-Suraj N. Sharma. 31Ronald Harris. 32 top~Simon Nathan; bottom~ Rohert Galbraith. 33-35-Simon Nathan.

36-37, 40~R.N. Khanna. 42-43-courtesy Aluminum Company of America. Inside back cover and back cover-Gordon Chittenden. courtesy Friends magazine.

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Front cover: Dancer L,aura Dean, who tours India with her group this month, creates dances based on a skip, hop or stomp.

See story on pages 8-13.

DANCER LAURADEAN

Back cover: What were once dull oil pumps on a California highway have been transformed by artist Jean Dakessian into a colorful "iron zoo."

See also page 49,

labor unrest in Poland with the attendant danger of anned Soviet intervention is very much in the news these days. This issue of SPAN features a critical appreciation of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, recipient of the 19'80 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although Milosz has had to speak from exile in France and the United States, his voice has never ceased to be heard in his native Poland.

This article by an American poet who ha s both studied under and translated Milosz poetry gives us insight into the spiritual and inteLlectual sources of Polish character. The article is preceded by a photograph of Michelangelo's famous sculpture of the biblical prophet-poet Isaiah--like Milosz, a visionary spokesman for humanity as well as his own people. For it was Isaiah who foresaw an age when the nations of the world would "beat their swords into ploughshares."

I

Until that happy "end of days" men of good will first have to learn to work and function together in the interests of global peace, regardless of their national differences. In this issue, Inderjit, editor of INFA (India News and Feature Alliance), talkS"with William Barnds, a staff member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on a wide range of questions relating to U.S. foreign policy in South and Southwest Asia.

In a lively give-and-take they disagree (amicably!): on the responsibility for the irritants in Indo- U. S. relations (e. g ., the supply of enriched uranium for the Tarapur reactor); on the Soviet military action in Afghanistan; on the Iranian-Iraqi war; on the "necessity for a growing American presence in the Indian Ocean.

But, despite their disagreements, the two political experts, the one American;the other Indian, are of one mind in their conclusion: their countries dare not become obsessed with their disagreements. Rather they should try to work together in all those areas of agreement where their broad approach as well as their goals are the same. And where they differ they should each respect and appreciate the other's position.

Americans and Indians cannot allow those differences to affect the relations between the two countries.

One area where there is general agreement among nations is, the need to protect the ..earth's environment . and to save creatures who have inhabited it for millennia from extinction because of the pollution introduced by . human beings.

The Siberian crane belongs to an ancient family that has existed for some 60 million years. Its seasonal passage between Siberia and India is a biannual ritual far older than civilized man. The International Crane Foundation, whose headquarters are in. the American state of Wisconsin, and the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary in Rajasthan, wFiere only 33 Siberian cranes were count~d last winter, are leading an international effort to help the species survive. An article by aU. S. leader in this movement tells us about it.

--M. P. ~/

LAND REFORM:EL SALVA ATLANTIC

El Salvador, a tiny country (about half the size ofHaryana) in Central America with a population of approximately 4.5 million people, has been much in the news lately because of violent attempts by both the extreme left and right to overthrow its established government. Thousands of innocent citizens have become victims to this violence and terrorism which has been abetted and aided by outside powers. The reality , of this beleaguered nation's political situation, notes the author, is that it is not merely a power struggle between left and right; it is a struggle between left, right and center. The reign of terror has been let loose by the extreme left and right to thwart the gqvernment's attempt at land reforms which will give "peace, bread and liberty" to El Salvador's common people, , who have had precious little of these all these years.

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he American labor movement, through its labor-aid arm for Latin America, the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), has been active in the tragic and troubled situation in El Salvador. That small country has been wracked by guerrilla attacks, a wave of rightist terror, a military coup, and continuing power struggles. In the midst of this turmoil and tragedy, one step has been taken which is filled with promise for a more stable and just society-the start in 1980of a massive land reform.

In this complex situation, the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations, which represent over 13,000,000 members] seeks to apply its basic policy guidelines which derive from labor's core values of liberty and equality: Strengthen free and democratic trade unions, and support the democratic center against both the dictatorial left and the dictatorial right.

Applying these guidelines in present-day El Salvador is not a simple matter, because the political situation there is extremely complex, and the contending forces cannot be put into two simple "good guy" and "bad guy" boxes. There are three basic viewpoints among the forces active in Salvadoran politics: â&#x20AC;˘ The Dictatorial Right. This outlook is common among the commercial and landed oligarchy, plus part of the military, Reprinted with permission from Free Trade Uniol1 News, published by the Department of International Affairs of the American Federation of Labor/Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-'CIO).

in which some commands are still held' by right-wing officers devoted ,10 the interests of the oligarchy. These rightist military elements probably have been cooperating with the right-wing vigilante groups in the wave of atrocities such as the assassination of Archbishop Romero, the murders of U.S. nuns, the assassination of Rodolfo Viera and the AIFLD's Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, the slaughter of seven top leaders of the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR), and countless murders of peasants who support the land reform, the FDR, or both. â&#x20AC;˘ The Democratic Center. The Christian Democratic Party is the largest political group in this sector, with the Social Democrats in a lesser position. The democratic center is supported by the Union Comunal Salvadorena (UCS), the largest peasant organization, and by major segments of the urbaillabor movement. The urban unions have been instrumental in the formation of a centrist umbrella organization: the Unidad Popular Democratica (UDP). This coalition of 15 trade unions, political groups, and civic associations seeks to give voice to the aspirations of the people and their pluralistic private associations for a way out of the present violence through further reforms and through free elections to provide legitimacy to the political system.

The UDP has entered into a dialogue with the govemingjunta, which has been receptive to some of the UDP's proposals. In addition to democratic parties, the trade

OCEAN

unions, and the UDP, the liberal army officers also share the democratic-center viewpoint. Thus the military is divided between the rightist and the democratic viewpoints. â&#x20AC;˘ The Dictatorial Left. This is composed of a number of Marxist revolutionary political organizations, which among them support three armed guerrilla units. These groups have carried out their own campaign of terror, directed primarily against the Salvadoran right, although also affecting the center, because the left refuses to admit any distinction between the right and the reformist junta. The center is thus caught in the cross-fire between the terroristic right and left. One guerrilla group, the Farabunda Marti People's Liberation Forces (FPL) has claimed that in sabotage actions, attacks on military units, urban bombings, and summary executions, it killed 914 Salvadorans in the first four and a half months of 1980.

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uring 1980, the holders of these three political viewpoints have been distributed among three political groups, two of them competing for control of the government, and one an opposition force. The government is officially led by a mixed military-civilian junta, which is comprised of liberal army officers and some leading Christian Democratic politicians. The junta favors a far-reaching land reform, to break the hold of the oligarchy and to deprive the dictatorial left of its primary appeal to the country's

OR'S HOPE FOR STABILITY peasant majority. The reform would then be followed within three years by free elections to choose a democratic government to replace the junta.

The junta has control over most of the economic policymaking organs of the government, plus the civilian bureaucracy, including the land reform institute.

Competing with the official junta for control of the government. are rightwing elements in the military which cooperate with extremists of the dictatorial right. In addition to efforts to expand their influence within the government, these military and civilian rightists are carrying out a wave of terror which is designed to destabilize the government and prevent implementation of the junta's land reform program. Some of these terrorist attacks are carried out by rightwing civilian goon squads, often financed

by Salvadoran oligarchs now living in Miami. Others are perpetrated by those military and police unions under the command of right-wing officers. The rightist terror is directed against both the centrist and leftist viewpoints in El Salvador, and even the lives of the members of the centrist junta themselves, both civilian and military, are in danger from assassins controlled by the junta's right-wing competitors for dominance in the government.

In 1980, for example. two attempts were made on the life of Colonel.Taime Gutier-, rez, a moderate proland-reform officer in the junta.

In the opposition is the FDR, composed mainly of Marxist revolutionaries, but also containing elements of the democratic left which have joined the FDR in frustration at the inability of the moderate junta to gain full control over the government and military.

The Social Democrats, some church groups, and a portion of the Christian Democrats are aligned with the FDR. The leftist opposition combines an urban terror campaign of assassinations and bombings with rural guerrilla warfare. he best hope for the emergence of both social and political democracy in EI Salvador lies in strengthening the democratic-centrist junta so that it can gain full control over the military, end the right-wing terror, fully implement the

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of the terroristic right-wing, and its land reform as a farce perpetrated by the oligarchy. They, of course, also vilify AIFLD's role in EI Salvador as being "antipeople. "

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land reform and thereby deprive the dictatorial left of its principal appeal, and carry out free elections. ~ A similar conclusion was reached by Archbishop Rivera Y Damas of El Salvador in his homily for January 18, 1981.

He noted that g.reat abuses of power exist in El Salvador, but that peaceful means of redress have not been exhausted. He attributed the lack of success of the leftists' January offensive to the fact that the people in El Salvador are not convinced that the left's program would be better than that of the present government.

"The people know that what is leftist is communist," he said, and added that the people do not want to shed their blood in a fight which might simply result in the domination of El Salvador by the communist superpower.

Also in agreement that strengthening the centrist junta holds the best prospects for peace with justice is the Union Comunal Salvadorena (UCS) and other democratic campesino groups, which are cooperating with the junta in its attempts to carry through the land reform. The FDR and its leftist supporters in the United States portray the junta as part and parcel

he land reform is not a charade-it is truly an important social transformation. Ownership of much of El Salvador's arable land is passing from upper-class families to those who actually till the land. Salvadoran society has up until now had a classic oligarchic structure, and that oligarchy's position was based on land ownership. Changing the system of land ownership thus means changing the social structure of El Salvador. In March 1980, the 263 estates over 1,250 acres in size were transferred from their former owners to the 60,000 peasant families who had been working on them. The peasants have formed production cooperatives and are growing coffee, cotton and sugarcane on the same scale as they were grown on the former estates. The 1980 harvest on these lands appeared to be equal to or higher than those of previous years. The 615,000 acres on these 263 former estates constitute about 15 percent of all the farm land in El Salvador.

A second reform program was announced by the junta on April 27, 1980, and affected a much larger number of peasants.

The program transferred to EI Salvador's sharecroppers and tenants all the land being worked by them, and it thus brought to an immediate end the country's traditional landlord-tenant system. About 490,000 acres of farm land,(l3 percent of the nation's total), previo~sly owned by 6,000 to 7,000 owners, have passed into the de facto possession of about 150,000families of former sharecroppers and tenants.

Since the reform expropriates all the largest agricultural estates and eliminates tenancy, it is not a "charade," but rather will be orie of the most sweeping social changes ever to take place in such a short period in the history of Central America, once the titling process is carried through.

Conservatives charge that the land reform is a "brutal expropriation" of the oligarchy's wealth, while the left contends that it "leaves the economic base of the' oligarchy intact." Actually, the land reformplan did not address one way or the

other the question of whether the oligarchy's net worth should be reduced.

Rather, it aimed at creating a modern, intensive, small-farm agricultural sector, with those who till the land having full incentives to raise productivity because they own their land. It was also intended to resolve the most pressing social grievance of the largest sector of El Salvador's population. The land is not confiscated-it is expropriated, with full payment to be made to the former owners, in a mixture of cash and bonds, by the Salvadoran Government. The peasants receiving the land must reimburse the government for the amounts paid to the former owners.

The peasants in effect will make "mortgage" payments for 30 years in equal installments. The 150,000 families of former sharecroppers and tenants will be paying on their "mortgages" considerably less than half of what they previously paid annually in rent.

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hus the conservatives are not correct in terming the reform a "confiscation," although it is true that the price the former owners are receiving for their land is based on the owners' declared valuations of the land on their 1976-77 tax returns. Given the political and economic power of El Salvador's .owning class in those years, it can be surmised that the degree of outrage about "brutal expropriation" is proportional to the accuracy of those declared tax valuations. Many former owners will probably not get in compensation the true market value of their lands.

While the left may well be correct that the land reform alone will not drastically reduce the oligarchy's present wealth, b~t will simply allow that wealth to be switched from land to industry, the left is not correct that the land reform is a charade. The reform deprives' the oligarchy of all future income from the farms affected. That income will now flow to the peasants. The reform is indeed, as characterized by the conservatives, a "sweeping" program of change in El Salvador's land tenure system.

Another leftist allegation about the reform is that the Salvadoran junta is showing favoritism in the awarding of land to peasants, giving it to "certain selected peasants who are acceptable to the junta." The fact is that in both programs of the reform, the land has gone to whichever. peasants were working it at

the time of the reforms in March and April 1980, regardless of whether those peasants have been progovernment, affiliated with the democratic left, supporters of the leftist guerrillas, or politically undefined. This was the procedure ordered in the decrees, and which has been followedin practice. (In fact, in one side-aspect of the reform program, precedence has been given to peasants in leftist-controlled organizations. The El Salvadoran Government's land reform institute [1STA] in 1980 still possessed some farms which had been expropriated from their former owners in an abortive land reform attempt of 1976. In the process of turning these farms over to the peasants who were

Conservatives charge that the land reform program is a "brutal expropriation" of the oligarchy's wealth, while the left contends that it "leaves the oligarchy's economic base int(lct." working them, the 1STA began precisely with those farms on which the leftists had control of the peasants.)

In certain outlying areas, such as in parts of Chalatenango province, the moderate junta and its land-reform institute have lost control to their political competitors in the civilian and military right-wing, and have been unable to implement the land reform. In these rightist and militarydominated areas, the peasants who were working the farms before the reform decrees have not received land. In some cases, in fact, they have been driven off by force from the lands they previously worked as tenants, becoming refugees in the hills or in camps in the larger cities.

It is precisely in these areas where the Marxist guerrillas have received enough peasant support, in late 1980, to allow them to mount major military attacks.

These instances illustrate the bankruptcy of the Salvaqoran right wing's strategy of using terror and repression to counter the dictatorial left. It is precisely these tactics which have created the Marxist left as an important political force in El Salvador.

The Salvadoran junta, needing the cooperation of some peasant organizations for the implementation of the land reform, appealed to the DCS for support.

The DCS, not wanting to let pass an

opportunity for the peasantry to finally become owners of the farm land, agreed to help implement the reform, but only after winning considerable concessions from the junta, including the naming of the DCS secretary-general, Rodolfo Viera, as president of the agrarian reform institute (1STA). Because of its cooperation in the land reform process, the DCS has been subject to terror perpetrated by both left and right. On January 3, 1981, Rodolfo Viera himself, having survived three assassination attempts during 1980, was murdered in a gang-style slaying which bore earmarks of the right-wing goon squads. Killed with him were Michael Hammer and Mark Pearlman, of the AIFLD, both of whom had been working closely with the DCS on the agrarian reform process.

I

istnot only the DCS leadership which has suffered. The fate of Maribel Santana, a member of the Union Comunal's cooperative in Sonsonate, is an example of what the organization's rank and file faces. On August 1, 1980, uniformed soldiers dragged her out of a meeting with workers on the El Balzamar plantation and murdered her with three shots in the stomach, one in the face, and one in the right breast. In another incident, 12 UCS members were machine-gunned to death in the early hours of the morning outside their cooperative. In the second half of 1980, many other local activists of the Union Comunal were jailed, beaten or harassed by police, government troops, or civilian right-wing forces. Obviously, given the terror applied against the Union Comunal from the right, the organization is not a rightist front "used to prevent the campesinos from carrying out any progressive rural" change" as charged by the left.

The DeS was formed in 1968 as a federation oflocal peasant groups founded during the previous six years. The organization has had two main types of activities. First, it has helped groups of peasants to rent or purchase farm land and cultivate it on a cooperative basis. By 1977, the DCS had 20 production cooperatives being farmed by 5,000 formerly landless peasants. Second, the DCS has operated as a political and economic pressure group, representing the interests of the peasantry, mainly of tenants and sharecroppers. In 1974, the DCS was able to (Text continued¡on page 48)

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. y ou ~an kill one but another ari~es.

~~Th . remem 'bers" e poet

by RICHARD

It was a perfectly Polish moment, the brutally real and the spiritually exalted mingling with the ease of old familiarity.

In late December 1980, the workers of Poland dedicated a monument in Gdansk to the memory of those killed in the protests of 1970. Representatives of all Polish society were present in an almost medieval pageant-cardinals in red silk, party officials in the dark suits of the bureaucracy, workers in hard hats and miner's helmets, villagers in local costume. Two other presences were also felt, that of Pope John Paul IT-who had a profound influence in returning evangelical self-esteem to his countrymenand Czeslaw Milosz, the poet whose voice never ceased being heard in Poland though it spoke from exile in France and California. Words that he had written 30 years earlier an ocean away in Washington, D.C., had now been inscribed into the base of the monument. The lines were from a simple and direct poem, a warning to a tyrant: Do nqt feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one but another arises.

Here Milosz was both speaking out of the poet's sense of responsibility to his nation, a tradition which has been preserved in Easterh Europe, and as well alluding to the eternal play of forms: The individual poet may be killed, but another arises, just as other tyrants arise. A poet of deceptive simplicity, Milosz can be naIve and subtle; his clarities are always intricate and exhilaratingly deep. Intensely historical, he is always pointing 'to a dimension larger than time.

Milosz' life forced him to reconcile many opposites-which he did through his poetry, that is, through acts of spirit, memory, contemplation.

He was always concerned with the role of the poet both in his work and in the conduct of his life. In "Dedication" written in 1945 in Warsaw, a city of ashes and craters, M ilosz asks: What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?

A connivance with official lies, A song for drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls.

The question-and-answer form is a favorite device- in Milosz' poetry; but these are not words written on a blackboard but outward signs of decisions which changed the course of a life.

Standing in that actual landscape of corpses, brick dust and agonized metal, watching the columns of Red Army soldiers bearing sub-machine guns and the future, Milosz was suspended between two worlds, the one that had been destroyed and the one he could feel forming around him. Perhaps there was some grim satisfaction in his own prophetic powers, for in the 1930s he had been associated with the Catastrophists, who foresaw and warned of the coming cataclysm. But Milosz had few illusions about what was to come; he had seen the structure of civilization revealed like the beams and plumbing of a house sheared by a bomb. When pinned by German gunfire he had had a moment of illumination: Watching the cobble stones struck by bullets rise like porcupine quills, he realized that such moments "judge all poets and philosophers" and require the "elimination of emotional luxuries." A poetry which did not at least attempt to aid man would be that "connivance," that "song for drunkards," those sophomore readings. Like many About the Author: Richard Lourie is a poet and translatorji-om Russian in/OEnglish.

Polish and

LOURIE

of his colleagues, Milosz at first saw his role in the new Poland as analogous to that of the Greeks conquered by the culturally inferior Romans-to smuggle the values of civilization into the new world.

But first there were accounts with the past to be settled.

There was the guilt of the survivor and the ghosts of the dead, to whom in "Dedication" Milosz says: They used to pour millet or poppy seeds on graves To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.

I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more.

Milosz also makes the guilt of the survivor quite clear, an expression which has become a cliche without having first been a plain truth, as is usually the case. He knows that in some way he will be counted "among the helpers of death: the uncircumsized."

In Child of Europe we see that guilt even more clearly, because its own unbearable pressure has deformed it into scorn and Irony: We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day, Who in May admire trees flowering, A re better than those who perished ....

Having the choice of our death and that of a (riend, We chose his, coldly thinking: let it be done quickly ....

Accept it as proven that we are better than they, The gullible, hot-blooded weaklings, careless with their lives.

Milosz entered the service of the new Poland, stepping onto a road five years long that would lead through the labyrinth he would so brilliantly analyze in The Captive Mind, written after his break with Poland in 1950. What saved him from despair and corruption in those years? The answer to that question is first to be sought in The Captive Mind and its analysis of ~J the role of the intellectual in communist society. Even after nearly 30 years the book retains its urgency, and the reader feels that the author is not thinking about a problem but rather thinking his way out of one where failure means more than bad reviews.

The years 1945-1950 were a strange, tense, and feverish period in Milosz' life. A strict separation between the outer and the inner life was required; a hint of heresy could be detected in the knotting of a necktie. Public life was a drama of tension and suspense whose denouements were real and severe. There were other pressures both positive and negative-the possibility for writers to achieve near ecclesiastical positions of moral authority (at the cost of their own morality, though this was not so apparent at first), and the spectre of exile, which Milosz feared as an abyss of "sterility and inaction." In 1948, while Polish cultural attache in Washington, Milosz sketched the poem "Greek Portrait," an image of a man abroad whose "plain face" makes him "one of the crowd."

My beard is thick, my eyelids half cover My eyes, as with those who know the value Of visible things. I keep quiet as is proper For a man who has learned that the human heart Holds more than speech does ....

Nor do I refuse to pay due homage To local gods. And I eat what others eat.

This much will suffice about myself But the passionate analysis which forms the basis for The Captive Mind was raging incessantly behind that mask. However, the decision to break with Stalinist Poland, when it came, "proceeded, not from the functioning of the reasoning mind, but from a revolt of the stomach. A man may persuade himself, by the most logical reasoning, that he will greatly benefit his health by swallowing live frogs; and, thus rationally convinced, he may swallow a first frog, then the second; but at the third his stomach will revolt." It was, he says, the "resistance of my whole nature" which caused the decision.

Our natures are clearer to ourselves, and to others, in youth and in old age, for there is something murky and turbulent about the middle of life. Milosz has written of his youth in his autobiography Native Realm, in his poetry, and in one of his two novels, The Valley of the Issa. In his autobiography he chose the impersonal approach, more to depict the matrix from which he arose than to draw a self-portrait.

Indeed, Milosz can never be intimately understood without some sense of his Lithuania, his Vilno, that unusual land of forests and lakes where Christianity came late and traces of rural paganism always remained, that city of churches which was also a great center of Jewish learning.

From early youth Milosz responded to nature with a chaste sensuality without, however, falling into sentimentality, for his acute intellect was. always aware of nature's automatic and destructive aspects; he had as well an almost tactile sense of the movement of time, and the past was as much to be felt in Lithuania as the future was in Warsaw; and what the Russians call the "cursed questions," the religious issues of death, morality, and judgment, were always real and pressing for him. But just as it was not reason but something more organic which faused his break with the violent lie of Stalinist Poland, so is the source of his strength not to be sought in his attraction to nature, history, and philosophy but in those capacities of his own nature which gave rise to those pursuits.

Chief among those capacities which he safeguarded and cultivated was the capacity for awe, amazement, admiration.

In the view of the world, of course, there is something childish about such capacities, and Milosz no doubt would be the first to agree, though he would differ as to the value which should be ascribed them. Preserving the child in himself saved Milosz from the temptations of anguish, allowed him a certain distance, a certain humor. He says that "through poetry ... I wanted to save my childhood," and this desire predates his political entanglements, for '~as a child I observed that it is precisely sexuality that makes fools of adults, weighing them down, depriving them of the capacity for disinterested enthusiasm:" Though history showed Milosz its grimmest visage and though he was always aware of the tragic limitations of life, that it is both given and unattainable, he never lost his sense of humor and could always make his reader smile and laugh. To the mask of the "Greek Portrait" must be added these lines from "Bobo's Metamorphosis" : Later on, when he had pressed trousers and a trimmed moustache, He always thought, holding a glass of liquor, that he was cheating them ....

After breaking with Poland, Milosz supported himself by his pen for 10 years in France and then in 1960 went to Berkeley, California, where he became a professor of Slavic literature.

My own father had been born few years before Milosz, a few miles away in another partof Lithuania. A Jew, a citizen of the Russian empire, he had crossed the Atlantic in steerage, and made a good life for himself in Boston. In 1960, his son went off

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another three thousand miles to Berkeley, to study at the university, where his path crossed that of Milosz. This is exactly the sort of historica,l brocade Milosz loves and taught his studenrs, He his apprentices in poetry and translation, to appreciate. chided us for lack of historical memory, shook us awake out of the American fogbank, taught us to think clearly, soberly, to be stubborn in the pursuit of knowledge and excellence, to be ashamed that "freedom of choice is being misused today by Western writers for the purpose of creating dehumanized literature," and not to be ashamed of certain common human feelings and virtues whose names are plain and which are rarely in fashion. Milosz too benefited from his students, recognizing in them a new wave of life. They aided him in his translation of Polish poetry into English and in the composition of History 0./ Polish Literature, itself a wonder, a textbook that can be read for pleasure.

America changed him. It gave him, geographically and spiritually, a new vantage point from the westernmost edge of Western civilization which can be felt both in his p.9~try and his essays, Views From San Francisco Bay. American cit'ies and landscapes entered his poems. Perhaps the vastness of the country and the influence of Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsburg helped open up his lines, allowing them more room to breathe, for, as he wrote in "Ars Poetica?" : I have always aspired to a more spacious form that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or the reader to sublime agonies.

Certain shifts of tone and emphasis occurred in Milosz' work in the American years. Some of the harsh and scornful elements were purged from his voice; there is now less irony, which he has come to call the "glory of slaves," and more praise for "life, that is, happiness."

Free from material and political pressures he was able to pursue his mystical bent, immersing himself in the works of Blake and Swedenborg which resulted in his philosophical summa, The Land of Ulro (the title is from Blake). His most recent collection of poetry, Bells in Winter, well named (for this is late and conclusive music), contains the sort of riches which only come through years of dedicated meditation. In "Readings" we see the Milosz who contemplated the Bible by translating it anew in Polish so that he, "the persistent reader:: Sees twenty centuries as twenty days In a world which one day will come to its end.

In the long, marvelous poem "From the Rising of the Sun" all the various selves of the man are united in the poet's voiceMilosz the boy, the avid reader of Doctor Catchfiy: Fantastic Adventures in the World of Insects, the youth in Lithuania and at college, the wanderer through time and landscapes. Memories, feverish hallucinations, fantasies, masks, dreams, fears of death and decay, awe, love, and the enduring sense of someth{ng unattained dissolve in and out of each other in a radiant tapestry of vision. This vision is really memory, the memory that wakes one from the nightmare of history: And if the city, there below, was consumed by fire Together with the cities of all the continents, I would not say with my mouth of ashes that it was unjust.

For we lived under the Judgment, unaware ....

It shall come to completion in the sixth millennium, or next Tuesday.

The demiurge's workshop will suddenly be stilled. Unimc.ginable silence.

And the form of every single grain will be restored in gloW I was judged for my despair because I was unable to understand this. []

by ELLEN

W. JACOBS

Oft-SPOken, almost shy woman with eyes that still view the world with amazement, a laugh edged with ~ the kind of anxiety that makes her seem eager to please: on the surface 35-year-old American choreographer and composer Laura Dean seems hardly capable of stirring the kind of controversy that is swirling about her. The most recent excitement was created by her invitation from Robert Joffrey to create a ballet and musical score for his company's New York season last winter.

Besides being one of the few choreographers to compose her own music, Dean is known for creating dances that have her performers spinning to the right for about 40 minutes, then to the left for the next 20; for making complete dances based on a skip, hop, or stomp; and for

choreographing dances so slow-moving the dancers appear motionless. Yet she has managed, without any conventional flash and dash, to create dances with an austere and compelling glamor all their own.

Though some audiences have difficulty with her work, prestigious producers such as Harvey Lichtenstein of the Brooklyn, New York, Academy of Music, and Charles Reinhart of the American Dance Festival have shown faith by commissioning major works from her. So convinced was he of her talent that Joffrey, whose own company's New York season could have spelt its financial life or death, merely shrugged when she warned him that people walk out of her concerts.

"That's O.K.," he replied.

Success with the Joffrey could bring Dean a whole new future. Official acknowledgment is already being felt. Last year,

she was invited to the White House for a party celebrating the 15th anniversary of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). "At first I thought I'd been asked because I am an NEA panelist. I was amazed when I found out it was because of my own art," she says with characteristic humility. She was also one of seven people invited to be part of the special dance delegation that went to China last year.

Yes, audiences may walk, even stalk, out of Laura Dean performances, muttering about the repetition of steps, feeling cheated by the lack of conventional virtuosity they expect of dancers. But instead of heading for the subway, they have been known to remain rooted in the Brooklyn Academy of Music lobby, shouting at each other about what they felt went wrong.

Those who stay seated, giving themselves over to the kaleidoscopic whirl of

Choreographer-composer Laura Dean, who tours India with her group this

joyous dancing, those willing to be seduced by the unique fusion of sound and movement, find themselves hard pressed to explain the transformation that takes place inside themselves when the curtain falls.

Dean may hypnotize her audience with the repetitious use of musical pulse and movement; then she suddenly jerks it awake with an unexpected change in either step or pattern. "It's the spinning, then stopping on a dime that's the most difficult," said Joffrey dancer Glenn Edgerton. The effect is as startling as the sudden blaze of sun through a day of drizzle. Inside we feel a sense of miracle.

Some of the miracle play is due to an uncanny instinct for kinetic geometry that would startle Euclid. In Night, Dean's new work for the Joffrey, a series of lines evolves into a circle of eight spinning dancers. The large circle transforms itself

into two circles: four women spinning'outside as four men do slow-motion thrusts within their archaic reaches suggesting slow-waking Egyptian friezes. Then the men are spinning outside and the women inside: inside, outside, outside, inside. This sequence is repeated several times.

Dean's choreography demands that dancers move to a very strict count.

"Be careful," she calls. "If you are only two beats off, the dance will fall apart."

The Joffrey dancers know she's not kidding. Initial rehearsals had the dancers jamming into each other, transforming the studio into a freeway free-for-all, offering little hint of the extraordinary logic with which the dance would finally emerge.

Joffrey dancer Cammy Basden says she never had to count so much. "With other choreographers you can get your cues from your partner or from the music,

but Laura's music has few changes in phrasing." Nor do Dean dances have partners, or entrances, or exits, during which the dancers can catch their breaths or reestablish their spacing. Ironically, while choreographic success is dependent on an absolute sense of ensemble, the dancers have none of the conventional cues of touch or eye contact. It is the dancer's independent counting that creates the spatial cohesion that is at the heart of her work.

"It demands so much inner concentration -we all have differentcounts-that by the end of a rehearsal I feel dazed, but actually the intense concentration relaxes me in a strange way. I feel ready for my next rehearsal," Basden continues.

Dean determines the counts after she decides the geometric shape of the dance.

"I like for the piece to give [the count] (Text continued on page 12)

month, creates dances with an austere and compelling glamor all their own.

Laura Dean's work has a natural intensity and a spirit that has been called everything from mesmerizing to intoxicating, from hypnotic to futuristic. to me, so rather than sit down with a piece had it, so she decided if the world was of paper, which I am notorious for not going to end, she might as well try to work doing- I have very few notes, and I really on her dancing. She assigned herself to a should have more - I'll just look at some- studio for two hours a day to work alone. thing and say:'Let's try this here; is this "But every time I started to move I felt, possible?' Then if I get something from it, like someone else, a Paul Taylor dancer it's like a gift." Her structural dependence [she had had a brief stay with the Taylor on mathematics, which is essentially intui- Company], something, someone .... " tive, is particularly fascinating considering In order to divest herself of former inthat she flunked geometry in high school. fluences and old muscle habits, she forced "You know why? You know why I herself to try what is very difficult for any failed it?" Her voice begins to rise before dancer, particularly one who still mainshe pauses. "I guess part of me has a very tained a deep-felt terror that if she ever rebellious mind, but it wasn't that I was stopped moving she would die: Dean tried trying to be snotty or pretentious. I to sit absolutely still. did have a difficult time learning, and ] Several weeks later, when she could no remember in geometry class, the first day, a longer bear the physical silence, she began very nice woman, a very nice math teacher, to walk. Back and forth, forth and back, she came in and put something on the she walked. Then she began to walk in board and she said, 'This is a given: and] circles. As she continued to close in on raised my hand and I said, 'Who gave it?' I herself, she found herself spinning. "I wanted to know where it came from, and started laughing because the kinesthetic when I can't get those answers, my mind feeling was so enjoyable." The spin has doesn't compute. I can't accept something become Dean's choreographic signature. at face value. I have to know the source The early dances that came out of those of it." lonely months of self-imprisonment in San She tells another story. When she was 18 Francisco included Stamping Dance, her months old she was run over by a truck in first ensemble work; Circle Dance, a the driveway of her parents' home on work created for 10 women; and Jumping Staten Island. Her leg was smashed in 18 Dance (the dancers jump together as long places, and the right side of her pelvic bone as they can before resting and beginning had to be completely rebuilt. The truck had once again; then when their feet hit the just missed her skull. The doctor warned ground, they emit a "Ha !"). It was these she would probably never walk again. She simple, rigidly structured dances that lay in a hospital room in traction for the had crjtics first declare her a "postmodern next eight months. Then she learned to minimalist." walk again, but the trauma of the exIn about 1971, she began collaboration perience may have taught the child never with composer Steve Reich, who was as to accept anything as a given, inspiring concerned with the possibilities of repetiher endless joy in movement and a terror tion in sound as Dean was with possibiliof remaining still. ties of repetition in movement. After Critics have suggested that her spinning Drumming in 1975, Dean, who had had 12 is a rip-off of the dervish whirl. Dean says years of music training, decided she also she discovered the spin in a dance studio in wanted to compose her own music. "That way a dance's visual and aural structure San Francisco. The year was 1968.

Like many of her disenchanted contem- come from one source," she said in poraries,. and like the Rolling Stones, who a New York Times article. "It's also were singing "Paint It Black," Dean, too, very playful to compose your own music. was convinced the world was about to end. You can just go ahead and lop off or add She decided to go to Mexico, where at on music wherever you like without least it was warm and sunny. But after having to get someone else's permission."

In 1976 she made Song and then Dance, running out of money, she returned to which had the dancers singing as well as New York. Then she decided to try San Francisco, where there was talk of com- dancing, with Dean as both choreographer munal living. Things were not as rumor and composer. Her rhythms and spatial

patterns were growing more and more complex, and her dances were resonating with greater splashes of freedom and joy.

Dean says she never really wanted to become a professional dancer or choreographer. "I didn't know what I wanted.

But I was always a physically aware child.

I was aware on the bus that my feet didn't touch the floor. I hated, absolutely hated, school. You couldn't move. If you did, you got into trouble. I wasn't hyperactive.

I just needed to move."

At the age of five her parents took her for dance lessons at the Third Street Settlement Music School in Manhattan.

"My first crush was on my dance teacher, Lucas Hoving. He was a blond, tall Dutchman with muscles sticking out of his arms." Dean's face grows animated at the memory. "Lucas' class was freedom.

You could use your imagination, could skip and go around in circles. I really got into technique. Yes, you have feet! Someone was on my wavelength. Lucas would talk about your back and neck. Someone was acknowledging: Yes, you have a body."

When she was about 10 years old, her mother took her to see New York City Ballet's production of The Nutcracker, and "I fell in love with the star.

He was a blond, blue-eyed boy." Knowing that The Nutcracker children studied at the School of American Ballet (SAB), she pestered her mother to take her to SAB for ballet lessons so she could meet the prince.

When she finally did, she was disappointed.

"He wasn't my type," she laughs.

As a student at the High School of Performing Arts, she studied both ballet and modern dance, eventually majQring in modern. At graduation she still didn't want to be a professional dancer, although she believes dancing "saved my life. I was always an incredible rebel. I spent one whole semester going to Central Park instead of school. But thank God for Performing Arts," she says quickly. "If I had had to go to my local high school, I would never have made it. I was rebellious and extremely unhappy. One thing about Performing Arts, you had to move, and there's something cathartic about moving. If you are depressed, at least you have your body."

While the spin has become ffean's chvreographic signature, her-dance alsonasa structurar dependence on mathematics, with counts, or pulse, and geometric patterns playing an important role in the score. Above is the notation and drawing of Dean's Stamping Dance, created in 1971.

After graduation, she entered Boston University as a theater major. Her college education ended after two months when in a fit of temper at the rules and regulations foisted on her-her theater work required she come in after the 9: 30 dorm curfew-she threw a lamp at her housemother. "I'd never, ever done anything like that in my life. I was so infuriated at their stupidity, and I told the dean of women.

And I am not a violent human being.

At that time, if anything, I was extremely quiet, a very intense, quiet person."

For a long time after her return to New York, she remained at home in Staten Island "doing nothing" until she got a job as a receptionist at New Directions. She still didn't know what she wanted to be, but she began to take ballet again. In 1965 she tried out for the Paul Taylor Dance Company and was accepted. She danced with Taylor for almost a year before leaving and beginning to work on her own.

Then at the Clark Center for the Performing Arts, New York, she became involved with two brilliant iconoclasts

- Meredith Monk and Kenneth King, both of whom incorporate theater into their dance. Dean laughingly describes her own experiments with theater pieces during that period-none of which was performed publicly-as "avant-garde kitsch."

These works happened before she took off for San Francisco in 1968. And now, 13 years later, the Joffrey seems to represent another beginning for another important departure.

In its comparative brevity and inclusion of a Dean-ized balletic vocabulary, Night might be regarded as a ballet audience's introduction to the mysterious spells cast

by Laura Dean. Perhaps. its shortness robs it of some of the hypnotic power that characterizes her full-evening dances for her own company, yet the work, with its slow-moving, snaking developes, spins en pointe, attitudes with arms in strange, unballetic angles, evolves with a beauty and shock all its own.

By suggesting a new dimension to Dean's own choreographic imagination. and providing a whole new look to the Joffrey I dances, Night fulfills her ever modestly stated intentions: "I wanted the challenge of working with ballet dancers.

I'd never worked with ballet dancers before. I'm working on my version of what ballet means. This is my first step out."

Another step Dean has been taking is television. During the Joffrey season she flew to Minneapolis with members of her own company, Dean Dancers and Musicians, to perform Tympani, which was commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The dance was performed live in Orchestra Hall and then taped in a television studio.

Though she is less interested in television as an art form than in its practical potential ("It's two dimensional; it's a great narrative, story-telling tool but it's not conducive to dance because there's no sense of gravity, and the dancing figure is relatively small"), she is intrigued by its ability to reach millions who sit at home rather than go to the theater.

0 About the Author: Ellen W. Jacobs has written about dance in numerous publications, including The New York Times and Soho News.

Teaching machines how to think for themselves is what Marvin Minsky does best. The founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's artificial intelligence laboratory believes that an economy run by computer-controlled robots is no longer afuturistic dream. With these mechanical "hands," he says, it will be possible to "work" in another room, in another city, in another country, and even on another planet.

don a comfortable jacket lined with sensors and musclelike .motors. Each motion of your arm, hand, and fingers is reproduced at another place by mobile, mechanical hands. Light, dextrous, and strong, these hands have their own sensors through which you see and feel what is happening. Using this instrument, you can "work" in another room, in another city, in another country, or on another planet. Your remote presence possesses the strength of a giant or the delicacy of a surgeon. Heat or pain is translated into

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informative but tolerable sensation. Your dangerous job becomes safe and pleasant.

The crude robotic machines of today can do little of this. By building new kinds of versatile, remote-controlled mechanical hands, however, we might solve critical problems of energy, health, productivity, and environmental quality, and we would create new industries.

It might take 10 to 20 years and might cost $1,000 million-¡less than the cost of a single'urban tunnel or nuclear-power reactor or the development of a new model of automobile.

To convey the idea of these remote-control tools, scientists often use the words teleoperators or telefactors. I prefer to call them telepresences, a name suggested by my futurist friend, Pat Gunkel.

Telepresence emphasizes the importance of high-quality sensory feedback and suggests future instruments that will feel and work so much like our own hands that we won't notice much difference.

Telepresence is not science fiction. We could have a remote-

might have cut this expense to a few million dollars.

Remote-control arms used at nuclear facilities are little better than pliers, unable to do many things you can do with your own hands.

No such device demonstrates true telepresence. The [(x.motegripper may well imitate the motion of your hand, but the remote arm does hot follow your arm's curve, and so you cannot always reach around obstacles. The dynamics are unnatural, and the designs skimp on many shoulder, elbow, and wrist motions. The hands have unnatural wrists. The conventional grippers can pinch or clamp but can't twist, shear, roll, or bend.

If people had a bit more engineering courage and tried to make these hands more like human hands, modeled on the physiology of the palm and fingers, we could make nuclear-reactor plants and other hazardous facilities much safer.

Developing telepresences will involve hard scientific and engineering problems, but I believe we should go ahead. Present devices are so clumsy they are, used only when nothing else works. Once improved, however, telepresence will bring us: • Safe and efficient nuclear-power generation, waste processing, and land and sea mining. The Gulf of Mexico undersea oil blowout in 1979

is the kind of accident that I'm convinced telepresence technology could have helped to mitigate.

• Advances in fabrication, assembly, inspection, and maintenance systems. With telepresences one can as easily work from a thousand

kilometers away as from a few meters. Manual labor could easily be done without leaving your home. One region of the world could export the specialized skills it has. Anywhere. A laborer in Botswana or India could market his or her abilities in Japan or Antarctica.

• The elimination of many chemical and physical health hazards and creation of new medical and surgical techniques. Ifwe miniaturize tele-

presence for use in microsurgery, for example, surgeons could repair or replace many little blood vessels in the brain. Other organs beyond the reach of scalpel and forceps could also be repaired or substituted.

• A reduction of transportation costs and of energy and commuting time, enabling one person to do different jobs in different places.

Marvin Minsky with his J4~iointed, 3-elbowed, computer-controlled, muscled mechanical arm. It can easily reach around things in its way.

hydraulic-

controlled economy by the 21st century if we start planning now.

A genuine telepresence system requires new ways to sense the various motions of a person's hands. This means new motors, sensors, and lightweight actuators. Prototypes will be complex, but as designs mature, much of that complexity will move from hardware to easily copied computer software.

The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in the United States really needed telepresence. The accident at the reactor underscored the absurd inflexibility of present-day technology in handling the damage and making repairs to that reactor. Technicians are still waiting to conduct a thorough inspection of the damaged plant-and to absorb a year's allowable dose of radiation in just a few minutes. The cost of repair and the energy losses will be $1,000 million; telepresence

Mass transportation could be replaced by ubiquitous taxis, remotely controlled by teleoperation. Telepresence devices could fix sewers, electrical conduits, and water mains from within. Teleoperation would do away with all hazardous and unpleasant tasks.

• The construction and operation of low-cost space stations. Telepresence might prove invaluable for solar-power satellite construction -for amassing materials in space and supplies for the human work force. Telepresence would be able to assemble various orbital structures. There are places here on earth more dangerous to humans than outer space is. Mines, for ex.ample. In a remote-controlled mining operation, there are no people to be hurt. A fire in a mineshaft would elicit no more response than: "Well, it's sad. We've lost six robots."

The biggest challenge to developing telepresence is achieving that sense of "being there." Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing? Will we be able to couple our artifici.al devices naturally and comfortably to work together with the sensory mechanisms of human organisms?

When any job becomes too large, small, heavy, or light for human hands, it becomes difficult to distinguish the inertia and elasticity of the instrument from what it's working on. Telepresence will be able to adjust and compensate for such problems, thus making the job easier. For instance, a remote "miner" could dig a narrow seam without himself having to stoop or crawl.

We have talked of mining, but no matter how much coal we mine, we are, like it or not, becoming dependent on nuclear power. The nuclear designers try to anticipate and avoid all modes of failure.

But all reactors have the potential to break down: High temperatures weaken structural materials; generators apply high pressures to those weakened structures; and radiation damage makes inspection

The biggest challenge to developing telepresence is achieving that sense of "being there." Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing? difficult, while aggravating structural damage and corrosion.

These problems compel designers to choose between two extremes. One is to build each part with monumental toughness-to minimize human exposure-and hope this system never fails; this is today's designers' favorite approach. But in the end breakdown and failure occur anyway, requiring man's intervention.

I think the better extreme is to build modular systems that permit periodic inspection, maintenance, and repair. Telepresence would prevent crises before they could arise.

If no one were in the buildings, no one would be exposed to radiation. Then we could all stop quarreling about "tolerable" and "threshold" doses. If nothing enters or leaves the reactor except by way of telepresence machines, no one can steal anything. Computers-or skeptical people-can monitor for unusual activities over viewingchannels.

We can employ telepresence in any environment alien to humans.

Most of the earth, for example, is ocean; "moonwalks" on the ocean floor at three kilometers' depth are technically more difficult to execute than moonwalks on the moon or Mars. Remotely operated seafloor "construction crews" could bypass the prohibitive hazards of manned exploration, avoiding the risk of weather-troubled ships and treacherous towers in mining on the continental shelf. The U.S. Office of Naval Research has some remote-controlled deep-sea exploration projects, and eventually such systems will explore for and extract deep-sea petroleum and minerals. Eventually entire undersea industrial plants could be so controlled from the surface.

In space the amazing success of Vikings 1and 2 shows how much can be done with remote control-even with day-long transmission delays. Yet the Viking spacecraft had pathetic limitations. There was no way to reconfigure the equipment to make use of what was learned; a week of breathless planning was required just to get Viking 2 to turn a stone over.

I think the best way to explore the planets is to have people in orbiting spacecraft to operate telepresences that maneuver on the surface. A Mars Rover with good telepresence manipulators can make extensive excavations, then reconfigure scientific equipment to exploit what has been discovered.

Among the most exciting prospects for solving our energy woes is to build a ring of solar-power satellites in orbit around earth.

Safe, free solar energy cQuld then be collected and beamed back to receivers located near our cities. The main problem is the cost: We must put sufficiently large structures in space to gather enou~h sunlight, since each station requires thousands of hectares of reflectors and collectors. And then there's the cost of sending people into space to build them.

Telepresence could save billions of dollars by employing remotecontrolled hands stationed in orbit and controlled by technicians on earth and on the moon. Most satellite construction could be done by people working in their own homes and offices.

To circumvent the cost of lifting satellite payloads against earth's powerful gravity, scientists have been devising ways to manufflcture and launch materials directly from the moon or from the asteroids.

Buildingsuch lunar facilities, however, would be impossibly expensive if carried out entirely by men in space, suits on the moon. Instead, why not use cheap, earth-based labor via telepresence to build factories on the moon? Imagine having to go no farther than your study to operate a crane on Mare Imbrium. We would then need to only send

telepresence machines on inexpensive one-way trips.

Scientists at Ames Research Center, in California, managed to develop a startlingly nice telepresence, a remote-controlled space suit. It looks like a real space suit; you put your arm into the master suit, and the slave suit moves just like your arm. It's an extremely good arm, a perfect imitation. Your arm feels natural in it. But it doesn't have any hand.

The space shuttle, too, has an arm. It is very long, and it takes about half a minute to complete any motion. But there isn't any reason to hurry. In zero gravity nothing weighs anything; so one can use a 45-kilogram, long, slender pipe to move a lO-ton load very slowly.

While the shuttle arms are merely glorified construction cranes, they are the beginnings of giant teleoperators. At the other ~nd of the size spectrum, biologists have long used micromanipulators, tiny teleoperators. But none of them have any sensors. If we were to miniaturize telepresences for surgery, we could develop touchreflecting micro hands on slender probes that reach through the vessels' narrowest passages. Further in the future a surgeon could direct a semi-intelligent procedure, including several simultaneous microtelepresences, to make smaller repairs swiftly.

The first crude remote-controlled mechanical hands were built around 1947 at Argonne National Laboratories, in Illinois, for handling dangerous chemicals. In 1954 the late Ray Goertz, a scientist at Argonne, developed hands in which electric motors "reflected" some of the forces back so that the operator could feel something of what was happening, at least resistance and pressure, if not textures.

Paradoxically, the very first telepresences could relay sense of feel better than later electric models could, because they used rigidly linked cables and pulleys. Later electric motors were stronger and could work at greater distances, but they lost that sense offeel one got through the cables.

Early pioneers like Goertz had the fantasy of building better robots of various kinds, and then people got interested in my field, artificial intelligence-getting robots to do smart things. And we did get them to do simple mechanical things like assembling a motor. But they were always handicapped by those terrible claw hands.

To create true telepresences, we must supply more natural sensory channels-touch, pressure, textures, vibration. We must learn which sensory defects are most tolerable. In 1958 Ralph Mosher, an engineer working for General Electric, developed a telepresence-called Handiman-that had good dexterity and compensation. It had only two fingers, but those fingers each had three joints so that they could wrap around any object. Handiman could lift hundreds of kilograms it transformed you into a superperson. But it was never put to any practical use. Mosher subsequently made a simpler version that permitted him to sit in his chair and pick up refrigerators.

Although basically little work has been done since the fifties, there now exist a few more versatile experimental manipulators.

Electrotechnical Laboratory, in Tokyo, has made a three-fingered, 12-jointed hand that can roll a baton. But that's about all it can do.

A group at Stanford University invented a long, snakelike tentacle that can wrap around objects. I once built a 14-joint, multielbowed arm that can easily reach around things in its way. But no project has the resources to perfect any such ideas.

I think we should make telepresences that compare well with the human hand: a five-fingered device capable of imitating natural motions. It should be mobile. We might then adapt designs and concepts from the arm to make legs, yielding a system able to work wherever people can, not only on carefully prepared floors.

To control such an instrument, we will want a light, well-articulated sleeve that includes effectors to reflect the sensations. This will require advanced materials and new muscle-imitating devices; for visual feedback, we'd need slender fiber-optic probes articulated to emulate the operator's head-and-eye motions. We probably would

want to have an eye of some sort on the fingers. . A Philco engineer named Steve Moulton made a nice telepresence eye. He mounted a TV camera atop a building and wore a helmet so that when he moved his head, the camera eye on top of the building moved, and so did a viewing screen attached to the helmet.

Wearing this helmet, you have the feeling of being on top of the building a'nd looking around Philadelphia. If you "lean over," it's kind of creepy. But the most sensational thing Moulton did was to put a two-to-one ratio on the neck so that when you turn your head 30 degrees, the mounted eye turns 60 degrees; it makes you feel as if you had a rubber neck"as if you could turn your "head" completely around! . Several major U.S. companies have been involved in telepresence research from time to time-AMF, Hughes, General Mills, IBM, and others-though none of them have reached "critical mass."

Manysmaller firms possess more precious skills- U nimation, Central Research Laboratories, Programmed and Remote, and others. The DefenseAdvanced Research Projects Agency, working with the army, once supported work on powered armored suits, like those in Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but the work was abandoned. University workers in the United States have had many good ideas, designs, and prototypes, but they could never afford to engineer complete systems.

Part of the problem has been that telepresence has never been anybody's baby. Such a project demands centralization. It requires imaginative specialists in sensors, effectors, control theory, artificial intelligence, software, engineering, psychology, and first-class facilities for mechanical and electrical engineering and materials science.

It will need strong resources for interactive computation and for real-time physical simulation. .

I can't imagine anyone doubting that telepresence is possible. It's a matter of solving many problems that are hard, but not impossible.

In the mechanical area the same things have been done over and over; engineers spend their time arguing about what kind of wrist is better. Some think the wrist should go round and round, spinning forever, especially on a robot that's using a screwdriver. That's all right for the industrial robots, but there isn't much point in that

because you can't spin your own wrist around to control it.

Some research has been done in the psychology of spatial perception, in terms of feedback controls and the interrelationship between electronics and the human nervous system. There is a device, for example, that can translate print into "feel," developed

by J.e. Bliss and J.G. Linvill, at Stanford, which enables the blind to read conventional printed matter. It's a gadget that fits conveniently on your fingertip and has a lot of miniature photocells to sense light and a lot of little vibrators that allow the finger to sense remotely the fine shape of the letters.

In my own laboratory, graduate student Danny Hillis recently fabricated a thin, skinlike material that can "feel" and transmit small tactile surface features.

Someone could develop similar devices for telepresencevibrating patterns, for example, that would convey the sensations of "hot" or "cold." However, very little is known about tactile sensations. It seems quite ironic to me that we already have a device that can translate print into feel, but that we have nothing that can translate feel into feel.

Eventually telepresence will improve and save old jobs and create new ones. Later, as we learn more about robotics, many human telepresence operators will be able to turn their tasks over to the robots and become "supervisors." In the long run, since each step toward telepresence is a step toward robots, telepresence sensors and output devices could be controlled by computers rather than by people. This becomes inevitable as we learn more about artificial intelligence.

Computers equipped with artificial hands and eyes have actually grasped and moved objects in accord with verbal commands. In that way a complicated precision bearing was assembled at MIT; an entire pump was put together at Stanford; a toy automobile was constructed in Edinburgh, Scotland. Similar work has been done at SRI International. These laboratory programs are too undependable for practical use because, although we can do many things with computers, we cannot get them to do many things any child can do.

Someday our machines could do all our work for us, but that is a long way off.

If teleoperator technology promises wealth and freedom beyond dreams, is there a dark side? People who issue manifestos should think about such matters. The solution may be to grant those who want to live in the "old ways" their chance, while those who want new gifts should also have theirs. I think the gifts promise better, richer, and longer lives. Might telepresence, though, have a special tendency to make workers feel alienated? Perhaps, yes, even with superb technology. Many jobs will become intensely more interesting and more creative, many worlds will be expanded.

If each step toward telepresence were also a step toward the economic pain and psychic grief of unemployment, one might consider working against it. Yet a generation of reforms is already eliminating many of the unsafe jobs that telepresence could preserve.

Telepresence offers a freer market of people's skills, rendering each worker less vulnerable to the moods and fortunes of one employer.

Finally, in a strange sense, the question of "t~chnological unemployment" may become moot: Many young people today consider it demeaning to be bound to any single employer, occupation, or even culture. Perhaps many of us sense-at least on some levelthat little of what we do really has to be done Our attitudes about work, about changing the quality of it, depend as much on our own dispositions and our alternatives as on the jobs themselves. In 0 effect, most of us already feel technologically unemployed.

About the Author: Marvin Minsky directs, one of the wor/cfs leading research groups in computers and robotics at M1. T. He is the author of Computation, Semantic Information Processing and Perceptrons.

THE QUALITY OF This is the story of the General Motors (OM) car assembly plant in Tarrytown, New York. In 1970 the plant was known as having one of the poorest labor relations and production records in GM. By 1929, the plant turned around to become one of the company's better run sites.

Born out of frustration and desperation, but with a mutual commitment by management and the union to change old ways of dealing with the workers on the shop floor, a program developed at Tarrytown known as "quality of work life." This phrase covers a person's feelings about every dimension of work: economic rewards and benefits, security, working conditions, organizational and interpersonal relationships and the intrinsic meaning of work in a person's life.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Tarrytown plant suffered from much absenteeism and labor turnover. Operating costs were high. Frustration, fear and mistrust characterized the relationship between management and labor. At certain times, as many as 2,000 labor grievances were on the docket. As one manager puts it, "Management was always in a defensive posture. We were instructed to go by the book, and we did. The way we solved problems was to use our authority and impose discipline."

Workers were mad at everyone, They disliked the job itself and the inexorable movement of the high-speed line-56 cars per hour, a minute and a half per operation per defined space. One worker remembers it well: "Hnish one job, and you always had another stare you in the face." Employees saw their foremen as insensitive dictators whose operating principle was "If you can't do the job like I tell you, get out."

Warnings, disciplinary layoffs and firings were commonplace. Not only did the workers view the company as an impersonal bureaucratic machine, but they also saw the union itself as a source of frustration. "The committeeman [a union representative] often wrote up a grievance but, because he was so busy putting out fires, he didn't tell the worker how or whether the grievance was settled. In his frustration, the worker would take it out on the foreman, the committeeman and the job itself."

In April 1971 Tarrytown faced a serious threat. The plant manager saw the need for change, and also an opportunity.

Reprinted with permission

from Harvard

Business Review.

Š

by the president and fellows of Harvard College. All 'rights reserved.

He approached some of the key union officers who, though traditionally suspicious of management overtures, listened to him. The union officers remember liking what they heard: "This manager indicated that he wanted to create a philosophy of management different from what had gone on before. He felt there was a better way of doing things."

The plant manager suggested that if the union was willing to do its part, he would put pressure on his own management people to change their ways.

The company decided to stop assembling trucks at Tarrytown and to rearrange the entire plant. Two departments, hard trim and soft trim, were to be moved to a renovated area of the former truck line.

At first the changes were introduced in the usual way. Manufacturing and industrial engineers and technical specialists designed the new layout, developed the charts and blueprints and planned every move~ They then presented their proposals to the supervisors. Two of the production supervisors in the hard trim department, sensing that top plant management was looking for new approaches, made a suggestion that was to have a profound effect on events to follow: "Why not ask the workers themselves to get involved in the move? They know as much about¡ trim operations as anyone else."

After the hard trim management group decided to involve the workers, the soft trim department followed suit. The union was brought in on the planning. Oldtimers in the union report "wondering about management's motives. We could remember the times management came up with programs only to find there was an ulterior motive and that in the long run the worker could get caught in between."

Many supervisors in other departments also doubted the wisdom of fully disclosing the plans.

Nevertheless, the supervisors of the two trim departments insisted not only that plans not be hidden from the workers, but also that they have a say in the setup of jobs.

Charts and diagrams of the facilities, conveyors, benches and materials storage

areas were drawn up for the workers to look at. Lists were made of the work stations and the personnel to man them.

The supervisors were impressed by the outpouring of ideas: "They made hundreds of suggestions, and we adopted many of them."

Here was a new concept. The training director observes: "Although it affected only one area of the plant, this was the first time management was communicating with the union and the workers to solve future problems rather than the usual situation of doing something, waiting for a reaction, then putting out the fires later." The union echoes the same point: "This demonstrated how important it is to solve problems before they explode. Otherwise, you get the men riled up against everything and everybody."

Moving the two departments was carried out successfully with remarkably few grievances. The plant easily made its production-schedule deadlines. The next year saw the involvement of employees in the complete rearrangement of another major area of the plant, the chassis department.

In 1972 Irving Bluestone, vicepresident for the General Motors department of the United Automobile Workers union (UA W), made what many consider to be the speech inaugurating the quality of work life movement in the United States. He declared: "Traditionally management has called upon labor to cooperate in increasing productivity and improving the quality of the product. My view is that management should cooperate with the worker to find ways to enhance the dignity of labor and to tap the creative resources in each human being in developing a more

WORK LIFE satisfying work life, with emphasis on worker participation in the decisionmaking process."

In 1973 the UA Wand GM negotiated a national agreement, which included a brief "letter of agreement" signed by Bluestone and George Morris, head of industrial relations for GM. Both parties committed themselves to establishing formal mechanisms for exploring new ways of dealing with the quality of work life.

In April 1974 a professional consultant, paid by management, was brought in to involve supervisors and workers in joint training programs for problem solving.

He talked at length with most of the union officers and committeemen, who report that "we were skeptical at first but we came to trust him. We realized that if we were going to break through the communications barrier on a large scale, we needed a third party."

Management and the union each selected a coordinator to work with the consultant and with the supervisors, the union and the workers. The consultant, with the union and the management coordinators, proposed a series of problem-solving training sessions to be held on Saturdays, for eight hours each day.

Two supervisors and the committeemen in the soft trim department talked it over with the workers, of whom 34 from two shifts volunteered for training sessions.

Management agreed to pay for six hours of the training, and the men volunteered their own time for the remaining two hours.

In November 1974, at the height of the 'oi,lembargo of the industrialized nations by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), disaster struck. General Motors shut down Tarrytown's second shift, and laid off half the

At a large American automobile plant, the union and management jointly seek to change t~e meaning of work itself.

work force-2,000 workers. A shock wave reverberated throughout the plant, among both workers and supervisors.

Some feared the convulsion would bring on, an avalanche of grievances, and all feared that the cutback was an early signal that Tarrytown was being targeted for permanent shutdown. It was one of the oldest GM plants, and its past record of performance was not good.

However, the newly developing trust between management and the union had its effects. As the union president puts it, "Everyone got a decent transfer, and there were surprisingly few grievances.

We didn't get behind, so we didn't have to catch up on a huge backlog."

What did suffer was' the modest and fragile quality of work life experiment. It was all but abandoned. Many workers who had been part of it were laid off, and new workers had not been exposed to it.

In spite of the disruption to plant operations, the quality of work life team, the plant manager and the union officials, were determined not to give up.

Everyone agreed that if the program were to be expanded on a larger scale, it would require more careful planning. A policy group made up of the plant manager, the production manager, the personnel manager, the union's top officers and the two coordinators was formed.

The program was structured so that both the union and management could have an advisory group to administer the system and to evaluate the ideas coming up from the problem-solving teams. Participation was to be entirely voluntary.

1 A survey of interest was taken among the 600 workers in the two volunteering departments; 95 percent said they wanted to be included in the program.

A second crisis occurred when the production schedule was increased to a line speed of 60 cars per hour. Total' daily output would not be enough to reql!ire a second shift to bring back all the laidoff workers. Instead, the company suggested that 300 laidoff workers be brought in and that the plant o

operate on an overtime schedule. Ordinarily the union would object strongly to working overtime when there were still well over 1,000 members out on the streets. "But," as the union president puts it, "we sold the membership on the idea of agreeing to overtime, and the criticism was minimal. We told them the plant's survival was at stake."

Despite the upheavals at the plant, it seemed that the quality of work life program would survive. Then a third blow was delivered. Just as 60 workers were completing their training sessions, the company announced that Tarrytown was to return to a two-shift operation.

For hundreds of those recalled to work, this was good news. Internally, however, it meant the line would have to go through the same upheaval it had experienced 14 months earlier when the second shift was dropped.

Workers were shuffled around according to seniority and job classification.

Shift preferences were granted according to length of service. With a faster line speed than before, the average worker had fewer operations to perform, but those he did perform had to be done at a faster pace. In short, because of possible inequities in work loads, conditions were ripe for another wave of grievances.

Happily, the union and management were able to work out the problems with a minimum of formal grievances.

But again the small,' partially developed quality of work life program had to be postponed. The number of recalled workers and newly hired employees was too great, and turnover was too high among the latter for the program to continue as it had been. However, capitalizing on the mutual trust that had been slowly building up, management and the union, agreed to set up an orientation program for newly hired employees ..

Early in 1977 Tarrytown made the "big commitment." The quality of work life effort was to be launched on a plantwide scale, involving approximately 3,800 workers and supervisors.

The policy committee and the quality of work life coordinators went to work giving all the top staff personnel, department heads and production superintendents a series of orientation sessions. By June all middle managers and first-line supervisors were involved. All union committeemen also went through the orientation sessions.

On September 13, 1977, the program was launched. Each week 50 different

workers reported to the training rooms on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, for nine hours a day. Those taking the sessions had to be replaced at their work stations by substitutes.

At the outset, the trainers made it clear that the employees were not to use the sessions to solve grievances or to take up labor-management issues covered by the contract itself. The presentation covered a variety of subjects presented in many forms with a heavy stress on participation by the class. The work groups were given a general statement of what quality of work life was all about.

The trainers used printed materials, diagrams, charts and slides to describe products and model changes, how the plant was laid out, how the production system worked and what the organ'izational structures of management and the union were. Time was spent covering safety matters, methods used to measure quality performance, efficiency, etc. The work groups were shown how and where they could get any information they wanted about their plant.

To develop effective problem-solving skills, the trainers presented simulated problems and then asked employees to go through a variety of experiential exercises. The training content enabled the workers to diagnose themselves, their own behavior, how they appeared in competitive situations, handled two-way communications and solved problems.

Trainers took notes on the ideas generated in the sessions and at the end handed out a questionnaire to each participant.

The notes and questionnaires were systematically fed back to the union and management coordinators, who in turn brought. the recommendations to the policy committee. The primary mode of feedback was the workers themselves to their foremen and fellow workers out on the shop floor.

When all the employees had completed their sessions, the union and management immediately agreed to keep the system on a continuing basis. From late December 1978 through early February 1979, production operations at Tarry, town were closed down to prepare for the introduction of a new automobile model.

In preparation for the model change, managers and hourly personnel together evaluated hundreds of anticipated assembly processes. Workers talked directly with supervisors and technical people about the best ways of setting up various jobs on the line.

Later, in evaluating the formal training program, the trainers repeatedly emphasized the difficulties they faced as well as

the rewards. Many of the men and women from the shop floor were' highly suspicious at the start of the sessions.

Some old-timers harbored grudges against management. Young workers were skeptical. Some of the participants were confused at seeing a union trainer in front of the class with someone from management.

In the early training period, the trainers were also nervous in their new roles.

Few of them had ever had such an experience before. Many agreed that their impulse was to throw a lot of information at the worker trainee. The trainers found, however, that once the participants opened up they "threw a lot at us." Although they understood intellectually that participation is the basic purpose of the quality of work life program, the trainers had to experience directly the outpouring of ideas, perceptions and feelings of the participants to comprehend emotionally the dynamics of the inv91vement process.

Labor in the United States is seeking more control over and involvement in the forces affecting their work lives.

But the trainers felt rewarded too.

They describe example after example of the workers' reactions once they felt comfortable with the program. One skeptical worker, for example, burst out after the second day , "You mean all this information about what's going on in the plant was available to us? Well, I'm going to use this."

Other regular activities to keep management and the union informed about new developments parallel the training sessions. Currently, following the plant manager's regular staff meetings, the personnel director passes on critical information to the shop committee. The safety director meets weekly with each zone committeeman. Top union officials have monthly discussions with top management staff to discuss future developments, facility alterations, schedule changes, model changes and other matters requiring advance planning. The union chairman and his zone committeemen check in with the personnel director each morning and go over current or anticipated problems.

What are the measurable results of quality of work life at Tarrytown? Neither the managers nor union representatives want to say much. They argue that

to focus on production records or number of grievances is contrary to the original purpose or philosophy of the quality of work life efforts. Getting the process of worker involvement going was a primary goal with its own intrinsic rewards. The organizational benefits followed.

There are, however, some substantial results from the $1.6-million quality of work life program. The production manager says, for example: "From a strictly production point of view-efficiency and costs-this entire experience has been absolutely positive, and we can't begin to measure the savings because of the hundreds of small problems that wer~ solved on the shop floor before they accumulated into big problems."

Although not confirmed by management, the union claims that Tarrytown went from one of the poorest plants in its quality performance (inspection counts or dealer complaints) to one of the best.

It reports that absenteeism dropped from 7.25 percent to between 2 and 3 percent.

In December 1978, at the end of the training sessions, there were only 32 grievances on the docket. Seven years earlier, upward of 2,000 grievances had been filed.

Tarrytown, in short, has proved that quality of work life works.

The Tarrytown story may reflect something important about quality of work life efforts springing up in many other places in the United States. Studies are showing that workers in large, rationalized industries and businesses are seeking more control over and involvement in the forces affecting their work lives. Due in part to the rising levels of education, changing aspirations and shift in values, especially among young people, I believe we are witnessing a quiet revolution in what people expect from work, an expectation that goes beyond the economic and job-security issues that led to labor unrest in an earlier day.

In parts of Europe, the response to this quiet revolution is manifest in broadscale political efforts on the part of labor and government to gain greater control over the management of the enterprise itself. In the United States the response is different. Workers or their unions have given no indications that they wish to take over basic management prerogatives. As the Tarrytown story illustrates, what they want is more pragmatic, more immediate, more localized-but no less important.

0 About the/Author: Robert Guest is professor of organizational behavior at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College. Hanover. New Hampshire.

AN INTERNATIONAL EFFORT

SAVING THE SIBERIAN CRANE The Siberian crane, whose seasonal passage between Siberia and India is a biannual ritual far older than civilization, is an endangered species today.

At Agra on the banks of the Jumna River sits the Taj Mahal, the most beautiful monument ever built to commemorate man's love for woman. Over the centuries countless tourists have marveled at¡ the intensely satisfying symmetry of the white marble tomb built in the 17th century by an emperor for his dead queen.

Fifty kilometers west of Agra resides a different monument in white, a celebration not of man's love, but of nature's exacting process of evolution. Built not of marble, but of flesh and feather, this wonderful creation isn't always on view to the public. It slips in and out of India seasonally, obeying instincts older than the weathered hills of the subcontinent. It is, in the words of Allan O. Hume, the "lily of birds," the Siberian crane.

The Taj Mahal and the Siberian crane share a characteristic beyond their whiteness and beauty: both may have become anachronisms in an age when humankind's burgeoning numbers threaten everything fragile and unchanging. The new oil refinery operating north of Agra at Mathura is consi.dered by some experts to be a threat to the Taj, since pollutants produced by the refinery may corrode the delicate marble and inlaid traceries of the 300-year-old building. Others disagree. Only time will tell.

But for the Siberian crane time may have already run out. Last year only 33 cranes wefe counted at the famed Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary, the only known wintering area for this bird in India. A severe drought turned the normally wet refuge into a muddy morass, and the handful of Siberians that appeared at the sanctuary in December and January seemed hard pressed to' find adequate food. An attempt to relieve the drought by building a pumping station within the refuge came too late to help the cranes, and they left earlier than usual for their flight back to their breeding grounds in northern Siberia. Whether their food reserves were sufficient for the 6,000kilometer journey is impossible to know.

The Siberian crane's seasonal passage between its breeding and wintering grounds is a biannual ritual far older than civilized man.

This bird belongs to an ancient family that has existed for some 60 million years; its immediate ancestors shared the planet with dino-

north-central India, the Siberian crane became ever rarer. And though Allan Hume might have been bothered by killing a few of these birds, hundreds have been shot since without a thought or care.

In 1974, the International Crane Foundation (ICF), an organization started two years earlier to assist the threatened crane family, began a long-term study of the Siberian crane. That winter, with funding from ICF and the New York Zoological Society, fellow Cornell University ornithologist Paul Spitzer and I studied the biology of this species at the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary. It was the first study since Hume's work in the 1860s. Two years later, I returned to India under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund and continued the work, ably assisted by Shahid Ali of the Bombay Natural History Society and John McGough, a friend from Cornell.

district of Etawah (now in western Uttar Pradesh), Hume became familiar with these large white cranes, which often spent the winter in areas under his jurisdiction.

Although he shot more than a dozen of these rare birds in the name of science, he was clearly troubled by .their deaths. "The worst of ornithology is having to kill birds like these. For birds of prey that one shoots so often in the saurs. Man's first record of the act of tearing some helpless innoSiberian crane is much more re- cent victim to pieces, one has little cent. In the Indian Museum at compunction; but with gentle Calcutta is a small painting of this vegetable-eating birds like these, bird that is remarkable for its who seem to love each other so accuracy. The work of Ustad Man- well, and so much, and who for so sur, the 17th-century court painter long evince their sense of the loss of Emperor Jahangir, the painting of any of the family party, the case was executed' a full 100 years be- is different, and no feeling man can fore the Siberian crane was first kill any of them, I think, without a scientifically described by the Ger- , pang." man PeterS. Pallas. Pallas named The Siberian crane was already it Grus leucogeranus, or "white rare in Hume's time; today it is at crane that is a crane" (such redunextinction's door. As Hume accurdancy is common among scientific ately noted a century ago, these names). cranes differ from other Indian Two centuries after Ustad Man- cranes in that they don't visit cultisur, we meet the Siberian crane vated fields to eat grain and other again in the writings of that re- crops. Instead, Siberians prefer markable politician-ornithologist naturally growing aquatic plants for Allan O. Hume, the father and food. As man drained, grazed, and founder of the Indian National cultivated more and more of the Congress. As a magistrate in the wild and undisturbed wetlands in

Siberian cranes remain at Bharatpur until early March, when their departure is triggered by a still unknown environmental cue.

The primary intent of our study was to determine what kinds of food these cranes eat. From dissections performed by Hume on freshly shot birds, we knew that Siberians consume almost exclusively plant material while in India. We, of course, couldn't use Hume's quicker but deadlier methods to determine food preferences. Instead, we had patiently and tediously to watch the cranes for hundreds of hours with highpowered telescopes. We found that their main food is the hard black tuber of a sedge, Cyperus rotundus, a plant which has almost a worldwide distribution. The tubers grow underground in the watered areas of the Bharatpur sanctuary, and to secure them Siberian cranes spend most of their day digging. So important is this food source that one's first glimpse of this bird is apt to be a featureless mound of white feathers emerging from the water-the rest of the bird,its head, neck, and legs, are completely submerged while the crane extracts choice morsels from the mud.

Another important facet of our study was to record the social structure of the species. Most of the Siberians at the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary feed in small loose flocks of five or six birds. Some of them, however, remain in pairs, and each pair stakes out a special feeding place that they alone utilize. Intruding cranes are challenged by a spectacular display that is performed by all species of cranes, but

particularly wonderfully by the Siberian. Known as the "unison call," it is a threatening duet given together by the male-and female.

The male initiates the call with a rapid and powerful catapulting of his head and neck, first backward then forward,. so that his head almost touches his legs. Then, like a huge white lily bursting into bloom, the male fans out his wings over his back and begins to flag his head. The female usually joins the male in this head-shaking, and both emit a series of clear, clarinetlike calls on alternating pitches. Heard at dawn, in the quickening light of an Indian morning, it is a primordial sound, an ancient challenge from eons long past, from ages man never knew. .

Among the paired cranes, we noticed several with a third bird, an "intruder" who was tolerated and even pampered. This is the pair's chick that was hatched and fledged on the Siberian tundras. Although every bit as large as its parents, the single young bird is distinctively dappled in white and cinnamonbrown and appears completely dependent on the adults for food.

Siberian cranes remain at Bharatpur until early March, when their departure is triggered by a still unknown environmental cue.

Since they don't fly nonstop to their breeding grounds, a distance of almost 6,400 kilometers, we were anxious to discover where these cranes might halt en route. Old ornithological .records indicated that Siberians visit a large but remotely situated salt lake in southeastern Afghanistan known as Abi-Estada. Consequently, when the last cranes left Bharatpur on March 7, 1977, I followed them northward into the forbidding region of Afghanistan's Hindu ~ush Mountains. Following a rugged six-hour jeep trip from Kabul, I arrived at the lake and within an hour found the cranes. All but one of the birds I had last seen in warm flat central India stood before me in terrain as harsh and wild as I had ever seen.

I was overjoyed. It was like a reunion with old friends in an inhospitable land. After nearly six months of observing nearly every move these cranes made, I felt a special kinship with them and a keen concern about their dangerfraught journey north. For I had seen Afghan nomads and villagers throughout the trip to Ab-i-Estada, many armed to the teeth with rifles

and other firearms. I had also seen the bird markets in Kabul, laden with hundreds of dead larks, ducks, and yes, cranes-eommon cranes, cousins of the Siberians, which also were migrating through Afghanistan at the time. Standing before me now at the edge of the huge salt lake, the large, conspicuous white birds looked so vulnerable and so easily reached with high-powered rifles that I wondered how they had managed to survive.

Since that memorable day in Afghanistan, ICF has made progress in publicizing the plight of the Siberian crane within international conservation circles. The governments of India, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China share ICF's concern about the fate of this species. China is the winter home for a second population of Siberian cranes that are thought to number approximately 250 birds.

On another optimistic note, Soviet scientists have gathered eggs of this species on ~three occasions and sent several to ICF, which has hatched and reared six healthy cranes. Today, our combined ICF and Russian propagation facilities have 25 precious individuals from whom we hope to establish new, more secure populations of these splendid birds in the wild.

But what of the Indian flock of Siberian cranes, the birds which for uncounted centuries have appeared out of the far north in the fall like so many displaced snowflakes to wait out the winter on the plains of the subcontinent? One can only hope that this old trooper of a bird, who has weathered the millennia and who has witnessed the rise and, fall of countless human dynasties,. will live on in Bharatpur.

D Ronald Sauey is cofounder of the

International Crane Foundation, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

Oflll

CJfist~!Y GfnCFlieir OWiiCWJUls

Oral history-the use, of taped interviews for research-has grown steadily since American historian Allan Nevins pioneered the technique in 1948 at Columbia' University. This fascinating method of preserving in detail the special flavor of an earlier, nearly forgotten time now forms a popular course in several American universities. The spoken word makes colorful local history come alive as old residents taperecord their reminiscences for libraries and universities . . SPAN presents memories of life in Vermont .(left) and Jaipur. Leonard Schonberg interviewed Harold Henderson in Vermont, and Anees Jung interviewed Gopal Narayan Bahura in Jaipur.

:Tales .

Prom a PeacockY-afllen The peacocks are as old as the village.

When the city of faipur began to grow and p-ushed its way out, the village withdrew, soon disappeared. The peacocks remained. They settled on the red brick wall and soon made the garden their home. I see a crowd of them-an ecstasy of shimmering blue-green wings-when I visit Gopal Narayan Bahura, the 70-yearold silver-haired, bright-eyed librarian of Jaipur's City Palace Museum. Do you breed peacocks? I ask him. "No, they live here," he says plainly, as if it is a natural answer. "This is their home, their habitat.

I do not look after them. They live off whatever grows in the garden."

--How did they come to live in the garden? What happened to the ancient village, their original home? And faipur?

How did it grow so big? Has it been true to itself through the years? And its denizens?

Has the quality of life changed? Gopal Narayan Bahura sits in the small square room in the middle of the garden that his great grandfather built. He begins to talk as if he is telling a story. Bits of tales emerge that put together make the fabric of his life and of faipur.

This garden dates back to 1711 A.D. It was then just open land. During the time of Maharaja Jagat Singh, son of Pratap Singh, the Pindari Amir Khan came with his forces to invade Jaipur. His army was stationed here-then a vast desert, an appropriate plain for warfare. My great grandfather was sent to speak to Amir Khan. He convinced the Pindari ¡to turn back. To mark that auspicious moment, my great grandfather constructed this garden and a temple with the image of Shiva.

Afterwards his son died and was cremated here. From then on he began to live in the garden.

He built this room, which was open on all four sides signifying' auspicious welcome from every side. There were no doors then-just 12 quilted curtains.

When the weather was inclement, the curtains were dropped and it became a closed room. A channel of water flowed around the room to keep it cool during the summerseason. Yes, thisisthesameroom.

I have only changed the plaster and closed the doors, leaving only four that open out on the four sides of the garden.

In my grandfather's days there were big mango and other trees. The land was watered from a well that was run by eight

bullocks. Now we have a water pump. I even connected a tap to the pump outside the gate so that passers-by could benefit from the water. After a week the tap was missing. That's the ethics of 'today.

Jaipur was then a beautiful city. The streets were paved with murand, the yellow mud. Watermen came mornings and evenings and sprinkled water on the streets. There was no dust, just a faint smell of the good earth. Today we have metaled roads and more dust. When I was a boy the streets had gas lamps. Men would come with long poles and light them. They were mor.e regular than the electric lights. The streets were not congested with cars, buses or scooters. Buggies, bullock carts and chariots plied the streets at their own pace. The footpaths were reserved for the pedestrians. Each street housed a different bazar. One was a street of the bangle makers, another of jewelers. Provision stores lined one street, while the halwais functioned in the by-lanes. The refugees have now turned the cloth shops into eating houses and halwais fry kachoris everywhere.

Public water taps that existed on corners of by-lanes and cross-sections have disappeared. Those that remain do not function or have drainage problems. In those days no one was allowed to take a bath at a public tap. If children urinated on the streets, their parents were fined.

Even when donkeys, who brought salt to the market, created a nuisance, there were sweepers to clean it right away. The municipal councillor took his daily rounds in a horse carriage and saw that the city was kept clean. People then were contented with the space they had. There were no extensions in front of shops -only uniform tin sheds covered with awnings of red and white stripes. They were put out when royal processions passed-a spectacle of harmony and

color. There was an order about the city, about the people.

In those days of maharajas special people were granted land for their maintenance. One who held these lands was known as a jagirdar. He represented the maharaja himself in that part of the land. So he lived like a king. It is generally felt that these jagirdars were oppressive. My t;xperience was however different. We too had ajagir. When I first went to my village in 1928, the relationship between the jagirdar and tenants was very healthy. Rent was collected from them in a special manner. People would bring and store all their produce in one open place. That heap of grain was then bifurcated in four parts. The jagirdar would choose one part and leave the three for the producers. The system was called batai. No begar (service without payment) was taken. People made to work were paid instantly. The only compulsion was they could not refuse to work.

A jagirdar's house was the focus of all important events in the village. Festival processions like the gangaur started from his house. Law and order was maintained by him with the help of a few village patels. A patwari kept the accounts of the produce. The day-to-day life of the village went on without any interference from the jagirdar. People were free to live the way they wanted. They had total freedom, and every village had its own identity. Now the village has lost its identity. Four or five are joined to function under a sarpanch.

The village panchayat of today did not exist then. It was based on caste. Social rights were preserved, and the village way of life was revered and kept intact.

There was a control on man's behavior.

No one could go astray-the social'sanctions of the village held him in place. The elders would sort out the issues. Policemen were called only in matters of dacoity or murder. The punishment meted out by the village would be to throw a man out of his caste, stop him from attending gatherings, feasts or marriages.

If freedom means you can say anything to anyone at any time, it is not really freedom. In those days the sweeper women acted as public reporters in the city. They composed their own songs and sang them as they swept the streets.

During the famine of 1917 when barley was being sold at nine seers a rupee, the 29

sweeper women sang: Nau seer ko bik khadi. Once when the director of,educagayo anaaj, raja to sota Chandra Mahal tion, an Englishman, visited the school, he mein. (While grain sells in the market for remarked that he was impressed by my nine seers a rupee, the raja sleeps in teaching but not by my dress. He expected Chandra Mahal.) These songs were re- me to wear foreign cloth, not khadi. ported to the maharaja, who tried then to My education began at the age of five. repair the condition. Though people did Boys were primarily sent to pathshalas. voice their discontent in a manner, an My mother taught me the alphabet. She average person's concerns were limited. was my first teacher. Later I studied arithHe did not think beyond his own necessi- metic, Sanskrit and Hindi with a joshi ties, never really thought of social uplift in a pathshala. I then joined a prior welfare. There was no public awaken- mary school, and went everyday on ing. Though we did bave some debates foot. A servant carried my books and and discussions in college, it was not accompanied me. After matriculation I possible to change anything. In 1931 was free to think for myself. I then went when the late maharaja came to take a alone and carried my own books. In our round of our college, one of the students house the bullock cart was used as the main means of transport. That gave way present was wearing a Gandhi cap. That was the first sign of agitation. The student to a horse tonga, which I had in this was expelled. Sawai Madhav Singh did garden until 1958. The motor car came to not like any change in his own lifestyle or in Jaipur in 1921. No, it was not the mahathat of those who were attached to him. raja who first brought the car to the city. It Change came after him. The national was Purohit Ram Pratap, a big jagirdar. awakening remained under the surface, We were amazed to hear that a car had came in very gradually. People began come to Jaipur. We all went to see it reading the newspaper only after World though we did not ride in it. I did for the War I. The person who got a newspaper first time in 1937. I still do not own any in his house was considered a big man. conveyance, I ride the city bus or a My father got the newspaper in Hindi. It three-wheeler. My son owns a car and a came in from Calcutta by post and ar- scooter. He is a mechanical engineer and rived four days late. People would come runs his own goods factory. to our house anp discuss what they read Our house in the city in those days was in the newspaper. But no one could im- called a haveli. It had two courtyards agine that one day the maharaja would go -an outer courtyard for men and an or the British would be thrown out. inner one for women. The kitchen was in Englishmen were considered to be big the inner part of the house. Kerosene sahibs. When an Englishman passed in a came to our house in 1928 and electricity car or buggy, everyone was afraid. They in 1933 after my graduation. The first kept a distance from us, never visited our light I saw was an oil lamp in an earthen houses. I could not understand these diya. Sixteen such lights were brought in things until 1945, though I did think that a big tray by a servant, lit and, put in change must come and rulers must initi- different parts of the house, including the ate it. It bothered me that all power was temple. Later we got a hurricane lantern, vested in the king, and no one had the and that's how I studied at night. courage to speak out.

My mother, like all women at that My familY being orthodox Brahmin time, ob~erved total purdah. But women and owning a jagir, had to observe a had a life of their own and a special place culture that was a blend of the Brahmanin the household. Women of a family ical code and the landed aristocracy's. As would assemble every afternoon and disajagirdar and a palace servant, my father cuss family affairs. Every lady was had to present himself at the court in a assigned some work-sewing, knitting formal dress-a jama, a waistcoat, a pugri small bags, embroidery, etc. Some and a cummerband. On ordinary days women who had read a bit would recite he would wear an angarkha, an achkan bhajans from books. Every family had its and churidar pyjama. I never saw my ceremonies, its rituals. Women were in father wear pants or shirt nor did I ever charge. They knew wha¡t songs went with see him walk on the street. He was driven what ceremony. Songs and folk tales to the palace in a bullock cart or a buggy. were passed on through generations. We Even I was sent to school wearing an heard them as children and learnt them achkan. I started wearing pants and shirt automatically. Folk songs, religious "drain 1939, when I was a primary school mas, tamashas were the means of enterteacher. Later I wore' pants made of tainment. Cinema came to Jaipurin 1933.

New things have begun happening only in my lifetime. Before, cloth was sewn by hand. I never saw the sewing machjne as a child. A tailor was paid a petty su'm.

Needlework was an art. A kantha (a bedspread) was woven very slowly. If it is done fast, it is spoilt. That kind of art has now gone out of life. Life has become shorter and so many things have to be done. People in those days took life in their stride. There was time for prayers, for recitations. Things were done with ease, were savored. Today there is more competition, more discontent. A person who has the largest number of luxury goods considers himself a happy man.

Family problems then were resolved by the elder ladies of the house. Today problems have changed. People go out of their house to solve them. The wisdom that grew inside the house and weathered all crises has now disappeared.

The small square room in the middle of the garden begins to vibrate. There is a strong wind outside. Dark monsoon clouds fill the sky. The peacocks shriek in unison. Soon the rain comes. The four doors of the room that have no stoppers begin to bang. A peasant seated on the floor fetches four large stones and places them against the four doors. They stop banging. His tale ends as the rain turns into a drizzle. "Before you go, you must see the rest of the house," he says. We walk across the wet earth covered with wild green and reach the bare cement structures that have an unfinished look. It is the house which his great grandfather buill.

'The temple is still intact----,adimly lit room with a black lingam resplendent with orange flowers. Next to the temple are several small rooms, bare, with littlefurniture. One room was the original bhandar where the' grains that came from the jagir were stored; another is the family kitchen, integral to the household, and a small back room, its walls lined with. books wrapped in fading red cloth. "This is where I spend most of my time and these are my companions," says Bahura pointing to the books. He takes us to the back and shows us rooms that are half built, rooms that he has added to the house of his great grandfather. There is no activity here. He will build them in due time.

There is no hurry, he says. That's the way Gopal Narayan Bahura lives. His garden is intact, still enclosed by the old 'brick wall. Jaipur roars outside. But that is not 0 his immediate concern.

I was always fooling with tools a period of about 10 years, and that or whittling with a jackknife. Once carried us over. About 1929, when somebody brought an old violin to we had the stock-market crash, the the house, kind of a rough-looking bottom dropped out of the instruthing, and I told my mother I guess ment business, and I didn't make I could make a better looking hddle any more violins until 1942. I made than that. I didn't know a thing in one that winter, then didn't make the world about making violins, but any more until 1972, because I was I had a piece of board on the carpentering all the time. There was kitchen floor and tried to chisel out no money in making violins. In 1972 the inside. Word got around that I I had surgery and they wouldn't let ~ was trying to make a violin, and a me work the rest of the winter, so I Harold Henderson is 86 years old and lives with his man up the street heard about me set my bench up and made two wife Ethel, 83. in East Jamaica, Vermont. He has lived in and came down. He'd been in the violi"ns that winter, and since then, Vermont for 60 years and is a violin maker. violin business and took me to his I've been making two or three every house to show me some beautiful winter. Got back into the swing violins made by a prominent Boston maker. He said, now if you again. I've probably made around 70 or 80 violins. The one I'm would like to take one of these home and copy it, I'll show you using now is one of the oldest I made. I gave that to a friend of mine for a wedding present, and when he died his wife gave the how to draw up your plans, how to make your forms, and Y9u violin back to me. I made that 68 years ago, in 1913. One man can go on from there. wanted to buy that old one, but I didn't want to part with it. I So that's the way I got started. I made a violin after the play the violin a little and love to play on one "that I really enjoy, pattern he gave me, and I did such a good job copving it that so I just keep it.

Mr. Bryant, the man he sent me to in Boston to help me finish When we first came up to Vermont, we had neighbors it, said, I know who you copied; Barstow was a good violin maker. Well, that's the man I copied from, so he knew from the nearby, and of course we got acquainted very quickly with way I executed the work that I was copying this Mr. Barstow. everybody. We used to go visiting a lot and spend evenings.

Those fellows are pretty clever-they can tell a Stradivarius or People were more sociable than at the present time. They didn't other violin by the lines and workmanship.

Well, Mr. Bryant have the entertainments that we have now. We used to get together and playa little music. The people were nice, just made me a proposition.

How would you like to make a violin regular old pleasant people. One time a friend of mine broke under my instructions from start to finish? He said he'd charge his leg. It was coming along wintertime and the boys got me $150 and furnish everything, and if I didn't want the violin together and we cut logs, made wood out of it. and took it up to he'd buy it back from me for $150, and I'd have the experience.

I thought that was a good deal. When I finished the violin, I sold the shed. Took us two or three days to get in his winter supply it for $150, and Mr. Bryant hired me. That's the way I got of wood. I had¡a bad time once, too, with an infection and had started in the fiddle business. Mr. Bryant wanted me to stay to go to a hospital in Boston. Of course, we had very little cash with him, but I was brought up in the country and was in those days and one of the fellows came by and said, do you hankering to get back. need some money? I'll write you out a blank check and when We came up to Vermont on vacation in 1919, and I liked you go through Brattleboro-I wasn't able to drive, I was laid the place. I was born in Canada, in New Brunswick, very much out on a stretcher in the back of the car-have your wife go in the same kind of country we have it! Vermont, except the rivers the bank there and she can write out any amount she wants. So are bigger. I bought an old farm on a hill that fall and in the she went in the bank and they wanted to know how much she winter worked on the old house so it was livable and my wife wanted and she said, well, I don't know. A thousand dollars? came up in May. We got a cow, a calf, and some chickens and No, she didn't think she wanted to pay a thousand dollars back tried to farm. I wasn't a farmer but we got along pretty well. so she took five hundred and that pretty well paid for 'my One year I put in a hill of beans in between every hill of corn. sickness. That's the way people lived in those times.

We had beans enough to last two or three years. Like any other I suppose none of us accomplish what we hope to, but I'm quite satisfied with the way my life has gone. I've enjoyed farm woman, my wife soon adapted to country living. She made myself, had the kind of work I like to do-construction, butter, took care of the chickens, and learned how to can working with tools-and I've had a happy married life. We've vegetables. We used to put up 500-600 quarts every year. We been married 65 years qnd do everything we can to share each did manage to grow about everything we wanted to eat except other's company and blessings. Marriage is a give-and-take the groceries like sugar and flour. We always stocked up on game, not all one-sided. You just work together. We never had those, because it was a long way to the store and lots of times much difficulty. you had to go with a horse and buggy or horse and sleigh.

I left the violin business behind me in Boston, but Mr. I think I'd like to continue doing just what I am doing. I'd Bryant, my contact there, made a deal with me and offered me like to keep up my little garden plot here and live in the country a hundred dollars for every violin I made and offered to furnish and go out fishing once in a while, go to church once in a while. all the material. I made about five or six violins every winter for and go for a trip occasionally-just as we have been doing.

0

IT'SAW

IDE

Simon Nathan, a globe-trotting, New York-based photographer, likesto do things in a big way. He not only sees "the big picture" on his travels-he takes it.

Nathan's forte is the wide-angle photograph, taken with a camera called the "Simon/Wide," which he specially designed and which uses 120 roll film. The pictures of a marketplace bookseller in Cairo (below), the Colosseum in Roine (left), and those on the following pages are examples of his widely acclaimed work.

A new development that h,as added a startling dimension to photography is the Megapan camera, invented by New York photographer Robert Galbraith and photographic engineer Marty Forscher. Unlike conventional wide-angle cameras, which . can cover'a maximum of 180 degrees, the Megapan records an image that encompasses a full circle-with the viewer seemingly located at the center. The camera operates from a fixed position, but it rotates on its axis 360 degrees.

Though the Megapan is a conventional panorama camera, its fish-eye lens renders surrealistic images, as in Galbraith's picture of the Trans World Airlines terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport (below, left).

THE

UNITED STATES Inderjit: The Iran-Iraqi war has heightened interest in America's South Asia policy. Everyone in this ref?ion is anxious to know Washington's perception of the situation in South Asia, as also its plans and prospective moves. Mr. Barnds, would you like to give us your idea of the situation in South Asia?

Barnds: The first point that should be made is that the United States Government and the American people are following the affairs in this part of the world with much more interest and concern than was the case a few years back. This stems largely from three events. First, the Iranian revolution and the seizure of American hostages in Tehran was a matter of great concern to the U.S. Government and to the American people. Second, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan convinced many people in the United States who had hopes of a better relationship between the United States and the Sov~i~tUnion that this move had endangered the security of all South Asian countries, and a strong response from the noncommunist world was required. ,Third, the conflict between Iraq and Iran not only poses a danger to the international movement of oil, but also could spill over to other countries, since some of the countries of the region are supporting Iraq and some are supporting Iran.

The first thing the United States would like to do is to help bring the conflict between Iran and Iraq to a halt-first to a ceasefire and then to some sort of a settlement.

We know that we do not have the influence with either coun-try to playa very prominent role in this. However, we would very much like to see other countries, who do have some leverage, urge Iran and Iraq to take into consideration their own future well-being as well as the interest of the entire region, and try to settle these differences by peaceful means.

With regard to the Indian Ocean and South Asia, I thipk there is a general American consensus that the United States and the Western countries in general, working with as many of the countries of the region as are willing, need to create some military counterweight to the Soviet Union. Few people in the United States are happy in the post-Vietnam period about expanding military power in this part of the world. The United States certainly does not want to do so unilaterally, or impose it where it is not wanted.

Many of the countries of the region, however, are concerned over local conflicts and over the Soviet move into Afghanistan" and have called upon the United States to give them more tangible and immediate support.

Inderjit: In the conflict between Iran and Iraq, wherfJ, as you say, the United States does not have a key role to' play, do you see any country or countries that could possibly offer their good offices and bring about peace in the region?

Barnds: I think that if outside powers are able to influence the Iranians and Iraqis, it will have to be a group of countries, mostly from this area, such as India and some of the Islamic countries that have not formally taken a stand on the conflict itself, and possibly some of the European neutral countries like Sweden.

Inderjit: All of us want the Iran-Iraq tension defused. But now a lot of naval power is moving into the Indian Ocean in order to protect sources of oil supplies and so on. And yet many countriesfeel that this is likely to escalate the situation further. For example, India feels that the real threat to the security of the region comes from all this militarization of the Indian Ocean, and not so much from the Soviet movement into Afghanistan. How do you look at this?

Barnds: I think that the great majority of the people of Afghanistan, who are fighting the Soviet troops, will disagree with this perception. In their view, the threat to the security of the region comes from the Soviets, who are actively engaged in military operations.

The United States has no particular desire to have its fleets sailing around the Indian Ocean. They are hard to supply there.

The United States is certainly not going to undertake military operations' except at the request of the local states that feel threatened. The expansion of American and Western European military strength in this region is only a prudent response to the situation both in terms of the Persian Gulf and in terms of the Soviet move into Afghanistan.

Inderjit: Prudent, perhaps, from your point of view, but it also seems to adversely affect Indo-U.S. relations. There seems to be a f?reat deal of distrust and distress over this militarization of the

he threat t~ .the security of the region comes from the Soviets, who. are active1y engaged in military operations."

ND SOUTH ASIA Indian Ocean. How do you view this develupment in the context of fndorelations?

Barnds: I think this is going to have some adverse effect on IndoAmerican relations. This is something we regret. We certainly are going to explain our position to India, and in most cases we will be able to explain our positions ahead of time. At the same time, I don't think that if the Indian Government and the American Government want to have better relations, either can expect the other simply to adopt its view.

We try to take India's positions and views into account, perhaps not always successfully. We hope that India will take our interests and our policies into account in the statements it makes and the policies it adopts. But if Indo-U.S. relations are going to be placed on a sound basis for the long term, it is not going to be by one country simply agreeing to whatever the other wants, or never doing anything that the other country does not want it to do. It's going to have to be a process of mutual adjustment.

us.

lnderjit: At this point, would you like to assess the present state of Indo-American relations?

Barnds: I think that since the birth of Bangladesh, once the great deterioration ofIndo-American relations in 1971 was behind us, the policies and actions of the United States toward the region have been largely acceptable to India. The United States accepts India's position as the key power in the region, and will not attempt in any way to challenge that. I don't think America had ever designed its relationship with Pakistan in order to challenge India. It was really because of our desire to contain the Soviet Union that we formed an alliance with Pakistan. Nonetheless, I can understand how Indians felt about this. It was a problem for them.

I

lnderjit: Oh yes, it really was. lawaharlal Nehru pointed out time and again that it brought cold war to our doorstep. Many of the problems of Indo-US. relationship have flowed from that subsequently.

Barnds: But certainly after 1971, the United States has not been providing arms to Pakistan. Now it took some years before this was fully realized and accepted in New Delhi, and I think that broadly speaking by the late seventies this enabled India and the United States to have a relationship as close as it had been in the early sixties during the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

The problem is that with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the seizure of American hostages in Iran. the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq, and the threat to oil supplies, the United States has found it prudent to build up its military forces in

the area. Now India objects to this. It feels that this buildup is the source for increased tension, that the Afghan invasion should be handled through diplomacy.

This is and has traditionally been a source of disagreement between our two countries. Now, the United States feels that when India deals with the other countries of the subcontinent, India wants a very significant military balance of power in its favor. Of course, India does not have the capability of projecting military force into Western Asia, and it has no ambition to do so under the present circumstances. But where India does have the capability of dealing with international problems by military force as well as by diplomacy, it does so. The United States is really following the same pattern.

Inderjit: You have rightly pointed out that from the early 1970s America has assigned to India a key role in this region; from that point of view, is it not necessary that we should reduce the areas of friction between our two countries, so that both of us could cooperate in the larger interest of promoting global peace?

Barnds: I think this is something extremely important. Many people, and I count myself one of them, have worked very hard over the years trying to understand this and to promote bilateral relationships.

Inderjit: And yet only recently there was tremendous bitterness generated in India over the supply of enriched uranium. We felt that America was not carrying out its terms of the agreed contract.

Would you like to comment on this?

Barnds: Well, the United States has carried out its terms of the contract.

India would have liked the shipments somewhat earlier, but now you have enough fuel supplies to last till 1982-83, perhaps till 1984.

he real threat comes from the militarization of the Indian Ocean and not so much from the Soviet move into Afghanistan."

Nevertheless, this has been a difficult problem because we have several different opposing interests here. We have an interest in promoting nuclear nonproliferation.

And then we have a contract with India to supply nuclear fuel. In the debate in the U.S. Senate over this problem, it was evident that this balance between the two considerations was very much on the minds of the senators when they voted in favor of sending the shipments of uranium to India.

Inderjit: If I remember right, the Senate voted the nuclear fuel by 48 votes to 46. But in the House of Representatives, the voting was predominantly against India. It was 298 to 98, if I remember the figures. This gives us the feeling that there is a predominant anti-India opinion in Washington. Infact, this is the kind offeeling that led Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to say in a recent press conference that she saw an anti-India tilt in American policy even as India wanted to be friendly with America. Does this voting pattern give you the feeling that there is an anti-India sentiment in Washington? .

Barnds: No. In my judgment the House vote was largely made on nonproliferation grounds. Now, I know many of them voted the way they did feeling that it was not a clear-cut issue. But, they came down this way overwhelmingly. However, it was different in the Senate vote. First of all, as I mentioned before, the Senate tried to weigh more carefully the American interests, to develop good sound working relations with India as well as the nonproliferation issue. Secondly, as a practical matter, the Carter Administration saw little chance of winning the vote in the House and, therefore, concentrated its efforts in convincing key senators to vote for the shipments.

Now, coming to the second part of your question that India wants good relations with the United States, but the United States has a tilt against India: I think this certainly was true in 1971, it is not any more. The United States, I might add, feels that it wants good relations with India. It has worked hard in that direction. It has supported Indian economic development in myriad fields. On the other hand, India has had a tilt toward the Soviet Union, and the perceptions of tilts in different directions make it very difficult for the two countries to work out a relationship that both would like.

Inderjit: Well, India has vehemently denied that there is any tilt toward the Soviet Union. However, as you yourself say, it is a matter of perceptions. Coming back to the issue of nonproliferation, we feel that the United States has been adopting a very unfair posture vis-a.-vis India, because India is on the doorstep of joining the nuclear club. We are all for nonproliferation, but we want it not only in the horizontal sense, but 'in the \iertical sense as well.

Barnds: I should make it clear that by and large nuclear nonproliferation to Americans me~ns no additional countries acquiring nuclear explosive capability. Again, there is, particularly in the developed countries, not only a desire but a determination to effect vertical nonproliferation as well as horizontal nonproliferation.

Here, it is difficult for anyone who has been involved in this sort of a thing on the American side to be completely ob-

jective. But I can say for certain that the United States has had very little in the way of military expansion since the Vietnam war. In fact, America has reduced its military forces substantially since, and there has been vertically no strategic buildup since the late 1960s.

At the same time, we have witnessed a very steady Soviet buildup throughout this period. In fact, many in the United States believe that the Soviet Union has reached a point of superiority over the United States. Now, this momentum of the Soviet missile and nuclear program is such that if we do not expand our own capabilities, we are going to be left behind.

Inderjit: Let me ask you a question about Pakistan. How do you perceive Pakistan's role in this region?

Barnds: I think Pakistan's primary role is to be simply to provide for its own security as best as it can, now that the Soviet troops are in Afghanistan in great numbers and over a million Afghans have fled their country and taken refuge in Pakistan. This has placed a great burden on Pakistan.

As for Pakistan's role in the region, I do not think that the United States can influence it in any way. That is something that will be worked out between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Gulf states. They are all Islamic countries Perhaps as important, if not more important, is the fact that a large number of Pakistanis, just as Indians, are working in the Gulf states. Economically, this is very important to Pakistan, and, I understand, very important to India as well. So, what role Pakistan will play in the region is a matter that will be decided

by Pakistan itself.

Inderjit: Are you likely to give Pakistan more arms now?

Barnds: Well, that would depend to a considerable extent on Pakistan's own policy. President Jimmy Carter during his presidency offered to provide a hundred million dollars worth of arms under military credit arrangement.

But President Zia, for a variety of reasons, decided not to accept that offer. This was all

ndians feel that while they want good relations with the United States, it is not possible because of the U.S. tilt toward Pakistan; Americans feel that they have supported India's development in myriad fields, but good relations have been hampered

by India's tilt to the U.S.S.R.

right. We did not feel slighted. In any case, these weapons were specifically meant to help Pakistan defend itself from any external threats along its North West Frontier borders due to the presence of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

Inderjit: We in India get a feeling that in view of your developing relations with China and your assistance to Pakistan, which also has close relations with that country, there is now an AmericaPakistan-China axis. How would you react to this?

Barnds: Oh, it is very hard to disprove something that does not exist. I can't prove that I did not rob a bank a month ago, I can't prove that I am not a member of the communist party in the United States. Nonetheless, neither of these things are true. The United States is not selling arms to China. It is, however, selling arms to India.

Inderjit: But the kind of technology you are giving to the Chinese could be used by the Red Army too.

Barnds: Well, that can happen with any technology. For instance, if you sell steel technology to a country, it can use that for making guns. One can't draw absolutely rigid lines aJ;>outthese matters. It is true that China is providing some arms to Pakistan. But I got the impression during my talks with Pakistanis from different walks of life-officials, journalists, politicians, academicians and others-that Pakistan values its relations with China, but there is a very important limitation on what China can or will do to assist Pakistan.

Inderjit: One last question, on Kampuchea, which is a key area in the South Asia region. What is your estimate of the Kampuchean problem, and of Washington's attitude to it?

Barnds: After the Vietnam war, the United States did attempt to normalize its relations with Vietnam. But given the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, this was not possible. The United States is taking 168,000 Vietnamese refugees each year. We are spending about $2,000 million on refugees and migration assistance-not entirely on the Vietnamese refugees but on all refugees. However, the program for the Vietnamese refugees is the biggest part of that.

Thus on the basis of our experience with Vietnam since the Vietnam war-not during it, because we put that behind uswe found that Vietnam's primary aim seemed to be the domination of Laos and Kampuchea, which our friends, the Thais, feel poses a serious threat to their country. This has weighed far more in the American policy than the alleged unwillingness to differ with China on Vietnam. Quite frankly, I feel that China's pressure on Vietnam has, at least in the short run, pushed that country closer to the Soviet Union.

Inderjit: But, don't you think that we ought to appreciate Vietnam's dilemma? For a thousand years, they were at war, and had been in a hostile position vis-a-vis China. They want to keep China out of this region, and it is their fear of the Chinese domination of this whole region that makes them adopt certain postures. That is why many in Indiafeel that by isolating Vietnam we are only pushing it into the arms of the Soviet Union. Do you agree?

Barnds: If Vietnamese have this fear of China, it would seem to me that they would do well to try to work out a modus vivendi with it. This may not be possible; China's objectives might be too extensive for Vietnam to accommodate them. But, just as anyone should recognize that there are certain things that the Soviet Union gets very sensitive about, such as relations with China, the Vietnamese should also recognize that there are certain things that China is very sensitive about, such as that country's relations. with the Soviet Union. It is by and large a matter of balancing all these interests.

We would certainly like to see a neutral, nonaligned government in Kampuchea, with no foreign troops. We certainly do not want to see the return of Pol Pot. Inderjit: That's precisely what we also don't want. But then what is the assurance that China will not move its own forces into Kampuchea once Vietnam withdraws its forces? Many in India sincerely want the¡ Vietnamese to withdraw its forces from Kampuchea; but the fear is that as soon as Vietnam pulls out from that country, Pol Pot will move in with the support of China, and the Heng Samrin regime will thus fall. Now is it not possible, in view of your closer relationship with China, for the United States to persuade China to assure the Vietnamese that it will not interfere with Kampuchea and it also wants a nonaligned and independent Kampuchea?

Barnds: I think if we are ever going to get a satisfactory solution to the Kampuchean problem, it will have to be along these lines: It will have to be a Kampuchea that is not a tool of Vietnam, and not hostile to China, a Kampuchea not hostile to Vietnam and also not dependent on China.

Inderjit: So the situation that obtains in Kampuchea to the one existing in Afghanistan.

Barnds: Yes, I think so.

is identical

Inderjit: I think India has a key role to play in South Asia. I also think that India and the United States could and should function together in the larger interests of global peace. The two of us could perhaps thelj, try to get together in solving the Kampuchea and Afghanistan problems.

Barnds: Well, that is something both our governments should continually strive to do. We should try to work with each other in all those areas where our broad approach as well as our goals are the same. Where we differ we should respect and appreciate the other's position and not let these differences affect the bilateral relations between the two countries.

0 About the Participants: William Barnds is a professional expert with the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Inderjit is editor of India News and Feature Alliance.

Proponents claim "homeopathy can cure anything that's curable."

Critics say it is "a semimystical gamble with people's health." The truth lies somewhere between the two.

by DEBORAH

LARNED

ROMANO

here are no official statistics, but in the United States homeopathy, a 200-yearold system of treating sick people with infinitesimal doses of natural substances, is enjoying a revival along with other health care systems that attempt to treat people "holistically. " The controversy that the practice of homeopathy invariably generates does not center around the effectiveness of natural substances; an estimated 15 to 20 percent of commercial drugs derive from natural sources, and even the United States Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia, which sets standards for the preparation of known pharmacological agents, is officially recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The issue is one of diagnostic methods and whether substances administered in mintlscule doses according to the homeopathic doctrine actually work.

"I consider homeopathy a specialty within the field of internal medicine," says Dr. James Stephenson, a licensed physician who regards himself as one of two remaining "classical" homeopaths in New York I City. "But it does share certain characteristics with perhaps 20 or 30 so-called holistic therapies like yoga, acupuncture, chiropractic: it is nonsurgical, does not use harsh chemical drugs, and has . been largely ignored by the medical establishment. At one time nutrition and homeopathy were pretty much it. Now, there's a new clinic being founded every other week for people oriented toward 'natural' medicine. Many offer homeopathic treatment, often done by people who aren't M.D.s or licensed therapists of any kind."

Homeopathy promises more than modern medicine, with all its arrogance, would dare: to get to the very roots of disease.

The literature is rife with success stories and cures for everything from bone cancer to bed wetting. "I do miracles," says Dr. Stephenson simply, "but as a homeopath I'm used to it." Without shots, serums, or side effects, sometimes without recourse to lab tests or extensive physical examination, homeopathy will take on Gust for starters)

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bites, bleeding, burns, teething, sting~, sties, to stimulate the patient's own defensive alcoholism, asthma, arthritis, epilepsy, hay But it would not be until mechanisms. the latter part of the century, with the disfever, hemorrhoids, hiccoughs, schizophrenia, even suicidal tendencies.

"In the covery of germs, and later vaccines produced hands of a skilled practitioner," says Harris from living organisms, that true immunoL. Coulter, a medical historian and devoted logical theory would flourish. believer, "homeopathy can cure anything In the course of his investigations, Hahnemann proposed yet another physical law that's curable." of nature-the Law of Potentization or, Though homeopathy relies on many of put simply, Less is Better. According to the same substances as traditional folk this doctrine the curative power of a subcures, it is not simple herbal medicine but stance increases with its dilution. To prepare an elaborate therapeutic system based on is first pulverized three overriding principles: the Law of a remedy a substance Similars, the Law of Potentization, and ("triturated"), then diluted to 1/IOOth of its original strength, and then subjected to the Single Remedy. The term homeopathy shaking ("succussion"). The resulting remedy (from homeo, "same," and pathos, "suffering") was coined about 1800 by has a potency identified as IX; a second dilution (2X) brings the substance to 1/10,000 Samuel Hahnemann, a German physician who, in the course of translating a text on . of its original strength; a third dilution (3X) to Ijl ,000,000. Some of Hahnemann's prequinine's curative effect on malaria, decided to take the medicine himself. After repeated scriptionsemployed dilutions as high as onesextillionth. (Today most homeopathic reministrations, Hahnemann concluded that medies are diluted to a potency of 1000X1M-or more.) A drop of diluted substance is then administered to the patient in a minuscule milk-sugar pellet half the size of a saccharin tablet.

For nearly 50 years the homeopathic school flourished in both Europe and the United States, spawning teaching institutions and professional societies. Then, in the latter part of the century, an avalanche of technical and biochemical discoveries, from X-rays to germs, and the concerted effort of the "regular" doctors unified under the American Medical Association (AMA) rubric all but buried homeopathy in the United States.

Today homeopathy is largely regarded as harmless quackery by the medical establishment, a kind of medicine of benign neglect. It is neither endorsed nor recognized as a medical specialty by theAMA. Thedisciplineis no longer taught at a single accredited medical school. Nevertheless, according to Ralph qumine produced in healthy people symptoms resembling those of malaria. From Packman, executive director of the U.S. this experiment Hahnemann developed the National Center for Homeopathy, .there are hypothesis that would become the corneras many as 1,000 M.D.s in the United States stone of homeopathy: Simi/ia Simi/ibus whose primary mode of treatment is homeoCurentur- "Like Cures Like." pathic. Others estimate that there are only "If a medicine administered to a healthy about 125 doctors, but that there are great person causes a certain syndrome of sympnumbers of lay practitioners who learn their toms," Hahnemann wrote in his major trade through informal apprenticeship. treatise on homeopathy, "that medicine For those stalwarts who hold tight the golden thread of Hahnemannian logic, the will cure a sick person who presents similar symptoms."

Hahnemann described the law practice is much as it was 100 years ago.

The homeopathic arsenal includes nearly as "a God-given philosophy" as fixed as the law of gravitation. He saw himself as assisting 1,900 remedies (many prepared personally by the practitioner), of which some 180 are nature by administering a substance that would mobilize what he called the body's used on a day-to-day basis. Consultations inown "Vital Force." Hahnemann's goal was volve an exhaustive exploration of a patient's

medical history as well as a cataloging of her or his perceptions, sensibilities, dreams, recurring thoughts, childhood experiences, habits, aversions, appetites, and obsessions, in order to select the single homeopatlUc remedy that, according to the Law of Similars, most precisely correlates with the "totality" of the patient. Relying exclusively on their own powers of observation and the self-reporting of the patient, Hahnemannian homeopaths often shun standard diagnostic tools (X-rays, blood and urine laboratory tests) that would provide information the patient was unable to provide.

"The medical profession has to make a diagnosis, put a name to a bunch of symptoms," says Dr. Jack Cooper, a retired psychiatrist and practicing homeopath. "But we don't treat 'diseases,' we treat whole people. If someone wants a diagnosis they should go somewhere else." (A good many homeopaths in the United States, however, have incorporated modern medical practice into the discipline.)

In an age of alienating and aggressive medical treatment, it's easy to see the attraction of this seemingly gentle medicine. But in its most extreme form, the practice that began as a reform movement with some logical basis, seems, in the light of modern advances, a semi mystical gamble with other people's health.

According to a strict reading of the Law of Similars, for example, a patient is not only matched with a substance that produces objectively similar physical and emotional symptoms in a healthy person, but with a substance that shares certain subjective character traits as well.

Sepia, for example, is a homeopathic remedy derived from the "potentized" ink of cuttlefish, a fish that mimics its surroundings . by changing colors and, when confronted with danger, expels a cloud of ink. "With the Sepia patient," says an article in a recent issue of The Homeopathic Digest, "there is an aversion to company. . . . The patient desires to escape. . . . The patient is further given to sudden moods, to flushes and to chronic skin discoloration .... Terrible headaches turn up repeatedly in the patient. . . .

The shape and form of the fish suggest, quite remarkably, the human uterine area.

This analogy is borne out in the remedy's constant use in the uterine disorders."

Even if you took the Law of Similars on faith, the Law of Potentization pose~ a considerable challenge to credulity. Even homeopaths concede that the typical homeopathic dose is so imponderably small as to be nonexistent. After a 3X dilution, it is unlikely that a single molecule of the original substance remains in the remedy. When it

gets right down to it, say critics of homeopathy, the magic of the minimum dose is merely palliation through placebo.

Homeopaths contend that their remedies work by effecting the "energy" that animates and integrates the body, mind, and soul.

"If we are controlled and maintained by a harmonious flow of vital force," says Dr. T.e. Cherian, a Connecticut homeopath, "we enjoy health; if there is any disturbance in the dynamic force of our system, it expresses itself outside as symptoms." Though a remedy has little or no molecular substance remaining, homeopathic theory holds that the very act of dilution releases the Vital Force of the remedy, which then acts to direct and realign the Vital Force within the patient.

Even some adherents of homeopathy find the Vital Force concept a hard pill to swallow.

"I was just like everybody else at pharmacy school," says Tariq Kuraishy, chief pharmacist for Standard Homeopathic, one of the five leading American manufacturers of homeopathic remedies.

"I didn't believe anything you couldn't 'prove' or make a formula out of But then, like a lot of people who get interested in homeopathy, a remarkable thing happened." He had suffered from chronic, incapacitating, cyclical headaches for seven years, and had gone to everyone and tried everything without success before he took a 6X potency of Sanguinaria (bloodroot) on a lark. Within 15 minutes his headache had completely disappeared.

"I have not had a headache in five years," he says. Now he is attempting to rationalize the potentization theory, to explain scientifically how, as he says, "something without quanrifiable matter works." Based on experiments that show that a substance increases in electromagnetic energy with each dilution and on a sampling of scientific literature on trance states, extrasensory phenomena, and auras, he has come to the tentative conclusion that homeopathic remedies work by altering the electromagnetic field that surrounds the human body.

Homeopaths claim, with justification, that the inability to explain how something works does not constitute an indictment of the therapy; there are numerous standard remedies, including aspirin, whose mode of operation is not fully understood.

Leaving aside the issue of effectiveness, then, the question remains: Is homeopathy safe?

None of the ho¡meopathic remedies have been tested in standard double-blind controlled trials. According to homeopaths, the very concept of a test sample is inapplicable; since homeopathy is so highly individualized, it would be impossible to find enough patients with identical symptoms. "Of the 180 reme-'

dies for a particular physical symptom," says Wilburt Richter, a New York homeopathic consultant, "there may be only one that is right for a particular person." When a homeopath says that a remedy has been "proved," it means that the substance has been shown to produce a certain set of symptoms in healthy people. (Homeopaths routinely refuse to give the name of the remedy to the patient to avoid a placebo effect. Tariq Kuraishy feels that this constitutes a kind of double-blind test.)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration isn't pressing the matter. "Basically we're concerned about any product that exists and what it's offered for," says Rudolf Apodaca, head of the drug labeling division of the Bureau of Drugs. "We simply have limited resources. The minute amount of drug in a homeopathic preparation is immeasurable and, theoretically, nontoxic. In this sense the safety question is not a major concern. But homeopathy may present a public health risk, if a homeopathic preparation is used to treat a serious condition like mammary cancer, when other treatments might be more successful."

Homeopaths do treat terminal patients.

"It is," says one practitioner, "a patient's constitutional right to a treatment of one's choice." Homeopathy's safety and usefulness are dependent upon the good judgment of its practitioners and the good sense of its patients.

But many of its patients have ailments that have resisted conventional treatment or been dismissed as psychological; they are modern medicine's castoffs, often desperate and vulnerable. They may find no cure here, but they are comforted to find an approach that is so individualized that a practitioner must spend at least an hour with a patient in order to elicit a picture of "the whole person."

Finally, even the most devoted homeopathic patients hedge when it comes to their children's health. Though vaccinations are in the spirit of the Law of Similars, they are not homeopathic, say strict homeopaths, because they rely on massive doses, are directly injected into the body, and often contain foreign protein to which the human body may be allergic. When asked whether she would allow her child to have the standard inoculations against polio, diphtheria, measles, and mumps, an ardent devotee of the homeopathic system said: "These are hard questions. My girl is 10 and she has already had her booster shots. So I'm lucky.

0 I don't have to decide."

About the Author: Deborah Larned Romano writes for a variety of publications, including Ms., WomenSports and Mother Jones.

he United States "throwaway society" is coming to a slow but certain end, a victim of American energy and environmental problems.

In its place is emerging an $18,000-million-a-year industry whose raw maferial is extracted from the 500 million tons of waste generated annually by individuals, government and industry.

As a result, items as diverse as old bottles, cheese whey, aluminum cans, abandoned cars, feedlot manure and household garbage are being recycled or reused instead of going into garbage dumps, littering the landscape or polluting the environment.

The throwaway society was a product of the booming decades after World War II when fuel and raw materials were so cheap and plentiful that it was often more economical to throwaway used products than to recycle them. Clean air and water were secondary concerns.

So much waste was created that its disposal became a major problem for local governments throughout the United States.

Bottles and cans littered the roadsides. Some 670 million tons of iron and steel scrap and at least 1,000 million discarded tires accumulated in dumps, salvage yards and vacant lots.

Today, the economic underpinnings of the throwaway society have been altered by soaring energy prices, raw material scarcities and growing concern over the environment.

At the same time, local governments are having trouble finding disposal sites because of protests by nearby residents.

These problems are producing a climate in which a growing number of businesses and individuals are finding that there are big profits in recycling.

The government is encouraging the trend toward recycling with financial incentives to the industry. A 10 percent tax credit for the purchase of recycling equipment was included in the Energy Tax Act of 1978.

The U.S. Congress has ordered the Department of Energy to set targets for the use of recycled materials by industry.

The U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission is under court order to review freight rates that recyclers complain discriminate against their products.

American Government regulations also are driving up the cost of waste disposal. All open dumps must be eliminated by 1985. Dumping of sewage sludge into oceans is to end by 1982.

A dozen states and some cities have laws that encourage the reuse or recycling of beverage containers.

All this does not mean that the end of the throwaway society is just around the corner. But the trend toward recycling is gaining momentum with each boost in the price of fuel and each new environmental regulation. '" Declares Robert McFadden, senior analyst at the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association: "Six or seven years ago, abandoned cars were lying around all over the place and you had to pay the junk dealer to tow them away. Now it's different.

High scrap prices and the oil crisis have relieved the problem of abandoned cars."

There are approximately 15,000 firms that make a business of recovering and reselling used parts from the I0 million autos, trucks and buses that are taken off the road each year.

Most steel mills depend to some extent on scrap to make new steel. The number of giant machines used to shred the hulks of wrecked autos was up from 67 in 1968 to 200 today.

In the future, discarded autos may be a source of precious metals. Gemini Industries, Incorporated, of Santa Ana, California, has developed a method of extracting platinum and palladium from the catalytic converters on late-model cars.

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Of the approximately 200 million tires discarded each year, some I0 million are recycled or reused in some form. At a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company plant in Akron, Ohio, up to 14,000 kilograms of old tiresa day are burned with coal to generate steam.

Goodyear and the Tosco Corporation have teamed up on a demonstration project in which 800 tons of scrap tires were converted into 227,000 kilograms of carbon black, 492,000 liters of oil, 26 tons of scrap steel and quantities of gas. Studies are under way to determine the feasibility of a commercial plant.

In Arizona, old tires are ground up and mixed with asphalt to create an excellent paving material. And large numbers of worn-out tires are being used to create artificial reefs and breakwaters along U.S. coasts.

In 1960, there were ISO companies that recycled 300 million tons of used lubricating oil a year, compared with 40 firms reprocessing less than 60 million tons a year in 1980. Now, the business is on the upswing again, thanks to price hrkes by foreign oil producers.

Oil drained from vehicle crankcases is becoming too valuable to be poured into storm sewers or thrown on the ground.

Reduced water pollution is a side benefit. At least a dozen U.S. states have laws encouraging the recycling of used lubricating oil. A New York state law, for example, forces any service station that sells at least 500 gallons of motor oil a year to accept used

papers, office paper-is recycled into new paper and other products. More than 500 of the United States 700 paper mills depend exclusively or partly on wastepaper for their raw material.

The Federal Government, often accused of generating too much paper, recovered more than one million dollars' worth of wastepaper in 1978.

Two dozen waste-processing plants, after extracting reusable materials such as metals and glass, burn garbage to produce steam or process it to make solid fuels. Another two dozen plants are under construction or on the drawing board, and some 200 communities are seriously exploring the feasibility of installing such facilities.

In 1979, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill authorizing the construction of six power plants to burn garbage, sewage sludge and lumber wastes to provide energy.

In 1968, only one city in the United States-Madison, Wisconsin-encouraged residents to separate recyclable materials such as cans, bottles and paper from other garbage before it was collected. Now more than 220 communities have separatecollection programs, mostly concentrated on the East Coast and West Coast, where there are strong markets for recyclable material and a shortage of land for garbage dumps. One-fourth of the programs are compulsory.

Even sludge from sewage-treatment plants is now recycled instead of dumped into the ocean or in landfills. About onefourth of the five million tons of sludge produced each year is used as land conditioner or fertilizer.

Perhaps the best known program is the recycling of alumi- num cans. Some 750,000 Americans collect recyclable cans, 'F'" ~ and in just one year aluminum companies paid nearly $53 .:"" 4i7! d. million for about 7,000 million used cans. t .' ',: The American glass-packaging industry estimates that 600,000 tons of old glass are crushed and remelted each year to make new containers. Comments Edgar Sleasman, plant manager at the Glass Container Corporation in Dayville, Connecticut: "The recycling of old glass reduces air pollution;saves fuel and prolongs furnace life."

Examples of the war on waste being waged by individuals, business and government are almost endless.

PCA International, a photo company in Matthews, North Carolina, has pioneered a waste-treatment system that enables it to salvage half a million dollars' worth of silver a year from the chemicals used in the photographic process.

At the University of Rhode Island, a pilot project uses a blend of waste lubricating oil and residual industrial oil to help heat the campus, at a saving of $ 30,000.

A Grand Marais, Minnesota, school expects to save $16,000 a year by switching from fuel oil to sawmill residues for heating purposes.

A waste-conversion plant being built in Lamar, Colorado, is designed to convert 350 tons of animal manure a day into 1 million cubic feet of methane gas to generate electricity, and into 130 tons of protein for livestock feed.

Milbrew, Incorporated, of Milwaukee is hoping to cash in on the growing popularity of alcohol as an additive for gasoline by converting cheese whey into alcohol. The Environmental Protection Agency does not permit the dumping of the whey motor oil from individual motorists. into streams.

Another big target for recyclers is the growing mass of solid municipal waste generated in the United States: 140 million tons Says M.J. Mighdoll, executive vice-president of the National Association of Recycling Industries: "The United States has to today, with forecasts of 200 million tons by 1985. go the way of recycling. We're still near the entrance to the tunMore than 90 percent of this waste is still dumped or incinerated. But 10 million tons is recovered and another I million tons nel, but we are seeing light at the end of it. " 0 is converted into energy by burning.

In all, one out of every four tons of wastepaper-boxes, news-

Recycling of aluminum cans' (above) saves 95 percent of the energy needed to produce aluminum, conserves natural resources and helps reduce litter.

Realizing the benefits of such reuse of old material, Americans are now saving much of what once went into garbage cans.

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U. S. Will CONTINUE FOREIGN AID

In his testimony before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee this March, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development pledged that the Reagan Administration "will continue to stress the importance of substantial development assistance."

Excerpts from his testimony:

national economic and technical assistance to the developing countries, in creating programs to provide such assistance, in urging other industrialized countries to increase their aid efforts, in promoting the expansion of the burden-sharing multilateral assistance agencies. Private U.S. The United States is committed to investment in developing countries has the essential idea that its various develop- been encouraged, and the system of ment assistance programs be carefully international trade strengthened in recogcoordinated and interrelated and that nition of the opportunities trade can offer our policies toward developing nations as an engine of growth.

This progress has also brought home be clearly enunciated and defined. These objectives will be achieved within the to us the reality of problems that persist coherent framework of U.S. foreign policy and affect us all ever more directly.

We have learned that continued progress now being established by President Ronald in Third World development is of growing Reagan and Secretary Alexander Haig.

Developing countries have made much importance to our own domestic and progress in the 30 years or so since their international well-being.

In the past year public awareness of modern, independent economic growth began and since the United States first our interdependence has been highlighted launched the concept of large-scale inter- by the president's Hunger Commission, the Brandt Commission, and the Global national development assistance.

Over the past 30 years developing 2000 Study. The Global 2000 report, country economies grew faster than those in particular, presents a sobering picture of the industrial nations had ever grown of large-scale interrelated problems caused in any comparable period. At the same by population growth, energy scarcity, time, life expectancy-a useful index of forest destruction with attendant soil a country's health and general living and atmospheric effects, and pressure standard-rose from 32 years (just before on food production capacity. The Hunger WorId War II) to 50 years, an increase Commission focused on food production that took the industrial countries the and effective demand for food, the conentire 19th century to achieve. Adult straints on growth, and the implications literacy rose from one-third in 1950 for development assistance and for the to about one-half by 1975, while the already vast numbers of hungry human number of students in primarY schools beings in the poorer countries. The Brandt more than tripled.

Commission stressed the wider framework Substantial progress has been made of economic policies and institutions, toward economic self-reliance and diversi- and the need to strengthen these policies fication. In the early 1950s many of and institutions if we are to have a the countries that have achieved these chance of meeting the problems of the advances were just emerging from colonial next two decades as effectively as we status, were torn by unrest or open war- have those of the previous three. fare, were dependent upon one or two Future actions in all these areas, commodities for the bulk of their exports, and in the progress generally of the and had barely begun to create the edu- developing countries, will have direct cational, research and governmental insti- impact on the well-being of the United tutions on which development depends. States. U.S. exports to developing counThe United States can be proud of tries have been expanding much faster the contributions we made to this histori- than exports to industrialized countries, cally unprecedented record of economic and now constitute about 40 percent and social advancement. The United of the total. About 6 percent of all States was at the forefront of the industrial American jobs in manufacturing produce nations in recognizing the need for inter- exports to developing countries, while I

the harvest of one out of every four farm acres in the United States is shipped to the Third World. Our growing need for imports of raw materials from developing countries (of which petroleum is only one) is well known. The entire planet's ability to sustain greatly increased num. bers of people, to control atmospheric pollution, to produce sufficient energy, and to reduce stark disparities in income levels and employment opportunities that lead to heavy pressures to migrate to stronger economies, will depend on the rate of economic progress in the developing countries and the extent to which this progress is shared among the entire population. Failure to make acceptable progress in ameliorating conditions of poverty can only lead to domestic instability and increasing frustration on the part of Third World governments over the workings of the international system and the distribution of economic and institutional power in that system as it is now constituted. Such instabilities, as we know all too well, can quickly spill over into regional disequilibrium, and create opportunities for interventions that are to the interest neither of the countries directly involved nor to ourselves.

The decision to provide aid to a country is, of course, a key foreign policy decision.

Successive Congresses and administrations, beginning with those of Presidents F.D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman and continuing with that of President Ronald Reagan, have recognized the importance to American foreign policy of a strong, broad-based foreign assistance program.

There is no doubt that the Reagan Administration shall continue to stress the importance of substantial development assistance to helping achieve our national objectives. Technical and economic assistance needs vary from country to country, as do the degrees and kinds of U.S. interests; as a result, the array of programs we conduct or help finance is also quite varied.

The total fiscal year 1982 request for all American foreign economic and financial assistance is $8,100 million ..

As the most powerful nation on earth the United States cannot, in my view, afford to neglect our own self-interestboth for national security and humanitarian reasons-by failing to provide the investment for development in this year's 0 budget request.

POLITICAL'IOLIICIII The recent attempt on the life of President Ronald Reagan was an individual and not a political act. In fact, asserts the author, there is no tradition of institutionalized political violence in the United States. What is disturbing, however, is the streak of individualistic violence in the life of America. It can best be checked, he says, through stricter gun laws.

It was "sickeningly familiar," wrote a reporter in one newspaper; it was "depressingly familiar," wrote a second in another newspaper; and a third-and a fourth-and a fifth-and not only in newspapers, but of course on television. One thing that is indeed all too familiar is this response. Six shots fired in two seconds from one gun are held to indicate a fearful pattern of political violence in the American life.

A political journalist of usually sound judgment wrote in The Washington Star: "Each time it is a reminder that political life ill the United States can be transformed in an instant, any instant, from civility to barbarity, from a contest of ideas and philosophies and personalities to the most elemental brutality."

They are eloquent words; they carry one along; they ate unjustifiable.

Not all the violence in all the history of the United States has, even for an instant, transformed its political life from civility to barbarity. Its political contests have overcome, not been reduced to, the eruptions of elemental brutality. '~Just how much more of this tearing at the fabric of the nation," asked another journalist in The Washington Post, "can America endure without fundamentally changing the character of national life?" The answer of American history is that it could endure quite a lot more. It was also the answer given by American politicians and the American people on Monday [March 30, the day on which an attempt on President Reagan's life was made].

The United States in a trying moment displayed its continually impressive resources of calmness. Almost the only hasty act was to postpone the Oscar awards, presumably as an act of respect from the [acting] profession to its most distinguished member.

If we are to be sensible in this, there are two questions to discuss. One is the extent and character of violence as such in America. The other is whether there is a pattern of political violence. Let's take the second.

It is impossible for¡even the most ingenious mind to deduce a pattern of political violence from the assassinations and attempted assassinations of political figures in America in the past two decades. This is especially true of the attempts made against the lives of presidents and presidential candidates. Nothing

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links Lee Harvey Oswald to Sirhan Sirhan to Arthur Bremer to Sara Jane Moore to Lynette Fromme to John Warnock Hinckley, Jr., except guns. . If we are to. adduce these to demonstrate a pattern of political violence, we must demonstrate that each of them was inspired by a political motive. It would not even be enough to prove that each had some madcap political scheme in his or her brain. If we are to speak of political violence, the political motive must exist in more than their minds, representing a more general attitude or discontent.

The madman who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria in 1840 may have been distraught by Republican notions of his own, but that did not make his action political.

But Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 for political reasons, murdered by Serbian irredentists who had¡ hatched their plot on Serbian soil. That is why their action began a great war.

But even if we look further than assassinations and attempted assassinations, it is hard to demonstrate a tradition of political violence in America that is stronger than elsewhere, or more threatening to the fabric of its society or of its political life.

Political violence is not only more than individual behavior, it IS also more than mere outbursts of collective behavior. Not every riot is a collective act of political violence. Political violence is intended to prevent or provoke change. White violence against blacks in the [American] South in the 1960s was meant to prevent change; black violence against symbols of repression in the cities in the 1960s, to provoke change.

We can make one more distinction. Morris Janowits describes the urban race riots [in the United States] in the period immediately after World War I as communal riots: "They represented white resistance to the population expansion of the ghetto. They erupted at the boundaries of the black and white communities, and involved attacks by whites on the black populations, often with the assistance of local law enforcement officials."

He describes the race riots of the 1960s as nearer to .being political: "They represented black attacks against the symbols of white authority and power-against white law officers and against economic establishments. The violence took place almost entirely within the black community."

Both these kinds of violence have been the common experience of all growing societies. There is nothing distinctively American in them, except insofar as they are racial, and that America is still very much growing.

Violence of these kinds may be spontaneous or concerted.

But the mark of true political violence is that it is institutionalized.

The violence of both organized strikers and managers in the past, for example, were institutionalized forms of political violence here in the United States and elsewhere.

So was the violence of rival miners' unions in Illinois in the

u. S.I1YTa ORRIILln,

1930s when, according to one historian, they "used their knowledge of dynamite to blow each other to oblivion." So was the violence used by the railroads. So was the violence of the cattlemen and the sheep grazers. So was, and still potentially is, the violence of the disputes over water in the west .... So one could go on through the whole brawling history of America as it has made itself, and still the blood that has been spilled would be as a teaspoonful compared with the buckets of it spilled

by European nations as they once made themselves.

Even if we consider only the political assassinations in America in two centuries, we might put them oeside the rather more bloody violence which attended the careers of political figures under the Plantagenets, and in the long bloody tussle in England which is charmingly known as the Wars of the Roses.

But political violence is most truly disturbing when it is institutionalized in the political life of the country in the form of a political party. The simple fact is that political violence in the United States has never produced a Communist Party, a National Socialist Party,¡a Fascist Party, a Falangist Party or any other like them which has seriously sought or held power.

Political violence in the United States has never ended in an Auschwitz or a Gulag Archipelago. The internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s was the mistaken and unnecessary reaction to a foreign war, which uprooted but did not kill or torture people. As for the treatment of the American Indians, it was less severe than what took place in Australia or New Zealand, where other English settlers went in the 18th century, and left far fewer traces of the aborigine and the Maori.

By not one single criterion can the record of political violence in America be judged worse than that in any other comparable societies.

What is disturbing about it in the United States is its very lack of institutionalization. It is because it does not reduce the political life of the country to barbarity, it is because it does not tear at the fabric of the. society, that it is so conspicuous and seems so inexplicable and threatening a phenomenon. If it were revolution, or class war, or religious fanaticism, or merciless colonialism or nationalism, it would be comprehensible.

There has been more political violence in the tiny island of Ireland in the past few years than in the whole expanse of America

in the 1960s. Yet do we therefore say that the Irish society is barbarous?

It is because the political violence in America is so unsystematic, so uninstitutionalized in the political life of the country, that everyone tends to think that it tells of terrible lusts in the society as a Whole.

There is indeed a streak of individualistic violence in the life of America. Its roots are in the individualism that is exalted in its life. Taking the law into one's own hands is an expression of what is otherwise a virtuous principle. The whole philosophy which lies behind the availability of handguns in America is based on the assumed right of the individual to protect himself.

It is not much of an extension of that principle, in a mind that is disjointed, to assume the right of the individual to get rid of a president. It seems that the only real explanation of Monday's tragedy is likely to be that a deranged man could have three guns confiscated one day in Nashville and two days later walk into a pawnshop in Dallas and buy two more.

What the gun lobby will not face is that, although anyone who seriously wanted a handgun would still be able to get one even under. the strictest gun control, the number and range of people who would think of buying one would be much fewer if their sales were severely restricted.

Shortly after World War II in Britain, there was the famous Antiquis murder. Antiquis was a civilian who one day on the streets went to the help of a policeman. For his pains, he was killed. The tragedy created such an uproar in Britain that the government announced that no questions would be asked of any demobilized soldier who turned in any weapons he possessed to a police station.

Starting the next morning, the lines at the police stations all over the country were almost endless, and so it continued day after day. A people disarmed themselves at the end of a violent world war. What was disclosed was a habit of mind in even the males and the young who had just been trained to kill.

America will not begin to cope with its violence until it begins to change a habit of mind by changing its laws.

0 About the Author: Henry Fairlie, a Britishjournalist States, i~a close observer of the American scene.

resident in the United

obtain passage of a new land rental law which limited rent increases and protected tenants from arbitrary dispossession by landlords. UCS lawyers subsequently helped tenants take landlords to court to obtain compliance with this law. In 1976, the UCS generated support for the land reform plan of President Molina, staging rallies and marches with as many as 25,000 participants. Unfortunately, the rightwing agrobusiness interests. and their military allies were able to prevent Molina's reform from being carried out.

In both of its major functions, aiding the production cooperatives and representing tenants' interests, the UCS has operated openly and legally, doing what was possible to aid the peasantry within the conservative and repressive environment of oligarchic Salvadoran society. The UCS leaders perceived that if fundamental social change was to be-won in El Salvador, peasant organizations would have to be built in advance, so as to be ready to take advantage of any future opportunities in that direction. Thus, when the sweeping land reform of 1980 was projected by the present junta, the UCS was in existence to assure the implementation of the reform, despite the resistance of local landlords, police, and military forces.

T

he UCS has not been controlled by the Salvadoran Government, as alleged by the left. It has on occasion offered support to civilian and military elements in Salvadoran politics in return for specific concessions. For example, it obtained government loans for financing purchase of land by UCS cooperatives. Thus, the UCS has dealt with governments, but it has not been controlled by¡ them. This same pattern applied to UCS-government relations in 1980-the UCS cooperated in the land reform, which benefits the peasants, but is bitterly critical of the right-wing military's policy of repression.

With its democratic outlook, the UCS favors free elections to produce a legitimate, civilian government to replace the junta's de facto rule. The UCS favors a "social compact" in which both left and right would cease their terror, participate in elections, and agree to accept whatever government emerged from the electoral expression of the popular' will. In the tradition of the democratic trade union movement in Latin America, the UCS seeks social reform, but opposes the imposition of a dictatorship of the left to

implement such reform. Therefore, the UCS opposes the gperrilla forces of the dictatorial left, and thus is just as bitterly denounced by the Marxist groups as it is by the oligarchs and their allies. the n summer of 1980, the strategy of the UCS-emphasizing land reform to give the peasantry an alternative ei'~ier to remaining in the clutches of the landlords or joining with the dictatorialleftwas showing results. Despite the violence which had already taken 8,000 lives in 1980, most of the peasants saw their interests as served by continuation of the moderate junta in power, for now at least 210,000 previously landless peasant families had land, and with it a stake in the future. In August 1980, a major leftist effort for nationwide demonstra-

I

The best hopefor the emergence of both social and political democracy in El Salvador lies in implementing the land reform¡ and carrying out free elections. tions and strikes drew little supportmuch less than had similar campaigns before the land reform was implemented.

On the small farms of the former tenants and sharecroppers, growing of corn and grain was proceeding normally, confoundingpredictions of agricultural disruption made by both Marxist and oligarchic critics of the reform.

The latter months of 1980 saw an intensification of right-wing violence against land reform beneficiaries and their elected democratic leaders. One hundred eighty-four died on the large cooperatives.

Twenty-four out of the four hundred union activists, who were the key to the tenancy reform, were slaughtered.

The key element in the extreme right's strategy in late 1980 was to prevent the issuing of formalland titles to the peasants who had received land. In August, the decree had been drafted and signed, but the subsequent resurgence of the extreme right alowed the oligarchy to block its promulgation. By the end of 1980, the former land owners began trying to reassert their claims and take part of the bumper 1980 harvest from the peasants.

This process began driving the peasants, in desperation, into the arms of the Marxist guerrillas, who claimed they could

offer the peasants protection. As the year ended, the fate of the moderate junta, of the land reform, and the UCS hung on the outcome of the struggle between the extreme right wing and the democratic center in El Salvador as to whether the titling process would be carried through. Continued success by the far right, maintaining its terroristic destabilizing campaign and blocking the titling process, would set El Salvador up for a takeover by the dictatorial left, just as the Somoza regime in Nicaragua paved the way for the Sandinista victory there in 1979.

The leftists support the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) in its effort to come to power in the country. The FDR is referred to by the leftists as '.'progressive," and. representing the "popular forces." However, no mention is made of the formidable hold of the dictatorial left on the FDR and on the three guerrilla armies supported by FDR member organizations. Neither is any mention made of the aid received by the guerrillas from Cu ba and other communist countries, nor of the kidnappings and assassinations perpetrated by the left. Also absent in the leftist publications is any analysis of how the FDR might align El Salvador in the world power balance, should the F9R come to power. The picture presented by the leftist literature is a simple one of the FDR representing "the people."

Against the "popular forces," the leftist publications pose the image of a "reactionary government," which is vilified as being completely on the side of the oligarchy, and as masterminding the campaign of right-wing terror being carried out by military and vigilante groups throughout El Salvador. The leftists portray the government's reform as a farce which merely sets the scene for terroristic counterinsurgency attacks by the military against all but the most collaborationist peasants.

The reality of Salvador's political situation is far more complicated-it is not just left vs. right, but a three-way struggle between left, right, and center. It is rather a question of "peace, brea.d, and liberty."

The Salvadoran peasantry has had precious little of any of these. The task in El Salvador is to help the common people there to obtain all three.

0 About the Author: William C. Doherty, Jr., is executive director of the American Institute for Free Labor Development.

A special section on American agriculture describes how u.s. scientists are discovering the advantages of organic farming, earthworm technology, plant tissue culture and integrated pest management.

Icebergs offer a promising, if still somewhat elusive, possibility as a source of fresh water. The article explains the problems involved in" harvesting" icebergs and proposes various solutions-including what today seems the way-out ambition of towing them to the desert.

The Rediscovery of Luminism An art technique that renders the subtle and poetic effect of light on landscape and seashore, luminism has gained wide recognition after 30 years of neglect.

An Indian and an American expert on family life' discuss the modern family in transition in their respective societies.

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PROGRAM SCHEDULE SUNDAY THROUGH SATURDAY

Language

Time (1ST)

Meter bands

English

0630-0930

Short Wave:

1830-0Q30

Short Wave:

0630-0700

Short Wave:

Hindi

139.

197.198.252.255.

194. 195.

197.198.307.309.311.

421.422.49.1 Medium Wave: 1~O

197.

2100-2130

254.

0700-0730

168.

41.8.

139. 140.

198. 25.4

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314.

2000-2030

139.

314.

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168.169.

Urdu

169.

42.2.

19.7.

25.4 .

139.

16.9.

41.8.

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197. 309.

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139.168.

254. 310' Bengali

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You'll Never See a Crazier Zoo There are some roads that, no matter how one looks at them, are just plain dull. The 19kilometer drive from Interstate 5 through the oil fields to the small town of Coalinga, California, is one of these roads. Nothing but unspectacular hills covered with dull oil rigs.

At least, that's the way it used to be. Now it's the wildest, craziest zoo in California, if not in the world. Each oil pump has been transformed into a different design: A zebra that kicks up its heels.An eagle that flaps its wings. Butterflies, a goat, a bull, even a clown.

You can find a green-eyed, red-nosed skunk complete with white stripe. A cowboy riding a bucking bronco. There are reindeer, a crow with multicolored feathers, a grasshopper, pink elephants, a sly alligator, and an American Indian chief.

"I just couldn't stand the dull drive," says Jean Dakessian, an artist who lives in Coalinga.

"So I asked the Shell Oil and Standard Oil companies for permission to decorate the pumps. They agreed and supplied the paint."

Dakessian supplied the talent and time, and there are now 60 inmates of the "iron zoo."