A NEW liFE FOR THE BlACK BUCK 'If you see tbis beautiful animal in its natural state, you won't dream of killing it,' says a forest officiat'in 1\.ndbra Pradesh, tIlJdng about tbe black buck. This rare species is now multiplying in a 200-acre sanctuary in Hyderabad. See pages 28-25 for stories on wildlife preservation around tbe world.
A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER The American Embassy in India has always been fortunate in its cultural counselors, and that good fortune continues with Dr. Ainslie T. Embree, a well-known Indologist, who recently took over the assignment from Dr. James Roach. Embree's association with India goes back to 1948 when he came to Indore to teach British and European history at the Indore Christian College, staying on for 10 years. His wife taught sociology at the same college, and both his children were born in India. This is when Embree began to study Indian history and culture, and emerged as a scholar of repute in South Asian studies. His numerous books and articles range from The Hindu Tradition, Muslim Civilization in India and Alberuni's India-which he editedto India's Search for National Identity, The Non-European World, South Asia: The Fourth World-which he wrote, among many others on related subjects. In 1958 Embree went back to teach in American universities, and until recently was Associate Dean of Columbia University's School of International Affairs. But his link with India continued throughout this period. He served on various boards concerned with educational exchange between the United States and South Asia, and was president of the American Institute of Indian Studies. One of Embree's contributions has been in helping to extend the interest in Indian studies beyond the major universities to smaller colleges and secondary, even elementary, schools in the United States. A great many of the states in America today have compulsory courses on non-Western civilization. "I think this is unique," says Embree. "I doubt if there is any other country where school systems require that courses should be given in the cultures of other societies. There is a widespread effort being made in the United States to teach about India at the elementary and secondary school levels." He feels that this fact is not well-known in India, and SPAN plans to carry an article soon by Dr. Embree on the scope ofIndian studies in the United States. What goals does he set himself for developing educational exchange between the two countries? "The aim of our relationship on both sides is to learn from each other. What we need from the American side is a deeper and more precise knowledge ofIndian culture, including training in Indian languages. Although English is widespread in India, the culture cannot be understood in depth except through Indian languages. The younger generation of American students of India is much better equipped in this respect today than we of the older age groups were-even Indian politics cannot be understood except in the context ofIndian culture. "There is an equal need, I think, for Indians to know the dynamics of American society. There is more familiarity with American literature here than with American history and culture." Dr. Embree quotes the example of Alberuni, the 11th century Arab historian, whose translation by Edward C. Sachau he edited, to show how the knowledge of another's culture helps one to understand one's own. "We must have a two-way cultural flow at a very deep level between the two societiesIndia and the United States." This is a central objective of the International Communication Agency, and we are pleased that Dr. Embree is herewith us to help carry it out. -J.W.G.
SPAN 2 3 4 5 10
Nonproliferation: A Long-Term American Strategy by Joseph S. Nye
Immigration to America-Then
and Now
by Elliott Abrams
14
18
20 23 26 28
The Hyderabad Zoo New Fashions for Men Singer Extraordinary: M.S. Subbulakshmi by Malini Seshadri
30 33
How New Yorkers Safeguard Their Rights
34 36
Controlling an Oil Spill
by Michael Gerrard
On the Lighter Side
39 41
49 Front cover: A graphic representation of a puzzling query before man: How does our mind's eye see what our eyes see? Does any object exist without an observer to see it? Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, talks about our internal mechanisms of perception. See pages 36-38. Back cover: As the airplane leaves Peggy Black behind, she begins her fall from 3,000 meters. An expert skydiver, Peggy free-falls to 650 meters and then pulls the ripcord that opens her parachute. See also page 49. JACOB SLOAN, Editor; JAY W. GILDNER, Publisher. Managing Editor: Chidananda Dasgupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu. Editorial Staff: Krishan Gabrani, Arona Dasgupta, Nirmal Sharma, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha. Photo Editor: Avinash Pasricha. Photographic Services: ICA Photo Lab. Published by the International Communication Agency, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by H. K. Mehta at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. Photographs: Front cover-Peter Jones. Inside front cover.l-Avinash Pasricha, 5-Gianfranco Gorgoni. Contact. 6-7-Nancy Crampton. lO-courtesy The New York Times. II left-courtesy George Eastman House. 16-LeRoy Woodson. 20-Avinash Pasricha. 21-Steven C. Wilson. 22-Gerard Bertrand except top right by Avinash Pasricha. 23,24 left. 2S-Avinash Pasricha. 26 left-Ozier Muhammad, Ebony magazine: right top to bottom-Fred Maroon; courtesy Golden Vee; courtesy Gant Shirtmakers. 27 left-courtesy Stanley Blacker; right top-Michael Mauney; bottom-courtesy Revlon. 34 & 3S top-courtesy Texas A&M. 3S bottom left- Martha Cole Glenn. 37-from Foun-. dations of Cyclopean Perception, Bela Julesz, University of Chicago Press, 1971. 42-Helen Weaver. 49 left-Tom Beiswenger; right bottom and back cover- Paul Wuchter; all courtesy Western Electric Company.
FAD AWARD FOR LILLIAN CARTER The FAO Ceres Medal for 1978 was awarded to Mrs. Lillian Carter, mother of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, at a recent ceremony in the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) headquarters in Rome. The medal, which highlights the role of women in agriculture and development, is named after the Roman goddess of agriculture "who taught mankind how to work the land, make it bear fruit and watched over her people, all mankind." A portrait of Mrs. Carter appears on one side of the medal, while the other shows three nurses, black, white and Indian, and carries the inscription: "Human kindness and caring-no barriers in healing." The medal was awarded to Mrs. Carter as a tribute to her services as a Peace Corps nurse in the village of Vikhroli (near Bombay) in 1967-68, and as a mark of appreciation for her continued concern for the world's needy. She is also well known as one of the first proponents of civil rights in her home state of Georgia. Presenting the medal to Lillian Carter, the Director General of the FAO, Dr. Edouard Saouma, said, "Your name and reputation evoke the most noble qualities .... This is but a token of our recognition that you share FAO's dream of a world free from hunger and want and the loss of human dignity that such privation brings with it." In her speech of thanks, Mrs. Carter said it was "a privilege to join the many distinguished ladies whose images earlier have appeared on the Ceres medaL ... In accepting this medal I want to emphasize the necessity for all of us to reach out and when necessary go to the people who need our help, even though this be in places where life is difficult and conveniences limited. I need not tell you in the FAO," she added, "of the satisfaction derived from knowing that you have brought care and help to one of God's less privileged children." Mrs. Carter became a Peace Corps volunteer at the age of 68 (eight years after the death of her husband), when, as her son once
said, she could have easily led a life of retirement. "She would have had a pleasant life in a small town," President Carter said. "But ... my mother began to see opportunities for involvement in local and statewide and regional and then national and international affairs that stretched her mind and stretched her heart. ... And never does a day go by," the President continued, "that mother does not get up in the morning and say, 'what can I do this day to make my life more meaningful, to show other people that I care for them, and to learn more about the world in which I live.' " In her speech, Mrs. Carter traced her interest in development work to her rural background and to the fact that she had lived and brought up her children in a time and area where a "kind of peaceful revolution" was taking place with the coming of electricity and other benefits of scientific research. With hard work "we were able to make our lives more comfortable, our community more prosperous, and to look beyond it to others less fortunate," she said. "As we weigh our obligation to help those in need, we must recognize that their requirements are vast and probably growing at a more rapid rate than our capacity to meet them. None of us has a monopoly on the answer. No nation or institution can do the job alone. That is why my message to you today is that we must work together." Director General Saouma said that the FAO had from its earliest days "addressed itself to the global problems of ensuring adequate food for the poorest countries and the poorest people." He said he was presenting the medal to Mrs. Carter with "profound pleasure, great respect for you and the ideals by which you live. "You have shown us that neither age, nor stage in life, nor origins are a barrier to caring for people less fortunate than ou~selves. Caring not only in our hearts, but showing our caring to the point where self-sacrifice is no sacrifice, because it is a joy."
IBOLBII rBSIOI 800D IBWS '1011 PIIIOBTOI "Planning to reach heaven" is how some scientists describe the work toward the goal of controlled nuclear fusion. When that heaven is attained, the supply of electricity will be limitless. Man will be finally free from energy problems. A first step toward that grand goal has been taken. This is the attainment of a temperature of 60 million degrees Celsius for half a second at a laboratory in Princeton University, New Jersey, using an experimental device called Tokamak. "We need to reach temperatures of 100 million degrees to demonstrate fusion," said Dr. Melvin Gottlieb, director of Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory. "We're on schedule and we're very confident we will succeed." "It took us seven years to go from 5 million degrees to 25 million degrees," Dr. Gottlieb added. "It has taken us six months to go to thelast 35million degrees." The feasibility of fusion may be demonstrated in a laboratory by 1981 or 1982, when the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactora machine twice the size of the device which made possible the 60-million-degree temperature-begins to operate. The United States hopes to build the first fusion plant by the year 2005 and develop it for commercial use by 2025. Fusion is described as the "ultimate" source of energy. The entire U.S. demand for electrical power could be met by fusing 10 kilograms of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) per hour. The world's oceans contain enough deuterium to last more than 30 billion years-a long period for a planet less than five billion years old. How does fusion occur? It is the process by which the nuclei of light elements such as hydrogen collide and join together. New atoms are formed, and an enormous amount of energy is discharged. Fusion is as old as the universe: the sun is actually a huge fusion reactor in which temperatures reach millions of degrees. The first large-scale application of fusion on earth was in the hydrogen bomb; nuclei of deuterium and tritium fused during a fission explosion. This method of producing a fusion reaction is violent and destructive. What scientists are now attempting is a gentle, controlled release of this awesome energy in a reactor. It has been described as the
toughest technological feat ever attempted. What scientists have to do to trigger sustained nuclear fusion is to heat a mixture of deuterium and tritium (known as "plasma") to about 100million degrees. The Tokamak device at Princeton is based on a concept originally developed by Russian scientists. It is a 3-meter-wide, 90centimeter-high reactor in the shape of an automobile tire. This encloses a smaller container which has the hydrogen plasma. It is controlled by a surrounding magnetic field that prevents the pillsma from hitting the metal wall of the reactor when heated to fusion temperature. To the elation of the Princeton scientists, the hydrogen-deuterium gas mixture did not "clump" together in swirls-that would have cooled the gas and spoiled the fusion reaction. The experiment validated the Princeton Tokamak laboratory model, said Dr. Gottlieb. "We are on the right track now. Our theories about how to build large reactors were correct."
* * *
American Ambassador to India Robert F. Goheen, who was president of Princeton University from 1957 to 1972, told SPAN that fusion research at Princeton got started in a very interesting way. "Dr. Lyman Spitzer, Jr., an astrophysicist who headed the astronomy department at Princeton, was skiing one day in the Rocky Mountains .... This was some time in the early fifties. It suddenly occurred to him that if mankind could learn to harness the energy released i~ the hydrogen bomb, the way the sun harnesses the same kind of energy, it would greatly benefit the human race." Dr. Spitzer persuaded a Federal agency to finance research based on this idea. The initial grant was for $50,000 a year. "While the work went on, new vistas kept opening up, new problems kept emerging .... The atomic particles and plasmas didn't behave the way they were expected to from observations made at lower temperatures. New theories had to be developed." The Ambassador said that one of his concerns as president of Princeton was to ensure that the gigantic fusion project, with its tremendous potential, for the world, didn't distort the basic purposes of the university, its commitments to teaching
and basic research. "We tried to devise ways in which the project could relate meaningfully to the university .... Certain key scientists of the fusion project were regular faculty members. Around them were clustered a great many research scientists without faculty status. On the whole this system worked well. "My successor at Princeton, President William Bowen, continues to watch the project closely from a management point of view to see that the great research task is well maintained, yet related to the university, so that it fosters and strengthens the basic functions of the university." Discussing the historical links between universities and scientific research in America, Ambassador Goheen said: "Till the end of the 19th century, research was not an important function of American universities in most cases. This began to change in the early 20th century, when places like Chicago and Johns Hopkins, under the influence of German universities, gave a new thrust to such research. World War I raised the importance of scientific and techilOlogical research in America. About the same time, some far-seeing private companies realized that they needed basic research, and one good way to do it was to fund scholars at universities. Thus there was a double development: product-oriented research was carried on in the laboratories of companies; basic research was supported at universities." World War II gave a further impetus to scientific research in American universities, Ambassador Goheen noted. The scientists who developed atomic energymen like J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi-were brought together from universities; many went back to universities after this work was over. And after the war, leaders of American science influenced the government to draw upon and support scientific talent in universiti~s. Today in the United States, more basic research in science is carried on in the universities than anywhere else, concluded Ambassador Goheen. These institutions have learnt to integrate research and teaching-working on great projects like fusion, at the same time as they train the next generation of scientists. 0
IOIPIOLlrlllTIOI I LOII-TIIII IIIIIICII STIITIII American nonproliferation policy has attempted to resolve the tension between u.s. national interests in nuclear technology and the shared international interest in the avoidance of nuclear war. During his election campaign, Jimmy Carter dramatized a broad but inchoate popular concern when he promised that curbing the spread of nuclear weapons would be among his highest foreign poLicy priorities. Perhaps it is hardly surprising that public attention during 1977 tended to focus on his initial highly visible actions and especially on their confrontational aspects. Both critics and sympathizers tended to score what they saw as the Administration's policy as if it were a game with clear-cut winners and losers, and in the process the wider outlines of policy were sometimes obscured. In fact, nonproliferation policy is much more like a large construction project than an adversary contest. It may, to be sure, never follow the precise blueprints of its architects, which will always need a degree of improvisation and adjustment. But it is to be judged by whether it is in fact advancing toward the kind of result laid out as its long-term goal. In the recent words of a perceptive critic, it is such long-term strategy that provides the "wider canvas" against which the merits of individual actions can be judged. So I shall try in this article to fill in and to put into focus the key elements of nonproliferation policy as they have emerged during the past year-sometimes in complex and little-publicized actions and negotiations-and to assess these elements in a long-term context. The goal of U.S. nonproliferation policy is to slow the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities-preferably to zero-and to minimize, and keep under control, any destabilizing impact of the diffusion of nuclear technology (i.e., any impact tending in the direction of conflict between nations or other forms of violence). ObviSlUsly,these are not tasks for the United States alone; they require for their achievement the highest possible degree of consensus among nations that now have or
might in the future wish to have nuclear technology. Thus, the long-run task can be defined as the development of an international regime of practices and institutions for governing the split atom that will be widely accepted as legitimate, equitable, and reasonable, and hence can operate effectively in the face of continuing technical and political change. This is the essence of the Carter Administration's six-pronged nonproliferation strategy, which starts with but goes beyond simply monitoring and restraints on transfers of nuclear technology. its six elements are: • Making the safeguards system more effective by insisting upon comprehensive safeguards; • Self-restraint in the transfer of sensitive technologies and materials that can contribute directly to weapons until we have learned to make them more safeguardable; • Creation of nonproliferation incentives through fuel assurances and assistance in the management of spent fuel; • Building consensus about the future structure and management of the nuclear fuel cycle through cooperative studies; • Taking steps at home to ensure that our domestic nuclear policy is consistent with our international objectives; • Taking steps to reduce any security or prestige motives that states might have to develop nuclear explosives. Let us look at the Carter initiatives in each of these six dimensions.
Starting from our basic decision to build upon the existing consensus about the legitimacy of international safeguards, we felt (along with others) that safeguards had to be improved. One means of improvement has been technical work and assistance to the IAEA (International
Atomic Energy Agency). Safeguards do not have to be perfect to be effective as a deterrent. They merely have to ensure that there is a high probability that IAEA inspectors will detect a diversion. The United States is contributing some $10 million over a three-year period for training, information processing, and new measurement and surveillance technology such as special cameras and seals. 'Even more important, the Congress and the new Administration have now agreed that the United States should insist that all countries that receive American material or facilities must place all their nuclear facilities under safeguards. (Such comprehensive coverage is sometimes called full-scope safeguards.) The Administration proposed such export conditions in April 1977, and has consistently supported the legislation recently passed by the Congress that mandates their application to any supply of American materials after an l8-month transition period. Full-scope safeguards can plug a serious loophole in the international safeguards system. They also remove what is at present a source of discrimination against nations that have, by signing the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), already accepted as a legal obligation the placing of all their facilities under safeguards. Currently, under the types of agreement previously accepted by the United States and other suppliers, a non-NPT recipient country has to submit only imported materials to safeguards. It may retain or develop a similar facility of its own alongside, without safeguards. This loophole, obviously, could be plugged by recipient countries all adhering to the NPT. But because some countries have historical objections to the Treaty, the new legislation makes it clear that the United States will continue supply so long as the recipient country, in practice, accepts international inspectors to safeguard all its facilities. (Continued on page 45)
tnhe late 1950s, dozens of idealistic young men and women went to Kenneth Clark for direction. He was an academic, black, articulate, and already a veteran in the movement-civil rights-they wanted, fervently, to join. He remembers one of them well: "Bob Coles didn't smile, didn't have any rhetoric; there was a curious kind of solidness, seriousness about him. He said that everybody up at Harvard thought he was crazy because he didn't want to practice as the child psychiatrist he'd been trained to be, but he wanted to study what would happen to these black kids who were integrating Southern schools. He asked if his being white would prevent that. Hell, I'm a paranoid black and 1 felt at home with him; 1knew that anybody could trust him." While many once-passionate "movement" voices are silent, and faces once highly visible are now unseen, Dr. Robert Coles has continued to study and write about the people who remain oppressed. With a doctor's black bag, a notebook, tape recorder and the paper and crayons with which children draw the landscapes of their lives, he has crisscrossed the United States, pointing up the strength and dignity of the shadowy poor, while showing how ubiquitous "socioeconomic forces" rule their lives. There has been a prodigious outpouring of words-30 books and more than 550 articles-a Pulitzer and numerous other prizes, honorary degrees, reams of testimony before Congress and the courts. However, Dr. Clark sees Coles' importance in other terms: "He's one of those people you can always look to and know that hope is alive. 1 don't know if he's one of the 10 just men required to keep this world spinning around but ... you can't judge him by normal standards any more than you could Martin Luther King; they are men possessed." The 48-year-old man under discussion looks out on a bleak Massachusetts day from his home in Concord, runs his hand through coarse dark hair, which looks as if it had been playfully blunt cut by one of his three children. Of medium height, he is slightly stooped and wears an oxford-cloth shirt with a frayed collar. His mannerisms are more like those of a tortured adolescent than of an influential writer and thinker. "Listen, anyone who publishes as much as 1 do has a towering ego," he says. "1 must feel 1 have something important to say. Pride, arrogance. God, do 1have a good dose of both! It all frightens me, but 1 don't know what to do. 1 leave a migrant's home and go back to a comfortable motel and I'm positively haunted. And then I'm tempted: Write a sex book, how to do it a million ways, . get a six-figure paperback sale. The hell
I
DOCTOR OF CRISIS:
ROBERT COLES
Quietly, modestly, he has observed people in crisis situations and written about them for two decades. While he is now hailed as a major social critic, Dr. Coles continues to wrestle with his own 'middleclass' failings that, he feels, keep him from accomplishing more.
In 'Women of Crisis,' Coles presents portraits of five poor women who, far from wallowing in apathetic resignation, rise up from the pages in towering strength and simple dignity. with all this business. What am I fighting? It's hopeless. Then I think about that coal miner who has to go into a dark hole to survive and realize that I have to go in there with him~and write about him~for my survival." With the completion of Coles' five-volume, million-word series called "Children of Crisis" and of Women of Crisis: Lives of Struggle and Hope, it's a good time to take a close look at both the body and the impact of his work, and at the public and private man some so unabashedly praise. In the "Children of Crisis" series, Coles has taken a sprawling look at America, through its children, during these two tumultuous decades of social change. And in the process he has virtually invented "social psychiatry" -a combination of anthrop~logical and journalistic reporting, oral history and psychological analysis. He started with school desegregation and moved to the plight of the sons and daughters of migrants, sharecroppers and mountaineers; then to Southerners who moved North supposedly to better their lives. Just issued are Eskimos, Chicanos, Indians, and Privileged Ones: The Well Off and the Rich in America, a book inspired by a poor child who told him: "The rich folks are the ones who decide how poor folks live." In Women of Crisis, Coles (who collaborated with his wife, Jane) presents portraits oftive poor women, who, far from wallowing in apathetic resignation, rise up from the pages in towering strength and simple dignity. These, the doubly oppressed by being both poor and female, show an uncanny ability to survive in a hostile world and to understand how it works. In studying children, Coles looked into their unconscious minds . by interpreting their drawings. Here, with adults, he includes their dreams, thus rounding out the characterizations by probing the darker corners of their psyches. The seed for the book was planted in 1960 by the simple but weighty words of Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old black girl whom Coles was studying as, all by herself after three other black children dropped out, she integrated a New Orleans grade school. Ruby was being encouraged by an older black woman to be strong, to cry to herself but greet the world with a confident smile. The child thought for a moment, then said, "If you're a man, you can be nice to your enemy and get away with it. If you're a
woman; you probably have to be nice to your enemy and you may not get away with it." Years passed, and Coles continued his relationship with Ruby, who without being a proponent of the new women's consciousness, knew that poor women faced unique problems and, as Ruby said, were people "who aren't mentioned in a lot of the books we've been reading in our high school social-studies course." Then, when Ruby entered college, she virtually forced Coles to do this book by saying, "There comes a time when some 'children of crisis' become 'women of crisis.' That's important~what happens to us then?" It was a logical spinoff for Coles, who has probably come in contact with more and more varied women from different poor cultures than anyone else in the field. Now that the book is published, however, he will go back to studying children, this time outside America~in strife-ridden Ireland, politically tumultuous Italy and racially volatile South Africa. His method has been and will be the same: a deceptively simple approach of getting to know families and talking to them over a period of years, asking few questions and allowing them to lead him to the issues that lie deep in their lives. In his writing, he has concentrated not on pathology, but on possibility. For instance, he finds that both youngsters born in poverty in Appalachian hollows and in silk-stocking families have inherent reserves; that newly integrated Southern schools caused less anxiety than the racially imbalanced schools in the North; that a strong family life is a bulwark against any traumatic change. Because he talked to blacks and segregationists, mine workers and owners, policemen and suspects, maid and lady of the house, and their children, Coles has "contributed antistereotypes," according to David Riesman, the sociologist and coauthor of The Lonely Crowd. "Policemen are not pigs," says Riesman, "white Southerners are not rednecks and blacks are not all suffering in exotic misery. The child who had to be escorted by Federal marshals into an all-white school can gather strength and courage to face other crises in life." Although Coles' work has generally been received well, there is a consistent theme among his critics: The books are too long, predictable, and they lack focus.
In his Harvard office, Dr. Coles consults with a young woman enrolled in his course. Many students seek his advice on channeling their lives into meaningful and satisfying work.
"He's criticized," Kenneth Clark responds, "for not being 'scientific,' which means he doesn't treat people like objects, as we were trained to do as so-called professionals. Listen, anybody who can make me understand~and like~some white racist, as Coles did in The Middle Americans, is doing something very right. Who cares if he's not classifiable; like any original thinker, he's broken down the artificial academic barriers." Father Andrew Greeley, whose work at the National Opinion Research Center relies heavily on sophisticated polls, says, "I'm terribly skeptical of any study without numbers and hard facts but when Coles writes, you are inside the culture. What's better, to look at a computer printout on Eskimos or to be able to live inside one of them as I did ~ through Coles?" Now that the series is complete, Coles is careful not to link the suffering that hunger might cause a poor child with the
emotional deprivation a child in a wealthy meaningful work, come to seek his advice. home might feel, but his message is clear. Says Gay Seidman, a former editor of Children are resilient, courageous and The Crimson, who took Coles' course, Social healthy in mind-up to a point. That is the Sciences 33: Moral and Social Inquiry: promise. The problem is that, as they grow "The typical Harvard point of view is, 'If older, inadequately educated, lacking in you were a policy maker, what would you opportunities and shunned by society, poor do if.... ' Coles has been out there studying children are more likely to give in. And the and writing, but he doesn't hide behind his rich ones will grow more protective of books; he's that rare kind of teacher who their prerogatives. puts his life up for appraisal. He's struggling To see Robert Coles in public is to realize right alongside us." Recently, Coles delivered a lecture in why the people he studies find him so easy to talk with. If anything, they must take his course-which was quickly oversubWilliam pity on him. There is a childlike innocence, scribed at registration-about a vague sort of confusion that belies the Carlos Williams, the doctor-poet whose intelligence within. His fame drives him dual careers influenced him profoundly. inward. He cannot comfortably bask in "He had his biases, his hates; people the limelight. he treated were suspicious of him," At Harvard, Coles' Spartan basement office Coles told the packed lecture hall. "Yet he is a crossroads of conscience. He is attached had this painful, overwhelming desire to to the Harvard University Health Services help them. He was torn by the lure of the staff, which sounds impressive but translates good life.... Don't try for an exegesis of into no staff or salary but the paper clips, his poetry; get inside this doctor's head as photocopying machine and academic affili- he looks at society. We all can take courses ation he needs to continue his work. Students and quote from his poetry and then spend he has taught, young doctors, others looking two months working in the ghetto, thinking for ways to channel their own lives into some we've done our share. Then we go on about
our lives and say, 'Well, I have my children to worry about now ... .' We all have to ask, 'Have we done enough?' " After class, a young woman lashed out at Coles: "I just feel like you're taking my freedom away. Like you expect me to act the way you would." To an audience, Coles can be indignant; to a single, threatened Radcliffe undergraduate, he cannot. "It's' my goddamn arrogance, my training, my education," he blurted out. "The way you talk, I have to feel that the ultimate goal is to apply it to my life," she returned. "I'm sorry. I just try to give you some experiences that have touched my life, moved me. It's such a tightrope. I'm sorry." His small seminar and this lecture course are anomalies at Harvard-as is his very presence. Few faculty members are aware. that he teaches, although he is well known to students. "Harvard is home to me in a way," Coles says, "I was an undergraduate here, met Erik Erikson, David Riesman, great men. Maybe I should be teaching working-Class
To see Robert Coles in public is to realize why the people he studies find him so easy to talk with. There is a childlike innocence, a vague sort of confusion that belies the intelligence within. kids over at Northeastern or the University of Massachusetts, but I love it here; the brightest kids from all over the country, a sharecropper's son and a President's daughter sitting next to each other. I'm more establishment than I want to admit. I criticize the arrogance, the narrowness, of Harvard, and, look, I'm part of it." As a child psychiatrist, at least by training, Coles is aware that the roots of his own personal conflicts (to name just two, middleclass values versus lower class affinity; the desire for fame and the fear of its possible corrupting effect) go back to his own childhood. It was not one of "crisis," as he has written of it, but one with certain conflicts. His father was politically conservative, a cool, rational engineer trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who took his sons, Robert and William (now a University of Michigan English professor), on long walks, during which he pointed out where neighborhoods changed, what group lived there and what they did. He did it, Coles recalls, "without sentiment or compassion but with a great eye for facts." His mother was warmer, a religious woman, almost mystical, who knew the Bible well. When young Bob brought home a good report card, her praise was always leavened with admonishments about the sin of pride and the dangers of worldliness. It was implied that the Coles boys were to do something significant-but neither commercial nor showy-with their lives. From the start, Coles was a loner and a seeker. He went to the prestigious Boston Latin School, then Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa in English), where with the late Perry Miller he studied the classics of the Christian tradition. He found resonant voices that spoke to him down through the centuries, but he had no response for them. At Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Coles found himself repelled by the competition, by classmates who would laugh when someone broke a flask in the laboratory. He almost flunked out. To make his life bearable, he took courses from Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary and read the Bible with a couple of fellow students. By his own admission, he was a "priggish snob." After spending two "genuinely happy days" in pediatrics during his rotation, Coles decided on that as his specialty. "Somehow," he says, "I had found an age group I could relate to." He continued his studies at the University of Chicago and in
Boston hospitals, but found his life continually bombarded with stimuli he didn't know how to assimilate. He heard Anna Freud lecture about studies of English children during German air attacks and the necessity of "direct observation" of children. In Paul Tillich's course in systematic theology, the concept of "the courage to be" thudded against the turmoil in his brain. Tillich didn't talk about "life's work" or "occupation"; he talked about "personal commitment as a religious act." Coles had already discovered it was wrenching for him to draw blood and cause a baby to cry. He desperately decided to go further in his schooling and become a child psychiatrist, thus putting off his confrontation with the workaday world. However, the studies, the techniques, the terms still seemed inhuman. Instead of giving tests or talking to his young patients in hospitalgreen clinic rooms, he took them to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and had them draw for him. His unconventional methods were viewed with humor by his classmates, with scorn by some of his professors. A doctor, sprawled on a museum floor, laughing with a child! In 1958, having used up every device to delay launching himself into life, he was drafted into the Air Force. He applied for San Francisco and Tokyo. He got Biloxi, Mississippi, and arrived in the South. more confused than ever, driving a white Porsche with red leather seats that he bought in memory of James Dean, the "Rebel Without a Cause" actor who was killed in a similar car. His life had become unbearable, Coles concluded, so he began five-times-a-week psychoanalysis in New Orleans. He would race from Biloxi after work, have a session, spend the night, have another session in the morning, and speed back to work. In analysis, he found a place where he could express those unspecified desires he had to help people. Where once he had tried to keep his idealistic and bewildered self hidden from other doctors, he now gave his hopes and dreams full reign. The thoughts of Kierkegaard, Tillich, Anna Freud, of writers such as George Orwell and James Agee, began to jell. "I knew there were people out there just like me," he concluded, "and they found something to do." One Sunday morning, Coles was riding his bicycle back from church and the angry shouts at a shallow-water beach on the Gulf stopped him. Four blacks were trying to integrate the beach, which was on Federal
land. That night, Coles was on duty at the hospital when the policemen who had arrested the blacks came in to cool off in the airconditioned emergency room. "Goddamn niggers. We'll kill'em next time." Coles was overwhelmed. He knew these policemen, knew them to be decent men. As a psychiatrist he could sense their fear; as a man, he could see their rage. How must the objects of that rage feel? For Coles, the pieces fell into place; he would later call the incident a "religious experience." The social idealism of his childhood, his training, this obviously historical time in the nation's life when blacks were beginning their long march for equality -all added up to something. He embarked on a work that would involve him Jor not only the next two decades, but perhaps for the rest of his life. His tour of duty over, Coles settled in Vinings, Georgia, near Atlanta, with his new bride, Jane Hallowell, whom he had met and married in Boston. He began visiting in the homes of black children, embarrassedly, clumsily "sitting there with a dumb look on my face, asking all the wrong questions," he recalls. "They were silent, withdrawn. What was this white doctor doing in their houses, worried about their problems?" Then he visited the black children at school, rode the bus with them. He talked to white students and their parents who opposed integration. He applied for foundation grants, and got form rejection slips. "What will be your results?" they asked. He didn't know. His parents and Jane's grandmother provided the young couple with about $4,500 a year, on which they lived until the first grant came through from the New World Foundation. His tenacity, his entree to the families as a doctor who treated their illnesses at no charge, eventually won their trust. After eight years of observation, thought and writing, Coles published the first volume of "Children of Crisis," about school desegregation, in 1967. Paralleling Coles' field work in the South was his involvement in the civil-rights movement. "When people got to the cracking point he was there for them," says author Pat Watters, who was an Atlanta journalist during those years. "He wasn't a day-tripper either; he was there month after month." Coles had guns put to his head, was in a home that was dynamited, and was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But he found himself more sure of what he was doing. While student activists were
Some of the men who by their life and work have influenced Coles and whose photographs he has hung on the walls of his study: Walker Percy (top), whose novels Coles admires .. William Carlos Williams (left), the doctor-poet whose dual career affected Coles profoundly .. and Erik Erikson (right), Coles' mentor at Harvard.
often derided as mentally ill, Coles felt comfortable with them. He was, in fact, exhilarated by the likes of Andrew Young, now the American Ambassador to the United Nations, and Julian Bond, now a Georgia legislator. "He was a model for grace under the pressure of those days," Bond recalls. "We had one fellow demonstrating against us who'd been accused and acquitted of bombing a synagogue; a real hater, this guy. Coles just patiently drew him out and the guy burst out in tears one day and sobbed to Bob that his mother always hated him and somehow he was getting back at her. I know it sounds theatrical, but he had this specialway with people." Although his "Children of Crisis" series showed a restrained, hopeful and accepting observer, Coles almost from the start wrote more pointed articles and books-muckraksocial ills, such ing journalism-exposing as unhealthy mining conditions, pesticide dangers, malnutrition and poor health services. His book Still Hungry in America helped launch the food-stamp program. His testimony before Senate committees "forced people to have an attitude toward the poor because he made them so human and believable," says Michael Harrington, who wrote The Other America.
Field work, an awesome amount of writing and testifying-all the product of a man with no staff, who works only with his wife and who writes in longhand on yellow legal pads, hoping to fill four pages a day, about 1,600 words. His other books have ranged
from Erik H. Erikson, The Growth of His Work to The Geography of Faith, conversations with Father Daniel Berrigan while he was underground; also children's books on such subjects as drugs, school desegregation and runaways. You might call it "Angs! central," the office in his home where Coles does most of his writing. He may be the friendly visitor with his subject in the field, but here he has chosen to be scrutinized by pictures of people who, by their life and work, openly challenge him. Among them, Simone Weil, a tortured, frail French writer who literally starved herself to death when the Resistance wouldn't send her on a dangerous mission; George Orwell ("People think of 1984 and forget his exposes of capitalism, of the coal mines"); The Catholic Worker's Dorothy Day; Walker Percy ("Ten pages of The Moviegoer are worth all the words I've written"), and George S. Bernanos, whose The Diary of a Country Priest is Coles' favorite book. ("He fought the temptation to ignore life's uncertainties .... ") His children at school, his wife resting from a touch of pneumonia she has just contracted, his blind and deaf dog, Grady, curled in a chair, Robert Coles paces in front of the window. In this room, the demands are implicit: He must test himself against the courage, the literary ability of these people. It is a constant self-analysis for the analyst, and as he talks now he cannot stand still. When Robert Coles is unsure about how to handle a section of a book, he paces; when he faces the dark side of his own nature, he must do the same: "Pride, pride. Of course, I wonder whether I'll be an important person and whether I have the 'unreflecting egoism' that Orwell talks about. I wrestle with my greed and my self-centeredness all the time. I love the Ritz and the Plaza, I get sick to my stomach when I see lice on children or flies buzzing around food. I couldn't take migrant work after a single day; my body ached; I wanted a shower and someplace clean to sleep." He turns around. "Then I look up at them and realize they struggled with ¡faith and belief and fought not to succumb to the secular culture. And I just go on. As St. Augustine said, 'I know I have sinned, yet I keep on sinning.' So I keep on writing." His life is hardly strewn with the privation he has written about, and Coles admits a certain uneasiness about his spacious but modest house, set on three secluded acres. He derives his income from a yearly grant from the Ford Foundation, from teaching, a bit from lecturing and articles, and the rest from the sales of his books (royalties from three books go to the Southern Regional Council and The Catholic Worker), none of
which has ever been a book-club selection nor sold more than 25,000 hard-cover copies.. "It's a common dilemma: I work with the poor, but I am a middle-class doctor, a writer. If I would give away everything and live with the poor, would it help relieve poverty in this country?" He quickly answers: "Of course not." For a man who has traveled so much. Coles is very much the family man, making sure that he sees his three sons, Bobby, Daniel and Michael, off to school in the morning before starting his work or leaving for Cambridge. He is often home before they return and keeps his office door open, hoping for interruptions. In his dealings with his own children, he tries to forget that he is a psychiatrist and has exhaustively studied the strains that children endure. "We psychiatrists learn about character disorder, but in raising children, what does that have to say about character? Kids need affection and discipline, not analyzing." Coles finds the way he and Jane raise their children is no different from their own upbringing. No pat theories, but a special emphasis on social concerns. When coal miners went on strike. the family talked about the impact and the two older boys asked pertinent questions. In a cabinet off to the side of Coles' desk are huge files on what will be his next series of works. He is going abroad soon to study how children are taught nationalism, political loyalty, an ideological system. "How can a child in Belfast throw a grenade? When do the children in Soweto say, 'Enough,' and strike back? Simone Weil said that tyranny is handed down from family to family; I want to look into that." For this work Coles will seek more substantial financial help and will use coresearchers. "One thing," he says late one evening as he looks up again at the pictures on his wall, "I know that these people aren't demanding that I go anyplace or write anything. That wasn't their style. You see, I speak and write with so much altruism, but I'm so weak. I remember when Dan Berrigan was underground and we hid him here at the house, I was terribly nervous. I saw him part of the way to his next stop, Block Island, and then I caught a train from Westport that was going into New York. All those Wall Street guys, all those Brooks Brothers suits. They all could have been Secret Service. And I was so happy to be safe, to be with them. Courage to be, . indeed, Dr. Coles." [] About the Author: Paul Wilkes is a well-known writer whose books, articles and television scripts focus mainly on profiles. Among his books are Six American Families and These Priests Stay.
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or most nations, at most times, immigration policy is a minor question. For the United States, a nation founded by immigrants from Europe, it has been a matter of importance throughout the country's history. Whatever have been the changes in policy-from no restrictions, to national origin quotas, to today's economic and family-oriented policies-immigration has been acknowledged as a central factor in determining the nature of American society. What has determined American immigration policy? A combination, varying over time, of attitudes about economic growth, race, and humanitarianism, all placed against the background of American political ideology. During its first century, America placed no restrictions on immigration, and indeed encouraged it. Of course, this policy reflected in part the fact, obvious to all Americans of the time, that the new land was vast, and vastly underpopulated. The development of a strong and prosperous nation required growth in the population. It is worth noting, however, that this policy of free immigration had a large ideological element: It was founded on the view that "Americans" were simply people who settled in America. There were no tests of race, origin, or politics; the new nation would welcome all who came there to live and work. This was a policy entirely consistent with the egalitarian creed enunciated in the Declaration ofIndependence. For a century, this policy was maintained. Until the 1920s there were no quantitative limits on immigration; such limits as there were were qualitative, and did not attempt to cut the total number of immigrants admitted. Restrictions excluded convicts, mental defectives, and those likely to be public charges. When this policy changed, the change resulted from a curious alliance of economic and racial motives. Between 1860and 1920 over 25 million aliens arrived in America; between 1901 and 1910 alone, an astonishing total of nearly 8.8 million came. To leaders of trade unions, the new arrivals represented competition for jobs, and therefore presented an obstacle to economic progress for their members. To "nativists" on the right wing of American politics, the large number of new immigrants represented a menace: It was feared that their "unfamiliarity with democratic politics" would endanger liberty in America, and that their "alien" cultures would never permit of assimilation into American life. Hence, in 1882 came the Chinese Exclusion Act; hence, in 1921 came the first of a series of immigration statutes limiting the total number of immigrants who would be permitted to settle in the United States-and basing the selection on national origin. The new "national origins quota system," which in essence remained in effect until 1965, based the number of immigrants to be allowed from each country (except those of the Western Hemisphere, from which immigration continued unrestricted) on the number of persons from that country present in the United States prior to the mass migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The result, as intended, was to favor North Europe, and to limit severely immigration from everywhere else. Thus, under the 1952 immigration statute, in effect until 1965, the national origins quota system allowed 65,631 immigrants from England-but 5,635 from Italy and 308 from Greece. This tightening of American immigration laws was, then, a response to the great increase in immigration which occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and to the fact that this increase came mostly from countries other than those which had supplied the nation's earliest settlers. It may also be argued that it was a response to significant changes in the supply of labor. For, from the mid-19th century to the early 20th, immigrants were a main source of unskilled labor. As the 20th century opened, more and more labor became available from
American blacks moving north to the industrial cities, and from Mexicans coming north on the new railroad links. With unskilled labor available even if immigration was restricted, the support of influential sectors of American industry for liberal immigration policies was reduced. Whatever the balance of forces-economic or ideologicalin the 1920s, by the end of World War II the balance had shifted. The plight of millions of refugees-from the War, and later, from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956-was one factor in changing popular views of immigration policy. A variety of new laws, new regulations, and private relief measures were implemented to provide paths through and around the national origins quota law. By the 1950s two-thirds of all immigrants were being admitted under exceptions to the law. Finally, in 1965, the national origins system was removed. It had become an anachronism, entirely out of place with the egalitarian and anti racist values which were then increasing greatly in popularity. The system could not last, and did not. Of course, in the new law, economics was not forgotten: The law established an elaborate preference system based on skills needed in the American labor market. Yet the overriding considerations which the law reflects are not economic, but humanitarian ones. The U.S. Senate report on the 1965 Act states that "Reunification of families is to be the foremost consideration." And in fact, only a small percentage of immigrants come into the United States pursuant to the labor provisions of the Act, and the vast majority are admitted because they are relatives of people living in the United States. It is thus easy to conclude that the role of economics in American immigration policy is 0vershadowed by two other factors-humanitarianism and ideology. For it remains true that the special provisions in American law allowing refugees to enter, and the general policy allowing large numbers of aliens to settle and to become citizens, reflect the continuing American creed that ours is an open society, welcoming newcomers who wish to work hard and make their own way.
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et this picture of American policy is clouded by several developments: the problem of illegal immigration, and the increasing discussion in recent years of the economic impact of immigration. The two are directly related. If recent estimates are even remotely accurate, hundreds of thousands of aliens enter the United States illegally each year (compared to about 400,000 who enter legally), and there are millions of illegal aliens present in the country now. As most "illegals" take low-skill, low-pay jobs, it is argued strongly that they lower U.S. labor standards and increase unemployment for low-skill Americans. Moreover, it is argued that the illegal immigrants are so numerous as to present problems in a country whose resources, though enormous, are nonetheless limited. This is not the place to argue whether these arguments are wrong or right. Two points are, however, noteworthy. First, the very fact that these arguments are being made bespeaks a growing concern about the economic impact of immigration. Twenty years ago, one rarely read that "immigrants take millions of jobs from Americans"-a commonplace charge now. Of course, the new tide of illegal immigration has caught Americans by surprise, and the notion that there are several million men and women living in the United States "unofficially," unknown to and afraid of the government and living without its protections, is unsettling to all Americans. What is more, the "limits of growth" view has gained popularity with some Americans. They conclude that these aliens are taking an unfair share of limited resources, limited numbers of jobs, limited wealth. This view has not prevailed in the United States: The
older, "frontier" view, according to which there is still much to the 1965 reforms. Now, immigration from India alone exceeds room for economic expansion, is still the more popular one. 15,000 per year, The characteristics of this group of immigrants Yet it must be said that economic concerns about the Impact of could not be more different from those of countries closer to the immigration are greater now-with the growth of illegal im- United States. First, "undocumented" entries-that is, clanmigration by large numbers of unskilled workers-than they destine entry across the border-is almost unheard of. Virtually all Indian immigrants enter the United States legally, as permahave been in over a half century. The second point worth remembering about illegal immi- nent residents, students, or tourists. Of illegal aliens from India, gration is that it may be interpreted in many-and often con- the largest groups are students or tourists who overstay their tradictory-ways. In one view, illegal immigration represents permitted time or who work without permission, or who do both. a new and startling factor in American history. The contrasting Typical are the many cases of Indian students who arrive in the view is that masses of unskilled workers have always come to United States with what they think to be enough money with the United States, and continue to do so; all that has changed is which to live. When they find their money has run out, they the law, which used to label them all as "legal" and now labels seek a job in order to support themselves, for the only alternative so many as "illegal." Under this view, economics does underlie is to drop out of school and go home. American immigration policy, for an economy which can use Second, the occupational status of immigrants from India many new workers welcomes them and quickly employs them. is high. Virtually no Indian immigrants enter domestic service, And a government able to do much more to stop illegal immi- for example, while many become successful merchants and many gration fails to do so, for it reflects the view of employers who are highly skilled professionals such as doctors and scientists. favor continued entry for large numbers of aliens. In recent years, Indian immigrants in the "professional and A third point worthy of note in any discussion of illegal technical" worker category have constituted three-fourths of immigration and American immigration policy is that illegal all Indian immigrants who enter the labor market-a percentage immigration is mostly from Latin America, and presents starkly exceeded by only a handful of other countries. Immigrants another element in policy formation-the question of foreign from India, typically, find a useful economic role in the United policy. Prior to 1965, in the years when the national origins States, and often prosper in what, for most immigrant groups, quota system was in effect, no such quotas were imposed on would be a remarkably short time. Here, the problems for United Western Hemisphere countries. from which unlimited immi- States foreign policy are minimaL and those of illegal immigration gration was permitted. Any national origins quota would have and undocumented entry take on very different casts than they virtually eliminated immigration from Latin America; the long do in the case of Latin American immigration. border with Mexico made enforcement seem impossible; and relations with neighboring Western Hemisphere countries would have been damaged by imposition of a quota. The State Departith illegal as with legal immigration, American policy ment strongly opposed a ceiling on Mexican and other Latin reflects a melange of ideological and economicconcerns. American immigration, on foreign policy grounds. Not until Few Americans favor greatly increasing the role of the police 1965 was any limitation on Western Hemisphere immigration agencies so as to allow them to eliminate this problem; yet few are legislated. The 1965 Act placed a ceiling of 120,000 on Western comfortable that there are so many "secret" residents in the counHemisphere immigration, but delayed the effective date until try. Few Americans would fail to acknowledge a "special relation1968 so that the question could be studied further. Yet in 1968 ship" with America's neighbors in Latin America, yet few can be the ceiling was allowed to go into effect, largely because populaentirely unworried when in an English-speaking country large tion growth in Latin America was thought likely to produce areas grow up in which Spanish is not so much a second as a a huge number of would-be immigrants; in fact immigration first language. Few Americans fail to recognize that immigrants from Latin America (legal and illegal) has risen to hundreds are hardworking and offer much to a growing economy, yet few of thousands per year. ignore the possibility that unemployment for American citizens If the case of Latin America illustrates that foreign policy may increase as immigration does. has played a role in U.S. immigration policy, the case of Mexico The present situation reflects all these conflicts. It is clear shows how significant that role can be. Mexico is the largest that the "supply" side of the immigration equation is nearly supplier of illegal aliens, in part because it has a large population limitless, for America remains a land of opportunity, vastly and large amounts of un- and underemployment, and in part of richer than the countries of most of the world, and therefore a course because of the long, porous border between the two goal for millions throughout the world. Moreover, as prosperity countries. Legally and illegally, Mexican workers have come to has increased at least marginally in many parts of the world, America in great numbers for over a half century. The "bracero" the number of people able to afford to reach America has inprogram allowed Mexicans to come to the United States creased greatly. Americans are, then, faced with an insoluble as temporary workers, and experts have speculated that the problem: How can a policy be found which protects the American economy, respects humanitarian concerns, and is consistent illegal immigration from Mexico is in a sense an "underground" continuation of the legal program. That program, and all special with the traditional American support for immigration? The the failure as of yet to treatment of Mexican immigration, had been supported by the high level of illegal immigration-and U.S. State Department for foreign policy reasons. It is argued that stop it-may indicate that this problem has produced a conflicted, still-evolving response, whose eventual resolution remains economic and political stability in Mexico are in fact dependent upon the ability of that country to send millions of workers to the unclear. Never before has America faced precisely this situation, United State~, when there is no work for them at home. Any and the product of this clash of humanitarian, ideological, and 0 discussion of U.S. immigration policy toward Latin America economic considerations cannot yet be predicted. and especially Mexico is, then, infused with concern about foreign relations, and about the impact of immigration not About the Author: Elliott Abrams is administrative assistant to Senator so much on America as on the sending country. Daniel P. Moynihan,former U.S. Ambassador to India. Educatedat Harvard Immigration from India, as from all of Asia, is of an entirely College and Harvard Law School, Abrams has written numerous articles different sort than that from Mexico and Latin America. Of on public policy questions, including American immigration policy, for course, immigration from Asia was virtually nonexistent prior American magazines such as the Public Interest.
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TWIN TOWERSOF WORLD TRADE
Above: Brokers in bright coats (shirt sleeves are taboo here) buy and sell everything from butter to zinc at the worlffs largest trading floor in the World Trade Center. Facing page: Shining brightly under the shadow of the center's twin towers, this 17-ton bronze globe makes a full turn an hour. Right: Revolving doors spin shoppers and officegoers into the lobby of the north tower.
Even in an age when skyscrapers jostle for space in the city's jagged skyline, the World Trade Center building in 'New York has raised eyebrows. The quartermile high twin-towered structure with its unusual sculpture houses eight hundred international trade organizations visited daily by over eighty thousand people.
is t eight years now since the first tenants moved into New York's llO-storied, 1,350-foot-high, two-towered World Trade Center (WTC), time enough, so to speak, to get an idea of how it has settled in. There has been controversy from the day the project was first announced until right now (although, it must be said, on a decreasing scale). Among its critics were those who condemned the gargantuan structures for their dehumanizing effect on the area. Now, in answer at least to this point of objection, there is a new plaza-five acres of open space, at its heart a commanding fountain, a wide circle of polished dark-brown granite. The tremendous ball of bronze, a hazel iris at the fountain's center, is set to make one full turn an hour. The function of the plaza, according to WTC chief architect Minoru Yamasaki, is a humane one; it exists to afford respite for the urban spirit from the torments of hurry and crowding, a place of relaxation and casualness, a refuge. "Lower Manhattan is a tangle of narrow streets," he said as we looked west from the plaza on a windy March morning. "People can't help but jostle other people. They push each other off the sidewalks into the streets. What I wanted to do was to give them a paved garden, like San Marco, where they can spend a little time away from traffic, a place totally for pedestrians. Some of them have to get away from the tensions of their jobs, some from the monotony." The analogy with Venice's Piazza San Marco is farfetched physically and spiritually but not in intent. If San Marco is, as Napoleon called it, "the grandest drawing room in Europe," the plaza at the World
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Soaring way above other buildings, the twin towers of the World Trade Center add a new feature to Lower Manhattan's skyline.
Trade Center may be the most awesome conversation pit anywhere. It is not quite as enclosed as it will eventually be when an 800-room hotel will cut across the space between the towers, blocking the view of the harbor, but it has the sense of being what it is for the sake of people, not esthetics. "The genius of the plan," an architect said to me, "is that Yamasaki decided on two tall and slender towers and not on one massive one, so that there is airiness rather than brutality about the open space." The structure of the towers, each rising I,350 feet, is unlike that of most skyscrapers. The exterior walls are not "curtains" hung on a steel cage. They are the supports that hold the buildings up and make them rigid. The steel columns, sheathed in aluminum and looking like silver ribbons that flow upward from the pointed arches at the base of the towers, are in fact cantilevered up from the foundations. They form a truss which braces the buildings against strong winds on high. Together with the spandrels they constitute a sort of rectangular tube to which the open floors of the structure are attached. Unlike the cage construction with its structural interruptions of interior spaces, Yamasaki's supporting walls allow for far greater flexibility in how the interiors can be arranged and the whims of tenants met. When Yamasaki, a native of Seattle whose offices are in suburban Detroit and whose elegant pavilions of commerce, transportation and learning are spread across the world (his biggest job at the moment is an airport for Saudi Arabia), received a letter from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey in 1962, he thought there had been a mistake. It asked if he would be interested in developing a scheme for a projected World Trade Center and mentioned that what they had in mind would be about a
$280 million undertaking for construction alone. "My first reaction," he says, "was that an extra zero had been added. My colleagues didn't believe it either, so I called Richard Sullivan, who signed the letter, and asked him if it meant what it said. He said it did." Fifteen years later the cost had risen to over $900 million, including relocation, demolition and site preparation. There are now roughly 35,000 persons employed in the complex, which is five buildings in all-the two towers, the U.S. Customhouse and two additional nine-story business structures that wall off the plaza. It is estimated that 80,000 visitors come each day on business to see people who work at the Center. In addition to these are the sightseers who come to gape up at and down from the towers, still others who come to the restaurants and cafeterias and those who sit by the fountain in the plaza and eat out of paper bags. Some come to shop in the vast concourse beneath the plaza for flowers or books, groceries or clothes or anything else one expects to find in a sophisticated shopping mall. Others in the late afternoon come to the jazz and marching band concerts and other entertainments in the plaza, or pause there on their way home from work via the WTC rapid transit connections. To talk with anyone who works for, not just at, the World Trade Center is to be showered with statistics. Depending on your temperament, it's either "Gee whiz!" or "God help us!" -disbelief or dismay. One is not likely to be indifferent, not, in any case, in the long shadows of the edifice itself. To wit: Every night 600 women with dusters and sweepers move in to clean up the day's mess, and they are complemented by 400 men for the heavy work. A police force of 38 uniformed men keep their eyes and ears open 24 hours a day every day. These are in addition to at least 200 private security About the Author: Russell Lynes is a former editor of Harper's magazine. He is the author of a number of books including The Tastemakers and A Surfeit of Honey.
guards. The restaurants, about a dozen of them, serve 20,000 meals a day. There are 102 automatic elevators per tower. It takes 58 seconds in the express elevator to get to the observation deck at the top of the South Tower or the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower. It makes your ears pop. It is comparable to Rockefeller Center, for it is not just a piece of archi tecture, it is, like it or not, a place. Beatrice Lillie is said to have asked when she boarded the RMS Queen Elizabeth some years ago, "When does this place get to England?" The analogy of the World Trade Center with a vast ship tied to the land seems to me more accurate than its comparison with a small city. It is selfcontained; it has no sprawl, at least not yet. Curiously, no one in this place which is dedicated to maritime concerns, surrounded by the waters of the harbor and suckled by freighters, mentioned its likeness to a great ship. Its first-class tenants occupy its uppermost floors and eat in its loftiest restaurants. Its crew is "below" in its engine rooms (its refrigerator plant must be the largest in the world). Its crow's nest is the observation deck on the top of the South Tower; its promenade is the plaza. If it should float down the harbor and out to sea, some of its critics would be pleased, but its friends would understand. It is what its name says it is, a center for world trade. A glance at its tenants' directory confirms this: import-export firms, shipping companies, freight forwarders, customhouse brokers, cargo inspectors, marine insurance brokers, international bankers, steamship agents. There are offices promoting the ports of Seattle, Boston, Baton Rouge and others. There is a World Trade Institute that "offers courses, meetings and seminars on all aspects of international trade for all levels of management." The tenants have different reasons for how far up in the twin Towers of Babel with their "confusion of tongues" they want their offices. An official at the World Trade Department
of the Port Authority said: "One Japanese company hired a soothsayer to throw dice to determine what floor they should have their offices on. They wound up in the 90s." There is more cachet to higher than lower and somewhat less convenience. Getting from building to building and access to the shopping and eating concourse is quicker from the lower floors. To get to the upper offices one changes from an express to a local elevator at one of the "skylobbies" (one on the 44th and one on the 78th floor) where there are restaurants, beauty parlors, a smoke shop and banks. The views of the harbor and its surroundings, which include a good deal of New Jersey as well as New York's five boroughs, are of course best seen aloft, from where the Statue of Liberty looks the size of a desk ornament. The top offices are not infrequently above the clouds, like an airplane that got stuck, and there is no telling short of a phone call or a wet visitor if it is raining below. The critical reception of the World Trade Center has been by no means all enthusiastic. It has drawn a hail of arrows, some of them with flattering bouquets attached to their' shafts. It has been called "kitsch" architecture by a critic who praises the Chrysler Building, perhaps unmindful that the generation of critics before his thought it unspeakably vulgar. It has been scored by pundits who say that the skyscraper is doomed, the very same critics who deplore the death of the center of cities because of sprawl/ and no open space for human dalliance. There are critics who deplore what they call the "daintiness" of Yamasaki's arches and the delicate quality of his detailing, to which Yamasaki replies by quoting Emerson: "The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy." D Reprinted by permission from Smithsonian
Š Smithsonian Institution 1978.
magazine.
I
NEW PRODUCTS
U.S.A.
A Humanoid for Radiographic Studies Designedfor use in teaching radiography to medical >students, the Pixy Model Two (below) is a simulatedfemale human skeleton encased in tissue-equivalent material. The humanoid can assume 96 per cent of the radiographic positions, thus avoiding the unnecessary exposure of patients to radiation. Free from metallic artifacts, the device comes with optional internal organs. Price: $3,965 to $4,445. Manufacturer: Humanoid Systems, Dept. CN, 747 East 223rd Street, Carson, California 90745.
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A DoU That Builds Self-Awareness
The Happy Wanderer
A new doll has been manufactured that helps children's emotional growth through play. Called " Me Doll" (below), it mirrors the child's facial expressions, thus making the doll an extension of the youngster's own self. As a result, it enhances the child's self-appreciation and also the capacity to respond to others. The 2joot doll also teaches body part identification. Manufacturer: PlayLearn Products, 29-24 40th Avenue, Long Island Cit , N. Y. 11101.
The electric wheelchair (left),first of its kind, allows people with limited mobility the freedom of the outdoors. The Happy Wanderer, as the vehicle is called, moves forward and reverse in two speeds-five and ten kilometers per hour-and its steering, direction and controls are operated with one hand. The . vehicle's large pneumatic tires provide a cushioned ride over all kinds of terrain-hilly, wet, dirty or paved roads. Two silent, permanent magnet motors friction-drive each rear wheel for precise maneuverability. Braking is automatic whenever the rider releases throttle lever. Price: $799. Manufacturer: Palmer Industries, P.O. Box 707, Endicott, N. Y. 13760.
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Make-It-Yourself Furniture
Games That Teach
Zip-on modular seating units (above) offer comfort without cost. The steel frame pieces slide into each. other and bolt together to create a chair, love seat or sofa. Polyester-filled covers zip on to the frame. Price: $110 to $130. Manufacturer: Design Research, 400 Franklin Street. Braintree, Massachusetts 02184.
An American company has developed a wide range of educational kits (above) that have made learning fun. Placing an activity card in the desk-top console, the student inserts responses from left to right. As each correct response is inserted, it magically lights up to reward correctness. Price: $35 to $295. Manufacturer: Spellbinder Inc., 33 Bradford St., Concord, Massachusetts 01742.
Light Communicators The hair-thin glass fibers (right) are part of the 1V0rld'sfirst lightwave system to provide a lViderange of telecommunications services to customers. Voice. data and video signals are carried on pulses of light transmitted through the fibers. Developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories, the system is undergoing an evaluation test. .
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SAVING THE WORLD'S WILDLIFE 'Wildlife is an integral part of our ecosystem,' says Dr. Gerard Bertrand, an American expert. In an interview, he describes efforts in the United States and other countries to save the world's rare fauna. "I was photographing birds in a Florida swamp," says American wildlife expert Gerard Bertrand, "when I heard an absolutely devastating sound that made my legs shake." A four-meter-long alligator had crawled up behind him and thrust its head between Dr. Bertrand's legs. "He was giving his mating call to attract female alligators; he was not the least bit interested in me. But the sound of an alligator's mating call can travel four or five kilometers, and when it's given between your legs, it provides a feeling that's like nothing else on earth." Dr. Bertrand experienced a more eerie feeling some years ago while walking along a ridge top in one of America's national parks: a pair of 500-kilo grizzly bears sighted him, growled, and charged! Bertrand looked
around: below him stretched a rocky cliff and a jumble of boulders. He dropped down five meters of sheer rock, then ran full speed downhill from boulder to boulder, faster than he had ever run in his life. He eluded the bears. The only casualty was his camera; it got smashed when he dropped down the cliff. When he isn't stalking or dodging alligators, bears and other predators in the wild, Dr. Bertrand, 34, is at his desk in Washington, D.C., generating ideas and projects to protect and multiply the world's wildlife. As chief of International Affairs in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he works with a staff of5,500 that is primarily responsible for America's wildlife-all the plants and animals that live in a natural environment. He helps organize treaties and cooperative projects with wild-
life authorities in India, Japan, Egypt, the Soviet Union, Mexico, Venezuela, Cal1ada, and other countries. The department's main focus is on saving threatened and endangered wildlife species. Most people fail to realize the vital connection between man and wildlife, says Dr. Bertrand. Wildlife is primarily important not for its scientific or even esthetic value Qut for its ecological value. "Wildlife is an integral part of our ecosystem; its survival is a very strong indicator of our own." . Above: An inmate of the lion safaripark in the Hyderabad zoo. Facing page:.4 bull, elk seeks a meal beneath the snow atafamous havenfor wildlife- Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, in the U.S.
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"The basic Hindu philosophy that man cannot exist without being in harmony with the world around is correct," says Dr. Bertrand. "Each animal and plant plays a part in this harmony. And every time we remove a plant or animal, we are taking a thread out of the tapestry of life. This tapestry will unravel before us if we continue to remove threads at the same pace as we have done in the past." Ten per cent of the world's vertebrate fauna are now in danger of extinction, Dr. Bertrand points out. "The rate of extinction has been rising during the past 100 years. More and more wildlife species have been joining the endangered list every year. If we don't pay enough attention to them immediately, we will lose them forever." Why is wildlife becoming extinct? The indiscriminate hunting and poaching of yesteryear is mercifuily 'at an end, at least in most parts of the world. But man continues to destroy wildlife's habitat-forests. Every day thousands of hectares of forests are cut down for human use. Wildlife.is being pushed deeper and deeper into the wilds, it is being pushed out of existence. One wildlife species that has been saved for posterity is the Siberian crane. "It's a magnificent bird," says Dr. Bertrand, "standing almost two meters high, white with black wings and a real joy to see." There are fewer than 300 of this species todav. and thev live in
two groups. One migrates to China each winter, the other migrates through Afghanistan and reaches Bharatpur in Uttar Pradesh. "Some people in Bharatpur believe that these are Indian cranes that fly to Siberia for the summer," says Dr. Bertrand. Sixty-five cranes were noticed in Bharatpur early this year, an increase of half a dozen over last year. Dr. Bertrand has been working with Dr. George Archibald of the International Crane Foundation in the United States and Dr. Vladimar Flint of the Soviet Union on a program to multiply the population of the Siberian crane. Eggs of the bird are brought to America from the Soviet Union and bred there in captivity. The "captive cranes" that grow up in America.will be reintroduced in the Soviet Union to establish new populations. "We hope to complete a three-country loop by developing an Indo-U.S. project to study the cranes at their wintering grounds in the Bharatpur sanctuary," says Dr. Bertrand. The United States is engaged in other types of wildlife projects around the world. In Central America, it is developing a regional center to train forest and customs officers of developing countries in the principles of ecology and in techniques of wildlife law enforcement and wildlife identification. In Mexico, it is helping to protect marine turtles, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope and wolves, and is studying the abundance of white-winl!ed
Clockwise from top left: The nilgai, the largest Indian antelope, and a crocodile bred in captivity, both from the Hyderabad zoo .. and the once abundant, now endangered American grizzly bear.
doves. With Canada, the United States is investigating 25 duck species that breed every year in that country and fly to the United States or Mexico. In Spain, it is developing a plan to protect the Coto Donana, a national park and wildlife sanctuary on the Atlantic coast. Dr. Bertrand has visited India thrice recently, and is working with the forestry department here to set up ajoint Indo-U.S. program to protect endangered species. "The program will be designed, developed and managed by the Government ofIndia," explains Dr. Bertrand. "The United States will provide technical assistance and financial support where appropriate." The program may cover four areas of cooperation-professional training of forest and wildlife managers; environmental education for the public; the analysis and protection of wildlife habitat including the setting up of national parks; and the status and management of endangered species. Many specific activities might be developed in these four areas, Dr. Bertrand said. Examples: â&#x20AC;˘ Posters on India's endangered species rrnntinupd nn novp
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THE HYDERABAD ZOO "You can build another Taj Mahal," says Pushpa Kumar, first curator of the Hyderabad zoo, "but if the Thamin deer vanishes, nothing can bring it back." The handsome, brow-antlered Thamin deer of Manipur is one rare wildlife species that is being preserved in the Hyderabad zoo (officially known as the Nehru Zoological Park). Set up in 1963, the 300-acre zoo is helping save several other endangered species--tb,e Indian tiger, lion and rhino, the gaur, the white-winged wood duck, and three types of Indian crocodiles. Besides' saving rare species, the Hyderabad zoo has three main objects, says Kumar: to educate people, serving as a "living textbook of nature:'; to carry out research on wildlife problems; to provide wholesome recreation. The Hyderabad zoo does excellent work on all these fronts, says American wildlife expert Gerard Bertrand: he rates it one of the world's 10best zoos. Birds and beasts at the Hyderabad zoo stroll, scamper, leap or fly in a natural habitat of rock, tree and bush provided for them in special enclosures. "There is no barrier between man and beast here," says Kumar: there are no cages, bars, grills. What separates wildlife and the viewer is a moat, a shallow tank. ' We tour the zoo. "Look at that fellow showing off," says Kumar. We turn: a male peacock qisplays his plumed glory for his lady's benefit. We humans are lost in admiration, but the female peacock trails away nonchalantly. The male gives determined chase. Other birds at the zoo include pheasants of all kinds, parrots, partridges, quails, weavers, thrushes, magpies, doves, pigeons, the crested serpent eagle. Kumar tells us about a bird that fascinates him: the pied-crested cuckoo, whose arrival always heralds the monsoon. Monkeys are scene-stealers, here as elsewhere. There are chimpanzees from central Africa, tiny squirrel monkeys from Brazil and Venezuela, hoolock gibbons from .Assam (black, agile and arboreal), stump-tailed and lion-tailed macaques, golden rhesus monkeys .... "The chimpanzees are very intelligent beasts," says Kumar. "Some of them pluck twigs offneem trees and brush their teeth .... They have seen a gatekeeper do that." The Egyptian baboon captivated Clive Lloyd, captain of the West Indies cricket team that toured India some years ago. He threw a dozen peanuts at it, one after another. The baboon caught them all deftly in its teeth. "Give him to us," Lloyd said. "We could do with such a fielder." We see 16-foot-high African giraffes-so tall that their feet splay as their necks stoop to graze. They adore acacia trees, and gobble up not merely the leaves but the bark as well. There's a scraggly protein-packed female American bison, acquired eight years ago. It has adjusted well to India, and the zoo authorities are trying to acquire a male bison from the United States to mate with her. The zoo is building up a flock of gaur, which are diminishing in their orig~nal habitat-Assam and Bengal. A few of them are likely to be put into a sanctuary. The antelopes are fascinating in their variety: the black buck (for which a 200-acre sanctuary has now been set up in Hyderabad); the chowsingha or four-horned antelope; the chinkara or the black-bodied, browntailed gazelle; the nilgai. There are deer of many kinds: the sambar, the cheetal (a hundred of whom roam about in the zoo), the hog deer, the barking deer, the mouse deer. A lovely creature ambles toward us from behind an artificial rock. It's the clouded leopard of north Africa. "No Persian carpet can duplicate that pattern," says Kumar. Besides being a visual treat, the pattern serves as a camouflage against enemies. In another enclosure, a sinuous black panther glides gently by, eyes blazing. Contrary to popular belief, this isn't a deadly beast, says Kumar. There's Raja, a majestic large-sized tiger given to the zoo as a cub many years ago by hill tribesmen; and Tippu, a tiger born at the zoo in 1972. Several years ago, Tippu's mother was mauled by a male tiger in the zoo. Doctors saved her life but had to amputate her tail. She was succe'ssfullymated with another male tiger, and Tippu was the result. A pride of the zoo is the 30-acrelion safari park whose varied landscape (dense forest, savannah grassland, hills and plateaus) harbors a lion and
three lionesses. Visitors enter the park in a jeep that's properly bolted and grilled. They may see a lion reposing under the shade of acacia trees, strolling past or rounding a bend. It isn't bothered by the jeep, even if it is just five feet away. Once a day the lions gladly enter a cage to be fed and examined. Another significant feature of the zoo is a crocodile conservatory. Under a project assisted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), crocodile eggs are collected in the wild and incubated in artificial nests at the zoo. The baby crocodiles that emerge months later are reared in special pools till they are about four meters long, then released into the wild. All three varieties of Indian croCodiles-the mugger, the salt water crododile, the long-snouted gharial-are being bred in the Hyderabad zoo. Eggs of the mugger were collected from the banks of the Godavari and the Krishna (fishermen designated by the forest department "patrol" the entire stretch of the Krishna and the Godavari for crocodile eggs); salt water crocodile eggs were brought from the Andamans; baby gharials were brought from Nepal. The zoo is the first in India to release captive crocodiles into the wild. Last year, four mugger crocodiles bred'at the zoo were released at the Ethipothala falls below the Nagarjunasagar dam in Andhra Pradesh. Very popular with children is a park for prehistoric animals (made of fiberglas). The dinosaur models "look more like the original beasts must have looked like than any I have seen so far," said T.M. Reed, director of the National Zoological Park of Washington, D.C., when he visited Hyderabad. Future attractions, Kumar says, include a reptile park, a serpentarium, a sanctuary for water birds, a park for nocturnal animals. Talking about wildlife preservation round the world, Kumar recalls a six-week seminar he attended in the United States eight years ago, at which delegates from 24 countries described their efforts at saving wildlife. "It gave me the impression that the problem of 'conservation is basically the same everywhere." Kumar also toured major national parks in the United States and Canada. "We could go miles and miles and see only birds and beasts." He said that any park that becomes popular deteriorates-litter is ,strewn about, hedges are vandalized. But then, "parks are meant for people." American park authorities have mastered the art of "reducing visitor impact." "That is something we will also hliVeto do," says the Chief Conservator of Forests in Andhra Pradesh, P.S. Rao, who plans to set up more zoos ,0 and wildlife sanctuaries in his state.
can be prepared in various Indian languages; • Tigers in the Project Tiger areas can be tracked by radio; • Endangered crocodiles could be captured and bred; • Wild antelope and deer could be captured and bred for eventual release in the wild; • The food sources of forest monkeys could be examined. "We hope that Indo-U.S. cooperation on wildlife protection can continue well into the future," says Dr. Bertrand. "Eventually, we hope for a regular exchange of Indian and American wildlife personnel. American scientists can learn much from their Indian counterparts. There is little that the best Indian scientists can learn from us; what we may be able to provide, however, is technical knowledge in skills such as radio telemetry, remote sensing and census techniques. Due to their cost and complexity they have not developed much in India." Dr. Bertrand talks with enthusiasm about the abundance and variety of India's wildlife. The Indian subcontinent has more than 1,400 species of birds; Indian forests are rich in reptiles, amphibians and mammals; the number of plants is vast. "There is no area in India I could visit without some excitement at seeing things I have never seen before. The animals are of course very different between the north and the south, between the dry and the wet areas .... A small deer in the south is no less spectacular to a biologist than a tiger. Each represents adaptations to the environment that are unique." "India is a funneling point for wildlife from the entire Eurasian continent," Dr. Ber-
trand observes. "It is an overlapping zone between East and West, and provides a blending of the two not found anywhere else." Elaborating, he notes that "Indian tigers range all the way to Siberia, into Sumatra and Indonesia; barking deer are found throughout India and eastward till Malaya; many Indian· bird species are found throughout Southeast Asia; and India also has a large component of Eurasian fauna-birds from Europe and western Russia, mammals such as wild boar and hyena." The forests of India have dwindled during the past 100 years, though they are still extensive-particularly in the south and in the Himalayan foothills of the north. Experts believe, says Dr. Bertrand, that India retains less than 20 per cent of its original forest cover. But India has many people dedicated to wildlife conservation; he is optimistic about the future of wildlife here. Has Bertrand had any exciting encounters with wildlife in India? He recalls his tour of the Corbett National Park last November, when he went looking for tigers from a safe height-on elephant back. The elephant almost stepped on a tiger. "The tiger was lying under a bush, the elephant had not seen it; the tiger jumped right in front of us, in beautiful light, and started roaring. I was very excited, I got my camera out and started clicking. But when I went to the studio with the film, the pictures all looked like modern art. The tiger was discernible, but only as a wavy blotch of orange on a patch of green." "Being in the jungle," says Dr. Bertrand, his eyes glowing, "you sometimes see things that you will only see once in a lifetime. Each experience with wildlife is unique and has to
be enjoyed for its own sake, for it is not likely to be repeated." Dr. Bertrand has been observing and studying wildlife ever since his childhood days. In college he acquired an undergraduate degree in biology, a master's degree in biological sciences, a degree in environmental law, and a Ph.D. in biological oceanography. "My general emphasis is really on the environment and on wildlife in its broadest sense-and that includes land use, habitat protection, pollution abatement, tax and financial incentives for good. land use, forest management, range management, coastal development." He has served as science adviser to the Council on Environmental Quality for Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Talking about American wildlife, Bertrand says that some splendid beasts-eastern mountain lions and plains wolves-have become extinct. White-tailed prairie dogs, that once existed in millions, are now scarce. But quite a few other wildlife species have been saved: there are several thousand American bison (once reduced to several hundred), nearly 80 whooping cranes (up from about 30 some years ago), 100,000 northern elephant seal Gust a few dozen at the turn of the century) and increasing numbers of peregrine falcon (once eliminated from the eastern part of the United States). "Things can be done to revive dying species," says Dr. Bertrand, "but they entail tremendous effort and expense, and you mayor may not succeed. It is better to prevent their decline and avoid the cost and attention that reintroduction requires. We must protect the habitat; tomorrow, it may be impossible." 0
Left: A squirrel monkey in the Hyderabad zoo. Its tail is as long (nine inches) as its body. Above: The Siberian crane, which winters every year in the Bharatpur sanctuary of Uttar Pradesh. An Indo-U.S.-U.S.S.R. project has developed to preserve it and study its habits. Facing page: The spoonbill, one of a dozen in the Hyderabad zoo. This bird preys on small fish and prawns.
nEWrASlllons rOR mEn Fashion once ruled men's clothing in the West, what with the tails and the wigs, embroidered waistcoats and lace-trimmed.collars, tight breeches and clump-heeled shoes. Two revolutions-the French and the American-put an end to all that. Court modes changed to country modes. For over one and a half centuries, men had to be content with varying the width oftrousers bottoms or coat lapels, and were allowed precious little by way of color. Today fashion has made a big comeback in men's clothing. From flaming yellows to blinding reds, from the ultrabohemian to the studiedly elegant, from blue jeans to white suit-the world of fashion is wide open to men. The well-dressed man today knows that his clothes are making a statement-about him. SPAN presents here a small cross section of what the American male is wearing today, formally or informally.
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SINGER EXTRAORDINARY
M.S.SUBBUL 'I would rather hear the words of a hymn spoken by Subbulakshmi than sung by anyone else.' In that famous tribute lies the secret of the 'M.S. magic.' Many years ago, in a quiet room in New Delhi, two women met for the first time. "I've heard so much about you," said the elder, "will you sing a song for me?" And as the rich notes filled the room, she placed sensitive fingers on the singer's throat, to feel the vibrations of the vocal chords, for she had been blind and deaf most of her life. When the song was over, Helen Keller sighed, "Oh! You make such beautiful music!" The singer, M.S. Subbulakshmi, one of the leading figures in Carnatic music today, was moved to tears. January 30th, 1948. It was one of those rare evenings of leisure for M.S. Subbulakshmi. She relaxed and listened to the radio. Suddenly the program was interrupted for an important announcement: The Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, was dead. And, then, Subbulakshmi's own voice filled the little room as the radio played her rendering of Hari turn haro, a hymn that Gandhiji had loved. But Subbulakshmi herself did not hear it. She had collapsed .... It was a whole year before M.S. Subbulakshmi could sing that hymn again without breaking down. Mahatma Gandhi had once said, "I would rather hear the words of a hymn spoken by Subbulakshmi than sung by anyone else."
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What is it about M.S., as she is affectionately known, that moves people so deeply? "It's more than her remarkable voice," say her friends. "When she sings, or when she talks to you, or even smiles at you, there is something there One catches a glimpse of what one can only call 'goodness' a sort of purity of spirit. The greatness is in the singer, not just in the song." M.S. Subbulakshmi was born in 1916. Her mother, Shanmukhavadivu, was a famous veena player. M.S. showed an early musical talent, and at the age of 10 gave her first classical music concert. Soon the Columbia Gramophone Company recorded the exciting new voice and brought it into the homes of enraptured music lovers. By the time she was 17, she was singing to discerning and increasingly appreciative audiences everywhere. She was invited to sing at the Madras Music Academy, "the Carnegie Hall of Madras." To this day, an invitation to sing at the Academy continues to be a significant distinctiona sign that the artist has "arrived." Later she was to be the first woman president of this august body. Two events in Subbulakshmi's career had the musical world ofIndia talking about her: The All India Music Conference in 1943 in Bombay gave her a platform to display her musical virtuosity before the best musicians of the time; and her film Meera, in which she starred and sang in the title role, drew large and enthusiastic audiences everywhere. . Subbulakshmi is now 62 years old, and still beautiful. She has expressive eyes and a warm heartfelt smile. Dressed in the traditional Iyer style, her hair adorned with flowers, her nose ornaments and ear studs glinting with the movement of her head, a characteristic smile lighting up her face, M.S. is an endearing person to meeLand talk to. I asked M.S., "Who has been the main inspiration in your
life?" Her eyes turned instinctively toward her husband, T. Sadasivam. It is his encouragement and guidance, friends say, which have helped M.S. attain such heights of excellence. M.S. still works hard at her music, practicing assiduously with her stepdaughter Radha Vishwanathan, who has been accompanying her for years at every concert in India and abroad. Speaking of M.S., Sarojini Naidu once said, "Her golden voice is an instrument of great causes .... " Trust funds, hospitals, schools, libraries, dozens of charitable, social and artistic causes have benefited over the years from Subbulakshmi's countless charity recitals and donations. In 1963 Subbulakshmi went to Europe to participate in the Edinburgh International Festival. The response, from audiences and critics alike, was enthusiastic. This was followed by recordings for the BBC and a special recital in London. On October 23, 1966, Subbulakshmi gave a concert at the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York. "They simply loved her," says Sadasivam of her first recital there. "The applause was something marvelous." In the course of a hectic seven weeks in the autumn of 1966, M.S. toured the United States giving concerts in 15 centers, from New York to San Francisco, presenting "a series of miracles," to quote the San Francisco Chronicle, and "dazzling the large audiences into spontaneous applause" (The Boston Herald). The New York Times said, "Her vocal communication transcends words." In 1977, M.S. was once again in the United States. This time her concert tour was in aid of funds for the Hindu temples at New York and Pittsburgh. At New York and Washington, Dallas and Houston, Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Poughkeepsie, Subbulakshmi and her ensemble thrilled old fans and collected new admirers in a stamina-testing, whistle-stop concert tour whose climax was a memorable farewell concert at Carnegie Hall. John Rockwell, writing for The New York Times, described it as "one of the finest concerts in living memory." "It was just like singing anywhere in Madras," said M.S., speaking of her American performance. "There was the same rapport, the same sense of participation." M.S. smiles with genuine, childlike pleasure at the memory. Appreciation has also come in the form of honors and awards: the Padma Bhushan 1954; the President's Award for Carnatic Music 1956; the presidentship of Madras Music Academy 1968; the Magsaysay Award 1974; and the Padma Vibhushan 1975. Universities have conferred doctorates on her. Said one young American girl after listening to M.S., "She does something to me, this great singer of yours. I seem to feel her music with all my five senses, perhaps a sixth one as well." D About the Author: Malini Seshadri is afree-lance She is a frequent contributor to SPAN.
writer living in Madras.
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From New York to New Delhi-every city has them: irritants, major and minor, that seem to trip one up at every step. "They're inevitable," shrug most people helplessly. But they're also illegal; some of them anyway. The harassed citizen can, with some diligence
and determination, make his life easier-if he brushes up his knowledge of the local law. New York City, for example, has a host of laws that impose penalties on petty and notso-petty offenders who, by their actions, make life fatally dangerous or just infuriatingly
unpleasant for their fellow citizens. We give below a list. There are other laws, other offences-this is just a sampling of a guide for the harassed New Yorker. Some offences will seem remarkably familiar to Indian readers-it's a small world, after all ....
Maximum Penalty
Where to Complain
New York State When done "with intent to harass, annoy, or $250 and/or Penal Law, alarm," it is illegal to attempt to, threaten to, or 15 days §240.25 actually hit or shove another person; to follow a person about in public; or repeatedly to commit "acts which alarm or seriously annoy ... and which serve no legitimate purpose." New York City Administrative Code, §1403.2-9 0~
Dark smoke may not be emitted from buildings or vehicles; dust or dirt must not be allowed to "become airborne" ; open fires, except for certain picnic or barbecue fires, are not permitted.
$250-$1,000, depending on situation
Dept. of Environmental Protection (966-7500)
CRANK PHONE CALLS
New York State Persons may not make a phone call "with no Penal Law, purpose of legitimate communication." §240.30
$1,000 and/or one year
Local phonecompany business office
FOOD, STALE OR DAMAGEDIN MARKETS, BAKERIES, ETC.
Consumer Food may not be sold in leaking, rusted, or Protection Law: badly dented cans, or cans with a punctured Regulation 41 lining.
$500
Regulation 55
$250
New York State Dept. of Agriculture and Markets (488-4820) Same as above or Dept. of Consumer Affairs (964-7777)
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FURNITURE DELIVERY
HOUSING CONDITIONS,
GENERAL
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LITTERING
Bread and dairy products must be stamped with last allowable date of sale.
Consumer Furniture sellers must give an estimated delivery Protection Law, date, and notify buyers of any delay. If no Regulation delivery is made within 30 days of the date, the 17 customer may cancel the order and receive a full refund.
$500
Dept. of Consumer Affairs (964-7777)
New York City Administrative Code, §D26-11.03
Landlords must keep public parts of dwellings "in a clean and sanitary condition."
Dept. of Rent and Housing Maintenance (960-4800)
New York State Multiple Dwelling Law,§78 New York State Real Property Law, §235
Landlords must keep all parts of buildings in good repair, though tenants are liable for their own actions and those of their guests. Landlords and superintendents may not willfully violate the terms of leases requiring furnishing of water, gas, electricity, heat, elevator service, or telephone service.
$50; $100 plus a daily charge in special situations $500 and/or 30 days $250 and/or 15 days
New York City Administrative Code, §755 (2)-7.0
Persons must not throw garbage or paper on streets or sidewalks, or out of vehicles. Property owners and tenants must keep sidewalks free of obstacles and garbage.
$150 and/or 10 days
Same as above
Same as above
Sanitation Action Center (925-2310)
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What the Law Says
New York City Administrative Code: §1403.3
Unnecessary noise is prohibited, including: -car horns, except in emergencies; soundreproduction devices; - building and car burglar alarms that do not automatically turn off; sirens, except on emergency vehicles; -loudspeakers for commercial advertising; -construction activities between 6 p.m. and 7 a.m., or on weekends, except in emergencies.
Maximum Penalty
$500 $1,000
Where to Complain Dept. of Environmental Protection (966-7500) except noisy parties (call Police)
Radios, phonographs, or tape recorders must not be operated on subways or buses if sound "is audible to another person." Street peddlers must have a license and may not block sidewalks.
Varies: fines, revocation of license, imprisonment
Dept. of Consumer Affairs (964-7777)
Persons may not stand on sidewalks, streets, or building entrances to solicit patronage for any business or service.
$50 and/or 10 days
Local police precinct
New York City Administrative Code, §434a-14.0
"Neglect of duty ... or any conduct injurious to the public peace or welfare, or immoral conduct or conduct unbecoming an officer" is prohibited.
Suspension or Ethnic slurs, discourtesy, dismissal; abuse of authorfines ity, excessive force (4777550); minor infractions (3745176); serious misconduct (834-4321)
Consumer Protection Law: Regulation 32 Regulation 23
If goods are sold above the manufacturer's suggested retail price, the suggested retail price must be disclosed.
Dept. of Consumer Affairs (964-7777)
Sales may not be advertised unless the items are in stock or were ordered in time to be. Rain checks are not necessarily legal substitutes. All but the smallest food stores must display accurate unit prices for all products except drugs and cosmetics. Pharmacies must post prescription-drug prices.
Same as above
New York City Administrative Code: §B36-93.0 §435-1O.1
New York City Administrative Code, §B64-3.0 New York State Education Law, §6826 Consumer Protection Law: Regulation 26
Repairmen must provide written estimates and get written authorizations before starting work. The final bill must be no more than 20 per cent above the estimate, unless there is authorization for more.
$1,000 and/or one year
Dept. of Consumer Affairs (964-7777) New York City Board of Pharmacy (557-2136) Dept.of Consumer Affairs (964-7777)
Repairmen must come on the day they promise to come, or notify the customer as soon as possible. Mechanical breakdown or employee illness is no excuse for not informing the customer. New York City Health Code: §81.23 (a) §81.25
Restaurants must be kept free of rodents and insects and conditions conducive to them. No animals, except for Seeing Eye dogs, are allowed in restaurants.
New York State Public Health Law, §1352
Food may not be served with unclean utensils or in unclean dishes, glasses, etc.
New York State Codes, Rules and Regulations Title I, §258.4 (0)
Restaurant employees may not use tobacco while serving or preparing food.
Health Dept. (566-7726)
Maximum Penalty
Where to Complain Sanitation Action Center (925-2310)
New York City Administrative Code: §755 (4)-1.0
Sidewalks or streets must not be obstructed with earth, rocks, or rubbish.
$250 and/or 10 days
§755 (3)-2.0
Property owners and tenants must remove snow, ice, and dirt from sidewalks. Streets must not be blocked without a permit.
$150 and/or 10 days $100/day
New York City Administrative Code: §692f-1.0 §692h-1.0
Dept. of Transportation: Bronx (9312066); Brooklyn (643-7945) ; Manhattan (566-2008) ; Queens (520-3294); Staten Island (390-5150)
Persons must not take up space on sidewalks without a permit. New York State Persons must not "obstruct vehicular or Penal Law, pedestrian traffic." §240.20 (5)
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New York City Administrative Code: §CI9-l65.l
No smoking or carrying a lit cigarette, cigar, pipe, or match is permitted, except in specially designated areas, in: -theaters;
§C19-l65.2
$250 and/or 15 days
$500 and/or six months
Fire Dept. (643-8763)
$100 and/or 30 days $250 or 30 days
Same as above
§C19-165.4
-retail stores with more than 300-person capacity, or more than 25 employees; -hospitals or nursing homes;
§1403.2-9.18
-passenger
New York City Health Code: §139.07
-public
$50 and/or 15 days $25 and/or 10 days
Health Dept. (566-7726) Transit Police
$50 and/or 15 days
Health Dept. (566-7726)
Suspension or revocation of license and/ or fine
Taxi and Limousine Commission (747-0930)
J&. .J/lli-A ~A ~ ~ ..... §181.17
elevators;
transportation facilities;
-supermarkets.
Taxi and Limousine Commission Rules 2 Drivers may not smoke. 6 Drivers must be courteous. 36 Drivers may not collect separate fares from passengers. Drivers may not ask destination before passenger is seated. 39 Shortest possible route must be taken. 42,43,44 Passengers must be taken anywhere within the city unless they're carrying something that could stain or smell up the cab; or the off-duty light is already on, rear doors are locked, and "returning to garage" is logged; or the passenger is carrying an uncaged animal, with the exception of a Seeing Eye dog. Passengers have the choice of whether the radio should be on, and what station should be played. Drivers may not ask for a fare above or below that shown on the meter for trips within the city. Drivers may not ask for a tip.
Same as above
((lI1.rs. Van Lewis-Smythe, third wife of your chairman of the board, said to me this evening at the corporate hoodingy, and twenty people within earshot, 'We all know what Mr. Parmalee does. Ii e is a very important vice-president of the Hi Lee Lolly Corporation. What we are all 'l-Dondering, Mrs. Parmalee, is ... just what is it that you do? Do you do anything?' I said, 'Mrs. Van Lewis-Smythe, Your Grace, I fix dripping faucets around our house. I prop up sagging bookshelves. I glue broken china. I dean windows, mirrors, floors, walls, pots and pans, and dishes. I jiggle the doodads on running toilets. I repair and refinish furniture. 1cane chairs. I paint and sew. I do electrical work, drive nails, saw boards, and I giw birth to our babies. I wash and iron and make the beds. I prepare the meals. I get the children to school. 1trim the hedge, plant and maintain a vegetable garden and flower garden. I mow the lawn, dean the basement, feed the birds, the cats, a dog, and a chicken, and I chauffeur a very important vice-president of the Hi Lee Lolly Corporation to and from the bar car every blessed day.'"
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"Now what?" Drawing by Woodman; © 1978 the New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
ON THE liGHTER SIDE
CONTROLLING AN OIL SPILL
dockhand bursts into the superintendent's office and shouts: "There's been a spill on board the Texas Clipper." Four thousand gallons of fuel oil have been accidentally spilled, and it is pouring out of the gunwales on both sides of the ship into Galveston Bay. The time is 1:40p.m. Superintendent Pat Kelly scans the cloudy sky. The wind is picking up. The bay is choppy, and the tide is moving out. He knows he must act fast to contain the spill above the drawbridge, a short distance away, before the oil begins to spread out on the water, and endanger the nearby yacht basin, beach and the wildlife refuge. Kelly radios his shoreline assistant. The two quickly determine the strate.gy to fight the spill. He activates two boat crews and a shoreline crew within minutes. By 3 :00 p.m. the team, wrestling with two booms (snakelike mechanical devices designed to direct or stop the flow of oil on top of water), has managed to anchor them above and below the bridge. Workers move in with skimmers and sorbent materials. The skimmers are designed to remove oil from the water, and sorbent materials collect oil that the skimmers cannot get. By 6 :00 p.m., the team has succeeded in its battle against the spill, and the superintendent notifies Galveston's authorities that the cleanup operations are successful. Actually, the spill had been simulated. The oil they battled against was not fuel oil-only cottonseed hull. And the members of the team were students-at the Oil Spill Control Course conducted in Galveston by the Engineering Extension Service of the Texas A&M University System. More than 1,000 people from the United States and 13 other countries have benefited from the 5-day, 40-hour course since its inception in 1974. Though the Galveston Bay spill was only an exercise, the danger of oil spills, as giant tankers crisscross the seas, is real. The consequences in such a situation could be disastrous: pollution and the loss of precious fuel. In fact, on December 15, 1976, the oil tanker Argo Merchant ran aground off the Massachusetts coast, spilling some seven million gallons of oil. Fortunately, wind and currents took the ship's oil out to sea where it could not damage beaches or
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Above: A boatload of Texas A&M Oil Spill Course students maneuver a snakelike boom to contain the spread of cottonseed hull during their simulated oil spill cleanup operation at Galveston Bay. Booms act to divert and contain oil spills and in that way protect shorelines.
fisheries. But that was luck. The next spill could be worse. To meet any such eventuality, the United States has built huge oil recovery vessels,called skimmers. The biggest, most efficientof its kind yet launched, is the Bay Skimmer, built by the JBF Corporation in Massachusetts, one of the two leading manufacturers of skimmers in the United States. The other is Marco Marine Company in Seattle. Unlike the tiny disk skimmer used by the students at Galveston Bay, the massive 100-ton, 20-meter Bay Skimmer, also called 5001, can handle any future Argo Merchant-sire spill, and can operate in two-meter waves. How does the Bay Skimmer work? The vesselopens big double doors at the front of its hull and moves through an oil spill, literally drinking the oil as it goes. Long clawlike booms on each side contain the spill and guide the oil into the opening. There a conveyor belt takes the oil and water down into the hold of the ship below the water line. Once in the tank, the oil
Above: Using a strong stream of water, a student practices the technique of keeping spilled oil away from the shoreline. Top: A cleanup team uses a hose and water pump to move an oil spill to the boom.
rises to the top, and the water sinks and is expelled, leaving the virtually pure oil to be pumped out to nearby barges for use. The other family of skimmers, those built by Marco Marine, use a space-age idea to collect oil-a one-meter-wide plastic conveyor belt known as "Filterbelt," which attracts oil as a magnet attracts iron filings. Filterbelt material was first used in rockets and missiles to hold oil and gasoline in place and keep it from sloshing around. The conveyor in the skimmer zips through the water, pulling oil from as far as 10 meters away and carrying it up, not down, into the ship. There giant rollers squeeze the oil out (the water has already run off, along with any debris). Marco has built 20 small vessels using
Above: The JOO-ton Bay Skimmer is the largest oil recovery ship yet built in the United States. Top: Texas A&M students who used a small disk skimmer, observe how much oil the skimmer took in.
this principle, and the company's president Thomas Barnhart calls them "the fire engines" of spill recovery. Moving at a speed of up to 20 knots, they carry booms to contain the spill and fire pumps to combat flames, if necessary. As these vessels stand guard against any spill, JBF engineers are already working on the 7001, a 49-meter, 750-ton ship that will harvest oil three times as fast as the Bay Skimmer. In fact, others, with seven times the capacity of the Bay Skimmer and capable of operating on the high seas, are on the drawing board. Though the cost is high -a Bay Skimmer costs $l,OOO,OOO-manynations are buying these oil-guzzling vessels for what they can do: keep the world's harbors and oceans clean. 0
In 1959, Bela Julesz replaced WheatA hundred and forty years ago, stone's two drawings with two astonduring one of the most fruitful periods ishing substitutes. Instead of a drawin the history of science, a hint of one ing, what the left eye saw was the great science was treated as if it were a toy. A clue to the solution of a whole area where the picture had been - but now sprinkled with black dots at principal metaphysical mystery was random, as if Julesz had dipped a passed by unappreciated. toothbrush in black ink and run a In my hometown library, the chief delight of the younger patrons was not pencil across the bristles. (He did in fact use a computer to insure the the books but the Brewster stereoscope. Through its lenses, children saw boats randomness of the spacing of the dots.) For the right eye, also, an array of and bridges and camels and mountains, random dots was presented. In neither and the best of all three-dimensional presentation was any pattern visible subjects, grottoes. The stereoscope because, in fact, there was no pattern. transported the child through the interWhen the left- and right-eye images play of stalagmites and stalactites into were combined in a Wheatstone the distant depths of the caves, having mirror stereoscope, however, a recconverted two slightly faded sepia, The inventor of the Polaroid flat, dull photographs into a vivid tangular area was seen projected in the reality. You could hear the dripping camera and other visual-perception foreground and hovering in space, three-dimensionally separated from the water, smell the dampness, fear the aids takes a look at the darkness as you sat with your legs whole background. internal mechanisms we use What Julesz had done to prepare this crossed under you on the chair in the dear old library. Where did this new phenomenon was the equivalent of to perceive the world. reality exist? In your chest, in your using three cards with identically spaced head, in your eyes-or rather did you exist in it? A toy? or the random dots on all three. He left one card untouched to provide, for example, the right-eye view. To make the left-eye view, a most powerful metaphysical clue to emerge in three thousand rectangular area was punched out of the second card; the hole left years? in that card was filled with a rectangular area punched out of the Our Western race, hopelessly immersed in all the philosophic intricacies from Plato to Wittgenstein, was not ready to notice third card in a position slightly displaced laterally from the hole that this presumed toy was a device in which the child and the in the second card. Since, in fact, all of the dots were located by three-dimensional space he rejoiced in seeing comprised one single union of mind and matter, of soul and body, of man In 1838 Sir Charles Wheatstone made these two drawings representing and nature, a single union of what in fact had never been divided a left- and right-eye view of a cubic block. Seen simultaneously in an and did not need reuniting. In this particular pre-Darwinian especially arranged set of mirrors, the blocks assume a third dimension. period, no one could have had the courage to imagine what, in the next two hundred years, would become the scientific basis of an un partitioned reality. In 1838, Sir Charles Wheatstone held a cubic block in front of him and made two drawings, one of the appearance of the cube from the position of his right eye, and a second of the appearance of the cube from the position of his left eye. He arranged a set of mirrors so that he could look back at the drawings, seeing simultaneously with his right eye only the drawing made from the right-eye point of perspective, and with the left eye only the other. There came into existence for him a real three-dimensional cubic block.
VIEWING THE WORLD ...
AND
OURSELVES
instructions to a computer, there was no trace of a cut-out edge that might have revealed monocularly the location of the rectangle. The left-eye card and the right-eye card had on them individually only random dots. Somewhere in the brain, after the images of the cards were formed on the respective retinas, the images were compared and the displacement with respect to the surrounding set of dots in the one rectangle from the identical set of dots in the other was discovered, utilized, and seen as a rectangle cut out from its surround and displaced in space. Seen as a rectangle? Who sees it as a rectangle? Now Julesz suggests a family of mechanisms cellular arrangements, models within the brain that might compare the two random-dot displays and might react symbolically, at least, with a pattern that would be the analogue of a three-dimensional representation. As I contemplated this mechanism and the color mechanism I am about to describe, there grew within me a sense of the general significance of this class of mechanisms. We must ask: Who or what looks at the analogue? Is there another stratum in the cortex, or another whole domain, that looks at these results? If there is, to whom does this stratum report-to still another stratum? Let us save the answer to this question until we have examined another aptitude equally remarkable: the aptitude for characterizingthe surface of objects with a color name largely irrespective of the wavelength composition of the light falling on the object and of the light reaching the retina from the object. If, as has long been thought, the color name characterizing the surface of an object were determined essentially by the wavelength composition of the light reaching the retina from the object, then a simplistic mechanism in which rays of light tie the object point by point to related points on the retina would suffice conceptually for the first step in seeing objects as colored. Such a scheme would be an evolutionary failure because the moment-to-moment and place-to-place variations in the composition of illumination in the world around us would change the moment-to-moment wavelength composition of the radiation reaching the retina from the object-and hence would lead to complete unpredictability of the color names characterizing the surfaces of the objects around us. We do find it to be a fact that the color characterizing a point in the field of view is not determined by the radiation from that point (and conversely, a given composition of light from a point in the field of view is not associated with any particular color of that point). Thus, there is implied a much more interesting association of the retina, the cortex, and the object in the field of view. By mechanisms as yet unknown, the rate of change of energy above some threshold value of the rate of change is determined across the field of view. Most significantly, it is determined independently for three wavebands. For every point in the field of view, the three summations of the changes over the whole field up to that point are compared. These three values together are the color dark brown, or white, or deep red, or gray, or orange, or black. If we assume that there is a monitoring cell responding to the summation, is there some other cortical stratum surveying all of the monitor cells, and if there is, is there still another stratum
A typical random-dot stereogram devised by Bela Julesz in 1959. Neither of the two arrays of dots shows a pattern by itself When they are stereoscopically fused, a rectangular area is seen hovering in space, cut out and three-dimensionally separated from the whole background.
surveying the surveyor? It seems to me that these questions suggest that there is a bit of absurdity in carrying on the succession of observational cells or loci for the spatial mechanism as well as for the color mechanism. What is implied are arrangements of processes so remarkable, intricate, elegant, quick-changing, and utterly precise that it would be increasingly absurd to monitor these mechanisms with a simplistic overriding mechanism. When the color mechanism has within it the responses that characterize an external area with the color name red, there is no place, no cell that can make better use of the characterizing conclusion than the mechanism that arrived at it in the first place. For many years, the scientific community has admired the investigations by Drs. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel of the responses along the neural pathways between sensing organs and the cortex. A particularly dramatic and significant experiment allows the audience to hear as clicks the response of a cell that is monitoring an area of the retina where there is an edge in the image on the retina. This focused result from a hard-won experimental program does not suggest ofThand that an array of analogous results from similar discoveries would constitute by themselves a matrix of phenomena that we could regard as being in itself, ourselves. The magnificent mechanisms in their entirety that we use for space, the other magnificent mechanisms we use for color, and the others we use for sound are at this date beyond our technological competence to imitate; so that if it were to turn out that all we are is this group of magnificent mechanisms, that would be nothing of which to be ashamed. These processes then would be what we are. I became impressed with the concept that the animal evolved in what we might call a "polar partnership" with the world around him. What we call chaos in the world around us can be regarded also as including most possible kinds of order, some of which are transient on a solar-year basis, some of which persist for eons on a solar-year basis. Any animal that is going to evolve in the universe must be related genetically to a time scale of permanency; that is, the animal must evolve an inner order related to an outer order, one of the outer orders in chaos, and if he is to do that then the outer order must persist long enough for a strain of the animal to evolve. The second concept that forced itself upon us is that when we talk about an inner order we must mean not a static cellular
order but a dynamic program in which all of the evolved internal cellular orders are a framework for a dynamic continuum of waves and discharges and ionic shifts, all curiously chaotic when seen detachedly and uninformedly, all hurrying to their special purposes for each kind of significant structured result, such as the bringing into being of a spatial continuum with great accuracy, or the bringing into being of a sense of color with great accuracy. The total concept becomes quite an exciting one: Not only is there a unity between matter and being, internally, but the end product of the process is, so to speak, the process itself. If, in addition, we feel that all of this has evolved in intimacy with the kinds of order that exist over extended periods of chaos in what we call the outside world, then we can see that there really is no outside world and no inside world. There is just one world. It is, perhaps, a little bit like moss growing on a rock, clinging to it, the tendrils penetrating the crevices in the rock and the cavities of the rock, where the rock/moss combination is the object and not the rock or the moss separately. Rather than rock/moss, consider the concept of a tree. Does the tree exist without the observer? Long before we get to an obscure metaphysical response, we must notice that in many ways the tree certainly does not exist in the physical sense without the observer. The tree does not exist for radio waves of a certain wavelength, nor does it exist for neutrinos. The tree exists as part and parcel of the interaction between that part of the cosmos and our part of the cosmos, namely the "We" that has evolved over many centuries to be a partner with the tree. Similarly, we ask if a color exists on the objects around us without our being there to see it. The answer is analogous to that for the tree, but it is even more dramatic, as we discerned in the earlier part of this discussion. If, for example, we were to take a projection photometer, a telescopic photometer, and scan the world around us line by line, trying to find objects and trying to find the color of the objects in the world outside-here we are thinking of color in the Newtonian way of expecting to find shortwave light from blue objects and longwave light from red objects-we would be impressed to find that we can hardly discover the objects at all, let alone describe their color in terms of distribution of wavelength. The trace of the response of the meter after such an experiment would look like peaks and valleys with a confused interlocking of them as a function of wavelength ; so it is correct to say that color does not exist in terms of being defined by wavelength-concentration distribution. On the other hand, since we do have the reliable experience that we call color, we must now ask the question "With what outer order did the inner-order evolution relate itself?" I am happy to report that we have learned what outer order ouf¡ evolving systems did discover and evolve with as a partner. As we traverse the field of view with our photometer it traces
Edwin H. Land, a world-renowned research scientist and inventor, is the founder, chairman and research director of the Polaroid Co rporat ion. As an inventor, he has been ranked with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. His work in syntheticpolarizers led to the development of glarefree automotive headlights, polarizing sunglasses and lens filters, color television and threedimensional color movies. He pioneered instantaneous photography with the Polaroid Land camera.
a line for its response. This trace may move up and down and across in quite an unpredictable way, free from relationship with the color we see. We note, on careful examination, that we don't see most of the slow, gradual changes shown in the photometer's trace. However, each time the photometer crosses what we see as the edge of an object, the trace of the photometer shows an abrupt change in the amount of light. It then occurs to us as we look at the whole map of the field of view that a system evolved not with a relationship to the amount of energy, but rather, with a relationship to sudden changes in energy, marked changes such as edges. Although the abrupt changes in energy are in the same place for each of three wavebands, they usually have different heights for each of the three wavebands. Since the system did not evolve with a relationship to the amount of energy, it did not evolve with a relationship to the amount of energy on any waveband. It evolved with a relationship to three independent sets of sudden changes or edges. This system can find permanences. It can find the outer order for the polar partnership. . Ordinarily when we talk about the human as the advanced product of evolution and the mind as being the most advanced product of evolution, there is an implication that we are advanced out of and away from the structure of the exterior world in which we have evolved, as if a separate product had been packaged, wrapped up, and delivered from a production line. The view I am presenting proposes a mechanism more and more interlocked with the totality of the exterior. This mechanism has no separate existence at all, being in a thousand ways united with and continuously interacting with the whole exterior domain. In fact, there is no exterior red object with a tremendous mind linked to it by only a ray of light. The red object is a composite product of matter and a mechanism evolved in permanent association with a most eleborate interlock-so that there is no tremor in what we call the "outside world" that is not locked by a thousand chains and gossamers to inner structures that vibrate and move with it and are part of it. The reason for the painfulness of all philosophy is that in the past, in its necessary ignorance of the unbelievable domains of partnership that have evolved in the relationship between ourselves and the world around us, it dealt with what would indeed have been tragic separation and isolation. What meaning is mind-by-itself-without-the-world? That is tragic. Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist. It is not error in grand policies that endangers our planet, but imprisonment in our own minds, which, if set free, would guide us individually first of all and collectively after all. The first step in freeing the mind of its own chains is to turn it toward reverence, insight, and appreciation of itself. It is now becoming apparent that insight into its nature can be pursued with all the modern techniques for thoughtfulness that the mind has used for investigations away from itself. I believe we will find in the processes within it a sacred evolutionary heritage, characterized by a miraculous combination of incessant action and serene and dignified form. It is as if all science has been schooling itself to acquire the new techniques for speculation and experiment appropriate for using the mind on the mind. In the gradual acceptance of the hypothesis that the processes involved in exercising the polar partnership are themselves reality, I find it helpful to think of a symphony in which the opening theme asks a question and the closing theme states that the question is itself
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CHILDREN SHOULD o W Recent research in America has revealed a surprising link between art and learning. Students in schools with strong art programs have shown remarkable improvement in the three R's-reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Important new evidence shows not only that the arts are beneficial in themselves but that their introduction into a school's curriculum causes marked improvement in math, reading, science, and other subjects that educators pronounce essential. Indeed, some researchers are now saying that the absence of arts programs can retard brain development in children. While such claims may be overstated, it nonetheless seems clear that the arts have far more than an "enrichment" role to play in the schools. They appear to stimulate a child's natural curiosity andperhaps literally-to expand the capacity of his brain. The arts even help children discover their own worth and identity and thereby point the way to future happiness. The enthusiasm that students in arts-centered schools display toward education is enough to impress all but the most jaded adults. In the United States, Connecticut's Mead School offers a striking example. Reprinted
by permission
Copyright
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from
1977 Saturday
Saturday Review.
Review
Magazine
Corporation.
At ,Mead, a private institution that has placed strong emphasis on the arts, nursery schoolers through sixth graders spend as much as half of their time in "regular" art classes and a good deal of the other half using art to learn mathematics, science, and a variety of other subjects. "Art gets the largest space here," says Mead's director, Elaine de Beauport, "because only art makes available such a wide variety of materials that a kid can work with instantly. It's not that he can work 'creatively' with them, but that he can use his mind in concert with his hands and eyes. No other subject, or medium, can offer this." As Ms. de Beauport spoke, childishly purposeful activity swirled throughout Mead's airy, colorfully decorated rooms. Several four-year-olds painted at easels deliberately placed side by side, so they could discuss each other's pictures; a couple of other children painted on opposite sides of a piece of standing plate glass, creating t\1e "same" picture from opposite vantage points. Six- and sevenyear-olds dipped into bins full of
marvelous little shapes in order to construct objects and designs. There was no one to say, "Now, children, we'll draw a sunflower" ; these children made what they wanted, the way they wanted it, and most of the results were handsome as well as imaginative. "Children inhabit two big worlds of learning-symbolic [as in 1 + 1 = 2] and experiential," Ms. de Beauport said. "Symbolic is what they get in traditional education. But experiential learning is a requirement for symbolic achievement. Given the proper tools with which to work, a child will naturally show an aptitude for order and sequence, which are so much a part oflearning math and science." She picked up a small sculpture of metal rings stacked in perfect pyramids. "No teacher taught that boy to do this. No teacher had to." Behavioral scientist Jean Houston, director of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, criticizes the way the arts have been "encapsulated" in the typical school curriculum and declares, "A person needs to think in terms of images as well as words. He needs whole-body thinking-to evoke more of his entire mind-body system." How do the arts help children learn? The answer is nof clear, but there are some guideposts. It is known that before the age of about six the brain increases in "gray matter," that is, in cells or neurons. After that, throughout life, the neurons make countless interconnections, associations based on such sensory perceptions as sight, touch, and sound. By an as yet undiscovered process, these associations are stored in the brain as learning. They are critical to our ability to recall events from our past; the novelist Proust used the taste of tea-soaked cake as a means of evoking a whole fragment of his past. If these connections and associations are not made at an early age, it is probable that the brain's neurons suffer something analogous to muscular atrophy, and the development of the entire organ is, to that extent, stunted. The differentiation of the brain into left and right hemispheres certainly plays a role in arts-centered learning. According to the widely accepted theory, the left hemisphere is the seat of analysis and sequential learning, including verbal and mathematical skills, while the right is superior in visual-spatial abilities. Says Robert Masters, Jean Houston's husband and coresearcher: "If the current thinking is correct that the arts come out of the right, or visual, side, you are obviously damaging the brain if you don't cultivate that side as well as the analytic side." Doctors Houston and Masters shy
away from making specific claims about the arts stimulating physical growth of the brain. But they believe firmly in the arts' far-reaching effects on bodily and intellectual development. The child without access to a stimulating arts program, Dr. Houston says, "is being systematically cut off from most of the ways in which he can perceive the world. His brain is being systematically damaged. In many ways he is being deeducated. " A handful of institutions now prepare teachers of the arts for a broad new role that may someday be open to them. Syracuse University's School of Art has a department of synaesthetic education that believes, like Plato, that the arts as well as the senses are interrelated and should be taught with no barriers between them. The Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado, offers a teacher retraining course whose theme is that "'artistic'
The child without access to a stimulating arts program is being gradually cut off from most of the ways in which he can perceive the world. His brain is being damaged. is a quality of mind available to the ordinary person and applicable to every aspect of daily life." A sizable number of public schools have embarked on innovative and promising programs. The Federally financed Project IMPACT (Interdisciplinary Model Program in the Arts for Children and Teachers) began in 1970 at five widely scattered schools and survived for a few years through local funding. In Eugene, Oregon, one of the IMPACT cities, the project grew into an ongoing "alternative" Magnet Arts school where, in the words of the principal, the arts "are used as a discipline in themselves but mostly as a vehicle to teach other disciplines." To aid in the development of reading and writing skills, Magnet Arts students write and perform their own plays; they also illustrate the texts, bringing in another artistic dimension. A good deal of the math instruction is done through the medium of dance, with dancers making themselves smaller and larger to dramatize the meaning of "greater than" and "less than." Science instruction utilizes the many similarities between scientific and musical principles; the students even make their own instruments. Each Magnet Arts teacher must special-
ize in an art, besides being a regular classroom instructor. Even so, the school is not more expensive to operate. Students spend less than half as much time on the three R's as do their counterparts in Eugene's traditional schools. Yet last year, competing with the 29 other schools in its district, Magnet Arts' sixth grade tied for first place in reading and for fifth place in math. At the Mead School the amount of arts and arts-related work varies considerably from student to student. "For some, an hour a week of actual artwork may be more than enough," says Ms. de Beauport. "For others, especially the younger children, a lot more is advisable. The first three years should be heavily experiential; the last three, heavily symbolic. That way, the younger child can exercise all of his sensory functions-physical, conceptual, aesthetic-as well as integrate himself with his outside environment. He can't experience A, B, C, but he can see a yellow flower and draw it, or imagine one and draw it, thereby taking what's inside him and expressing it." The kind of educational enhancement Mead provides can have both salutary and unhappy effects. The unhappy is pointed up by the case of a learningdisabled boy with no sequential ability who did well at Mead (learning-disabled children often thrive on arts-centered therapy). In intermediate school, however, he is having great difficulty. Not only can't he cope with sequentially organized subjects, he received a D in art-for failing to get his project in on time. Happily, the case of Chris Grant is more typical of Mead students. In the early grades of a public elementary school, her mother says, "Chris got passed along although she wasn't reading and didn't know her math concepts." Enrolled at Mead in the fourth grade, she did almost nothing but artwork for the first year; that was just as well, because she wasn't interested in much else. Suddenly, she developed a passion for math, and her math grades improved rapidly. Her other grades began improving also. At the end of sixth grade, she was testing at the seventh and eighth grade levels in all subjects. Now a secondary school senior, she gets all A's and B's and is headed toward a career in art. "I used to hate both reading and math," Chris Grant recalled recently. "Maybe that's because in the public school, they said, 'Learn it.' Mead made learning fun. In fact, I didn't know I was learning." 0 About the Author: Roger M. Williams is a freelance writer whose articles often appear in Fortune, New Republic and Saturday Review.
TEACHING CHILDREN TO TEPOETRY The children cheer when poetry teacher Kenneth Koch enters the classroom. There is more excitement when he announces the subject for poetry they are to write that day. He sets a direction; dipping into their imaginations, the youngsters create remarkable, delightful poems. In the spring of 1968, when Kenneth Koch firstcame to Public School 61 on New York's Lower East side and faced a mixed class of 11- and 12-year-olds, he had only a vague idea of what he wanted the children to write. And he had perhaps not the slightest notion that in a few years his method would be widely used by schoolteachers all over the United States. Sponsored first by the Academy of American Poets and then by the Teachers' and Writers' Collaborative, Koch started by taking two or three 40-minute classes a week. (He increased the frequency of his visits later after he found¡ the children excitedly cheering his entry into class.) He came in the capacity of a guest teacher, but unlike other special teachers, he asked the regular class teacher to stay in the room while he was there: He wanted her help and wanted to teach her as well as the children. A resident of New York, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, and a poet in his own right, Koch had taught writing classes for a number of years at Columbia to people who
wanted to be writers, who had read widely, and were driven by all the usual forces writers are propelled by: "I knew how to talk to them, how to inspire them, how to criticize their work-what to say to an eight-year-old with no commitment to literature." His adult writing classes had relied on assignment of themes, forms and techniques. How to get across to the uninitiated, ideas they could comprehend and respond to eagerly? The word assignment is like the dreaded homework; poetry under such a tag, becomes a remote and difficult exercise. Koch's interest in the subject was inspired by Emily Dennis' method of teaching art to children at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That sort of breakthrough is what he wanted in poetry. Two positive factors urged him on. One was how playful and inventive children's talk was. They said true things in new and astonishing ways. Another was their delight in making thingsdrawings, collages, objects from natural materials such as shells, timber, tin, plastic. If he could find a way of getting the children excited about poetry and of using
their joyful creative energy III words, he would be launched. Since working in a group is a good way of overcoming inhibitions, the first exercise was a class collaboration. Everyone was to write a line on a sheet of paper and turn it in; names were not to be mentioned so no one had to worry about failing to write a good poem. The poem had rules like a game with anticipatory and resulting pleasures. It was suggested that there should be a color in every line. To give the poem some unity, it was collectively decided that each line contain, in addition, a comic strip character, a city or country and each line should begin with the words "I wish." Children, like adults, cannot start from a blank; once they have a subject they like, they have no problem. The lines were collected, shuffled and read out aloud as one poem: [ wish J was Dick Tracy in a black suit in England. [ wish that J were Veronica in South America. [ wish that [ could see the blue sky ....
The children were waving, blushing, bouncing with excitement as they heard their lines read as a poem. The "I wish" idea was later tried on other students who were told their wishes could be as wild and crazy as they liked. Explaining this, Koch says: "The trouble with a child's not being 'crazy' is that he will instead be conventional-and a conventional 'red as a rose' image is less effective than, say, 'as orange as a rose.' Creating something novel gives a child more pleasure than repeating words that he has already heard before." Besides making the child take wild chances, this also helps him trust his own perceptions, which are fresh and unconditioned by adult reasoning. Comparisons people are aware of but too timid to say aloud because they seem far-fetched, are uttered boastfully and gleefully by children. Referring to a line, "A cat is as striped as an airplane take off," that had pleased but intrigued him, Koch asked the fifth-grade girl who had written it, to explain. "Oh you know," she said, "when the plane is on the ground and starts going faster and faster over those white lines on the runway, it looks like my cat." Like wishes, which are a customary part of all poetry, Koch looked for other ideas like "Comparisons," "Noises," "Colors," which would come naturally to children and allow them to be as free and extravagant as they liked. But suggesting ideas and framing rules was not always enough to get the children actually writing, he found. They needed more direct cues. Koch says he would ask his fourth-graders to look at the sky (overcast) and say what thing in the classroom it most resembled-someone's dress, the geography book, the chalk-smeared blackboard. For the noise poem, he asked them to shut their eyes, then describe the sound they heard-the crumpling of paper, the dropping of a bunch of keys, tapping with a ruler. Such question-games made for an excited atmosphere. The children were quick to guess, and were swept into associating objects and words, sounds and their identities: A eat's paw touching grass sounds like a cloudfloat ing. A person's whisper is like a soft pillow. Black ink is dark as midnight. -Lisa Jill Braun, fourth grade
"Swan of bees" was a spelling mistake a third-grader made trying to say "swarm of bees." Believing that the error had created an arresting image, Koch pursued the idea, and got a marvelous array of "accidental" compounds from the kids:
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I once dreamed That I lived on A planet full of peace One dare not say A word about The violence there had been The flowers bloomed Yet never wilted The people they were gay But that was a dream No wars or meanness, But that was a dream.
Kenneth Koch listens intently as a student from the fifth-grade class of a New York school reads out her poem.
A blackboard of moons A window of kisses A girl made of kittens A baby of mittens A face of roses A kiss of babies A lady of decks A sky made of sugar A skeleton of discoveries.... The effort of finding rhyme stops the free flow of associations and, worse, poetry gives way to singsong. So the use of rhyme was discouraged. Instead, other formal devicesrepetition, the same starting word or phrase, a series of comparisons-which are easier and more inspiring were used. The "I wish" idea not only unified their lines but gave them a form with which they could relax after every line and start up fresh again. Other rules for prospective teachers to keep in mind are listed by Koch: • Don't bother about spelling, punctuation or neatness . • Avoid high-sounding jargon. Speak the language of the child. The "Wish" poem
would not have been successful if the children had to start every line with "I desire." .Don't single out the best or worst-praise the work with the intent of making others try similar things. • Don't correct the poem to make it meet your own standards. The child's poem should be all his own. Comment individually over the shoulder: "That's not exactly what I meant. Turn it over. Let's start again." • Never use the poetry to analyze the child's personal problems. The poems in Koch's book Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1970), a remarkable collection of children's poems, in which he also records his experiments in teaching children to write poetry, are divided into 20 sections, each corresponding to one of the poetry ideas, and each followed by a brief commentary and explanation. From section to section one can see the development of the children's perceptions. The children weren't forgetting things from poem to poem-the "Dream" poems contained wishes, comparisons, noises all together. The "Metaphor" poem is a varia-
tion of the comparison poem; "Being an Animal or Thing" brings the identification home to one of the fundamental poetic talents that all children have-empathy. An associate of Koch's brought a live mouse and had each child hold it in his hand and then write about how it would feel to be a mouse. Many other ideas were tried out. Since the students had listened to symphony music in the school, an exercise with the help of music was done. Rock, jazz, African drums, as well as a recording of bird calls, trains, the ocean and other sounds of nature and civilization were experimented with. Similarly poems can be written on site-on visits to the zoo, museum, park, the bank of a river, a traffic island-any place interesting and stimulating. Two poetry ideas evoked some of the most enthusiastic reactions: one was, "I Used To/But Now." Comparing adult poems on this theme, which are usually sad and concerned with loss of love, beauty, youth, Koch found children's poems about the past sometimes sad too but most had a triumphant note: I used to have diapers But now I have underwear I used to be a boy But now I am a girl I used to have a teacher of meanness But now I have a teacher of roses When I was a baby my mother and father loved me But now love and hate me sometimes I used to have a nice brother But now he punches me in the shoulder I used to like eggs But now the color of the yolk makes me sick I used to hate a person whose name I don't want to mention But now I still hate her.
Making a whole poem in which nothing was true and calling the poem "Lies" rather than "Make-Believe" or "Fantasies" brought the idea alive to children. The children took the word "lie" in the right spirit-they had to make things up, not practice dishonesty in their daily lives. Sitting in a group, the children were excited by each other's lies, and tried to top each other with statements stranger and more fantastic than the ones they'd heard: I fly to school at 12 :00 midnight I run to lunch at 9 :00 I go underground to go home at 11 :00 My name is Clownaround James Jumping-
bean Diego Spinaround Jimmy and Flipflop Tom My head was born in Saturn my arms were born in the moon my legs in Pluto and the rest of me was born on the earth My friend the bee zoomed me home. -Eduardo
Diaz, fifth grade
On his first visit to a primary class of 40 students from six to eight years old, Koch found that the best way to start was to read to them the poems written by the fourthgraders: "They hadn't seen a 'poetry teacher' before. When I started to read the fourthgrade 'Wish' poems, it was as though they couldn't believe what was happening. Their secret thoughts and dreams, cast into verse, and being read to them in school by a smiling man!" I wish I could leap high into the air and land softly on my toes I wish I had a kitten to do my homework And a chimpanzee to do my housework.
The commotion this caused was tremendous. They were wild with excitement and raring to write their own one-liners. Once this got started, Koch was reading poems from all grades to all other grades. It was like a homespun literary tradition that would influence younger students to shape their own emotional experiences. What was going on was not copying-every artist tends to appropriate to some extent that part of someone else's work which inspires him-but transmutations of images, ideas, lines, changed by the personality of the child to blossom in new places. A free and inspiring classroom atmo.sphere, Koch insists, is essential to make the poetry ideas work. The teacher has to be a continual catalyst, to explain, to admire, to furnish additional ideas, more as a fellow worker than as a boss. One of the discoveries Koch made was that the children made a good deal of noise, walked around the room sometimes, teased others. This made for an exhilarating and mildly competitive atmosphere. It disproved the notion that poetry is necessarily written in quiet and isolation. "It is not our mysterious charm," Koch concludes, "for which Ron Padgett and I are wildly applauded when we go into the fifth-grade class and for which shrieks of joy have greeted us in other classrooms too. It is the subject we bring, and along with that, our enthusiasm for what the students do with it." It may be legitimate to wonder whether these children would grow up to be "poets." I am not aware of any follow-up study that
has' recorded the creative development of these students. I think Koch would disclaim any such intention of grooming budding talent for a literary vocation. The educational and psychological advantages of a creative activity which children enjoy are clear. It makes them happy, capable, and responsive. When dance is used as a form of personal expression, for other than artistic reasons, one does not expect the trainee to perform as a professional. What matters, according to Koch, is that every one of the children he taught had the capacity to write poetry well enough to enjoy it himself and give pleasure to others, whether it was entire poems or surprising images, lines or combinations of words. The same is true of adult talent. Adults' ability to use their talent is in most cases restricted by their not knowing about poetry or by their "knowing" about it in the wrong way as something obligatorily rhyming and abstract and grandiose and far from anything they could ever attempt successfully.
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From reading and appreciating their own work and that of their friends, the logical second step was to introduce the children to the great poetry of the past and the present. The writing and reading of poetry had already been treated as one subject, as Koch had frequently used examples from established poets to give the children an idea of how a particular subject could be handled. His new teaching aim was to surround the children with other fine poems which would create new experiences for them and help them in their own writing. This is the subject of Koch's second book Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (New York, Random House, 1973) subtitled, Teaching Great Poetry to Children. Along with a detailed account of how Koch taught particular poems by Donne, Herrick, Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, Stevens, Rilke, Ashbery and many other poets, the book includes a large selection of poems the children wrote after reading these poets. In addition, there is an anthology of 50 more poems to teach children with hints about how to teach each one. Poetry texts for children are invariably "sweet" and condescending toward their emotions and intelligence. They project a trouble-free, singsong view of life and aim at total understandability, which stunts children's poetic education by giving them nothing to grasp that they do not already know. It is the constant "childlikeness" ". of theme and treatment that sometimes ' makes boys dislike poetry as something
If I were the snow I would snow every single Christmas ... I would not be just white I'd be red, blue and green. I'd be yellow dots, orange dots black ones too.
silly and sissified. Koch chose poems on the basis of some element in them that would appeal to the children and connect it with their own feelings: the fantasy element in Blake's "The Tyger," for instance, or multiple ways of looking at the same object in Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," or the simplicity and charm of ordinary things in William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say." Given below are variations the sixth-grade children wrote on the last one. They were as playful and wicked as the original poem by Williams.
Please for give me for eating your dog biscuit.
THIS IS JUST TO SAY That the dog tore your shoes in to little pieces and I let him do it. It was quite amusing.
I have eaten The flowers That were On your head Which you Were probably Saving for A funeral. Please forgive Me. I liked to say You looked great In a coffin fll bury you For what I did Please forgive me D.H. Lawrence's "The White Horse," quoted to illustrate the conception of a world of secrecy, silence and mystery, evoked a sensitive response from Amy Levy, a sixth-grader. I give below both poems:
THE WHITE HORSE The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on and the horse looks at him in silence. They are so silent they are in another world.
MY OWN LITTLE WORLD We go to the beach I look at the sea My mother thinks I stare My father thinks I want to go in the water. But I have my own little world. I stare, I see myself I walk along the beach Not another soul But me. I walk to a white horse Snowy is her name I get on I hold tight to her manes I nudge her slightly She walks The sun is setting The sea is quiet The sand is moist The air is tender The sky is all the colors of the rainbows I kick her harder My hair blows in the wind On to the destiny, of nothing It seems endless I think perhaps it is My own little world. Problems of obscurity, allusiveness, textural and thematic difficulties, the poem's literariness and often its length were encountered in several poems, but dealt with on a level as tangible and concrete as the children's understanding permitted. "Symmetry" was a word none of the children knew but by making them touch their shoulders, elbows, ears and knees, they could feel the strangeness of the tiger's symmetry too. The details didn't matter; Koch's purpose was not to make the children admire Blake and his achievement but that "each child be able to find a tyger of his own."
has recently ventured to teach poetry writing in nursing homes, prisons, homes for the handicapped and other such institutions. In a long article in The New York Review (January 20, 1977) he has described in detail a series of sessions he conducted at the American Nursing Home in New York with 25 students between the ages of 70 and 90. Most of them were ill, depressed and sometimes in pain; relatively uneducated, they had speech and memory problems and none had written before. Starting with more or less the same assumptions and the same simple examples and exercises he had used with children, Koch got the aged inmates involved and interested and writing things they had never imagined they would be able to say. Koch is firm in believing that although the activity helped the inmates in adjusting to life in the nursing home a little better, he would not consider his teaching as therapy. But as art and accomplishment, it can make people fully alive. I will end this article with a poem by William Ross, whose belated poetic career was the most dramatic product of Koch's 16-week session at the nursing home:
Beloved, I have to adore the earth: The wind must have had your voice once. It echoes and sings like you. The soil must have tasted you once. It is laden with your scent. The trees honor you in gold and blush when you pass. I know why the North Country isJrozen. It has been trying to preserve your memory. I know why the desert burns with fever. .It wept too long without you. On hands and knees the ocean begs up the beach. Andfalls at your feet. I have to adore the mirror of the earth. You have taught her well how to be beautiful. About the Author: Saleem Peeradina is a teacher at Sophia College, Bombay. His poetry has appeared in periodicals in India and abroad, and he is represented in Young Poets of India-An Anthology of Indo-English Poetry. Among his works are Contemporary Indian Poetry in English and Multifold.
0
This condition, called "de facto full-scope safeguards," in fact exists today in all but five nonweapons states that have received (or might receive) U.S. nuclear materials: India, Egypt, Argentina, Israel and South Africa. *
area. The Suppliers Group had already become such a source of friction. Many consumer countries saw it as a "secret cartel" that was at odds with the IAEA system. In fact, while the early meetings of the Group were secret, its purpose was quite the opposite of a cartel. Rather than discussing ways to raise prices, the members were seeking guidelines to prevent commercial competition from undermining safeguards obligations. In order to make their purposes clear and to underline their support for the IAEA, the supplier countries have now published their presently agreed Guidelines by each submitting them to the IAEA, in January 1978. (The Guidelines set forth safeguards conditions, urge restraint on sensitive transfers, and establish consultation procedures in case of safeguards violations.) The Group left the possibility of further refinements of the Guidelines as well as possible expansion of membership for future meetings. Publication of the Guidelines helped to correct misperceptions of the Suppliers Group and showed that the Group's activities will be supportive of the IAEA safeguard system. London did not become an institutional antipode to Vienna.
The second aspect of the strategy is restraints on transfers of weapons-usable materials and sensitive facilities, particularly the enrichment and reprocessing plants that can give countries direct access to weapons-usable material. First, more specific controls were placed on U.S. exports of highly enriched uranium. Many research reactors fueled with weapons-usable highly enriched uranium can be converted to use nonweapons grade uranium. To encourage such conversion and minimize flows of weaponsusable material, the Administration requested justification for use of highly enriched material and set limits on the amounts that could be transported or accumulated in one place. Exports of such material were made subject to Presidential approval. Exports were not prohibited (though this was misunderstood by some at first), but more stringent transfer conditions were established. Another important choice in the restraint dimension concerned the role of the Nuclear The third component of our international Suppliers Group. This group had made connonproliferation strategy is the creation of siderable progress in moving toward a set of guidelines for exports, including restraints on nonproliferation incentives. If nations are to forego their own enrichment and reprocessing sensitive transfers. In December 1976, France facilities, they must have an adequate, timely, announced that it would henceforth not export reliable, and economic supply of nonsensitive reprocessing plants, and Germany's similar announcement in June 1977meant that, leaving nuclear fuels, and they must be confident that aside the earlier arrangements with Pakistan and there will be adequate disposition of the spent Brazil. there was general supplier agreement fuel from their reactors. To be successful, a program of assured fuel about the undesirability of further transfers of supply must assure access to adequate supplies reprocessing plants. of natural uranium and enrichment services At the same time, the Suppliers Group at reasonable prices. In this connection, the cannot alone solve the proliferation problem President announced on April 7, 1977, that the over the long term. At some point, countries United States would increase production cawill be able to design their own sensitive plants. Perhaps they will be less efficient. more costly, pacity for enriched uranium. By 1988, a fourth U.S. enrichment facility will be in production and take a longer time. but eventually they could at Portsmouth, Ohio, to help assure that there be built. A position of trying to hold back other will be no U.S. or global shortage of lowcountries without giving them anything in enriched uranium fuel. return would, over time, erode. In the meantime, In addition, on April 27, 1977, the President it would create considerable resentment of the sent a legislative message to the Congress that kind that could make countries want to speed supported more stringent export criteria, while up their indigenous efforts in the very direction carefully avoiding provisions that might lead that was contrary to general nonproliferation interests. Thus restraint can only be an interim to a broad export moratorium. One of the aims of the policy on exports is to make the export policy until the world develops technologies and institutions that make the sensitive parts . criteria clear and U.S. fuel supply predictable. Another essential feature of such a program of the fuel cycle as safe as the reactors that are is the development of an international institucurrently sold. In addition, we wished to avoid bitter divi- tional arrangement to ensure vulnerable counsions along rich-poor, North-South or supplier- tries against interruptions in bilateral supplies. Internationally controlled stockpiles of lowconsumer lines that would interfere with enriched uranium could be available for release development of broader consensus in the nuclear under carefully defined conditions to countries 'In addition, the Vandellosreactor in Spain is not. in compliance with their nonproliferation underunderIAEA safeguards,but isjointly operated with takings. In October 1977, President Carter France,whichcontrolsthe plutoniumproduced. announced U.S. willingness to contribute to
such a fuel bank and to join with others to study its establishment. The problems related to the need to ensure adequate spent fuel and nuclear waste storage are equally urgent. The Department of Energy is presently studying a wide range of solutions. In October 1977, it announced our willingness to make a limited amount of storage capacity available for spent fuel from other nations. We are also studying with other countries the development of international centers for the storage of spent fuel. (Both fuel assurances and spent fuel storage are subjects of intensive study in the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation, discussed below.) Finally, in the area of energy planning, the Administration established a program to provide assistance to developing countries in assessing their energy needs. Many developing countries lack the planning basis for judging the relative roles of nuclear and non-nuclear energy. Consequently, investments are sometimes ill-advised and premature. By offering assistance in energy planning, the United States can help them lay a more appropriate groundwork for energy investments.
The first three elements would not be sufficient unless it were possible to hold out the prospect of moving in the future toward a somewhat more equitable and more satisfactory system. That fourth part of the strategy-building consensus on the shape of the nuclear fuel cycle-is one of the purposes of the International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Evaluation (INFCE). The President called for such a project in his April 7 statement and after careful negotiations it was set up and held its opening conference in Washington in October 1977. The idea behind INFCE is to have both the supplier countries and the consumer countries come together to study the technical and institutional problems of organizing the nuclear fuel cycle in ways which provide energy without providing weaponry. The 40 countries that assembled in Washington to establish INFCE included consumers and suppliers, rich and poor, East and West, and 11 countries that had not signed the NPT. The purpose is to evaluate scientifically various aspects of the fuel cycle, and lay an agreed factual basis upon which a consensus might be built. Participation in the program does not commit a country to its future course of action. There will be no votes in INFCE. A Technical Coordinating Committee, which meets in Vienna with the assistance of the IAEA, oversees eight Working Groups, each of which is concerned with an important element in the effort to strike a balance between the benefits of nuclear energy and its proliferation risks. Over the next two years, INFCE will explore a variety of ways to make the nuclear fuel cycle safer than is currently believed possible in the transnational nuclear fraternity. INFCE is not
The weight of a country's voice in international gatherings-speaking on the Law of the Sea, resource transfer or any other issuedoes not depend on whether it possesses a nuclear weapon. a quest for a single solution, but as the following description of the Working Groups indicates, INFCE can provide better international understanding of the elements from which solutions can be composed-time, technology and institutions. The first two groups deal with natural resources and enrichment capacity. If the facts support the Administration's view that uranium and thorium resources are more plentiful than is commonly believed, there will be less time pressure to move to next-generation fuel cycles before we have solved their proliferation risks. At the same time, it is not enough merely to prove the existence of sufficient uranium, thorium and enrichment. One must also establish an international system of assured fuel supply. That is why the third group specificallyaddresses institutional ways to assure supplies for resource-poor countries. The fourth group will examine the economic and proliferation implications attendant on various reprocessing alternatives. The United States is especially interested in reprocessing techniques that would avoid producing pure plutonium. At the same time, however, the groups will also explore the feasibility of technical and international institutional means of increasing the safeguardability of conventional fuel reprocessing methods. Similarly, the fifth group, which will {leal with breeder reactor systems, will focus on whether there may be breeder systems that are economical and at the same time minimize the presence of weaponsusable material. The sixth and seventh groups will examine problems associated with spent-fuel and waste disposal. Clearly, a growing nuclear economy requires responsible storage and disposal programs. Some argue that reprocessing alleviates the waste management problem by removing plutonium before disposal. However,.reprocessing and subsequent fuel fabrication themselves produce wastes that must be disposed of. Scientific evidence will be brought to bear on the conflicting claims that reprocessing increases or reduces the environmental risks involved in nuclear waste management. The development of international institutions in this area may create a precedent for international cooperation in other aspects of the fuel cycle. The eighth group will look at advanced reactor and fuel cycle concepts including ways to improve the efficiency of uranium utilization in current types of reactors. There is credible
evidence that it may be possible to more than double the utilization rate through various techniques. This effectively would double the existing uranium resource base, resulting in a longer lifetime of the current fuel cycle, yielding more time to design proliferation-resistant future fuel cycles. What the United States hopes INFCE will do is to lay the basis for a longer term consensus. We do not expect the INFCE will produce one agreed document at the end. It is quite unlikely that everybody is going to agree over that short a period. However, many of the disputed technical problems and possibilities will be clarified. We do not expect to find a simple technical fix. But we hope to find combinations of time, technology and institutions that can produce a more safeguardable fuel cycle. Then it will be the task of diplomacy to get wide agreement to adopt such safer technologies.
with the President on the Clinch River breeder reactor, the President exercised his first veto since entering office.* In another, less visible aspect of domestic policy, the Department of Energy has been working on the safeguardability of the next generation of enrichment technology. This includes not only centrifuge technology, which is under active development in several countries and is scheduled for deployment in the United States in 1988, but also longer term projects such as laser isotope separation. We will ensure that safeguardability criteria are included at the laboratory stage before going to the engineering stage.
The last but most basic dimension of the nonproliferation strategy concerns efforts to reduce the motivations that countries may develop to build nuclear weapons-chiefly military security and the quest for political prestige. In the bilateral context, the security guarantees Budgets speak more clearly than speeches. For this reason we felt it essential to our non- that the United States provides to its allies proliferation strategy that our domestic policy are among the most important nonproliferation be consistent with our international policy. policy instruments we have. Critics who argue We did not expect other countries to quickly . that the Administration failed to pursue disputes follow suit; we were sure they would not do so over reprocessing with our allies because it if our domestic actions undercut our inter- feared to destabilize the alliances miss the point. national policy. Thus, the President took two Any policy pursued to the point of severely decisions that were not widely popular in the shaking those alliances would be a failure in Congress-indefinite deferral of commercial nonproliferation terms. A cooperative approach reproces~ing and restructuring of the breeder with our allies is not only good alliance policy, it is also good nonproliferation policy. program. In other parts of the world, new bilateral The Administration rejected proposals to make the partially completed Barnwell, South security guarantees are less feasible in the postCarolina, plant into a multinational reprocessing Vietnam era, but the existing ones still have center. Accepting such a proposal would have value. Countries with a security relationship tended to undercut our argument that com- with us have to ask whether their security mercial reprocessing is premature, While an would really be enhanced by the introduction inadequate proposal at this stage could spoil of a vulnerable nuclear capability, if that would a multinational approach which might hold have the effect of removing the residual Ameripromise in the long term. We felt that if we were can security relationship. To the extent that telling other countries that going ahead now other nations rely on the United States for with the current type of reprocessing has the supply of the conventional arms for which marginal economic benefits and great se<;:urity they have reasonable needs to assure their own dangers, we had to apply that same logic to security, there is no question that our convenourselves. The President announced this on tional arms sales also play a part in affecting motivations to turn to nuclear weapons. April 7, 1977, and in talking to other countries We also have multilateral instruments to about deferring reprocessing, we have pointed address the security motivations. Most to the fact that we are not claiming any comimportant is, of course, the Nonproliferation mercial preference for ourselves. Similarly, we took the position that the Treaty (NPT), which 103 nations have now ratified. The Treaty has helped to create an breeder reactor program should be restructured to emphasize development of a safer fuel cycle international regime in which states agree that rather than early commercialization. This meant their security interests would be better served cancellation of the Clinch River project, which was not the safest or most advanced design, *Contrary to some interpretations, the Administrabut was oriented toward demonstrating early tion did not try to kill all breeder programs. As commercialization. We felt that it was incon- President Carter told the NewspaperFarm Editors on September 30, 1977, "I have no objection to sistent for us to urge caution and dehberation breeder reactors. I don't think the time has yet on entering into the plutonium generation, come." The Department of Energy 1979 budget of while at the same time proceeding with a $367 million for breeder research and development design that had been explicitly created to is the largest breeder budget in the world. It is also provide early commercialization of the pluto- about the same as thebudget for solar researchand nium breeder. When the Congress did not agree development.
by avoiding the further spread of the bomb. It provides important reassurances that potential adversaries are confining their nuclear activities to peaceful purposes. The NPT is a delicate international arrangement. Countries without nuclear weapons have accepted an explicitly unequal status in the military area, on the condition that they be treated equally with regard to civil nuclear cooperation. Thus we have to aVQid, to the greatest extent possible, discriminatory policies on the civil side that would weaken the fabric of the Treaty as one of the key nonproliferation institutions. Another multilateral instrument is the nuclear weapons free zone. The Administration has supported the establishment of such zones wherever the states in a region can agree. The most important example is the Latin American Nuclear Weapons Free Zone, which was established in the 1960s by the Treaty of Tlatelolco, but which lacked several adherents, including U.S. ratification of its first protocol, before becoming fully effective. Early in his term, President Carter announced that the United States would ratify the protocol and later in the year Argentina declared its intent to ratify the Treaty. Once these ratifications are completed, only Cuban, Russian and French actions would be necessary before the Treaty enters fully into force. As for prestige motivations that might lead states to acquire nuclear weapons, the best answer is to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in world politics. This was a goal that President Carter stated in his Inaugural Address. Efforts to control the vertical proliferation of nuclear arsenals thtough the SALT and Comprehensive
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Test Ban negotiations have an important effect on nonproliferation policy. At the same time, we must avoid military doctrines that imply that nuclear weapons have more than a negative or deterrent role. Above all, we must be careful not to reinforce any notion that being a nuclear weapons state provides unusual privileges or position in international affairs. Over time, we want to show other countries that the weight of their voice in international gatherings-on the Law of the Sea, exchange rates for their currencies, resource transfers, or any other issue-really does not have much to do with whether they possess a nuclear weapon or not. There are much more usable and directly effective forms of power. The clear corollary is that the United States must be careful not to try to use its own nuclear status to win games in other areas. Disincentives are also important. A temptation to go nuclear can be counterbalanced in many cases by the prospect of severe adverse reactions. The general heightened concern {hat has accompanied the Administration's high priority for nonproliferation has raised perceptibly the probability of a strong international reaction to any violation of international safeguards or other proliferation event. Peaceful nuclear cooperation helps to provide disincentives for proliferation. Temptations toward proliferation are couJ,].terbalanced by the cost of disrupting expensive nuclear electric-generating systems. The new U.S. nonproliferation legislation inscribes in statute strong sanctions against those who would violate safeguard agreements. Moreover, under the Suppliers Guidelines, members agree to avoid commercial competition while consulting about cases of
possible safeguards violations. Over the past year, it has become increasingly clear that the international response will make safeguards violations, and violations of the nonproliferation regime generally, very costly actions. The Carter initiatives on nonproliferation stirred up a degree of turmoil at home and abroad. The nuclear industry had been proceeding internationally on a set of fixed assumptions about moving as quickly as possible from uranium to plutonium, with only secondary attention to the proliferation problem. But the turmoil has started a process of rethinking. It is no longer business as usual. In recent years, the industry had examined and rejected a series of measures that could have been used to make the use of plutonium .more proliferationresistant, albeit more expensive. Now the industry at home and abroad is looking at those ideas again. Similarly, countries that currently plan to use plutonium are beginning to look at ways to reduce the proliferation risk-such as introducing radioactivity to prevent plutonium fuels from being stolen or misused. As one high European official has put it: "We don't agree with all your answers, but we admit that you've raised the right questions." One of the major accomplishments of 1977 was raising a concern, making nations realize that proliferation is a priority issue that deserves serious measures beyond business as usual. But beyond the posing of a challenge, the first year also saw the beginnings of an international institutional response. The supplier countries maintained their unity, agreed on a moratorium on sensitive transfers, and published common export safeguards guidelines. A brand
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new dialogue was begun in INFCE, and the broad participation in that effort represents the first step toward a common consumersupplier approach. While dramatizing the challenge that technology was posing, the Administration took careful note of the energy concerns of other countries. We were careful to avoid any comment on other countries' breeder research and development programs while focusing on the dangers to their security and the dubious economic benefits of reprocessing for recycling in the current type of reactors. The situation was aptly summed up by Rudolph Rometsch, Deputy Director General of the IAEA, who said that as recentl)' as a year ago it was hard to find either utility or government officials interested in ways to internationalize plutonium control and other aspects of the fuel cycle in order to make them more proliferation-proof. Now "quite a number are willing to go a long way to make that possible." He added that "this may be the most positive point, if properly exploited, to emerge from the renewed u.s. concern over proliferation." The objectives the Administration has set out to accomplish .cannot be achieved quickly. International institutional responses take more time to develop than does an initial national challenge. Basic assumptions change slowly. Consensus can only be developed over time. New problems and temptations continually arise and require responses. To repeat, nonproliferation policy is not a game where one can easily score victories and defeats. If one country defers reprocessing or another sets off an explosion, that alone does not constitute the success or failure of a nonproliferation policy. Our goal, which we share
with others, is to strengthen an international regime of norms and institutions that rests on shared interests and thus to strengthen the presumption against proliferation. Both the technological explorations and the specific institutional innovations examined in INFCE are designed to reinforce and expand the consensus on the regime that is centered on the IAEA. A strong international regime can consist of many institutions, so long as they are complementary.* * * * In summary, one can view three decades of American nonproliferation policy as an attempt to resolve the tension between national interests-our own and others-in nuclear technology, and the shared international interest in the avoidance of nuclear war. Increasingly, nations have come to understand that the potential or actual undertaking of nuclear explosions, in their own country or elsewhere, is a matter of legitimate concern to the community of nations. Our efforts toward strategic arms limitation and a comprehensive test ban respond to those concerns, and our nonproliferation policy reflects an appreciation of the need for an international rather than a unilateral solution. Thirty years ago, the Baruch Plan proposal for internationalization was rejected, in part *For example, the four types of institutions being examined in INFCE-an international stockpile of low-enriched fuel, international spent fuel depositories, international enrichment facilities, and international reprocessing facilities-could have the effect of reinforcing the IAEA-centered international regime without necessarily being part of the IAEA or having exactly the same membership.
because it was seen as an attempt to perpetuate what was then an American nuclear monopoly. The succeeding period of strict export controls on civilian as well as military technology emphasized U.S. self-sufficiency to the neglect of the common interest in peaceful nuclear development. The Atoms for Peace policy used the promotion of nuclear research and civilian applications to build an international regime of safeguards. In recent years, with civilian nuclear power becoming at once more widespread and overlapping with the technology and materials used for nuclear weapons, the international community has entered a period of re-examination and redirection. For the period ahead, our aim is to work with the international community in minimizing the weapons potential of civilian technology, and building institutions to manage the remaining areas of overlap. The development and diffusion of nuclear technology requires of all involved nations a dual commitment to caution and to shared benefits: that which cannot be effectively safeguarded or postponed must be jointly controlled. The alternative would make 0 us all poorer. About the Author: Joseph S. Nye is Deputy to the Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. He chairs the U.S. National Security Council Group on Nonproliferation that formulated the Carter Administration's policy. During 1969-77, he was Professor of Government at the Harvard University Center for International Affairs. He is the coauthor of Power and Interdependence and a contributor to "Nuclear Power Issues and Choices: Report of the Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group."
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SKYDIVING-FOR THE BEAUTY OF IT Until recently, skydiving was considered a man's sport. But not any more. Today, there are hundreds of women skydivers in the United States, and their number is swelling each day. One woman who typifies this interest is slim, sandy-haired Peggy Black of Solon, Ohio. Talking about her first jump from the airplane, Peggy says: "On my first time up in the plane, I was really sick. But being sick made me want to get out of the plane. I wasn't scared till I got to the door. When I hesitated, the pilot said, 'Don't act like a woman.' 'Well,' I thought, and jumped out." That was six years ago. Now, Peggy
jumps at least several times each weekend. She leaps from the airplane at more than 3,000 meters (also see back cover), free falls till she reaches about 650; then she pulls the ripcord and opens the parachute, which has a two-by-three-meter butterfly, sewn by her, stitched to it. Does the obvious danger of the sport playa role in Peggy's enthusiasm? She claims not. "Everyone dwells on that aspect of skydiving," she says. "To me, it's not a death-defying, thrill-seeking stunt. I do it for the beauty of it. Looking at the earth from up there makes you realize how pretty everything is."