SPAN: October 1979

A LEITER FROM THE PUBLISHER According to some predictions, the world's oil reserves are expected to last another 30 years. So, apart from the problem of price increases by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the challenge of reducing the. use of oil and of finding alternatives looms large on the human horizon. In the United States the response to that challenge is fast taking shape. At the same time, there is a growing awareness that the solution to this global problem of diminishing oil must lie more in global cooperation than in isolated national endeavor. In this issue, Norman Cousins, Chairman of the Saturday Review's Editorial Board, makes a comprehensive survey of the modes of alternative energy or energy use that the United States is developing in its effort to meet the challenge. The development of alcohol as an additive to petroleum, the reactivation of abandoned oil wells, the improvement of the fuel efficiency of the automobile engine, nitrogen fixation research to reduce the world's fertilizer needs, geothermal wells successfully worked in the Rocky Mountains, projected solar power from satellites, experiments in the use of pure hydrogen as a universal form of cheap energy-these are some of the lines of fruitful endeavor that he describes. In doing so, Cousins does not lose sight of the fact that "the search for new energy systems involves more than just the need to provide an alternative to oil. The primary need is to find the kind of energy that will run an industrial society without imposing ghastly penalties on living things."

He ends on the need for a world order within which new energy sources can be found and mobilized in the human interest.

Indeed the problem, and its solution, admit of no scale less than the global. Developed countries consume more oil; but this does not mean that. developing countries-except those that export oil-suffer less when oil prices go up. Their balance of payments is hit hard, and so is their growth rate.

Increases in India's exports, for example, can be negated by the expanding oil import bill. Speaking at the recent Indo-U.S. conference on economic cooperation in New Delhi sponsored by the Association of Indians in America, Lawrence Klein, professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, suggested that since India, like the United States, imports about half its oil requirements, studies similar to those made in the United States on the impact of oil price rises could help in assessing their secondary effects on other prices and on the economy of India.

From his "fireside chat" of April 18, 1977 to his address to the nation on July 15, 1979 (see September SPAN), President Jimmy Carter has been urging the American people to help the global effort to solve the energy crisis by reducing their individual energy consumption. Similar possibilities for public conservation exist in many other countries. This is basically a short term measure, albeit a vitaIiy important one. It is in the area of developing alternative modes of energy that international cooperation will playa key role in humanity's progress in the next century. Like many other countries including India, the United States is setting aside substantial sums of money and designing a number of imaginative projects for this purpose. SPAN will keep you informed of important American initiatives and achievements, both on the national and international levels, aimed at solving this crucial global problem.

-J.W.G.

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SALT II and Global Security Commentaries by Jo L. Husbands and v.K. Narasimhan

5 Life Aboard an Oil Rig 9 Grow Your Own Fuel 1 5 Forty-seven Million Helping Hands 20 America's Independent Sector 22 Eilshemius: Fame Came Too Late

by Gary Pergl

by Norman Cousins

by John W. Gardner

by Paul J. Karlstrom

2 8 The Origins of Totalitarianism 33 The Martha Movement 37 On the Lighter Side 38 They Till the Urban Soil 40 The Quest for Intelligent Life in Space 45 What Can Be Done With Atomic Waste?

49 Lord of the Rings A Reconsideration by Krishna Chaitanya

by She/by White

by Carl Sagan

Front cover: More and more urban hands are tilling the soil in the United States and savoring the fruits of their labor. Town dwellers have come to realize that gardening is the best answer to many financial and ecological problems. Last year some 40 million Americans took to hoe and hose. See story on pages 38-39.

Back cover: This multiple exposure shot dramatizes the remarkable talents of Kurt Thomas who at 22 is the'number one gymnast in the United States. See also page 49.

JACOB SLOAN, Editor; JAY W. GILDNER, Publisher.

Managing Editor: Chidananda Das Gupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu.

Editorial Staff: Krishan Gabrani, Aruna 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-Mike Mitchell. Inside front cover- Texas Institute for Rehabilitation & Research and Dan McCoy. 5-8-Gary Pergl. 10- Department of Energy photos by Schneider. 11- Dan McCoy. 13 bottom- U.S. Naval Academy. 16 bottom left-Hope Alexander. 18 top left-Matt Bradley. 19 top right-David Cupp. 22-23Museum of Modern Art, New York. 24-25-Herb Gehr, Life Magazine © 1939Time inc: 26 top-Joseph H. Hirsh· hprn Collection; bottom - Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden. 27 top- Worcester Art M 1!seum,Massachusetts; bottom-H~rshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden. 29-Alan E. Cober, from Rights of Man Poster Exhibit. 30-Viking Press Photo by Alfred Bernheim. 31-Geoffrey Moss, from Rights of Man Poster Exhibit. 34- United Press Inter· national. 35-Diana H. Walker. 38-39:-8ill Kuykendall. 41-IlIustration by Alan E. Cober, courtesy Texaco. Inc. 42-Avinash Pasricha. 44-John Huehnergarth. 45-Wide World Photos. 49 & back cover-John Zimmerman.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged. except when copyrighted. For permission. write to Ihe Editor. Price of magazine : one year's subscription (12 issues). 21 rupees; single copy. 2 rupees 75 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along Wilh new address to A.K. Mitra. Circulation Manager.

SPAN Magazine. 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001.(See change of address form on page 48.)

SILl IIAID

Two commentators-Jo L. Husbands and V.K. Narasimhan-explain the significance of the

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Over the next several months, as the U.S. Senate debates the ratification of the SALT II treaty, the focus will be, appropriately, on the importance of the new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty for U.S. national security interests and the U.S.-Soviet strategic balance. Much of the debate will thus be consumed with the esoteric language of nuclear deterrence and the technical details of verification and nuclear weapon performance.

All this may create the impression that SALT IT affects only U.S.-Soviet relations, with only a marginal impact on the rest of the world and its problems.

Such an impression would be false.

In one sense, the significance of SALT II to non signatory nations is simple, for, as President Jimmy Carter said in presenting the treaty to the U.S. Congress, "In this age of the hydrogen bomb, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between global war and global suicide." It might be possible to fight a "limited" nuclear war, but no sane person wants to find out.

During the 34 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the technology of nuclear destruction has threatened to outrun man's capacity to find the political means to contain it. The destructive potential of the current nuclear weapons held by the two superpowers exceeds even the most dreadful visions of the creators of those first atomic devices.

SALT II will not diยงmantle the nuclear arsenals of the Unit~d States and the Soviet Union, but it will check their headlong expansion. It is a modest, vital step in the direction of halting the nuclear arms race, and on its success rests far more than just the fate of the superpowers.

The SALT treaty covers only one aspect of U.S.-Soviet relations and does not spell the end to competition between the two nations. As the representative of Mauritius noted during the United Na-

How India views the Second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) might perhaps be less significant for the future' of the agreement and its global implications for the two superpowers-the United States and the Soviet Union-and for the Western world than for India and its friends among the "nonaligned" nations. If there is no euphoric enthusiasm in India over the agreement, with its highly complicated provisions governing the most inconceivably lethal weapons that human ingenuity could devise, it is understandable.

What might be more significant in the immediate context is the restrained, even skeptical, reaction in the United States and Western Europe and the deep suspicion that seems to persist in knowledgeable quarters as to whether the Soviet U n'ion can be relied upon to honor the agreement in the spirit and the letter.

India is unlikely to harbor similar suspicions not only because its relations with the Soviet Union have been friendly, bu( also because it will be inclined to accept the view that the leaders of two great countries, who realize the dangers as well as the cruel burdens on their countries of an unrestricted nuclear arms race, see also the wisdom and the necessity of making some definite moves toward limiting the piling up of these arms, however limited and halting they may be, as the first steps toward an ultimate nuclear disarmament.

Eighteen years ago, speaking at the historic Belgrade conference of the nonaligned nations, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru declared: "The most important thing for the world today is for the great powers to meet togethet and negotiate with a will to peace."

Had he lived long enough, he would have seen the negotiating process, set off by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which brought the world to the brink of disaster, leading to the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the 1972 SALT I treaty to limit defensive antiballistic missile systems (negotiations for

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tions' Special Session on Disarmament, "It is to be stressed that we do not regard disarmament as a universal remedy to contemporary problems. It does not and cannot solve the opposition between rival ideologies, nor does it solve territorial disputes or conflicts of economic and political interests among nations."

Fundamentally different values and visions of society and politics ensure that some level of tension will always persist, and that tension directly affects the political future of the rest of the world. The SALT process, with SALT II as its latest achievement, signifies the determination of the two superpowers that thatcompetition will never find expression in the awful destruction of nuclear war.

As President Carter has said, "SALT II does not end the arms competition, but it does make that competition safer and more predictable, with clear rules and verifiable limits where otherwise there would be no rules and there would be no limits." As such, SALT Ii represents one more payment on U.S. and Soviet pledges to bring the nuclear arms race to a halt.

The fate of SALT II will directly affect the fate of other important arms control measures currently under negotiation.

The prospects for a comprehensive test ban, first raised as an arms control issue by the nonaligned nations in the 1950s, depend in large measure on the restraints embodied in SALT II and the confidence these may give the world's nuclear powers to finally forego all nuclear testing. Other advances also will depend on the climate of cooperation bred by a successful SALT agreement, as well as on the attention available for other projects after the consuming task of SALT. These are measures of concern to both industrialized and developing nations, measures such as arms control in the Indian Ocean, and an agreement on chemical weapons.

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which began between Moscow and Washington in 1969), the Brezhnev-Ford accord reached at Vladivostok in 1974, which provided the outlines for a treaty to limit strategic weapons, and now SALT II which says, "Thus far and no further." All these are sm~ll but significant steps toward a safer world.

For nearly two decades now, international diplomacy has been preoccupied with the concept of detente. The use of the word in its current sense began in 1971 and the era of detente was officially inaugurated when President Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow in May 1972 to sign the SALT I document.

Detente between states with conflicting ideologies or interests follows from the acceptance of the idea of peaceful coexistence.

George F. Kennan has pointed out that the United States initiated the SALT talks with the Russians when it realized that American policy in the field of nuclear ,weaponry had been a failure. "It was a policy," says Kennan, "marked by basing our defense posture upon it, by our early commitment to the principle of first use in any serious encounter with another great power and by an attempt to assure ourselves a commanding lead in the development of nuclear weapons." On the Soviet side, nuclear parity with the United States had to be attained before nuclear war became unthinkable. In the sixties, the Soviet Union directed a massive and meticulously planned civil defense effort. In the Soviet Civil Defense Manual issued in large numbers during this period the estimate is made that implementation of the prescribed evacuation and civil defense procedure would restrict the civilian casualties to 5 or 8 per cent of the urban population or 3 to 4 per cent of the total population even after a direct U.S. nuclear strike against Soviet cities.

The First Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) signed in Moscow in May 1972 after three years of negotiations placed limits

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But the clearest linkage between SALT 11 and other arms control measures lies

with nuclear nonproliferation. The second review conference of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) is to be held next year in Geneva, and SALT II is evidence of the superpowers' commitment to place controls on their nuclear rivalry. That commitment was a fundamental demand of the nonnuclear weapons states during the treaty negotiations; in return for their pledge to forsake nuclear weapons, they insisted that the nuclear powers take steps to check their own vertical proliferation.

Article VI of the Nonproliferation Treaty thus commits its parties "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament. ... " As the Special SALT Adviser to the'U.S. Secretary of State, Paul Warnke, has said: "I think we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that we could wait indefinitely to bring about meaningful measures of nuclear arms control and still expect the rest of the world to continue to forego the acquisition of nuclear weapons capability of their own. They won't indefinitely listen to lectures about nonproliferation without seeing hard evidence that we ourselves and the Soviet Union are prepared to accept nuclear restraint."

The new SALT treaty demonstrates the U.S. and Soviet commitments to such restraints. SALT II does not address directly the pressures for proliferation felt around the world, but the credibility of the further nonproliferation efforts of the superpowers quite properly rests on its successful conclusion.

Beyond the urgent issue of nuclear arms limitation, SALT II will produce other benefits for international politics. The U.S.-Soviet nuclear competition represents only one portion of their broader competition, and those other aspects intrude directly into the daily political lives of many nations.

During the worst years of "East-West tension, the United States and the Soviet Union, in pursuit of their cold war conflicts, constructed networks of friendships and alliances throughout the world. Regional political tensions and conflicts then became extensions of the cold war, viewed through cold' war lenses with distorted perceptions, and therefore often with inappropriate responses by both sides.

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on the construction of defensive missile systems on the assumption that the superpower that came up with an effective defense against missiles might be tempted to start a war.

Accordingly, each superpower was allowed to construct only two antiballistic missile systems (ABMs) around its respective capital.

Thus, a costly and meaningless defensive arms race that would have involved multiplying the ABM defense systems around Moscow and Washington and possibly building defense systems around the major Soviet and American cities was avoided.

This accord, however, permitted the superpowers to concentrate on increasing the strategic arms stockpile. It is estimated that the United States now has 1,054 land-based Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), while the Soviet Union has 1,400 of these weapons: the United States has 656 submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs); the Soviet Union has 950.

The U.S. has 344 strategic bombers, while the Soviet Union has 150. These add up to 2,054 missiles in the U.S. nuclear armory as against 2,500 on the Soviet side. Warheads are something else again. Each of these ICBMs and SLBMs can be fitted with 10-14 nuclear warheads, each capable of striking different targets (Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles-MIRVs).

What exactly does the painfully hammered out 81-page SALT II document signify? By December 1981, neither side can have more than 2,250 strategic missiles, which means that the Russians have to dismantle 250 of their older weapons, while the Americans can add 196 to their armory if they so wish. These ceilings will be in force till 1985, when SALT II is replaced by a new treaty.

The treaty will not reduce the number of nuclear warheads available to each side. On the contrary, thousands of new warheads will be built and added to the two arsenals, because SALT II .allows 1,320 missiles on each side to be armed with MIRVs. By 1985, under the terms of the treaty, the United States is likely to increase its nuclear warheads from 9,200 to 17,000, while the Soviet Union is expected to increase its warhead stockpile from 4,500 to 9,500, and possibly to 18,000.

The annual Yearbook on World Armaments and Disarmament published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) some 72 hours after President Jimmy Carter and Leonid I. Brezhnev had signed the treaty in Vienna highlighted the awesome fact that the United States and the Soviet Union (Text continued

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LIFE ABOARDA.

The United States, like India, has embarked on an ambitious program of offshore oil drilling to free itself of dependence on foreign oil. Some 3,000 pumping and drilling stations have been set up in the Gulf of Mexico alone. On these pages, SPAN looks in on life aboard one such rigthe Zapata Saratogaand the problems and potential of offshore oil.

The drill floor, above, is where the action is on an oil rig.

Here "roughnecks" operate the tongs, a power-driven wrench that snugs up the threaded connections of the drill pipe.

Left: A telescoping joint inside the pipe casing allows the Zapata Saratoga to accommodate the 12-meter lift of the waves '~ breaking away from the riser pipe that guides the drill down to the wellhead.

F

ormore than 30 years, the Gulf Coast of the United States has been the world's foremost test center for developing offshore oil technology. Some 2,800 pumping platforms protrude from the Gulf of Mexico like so many subtropical islands of steel. They range in size from wellheads no larger than buoy markers to veritable cities-platforms the size of small apartment buildings clustered together and connected by catwalks.

In 1947, the Kerr-McGee Corporation erected the first true offshore oil rig in the area. It was a cramped steel platform 19 kilometers out to sea from Morgan City, Louisiana. The rig struck oil at 782 metersnot exactly a gusher, but enough to signal the start of the offshore oil industry.

Oilmen since then have punctured the gulfs continental shelf with more than 18,000 wells, and despite the recent upsurge of activity on the North Sea, the gulf continues to be the site of the world's most intensive offshore drilling effort. In 1977 an average of more than 100 rigs at any given time were exploring for oil off the Louisiana and Texas coasts.

Crude oil extracted from all offshore wells accounts for an increasingly large share of America's total oil production. In 1957, offshore platforms (including those off California and Alaska) pumped 12 million tons of oil, about 3 per cent of the total U.S. output. By 1977, offshore production had risen to 70 million tons, more than 15per cent of U.S. production.

This may be only the beginning. Despite the extensive drilling efforts in the gulf, the U.S. continental shelf as a whole remains virtually unexplored. The U.S. Department of Interior, which administers the country's outer continental shelf, h~s leased just 3.2 million hectares, less than 5 per cent of the total shelf area, to private oil companies for exploration.

One reason so little ocean bottom has been leased is that drilling offshore in depths of more than 180 meters is considerably more expensive than sinking wells on dry land.

Deep-sea drilling was not economically feasible before the dramatic 1973 increases in oil prices, when a barrel (159 liters) of imported Saudi Arabian crude oil vaulted in price from $2.59 to $11.65. With the boost in price, oil explorers could move into deeper water, where the technology is more expensive, and still bring in the oil at a profit.

Extensive offshore drilling is likely to continue. While oil fields on land have not dried up, discoveries of new onshore sources have slowed. The latest estimates place

worldwide offshore oil reserves at about 18 per cent of total world reserves, yet oil experts believe that eventually more than half of all supplies will come from undersea sources. "The easy oil has been found," says a geologist for a major oil company. "Now we're moving into the t.ougher, more expensive, ocean phase."

Exploration and development of new offshore oil-drilling locations were the subject of fierce debate in the United States last year when Congress reformed the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a bill passed in 1953 to regulate the leasing and development of offshore oil and gas. The amendments devised a system for monitoring the flow of oil; enforced stricter environmental and safety regulations; set up an offshore oil-spill pollution fund and a fishermen's contingency fund; and devised a clear framework for handling citizen suits. Impetus for new legislation came, in part, from a move by major oil producers to open the virgin territory off the Atlantic seaboard to drilling. Atlantic coastal states pushed for the bill in Congress that would assure them of a bigger say in the planning and development of that part of the outer continental shelf adjacent to their coastlines. They were joined by environmentalists, who wanted the Atlantic shelf developed more slowly and carefully. Among their reasons: The Atlantic coast has a high population density; storm and sea conditions there are more hazardous than those in the gulf and Pacific; hundreds of kilometers of Atlantic beaches account for a multimilliondollar tourist industry; and Atlantic fishing grounds are among the most important in the world.

The petroleum industry unsuccessfully fought the bill, claiming that it would slow down exploration just when the United States is running short of fossil fuels and needs to exploit its oil reserves. Further, they argued, technology and strict operating procedures have practically eliminated the possibility of spills and blowouts.

The final legislation attempts to strike a balance between the competing claims of environmentalists, coastal states, and large and small oil companies.

An oil well is drilled by threading together 9.14meter sections of steel pipes end to end to form a drill string. On the Saratoga it can run up to 900 lengths of pipe, storedJar left, ready to be used by the men working on the drillfioor.

Left :The "toolpusher" in charge of the platform is John Holbrook, who began working offshore in the gulf in the early days of the industry, and has since drilled for oil off Peru and Nigeria.

With a 7-day, 84-hour week, life on the Saratoga is no bed of roses. Drilling continues 24 hours a day; the rig is idle only when it is being towed to a new location, which may be near or far.

Survival capsule on Saratoga ensures crew's escape in the event of emergency, whether it is a capsizing rig, afire, or an oil well blow-out. Right: A "roughneck"

checks the blow-out prevention valves.

Below: For some, a game of cards is the standard way of relaxation. Bottom: For others, it's early to the bunk.

GROW YOUR OWN FUEL The world will run out of petroleum in about 30 years. To fuel our progress in the post petroleum era, new approaches to energy systems are called for. A distinguished journalist and thinker discusses some of them here-reactivation of old oil wells, development of fuel-eflicient automobile engines, fixation of nitrogen in the soil, separation of hydrogen from water.

hrough all the murk, confusion, and contradictions in the energy crisis, one dazzling fact is beginning to emerge. The American people have an excellent chance to free themselvesof dependence on Arab oil, possibly within the next decade.

A related fact of even greater importance is that, in the act of meet, ing their energy problems, the American people could be caught up in a new industrial revolution, the most significant and exciting feature of which could be a less centralized, more cooperative, and more creative way of life.

The newspapers and round-table discussions over television and radio create a grim picture of mighty nations grinding to a halt before long, their turbines and dynamos enveloped in a ghostly stillness for want of oil. Yet there is now realistic promise not just of energy sufficiency but of an upgrading of human prospects. In laboratories and in open fields, revolutionary new approaches to energy are being developed. Arnold Toynbee's observation that Civilization is the story of challenge and response has seldom been better exemplified than by the reaction to the effect on the world economy of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) policies.

Before examining the response, it is important to make distinctions between short-term and long-term problems and prospects. The short-term applies to the time remaining before the world's known oil reserves run out, estimated to be about 25 or 30 years. The principal need during this period will be to keep going as best we can until other forms of energy become widely available.

The short-term period is bound to be confusing because it will be marked by alternating periods of scarcity and surplus.

The periods of scarcity may be related more to political factors than to natural causes. A flare-up in the Middle East could have the effect of cutting down on our oil supply. The periods of surplus may be the result of larger yields than expected from new or existing sources.

For the long term, the overriding fact is that a postoil era is inevitable and inescapable. Since the long-term needs of the world call for a vast increase of energy, the time to ensure our supply of energy is today.

President Jimmy Carter's energy policy begins with the need to find a way in the years just ahead to maintain access to enough

,

fuel to keep the world moving-without knuckling under to nations that threaten economic blackmail if we don't accept their political objectives or policies.

It is a serious mistake to think of nuclear power-fission or fusion-as the only answer to the world's energy problem.

Similarly, America's abundant coal reserves-and also the prospect of coal's being "gassified" -are not regarded by energy specialists as a definitive solution to the energy shortage. Research laboratories, small and large, in the United States and elsewhere are actively engaged in the search for new sources of power or new approaches to getting more out of the old sources.

O

ne of the best chances we have for bridging the gap to the postoil era may be the reactivation of America's hundreds of thousands of small wells.

It is not generally realized that a large part of America's oil supply once ca~e from' small wells spread over a wide area from Pennsylvania to the Dakotas and Texas. These were "stripper" wells, in which the oil was relatively close to the surface, as contrasted with the deep wells, where exotic drills often had to penetrate 4,300 meters or more. The stripper well was a familiar feature of the American landscape, especially in the Southwest.

You could see it in front of the local church, or alongside the town grocery store, or in the backyard of the neighborhood mechanic.

The popular conception of oil wells is of black geysers shooting oil skyward at the rate of hundreds of gallons a second. But the average well in the United States has been an unspectacular affair, with its daily output of less than a half-dozen barrels.

Even so, the cumulative total for many years helped to make the United States the largest oil producer in the world.

Most of these wells are now idle-not because the oil is exhausted but because the oil is no longer free-flowing, having been trapped in rock or tar sands, or impeded by limestone. Not infrequently, the pores in the earth are clogged by clay, and the oil cannot move, a condition the oilmen refer to as "constipation." Yet the oil is there- hundreds of billions of barrels, more of it than has been brought to the surface since the first American oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859.

Attempts to reactivate these' wells come under the heading of "secondary recovery." The big problem, however, involves not just the extremely high cost of separating the oil from rock

and unclogging the pores of the earth but the amount of energy required to produce the energy. If, for example, it takes 10 units to produce 12 or even 15 units of energy, the net gain is minimal and the cost is uneconomic.

So the search is for new systems. Petroleum scientists and engineers have tried to get at the oil with all sorts of devices. They have tried shooting "bullet-holes" into the clogged underground areas in those cases where petroleum has been constipated. They have tried to build up pressure to move the petroleum by "waterflooding" and "gas-flooding." They have tried "thermal recovery" for thinning out the tar sands. They have even created underground fires in order to produce hot gas pressure to force the oil off the rock and into motion. Among the newer systems are "hydrocarbon miscible flooding," "carbon dioxide flooding," and "miscellar polymer flooding." But while a number of systems have succeeded in varying degrees in getting at the oil, none has been able to do so with a sufficient net-energy gain, or at an economic price.

Enter two Texans, Frank DeFalco and Charles McCoy, and a Hungarian-born scientist, George Merkl. In 1974 DeFalco and Mc oy created the olecular Energy Research Company (MERCO) for the purpose of finding a technologically efficient and economically advantageous method of oil capture.

Merkl has credentials in theoretical and solid-state physics, nuclear chemistry, petroleum geology, and electronics. The contributions he is making to the solution of America's energy problem is reminiscent of the role of other foreign-born scientists -Einstein, Szilard, Fermi, and Wigner among them-in helping the United States to use science as a decisive factor in the war against Nazi Germany. Merkl came to the United States in 1957 after advanced studies in Vienna. He worked in several American research laboratories and immersed himself in research on catalysts, agents that speed up chemical reactions.

Merkl teamed up with DeFalco and McCoy in 1976. Like many others, he was obsessed with the possibility that a way could be devised to get at the estimated 350 billion barrels of petroleum locked into America's natural underground vaults.

Almost intuitively, he turned to inorganic polymers-Iargemoleculed hard substances, like silicon or graphite, with a very high melting point. The process involved a polarized hydrogen bond. The bonding releases atomic hydrogen, which cracks the light end of the oil, creating natural gas. This gas forces the trapped oil out of the rock and causes it to form a pool or reser-

Fuel from biomass (living things and their waste products) : At the University of California, Professor of Engineering John Goss has developed a prototype unit to convert farm and forest residues (above) to methane gas. The gas fires a boiler (left) that heats and air-conditions a campus building. Facing page: Electricity from the sun. The solar thermal test facility at Sandia Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the largest product of its kind in the world. A 60-meter-high steel-and-concrete tower is surrounded by 222 sun-tracking heliostats, each of which contains 25 mirrors. Sunlight reflected from the mirrors is concentrated on boilers atop the tower, producing highpressure steam that can be used to turn a turbogenerator.

voir, making it accessible to conventional collection methods.

DeFalco and McCoy have applied for and received several patents on Merkl's process and are now tooling up for the largescale development.

The first test of George Merkl's inorganic polymer system began on June 14, 1977, in an overworked and abandoned oil field in Cherryvale, Kansas. Some 25 wells were in this particular field; seven of them were used to test the Merkl method. The experiment was a success. The oil in the first well tested broke through the surface on June 17, 1977, and the well has been producing 7 to 12 barrels a day since. What is most significant is that there has been a sixfold increase in the rate of production over previous yields.

Cherryvale has led to equally successful tests in Oklahoma, Louisiana, Texas, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The results of these tests indicate that Merkl's system can step up existing production an average of at least four or five times the old yield.

In some wells, the yield shows a thirtyfold increase.

Especially promising is the use of the Merkl system for tapping natural gas. A test in West Virginia in July 1978 was successful in producing a relatively large quantity of natural gas.

The significance of this fact cannot be overestimated when it is considered that the United States has an abundant supply of underground natural gas.

Dozens of additional tests, especially under varying conditions, have yet to be undertaken, but it is not too soon to assess the prospects. Consider the arithmetic: America is now consuming oil at the rate of 16 million barrels a day, or six billion gallons a year. Almost half that oil now comes from the Middle East.

If Merkl's system enables us to get at only half the petroleum that has been considered "unrecoverable" until now, we will be able to buy all the time we need to develop other sources of

What the world needs is not just an alternative to petroleum, but an energy system that will be able to run an industrial society without imposing ghastly penalties on living things.

energy for the postoil era. Specifically, American resources would replace all or most of the Arab oil we are now importing.

What about prices? DeFalco and McCoy estimate the cost of producing oil through the inorganic polymer system at not more than $5 per barrel (in contrast to the $20-per-barrel cost of recovering oil with organic polymers), which makes its market price competitive with existing prices.

Rosy though the glow may be, we must remember we are still talking about the short term. America's vast petroleum reserves, however abundant, will at some point run out, if not in 25 or 30 years, then in 40 or 50. Therefore, the search for other sources of energy must be energetically pursued. he

name given to living things and to their waste products is "biomass." Since the process for converting biomass into fuel is now well known, it may be only a matter of time before the virtually limitless quantity of biomass in the world can be used to create fuels that can replace oil. ' The government of Brazil, for example, has involved itself in large-scale production of alcohol, totaling millions of gallons a year. In the popular mind, alcohol is associated with libations, solitary or communal, and with rubdowns for tired muscles. But alcohol can also be used as a fuel for combustion engines.

Traditional methods of producing alcohol, however, make the price uneconomic for automobile use.

Brazil's economy, like that of other oil-importing nations, has been out of kilter because of the vast sums it has to spend to fuel its industrial machines. As the cost of oil sky-rocketed, the Brazilian Government became increasingly determined to reduce its dependence on oil imports. The present extensive program for developing alcohol as a fuel is the result. More than 300 alcoholdistilling plants are in construction or are being planned. The raw material is sugarcane. Manioc, a form of tapioca, is also being tried. The fermented sugar is processed to remove excess water and is reduced to 95 per cent alcohol. The result is ethanol.

Brazil's record in this undertaking commands respect. In 1977 it produced more than 200 million gallons of alcohol for use in combustion engines. The Wall Street Journal's Brazil correspondent reported on July 12, 1978, that the program to use alcohol instead of gasoline is no longer experimental. Some 500 Volkswagen telephone-repair cars now operate on 190-proof grain alcohol distilled from sugarcane or manioc.

It costs about $350 to convert an automobile engine for ethanol use. But owners of such cars report improved performance, especially on hills and in situations requiring rapid acceleration. Moreover, ethanol is clean-burning; the pollution problem is practically nil.

Most of Brazil's automobiles have yet to be converted. But they are nonetheless beneficiaries of the alcohol revolution, since they use a fuel mixture in which the alcohol percentage runs from 10 to 20.

In a very real sense, ethanol comes under the heading of solar energy, for sunlight is the principal ingredient in the production of sugarcane and manioc.

Following along the lines of the Brazilian experience, a company in Oklahoma, Calorific Recovery Anaerobic Process, Inc., has been able to utilize unused cadle feed and other wastes.

After the fibrous content is removed, the material is dumped into tanks containing various kinds of bacteria. The resultant decomposition produces methane gas, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. The present plan is to use pipelines for transporting the gas to industrial centers.

Meanwhile, millions of gallons of oil can be saved by burning waste products for generating electrical power. About 40 per cent of Hawaii's electricity is generated by burning sugarcane wastes.

At least a half-dozen European cities have found ajoint solution to their energy needs and their waste disposal problem by using garbage as a whole or partial substitute for oil in their powergenerating plants.

A mixture of 10 per cent alcohol from fermented grain and 90 per cent regular gasoline is being used as automobile fuel in the American Midwest. Consumers of gasohol report a fuel usage savings of about 5 per cent. Reduction in carbon-monoxide emissions is about 30 per cent.

Perhaps the most striking example of the successful production of fuel alcohol from grain is furnished by the Southeast Farmers' Cooperative of Selma, Alabama, a community associated with the name of Martin Luther King. One of King's associates, Albert Turner, has persuaded his farmer colleagues to apply their cooperative philosophy and techniques to the development of alcohol as a fuel. Turner learned two years ago about the potentialities of grain as a base for fuel alcohol. His friends encouraged him to find out as much as he could about the process. Turner heard of a young agricultural scientist, Alan Zeithamer, 25, in Alexander, Minnesota, who had been studying techniques for converting grain into alcohol. Another resource person was a former bootlegger who had abundant experience in distilling alcohol from grain. The "faculty" was completed with the addition of Professor Westley Buchele, a microbiologist at Iowa State University, and Professor Paul Midow, an agricultural engineer at South Dakota State University.

The group received a small grant from the Office of Minority Business Enterprises, Washington, D.C. Fortified with expertise and capital, Turner and his associates in the farmers' cooperative decided to move ahead. In their first full year of operation, the Selma farmers have been able to produce about 200 gallons of grain alcohol a month.

Obviously, the cost would be much higher if an individual farmer attempted to go into the business. By pooling their land, their machinery, and their labor, the Selma farmers have been able to create both a scientific and social model in the approach to fuel as a reservable resource.

J(

COh. 01as a substitute for gasoline is already a practical reality. The big question is whether the present automobile engine can be made compatible at a low cost.

Encouraging progress in this direction is being made at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. It all began in 1972, when some of the science professors on the faculty met an engineer from Argentina who was studying for a Ph.D. degree at the University of Maryland. His name was Richard Blaser, and he had come to this country in search of a new way of life and a chance to develop his theories on automobile engine design.

Blaser thought it absurd that the average automobile engine should be able to make efficient use of only fraction of its fuel.

He didn't see why the automobile industry and the owners of cars should put up with a car engine that is prone to overheat; that

a

Two facets of the energy movement. Top: Steam hisses out of a geothermal experimental facility in California. Above: Engineer Richard Blaser (right) discusses his new fuel-efficient low-pollution jeep engine with a professor of the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, which helped develop it. It is known as the Naval Academy Heat-Balanced Engine.

spews carbon mc,)lloxideand hydrocarbons into the atmosphere; that is heavily dependent on a complicated distributor head; and that cannot use different kinds of fuel. Blaser's inventiveness appealed to the professors, and they contrived to find a laboratory for him at the Naval Academy. At first, Blaser led a nocturnal research existence, for Melville Hall, one of the engineering laboratories, was open to him only at night. Then, when the Academy no longer had any use for Melville Hall: Blaser was given full-time use of the quarters and achieved a quasilegitimacy. Finally, in the spring of 1977, Blaser moved up the recognition ladder when the Office of Pesticide Programs of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave a grant to the Naval Academy, part of which went into research and development of the Blaser engine. Modest though the subvention was, it enabled Blaser and his 20-year-old son to move forward.

Recently, under the joint imprint of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Naval Academy, a report was issued on the successful modification of standard engines to NAHBEs (Naval Academy Heat-Balanced Engine). Main conclusions of that report: The NAHBE is more efficient than the regular combustion engine; it offers a substantial increase in mileage per gallon; it is 98 per cent free of carbon monoxide and other noxious emissions; it operates at much lower pressures than are possible in standard engines, with the prospect of lower repair bills; it has a much lower compression ratio than the regular engine; and it can use gasoline, diesel fuel, alcohol, benzine, or kerosene.

All these features would appear to be something out of science fiction were it not for the fact that they are certified in a government report. At the invitation of William Holmberg, of the U.S. Department of Energy, I went to the Naval Academy and met with Richard Blaser and his son. I was permitted to drive the military jeep containing the Blaser engine, the first vehicle of its kind in the world. The drive was no more than perhaps a quarter-mile through the streets of the Naval Academy, but it was long enough to convince me that NAHBE is real and that a great revolution is impending in the history of the automobileboth in the United States and the world. NAHBE helps to solve one of the single greatest environmental problems facing the nation-carbon monoxide emissions from combustion engines.

Incredibly, the NAHBE engine emits only 5 per cent of the carbon monoxide produced by the average automobile engine.

It also offers the American people a much more durable and economic automobile engine, one that doesn't have to be replaced every two or three years. It costs about $400 to convert an existing automobile engine to the NAHBE, but this increase is more than offset by operational savings.

Richard Blaser is a dark, intense, compactly built man in his mid-50s. When he speaks about science or engineering, the philosophical undertones and overtones are immediately apparent. He talks about his hopes for NAHBE, but he relates those hopes to his perceptions of American history. He came to the United States because of his belief that anyone who wants to create, whether in science or the arts, should be given an environment that fosters hope and is congenial for people who can't live without hope. His life in the United States has not been easy.

Most difficult of all has been the fact that he feels somewhat like a stowaway, since he is working in a government laboratory without government status. He holds no government position and is on no government payroll. Because of his gratitude to the people at the Naval Academy, he has made his pollution-free engine available to the U.S. Government. Indeed, Blaser insisted that the engine be named after the Naval Academy. He expects

All the exotic systems of the postoil era have one thing in common. They will have to be developed in the human interest and cannot be the exclusive property of any single nation.

no bonanza for what could be one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.

Thanks to some U.S. Department of Energy officials who know of his work, Blaser has been put in contact with a group of farmers in Selma, Alabama, who have been trying to develop low-cost alcohol as a gasoline substitute. The Selma experience in "growing" alcohol and Blaser's ability to produce a multifuel engine should make for an ideal mating.

F

or years, leading scientists in the United States and elsewhere have tried to find ways of cutting down on the world's fertilizer needs. Since it takes a ton of petroleum to make a ton of fertilizer, the connection between the world's hunger problem and the energy shortage can readily be recognized. The inability of many nations to grow enough food to prevent famine is directly tied to their inability to buy enough fertilizer. Nitrates are expensive. Hence, research that can fix nitrogen in the soil stands very high on any list of challenges to sCIence.

In the United States, the C.F. Kettering Research Laboratory in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the du Pont Laboratory in Wilmington, Delaware, are generally recognized as leaders in nitroge.n-fixation research. But significant work in this field is also being done by an individual, a Czech refugee named Backlov Petric, who now lives in California. His model is the legume, one of the few products of nature that are able to make their own fertilizer. Petric has made significant findings in the way legumes use bacteria to pluck nitrogen out of the air.

It is much too soon to predict when nitrogen fixation will become a working reality. But enough progress has been made to warrant far more government support than has been given to date to nitrogen fixation. The United States had far less to go on when it committed itself to the Manhattan Project for splitting the atom, less than 40 years ago. Yet nitrogen fixation could be more important for the future than atomic energy.

The magazine The Futurist recently identified several promising solar energy uses or approaches that mayor may not be developed before the turn of the century, but that in any case will be permanent features of the human future. Among these systems are the following: 1. Ground-based Solar Thermal Plants. The main characteristic of these plants is a vast array of fiat mirrors (heliostats) that trap solar energy in a central receiving unit. Water is introduced, as in geothermal system, to produce steam that in turn is fed into a "At last Fve hit upon a generator to produce electric cheap source of energy, Janet." power. The U.S. Department of

Energy has authorized the building of a I O-megawatt power plant at Barstow, California.

2. Geosynchronous Solar Satellite Stations (GSSS). Readers of science fiction and moviegoers who are aficionados of Star Wars or Close Encounters of a Third Kind will have no difficulty visualizing the designs for massive solar-energy satellites placed in fixed orbit 35,000 kilometers beyond earth. Each satellite collects solar energy by means of "photovoltaic" cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity for microwave transmission to ground-receiving antennas.

3. Low-Orbit Solar Satellites (LOSS). The system here is similar to that of the GSSS, except that the stations are orbited at a height of 4,600 kilometers. The conversion of solar power into electrical energy takes place in what is called a "cascaded dielectric" power system. The current is generated by two unaligned magnetic poles, which release electrons to flow through an external circuit. Energy is transmitted, as with GSSS, through microwaves. The transmission capacity of the LOSS is unaffected by its lower altitude.

What about costs? Obviously, the big expense will be the initial investment. But the operating costs will be low enough to offset the amortization of the original cost.

W

e have saved for last the most dramatic and probably the most efficient system of all. It involves the use of pure hydrogen.

Like the dream of transmuting cheap metals into gold, the notion that hydrogen can be split off from water and used as a universal form of cheap energy has lit up the minds of philosophers and scientists ever since the letters H20 were first affixed to water.

George Merkl, the same man who has pioneered in stabilizing the hydrogen atom to liberate oil from rock and tar sand, is now attempting to revolutionize organic chemistry by separating hydrogen from water. He sees a model in the process by which the sun itself creates energy. He believes it is possible to create a controlled solar reaction on earth.

George Merkl is not given to melodramatic forecasts, but he believes we will have cheap energy from pure hydrogen in our lifetime and that the oceans themselves will furnish the inexhaustible raw material.

The search for new energy systems involves more than just the need to provide an alternative to Arab oil. The primary need is to find the kind of energy that will run an industrial society without imposing ghastly penalties on living things.

The Merkls and the Blasers and dozens of others like them may be the architects of a new industrial revolution. It will not happen overnight, but neither will it be spread out over decades.

The new technology will not require, as did the last, that humans be subordinate and subservient to the machine. A new and higher station for the individual is being built. The past century has seen a phenomenal increase in human productivity and an expansion in human consciousness.

All the exotic systems that will figure in the postoil era have one thing in common. They will have to be developed in the human interest and cannot' be the exclusive property of any single nation. It is difficult to imagine the emergence of such new sources of energy outside a world energy authority-just as it is difficult to imagine a world energy authority outside a workable world order that can ensure world peace.

0 About the Author: Norman Cousins is chairman of Saturday Review's editorial board. Among his published H'orks are Talks With Nehru, The Celebration of Life and Doctor Schweitzer of Lambarene.

O

bservers of the American scene have often commented, only half-jokingly, that the United States would grind to a halt if the volunteers, who help in practically every aspect of American life, decided one morning to stay home.

But the eventuality of that happening seems remote, considering the willingness, sometimes almost compulsive, of Americans to give of their spare time. Today about 47 million people-one of every four Americans over the age of 13-are engaged in organized voluntary activity. However, figures cannot adequately convey the breadth and depth of volunteer activity that takes place in the country.

Every day in every city, town, village and hamlet volunteers contribute time and labor for literally thousands of different causes,

many of which would never exist without the unpaid services of these energetic and socially motivated citizens. Increasingly, the work of such volunteers is helping fill the gap between what the government can afford to do and what still needs to be done.

The idea of organized volunteerism-as different from the older practice of individual, neighborly help-was born in the 19th century and is still developing. Essentially, volunteer work breaks down into two categories: service and advocacy. Service takes in a broad spectrum of activities related to fields like health, education, sports, culture, religion. Advocacy covers good government, environmental and ecological issues, minority rights-to name just three common causes of the day. Today's volunteers don't just meet

1. A volunteer visits a young prison inmate as part of a prisoner rehabilitation program. The volunteer may be a psychologist, a social worker, or even an ex-convict. 2. Using a van provided for him as a Red Cross worker, this driver helps transport a woman in a wheelchair for the Retired Senior Volunteer Program in Wichita, Kansas.

3. Combining a traditional quilting gathering with social work, these women make quiltsfor a West Virginia orphanage.

4. An elderly patient is carried to safety by a Red Cross volunteer as flood waters rise into a nursing home in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. 5. In the Big Brother/Big Sister program, an older person "adopts" a youngster to offer guidance and companionship in school work and play. 6. College students in North Carolina get together to build a house for a family whose home burned down.

needs of the people; they solve problems.

Volunteer work is no longer only the rich helping the poor or the strong helping the weak. The elderly, the disabled, the unemployedpeople usually thought of as recipients of service-are finding that they have something to offer the less fortunate. The average volunteer is no longer a woman. Today, a large number of women have taken up full-time jobs. There are, however, still many who offer their services both as a means of helping others and to learn skills that could lead to employment. The same is true of students preparing for a career. Retired people are finding enriching activity to fill their days and ward off loneliness. A new volunteer is the businessman. Many companies in the United States are encouraging

employees to take time off-with full pay-to donate their time and talent to the community.

The reasons that motivate these volunteers may be as diverse as the types of volunteers themselves. It could be self-realization, an overriding desire to serve the community, an escape from loneliness, a training ground. But, more than all this, in the words of Barbara Sloane, former director of the Council of Jewish Women's Field Service, "Volunteerism allows people to give of themselves. That's what it's all about-unselfconsciousgiving.

If you take away from anybody the opportunity to give of himself, then you're holding him back. You're actually hindering his development as a human being."

0

I. Volunteers take city children to camp out in the woods and learn about outdoor life. 2. A young graduate in city planning receives practical training while working as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteer for a community center in New Orleans. 3. Volunteers clean up trash beside a highway. 4. A geography graduate (left), who grew upon a farm, teaches agricultural science at an alternative high school to students who had dropped out but now wi~h to continue their education. 5. Volunteers help in an archaeological dig near Plymouth, Massachusetts. 6. A young girl helps in a hospital kitchen. Hospitals attract a large number of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds. They perform a variety of functions ~from cheering up a patient to helping the staff in chores. 7. In her spare time. this teacher guides visitors through a museum as her contribution to her home town. Pittsburgh.

Virtually every social change of significance in the past century has arisen out of independent, voluntary effort; from yesterday's suffragettes to today's environmentalists.

This is not an assertion of the inmittee or associatIOn and tackle the problem on their own. The fact that they novativeness of all or even most instituwere not officially authorized to do so tions in the independent sector. It points, but simply had nominated themselves to rather, to its relative freedom from contake on the assignment didn't give them a straints and rigidities. New entities can form overnight-and dissolve just as moment's hesitation. Full speed ahead!

Out of that tradition has come an swiftly. There is freedom to try-and extraordinary array of institutions: some freedom to fail. of the finest universities, museums and Every nonprofit activity isn't innovative. scientific laboratories in the world, in- But the sector provides an environment numerable religious institutions, sym- for innovativeness, for inventiveness and here are at least six million non- phony orchestras, libraries, private for creativity. There is here something of schools, social agencies, hospitals and so the extravagant redundancy of nature-a profit organizations in the United on. The variety is extraordinary: Alcohol- thousand grains of pollen for one that States today, their annual outlays exceeding $80 billion. They comprise a ics Anonymous, volunteer firefighting serves its purpose, a thousand eggs for one third, or independent, sect<;>r, in addition to units, the Society for the Prevention of that gets fertilized, luxuriant planlessness, Cruelty to Animals, environmental competition, survival and loss. government and private business. This extraordinary segment of American life groups, consumer groups, good governAn idea that is controversial, unpopular ment groups and homes for the elderly. or "strange" has little chance in either is too diverse to lend itself to general description. There is the Red Cross and In short, the third sector isn't a coherent the commercial or political market place. the Little League for very young baseball . and describable thing. It is an arena in But in the free world of the nonprofit which freedom flourishes. It is a "loose" sector it may well find the few followers players; the philanthropic United Way area of American life, unconstrained, necessary to raise it to maturity. It is, and the Friends of the Sea Otter, the in fact, the natural home of nonmajoriGideon Society (which supplies free unbureaucratic and decentralized.

Bibles to hotels) and the American ColPerhaps its most fruitful characteristic tarian ideas, movements and values.

This is not to suggest that all it enis the opportunity it provides for a conlege of Surgeons. stant flux of ideas and activities. One courages is quantity. Both the commercial Volunteerism, which is the basis for hundred thousand ideas can spring up in and political market places are often subthe nonprofit independent sector, is as a single week. If99,000 of them blow away ject to leveling forces that may seriously old in the United States as the country before the week i~ over, so be it. The threaten high standards. In the nonprofit itself-in fact older. It was fairly common following week another hundred thousand arena, the fiercest champions of excellence in 17th and 18th century colonial America will spring up. The only ideas that survive may have their say. for settlements to come into existence As in the for-profit sector, there are the continuous winnowing will be those before there were any governmental arinnumerable opportunities for the rethat serve some purpose, that fill some rangements. Settlers fell into the habit of sourceful hereto start something, need, and that speak to the condition of voluntary collaboration to accomplish explore, grow, cooperate, lead, make a the times.

It is a supremely un bureaucratic the necessary shared tasks ofacommunity. difference.

At a time in history when Later when European travelers visited phenomenon. No bureaucracy could perindividuality is threatened by the impermit a hundred thousand ideas to spring up, the United States in the 19th century they sonality of large-scale organization, this and if they did spring up, it certainly were amazed-and sometimes amusedemphasis on individual initiative is a couldn't allow most of them to blow away. by the persistence of this American habit. priceless counterweight.

If two or more Americans perceived a To do so would imply that some bureauAt the same time this sector is the crat had failed-either in letting the idea community problem, they might turn seedbed and greenhouse of American spring up, or in not nurturing it after it did to government to solve it, but it was just pluralism.

Freedom of choice is only spring up. as probable that they would form a com-

T o

ENTSECTOR

1:-------------significant to the extent that there is a diversity of alternatives to choose from.

The nonprofit institutions ensure that diversity-of beliefs, goals, values, communities, dreams, philosophies.

As the United States has grown more populous, more intricately organized, and subject-inevitably-to more central direction, a new virtue of these nonprofit, independent organizations has become apparent. In a huge society in which far too many citizens feel anonymous and alienated, these institutions provide rich opportunities for personal involvement and participation in national life complementing the basic constitutional instruballot. ment of citizen participation-the

C

itizens banding together can make themselves heard in the centers of power. Local community needs, sometimes very poorly understood by a distant legislature, can be met by local action.

Seenfrom this perspective the independent sector is a means of preserving grass-roots vitality, of escaping total centralization and bureaucratic clearances. As such it becomes an instrument of community and citizen expression.

Institutions within the independent sector can dissent from the established a'rder,monitor the actions of the powerful, and serve as the guardian of intellectual and artistic freedom. They can harbor every critic-and every innovator.

Finally, the independent sector serves the individual's need to be needed, the human impulse to serve. Compassion can express itself in direct charitable activities.

Here all of the bonding impulses, all of the need to belong, to serve the community, are given free rein.

How is this sector supported? Of course,

some of the activity does not need any formal backing, financial or otherwise.

A dozen neighbors get together to petition for a traffic signal on their street; a group of mothers volunteer to sew costumes for the school play; a few citizens volunteer to tend the lawns around the local war memorial.

But most of the activity does depend on contributed funds. In 1977, private giving to nonprofit institutions was estimated at $35.2 billion. Philanthropic foundations, which are the most talked about, most visible and most controversial donors, accounted for slightly over $2 billionwhich is less than 6 per cent of the total.

The great bulk of donations is from individuals-$29.5 billion, almost 84 per cent of the total.

Some radicals and populists disapprove of private philanthropy, charging that it puts all kinds of ventures at the mercy of rich private citizens. If the whims and arrogance of the rich are to be avoided, these critics argue, nonprofit activities must be financed out of the public treasury ("the people's money").

There are several flaws in the argument.

First, a high percentage of individual giving comes not from "the rich" but from middle- and lower-middle-income families.

Private giving in the United States has an extraordinary broad base. Second, "the people's money," once it gets lifted out of the people's pocket and funneled into the public treasury, isn't always easy to get at.

A local group that has been fighting its way through the layers of a distant bureaucracy to obtain a modest grant for a neighborhood project may look with relief on readily available private funding from a local source. Finally, groups concerned with finding solutions to problems that are controversial or novel, find

that government is often unresponsive.

Virtually every significant social change of the past century has arisen out of the independent sector. The abolitionists, the populists, the suffragettes, those who sought legislation against child labor, the environmentalists, consumer groupsall of these sprang up here.

Today too all over the United States, American scientists, businessmen, engineers, artists, nurses, labor leaders on their own are solving problems, starting organizations, devising new technologies, helping their neighbors, combating injustice, pioneering new fields of science, creating jobs and in countless other ways enriching the lives of others.

Yet, despite this positive contribution that they have been making to American life, in recent years organizations in all parts of this sector have shared an uneasiness. They feel that their place in American life is threatened, that the walls are closing in. They worry about the erosion of private giving, about tax policies that may bring further erosion, about the increasingly heavy flow of government money into the sector and about the government rulebook that comes with this money.

But even as doubts and fears about its continued independent existence are raised, we are confident that the resourcefulness inherent in the independent sector will protect, preserve and enhance this unique part of American life.

D About the Author: John W. Gardner retired in early 1977 as chairman of Common Cause, a voluntary, nonprofit "citizens' lobby." He is the author of No Easy Victories, In Common Cause and Know or Listen to Those Who Know. This article has been adaptedfrom his recent address to the Council on Foundations, Seattle, Washington.

FAME CAME, TOO LATE

The world was too slow in recognizing the genius of this gifted and eccentric painter, wh'o died penniless, bitter-and famous.

Toward the end of his life, Louis Michel Eilshemius said of himself, "I'm ten persons in one, but I'm a hard-luck fellow." Certainly the second part of this self-description was, for once, no exaggeration. Although history records other artists who were destroyed by their chosen profession, Eilshemius' example is particularly poignant. Part of his tragedy came, no doubt, from a lack of emotional resilience which prevented his withstanding the worst consequences of the creative life. It may have been that in the beginning he would have been satisfied with a modest success along academic lines, but Eilshemius made the fatal error of measuring success exclusively in terms of public acclaim.

By the time he was catapulted to prominence in the early 1930s, fame had tarried too long, and apparently no amount of attention could heal the deep wounds inflicted by years of neglect.

Eilshemius was basically a traditionalist whose individuality was the natural result of a powerful imagination and a personal vision that could not be denied. The irony is that he was finally rescued from oblivion by those whose aesthetic values were radically divergent from his own. His "discovery" in 1917 by Dadaist Marcel Duchamp and other representatives of the New York avant-garde may be the best known, and heretofore most "respectable," aspect of Eil.shemius' career. The fact is that Eilshemius was adopted-not unlike the way Henri Rousseau had been by Picasso and others of the French The subject of Louis Michel Eilshemius' Afternoon Wind (1899) typifies the predominant interest of this painter's work -the female form. His paintings of women number fully one thousand.

In a profound way, Eilshemius' paintings became entries in a personal diary, whose pages graphically document the fantasies and obsessions of a tormented soul living in fear of oblivion. avant-garde-as a mascot. He embodied, it seemed, values that had become central to current modernist ideas of creativity: spontaneity, lack of sophistication and training, and direct expression of subconscious activity. Duchamp was joined in his support by Joseph Stella, Abraham Walkowitz, Gaston Lachaise, Charles Demuth and others with similar interests. Whatever virtues they may have recognized in Eilshernius (and it would be difficult to overlook the exhilarating lyricism of his color), they valued him primarily as a symbolic tool in modernism's continuing assault on traditional values.

Eilshemius' "discovery" began when, at 53, he submitted a couple of recent works to the unjuried exhibition of Independent Artists.

Duchamp proclaimed one of them, Supplication, to be one of the only two significant entries in the show. Largely through Duchamp's efforts, Eilshemius was given a one-man show in 1920 by the progressive Societe Anonyme. The hostility with which this show was greeted broke Eilshemius' spirit: shortly thereafter he put up his brushes forever. But a second Societe exhibition in 1924 (selected from the artist's less eccentric middle period) enlisted the support of severalinfluential critics, and Eilshemius was on his way.

But, as rapidly as it had risen, Eilshemius' public reputation subsided. Despite a number of exhibitions over the following years, and the faithful support of enthusiastic collectors such as Duncan Phillips and Joseph H. Hirshhorn, his position in American art was far from secure.

In 1978, 37 years after the artist's death, attention was focused upon him as it has not been since the late 1930s. His first major museum retrospective opened November 9, 1978, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, where it was shown through January 1, 1979. Since then it has been touring the country under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution.

The show includes more than 80 examples of the artist's work, all drawn from the extensive holdings of the Hirshhorn Museum, and provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the less familiar as well as the better known aspects of Eilshemius. Many who know the artist only through his more bizarre subjects, awkwardly painted in the so-called "primitive" manner that first brought him attention, may be surprised to see early drawings and watercolors of great delicacy and sensitivity. These, together with the early landscapes, present a facet of the artist that is too often ignored. The best of the landscapes are truly splendid examples oflate 19th-century American painting in the then-prevalent Barbizon-inspired manner.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Eilshemius' development is the dramatic shift from this charming and conventional late 19thcentury landscape manner to the eccentric, melodramatic and frequently disturbing subjects and idiosyncratic style of the later period.

The work seems to be divided into two major groups, with the transformation taking place around 1910. The crucial question in connection with Eilshemius is what brought it about. Even allowing for a reluctant response to the impact of modern painting and to other external aesthetic influences, it is clear that the answer lies in the unusually direct connection between his life experience and his art.

Eilshemius' personal history constitutes one of the most interesting and pitiful stories in American art. Born in 1864 to wealthy and socially prominent immigrant parents at the family estate near Newark, New Jersey, his beginnings were privileged and auspicious.

After a period at Cornell University, Eilshemius overcame his father's predictable objections to a career as a painter and enrolled at New York's Art Students League. From there, like so many aspiring young An automobile accident in 1932 confined Eilshemius to a chair in his cluttered quarters in New York/or the rest o/his lonely, embittered life.

American artists, he went on to Paris and the crowded, smoke-filled classrooms of the Academie Julian. Eilshemius dutifully followed a path that promised a successful academic career. His earliest paintings, reflecting the influence of Camille Corot and George Inness, placed him well within the context of cOQtemporary American artthe native landscape tradition qualified by a conservative, tonal response to Impressionism; and he was rewarded by the acceptance of landscapes by the National Academy of Design for its exhibitions in 1887 and 1888.

This official recognition, apparently so promising, had to sustain Eilshemius for the remainder of his active career. His subsequent entries were rejected, and he continued to work for three decades without further encouragement. This involuntary isolation ultimately destroyed him. But there is no question that this very isolation, with the psychological effect it imposed, is largely responsible for the full emergence of Eilshemius' distinctive artistic personality. As the years went by, the artist must have realized that he was, indeed, painting himself. In a profound way, Eilshemius' paintings became entries in a personal diary, the pages of which graphically document the fears, fantasies and obsessions of a tormented soul.

Try as he might, he could not seem to establish lasting friendships, and his efforts to attract and win the favors of young women were equally and pathetically unsuccessful. This devotee of the female

form, whose paintings of nude women may number as many as one thousand, this expert observer who claimed to know his subject so intimately that he should have been a doctor, never married and perhaps never enjoyed a satisfying relationship with a woman.

It is, in fact, in the nude figure paintings that the autobiographical current surfaces most tellingly. The endless progression of nymphscavorting in landscapes, bathing in pools, posing in interiors that suggest the activities as well as the appearance of a brothel, and even floating in the air-inhabit an exclusively female world created by Eilshemius as a substitute for unfulfilled experience.

Of course, Eilshemius' work was not exclusively devoted to or motivated by women. His was a fundamentally romantic sensibility that led him to explore the full thematic catalogue of late 19th century art. This quest also led him to travel extensively, a luxury he could indulge thanks to the generous inheritance he received upon his father's death in 1892. During the following decade, the artist set off on a series of expeditions in search of his "Muse." His journeys took him several times to Europe, to North Africa in 1892 and even, during the winter of 1901-02, to Samoa and the South Pacific. The compositions painted several years later in response to the Samoan sojourn rank among Eilshemius' most impressive works. Certainly the years during which they were done, 1907-08, mark the period of his greatest productivity and highest level of achievement. By this time, after a brief and unsuccessful residence in Rome in 1903, Eilshemius had decided to settle down in New York, where he spent the rest of his life. The resulting views take their place with the Samoan paintings as among his greatest accomplishments.

Eilshemius sustained this remarkable level of creative activity up until about 1910. In addition, he published at his own expense a number of volumes of poetry, prose and musical composition that, though in quality far below the level of his paintings, express a charmingly old-fashioned romantic sensibility. But the sense of isolation that had been growing over the years finally affected his work and public behavior. He began to distribute his shamelessly self-laudatory handbills (see next column).

In 1911 Eilshemius' mother died, and that year seems to mark the crucial shift in his art.

It may be that in the year following her death he painted nothing whatsoever; it is certain that fantasy and unreality became much more pronounced in the years afterward and, in many cases, technical ability deteriorated lamentably.

Always an uneven artist, he had even more difficulty in maintaining consistent quality. In 1911 he also introduced the decorative "painted frame" that reinforces a sense of artificiality in his later work and, appropriately, to our eyes suggests a television-image world. The work of the period after about 1913 is characterized by rapid and direct application of paint, broad handling, arbitrary color and the substitution of cardboard for canvas. He increasingly turned to whatever support material was available, including music sheets and cigar-box tops.

After Eilshemius stopped painting in 1921, he devoted himself to self-promotion and to the cultivation of his eccentric Bohemian image.

By the late 1930s virtually everyone in the New York art world knew of Eilshemius. Many, including friends like the Milton Averys and Joseph Stella, visited him regularly in an attempt to bring some warmth and fellowship into his lonely life. Similarly, Alfred Stieglitz addressed ex-

LOUIS MICHEL EILSHEMIUS, M.A. Educator, Ex-Actor, Amateur All Round Doctor, Mesmerist-Prophet and Mystic, Reader of Hands and Faces, Linguist of 5 Languages, Graphologist, Dramatist (7 Works), Short Story Writer and Novelettes (26 Works), Humorist Galore, Ex-Mimic, animal voices and humans, Ex All Round Athletic Sportsman (to 1889). Universal Supreme Critic.

Ex Don Giovanni, Designer of Jewelry, etc., Spiritist, Spirit-Painter Supreme, Best Marksman to 1881, Ex Chess and Billiard Player to 1909, Scientist supreme: all ologies, Ex Fancy amateur Dancer, The most rapid master creator in the 3 Arts, Most wonderful and diverse painter of nude groups in the world. Travelling salesman-in 30 cities on 30 nights, Philanthropist, Saved 20 lives-3 from suicide, Greatest Religionist, Globe Trotter, Half the Globe, Western.

His middle name is "Variety." All the supreme Genius Minds down the ages find Domain in

tremely kind and encouraging letters to "M y Dear Friend and Master."

But by this time Eilshemius' condition had tragically deteriorated. As the result of being struck by an automobile in 1932, he was confined to a chair for the rest of his days. His room in the family brownstone on East 57th Street was described as a perfect Victorian chamber, gaslit, with Oriental carpets on the floor and paintings strewn everywhere. As the years passed and visitors climbed the stairs and descended, often with paintings under their arms, the room was slowly emptied of the results of a lifetime's labor.

This generally unkempt and apparently demented old artist, who alternately mumbled and shouted curses at a world too slow in recognizing his greatness, and whom some authorities were indeed hailing as an authentic American genius, provided journalists with better copy than they could have fabricated on their own. Unfortunately, the many articles bringing further attention to the selfstyled Mahatma did nothing to alleviate his desperate circumstances.

With the family fortune long ago exhausted and the house heavily mortgaged, there was not even money to pay the faithful servant who nevertheless continued to care for Eilshemius and his brother Henry, often buying food from her own savings. Despite efforts on his behalf by his biographer, William Schack, and other friends, Eilshemius was on the whole treated disgracefully. Even the dealers who were by now selling some of his pictures refused to help.

Penniless, bitter-and famous- Eilshemius died of pneumonia on December 29, 1941. His funeral was attended by a distinguished group of artists, critics, writers and museum professionals-the very company to which he had so ardently sought admittance since his return from Paris.

Of the 3,000 or more works Eilshemius left to us, the majority are stamped by an unmistakable personality that sets them well apart from the work of his contemporaries. Eilshemius' art, like that of Albert Pinkham Ryder, with whom he has so much in common, is subjective and metaphorical. And the enjoyment of it depends upon a willingness to suspend disbelief-and frequently gravity-entering with the artist into the enchanted realm of his fantasies. This imaginative landscape is occasionally disturbing; but more often it is playful and lighthearted, animated by a healthy measure of conscious humor. It may be this element of playful fantasy that is overlooked by Eilshemius' severest critics.

But the role of visionary art, and its contribution, is to remove us by whatever means the artist has at his disposal from a world conditioned and circumscribed by the limitations of everyday existence.

In this, Eilshemius at his best has been successful. His gift to the¡ viewer is an invitation to participate in, or at least eavesdrop on, a dialogue between a remarkably unsophisticated soul and his imaginative creations.

About the Author: Paul J. Karlstrom, West Coast area director of Archives of American Art, is the author of Louis Michel Eilshemius.

Above: When canvas was too costly for him, Eilshemius lVould turn to whatever was at hand, like this cigarbox lid. The underside of the lid contains a perfectly realized painting in miniature (top), whose scale in no way diminishes the work's luminosity, played against dark areas as he portrayed his private world.

Right: Ranking among Louis Eilshemius' greatest creative accomplishments are his studies of his home city, like this East Side, New York (1908).

Left: A dramatic and mystical rendition of Macbeth and the Witches ( 1908) was painted after a visit to another visionary artist, Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Below: Three Bathers (1918) is an important example of Eilshemius' later, more idiosyncratic style.

THE ORIGINS OF The dangers of suppression of ,the individual's power of independent thought and the destruction of his personal dignity are ever present in human society. Seldom has an analysis of these dangers been made more penetratingly than in Hannah Arendt's remarkable work. The world being what it is, few books need to be reread as often as this one.

The manuscript of Hannah Arendt's classic, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was finished in 1949, more than four years after the death of Hitler, less than four years before Stalin's death. The book was first published in 1951.

To the latest edition (1966), she added an introductory essay, noting the detotalitarianization in Russia after the death of Stalin and assessing the significance of the Chinese revolution. She senses here some lightening of the somber darkness and hopes that the light will strengthen.

But this is an aside. The events she tried to understand came to an at least provisional end with the death of Hitler and Stalin. These events composed a phenomenon that amounted to an almost total eclipse of the essence of man, a nearly complete destruction of his dignity.

Rich and precise in documentation, penetrating in analysis, Hannah Arendt's book examines, with courage and hope, a malady in the psyche of man that almost seemed to spell the death of mankind. The agonizing thoroughness of its diagnosis has won for the work great tributes which it abundantly merits. To reconsider it in terms of its details would only be a task of archival scholarship. Far more profitable would it be to take heed of its warning and share its aspiration.

The warning is here: Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man,

Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited.

The aspiration emerges in the sustained momentum of the book and its clear faith that Doom is a superstitious concept. Arendt concedes that Progress tOQ is likewise an invalid concept. This is because human history is not an unreeling of encoded instructions written into the genes, the blood, the protoplasm of man in some dark backward of time; it is not automatic ascent to Utopia or descent to the gas chambers of death factories. If man falls, the fall will be self-wrought; if he is redeemed, it will be because he finally manages to pull himself up by his bootstraps.

Several appraisals of this work have noted that Arendt's arguments can often seem to be most abstruse, making great demands on the reader for intellectual readjustments.

The main reason for this difficulty seems to be that while she definitely relates the beginning of the degradation of man to social origins-in the desperate choice of solutions unworthy of man for political, social and economic problems-she seems to need the concept of a "radical evil" when she studies the frightening nature of the final degradation. At this nadir, she finds it difficult to rationalize human behavior "in the concept of 'a perverted ill will' that

TOTALITARIANISM

conrinued

She still remains unshaken in her faith in human freedom; otherwise she would not have dared to retain hope after painting this vast fresco of a descent into hell. could be explained by comprehensible totalitarianism we witnessed

motives."

In

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an unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive. Just as the victims in the death factories or the holes of oblivion are no longer "human" in the eyes of their executioners, so this newest species of criminals is beyond the pale even of solidarity in human sinfulness.

In spite of the intimation here of sulfurous fumes smelling of burnt human flesh, boiling up from a doomladen netherworld through the cracks in the floor of human solidarity to blot out the sun forever, it is absolutely essential to understand that Arendt is not going back in desperation to a lost Manichaean myth os, of some dark power outside man that bends him to its will. She still remains unshaken in her faith in human freedom; otherwise she would not have dared to retain hope after painting this vast fresco of a descent into hell. But she is repeating the warning uttered

by Pico delia Mirandola during the heady optimism of the Renaissance: that freedom is real, but it is a bitter-sweet gift, and depending on how responsibly or irresponsibly you handle it, you can become an angel or you can become a devil; and she has been able to show how unbelievably devilish man can indeed become, with the surrender of responsibility.

Since thought is the highest capacity of man, error in thinking can corrupt his being; and the corruption is especially swift when the thought relates to man's concept of himself, of human nature. Arendt has pointed out elsewhere that the real danger in theories like behaviorism is not that they are true, but that they can become true if man accepts them as the ultimate truth about himself.

If one ignores the fact that evolution is continuously creative and opts for reductionism, one will end up by subjecting the higher being to the laws of the lower, by reducing the person to the animal and then to a clod of matter that can be pushed in any direction, molded into any kind of marionette by indoctrination or terror. Arendt notes the fateful momentum with which the laws of history were thus degraded. To claim that man is more than animal is not to deny evolution but to affirm its creativity.

Arendt's extended study of the activation of the imperialist drive by heady concepts like the chosen race and manifest â&#x20AC;˘â&#x20AC;˘ destiny, with penetrating analyses of men like Rudyard Kipling, Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cromer and T.E. Lawrence, is by itself a brilliant contribution to historiography.

But a point which she repeatedly stresses in her work is that when error, the abdica-

tion of responsibility, exceeds a critical magnitude, there is a discontinuous mutation, a quantal leap from the shelf, though it has been steadily descending, of the continent of man into a practically bottomless abyss. There is a leap, as she says, from Darwin to Marquis de Sade. Though the old imperialism could rely only on rationalizations, they were paraded as reasons. The genocide of the death factories appears to Arendt as a deliberate severance of all continuities of reason. This is why she wants us to see totalitarianism as radically different from the forms familiar to earlier history like imperialism, dictatorship, tyranny. It seeks "to destroy the essence of man."

If here one transiently gets the feeling that Arendt is leaving rational historiography to develop an abstruse mystique, the impression passes when one reads further. A tropism for the transcendental seems to be inherent in man, and, therefore, when he dethrones God, he has to install the devil. It is man's nature that leads to this mystique.

Arendt has piled up impressive evidence to show that violence, used by traditional despotisms to consolidate power, becomes an end in itself, irrational but absolute, in totalitarianism. Violence becomes identical with power, its self-affirmation.

And violence administeredfor a destructive principle that violate.

power's (and not for law's) sake turns into will not stop until there is nothing left to

If the totalitarians betrayed man and came very near to destroying him, this became possible only because men first betrayed themselves. Arendt massively documents the betrayal by all the important groups of society; the masses, the bureaucrats, the intellectuals. When a book is so richly faceted that it can be reconsidered from many perspectives, some principle of selection has to be adopted; the most profitable would seem to be to benefit from this analysis so that all can be alert to the danger of the recurrence of such a somber phase in the history of man.

The facile assumptions that the masses are indifferent to decisions affecting social destiny, and that in any case they do not matter, were exploded by the totalitarians.

The masses were prised loose from class solidarity, atomized and exposed to propaganda that was blatant indoctrination.

Totalitarian regimes seem to have studied all the warnings extended by Ortega y Gasset about the possible advent of . mass society and used them for expediting its arrival. It is true that even in free societies mass communication, as discipline and practice, tends to view persons as "targets" of communication impact rather than as active factors in a total communication process. This pitfall, however, is well known, and free societies have resources to avoid it.

But the atomized mass man becomes the ideal Pavlovian dog for totalitarian conditioning. Arendt shows how easily the Nazis were able to sell myths like a Jewish world conspiracy and forgeries like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

TOTALITARIANISM

conrinued

Authentic living does not come to you giftwrapped from history; it has to be rewon every day by the individual human being's fresh affirmation of his integrity. to the masses. The layman is not born a moron; it is by a surrender of responsibility that he becomes a Pavlovian animal. The remedy therefore is continuous alertness.

The bureaucracy has to undertake even more demanding self-criticism because of its specific occupational hazards.

Arendt has shown that in the pseudomysticism that develops among bureaucrats who have forgotten that they are men and become machines, rule by decree comes to be preferred to rule by law. The latter needs to be interpreted; the decree has the naked purity of absolute power. It is for this reason that both in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, the secret police was given an enormous range of power and allowed to encroach into many fields normally handled by civil administration. Totalitarianism and catastrophe are just round the corner for any society that lets itself be governed by officials whose actions are shielded from the forums of public debate.

Ever since the appearance of La Trahison des Clercs by Julien Benda, it has become increasingly difficult for the ordinary man to share the intellectual's high opinion of himself. A recent study by Philip Rieff (On Intellectuals) shows even greater disenchantment. Threatened by the possibility of being specialized out of existence, the intellectual has become marginal to society, though he claims monopoly over its cultural apparatus. He occasionally dissents, but more often than not he is made the court jester of the power elite, who render him harmless by giving him freedom within ineffectual limits. Or he sells out to particular interest groups. And while one would have thought that rightness in thought, word and deed-in fact all along the line indicated by the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha-would be the mot!o of the intellectual's metier, he has shown a surprising readiness to embrace solutions unworthy of man for the problems of men. And here he has shown a consistent inconsistency too. "Many of the intellectuals now," writes William Irwin Thompson, "are so hungry for order that they would be willing to see the end of democracy and some new kind of Napoleonic order coming in." But, in the thirties, as Arendt has shown, the intellectuals embraced disorder, violence and disintegration in a masochistic celebration of a Wagnerian twilight of the gods.

To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world.

The individual cannot integrate himself into the world in a way which will hold out some promise that the further journey of both through time and history win be auspicious, unless he first integrates himself. This was the perspective of Plato and Platonic reminiscences are invariably present whenever Hannah Arendt takes up the problems of the

nature alfd destiny of man. In this book she recalls Plato's fight with the ancient sophists, who sought to replace truth by opinion which clearly was the rationalization of selfinterest. She points out that while the old sophists were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality. But man can proceed to destroy history by distorting the reality of the world only if he has already lapsed into an inauthentic being, into what Plato called "the lie in the soul." This has been described as "lying with the highest part of oneself, and concerning the highest things." Only unremitting work on oneself to preserve one's own integrity can guarantee against such lapse.

Arendt has elsewhere (New Yorker, February 25, 1967) clarified this concept of integrity by referring to a Socratic interior dialogue: Since man contains within himself a partner from whom he can never win release, he will be better ofl' not to live in company with an intruder or liar. Or. since thought is the silent dialogue carried on between me and myself, I must be careful to keep the integrity of this partner intact, for otherwise I shall surely lose the capacity for thought altogether.

In a subsequent work (Crises of the Republic, 1972), Hannah Arendt has discussed the fictitious character of most of the social contract theories of government. Even when a community already in existence draws up a constitution, we can speak only of a tacit consent. "How can we will what is there anyhow?" Society is already there and it is the powers of government that are being defined.

While power may use violence as an instrument, when violence is used as a source of power, the limits of tacit consent are transgressed. The individual is once again free-and obliged-to take a decision regarding his relationship with the state which has lost its legitimacy by such transgression. In Between Past and Future (Meridian, 1970), Arendt pointed out that the situation gains the maximum clarity when men are involved in resistance against a conquering force that has overrun the country.

She discusses this with detailed reference to French resistance to the Nazis, pointing up the significance of the fact that this resistance was accompanied by a profound existential analysis of the human predicament, in Sartre and others. If some of the militarists from whom the Nazis drew their inspiration had claimed peace to be a mere interregnum between wars, she too reiterates it, but as a danger against which men should always be on guard. And her summative lesson for the present and future would seem to be this: Authentic living does not come to you gift-wrapped from history; it has to be rewon every day by the fresh affirmation by the individual of his integrity.

This is the only law Hannah Arendt knows that can guarantee human dignity and redeem man's history.

But perhaps it really is not a new law, and it is far more a principle of the being of man than just of his politics. 0 About the Author: Krishna Chaitanya. a versatile writer on a broad range of subjects, has published a nine-volume history of world literalure. Among his other books are Physics and Chemistry of Freedom.

Biology of Freedom, Psychology of Freedom Freedom. He is ajl-equent contributor to SPAN.

and Sociology of

Formed about three years ago to help housewives gain recognition and dignity for the work they do at home, the Martha Movement today has over 4,000 members all over the United States.

Named after a homemaking Martha referred to in the Bible, the movement speaks for those large numbers of women, including many feminists, in whose lives home and family are pre-eminent.

T

oday, in the wake of the women's movement, the housewife's image is badly tarnished. In this era of the working woman, there are some 23 to 25 million women in the United States whose principal occupation is still their home and family. But instead of gaining rewards for their efforts, they are scorned.

The homemaker is portrayed as a dummy inTV ad commercials showing her worried about "ring-around-the-collar of her husband's shirt." Her tireless efforts on behalfof her family and her neighborhood are ignored by government, which does not consider her work of economic value.

And, perhaps hardest to swallow, her militant sisters have denounced her as well-though this scornful attitude may be changing.

Jinx Melia believes housewives deserve better. Her attempts to help them gain recognition and dignity resulted in the formation, about three years ago, of the Martha Movement, with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

The name derives from a Martha mentioned in the Bible. Jesus visited the

home of Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus, in Bethany. While Martha busied herself with household chores, Mary "sat at Jesus' feet and heard his word."

Finally Martha complained to Jesus about doing all the work alone: "Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me."

Jesus replied: "Thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her."

This may have been the first recorded put-down of the homemaker in history, but it surely hasn't been the last.

"Look," said Mrs. Melia, "those women who are staying back in the community are providing a service. I want to make it prestigious to raise American citizens."

She sees the housewife not as somebody on the sidelines but as a pillar of society.

The Martha Movement wants to help women cope with the problems they are encountering in a changing world.

The worst of these problems appears to

be psychological, and is frequently manifested by depression and a sense of isolation. The housewife, or homemaker, often living in a community far removed from her home town, finds she lacks the traditional extended family to help her in times of need. Large urban developments have further added to the sense of loneliness that pervades her daily life.

Sometimes alcoholism and drug addiction result. Studies by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health have identified mothers with children under the age of six as the largest clinically depressed group in the country. Added to this are guilt feelings about staying in the home, brought on in part by the very success of the women's movement. There are few women .who can serve as role models for the homemaker and help her feel good about herself. Consider, says Jinx Melia, that the Ladies Home Journal gives awards to the women of the year and fails to include a homemaker category.

The skills that the homemaker brings to her life go largely unrecognized even by groups that purport to cater to her.

A leading woman's magazine recently featured an article on going back to work for the "unskilled housewife." Perhaps an even more damning commentary was supplied to me recently by a young woman lawyer. She told me she had two sisters. One was also a lawyer; the other one, who was married and stayed home to raise her children, did "nothing."

No wonder homemakers often hesitate to identify themselves that way. Working on a book about the Martha Movement, Jinx Melia interviewed over 600 housewives, but only IO allowed their names to be used.

Added to the psychological problems are some very real financial problems. The homemaker who chooses to give up her role as a wage earner takes an enormous financial risk -and yet she is not always protected by law should anything happen to her marriage. Ideally, says Eleanor McGovern, chairperson of the Martha Movement, income brought into the home should be divided so that each spouse owns half. Legislation has been introduced in Congress along these lines, recently by Congressman Clifford Allen, and, not surprisingly, in the Senate by George McGovern, Mrs. McGovern's famous husband, who ran for President of the United States in 1972. But passage of such bills is a long way from reality. Not only is income not shared but often a wife's contribution is totally ignored.

Consider, for example, the farm wife.

She most often shares the work with her husband, but never receives compensation for her efforts. When her husband dies, she has to pay an inheritance tax on the farm. The result is often the forced sale of a property that the woman had helped to develop in the first place. Recently, a Federal district court in South Dakota declared that a farm wife's contribution could not be ignored when considering taxes. And in the new tax measure passed

by Congress, there is a provision widely called "the widow's tax" that, in effect, makes the South Dakota decision national policy. In other words, the widow of a farmer, or a small businessman, gets a big break on the estate tax. (Should the situation be reversed, the law gives husbands the same break.)

These reforms are not new ideas. In 1848 the first women's conference in the United States was held at Seneca Falls, New York. There a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions was adopted calling for the married woman to be treated as a full partner in the marriage. In 1963 the

President's Commission on the Status of Women recommended "marriage as a partnership in which each spouse makes a different but equally important contribution," and wanted each spouse to have a "legally defined substantial right to marital property."

Mrs. Melia blames what she calls the "business ethic" -which asks, "Does she make money?"-for the low esteem in which the housewife is held. "Society," claims Jinx Melia, "is making a value judgment about the homemaker." Our society, her belief goes, has not decided that homemaking is important. When society decides an activity is important, such as education, it finds a way to support it. There is no public support for the homemaker. There are no government programs to help women stay at home.

Yet there is Federal funding of day care centers for children to help women get back in the job market.

Jinx Melia didn't start out trying to be the spokeswoman for the homemaker. She was a working woman, a college graduate with a master's degree in educational counseling. Now in her early 40s, she grew up with the successive waves of causes of the sixties and seventies. She was a feminist who joined NOW (the National Organization for Women) in 1967. She was a computer programmer before going to work for an educational publishing company. She married Peter Melia, a civil engineer, and had two children. Jinx Melia joined the ranks of homemakers.

To her surprise, although she had always hoped to be a mother and raise a family, she began to feel that what she was doing was unimportant. She began to lose her selfesteem. She began to realize that other women at home had similar feelings. Still a strong feminist, she felt that the feminists were excluding a large constituency by devaluing the role of the homemaker.

When Jinx Melia tried to explain her position to the leading feminists, she was ignored. She discovered that when she tried to speak as a housewife, she had as much credibility as a person who wants a job as an economist because he or she is a taxpayer. The school board in Fairfield County, Virginia, where she lives, started a committee to eliminate sex bias in education-such things as taking out sexist references in textbooks. Mrs. Melia volunteered, but was told she couldn't be on the board: although she had two schoolage children, she did not represent an organized group. Mrs. Melia is not a woman who takes no easily. She formed

The liberation of women should include all women.

Homemakers are an integral part of the feminist movement.

Above: Eleanor McGovern, chairperson of the Martha Movement. Facing page: Jinx Melia,founder of the movement and chief spokeswoman for American homemakers, with her children ( above) and her husband (below).

the Martha Movement with four other women. "I didn't think about it as a national organization. I thought if I had a letter head that listed me as executive director, I would be listened to," she explained.

Three years later the Martha Movement has more than 4,000 members in 85 chapters distributed across the country.

The Marthas are as diverse as the board. There is no typical Martha, but they do share some characteristics. Most do not have college degrees. "They are more likely to be married to, say, union men and schoolteachers than to doctors," according to Jinx Melia. Almost all have

children or have spent 20 years as homemakers. While some Marthas are in their 70s, most are between 25 and 40. Many work, but usually to supplement a family income. Above all, they share a common bond in their desire to remain at home.

Dues are $5. All members receive Martha Matters, a monthly newsletter covering such diverse topics as how to make money at home and how to recognize and cope with depression. Chapter meetings provide a forum for the members. There is little solicitation. The movement relies heavily on Mrs. Melia's talk show appearances and other publicity to win new recruits.

Despite the visionary goals of its founder, who foresees Marthas on every corporate board and consumer panel, and in every backyard, the fledgling organization is finding the going rough.

Women are not joining the organization as quickly as Mrs. Melia would like.

One problem may be the eponymous name, which leads many people to believe it's a religious organization. It isn't, but the association does deter some people.

Another problem may be some confusion as to where the Martha Movement stands within the spectrum of the women's movement. Unlike other organizations that appeal to the woman at home, the Martha Movement places itself in the mainstream of the feminist movement.

According to Eleanor McGovern, the "liberation of women should include all women, and homemakers are an integral part of the feminist movement. Homemakers will be liberated by being aware of their own contribution to society and an appreciation by that society of the homemaker's contribution." There were many housewives at the National Women's Conference in Houston. In the final resolutions the homemaker certainly was not neglected. The Resolution on Homemakers called for Federal and state laws relating to property and inheritance to consider the contribution of each spouse "of equal importance," and asked Congress to devise a plan to cover homemakers in their own right under Social Security.

Going even further, the resolution also wanted to protect the "displaced homemaker, uprooted because of divorce, widowhood or desertion."

I spoke with Robin Morgan, a leading feminist writer and contributing editor of Ms. magazine, who says, "Most feminists have been homemakers-we're talking about more options for women." There is certainly a feeling of some rapproche-

SHOULD HOUSEWIVES BE PAID? ment between the feminists and the Marthas.

Among the Martha board members, there seems to be a great deal of dissension about the direction the movement should take.

Mrs. McGovern believes that the main priorities should be fund raising, organizational activities (such as chapter formation), and continued publication of Martha M alters. She also supports a current research project to identify homemakers, find out where they are, learn their problems, and put them in touch with each other.

Other members want the movement to become more of an activist organization.

There is talk of a lobbying group to monitor state and local legislation, and to analyze its impact on housewives. There is also some talk of eventually harnessing the consumer purchasing power of the housewife as an effective way to make her voice heard. Jinx Melia admitted that she herself has contemplated running for the Virginia legislature. She also envisions traveling conferences dealing with issues concerning Marthas, homemakers' directories, and telephone support systems that will enable Marthas to call each other and discuss their common problems. Television and radio shows, and development of films and other materials to be made available to women's groups are also planned.

At present, however, money is the major concern. Dues at $5 a year do not bring in the kind of money needed to finance programs; in fact, they barely cover the cost of the newsletter. There have been some corporate contributions, including Avon, Equitable, Borden and Standard Oil of California. These have not been substantial. Without more funds the Martha Movement faces grave problems.

Of course, since the homemaker does not usually control the purse strings, it is unlikely that she will herself have much money to donate to the Martha Movement.

But Jinx Melia is hopeful. Nor does she consider homemaking strictly the province of women. "There are a lot of men out there who are closet homemakers," she says. Maybe when they declare themselves, it will be acceptable to be a Martha.

0 About the Author: Shelby White, a free-lance writer, often contributes articles to Barron's and Institutional Investor.

Doing housework, taking care of children, and carrying out assorted jobs for husbands are work just as much as is performing paid employment in an office or factory. To ignore this is to do a disservice to women in the labor force.

The reality of housework is that women's work in the home averages 56 hours per week for the full-time homemaker, and 26 hours per week for the employed wife/ mother. Husbands and children barely increase their contribution to housework and child care when the wife/mother is in the labor force. As a result, the employed woman with family responsibilities gives up most of her. leisure to carry out the responsibilities of family life.

We realize that it may sound strange to hear women's activities in the home called work. Since women who do housework and take care of children receive no salary or wages, homemaking is not considered "work." Economists have finally helped us to recognize the importance of women's work in the family by estimating the monetary value of homemaking. These estimates range from $4,705 (1972) through $8,200 (1968) to over $13,000 per year (1973), depending Oll whether the work of the homemaker is considered equivalent to an unskilled, skilled, or a professional worker, respectively. For example, is child care comparable to babysitting at $0.75 per hour, to a nursery school aide at $3 per hour, or to the care of a child psychologist at $30 per hour?

Some people have proposed that the solution to the problems of the employed housewife would be simply to pay women for being housewives; hence, women with heavy family responsibilities would not have to enter the labor force in order to gain income for themselves and/or their families. This is not a solution for many reasons: • Wages provide income, but they do not remedy the isolating nature of the work itself, nor the negative attitudes housewives themselves have toward housework (but not toward child care).

• Wages for housework would reinforce occupational stereotyping by freezing women into their traditional roles.

Unless women and men are paid equally in the labor force and there is no division

of labor by sex, women's work in the home will have no value.

• Since it is not clear what constitutes housework, and we know that housework standards vary greatly, it would be difficult to know how to reward it.

• Pay for housework might place homemakers (mainly wives) 1D the difficult position of having their work assessed by their husbands, while in the case of single homemakers it is not clear who would do the assessing.

• Wages for housework, derived from spouse payments, overlook the contribution women make to the society (e.g., by training children to be good citizens), and assume that their work is only beneficial to their own families.

• Finally, payment for housework does not address itself to the basic reason why women with family responsibilities work: to increase family income over that which the employed husband/father makes. Also, single women with family responsibilities work because they are the family breadwinners.

It may seem puzzling that the hours of U.S. women's home activities have not declined because of the availability of many appliances (washing machines, gas and electric ranges, blenders, etc.) and convenience products (prepared soaps, frozen foods, mixes, dried foods, etc.).

The truth is that appliances tend to be energy-saving rather than time-saving, and the convenience of appliances has encouraged a rise in the standards of housekeeping. Hence, women today spend more time than their grandmothers doing laundry, since family members demand more frequent changes of clothing today than in earlier generations.

Husbands and children expect more varied meals. Advertising encourages women to devote an inofdinate amount of time and money to waxing floors, creating rooms free of "odor-causing" germs, and seeking to meet other extraordinary standards of cleanliness. Furthermore, the increasing concern with good nutrition means that many homemakers are now spending more time preparing foods that are not available in the market place, or which are only available at great costs.

0

-From "American Women Workers in a Full Employment of papers submitted to the Subcommittee on Economic oftheloint

Economic

Committee,

Congress

Economy," a compendium Growth and Stabilization

of tile United

States.

ON THE

LIGHTER SIDE

"Everyone promised to show up." © Canoon Features Syndicate.

"Quick, Miss Fullerton! Bounce this off the satellite to Ferd Moseby in Bombay!';

D

eep inside many a city dweller there is a vegetable gardener struggling to be free. More and more people in the United States, like those shown in these photographs, are finding a place in their backyards to plant a few rows of beans or tomatoes. They get dirt under their fingernails, and a sore back digging in the sun. But they love it all. For when the time comes, they have baskets of fresh produce for their dinner table, all the sweeter for being the product of their own labor.

"Somehow the food just seems to taste better when it comes from your own garden," says Lois Blackburn. The Blackburn family, which lives in Kansas City, Missouri, travels several kilometers to tend their vegetable farm and harvest their own maize, squash, beans, tomatoes, onions and cucumbers.

"It's a hobby with.us. It's fun," Mrs. Black-

bum continues. "We enjoy the work. Besides, it's saving us money."

A little more than 10 years ago, in the boom times of the rnid-l 960s, the average city dweller in the United States gave little thought to where his food was coming from, and how much it was costing him. However, around the end of the decade, a marked change in attitudes set in. Troubled by wasteful, artificial lifestyles and rising food prices, many Americans felt a need to return to a simpler, more frugal life. Added to this was a growing concern for the need to preserve the natural environment. Tilling the earth oneself seemed an appropriate response to both financial and ecological questions; as time passed, more and more Americans took to hoe and hose. Last year, some 40 million people planted gardens, many of them turning their lawns into miniature farms and

filling their patios with planters.

The urbanite's backyard is not the only site of spring-sprouting onions and carrots.

A great number of landless Americans, whether apartment dwellers or homeowners who refuse to convert their peonies to potatoes, are planting vegetable gardens on other people's land that might otherwise lie idle.

The lead was given by the State of Pennsylvania a few years ago when its governor asked 25 state institutions to supply excess land, plowing, water and fertilizer free of charge to would-be farmers. Now, in cities across the United States, land-hungry urbanites are pressuring their municipal governments to make vacant, city-owned land available for gardening. In Milwaukee, for example, city and county governments have leased about 3,000 plots to the public for the nominal fee of $ 8 per year.

For the city, there is an additional motive: on gardening, home canning and freezing.

A number of private businesses have been beautification. Starting with a "Make Baltiproviding their workers with gardening land more Bloom" program, that city's "Adopta-lot" committee has turned more than 150 for some time, but only in the past few years vacant lots into community vegetable gardens had the demand equaled and finally exceeded the amount of available plots. The employees (and 30 others into miniparks).

Governments are not the only ones playing seem to find lunch-hour gardening as relaxing a role in this back-to-the-land movement. . as a midday siesta.

Gardening has taken on such mass appeal Churches are providing land to those in their community, whether parishioners or not. In that it is being televised. The Public BroadFort Wayne, Indiana, the United Methodist casting System's Boston station began a Church spearheaded a movement to convert few years ago a weekly program called a four-hectare tract into a small park and 725 "Crockett's Victory Garden"; it goes on the garden plots. The Reverend James Miller air at the beginning of the growing season in mid-April. The program became an instant calls the project "an ecumenical thing," because only 5 per cent of the gardeners are success and was picked up by other PBS from his congregation. For a fee of $4 stations through the northeast section of the a year, participants receive not only their United States. plot of land, but an adjacent picnic area, a James Crockett, one of America's leading smallplayground, toilet facilities, and lessons authorities on raising vegetables, set up a

12 x 12-meter garden plot on a piece of ground adjoining the television studios. Each week, the camera followed him as he prepared and planted his garden, all the while giving viewers tips on what they should be doing in their own gardens that very week. The program was scheduled to end at harvest time, but the response was so enthusiastic that Crockett moved indoors for the winter and continued 'broadcasting from a greenhouse maintained at an average temperature of 13 degrees C. "We've been' getting a steady flow of mail at rate of about 150 letters a week," Crockett says, "from localities as diverse as Ontario (Canada) and Virginia. I got a letter from a man who said he'd been gardening steadily for something like 40 years, but he'd watched every pr.ogram and each time he'd learned something he hadn't known."

0

Th~~ ues,.or telll ent pace Through all of our history we have pondered the stars and mused whether mankind is unique or if, somewhere else out there in the dark of the night sky, there are other beings who contemplate and wonder as we do, fellow thinkers in the cosmos. Such beings might view themselves and the universe differently.

Somewhere else there might exist exotic biologies, technologies and societies. What a splendid perspective contact with a profoundly different civilization might provide! In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding we are a little lonely, and we ponder the ultimate significance, ifany, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet, earth. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SET!) is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

Until recently there could be no such search. No matter how deep the concern or how dedicated the effort, human beings could not scratch the surface of the problem. But in the last few yearsin one-millionth of the lifetime of our species on this planet-we have achieved an extraordinary technological capability which enables us to seek our unimaginably distant civilizations, even if they are no more advanced than we. That capability is called radio astronomy, and involves single radio telescopes, collections or arrays of radio telescopes, sensitive radio detectors, advanced computers to process received data, and the imagination and skill of dedicated scientists. Radio astronomy has, in the last decade, opened a new window on the physical universe. It may also, if we are wise enough to make the effort, cast a brilliant light on the biological universe.

Some scientists wQrking on the question of extraterrestrial intelligence, myself among them, have att~mpted to estimate the number of advanced technical civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy-that is, societies capable of radio astronomy. Such estimates are little better than guesses. They require assigning numerical values to quantities such as the numbers and ages of

stars, which we know well; the abundance of planetary systems and the likelihood of the origin oflife within them, which we know less well; and the probability of the evolution of intelligent life and the lifetime of technical civilizations, about which we know very little indeed. When we do the arithmetic, the number that my colleagues and I come up with is around a million technical civilizations in our galaxy alone. That is a breathtakingly large number, and it is exhilarating to imagine the diversity, lifestyles and commerce of those million worlds. But there may be as many as 250,000 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Even with a million civilizations, fewer than one star in 250,000 would have a planet inhabited by an advanced civilization. Since we have little idea' which stars are likely candidates, we will have to examine a huge number of them. Thus the quest for extraterrestrial intelligence may require a significant effort.

Of the long-distance techniques available to our technology, radio is by far the best. Radio telescopes are relatively inexpensive; radio signals travel at the speed of light, faster than which nothing can travel; and the use of radio for communication is not an anthropocentric activity: Radio represents a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and any technical civilization anywhere in the galaxy will have discovered radio, just as we have.

Advanced civilizations might very well use some other means of communication with their peers-"zeta rays," say, which we might not discover for centuries. But if they wish to communicate with less advanced civilizations, there are only a few obvious methods, the chief of which is radio.

The first serious attempt to listen to possible radio signals from other civilizations was set up at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, West Virginia, in 1959. This program, organized by Frank Drake who is now at Cornell University, was called Project Ozma, after the princess of L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz, a place exotic, distant and difficult to reach. Drake examined two nearby stars, Epsilon Eridani and

Is there life in outer space? By, the use of radio astronomy, which has opened new windows on the universe, ~':';"'...J man is seeking answers. Radio tele. .

••••• •••• scopes scan the skies, transmitters ..J"-:.L...J send out signals that travel at the . . '". speed of light. Simple numerals such "" - -.. (, as zeros and ones-broadcast as dots '" . ..,. •• -.s and dashes, as shown in diagram at ~ right-· can transmit complex inI ·1111····· formation; sophisticated computers can analyze data that is received back. The search for other civilizations will advance the quality of our own; such quests have, from time immemorial, triggered technological as well as social progress.

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Tau Ceti, for a few weeks with negative results. Positive results would have been astonis\1ing, because, as we have seen, even rather optimistic estimates of the number of technical civilizations in the galaxy imply that several hundred thousand stars must be examined in order to achieve success by random stellar selection.

Since Project Ozma, there have been six or eight other such programs, all at a rather modest level, in the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union. Not one of them has achieved positive results. The total number of individual stars examined to date is fewer than 1,000. We have performed something like one-tenth of one per cent of the required effort.

However, there are signs that much more serious efforts may be mounted in the reasonably near future. All the observing programs to date have involved either tiny amounts of time on large radio telescopes or large amounts of time on smaller telescopes.

In a major scientific study for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, directed by Philip Morrison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the feasibility and desirability of more systematic investigations have been powerfully underscored. The study has four main conclusions: • It is both timely and feasible to begin a serious search for extraterrestrial intelligence; • A significant ... program with substantial potential

secondary benefits can be undertaken with only modest resources; • Large systems with great capability can be built as needed; and • Such a search is intrinsically an international endeavor in which the United States can take a lead.

A wide range of options is identified in the Morrison report, including new (and expensive) giant ground-based and spaceborne radio telescopes. But the study also points out that major progress can be made at modest cost by the development of more sensitive radio receivers and of ingenious computerized data-processing systems.

In the Soviet Union there is a state commission devoted to organizing a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the large RAT AN-600 radio telescope in the Caucasus, just completed, is to be devoted part time to this effort. Along with spectacular advances in radio technology, there has been a dramatic increase in the scientific and public respectability of theories about extraterrestrial life. The Viking missions to Mars were, to a significant extent, dedicated to the search for life on another planet.

Of course, not all scientists accept the notion that other advanced civilizations exist. A few who have speculated on this subject lately are asking: If extraterrestrial intelligence is abundant, why have we not already seen its manifestations?

Many aspects of the problem, fortunately, can be experi-

biological ongm. No pnor agreement between the mentally verified. We can transmitting and receiving search for planets of other civilizations, and no precaustars; seek simple forms of life on such nearby worlds tions against earth chauvinism, are required to make as Mars, Jupiter and this clear.

Saturn's moon Titan; and Such a message would be perform more extensive laboratory studies on the chean announcement, or beacon signal, indicating the mistry of the origin of life. presence of an advanced We can investigate more civilization but communideeplythe evolution of orgacating very little about its nisms and societies. The nature. The beacon signal problem cries out for a long-term, open-minded might also note a particular frequency where the main and systematic search, with nature as the only arbiter of message is to be found, or Pioneer 10, which was launched on March 2, 1972, on a long journey to infinity, might indicate that the prinwhat is or is not likely. carried this metal plaque for the benefit of spacelings. It contains diagrams of cipal message can be found If there are a million the male and female bodies, and technical data on the location of planet earth at a higher time resolution technical civilizations in the with respect to the sun. Pioneer 10 passed Jupiter in 1973 (and sent back a at the frequency of the beaMilkyWay galaxy, the averwealth of data about the planet),. it is now headed toward the deepest recesses con signal. The communicaageseparation between civiof the solar system. It is expected to greet Neptune in 1983 and Pluto in 1987. tion of quite complex inforAn estimated 11 million years after the spacecraft has left the solar system, lizations will be about 300 it may reach the constellation Taurus. mation is not very difficult, light-years. Since a lighteven for civilizations with year is the distance which lighttravels in one year (a little under six trillion miles-9.6 tril- extremely different biologies and social conventions. Forexample, lionkilometers), this implies that the one-way transit time for an arithmetical statements can'be transmitted, some true and some interstellar communication from the nearest civilization will be false, and in such a way it becomes possible to transmit the ideas some300years. The time for a query and a response would be 600 of true and false-concepts which might otherwise seem exyears.This is the reason why interstellar dialogues are much less tremely difficult to communicate. likely-particularly around the time of first contact-than interBut by far the most promising method is to send pictures. stellarmonologues.

The message might consist of an army of zeros and ones transmitIt might seem remarkably selfless for a civilization to broadted as long and short beeps, or tones on two adjacent frequencies, cast radio messages with no hope of knowing, at least in the or tones at different amplitudes, or even signals with different immediatefuture, whether they have been received and what the radio polarizations. Properly arranged in rows and columns, responseto them might be. But human beings often perform very the zeros and ones form a visual pattern-a picture similar to similaractions-as, for example, in burying time capsules to be those an imaginative typist can create by using the letters of the recovered by future generations, or even in writing books, alphabet as a medium. Just such a message was transmitted to composing music and creating art intended for posterity. A space by the Arecibo Observatory, which Cornell University runs civilization which had been aided by the receipt of such a for the National Science Foundation, in November 1974 at a messagein its past might wish to benefit other emerging technical ceremony marking the resurfacing of the Arecibo dish-the societies.The amount of power that need be expended in inter- largest radio/radar telescope on earth. The signal was sent to a stellarradio communication should be a tiny fraction of what is collection of stars called M13, a globular cluster comprising about availablefor a civilization only slightly more advanced than we, a million separate suns, because it was overhead at the time of the and such radio transmission services could be an activity either ceremony. Since M13 is 24,000 light-years away, the message ofan entire planetary government or of relatively small groups of will take 24,000 years to arrive there. If anyone is listening, it hobbyists,amateur radio operators and the like. will be 48,000 years before we receive a reply. The Arecibo Although probably no previous contact will have been message was clearly not intended as a serious attempt at interachieved between transmitting and receiving civilizations, com- stellar communication, but rather as an indication of the remunication in the absence of prior contact is possible.

It is easy to create an interstellar radio message that can be About the Author: Carl Sagan, director of Cornell University's Laboratory recognizedas emanating unambiguously from intelligent beings. for Planetary Studies, is a widely known commentator on the relationship A modulated signal ("beep," "beep-beep," ... ) comprising the between man and the cosmos. He is a frequent contributor to American numbers 1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17, 19, 23,29, 31,forexample.consists periodicals and is the author of a number of books, including The Cosmic exclusivelyof the first 12 prime numbers-that is, numbers that Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective, Intelligent Life in the Unicanbe divided only by 1, or by themselves. A signal of this kind, verse (with Jonathan Leonard) and The Atmospheres of Mars and Venus based on a simple mathematical concept, could only have a (with l.S. Shklovskii).

Left: Antenna and microwave tower of the earth station at Dehra Dun, India. Advanced extraterrestrial civilizations might very well have more sophisticated means of communication with their peers.

If there is life in outer space, what is it like?

Do the creatures there think, dream, suffer and speculate as we do on earth? An artist's imagination takes wing as he looks at the search for extraterrestrial life.

mark able advances in terrestrial radio technology.

And what if we make a long-term and dedicated search for extraterrestrial intelligence and fail? Even then we surely will not have wasted our time. We will have developed an important technology, with applications to many other aspects of our own civilization. We will have greatly added to our knowledge of the physical universe. And we will have calibrated the importance and uniqueness of our species, our civilization and our planet.

For if intelligent life is rare or absent elsewhere, we will have learned something about the rarity and value of our culture and our biological patrimony, which have been painstakingly extracted over 4,000 million years of tortuous evolutionary history.

It is difficult to think of another enterprise within our capability and at relatively modest cost which holds as much promise for the future of humanity.

0

What Can Be Done With Atomic Waste II QUESTION: Atop all its new troubles, nuclear energy is still encountering an old one: What to do with the flood of radioactive waste. Just what is nuclear waste, and where does it come from?

ANSWER: There are two main types of

nuclear waste. One comes from atomic power plants, the other from weapons production. The main waste product from power plants is in the form of spent fuel rods. These rods contain uranium and some of its deadly byproducts such as plutonium, which remains toxic to humans for over 200,000 years. Another waste product from power plants is radioactive iodine, which can cause cancer of the thyroid gland.

What are the waste products from nuclear-weapons plants?

The main radioactive ingredient used in atomic bombs is plutonium, which produces as waste products radioactive strontium and cesium, both cancercausing substances. Like the waste products from power reactors, these materials generate heat and penetrating radiation for centuries.

Is the amount of radioactive waste materials a serious problem in the United States?

Wastes from defense production are immense: An accumulated total of a half million tons of highly radioactive material in addition to over 60 million cubic feet oflower-level radiation. The nuclear waste from 72 nuclear power plants in the United States is considerably less-about 5,200 tons of spent fuel. Nonetheless, most scientists have focused their attention on power-plant waste, which contains more radioactivity and is increasing faster than military waste.

What happens to nuclear waste once it leaves the power plant?

Virtually all waste from nuclear power facilities is stored under water in gigantic "swimming pools" at plant sites, but many plants are running out of such storage space. Some low-level reactor waste is buried in government-licensed repositories.

And waste from weapons plants?

Military waste is buried temporarily

in huge underground tanks in solid or liquid form at government installations in Idaho, South Carolina and Washington state. Between 1946 and 1970, the United States buried thousands of canisters of low-level atomic trash, mostly from weapons production, off the Maryland coast in the Atlantic and off the California coast in the Pacific.

Are stored waste materials dangerous to people living nearby?

This is a point of great contention. Critics point to accidents that have occurred at waste-disposal sites. At the Hanford Military Reservation in Washington state, for example, nearly 500,000 gallons of atomic waste seeped into the soil around the storage tanks. Such incidents have led many communities to object strongly to dumping nuclear waste in their area.

How serious is the shortage of storage space for nuclear waste?

Both critics and supporters of atomic power agree that waste disposal is the toughest problem faced by the nuclear industry. It is estimated there will be seven times as much power-plant waste by 1990 as there is today. U.S. Government scientists say some facilities could be forced to close as early as 1983 unless a permanent, safe disposal method is found.

What is being done about the disposal problem?

Atomic waste dwnps like this one in Hanford, Washington, are drawing protests from citizens.

New Mexico citizens, and court fights could drag on for years.

Are other states opposing of atomic wastes, too?

the burial

Yes. South Carolina authorities recently refused to allow a shipment of low-level waste from the crippled Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania to be brought into their state for burial at a government-licensed site. Eight more states have banned nuclear-waste depositories, and others are considering similar action.

Do all radioactive wastes come from power stations or defense plants?

No. Piles of tailings containing raA number offarfetched solutions-such dioactive substances have been left everyas rocketing the wastes into space or bury- where that uranium has been mineding them in Antarctic ice-have been mostly in Utah, New Mexico and Colorejected as unsafe, impractical or too rado. These piles contain pulverized ore costly. Until recently, the U.S. Govern- from which uranium has been extracted. ment was doing little to solve the problem.

Are these tailings piles a threat to human This year, however, the Department of health?

Energy will spend nearly half a billion For years it was believed that the dollars on disposal technology. What has .tailings, containing relatively low-level emerged is a' plan to drill deep holes radiation, posed no danger. They were into salt beds near Carlsbad, New Mexico, even used as foundation material for where tons of nuclear waste can be houses and schools in Grand Junction, permanently stored.

Colorado, during the 1950s. Scientists How soon can this plan be put into now know that the tailings emit radon, 'a operation? radioactive gas that can be spread by If the project is given final approval, wind and rain and seep through concrete. experts say it will be at least 1988 before a Radioactive particles of radon can cause permanent storage site could be in opera- cancer in humans exposed to it.

0 tion-even for testing. But the plan is encountering widespread opposition from

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cessful ending of this round of negotiations would mean that other issues would stand a better chance to receive their full, fair measure of high level attention.

Humanitarian interests could also receive indirect benefits from SALT II in the form of greater monies for economic assistance and aid. For many years the developing nations have argued that the resources freed by the reduced military expenditures made possible by disarmament should be devoted to the urgent .tasks of economic and social development.

The United States also recognizes its responsibility to aid in that development process, regardless of any progress toward disarmament. As U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance has said, "At least one-half billion [500 million] people regularly go hungry in a world of plenty.

A half-billion is an abstract number, another statistic among many, and, therefore, too easily dismissed. But when we pause to picture the human suffering that lies behind that statistic, the scope of our moral challenge is clear. The continuation of that suffering is an affront to the conscience of men and women everywhere."

Nuclear arms account for only a fraction of the $400,000 million the world spends in annual military expenditures, but they are the most visible and appro-

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1I11SII1Bli faith with a view to achieving general and complete disarmament.

Considering the fact that it took seven years of painful and wearisome negotiations to conclude a very limited agreement like SALT II, that consummation may seem a long way off. But, in a world dominated by mutual suspicion and fear, even such small steps should be welcomed for what they are worth. As U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said: "This treaty (SALT II) will not mark the end of one negotiation; it will open the way for another. When it is ratified by the U.S .

Senate it will become the cornerstone for still further limits in SALT III. " If the Senate were to refuse to ratify it or to amend it in such a manner as to make it unacceptable to the Soviet Union, it would be a major tragedy, whose consequences for the world would perhaps be as disastrous as the rejection by the U.S. Senate in November 1919 of the peace treaty which President Woodrow Wilson had signed at Versailles and the Charter of the League of Nations.

Nonparticipation of the United States in the League was doubtless a contributory factor to the outbreak of World War II. I do not underrate the concern for security on both sides. If the United States has reason to remember Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union cannot forget the ravages inflicted by the Nazi hordes. But these historic memories are not of primary relevance when both countries

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Over the years, however, both the United States and the Soviet Union have learned painful lessons about the folly of simply imposing their own competition on complex local situations. Fears that a regional conflict, where each side had its superpower sponsor, could escalate to direct U.S.-Soviet confrontation have forced further restraints. The dangers have not disappeared, particularly in tensionridden areas such as the Middle East, nor has this new realism meant a diminution in commitments to the security of friends and allies. But the lessons learned do signal a greater awareness and sophistication in dealing with essentially regional issues. The world can only benefit from this hard-won wisdom, and SALT II, to the extent it further stabilizes US.Soviet nuclear relations, will strengthen this increased superpower realism.

Important indirect benefits also may flow from the completion of SALT II, for it will free the attention of US. leaders to concentrate on other issues.

The stabilizing of U.S.-Soviet nuclear tensions should make it possible for the United States to devote greater time to a long list of international problems, many of them related to nonmilitary aspects of international security.

One such problem is the development of effective action to cope with the severe constraints emerging with regard to the world's natural resources. The current energy crisis is plainly a case in point. The developing nations have been particularly hard hit by the dramatic increases in oil prices, and international cooperation is needed to effect solutions.

Another problem is to provide recognition of the impressive economic strides made by nations such as Brazil and Nigeria, and to give due regard to the standing in global political and economic affairs their performance commands.

Many of these problems, falling under the heading of a New International Economic Order, demand fundamental changes in thâ&#x201A;Ź way developed and developing nations deal with one another. Building these new relationships is a difficult, time consuming, and sometimes bitter process, but that process cannot receive America's full attention while the basic issues of nuclear arms control remain unresolved.

SALT II provides no definitive answers to the nuclear dilemma, and will not remove these issues from their central place among U.S. concerns, but the suc-

between them now have nuclear arms with a total explosive capacity equivalent to one million Hiroshima bombs, or about three tons of high explosives for every man, woman and child on earth. A fraction of this combined atomic arsenal, if triggered in a nuclear war, would be enough to spell the end of civilization in the Northern Hemisphere, with millions more perishing in the Southern Hemisphere from the effects of radioactive fallout.

Illustrating the devastation that could be caused by a nuclear war, the SIPRI survey noted that a single US. Poseidon submarine carrying its full arsenal of 14 nuclear warheads was capable of obliterating every Soviet city with a population of 150,000, or one-third of the Soviet Union's population of 260 million.

From the American and the Western point of view the chief merit of SALT II consistsunlike its predecessor SALT I-in the fact that it goes a long way toward establishing the principle that each side may have the same numbers of major nuclear weapons. The main exception to this principle of equality is the provision which allows the Russians to have 308 superbig missiles, and the United States none.

The biggest advance made in SALT II is the obligation imposed on the Soviet Union not to conceal its nuclear weapons and the right given to each country to monitor the other's weapon developments and force levels. The main concern of the treaty is to ensure that the Soviet-American balance of power in the crucial area of strategic arms is maintained.

One of the interesting questions arising out of SALT II is whether the two superpo\yers would accept independent inspection of their nuclear arsenals, now that they have agreed to mutual monitoring of their weapons development. This was suggested by Morarji Desai when he addressed the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament in June 1978 and called upon the superpowers to dismantle their weapon stocks. India's unilateral renunciation of nuclear weapons, affirmed from Nehru to Morarji Desai, has impressed President Carter, who told a press conference in Washington on May 1 that if the strategic arms limitation negotiations failed, the dangers posed by proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Third World would increase. It may be pointed out that even the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty-which India has so far declined to sign on the ground that it discriminates against the nonnuclear nationscontains an article (Article 6) calling upon the superpowers to pursue negotiations in good

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priate symbols of the dreadful waste of resources these expenditures entail. SALT II itself may not result in any direct reductions in U.S. or Soviet military spending, for new programs already begun will likely keep expenditures at their present levels. But the additional progress in nuclear arms limitation which SALT II represents could make it easier to find funds for helping the developing countries meet basic human needs, such as food, shelter, and health care. And future arms control agreements, such as SALT III, by further easing of tensions and reductions in the superpowers' nuclear forces, would make more direct benefits available.

The SALT III negotiations could be extremely complex, for they would touch on a number of issues that have remained outside the negotiations until now.

SALT III would tackle limitations on the newest nuclear weapons technology and move into genuine reductions in the arsenals of both nations. These negotiations could be incredibly arduous, and agreement likely would not appear quici-.ly, but SALT III, if completed, will produce positive spin-offs and benefits just as SALT II promises to do.

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have arsenals far beyond their security needs and, what is more, any attempt at using them may well end in mutual annihilation and what survives from such a holocaust may not be worth saving. Internationally we have reached a stage when all countries, including the superpowers, should resolutely move toward international cooperation and comprehensive disarmament as the condition for the survival of the civilization which mankind has built up through 20 centuries of conflict and suffering and ceaseless striving toward control of natural resources and improvement of the human condition. When The Economist (of London) described the touching scene in Vienna after the signing of the SALT II treaty-the kisses which Carter and Brezhnev exchanged-as "a wasting of Christian kisses on a heathen idol's foot," it was being unduly cynical and sanctimonious. The new world order which all countries seek, each in its own enlightened self-interest, cannot come into being without increasing mutual trust and cooperation between the superpowers. It is in that spirit that I welcome SALT II and look upon it as one of the foundation stones of the emerging edifice of a new peaceful and cooperative world order. .0

About the Author: Dr. Jo L. Husbands is a senior research associate with Consolidated Analysis Centers, Inc., of Arlington, Virginia. A private research and problem-solving company, it contracts its services to business and government.

About the Author: v.K. Narasimhan,former editor-inchief of the Indian Express, is now editor of the Deccan Herald, published from Bangalore. Among his books are Democracy and Mixed Economy and

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