Men 'versus Women Do~lt~Yourselfa,ndth~¡Anier!Cah ;qharC{~t~r":~' :',~. r
SPAN
A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
Only a first-time reader will fail to notice the change in SPAN this month. We have shaved a couple of centimeters from our borders. The smaller format may lessen the impact of large illustrations that SPAN has liked to feature over the past 31 years, but it scarcely will change the amount of text in the magazine. The greatest effect of down-sizing will be to save us money. Yes, SPAN, too, is fighting the battle of shrinking budgets. This change does something else. It makes SPAN the same size, more or less, as the majority of American, Indian, and international magazines. SPAN was born when large-format, heavily illustrated publications such as LIFE and LOOK dominated magazine racks in the United States. Such magazines came into being before television. Their rich visuals entertained and informed, shocked and delighted, showcasing some of the best photojournalism ever produced. The advent of television, however, brought sound and movement to these 'images and forced some retrenchment in the magazine world. Look at an American newsstand today, and two things are readily apparent: One, almost all of the large-format magazines have disappeared (LIFE, once a weekly, ceased for a while and then was resurrected as a monthly). Two, there is more variety than ever among the country's II,OOO-plus weeklies, biweeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies. The traditional news, current-events, women's, and sports publications have been joined by many city, regional, and special-interest magazines. In America it is difficult to think of a human endeavor that does not have a magazine to go with it. Beginning on page 28, we profile a publisher, Taunton Press, that puts out magazines for woodworkers, gardeners, seamstresses, boaters, and others who like to make, fix, or restore things. Taunton has tapped a rich vein in the American character, the proclivity to do things for oneself. Rare is the American homeowner who does not care for his own lawn and garden, and perform minor maintenance chores such as repairing a leaky faucet or painting a room. In a companion article beginning on page 31, author James Finn tracks the roots of the American do-ityourself character. I have often noticed with amusement how readily newcomers to America, Indians prominent among them, quickly get caught up in this most American of traits. Someone who successfully has replaced a broken window pane may decide he is ready to undertake something more ambitious-installing an electric garage-duor opener, for instance, or replacing the shingles on the roof of his home. Enthusiasm and optimism, however, can quickly succumb to a bruised thumb or psyche if one has not prepared properly for such a project. "One problem with being an amateur," says professed do-it-yourselfer David Owen, "is that the knowledge one gains in the course of doing something is usually the knowledge one ought to have had before trying it in the first place." Happily, Owen, in an article for Atlantic Monthly magazine, gives high marks to the publications that Taunton Press puts out imparting such knowledge. -L.J.B.
2
The Black Image in American ArtFacing History by Grace Glueck
8 Men vs. Women
(
by Merrill McLoughlin
15
The Poetry of Rodney Jones-Transparent
18
Coping With Climate Chaos
20
Moth Research
22
Focus On ...
24
Pyramids of the Future
28
Editors of all Trades
31
The Do-It-Yourself American
38
In Tune With India
40
On the Lighter Side
41
Willa Cather 1873-1947
Gestures
by David A. Wirth
by William G. Schulz
by Jim Schefter
by Rita Koselka byJamesFinn
An Interview With Stanley ScOll by Shantanu Sengupta and Bamapada Gangopadhya
In Cather's Footsteps by S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal and David Harrell Immigrants In Cather's America by S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal
46
Solar Power Comes of Age
by Richard C. Schroeder
Front cover: Head of a Negro by John Singleton Copley was among the paintings on display in a recent U.S. exhibition on the black image in American art. See pages 2-7. Publisher, Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants, Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, Y.P. Pandhi; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services; American Center Library, New Delhi. Photographs: Front cover & 2-7- The Brooklyn Museum, New York. IS-Nand Katyal. 19-USDAjAgriculture Research Service. 21-Smithsonian News Service Photos courtesy Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. 23 below-Partab Ramchand. 24-25John B. Carnett. 28-Richard Bowditch. 3 I-David Rogowski. 32-Christopher Little. 35-U.S. Dept. of Energy. 37-Avinash Pasricha. 38-39-Kanku Das. 42-43-David Harrell. 46-47-eourtesy Luz International Limited. Inside back cover & back coverDuane Michals. Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg. New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of tile U.S. Government. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged •.except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor. Price afmagazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 30; single copy. Rs. 5.
The Black Image in American Art
Facing When white American artists looked at black Americans, what did they see? Stereotypes, such as banjo players, watermelon eaters, slaves and idlers? Or heroes, teachers, soldiers, individuals of dignity and purpose? AII of the above, as evidenced by a complex exhibition, "Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940," that was shown last year at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The show was organized by Guy C. McElroy, a black art historian, and took cues from the "new" scholarship that examines works of art in their political and socioeconomic context. The exhibition documented the ways in which American artists "reinforced a number of largely restrictive stereotypes of black identity," said McElroy. Yet so subtly were some of these stereotypes presented, he says, and so persuasive were the skills of many of the artists, that they are not always apparent to the viewer. In recent years, many art historians in the United
¡story States have been digging into such works as John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark, a 1778 painting of a rescue attempt, to find in it a subtext of racial and political conflict. McElroy-eonfined to a wheelchair since the summer of 1987, when an automobile accident left him a paraplegicserved for eight years as a curator and then assistant director at the Bethune Museum-Archive in Washington, D.C., which is devoted to the history of black women in America. Now working toward a PhD at the University of Maryland, he conceived the idea for "Facing History" five or six years ago after studying the 19th-century artist William Sidney Mount in a class on genre painting. "He was one of the first to portray African Americans," McElroy said, "and I'd heard that his work was positive or neutral. But it seemed to me that though he created paintings depicting African Americans in a sympathetic and natural manner, they didn't break from the idea of blacks as minstrels,
William Sidney Mount: The Bone Player, 1856; oil on canvas; 91.4 x 73.6 cm.
Facing page:
Edward Lamson Henry: Kept In, 1888; oil on canvas; 34.3 x 45.4 cm.
John Singleton Copley: Head of a Negro, 1777-78; oil on canvas; 53.3 x 41.3 cm.
servants, entertainers, members of the slave class. I thought after that it would be interesting to look at other American artists." In an interview, McElroy said, "All art is by nature a political statement. It represents a way of life in society primarily as seen by the majority culture, and in the case of blacks, influenced by the subjects' lack of access to money, education and social power. So the show was clearly a statement about the politics of black life in American society." While it was being organized, "Facing History" was criticized by the head of one prominent black institution, who refused to lend a painting to the Corcoran on the grounds that such a show should present a more positive image of blacks, done by black artists. In refusing to lend The Banjo Lesson, by the 19th-century black painter Henry O. Tanner, William R. Harvey, president of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, complained that the show did not include works by black artists depicting "images that are both real and positive." Works by four major black artists of the 19th centuryEdmonia Lewis, Joshua Johnston, Edward Bannister and Robert Duncanson-were included in the show, however, along with some by 20th-century black artists. But because no other representative Tanner could be found, the exhibition lacked a painting by this artist-a student and friend of Thomas Eakins-who is widely regarded as the most talented black painter of the 19th century. "We are showing black artists to provide a contrast between blacks looking at themselves and the majority culture looking at blacks," McElroy said. "Yet their images are not ideologically separate from those of the white artists. Their techniques and values were based on mainstream culture. Conscious efforts to create a 'black' style didn't occur until the 1960s." McElroy believes that the exhibition conveyed the "spiritual strength of people who managed to survive in spite of terrible odds. When you look at this show, you won't feel subjected to a negative experience. The paintings are too beautiful and the points they make are too strong in presenting the complexities of African-American life." The show was the latest and one of the most ambitious in a series of endeavors to examine the perception of blacks by artists reflecting a majority culture, and the first to be done by a black art historian. Two earlier exhibitions mounted by Sidney Kaplan, now professor emeritus of American literature and American art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a founder of the W.E.B. DuBois department of AfroAmerican studies there, served as important preludes. One was "The Portrait of the Negro in American Painting" at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, in 1964,which included about 60 paintings, mostly by white artists, covering the period from 1715to the 1960s.The other was "The Black Presence in the Era of Revolution, 1770-1800," a 1973 show of documents and pictures at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. About the Author: Grace Glueck works for The New York Times as art news editor.
There is also the massive research project begun some 20 years ago by the Menil Foundation of Houston, Texas, which has so far produced four volumes of documentation and interpretation of the portrayal of blacks in Western art. The last one, published in 1989, was The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the American Revolution to World War I, by the English historian Hugh Honour. Another Menil publication, Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction YearS, 1988,by Karen C.c. Dalton and Peter H. Wood, was accompanied by a touring show that originated at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, in 1989. McElroy credits both these books as offering "startling insights that have dramatically revised our understanding of how white artists and audiences have historically viewed black subjects." The 120 objects in the Corcoran show included paintings, .sculptures and works on paper, by such stellar names as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frederic Remington, Charles Demuth and Jacob Lawrence. But there were also relative unknowns, among them Thomas Ball, Charles Deas, Edward Troye, Christian Mayr and Joseph Decker. The approaches range from outright caricature, like Edward Potthast's Brother Sims's Mistake, which pokes fun at a black church congregation, to precise and eloquent observation, as in Saint-Gaudens's head of a Civil War soldier, a study done for a monument commemorating the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first black volunteer unit, which fought with distinction during the American Civil War (and whose history is told in the recent movie Glory). The subjects run from such serious matters as abolition, exemplified by Eastman Johnson's tense Ridefor Liberty-The Fugitive Slaves, to lighthearted revelry, as in Reginald Marsh's high-energy Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom. A famous icon is Copley's big, dramatic Watson and the Shark, 1778, now seen as an allegory of the American Revolution. But there are also simple paintings like Harry Roseland's Wake Up, Dad, in which an elderly man dozing in a church pew is nudged awake by his wife. The show gave a penetrating reading of blacks viewed by whites: As inferiors and equals, as individuals and abstractions, as figures of fun and of respect, as workers and passive bystanders, as childlike dependents and strong role models. In hatching "Facing History," McElroy said, he first thought of assembling negative images in popular art, racist ephemera consisting of broadsides, cartoons, sheet music, posters, dolls and so forth. In fact, he and Jane Livingston-who as chief curator and associate director of the Corcoran recruited McElroy for the project-amassed a huge file pertaining to both fine and popular art. "If we'd used the racist ephemera, we would have had something like 450 items in the show, and it would have been a much more frightening exhibition," McElroy said. "So we decided to confine it to fine art." Besides, Livingston said, "in the fine arts there is a more complex and layered reality. Political cartoons and other
Reginald Marsh: Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom, 1930; tempera on composition board; 91.4 x 122.2 em.
popular imagery by definition are simplistic and very often jingoistic, whereas a cultured, conscious artist is a synthesizer, an assimilator and an interpreter of his own time. He brings to his work a rich communal background. In our age we've had so much fine art drawing on popular art that we tend to forget the mission that the artist has assumed in other societies and at other times." Fueled by the efforts of scholars before him, McElroy gives complex readings of well-known works. No one who saw the show, for instance, is ever again likely to view John Singleton Copley's famous Watson and the Shark as merely a dramatic painting of a rescue attempt. Commissioned by Brook Watson, a rich Englishman with strong slave-trade connections, it depicts an incident from Watson's youth in which, while swimming in Havana Harbor, he lost his leg to a shark. In the painting, we see young Watson floating helplessly on his back in the water, the shark's jaws agape nearby, as a group of men in a dory try to rescue him. The key figure in the boat is a black man, his face contorted in concern, as he holds one end of a lifeline flung out to the victim. There has been some argument over the interpretation of the black man's role. Albert Boime, a professor of art history at the University of California at Los Angeles, notes that the black figure holds the rope in an "unsailorlike" fashion, between the wrong fingers. The "disjunction between the prominent com-
positional location and passive narrative role of this figure," he has written, "is a telling feature of the racism of both patron and painter. The black crew member prefigures the classic token black, a metaphorical allusion to some abstract principle of humanity, but this black is unable to function in the real world dominated by whites." On the other hand, Sidney Kaplan, a selfstyled neo-Marxist, dismisses Boime's reading as "offensive." He adds: "I look at the rope in the black man~s hand as an umbilical cord between him and Watson. Copley paints an exquisite painting of a black man, who lowers the lifeline. Whatever his reasons, he gives him an honorific position, the dominant one in the painting." McElroy-taking cues from Hugh Honour and Albert Boime-decodes the work this way: Its complex subtext, he suggests, includes a strong element of remorse on Watson's part for his role in the slave trade-hence the nobly portrayed black man, who is seen as his doppelganger. At the same time, the painting is a "conservative polemic" in that the presence of Watson's body "also plays on images of dismemberment that were routinely employed by artists to warn of the loss of power that would result from the impending revolt of colonial territories from the British Empire." "Still," McElroy says, "as important as it is to set? the allegory, it's also one of the earliest images in which an African American is viewed as pivotal to, and an equal participant in, a dramatic event." A case of an artist's softening his experience of black male authority is William Sidney Mount's 1845 work, Eel-Spearing at Setauket, depicting a young white boy and a black woman eel-fishing in a Long Island pond. It was based on a childhood memory of the artist's, McElroy says. But the person who taught Mount eel-fishing, he points out, was in reality a black man named Hector. Satisfying his own "proscriptions against images of assertive African American men," says McElroy, Mount "deemed an image of a black man teaching a white youth too great a risk in a commissioned painting."
Like other scholars in the field, McElroy gives good grades to Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins for their portrayals of blacks, saying that their mature works "represent a high-water mark in 19th-century artistic expression of African-American identity, offering an alternative to the penchant of typing that, with a precious few exceptions, marked the development of American art." Even though Homer's The Watermelon Boys of 1876, depicting three youths-two black, one white--eating watermelons in a field, would seem to perpetuate a common stereotype first popularized in minstrel shows of the 1850s, McElroy finds that Homer's use of the image "predates the explicitly derogatory linking of the watermelon with blacks that developed in the 1880s after the collapse of Reconstruction." Eakins's outlook was broader than the "simplistic nostalgia of the implicit racism that dominated most post-Reconstruction images of blacks," McElroy notes. But in his painting Will Schuster and Blackman Going Shooting, 1876, in which a black guide poles a canoe while a white hunter takes aim, "the white man is named while the black man is identified only in terms of race." Hence Eakins's "unspoken subtext," according to McElroy, is to stress the difference between whites and blacks "in terms of an
interdependent but clearly hierarchical economic relationship." But-perhaps mindful of some critics who accuse the "new" historians of scanting aesthetics for sociology-McElroy emphasized that the show was an aesthetic experience. "One of the high points in putting it together was looking at the objects, because I enjoy their beauty and spiritual quality," he said. Professor Kaplan also endorsed the idea of such an exhibition. "Such shows as these, if they gather good material, can be a revelation of what has hitherto been more or less invisible," he said. "In the past, if one tried to visualize what black people were like up to the Civil War, there was a blur. Now all of a sudden we are finding that white artists have given us some splendid pictures, artists like Copley and Eakins and Homer and Eastman Johnson, and so many of them seem to be valid pictures without prejudice. "The leading artists of the time do splendid and valid work, as if genius were able to get beyond stereotypicality and preserve for us the flesh and marrow and intellect of black people. It raises a very interesting question for art history, that some of our best artists were doing the greatest works on the victims of brutal slavery and oppression, even as they were portrayed in the popular press in a stereotypical way." The initial impetus for the show, Livingston said, began with
Jacob Lawrence: The Migration of the Negro, 1940-41;
William Aiken Walker: Plantation Economy in the Old South, 1876;
casein on hardboard; 30.5 x 45.7 cm.
oil on canvas; 55.9 x 106.7 cm.
the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities, whose chairman at the time, Peggy Cooper-Cafritz, was interested in developing projects that involved the "minority presence" in American arts. "With this in mind, I tried to find a young black art historian to do a good show," Livingston said. In 1985, she heard about McElroy. He proposed what turned out to be "Facing History"-a show, Livingston said, that would not have been possible without the nurturing of the
District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the Rockefeller Foundation. Assessing the impact of the show, Livingston said: "I think the black community is ready and willing to face the depredations to its own self-image in American history, depredations that seem more painful in visual material than in much of the literature. Virtually everyone of the stereotypes seen here has some vestige of vivid reality today." 0
There was a time, not so long ago, when all the answers seemed clear. Everyone knew which was the weaker sex: Analyzed in terms of political power and bodily brawn, wasn't it obvious? Turn-of-the-century scientists produced learned tracts solemnly warning against an excess of exercise or education for girls: Too much activity-or thinking-would divert needed blood from their reproductive systems. Pseudoscientists meticulously measured human brains and found women's wanting. And when the new science of intelligence testing turned up repeated and systematic superiority among girls, researchers kept tinkering with the tests until they produced the "right" results. We have come a long way since those bad old days. We have also moved beyond a backlash of 1970s feminist scholarship, which insisted with equal ideological fervor that apart from the obvious dimorphism of human beings, there wt:re no real differences between the sexes-that seeming disparities in mental abilities, emotional makeup, attitudes and even many physical skills were merely the product of centuries of male domination and male-domina~d interpretation. Lately, in bits and pieces that are still the subject of lively debate, science has been learning more about the fine points of how men and women differ-more about their physiology, their psychology, the interplay between the two and the subtle ways society influences both. Among the questions these studies may help answer: • Are more women doomed to die of heart attacks as they rise
DIVERGING PATHS
to positions of power in the work world? Or are they peculiarly protected from the stresses that beleaguer modern men? • Is there something to be learned from female longevity that might help improve and prolong the lives of men? • Are boys always going to be better at math than girls? And why is it that there have been relatively few women of acknowledged artistic genius? • Are men, by nature, better suited than women to lead and manage other people? Or is it possible that society would be better off with women's ways in the board rooms, female fingers near the nuclear buttons? The old answers, once so sure, just won't do any more. In The Myth of Two Minds, her provocative 1987 book analyzing findings on sex differences, Beryl Lieff Benderly put the argument succinctly: "Who had the stronger shoulders, who might unpredictably become pregnant, clearly meant a great deal when work and warfare ran on muscle power and conception lay as far beyond human control as the weather. But now, when every American fingertip com-
'
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FETUS. At first, the embryo has
INFANT. At birth, the skeletons of
TODDLER. Boys gain and pass
ADOLESCENT. Girls begin to fall
all the equipment to become either sex. The only clue to its destiny is buried deep in the genetic code, in the 23rd chromosome pair. In the sixth week of development, if the embryo has inherited a Ychromosome from its father, a gene signals the start of male development. In both sexes, hormones begin to prepare the brain for the changes of puberty a dozen years aw.ay.
girls are slightly more mature than those of boys. Some studies have suggested that newborn girls are slightly more responsive to touch and that infant boys spend more time awake. There is also evidence that boy infants respond somewhat earlier to visual stimuli, girls to sounds and smells.
girls in skeletal maturity by the end of the first year. At the age of two, boys begin to show signs of greater aggressiveness. At three, a slight, early female edge in verbal ability disappears-but by ten or 11, it is back. Boys begin to show superiority in spatial skills at the age of eight or so, and at ten or 11, they start outperforming girls in math.
behind in body strength. In both male and female, reproductive organs develop rapidly. Both spurt in height; when it is over, the average male willbe ten percent taller than the female. Meanwhile, the female superiority in verbal skills increases. So does the male edge in spatial skills and math.
mands horsepower by the thousands, when the neighborhood drugstore and clinic offer freedom from fertility, those two great physical differences weigh very lightly indeed in the social balance." While scientists still have a long way to go, research in a dozen disciplines-from neurology, endocrinology and sports medicine to psychology, anthropology and sociology-is beginning to point in the same direction: There are differences between the sexes beyond their reproductive functions, the pitch of their voices, the curves of elbows and knees, the fecundity of hair follicles. Many of these differences suggest that women are at least as well equipped as men for life-and that in some ways they are, in fact, the stronger sex.
BODY
I
God f created man first, He or She apparently took advantage of hindsight when it came to woman. Except for the moment of conception (when 13 to IS males are conceived for every ten females, according to American statistics), the distaff side simply has a better chance at survival. Spontaneous abortions of boys outnumber those of girls. More males than females die during infancy, youth and adulthood. In every country in the world where childbirth itself no longer poses mortal danger to women, the life expectancy offemales exceeds that of males. And in the United States, the gap is growing. A baby girl born today can look forward to nearly 79 yearsseven more than a baby boy. Why? Some of the answers seem to lie deep in the genes. Others doubtless float in the hormones that carry messages from organ to organ, even, some researchers believe, "imprinting" each human brain with patterns that can affect the ways it responds to injury and disease. The research suggests that females start out with some distinct biological advantages. Among them: THE GENETIC CODE. Genesis was wrong: Women came first--embryologically speaking, at least. Genetically, the female is the basic pattern of the species; maleness is super-
ADULT. The mature woman carries twice as much body fat as a man. And the man carries oneand-a-half times as much muscle and bone. Because of the female hormone estrogen, which works to keep women's bodies in peak childbearing condition, women have some built-in health advantages-including more-pliable blood vessels and the ability to process fat more efficiently and safely-than men.
OLD AGE. After menopause, estrogen production drops off, and women lose some of the protection the hormone formerly provided. Even so, the advantages of her fertile decades persist for at least 15 years: Only slowly, for example, do the blood vessels become more rigid. The male can continue spermatogenesis into the late eighties and early nineties.
imposed on that. And this peculiarity of nature has the side effect of making males more vulnerable to a number of inherited disorders. The reason lies in the way our genes determine who is a male and who is a female. A normal embryo inherits 23 chromosomes from the mother and 23 from the father. One of these chromosome pairs, the 23rd, determines what sex the baby will be. From the mother, the embryo always receives an X chromosome. From the father, it receives either an X, creating a female, or a Y, creating a male. The Y chromosome carries little more than the genetic signal that, in the sixth week of development, first de feminizes the embryo, then starts the masculinization process. In a female, the X chromosome supplied by the father duplicates much of the genetic information supplied by the mother. Thus, if there are potentially deadly genetic anomalies on one of the female's X chromosomes, the other may cancel their effects. But the male embryo has no such protection: What is written on his sole X chromosome rules the day. Among the X-linked troubles he is more likely to inherit: Color blindness, hemophilia, leukemia and dyslexia. THE ESTROGEN FACTOR. The main task of the female sex hormones, or estrogens, is to keep the female body prepared to carry and care for offspring. But as it turns out, what is good for female reproduction is also good for the arteries. One effect of estrogens, for example, is to keep blood vessels pliable in order to accommodate extra blood volume during pregnancy. That also reduces the risk of atherosclerosis. And because a developing fetus needs lots of carbohydrates but is unable to use much fat, the mother's body must be able to break down the extra fat left behind after the fetus's demands are met. Estrogen makes this happen by stim~lating the liver to produce highdensity lipoproteins (HDL), which allow the body to make more efficient use of fat-and help to keep arteries cleared of cholesterol. The male hormone testosterone, by contrast, causes men to have a far higher concentration of low-density lipoprotein (LDL). "LDL forms and fixes in large amounts to the lining of the blood vessels," explains endocrinologist Estelle Ramey. "They become narrower and more fragile." That didn't matter two million years ago, when men were far more physically active: Exercise lowers the LDL count. Long after menopause, when estrogen production drops dramatically, women maintain the cardiovascular advantages built up during their childbearing years. The Framingham study, a 24-year examination of the health of almost 6,000 men and women between the ages of 30 and 59, found approximately twice the incidence of coronary heart disease in men as in women, even in the upper age range. And in an analysis of the health patterns of 122,000 U.S. nurses, Graham Colditz, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has found that women who use estrogen supplements after menopause cut their risk of heart attacks by a third. So, would men live longer if they took doses of estrogens? So
far, the answer is a resounding no. In experiments where men received estrogen supplements, "they dropped like flies," says Elaine Eaker, an epidemiologist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, from heart attacks. Eaker speculates that men don't have the proper receptor sites for estrogen. But there may be hope for greater longevity in highly experimental work on macrophages, cells that form part of the immune system. Macrophages, Ramey explains, "gobble up" unmetabolized glucose that randomly affixes itself to DNAand would eventually cause damage. As people age, the macrophage system slows, and the damage gets worse. "Macrophage activity in females, because of estrogen, is much higher," says Ramey. Researchers hope to find a way to increase and prolong that activity in both sexes. THE STRESS SYNDROME. "Women," Ramey, declares flatly, "respond better to stress." Although the evidence on how stress hurts the human body is still equivocal, there are two main hypotheses. The first is mechanical: Elevation of heart rate and blood pressure due to stress promotes damage to the inner lining of the artery wall, laying the groundwork for heart disease. The second is chemical: Increased production of stress hormones promotes arterial damage. Ramey is one scientist who is convinced that stress does damage. And she puts the blame squarely on testosterone-and the fact that while the world has changed substantially, men's bodies have not. In the world where primitive man evolved, "testosterone is the perfect hormone." In effect, it orders neuroreceptors in the brain to drop everything else and react as quickly as possible to a release of stress hormones. This greater reaction to stress may be damaging in the long run, but the short-term benefits were much more important in an age when "the life expectancy was about 23," says Ramey. Today, when the average man is less likely to be threatened by a sabertoothed tiger than by a corporate barracuda, his stress reaction is exactly the same-and just as damaging to long-term health. Perhaps because testosterone is not egging them on, women
Between 130 and 150 males are conceived for every 100 females. About 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. But by the time they reach the age of 20, there are only about 98 males per 100 females. And among those 65 and older, just 68 men survive for every 100 women. Females have a better sense of smell than males from birth onward. They are also more sensitive to loud sounds. But males are more sensitive to bright light-and can detect more subtle differences in light. It is physiologically more difficult for women than for men to maintain a desirable weight and still meet their nutritional needs. Women spend 40 percent more days sick in bed than do men.
Boys get more than 90 percent of all perfect scores of 800 on the math section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). And the gap between SAT math scores for boys and girls is greatest-about 60 points higher for males-among students who are in the top ten percent of their class. Infant girls show a strong, early response to human faces-at a time when infant boys are just as likely to smile and coo at inanimate objects and blinking lights. Boys are far more likely than girls to be left-handed, nearsighted and dyslexic (more than three to one). Males under 40 are also more likely than females to suffer from allergies and hiccups.
seem to respond to stressful situations more slowly, and with less of a surge of blood pressure and stress hormones. Some researchers suspect that psychological factors also playa big role. Dr. Kathleen Light, a specialist in behavioral medicine at the University of North Carolina, thinks women may have a different perception of just what situations are threatening. Women show much less stress than men, for instance, when asked to solve an arithmetic problem. But Light's preliminary data in a study of public speaking show that women experience about the same surge in blood pressure as men. "Women may respond more selectively than men," she suggests. "We think this reflects learned experience." But Karen Matthews is not so sure. Postmenopausal women, she observes, show higher heart rates and produce more stress hormones than women who are still menstruating. This leads her back to the reproductive hormones. One possible conclusion: Estrogens may be better adapted than testosterone for the flight-or-fight situations of modern life. THE BRAIN PLAN. Men's and women's brains really are different. Over the past decade, researchers have discovered that in women, functions such as language ability appear to be more evenly divided between the left and right halves of the brain; in men, they are much more localized in the left half. After strokes or injuries to the left hemisphere, women are three times less likely than men to suffer language deficits. What accounts for these differences in brain organization? One clue: The central section of the corpus callosum, a nerve cable connecting the left and right halves of the brain, seems to be thicker in women than in men, perhaps allowing more rightbrain-left-brain communication. Many researchers think that sex hormones produced early in fetal development-as well as after birth-literally "sex" the brain. In young animals, says neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen of New York's Rockefeller University, "the brain cells respond to testosterone by becoming larger and developing different kinds of connections." These changes add up to big behavioral differences. Inject a female rat pup with testicular hormones, for instance, and it will mount other females just like a male. And it is not just a matter of mating. Male rat pups deprived of testicular hormones perform more poorly on maze tests than normal males; young females injected with testicular hormones do better. Many' researchers are convinced that hormones have similar effects on human brains. Males produce testosterone from the third to the sixth month of gestation. Another burst is released just after birth, and then one final spurt at the onset of puberty-roughly coinciding with the time boys begin to surpass girls in math. What is more, males with an abnormality that makes their cells insensitive to testosterone's effects have cognitive profiles identical to girls: Their verbal IQ is higher than in normal males and their "performance" IQ (correlated with mechanical ability) is inferior to that of normal males. Such findings are highly controversial. Feminist scholars, in particular, fear that they will give new life to the notion that
MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH About 60 percent of the gap in American mortality rates between the sexes is the result of increased social risks for men-smoking, drinking and fatal accidents; some demographers expect women will lose some of that advantage soon, as the rise of female smoking begins to show up in the statistics. The other 40 percent seems rooted in biology. Women are sick more often than men and more likely to suffer from chronic conditions. But men are more likely to suffer from killers like heart disease. The bottom line: for every The risk of death is higher for males of all ages-and leading cause of death.
biology is destiny-and that females just are not the equal of men at certain tasks. But biodeterminists tend to ignore a critical difference between humans and other animals: The hugely complex human brain is not simply the sum of its synapses. There are other factors at play.
MIND Different ways of thinking, from math to morals
D I]
WOMEN
Chronic conditions that afflict women between the ages of 45 and 64 more often than they appear in men of the same age group. The percentages indicate the higher prevalence of each disorder among women, as compared with its rate among men.
Chronic conditions that afflict men between the ages of 45 and 64 more often than they appear in women of the same age group. Percentages indicate the higher prevalence of each disorder among men, as compared with its rate among women.
Thyroid diseases Bladder infection, disorders Anemias Bunions Spastic colon Frequent constipation.. Varicose veins Migraine headaches Diverticulitis of intestines Chronic enteritis and colitis Sciatica Trouble with corns, call uses Neuralgia and neuritis Gallstones Art hritis Dermatitis Gastritis and duodenitis Heart rhythm disorders Diseases of retina
Visual impairments Hearing impairments Paralysis, complete or partial Tinnitus Hernia of abdominal cavity Intervertebral disk disorders Hemorrhoids
..49 ..46 25 21 18 14 5
Emphysema.. . Atherosclerosis Ischemic heart disease Cerebrovascular disease Liver disease including cirrhosis Other selected heart diseases Ulcer of stomach, duodenum
59 54 51 32
551
.
382 378 335 305 253 233 175 152 111 85 82
.
.
79 64 59 59 54 .43 32
-A risk factor for fatal circulatory Women's
higher prevalence
.23 3 3
diseases.
rates are thought
to reflect earlier diagnosis and control, compared with men. For younger,
premenopausal
women,
is less common
high blood
pressure
than among men, and more men die from the disease because of damage done to their blood vesels at the younger
age, when they do con-
tract it in higher proportions.
Asthma. . High blood pressure*
.41 8
USN& WR-Basic
data: Lois Verbrugge of Univer-
sity of Michigan and unpublished
data from the
U.S. National Health Interview Surveys. 1983-85.
eclare that women are more sensitive to the color red, and you get a few raised eyebrows. Argue that females areby nature-not as good as males at mathematics, and you will evoke outrage. Not surprisingly, intellectual ability is the arena in which sex differences are most hotly disputed. Most of the controversy over sex differences nas focused on the long-standing male edge on tests of math aptitude. And it was further fueled in 1980, when Camilla Benbow and Julian Stanley, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, reported on a study of 10,200 gifted junior-high students who took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) between 1972 and 1979. Their conclusion: Boys were far more likely than girls to be mathematically talented. The researchers went on to speculate that there may be 13 male math geniuses for every female with such talent-and that the sex differences in math are the result of biological factors, perhaps exposure to the male sex hormone testosterone. The Johns Hopkins studies were savagely attacked from the moment they were released. For one thing, the SATs regularly have shown wider differences in male-female scores than other math tests. And the population that Benbow and Stanley studied is by definition exceptional: Its performance does not necessarily mean anything about boys and girls in general. But many other tests have consistently turned up a male superiority in math as well. And the explanation of the results offered by critics-that boys traditionally have been expected to do better at math, so they got more encouragement from parents and teachers--doesn't quite wash, either. Girls get better average grades in math at every level. Lately, some researchers have found hints that testosterone plays a role in enhancing math aptitude: Girls who have received abnormal doses of it in the womb seem to do better than average on the tests. Whatever the explanation, however, the gap is narrowing. According to psychologist Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, a preliminary analysis of dozens of studies of sex differences suggests that the gap has been cut in half in the past seven years. But on another cognitive front-visual-spatial abilitymales still hold an undisputed edge. The male advantage begins to show up around the age of eight, and it persists into old age. Some simple explanations are tempting: A few researchers have even suggested that a single, sex-linked gene is responsible
for the male edge in analyzing and mentally manipulating three-dimensional objects. Like hemophilia, such a sex-linked trait could be carried by both men and women but would become active in a woman only rarely-when both of her X chromosomes carried the gene. Men, who have only one X chromosome, would by contrast need only a single copy of the gene to acquire the ability. But there are no rigorous data to support the idea: No gene has been identified, nor has anyone been able to trace the inheritance of an enhanced spatial ability from mothers to sons-as has been done extensively in the case of hemophilia. Moreover, most researchers are skeptical that such a complex ability as spatial reasoning could possibly rest in a single gene. Many researchers are thus beginning to suspect that the male superiority is the product of a combination of factors-genetic, hormonal and cultural-with roots deep in humanity's hunting-gathering past. Separating out those various factors is a daunting task. One promising approach is to study sex differences as they develop, rather than merely focusing on aptitude-test scores. Among the recent findings: Females are more attracted
to people and males to objects.
Numerous studies show that girl infants between five and six months detect differences in photographs of human faces, while
males of the same do not. In addition, writes psychologist Diane McGuinness, studies on very young infants show that "females smile and vocalize only to faces, whereas males are just as likely to smile and vocalize to inanimate objects and blinking lights." McGuinness concludes that there probably is a biological predisposition in females to caretaking behavior that is later reinforced by observing adults. Boys have a shorter attention span. McGuinness has conducted a series of studies of sex differences in preschool children. Her results are intriguing: In a given 20-minute interval, boys did an average of 4.5 different activities, while girls concentrated on 2.5. Girls started and finished more projects than the boys. Boys were more distractible, interrupting their play to look at something else almost four times as often as girls-and they also spent more time in general watching other kids. Why the difference? "Maybe boys are just more visually oriented, and they learn by watching," McGuinness suggests. Boys and girls differ in their approach to moral problems. The pioneering work in the study of moral development was carried out more than 20 years ago by Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. But a former student of his, Carol Gilligan, notes, Kohlberg's research seemed to assume that "females simply do not exist": He studied 44 boys over 20 years, but no girls. Gilligan has retraced some of Kohlberg's steps, including
Are Males Better at Math? Test Yourself Tests of cognitive ability have long shown a male edge in mathematics and visualspatial skills and a female advantage in work needing verbal aptitude. Mathematical A kindergarten class wants to buy a $77 tropical tree for the school. If the teacher agrees to pay twice as much as the class and the administration promises to pay four times as much as the class, how much should the teacher pay? (A) $11.00 (C) $22.00 (B) $15.40 (0) $25.70 (E) $38.50
Assume that these glasses are half filled with water. Draw a line to indicate the top of the waterline in each.
Spatial-visual Can these pairs of three-dimensional objects be superimposed by rotation? Answers: A yes; Byes
Males consistently outscore females in spatial-visual-abilities tests. At a young age, they are better on mazes; later, they show particular talent on exercises requiring mental manipulation of three-dimensional "objects" like those in the drawing above. The average 12-year-old boy knows that the water level remains horizontal in both glasses, but about half of college women get the answer wrong. Mark the "word" that best fills the blank: A gelish lob relied perfully. I grolled the -----meglessly. (A) gel ish (B) lob (C) relied (0) perfully Answer: B
If x, y and z are three positive whole numbers and x> y > z, then, of the following, which is closest to the product xyz? (A) (x-1)yz (C) xy(z-1) (B) x(y-1)z (0) x(y + 1)z (E) xy(z + 1)
Verbal Five girls are sitting side by side on a bench. Jane is in the middle, and Betty sits next to her on the right. Alice is beside Betty, and Dale is beside Ellen, who sits next to Jane. Who are sitting on the ends? Answers: Dale and Alice
Boys and girls do about equally well at arithmetic-problem solving. But when it comes to higher mathematics, boys have long shown a distinct advantage on average--even over girls who have taken comparable courses.
During early adolescence, girls begin to outperform boys on tests of verbal ability, including questions designed to measure their understanding of logical relationships. The female edge persists into adulthood. Sources: Bias in Mental
Testing, by Arthur R. Jensen (the Free Press): The Psychology
of Sex Differences,
by Eleanor
Emmons
Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin (Stanford University Press); Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilfties, by Diane F. Halpern (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates):
College Entrance Examination
Board.
girls this time, and found some highly interesting differences between the sexes. One example: Gilligan posed one of the "moral dilemmas" Kohlberg used in his studies to a boy and a girl, both 11 years old. The dilemma involves the case of "Heinz," who faces the choice of stealing a drug his wife needs to stay alive but which he cannot afford, or obeying the law and letting her die. Jake, the boy, thought Heinz should steal the drug because a life is worth more than property. Amy, the girl, argued that the problem was more complicated: "I think there might be other ways besides stealing it, like ifhe could borrow the money or make a loan or something. Ifhe stole the drug, he might save his wife then, but if he did, he might have to go to jail, and then his wife might get sicker again and he couldn't get more of the drug." In Gilligan's analysis, Amy sees the moral problem in terms of "a narrative of relationships that extend over time." Jake, by contrast, sees a "math problem." Even a few years ago, research on sex differences still met enormous resistance from feminists and others who believed that merely posing the question was unscientific at best, politically inspired at worst. Diane McGuinness recalls the rejection she received once from a scientific journal when she submitted a paper on cognitive processes in males and females. One of the scientific referees who reviewed the paper wrote: "The author purports to find sex differences. Who cares!" That attitude is beginning to change. "As time passes, people are less frightened and less rigid," says Grace Baruch, associate director of the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Scholars are finding that a focus on "female" psychology and behavior can add much to a body of knowledge built almost exclusively upon studies of males. And new statistical techniques have also made the investigation of sex differences more reliable. The new wave of results has even made converts of researchers who were skeptical that sex differences existed. "I've had to revise my view considerably," says Alice Eagly, social psychologist at Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana. Still, she adds, "the public needs to be warned that knowing a person's sex doesn't allow you to predict much of anything about him or her." The overlap between men and women is still much greater than their average differences.
ATTITUDE In management and politics, the "gender gap" is real
T
here is one difference between the sexes on which virtually every expert and study agree: Men are more aggressive than women. It shows up in two-year-olds. It continues through school days and persists into adulthood. It is even constant across cultures. And there is little doubt that it is rooted in biology-in the male sex hormone testosterone.
If there is a feminine trait that is the counterpart of male aggressiveness, it is what social scientists awkwardly refer to as "nurturance." Feminists have argued that the nurturing nature of women is not biological in origin, but rather has been drummed into women by a society that wanted to keep them in the home. But the signs that it is at least partly inborn are too numerous to ignore. Just as tiny infant girls respond more readily to human faces, female toddlers learn much faster than males how to pick up nonverbal cues from others. And grown women are far more adept than men at interpreting facial expressions: A recent study by University of Pennsylvania brain researcher Ruben Gur showed that they easily read emotions such as anger, sadness and fear. The only such emotion men could pick up was disgust. What difference do such differences make in the real world? Among other things, women appear to be somewhat less competitive-or at least competitive in different ways-than men. At the Harvard Law School, for instance, female students enter with credentials just as outstanding as those of males. But they don't qualify for the prestigious Harvard Law Review in proportionate numbers, a fact school officials attribute to women's discomfort in the incredibly competitive atmosphere. Students of management styles have found fewer differences than they expected between men and women who reach leadership positions, perhaps because many successful women deliberately imitate masculine ways. But an analysis by Eagly of 166 studies of leadership style did find one consistent difference: Men tend to be more "autocratic"-making decisions on their own-while women tend to consult colleagues and subordinates more often. Studies of behavior in small groups turn up even more differences. Men will typically dominate the discussion, says University of Toronto psychologist Kenneth Dion, spending more time talking and less time listening. The aggression-nurturance gulf even shows up in politics. The "gender gap" in polling is real and enduring: Surveys in America show that men are far more prone to support a strong defense and tough law-and-order measures such as capital punishment, for instance, while women are more likely to approve of higher spending to solve domestic social problems such as poverty and inequality. Interestingly, there is virtually no gender gap on "women's issues," such as abortion and day care; in fact, men support them slightly more than women. Applied to the female of the species, the word "different" has, for centuries, been read to mean "inferior." At last, that is beginning to change. And in the end, of course, it is not a question of better or worse. The obvious point-long lost in a miasma of ideology-is that each sex brings strengths and weaknesses that may check and balance the other; each is half of the human whole. 0 About the Authors: Merrill McLoughlin is co-editor ofD.S. News & World Report. She was assisted on this article by senior writer Erica E. Goode and then-staffmembers Tracy L. Shryer and Kathlee~ McAuliffe.
A Primitive Prescription
lor Equalitv
In this conversation with Kathleen McAuliffe, anthropologist Helen Fisher says the roles of men and women in industrial societies increasingly are paralleling those played by their primeval ancestors.
M
en and women are moving toward the kind of roles they had on the grasslands of Africa millions of years ago. But this "backward" trend is a step forward, toward equality between the sexes. The rise of economically autonomous women is a new phenomenon that is in reality very old. For more than 99 percent of human evolution, we existed as hunters and gatherers, and women in those cultures enjoyed enormous clout because they probably brought back 60 to 80 percent of the food. At least that is the case in today's hunting-gathering communities, such as the Kung bushmen of Africa, whose lifestyle is thought to mirror that of early Homo sapiens. The recent trend toward divorce and remarriage is another example of a throwback to earlier times. The constant making and breaking of marital ties is a hallmark of hunting-gathering societies. The trend only seems novel to us because we are just now emerging from an agricultural tradition-a male-dominated culture that, while recent, lasted for a flash in the night on the time scale of human evolution. A peculiarity of the farming lifestyle is that men and women functioned as an isolated, economically dependent unit. Marriage was "till death do us part" for the simple reason that neither partner could pick up half the property and march off to town. But when men and women left farms for jobs and came back with money-movable, divisible property-we slipped right back into deeply ingrained behavior patterns that evolved long ago. Money makes it easy to walk out on a bad relationship. A man is going to think a lot harder about leaving a woman who picks his vegetables than leaving a woman who is the vice-president of Citibank, because she can fend for herself and vice versa. Indeed, around the globe, wherever women are economically powerful, divorce rates are high. You see it in the Kung, and you see it in the United States: Between 1960 and 1980, when the number of women in the work force doubled, the divorce rate doubled, too. That figure seems bleak until we recall that the vast majority of couples who split up remarry-and that's as true in huntinggathering communities as in postindustrial America. This suggests that the so-called
new extended family may actually have evolved millennia ago. If so, perhaps our tendency to equate divorce with failure has made us blind to the advantages of the extended family: Children grow up with more adult role models and a larger network of relatives, increasing their range of power and influence within society. The trend toward smaller families may not be as modern as we think, either. Although women gatherers had four or five children, only two typically survived childhood-the number found in the average American family today. Even our style of rearing children is starting to parallel hunting-gathering communities, in which girls and boys are permitted to play together from a young age, and consequently experiment at sex earlier and engage in trial marriages. Clearly we have moved away from the agricultural custom of arranged marriages and cloistering girls to preserve their virginity. Moreover, the home is no longer the "place of production," as it was in farm days. We don't make our soap, grow our vegetables and slaughter our chicken for the dinner table. Instead, we hunt and gather in the grocery store and return to our "home base" to consume the food we have collected. No wonder we are so in love with fast foods. It probably harks back to an eating strategy our primate relatives adopted over 50 million years ago. There is no mistaking the trend: Human beings are once again on the move. Husband and wife are no longer bound to a single plot of land for their livelihood. Women are back in production as well as reproduction. As we head back to the future, there is every reason to believe the sexes will enjoy the kind of equality that is a function of our birthright. By equality, I mean a more equitable division of power-not that our roles will converge. Alike men and women have never been and never will be. Very simply, we think differently, which is again tied to our long huntingcgathering heritage. For two million years, women carried around children and have been the nurturers. That is probably why tests show they are both more verbal and more attuned to nonverbal cues. Men, on the other hand, tend to have superior mathematical and visual-spatial skills because they roamed long distances from the campsite, had to scheme up ways to trap prey and then had to find their way back. That specialization is reflected in genu-' ine gender differences in the brain today. Nature not only intended men and women to put their bodies together; we are meant to put our heads together as well. That is what is so thrilling about what is happening now. All those male and female skills are beginning to work together again. At long last, society is moving in a direction that should be highly compatible with our ancient human spirit. D
hen Rodney Jones was awarded the National Book Critics Award for the best volume of poetry written in 1989, the 20 judges, all professional literary critics, noted that poetry was. the only category in which little debate was necessary to determine the winner. Jones's book, Transparent Gestures, is his third collection of poems, following
W
The Story They Told Us of Light and The Unborn.
In his work, Jones combines a rural southern black sensibility with a scholarly erudition that can produce surprising and astonishing juxtapositions. He writes as easily and cbnfidently of a pastured mule, "this horse from a bad family ...Half-ass, garrulous priest, his religion's a hybrid appetite that feasts on contradictions," as he does of an overburdened bureaucracy, "Fact-fluffed, appended with dates, they drift
down, 0 bountiful accountings, 0 grim disbursements." Born in Alabama in 1950, Jones is currently an associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University. In assessing Jones's career, critic Louis Skipper said, "I believe that he is, quite simply, the most distinguishable, imaginative, intelligent, and well-wrought voice of any young poet writing today, one who is just arriving at his most important concerns."
What we I:tavehere is a mechanic who reads Nietzsche, who talks of the English and French Romantics
put in the plates. He will tap his head like a kettle where the shrapnel hit, and now history leaks from him,
as he grinds the pistons; who takes apart the Christians as he plunges the tarred sprockets and gummy bolts
the slow guile of diplomacy and the gold war makes, betrayal at Yalta and the barbed wall circling Berlin ..
into the mineral spirits that have numbed his fingers;
As he sharpens the blades, he will whisper of Ruby and Ray.
an existentialist who dropped out of school to enlist, who lied and said he was eighteen, who gorged himself
As he adjusts the carburetors, he will tell you
all afternoon with cheese and bologna to make the weight
of finer carburetors, invented in Omaha, killed by Detroit, of deals that fall like dice in the world's casinos,
and guarded a Korean hill before he roofed houses, first in East Texas, then here in North Alabama. Now
and of the commission in New York that runs everything. Despiser of miracles, of engineers, he is as drawn
his work is logic and the sure memory of disassembly.
by conspiracies as his wife by the gossip of princesses,
As he dismantles the engine, he will point out damage and use, the bent nuts, the worn shims of uneasy agreement.
and he longs for the definitive payola of the ultimate fix.
He will show you the scar behind each ear where they
in a room where farmers spun and curses were flung,
He will not mention the fiddle, though he played it once
or the shelter he gouged in the clay under the kitchen. He is the one who married early, who marshaled a crew
repairing what comes to him, rebuilding the small engines
of cranky half-criminal boys through the incompletions, digging ditches, setting forms for culverts and spillways
is to break it all down, to spread it out around him like a picnic, and to find not just what's wrong
for miles along the right-of-way of the interstate;
but what's wrong and interesting-some absurd vanity, or work, that is its own meaning-so when it's together
of lawnmowers and outboards. And what he likes best
who moved from construction to Goodyear Rubber when the roads were finished; who quit each job because
again and he's fired it with an easy pull of the cord,
he could not bear the bosses after he had read Kafka; who, in his mid-forties, gave up on Sartre and Camus
he will almost hear himself speaking, as the steel clicks in the single cylinder, in a language almost
and set up shop in this Quonset hut behind the welder,
like German, clean and merciless, beyond good and evil.
Winter Retreat: Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr. There is a hotel in Baltimore where we came together,
politely reprioritized the parameters of our agenda
we black and white educated and educators,
to impact equitably on the Seminole and the Eskimo.
for a week of conferences, for important counsel sanctioned by the DOE and the Carter administration,
We praised diversity and involvement, the sacrifices
to make certain difficult inquiries, to collate notes on the instruction of the disabled, the deprived,
Gwendolyn Brooks and the next black Robert Burns. We deep made friends. In that hotel we glistened
the poor, who do not score well on entrance tests,
over the pommes au gratin and the poi trine de veau.
who, failing school, must go with mop and pail
The morsels of lamb flamed near where we talked.
skittering across the slick floors of cafeterias, or climb dewy girders to balance high above cities,
The waiters bowed and disappeared among the ferns. And there is a bar there, there is a large pool.
or, jobless, line up in the bone cold. We felt substantive burdens lighter if we stated it right.
Beyond the tables of the drinkers and raconteurs, beyond the hot tub brimming with Lebanese tourists
Very delicately, we spoke in turn. We walked
and the women in expensive bathing suits doing laps,
together beside the still waters of behaviorism. Armed with graphs and charts, with new strategies
if you dive down four feet, swim out far enough, and emerge on the other side, it is sixteen degrees.
to devise objectives and determine accountability,
It is sudden and very beautiful and colder than thought, though the air frightens you at first,
we empathetic black and white shone in seminar rooms. We enunciated every word clearly and without accent. We moved very carefully in the valley of the shadow of the darkest agreement error. We did not digress.
of fathers and mothers. We praised the next white
not because it is cold, but because it is visible, almost palpable, in the fog that rises from difference.
We ascended the trunk of that loftiest cypress
While I stood there in the cheek-numbing snow, all Baltimore was turning blue. And what I remember
of Latin grammar the priests could never successfully graft onto the rough green chestnut
of that week of talks is nothing the record shows, but the revelation outside, which was the city
of the English language. We extended ourselves with that sinuous motion of the tongue that is half
many came to out of the fields, then t~e thought
pain and almost eloquence. We black and white
that we had wanted to make the world kinder, but, in speaking proudly, we had failed a vision.
That I might arrive like Columbus,
I have been told it is all theory in the end, no letter applying to a number
to the right unknown.
o hypothetical
that stands for a thing, no principal accruing interest
who came by wrong
Nothing
applied.
mind, we many who are left behind know
we can never know. We
in a practical account,
Stand grounded
Only the pure joy of theory and the theory of theories
under the twin wings of the infinite sign.
I heard My drunk mathematician in a Country
But in the banking offices near the train station in Rome
friend try to explain one night
where the currency
& Western bar,
Collaring the few who'd listen, truckdrivers
Is exchanged-kroners
and ex-jocks,
. to show them sure proof
for deutschemarks,
yen for lire-
it all applies.
That followed some premise they didn't care to understand.
A button is pushed and the great curve flashes onscreen,
We might have been crabs comprehending
All livestock, grains and ores, all modes of production,
reckoning opera or sibyls
all strikes against management.
poking the blue entrails of frogs, And still his logic accumulated that the red-haired
all commodities,
And all mismanagement,
napkins in an orderly pile
represent
waitress,
The fluctuation
Who finally asked him to leave, swept away and dumped
all mines, ships, wells, and guns
and are represented
by
of that curve against the undeviating
line
under the counter in a barrel. And driving home later on that icy farm-to-market
That neither gold, nor oil, nor missiles banked in silos
road,
will ever turn to theory.
he was still Expounding,
jubilantly,
maniacally,
In one of the white lies that numbers tell, I stood there
as the way weaved
while the dollar went
and the universal values Of arbitrary
points unrolled an infinitely expanding
Down on its knees and prayed to the Allah of the Saudis
line.
and the Buddha of the Japanese It was the clean relish of his mind that made me forget
To rise changed into millions of lire, to sing in the grotto of the vendor's
the hard curves, the trees
o wherever
That loomed from the snowy shoulders down to the creek.
palm,
I went all that day, not knowing the language,
and no difference too
My mind was never like that.
Small, no knowledge
What I liked best the year I studied calculus was chance error, my lame prayer
From
the book,
Transparellf
published
by HoughlOn
Copyright
Š
Gestures
by Rodney
Mimin Company,
1989 by Rodney
Jones.
Jones,
Boston.
Reprinted
by permission.
that would not be turned to advantage.
Coping With Climate Chaos The author calls for an international effort to stave off any further defiling of our ecosystem. "A failure to respond to the threat of greenhouse warming," he warns, "could have catastrophic consequences for the habitability and productivity of the whole planet."
For the past several years, scientists have issued ominous warnings about the future of the Earth's climate. Predictions of dramatic global change arising from the continued dumping of industrial by-products into the atmosphere and forest loss of massive scale can no longer be ignored. Compelling scientific evidence strongly suggests that world climate patterns, previously regarded as reliably stable, could be thrust into a state of turmoil. Emissions of natural and synthetic gases are increasing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere through a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect. The projected impacts of this worldwide climatic disruption dwarf many of the environmental problems of the past and augur political, economic and social disruptions on an enormous scale. Global warming could have catastrophic consequences for the habitability and productivity of the whole planet. The accompanying strain and upheaval on the international scene, in turn, could have serious foreign policy consequences for all countries. Broad scientific agreement exists on the underlying theory of climate change, although the nature and magnitude of future effects from greenhouse warming remain in debate. Nonetheless, the range of consequences is sufficiently clear and the magnitude of the resources at stake so enormous that policy action is required sooner rather than later. Once a crisis is reached, it will be too late to act. The international political and legal system remains illequipped to offer a solution that will assure the integrity of the Earth's climate. Arresting the impending climate instability will require a concerted international agenda and a reorientation of energy and development priorities in virtually all countries of the world. Heading this agenda for action should be a global multilateral agreement that sets strict, binding standards for national emissions of greenhouse gases.
The greenhouse effect Human activities since the industrial revolution have dramatically altered the composition of global atmosphere. A
number of gases, emitted in small but significant amounts, absorb infrared radiation reflected from the surface of the Earth. As concentrations of these heat-absorbing gases increase, average global temperatures will rise. Emissions of carbon dioxide are the single largest cause of elevated terrestrial temperatures from the greenhouse effect, accounting for about half of the problem. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the range of 280 parts per million (ppm), together with water vapor in the atmosphere, established the preindustrial equilibrium temperature of the planet. Since the middle of the 19th century, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased by about 25 percent to approximately 350 ppm and are continuing to rise by about 0.4 percent per year. Elevated carbon dioxide concentrations result primarily from the intensified burning of fossil fuels-eoal, oil and natural gas-which liberates the chemical in varying amounts. The world's forests are vast storehouses, or "sinks," for carbon. Worldwide loss of forest cover, by releasing this vast stockpile of carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, aggravates the greenhouse problem. Deforestation in Third World countries is particularly severe, with the destruction of tropical forests in countries like Brazil and Indonesia exceeding ten million hectares annually from activities such as burning, logging and conversion to agricultural and pasture land. In-. deed, the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of deforestation amounts to 2,000 million to 10,000 million tons annually. Concentrations of a second important greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, have also been rising, probably because of heavier fossil fuel use, greater agricultural activity and other ecological disturbances. Average global atmospheric levels of nitrous oxide are increasing at an annual rate of 0.2 percent. Both carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are very stable compounds; carbon dioxide remains in the upper atmosphere for decades after its release, and nitrous oxide for considerably more than a century. Without major¡ reductions in emissions of these gases, their concentrations will continue to grow.
Scientists 0/ the U.S. Department of Agriculture conduct tests to determine the impact of global warming on cotton plants.
A group of volatile chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is believed to be currently responsible for IS to 20 percent of the global warming trend. These synthetic chemicals are used as refrigerants, propellants, solvents and thermal insulators. A related class of bromine-containing chemicals called "halons" is found in fire extinguishing systems. Atmospheric concentrations of CFC-Il and CFC-12, two of the most commercially important chlorofluorocarbons, are growing at a rate of more than seven percent annually as a result of increased world production in recent years. Although their concentrations are small relative to that of carbon dioxide, CFCs are up to 10,000 times more potent in absorbing infrared radiation. After release, CFCs and halons reside in the atmosphere for a century or more because of their great chemical stability at low altitudes. Consequently, an immediate 85 percent reduction in emissions ofCFC-ll and CFC-12 would be necessary merely to stabilize their atmospheric concentrations. With their long atmospheric lifetimes, CFCs and halons eventually reach the upper atmosphere. There, they are the principal culprits in the worldwide loss of the protective stratospheric ozone layer, which shields life on Earth from harmful levels of ultraviolet solar radiation. Methane, the principal component of natural gas, is another significant climate-modifying chemical. It has an atmospheric residence time of about II years. Average global concentrations of methane ¡are increasing by about one percent per year. Animal husbandry and rice cultivation have been identified as major sources of increased methane emissions; coal mining and landfills are also significant sources, with large potential for growth in the future. Low-level ozone is another greenhouse gas. Although ozone in the stratosphere is beneficial, this highly unstable chemical is the leading component of photochemical
smog pollution at the Earth's surface. While greenhouse gases are dispersed relatively quickly throughout the global atmosphere after release, industrial emissions of these heat-absorbing chemicals are highly concentrated in the developed world. In 1985, 23 percent of total global emissions of more than 20,500 million tons of carbon dioxide originated in the United States. Other major contributors are the Soviet Union (19 percent), Western Europe (IS percent), Japan (five percent) and the People's Republic of China (11 percent). Other developing countries together accounted for only 20 percent of total industrial carbon dioxide emissions. Emissions of CFCs are even more strongly skewed. In 1980, the United States produced roughly 28 percent of the global total. Western Europe produced about 30 percent, industrialized Asian countries 12 percent and the Eastern bloc countries an estimated 14 percent. The developing world accounted for just over two percent of this amount. (In the December 1990 issue, SPAN reported on recently passed amendments to America's Clean Air Act.) An international scientific consensus now supports the assertion that the accumulation in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, CFCs, methane and low-level ozone could have far-reaching effects on the Earth's climate. By as early as the year 2030, the heat-retaining capacity of the atmosphere may have increased by an amount equivalent to doubling preindustrial concentrations of carbon dioxide. The absolute magnitude of the temperature changes and their rapidity will exceed any previously experienced in human history.
Consequences of greenhouse warming The effects of a greenhouse-driven climate disruption will be characterized with complete certainty only after significant damage has already occurred. However, among the most dramatic probable effects is an unprecedented rise in sea level resulting from thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of glaciers and polar ice. Over the past century, the average global sea level has increased less than 15centimeters. By contrast, the sea level will have a total increase of between 30 and 213 centimeters by 2075, depending on the degree of global warming that occurs. The impact of sea-level rise in the United States is likely to be severe. The anticipated increase in the elevation of the oceans could permanently inundate low-lying coastal plains, accelerate the erosion of shorelines and beaches, increase the salinity of drinking water aquifers and biologically sensitive estuaries, and increase the susceptibility of coastal properties to storm damage. An increase of one-and-a-half to two meters in sea level (Text
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Moth Research An American scientist has discovered chemicals in Omphalea, a group of plants on which Urania moth larvae feed, that may be useful in the fight against diseases such as diabetes and AIDS.
For almost 30 years, biologist Neal Smith and his colleagues at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama have pursued an elusive goal-answers to mysteries surrounding the migratory behavior of the Urqnia moth and its ancient relationship with the plant on which its caterpillars feed. In the course of their research, they have found chemicals in the moth's food plant that may one day prove useful in the fight against diseases, including AIDS and diabetes. These chemicals, a class of alkaloids, may also be effective in eliminating insect pests that ravage crops. Such discoveries are often among the unexpected results of research. Smith's office is a treasure trove of Urania specimens. With their shimmering black-and-green wings and swallowtails, these beautiful, day-flying insects look more like butterflies than moths. * In 1963, when Smith joined the STRI, the Urania were so abundant in Panama City that he couldn't help noticing them, asking: "What these butterflies are, where they are coming from and where they are headed." Today, 28 years later, Smith can "sometimes answer where they're coming from," but has "a lot more trouble answering where they're going." In general, populations of Urania migrate from their northernmost occurrence in Mexico, * Editor's
note: No single factor distinguishes moths from butterflies, which make up the second-largest order of insects, the Lepidoptera. Most moths fly by night, while butterflies are diurnal, but there are many day-flying moths. Again, most moths are relatively dull colored, but some, like Urania, are as brilliantly colored as any butterfly.
south through lower Central America and northern South America. But because migration of a particular moth population is unpredictable, Smith says, it is difficult to determine the origin of the migrating moths. And they fly such great distances-some 100 to 150 kilometers a day-that to find out their destination is often impossible. In his efforts to understand the migration of the Urania, Smith turned his attention to Omphalea, a group of plants on which the moths as caterpillars feed. The world distribution of Urania and Omphalea suggests an ancient relationship, one that goes back to 280 million years when Earth was a single continent. The chemicals in Omphalea are known as polyhydroxyalkaloids. Alkaloids can have a strong effect on insect nervous systems. In terms of their molecular structure, the alkaloids in Omphalea mimic sugars. Smith asked scientists at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, Great Britain, to analyze the compounds in Omphalea for him. For their part, the British chemists, who study biologically active chemicals in plants, wanted to find out if the alkaloids were active against insects or had other possible applications. At other laboratories, when alkaloids were fed to rats, the rats lost weight. This finding suggested that alkaloids may be effective in treating diabetes and obesity. And, because just about every new chemical is now tested for activity against the human AIDS virus, that too was tried with the Omphalea alkaloids. The AIDS virus must develop a sugar coat at some point in its life cycle ifit is to successfully reproduce. In lab experiments, alkaloids
have proved effective in stopping development of the sugar coat and thus reproduction of the virus. Aside from human disease, Smith notes, the Omphalea compounds may help fight locust plagues that devastate crops in Asia and Africa, resulting in untold human misery. A sugar-mimic alkaloid in Omphalea is not poisonous per se, but subverts the nervous system in many insects. When locusts eat the alkaloid, it seems to shut down their ability to migrate. Used as a pesticide-a possibility being studied at Kew-it could prevent locusts from migrating and therefore destroying crops over wide areas. Omphalea, Smith reasons, also plays a significant role in the moth's migration. As his research progressed, he wondered if there are two types of moths-sedentary and migratory. The plant, the biologist hypothesized, may have something to do with the emergence of one or the other behavioral type. Smith's first experiments were designed to see what influence larval population densities and, hence, abundance of food had on the moth. He could not find a consistent association between the behavior of moths and this factor. But in one experiment, he noticed that larvae refused to eat Omphalea leaves from a grazed wild plant but ate leaves from the plant's ungrazed clone. Perhaps the emergence of a migratory or sedentary adult moth was related to plant quality, he thought. To test this idea, Smith grew genetically identical clones of Omphalea. On some clones, he artificially "grazed" the plant-mimicking the effect of larval feeding-with tools such as a razor blade. and a paper punch. The third generation of larvae placed on grazed leaves refused to eat, and most died. It seemed grazing may have changed the plant's chemistry. Many insects consume toxic, distasteful plant compounds and incorporate them as a defense against predators. Urania larvae eat the alkaloids, Smith says, perhaps for the same reason-to protect the caterpillars and the adults from predators such as wasps or birds. For example, wasps that will eat young larvae will not eat a caterpillar when'it is in its final
For almost 30 years, biologist Neal Smith (top right) has studied the migratory behavior of the beautiful, day-flying Urania moth (above). To mimic the effect of the Urania larvaefeeding on¡the plant Omphalea, Smith grazes the plant with a razor blade (top left). larval stage. The younger larvae, Smith notes, probably have not consumed enough of the plant to make them distasteful or toxic to predators. Urania lay their eggs on older leaves of the plant. This means that the first larval stages of the moth eat only older leaves,
which presumably have a lower content of toxins compared with younger leaves. By the time of the fifth and last larval stage, they prefer the new, nutrient-rich leaves, perhaps having built a tolerance to the plant's toxins or, as Smith says, "It looks like maybe they become addicted to the plant." The evidence so far indicates that Omphalea's biochemistry is the driving force behind the moth's migration. It could be, Smith says, that the moth feeding on the plant slowly changes its biochemistry. These changes possibly are
responsible for cycles in moth population growth and migration that occur' every four or eight years. Yet, even after almost 30 years of unceasing research, Smith is uncertain that the answers he seeks on the evolutionary relationship between Urania and Omphalea are truly in sight. Meanwhile, his probing questions may help solve human problems of equal complexity. 0 About the Author: William G. Schulz is a staff
writer with the Smithsonian News Service in Washington, D.C.
FOCUS With the death of legendary composer Aaron Copland in New York on December 2, 1990, an era in American music has come to an end. In a tribute, The Times of London said: "Aaron Copland was perhaps the most influential American composer of the 20th century. His death ...comes just seven weeks after that of Leonard Bernstein. To a considerable extent these two figures were responsible for the phenomenal growth of classical music appreciation in the United States after 1940....Bernstein regarded Copland, both spiritually and musically, as a father figure." Copland was born on November 14, 1900, in Brooklyn, New York. As a boy he took piano lessons, attended orchestral concerts, and studied harmony and counterpoint with Rubin Goldmark. He wrote a fragment of a song for his mother when he was just eight
L
and his first complete work, the song "Lola," when he was 14. However, he came of age in Paris-where he spent a threeyear apprenticeship with Nadia Boulanger, the most influential composition teacher of the century. Returning home in 1924, Copland took avant-garde European music styles and gave them a distinctive American accent, to popular acclaim. His success was the result of meticulous craftsmanship, an accessible style and a keen awareness of what the American musical public wanted. Copland's works, which were prodigious, captured the sweep, sinews and soul of America. His titles alone tell the story: The exuberant ballets, "Billy the Kid" and "Appalachian Spring"; the moving, symphonic "Lincoln Portrait"; and the noble orchestra anthem, "Fanfare for the Common Man."
ast month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture extended a Rs.1.8million grant to the Instituteof Agricultural Sciences at Banaras Hindu University for a joint Indo-U.S. ecological study to assess the role that organisms play in the decomposition and fertility of soil. The three-year project will try to determine how to improve the biological condition of soil, and characterize the effects of organic fertilizers and pesticides on organisms in the soil. The process of decomposition in different cropping patterns is directly affected by the soil's flora and fauna, as well as by the types and amounts of fertilizers and pesticides used. Scientists will first try to establish a methodology for sampling and extracting arthropods and annelids (insects and worms). Once this is done, they will identify organisms in grassland, cropland and forest soils in Uttar Pradesh. The joint project will help in designing more efficient management practices for improving soil fertility. The principal investigator of the joint project will be Janardan Singh, professor and head of the institute's department of entomology. He will be assisted by Clive A. Edwards, chairman of the department of entomology at Ohio State University in Columbus.
Copland's film scores set new standards for Hollywood. He won an Oscar in 1950 for his score to The ,I1eiress. Among the many other honors he won were the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. However, the honor that touched the maestro most was the all-Copland concert organized by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, on the occasion of his 85th birthday. After the day-long event, which cul-
In September 1989, a landmark agreement was signed in New Delhi by the Indian and U.S. governments for the avoidance of double taxation and the prevention of income tax evasion. Lengthy negotiations spanning almost 30 years preced.ed the agreement. The Indo-U.S. income tax convention came into effect on the first of January in the United States, and will come into force in India on April 1, 1991. The convention establishes an important legal tax platform in each country for businesses, individual citizens and perma-
minated in a performance of his Third Symphony conducted by Bernstein, the patriarch of exclaimed American music delightedly, "All this fuss is. enoljgh to spoil a man." Commenting on one of Copland's early symphonies, American composer Virgil Thomson once said, "I wept when I heard it-because I had not written it myself." As Time magazine put it, "For more than six decades many another American composer has felt the same way."
nent residents of the other country. Taxation of income earned from the conduct of business, transfers of technology, investments and other forms of income will now be subject to binding understandings by the two governments. This will prevent earned income from being taxed by both the United States and India. Under the agreement, business profits of an enterprise of one country will be taxable in the other country only if the enterprise maintains a permanent establishment-a branch, office, factory, or place of man-
Lois Conner, who teaches photography at various institutions in New York (including the prestigious School of Visual Arts) . recently exhibited platinum prints of her photographs in Bombay at the Piramal Gallery of the National Centre for the Performing Arts. Conner's specialty is landscape photography. She has exhibited her works all over the
Above right: Lois Conner with her wooden field camera. Above: Budda Le Shan, Szechwan, China, 1986.
agement-there. It provides fer mutual exemption of aircraft and shipping profits of the enterprises of the two countries. Dividends, interests, royalties and fees for services related to transfers of technology and other specified services will be taxed in the source country at concessional rates.
"Given the sheer dedication and tenacity of these BAT boys, the future of Indian tennis is safe," says Dave O'Meara, chief coach of the Britannia Amritraj Tennis Foundation (BAT), the brainchild of Vijay Amritraj. Set up in 1985 in Madras with the active support of the Britannia company of India and its parent American company NabiSco, BAT aims at scouting and nurturing young (under 15) Indian tennis talent. The program provides free coaching and lodging for the selected players. Under O'Meara's stewardship Rohit Rajpal and Asif Ismail became Asian junior champions, and Leander Paes won the 1990 Wimbledon junior title and, more recently, the CocaCola International Youth Masters championship in Melbourne, Australia. O'Meara gave up his own tennis career to become a coach some five years ago. In late 1985, when he was playing on the European circuit, Peter Burwash, impressed with his game, asked him to become a coach in his company,
United States and in England and China. The Bombay show was her first in India. Her photographs are in the collections of dozens of museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Victoria and AIbert.Museum in London. Conner earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Pratt
Peter Burwash International (PBI) of Woodlands, Texas, the world's first and largest company of tennis-teaching professionals. PBI, which has a contract with BAT, has about 70 coaches training tennis hopefuls in some 50 cities around the world. O'Meara, a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, arrived in Madras in mid-1986 to replace Fred Roecker who, along with Ted Murray, had been coaching at BAT since its inception. And when Murray left in 1987,
University in New York and a master's degree in fine arts from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She was awarded the prestigious U.S. National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1979 and the Guggenheim Fellowship five years later. The Guggenheim Fellowship enabled her to visit China and study Chinese painting. The influence of Chinese landscape paintings on her work can be seen in the complex and delicate positioning of elements within her narrow, elongated frames.
O'Meara became BAT's chief coach. With his own term Maynearing completion-in O'Meara says, "Left to me, I would like to renew my contract with BAT. I have enjoyed working with the boys here. They are affectionate, hard-working and reverential-in the best Indian traditions."
American coach Dave O'Meara supervises Leander Paes's service action at the Britannia Amritraj Tennis Foundation in Madras.
Pyramids of the Future
Ace aircraft designer Burt Rutan has built a highly energy-efficient house in California's Mojave Desert. An aerial view shows two hexagonal pyramids (house and garage) glowing in the twilight. The full-size aircraft fuselage and tail assembly poking out of the sand at the driveway entrance is Rutan's idea of a mailbox stand. Below: Rutan designed this tricky parallelogram billiard table; it has two corners at 60-degree angles and two at 120-degree angles.
Mojave, California: It's blistering hot and dry, a day that conjures up the image of a parched prospector crawling across the sand. But when you drive up to Burt Rutan's desert pyramids, you hear a tropical bird squawk. If the pyramids weren't so glistening new and white, you might expect to find Cheops [26th-century B.C. king of Egypt and pyramid builder] instead of Rutan. But the structures are as modern and innovative as the aircraft that fly from the designer's fertile imagination (see inside front cover). The late afternoon sun sucks moisture from your cheeks in the moments it takes to walk from your car to the front door. The sun has been pounding heat onto the house since Rutan left early that morning to work on a half-dozen new airplanes at his company, Scaled Composites. Inside, the thermostat was set so high that the air conditioner hadn't come on all day. Now step across the threshold of the energy-efficient home. You feel a rush of cool air washed with humidity and inhale a lungful with relief. Rutan points to the
"There are things in this house that might not appeal to electronic setback thermostat, and you are amazed. It shows an inside temperature of just 26 degrees Celsius. Outside, it felt like 126. "That is a little warm for me," Rutan says disapprovingly. ''I'll set it down to 25, and let the air conditioner run a few minutes." If the air conditioner did come on, its sound was lost in the music of a waterwheel splashing between a pair of pools set against a solid-rock wall in the open area that comprises the den and living room. Beside the pools is a wood-burning stove. These features help make Rutan's house so efficient that it requires little cooling or heating. "There's lots of thermal mass among the rocks and the ponds," Rutan says. "It gets cold enough to snow here during the winter, but a couple oflogs in the wood stove is all I'll need to heat the house. And long after the fire goes out, there will be warmth coming out of the rocks and water that I can move around the house." Designing and building an efficient house has been one of Rutan's dreams since the energy crunch of the I970s: "If I wasn't into airplanes, I might be an architect." Using Versacad software on his Macintosh II computer, Rutan created a rough floor plan. It showed the openness and the room arrangement he wanted. Then he wrote down his requirements and specifications and hired a contractor, Doug Stone, and an architect, David Cassil, to make it happen. Cassil came back with a plan that Rutan appreciated. "When I saw the drawing, I fell in love with it," he says. While the plan met Rutan's requirements, it also had interesting additions. "I can't take credit for designing this house," Rutan says. "I planned a super-insulated structure with a rock pit for thermal storage, so the house would have provisions for a semi-active, semi-passive solar heating and cooling system. But it was basically a square house." Cassil's plan showed a 290-square-meter hexagonal ho~se, with an attached hexagonal garage big enough for thre~ .cars and a large shop area. The pyramidal roof woul~ capture rising interior heat that could be recirculated in the winter, vented in the summer. The outside would be bermed to create an earthen barrier between vertical walls and the desert sun. It would have a southfacing entrance. "Later I sat down and did a lot of the refinement myself on the computer," says Rutan. "But I didn't change anything structural." ,. One of Rutan's architectural changes was to halve the
number of double-paned windows, and then to rec..f~ them in deep tunnels at the top of the walls. "I'm~'ii:ot home in the daytime," explains Rutan, "so why have extra windows soaking up sunlight and heat? With the windows way in, the summer sun doesn't hit them." To make up for having fewer windows, "We did tricks with mirrors," says Rutan. For example, a mirrored wall behind an elevated tub doubles the effect of the master bedroom's three double-paned windows, which open to a view of the desert and Tehachapi Mountains. Other mirrors are at strategic points. What happened to the planned thermal-storage rock pit? It was dropped after an analysis of the house design showed that it would add little to energy efficiency. "The pit would have had a payback period of some 75 years," adds Rutan. Instead, he concentrated on his own innovations and. insulation to make sure the house would use the smallest amount of energy possible. The roof is anything but standard. From the inside out, it is plaster, then 30 centimeters of fiberglass insulation, then plywood, and a commercial rubber-plastic material for waterproofing. On top of that is a five-centimeter layer of Styrofoam, then tar paper, wire, and several coats of stucco. The base coats of stucco contain fiberglass filaments for strength. The top coat is white to reflect heat. The walls are also designed to cut heat flow. Behind the decorative' plaster of their inner surfaces is a 20-centimeter concrete-filled block wall, about eight centimeters of urethane foam, and ten centimeters of Styrofoam abutting the berm. Sandy soil is banked up to the eaves at about the same 30-degree pitch as the roof. That keeps sunlight from hitting the walls and, combined with the properties of the walls, causes a thermal lag of about 12 hours between the berm's outer and inner faces. So outside heat reaches the interior in the middle of the night, and the desert's cold night temperatures reach the interior walls mid-afternoon. "Right now, you're feeling this morning's temperature," Rutan says, putting his hand on a cool wall, "not this afternoon's heat." The heat that does make it into the house comes through the hexagonal skylight at the pyramid's apex. But even here, Rutan has a trick to cut heat transfer. ."Skylight structures are normally made of metal, such as aluminum," Rutan says. "But metal conducts heat very well. So this frame is a highly insulative fiberglass-foam sandwich." It was made at his aircraft plant.
everybody. But it's the last house I'll ever build, and I like it." The skylight glass, like all windows in the house except those facing south, is reflective to turn away heat. The south-facing windows are clear glass; during the winter, the low sun angle bathes them with light the entire day to help warm the house. In summer, when the sun's angle is higher, the windows admit light but not direct rays. An air conditioner in a small attic-level room provides the extra cooling the house needs. There is a single returnair duct above the loft and near the peak of the pyramid that functions for the entire house. An exhaust fan vents hot air outside if needed during the summer. In cool weather, that warm air can be recirculated. Because of high insulation and high thermal inertia, the house stays cool inside all day. Rutan's setback thermostat is set at 28 degrees Celsius during the day, but drops back to 25 degrees Celsius for a few hours before he gets up in the morning. "I thought I'd let the air conditioner come on briefly in the afternoon," Rutan says, "but it turns out that it's more efficient to run it in the predawn hours when the outside air temperature is lower." And with all its thermal mass, the house's interior temperature varies only about one degree over 24 hours. Desert homes of standard design typically have six-degree day-night swings. Outside temperature varies 21 degrees Celsius. During temperate or winter months, a small electriccoil heater activates briefly to provide warmth. But most of the house's heating needs, Rutan says, will come from the normal use of electric lights, the electrically heated spa, and the kitchen appliances. Not even the wood-burning stove will be needed often for heating. But the waterwheel next to it plays a crucial role in keeping temperature and humidity at comfortable levels, typically around 40 percent. Rutan designed the wheel and its two ponds, which together hold about 1',I35 liters of water, or about 1,135 kilograms of thermal mass. Water temperature stabilizes at close to the 24-hour average for air temperature in the house, about 25 degrees Celsius in late summer. The transparent-plexiglass waterwheel is started or stopped by hand. It lifts water from the lower pond, dumps it into the upper pond. The resulting overflow pours into a plexiglass compartment near the wheel's outer edge, giving it a propulsive push. This exposes more water surface area to evaporation, putting needed humidity into the air and dispersing or absorbing warmth. Rutan won't say how the wheel continues turning: "It's like a magician giving up the secret of his trick."
"The house is a little warmer than I expected on the really hot days, but not uncomfortably so," says Rutan. "But it handles changes in the thermal load better than expected. In June, we had 65 people over for an open house and during five hours the inside temperature went from 22 to just 24. I used the exhaust fan to dump the heat, and it dropped back to 22." In June, the house stayed within two degrees of23, with no air-conditioning, though many days were in the upper 30s. While the energy efficiency appeals to Rutan's technical side, there is plenty in the house to appeal to the rest of him. He liked the idea of a house with almost no right angles so much that he designed a parallelogram billiard table. It changes the game. "You have to learn a whole new set of angle combinations," Rutan says, grinning. "But after five or six times, you start getting used to it." He also designed a trapezoid table for the sunken dining room, and had it built of aerospace shiny black epoxy cast and cured at his aircraft plant. Three glass triangle inserts, separated by the black frame, form the eating surface. The table is stressed like an aircraft truss along its long side, so that it is rigid and stiff; it sits on clear plexiglass tubes that make it look like it is floating. Upstairs there is a loft with a built-in library, an adjoining spa, a full bathroom, and an office. A couch folds out for sleep-over guests. To continue the open feeling, sheets of tempered glass serve as railing supports. The master bedroom has a built-in king-size headboard with storage space; a built-in stereo cabinet; a walkthrough closet that leads to a utility room or to the kitchen; and a circular stairway up to the back of the loft. It also has one other innovation from Rutan. "I love television," Rutan says with a grin, "so I built a' three-beam commercial TV projector into the headboard of the bed. It's focused on a 2.5-meter screen near the' ceiling. The angle is perfect for lying in bed and watching TV without getting a crick in your neck. "That screen is ugly, though," he admits. "I'm going to find a 2.5-meter painting and put the screen on the other side. With hinges and a small motor, I'll drop it down so it's a painting on the wail when I'm not watching TV. "There are things in this house that might not appeal to everybody," Rutan acknowledges. "But it's the last house I'll ever build, and I like it." D About the Author: Jim Schefter is a former editor of Popular Science magazine.
Fine Woodworking magazine has spawned a thriving publishing business that specializes in magazines for the do-it-yourself American.
Editors of all Trades Like any number of prosperous little businesses, Taunton Press was born of frustration. In 1974 Paul Roman, then 41, and his wife, Jan, 36, had five young children and a limited budget. Roman was trying to build some bookshelves, but found his progress stymied by the lack of high-quality instruction or workable project plans. An idea dawned: He would start a quality woodworking magazine for himself and all the other frustrated craftsmen out there. At the time, Roman was working in public relations for General Electric. But he knew something about magazines. A physicist who had dropped out of a graduate program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, to raise his family, Roman had worked for the New York publishing house of McGraw-Hili, editing technical journals and trade magazines. These would be the models for his woodworking magazine. Before Roman quit General Electric, he and his wife took all of their savings, $12,800, and put together a direct mailing to 20,000 people, compiled from three tool-catalog lists. They mailed out a description of their proposed magazine, Facing page: John Kelsey is typical of Taunton Press's editors; if they weren't editing the publishing house's magazines, they would be subscribing to them.
to be called Fine Woodworking, asking $8 for a year's subscription~quite a bit of money back then, the equivalent of about $35 today. To the Romans' astonishment, 3,000 responses came back bearing $8 checks, for a magazine that was still in the planning stage. They used the money to extend their direct mailings. When they accumulated 25,000 presold subscriptions, Roman took three weeks off from work to put together the first issue. Readers reacted enthusiastically. Within a month, Roman quit his job and began hiring staff. Taunton Press was in the black from Fine Woodworking's very first issue, on circulation revenues alone. The Romans didn't even budget advertising for the first seven years. "I believe in giving the reader what he wants and making him pay for it," says Roman of his publishing philosophy. With a paid circulation now of290,000, Fine Woodworking is, by common consent, exerting a major impact upon America's power-tool and do-it-yourself industries, and on the leisure time of milliom of Americans. Says Jack Warner, a columnist for the Atlanta Constitution, "I think Taunton Press is single-handedly responsible for the boom in fine woodworking." Taunton Press has also grown into a thriving business. Once Fine Woodworking was up and running, the Romans in
1978 launched Fine Homebuilding, a magazine offering advice on home building and home improvement. Fine Homebuilding now boasts a paid circulation base of 245,000. Almost all of Taunton's woodworking and homebuilding magazines' readers are men. So in 1981 the Romans launched Threads, a magazine about sewing and other needle Forcing Bulbs Compost FormoJ Garden 0
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crafts, targeted FINE at the wives of ~, ;;0" . . Taunton's male subscribers. It now has a paid circulation of 125,000. Further extending their product line to readers of both sexes, Taunton introduced Fine Gardening three' years ago; it already has a paid circulation of 125,000. But publisher Jan Wahlin expects circulation to double over the next several years. Last year Taunton Press launched Boats & Gear, a magazine for boat owners. The combined circulation of Taunton's magazines is about 900,000. Including revenues from its 69 how-to books and 21 videotapes, Taunton's sales hit $25 million in 1989; the payroll is up to 200 employees. The Romans own the company outright and politely decline to
divulge its profits, but Taunton is probably earning at least $3 million a year before taxes. In a business where the most important assets are talented-and often expensive-people, Taunton's economics are sublime: Fine Woodworking and Taunton Press's other f!n..~"~meb~ing magazines are all reader-written. Woodworkers send in ideas and suggestions to Taunton's editors. In case their ideas are selected, the reader-woodworker writers are paid $150 per magazine page. Taunton employs 20 full-time editors, who are all woodworkers, gardeners, carpenters, boat owners or seamstresses. The editors spend about three weeks a month working out of Taunton's beautifully crafted (of course) stone, wood and glass building, set in woodlands above a stream outside Newtown, in Connecticut's Fairfield County. There is a guest house on the premises, where struggling writers can stay. One week a month, the editors are expected to be on the road checking up on writers and visiting trade shows and seminars. They can spend up to a year working on a single article with a reader-writer, trying out designs and techniques and editing. Ideas come from everywhere. If an editor sees a house he likes, he will often stop and ring the bell to see if there is a story. The editors also travel with cameras, and double as the magazines' photographers. The photography, graphics and layout of the magazines are done in-house with sophisticated photo-imaging equipment and a desktop publishing system to assure quality. "When you start a small business," says Paul Roman, "you learn how to do everything yourself and you realize it's not that hard." But the point is not keeping overheads down, especially with their travel budget
so high. The point is to create an informal collegiality between Taunton's editors and its readers. If Taunton's editors weren't editors, they would be enthusiastic subscribers themselves. In short, a sturdy bond has been forged between the supplier and the consumer. Consider John Kelsey, the first editor Roman hired and now head of Taunton's $5 million (revenues) books and videos division. Kelsey had quit his job as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer to go to the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York to learn woodworking. Roman found him there and asked him to write articles for the magazine. After seeing Kelsey's work, he quickly hired him. John Lively, now publisher of Fine Woodworking, Fine Homebuilding and Boats & Gear, is another example of Taunton's reader-editor bonding. In 1974 Lively was teaching freshman English at the University of North Texas in Denton, and was an avid woodworker. Like Roman, Lively was starved for good information and project ideas and subscribed lO Fine Woodworking in the Romans' first mailing. "When I first read the magazine, I knew my dream job would be to work there," says Lively, who joined Taunton Press in 1980. The Romans receive a steady flood of valuable information from their broad base of readers who are highly involved with the magazines. Taunton uses this information to work with advertisers, publish and market its books and videos, and fashion new magazines and other products. Not long ago, for example, Fine Woodworking ran a picture of a 19thcentury tool chest. Dozens of readers called in, requesting that Taunton blow up the picture and sell it as a poster. Taunton listened. Since then, the company has sold 12,000 of these posters. "Without any doubt, Taunton Press's magazines are one of the factors that have brought the quality and skill level up to where
amateur practItIOners could use our tools," says Richard Schmidt, advertising manager for Porter-Cable Corporation, a high-quality power-tool manufacturer and consistent advertiser in Taunton's pages. "They are a major force in the growth of fine woodworking." Not all marriages can handle the strains of spouses working together. But the Romans say they would have things no other way. Whiledlaul leads the publishing effort, Jan takes care of finances, facilities and fulfillment. "rt's been really good to have my wife as a team," says Roman. "Our skills are very complementary. I'm a dreamer and she takes care of the details." About a half-dozen woodworking publications have been introduced in the United States since Fine Woodworking hit the scene. Taunton has maintained its market share, although publisher Lively says he feels the competition and is constantly trying to improve the product. The Atlanta Constitution's woodworking columnist, Jack Warner, remains reassuring: "The field may get overcrowded and some of the magazines may fail, but it definitely won't be Fine Woodworking. " What's next for the Romans? Like millions of other U.S. businesspeople, they have caught Euro-fever. Initial tests of Fine Woodworking in the United Kingdom have been very positive, and direct mail is still a largely undeveloped business in most European markets. Meanwhile, back home, the Romans recently bought a company that makes ethnic clothing patterns, to be sold retail and through Threads magazine. "We don't believe in growth for growth's sake," says Paul¡ Roman, "but as long as we have new ideas and good people coming up with new ideas, we want to see them to fruition." What of the frustrating bookshelf project that spawned Taunton Press? Since he started the magazine, Roman laughs, he hasn't had any time for it or for any other woodworking projects. D About the Author: Rita Koselka is a staff writer with Forbes magazine.
The Do-It-Yourself American The teenager who tinkers with his car, the executive who spends the weekend painting his house, the housewife who repairs a leaky faucet, the musician who makes his own violin bow have all inherited a "do-ityourself" trait that has been a part of the American character since the country's beginning.
T
he American character remains unfinished. More accurately, it continues to shift, change and develop in response to major historical events and to the variety of immigrants that America continues to welcome as new citizens. People from different countries and different cultures constantly in¡¡ troduce new material and new designs into the rich tapestry of American life. But certain qualities of the American character, developed at the earliest stages of American history, still endure. They help form an underlying pattern of American life, shaping the habits, customs and attitudes of most of its citizens, new and old. The typical American is frequently described as being open, friendly, casual, talkative, trusting, hardworking, and sometimes parochial, superficial and naive. Each of these ascriptions has an element of truth. There is, however, another trait or characteristic that, although it is less frequently mentioned, gives just as good an insight into the American character, into American life. It is the propensity of many Americans to do for themselves what they might well have others do for them. People in every country learn-frequently out of necessity-that if they want certain things done they must do those things themselves. But in the United States the impulse to do it yourself goes far beyond simple necessity. It extends
from small and nonessential tasks to large and complicated projects, from the teenager who likes to tinker with his old and somewhat battered car, to the well-paid executive who builds a screened-in porch onto his home. It touches the housewife who repairs a leaky faucet herself rather than call in a plumber to do the job; the family that makes a family project out of building a house together; the adventurer who makes and flies a hot-air balloon; the musician who makes his own violin bow
A youngster helps his father paint the porch that they spent six months building, working at nights and on weekends and holidays.
or clarinet reed; the busy student who makes the jewelry she wears. This strong impulse reaches out to and includes the country person and the city person, the rich and the not so rich, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. It is, in fact, hard to be an American without deciding, at some
point, to do it yourself rather than turn to the specialist, to do something that is different from anything you have done before, something that extends and tests your abilities. This American trait has deep historical roots. It was stimulated and encouraged by the unique circumstances that attended the creation of the nation. The great, open frontier that greeted settlers exerted a creative influence upon the emerging American character. The openness of the country, of the laws, of the customs, freed the citizen of the new land to have new ideas, to experiment. This is an inheritance that the contemporary American has not lost and that modern science and technology have allowed him to convert into contemporary terms. In the two-volume Democracy in America (1835-40), one of the most illuminating books on the United States and the character of its people, Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that the American was burdened with the necessity of doing things in a new way and was blessed with the opportunity to do them. Tocqueville wrote: "In America it sometimes happens that one and the same man will till his fields, build his house, make his tools, cobble his shoes, and with his own hands weave the coarse cloth that covers him .... An American finds it very easy to change his trade, suiting his occupation to the needs of the moment. One comes upon those who have been in turn lawyers, farmers, merchants, ministers of the Gospel, and doctors. Though an American may be less skilled than a European in each craft, there is hardly any skill to which he is a complete stranger. "The American lives in a land of wonders; everything around him is in constant movement, and every movement seems an advance. Consequently, in his mind the idea of newness is closely linked with that of improvement. Nowhere does he see any limit placed by nature to human
endeavor; in his eyes something which does not exist is just something that has not been tried yet. ... "These same causes working simultaneously on every individual finally give an irresistible impulse to the national character. " The need to do things for oneself and the freedom to do them in a new way led to a third important ingredient in the American character. Work, manual labor, was not scorned or looked down on; it was highly valued. The person who could do many things was honored for that reason. Benjamin Franklin, who was born in 1706 in the new country, not only commented on this in his writings but was an example of it in his own person. Born poor and given little formal education, Franklin became a printer, a businessman, a writer, a philosopher, a scientist--every schoolchild learns how Franklin used a kite and a metal key in an experiment to prove the identity of lightning and electricity-a politician, a skilled ambassador. He was, finally, a signer of the Constitution of the United States. He died highly honored not only in his own country but in many others.
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none chapter of Poor Richard's Almanack, a book of advice on a wide range of matters, Franklin offers a tip to those who might think of leaving Europe to come to America. If they think they will be welcome and rewarded merely because they come from high birth, from well-known and well-placed families, they are certain to be disappointed, Franklin states. High birth has a value in Europe, "but it is a commodity that cannot be carried to a worse market than that of America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, What is he? but, What can he do? Ifhe has any useful art he is welcome; and if he exercises it, and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him."
The new country GiG not have reFacingpage: Whether it is trimming a tree (above) or repairing a lawn mower (below), do-it-yourself projects can provide satisfaction andfinancial savings.
sources to support those who did not contribute to its development. That development took hard work, and hard work was valued accordingly. Franklin
recalls the typically American way the people themselves expressed this fact: "God Almighty is himself a mechanic, the greatest in the Universe; and he is respected and more admired for the variety, ingenuity, and utility of his handiworks, than for the antiquity of his family." That attitude toward work runs as a strong strain through American life, history and literature. James Russell Lowell, an acclaimed 19th-century poet, wrote: ... there is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will, and blessed are the horny hands of toil.
Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), a black leader and educator, said: "No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem." The impulse to do it yourself, then, flourished on necessity and pride in hard work and inventiveness, all of which the environment of the new world conspired to nourish. But that new environment is no longer new, the open frontier is no longer open and, for the most part, the jack-of-all-trades has long since given way to the specialist. Yet the typical American is still drawn to do things for himself-sometimes very difficult and demanding things-that he could have specialists do. Why has this characteristic persisted beyond the life of the circumstances that practically forced it into existence? Part of the reason remains economic. A person who paints his own house, fixes his own broken toilet, or repairs hi~ own lawn mower, will spend less money than he would if he hired someone to do it. He may need the money he thus saves to buy clothes for his children or pay his mortgage or other bills. But he may well be saving to spend not on something he needs but on something he enjoys, such as travel, entertainment, a dinner out-or
materia) to blJiJd a speciE) piece of
flJI-
niture according to his own designs. And here we touch on another reason why Americans do for themselves as amateurs-often with a number of failures
and mishaps along the way-what the professional or specialist might do. The colonists and those who immediately followed them often had to make and fashion for themselves things they could not buy, from ax handles to quilts and leather goods to kitchen equipment. The first consideration in making these objects was that they should serve wel1 the function for which they were intended. But, as often happens, the maker of an object is not always content that it only be useful; he or she wishes it to be attractive also. The attempt to make the useful object attractive is especial1y evident in the clothes, blankets, quilts, and other household objects of that time. For example, quilting, although a long and sometimes tedious process, was a particularly popular activity. Quilt-making sessions would spread over many evenings, often bringing together the women of the household, or of several households. It was an occupation that combined many features. It was a way of making good use of old scraps of material, of working on something that was much needed, of providing a time for discussion, and of opening channels for creativity. This need to make quilts at home for the household has almost completely died. The time required to complete a wel1-designedquilt makes it an economical1y prohibitive occupation for most people. And yet quilt-making has not ceased. Quilts are a main feature of exhibits at county fairs and elsewhere throughout the United States each summer, along with numerous other items-flower arrangements, intricately carved and painted belts, enameled jewelry, handmade furniture, wood carvings, potterythat once were crafted to meet a material need, but now are made to achieve personal satisfaction. The need has died but not the art. nother old do-it-yourself activity that has resurfaced-but with a difference-is the building of log cabins. In decades past it used to be both a claim and a boast for an American politician to say that he had been
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born in a log cabin. It was a claim that he knew from experience what it was to be poor and therefore that he knew the needs of the poor; it was a boast that he had climbed from that background to a position of power and influence as a politician. In future decades, a growing number of Americans wil1 be able to say that they, too, were born in a log house-but it wil1 no longer carry the implication that they were born poor. In the United States, about 25,000 log houses are now being built each year. This is a very smal1part of the 1.75 mil1ion new houses being built annual1y, but it is double the number of log houses that were being built 15 years ago. The interest in these houses has grown because of their rustic character, their energy efficiency, and because they can be bought in kit form and constructed, at least partly, by the purchaser himself. Americans are not only building log houses-but al1kinds of houses. With the increasing importance that Americans are now giving to the family, home building has gained added attraction. Do-it-yourself house projects offer occasions for members of the family to work together. Even the children pitch in, fetching and carrying nails, measuring and cutting material, holding something in place while it is glued, stapled, or nailed. In 1965, according to surveys made by the building industry, almost 40 percent of American households engaged in a do-it-yourself project for the home. Two decades later that number had soared to almost 75 percent. A longrunning television program cal1ed This Old House, which shows people how to renovate a home from the basement to the attic, is watched by mil1ions of viewers every week, including entire families. Marketing blitzes by the producers of do-it-yourself manuals have given a boost to al1kinds of do-it-yourself activity. Besides, modern science and technology have al10wed the adventurous to make quantum leaps in what they are wil1ingto
attempt. For instance, numerous books and pamphlets are available to instruct the homeowner on how to improve the insulation in his home and take other steps to save fuel. Other publications instruct readers in how to instal1 solar panels--even on a log house. More unusual is the publication that instructs one in How to Build a Computer-Controlled
Robot.
The do-it-yourself trait sometimes manifests itself in a way that exhibits yet another typical1y American characteristic-the tendency to add a touch of whimsy, fun and humor to everything. After encountering books that instruct one in how to build an adobe house, an igloo, a kayak, a solar heater; how to make fishing flies, mobiles, animated movies, micro labs, and wedding dresses; how to fix cars, watches, and washing machines; it is only a slight surprise to find a book entitled How to Do Almost Everything and another titled How to Fix Almost Every Damn Thing.
It is sometimes difficult to tel1 by the title alone on which side of the dividing line between the serious and the pseudoserious a particular book fal1s.Thus, How to A void Lawyers could wel1 be serious; knowing the lore of jokes about lawyers one would have to examine the book to be sure. But when one encounters How to Avoid Love and Marriage, one would have to be overly solemn not to recognize the book as a spoof of books that instruct one in how to improve one's life. However, if after learning how to avoid both love and marriage one decides that the future doesn't hold much promise, one can turn to another "helpful" book, possibly the. capstone of this genre: How to Avoid the Future.
Modern technology and the American penchant for humor and self-mocking have added some interesting dimensions to the do-it-yourself trait. But beneath the contemporary veneer of American life, the grain of the early American character endures. 0 About the Author: James Finn is the editor of Freedom at Issue, a bimonthly publication of Freedom House, a think tank in New York City.
Coping With Climate Chaos would submerge 30 to 80 percent of the coastal wetlands in the United States, which are crucial to the productivity of commercially important fisheries. Extensive existing coastal development may prevent the widespread formation of new wetlands. Even in undeveloped coastal areas, the rapidity of the predicted sea-level rise will mean that existing wetlands would be lost faster than new ones can be created. The increase in elevation of the oceans will also seriously affect the approximately 50 percent of the Earth's population that inhabits coastal regions. A rise in sea level of only one meter could flood an area of the Nile Delta that constitutes 12 to 15 percent of Egypt's arable land, produces a similar portion of the Egyptian annual gross national product (GNP), and is home to a comparable percentage of the country's 51.4 million people. In Bangladesh, a one-meter rise would inundate 11.5 percent of the country's land area, displace nine percent of the 112.3 million people and threaten eight percent of the GNP. The dramatic anticipated increases in global temperature are virtually certain to cause a wide variety of modifications in regional climates. In middle latitudes, summertime temperature increases are¡ expected to exceed the global average by 30 to 50 percent. Forests could begin to die off as early as the year 2000 if they are unable to adjust to rapidly shifting climatic zones. Regions of agricultural productivity could shift at the expense of the American Midwest, which currently has some of the most fertile soils in the world. Even a moderate warming could decrease wheat and cereal yields by three to 17 percent. Computer models predict continental drying in middle latitudes, which means that parched soils, scorching droughts and massive heat waves, like those that devastated crops in the American Midwest in the sum-
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In the United States pine tree seedlings, grown under controlled greenhouse conditions, will be transplanted in fields where the effects of airborne pollution on them will be monitored.
mer of 1988, could become commonplace. Water levels in the Great Lakes could drop by 30 centimeters, interfering with navigation for ocean-going vessels. Countries with tropical climates could experience especially severe consequences. Semiarid areas might suffer from even lower rainfall; tropical humid climates could become hotter and wetter, with an increase in the frequency and severity of tropical storms. Floods, which between 1968 and 1988 killed more than 80,000 people and affected at least 200 million more, could worsen. Indeed, climate disruption caused by the greenhouse effect may already be evident. Global temperatures in 1988 were at or near the record for the period of instrumental data, with temperatures somewhat elevated relative to the average for the 30-year period beginning in 1950. And because there is a lag on the order
of decades between emissions of greenhouse gases and their effects, the level of heat-absorbing chemicals already released into the atmosphere has irrevocably committed the world to an additional warming over the next 50 years, even if the atmosphere's composition were stabilized today. The greenhouse effect, if unchecked, is also likely to cause unpredictable disruptions in the balance of power worldwide, exacerbating the risk of war. It is very unlikely that any region of the world will be a net "winner" from climate change. The very concept of "winning" implies the existence of a stable warmer climate, which will not occur unless the warming trend is halted. Even the limited goal of a steady-state warmer climate will require major policy reform. Otherwise, greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperatures will continue to increase indefinitely, nullifying any short-term benefits. While all countries are likely to be losers in the global climate gamble, some countries have more at stake than others. The United States has a particularly large investment in the status
quo. Impending climate change means that the productivity of the country's natural resources can no longer be taken for granted. The United States has one of the most productive agricultural sectors on Earth, producing nearly 50 percent of the world's corn and nearly 60 percent of its soybeans. It is also the world's leading exporter of wheat and corn. By contrast, the Soviet Union is one of the planet's largest importers of wheat and corn. Climate models suggest that this pattern could change dramatically if the American Midwest became ten to 20 percent drier and crop yields were reduced. At the same time, Soviet agricultural areas, located considerably farther north, could suffer smaller losses in productivity relative to their American counterparts. The effects of greenhouse warming will also be felt in other parts of the world, potentially fueling turbulent regional conflicts that could upset the existing global balance of power. Loss of low-lying territory could create refugee problems of an unprecedented scale. Competition over territory and natural resources launched by those displaced could create or exacerbate regional strife. Famine by greenhouse-driven crop failures could also generate regional clashes that might encourage the major powers to take sides. Such an acceleration in showdowns among the superpowers would destabilize the world political balance in highly unpredictable ways. The worst effects of a greenhouse-induced climate cataclysm can be averted. And the sooner action is taken, the more effective it will be. CFCs and halons are by far the easiest component of the greenhouse problem to eliminate. Motivated by concern over the pivotal role these chemicals play in depleting the stratospheric ozone layer, 45 countries and one
Coping With Climate Chaos . international organization have signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, which took effect at the beginning of 1989 after negotiations sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program. Aside from representing a diplomatic milestone for international cooperation on environmental problems, the Montreal Protocol is an important precedent for a multilateral strategy on the more challenging issue of greenhouse warming. The Montreal Protocol requires an incremental 50 percent reduction in the consumption of five ozone-depleting CFCs by the end of this century. In July 1989, consumption of these substances was frozen at 1986 levels. A reduction of 20 percent must be achieved beginning in July 1993, and an additional 30 percent beginning III July 1998. Each country may implement these requirements as it chooses through recycling, destruction, or abandonment of unnecessary uses of these chemicals. However, the overall strategy is to stimulate the development of alternatives to CFCs by constricting supply. The Montreal Protocol contains ground breaking trade incentives for broad participation, including a ban on imports of controlled substances from countries that are not party to the accord. It resolves delicate equity issues by allowing Third World countries a ten-year grace period to make required reductions.
Shortfalls in the Montreal Protocol Despite the precedential importance of the Montreal Protocol, the agreement is inadequate. Because of loopholes and leakages built into the document, the actual reductions in emissions of substances controlled by the protocol will be only about onethird under even the most optimistic assumptions. Consumption of halons is merely leveled off, not reduced. The agreement
continued
explicitly specifies that production-as distinct from consumption-of CFCs and halons may actually increase by as much as ten percent over the 1986 level. It is now clear that emi~sions of CFCs and halons must be virtually eliminated because of the overwhelming risks these chemicals pose to climate and stratospheric ozone. Soon after the Montreal Protocol was signed, a seasonal thinning of 50 percent of the ozone layer over Antarctica-the ozone "hole"-was conclusively connected to CFCs. New and widely accepted scientific evidence documents that average global losses III stratospheric ozone of about three percent-two to three times that previously predicted by computer models-have already occurred. Even if CFCs and halons are phased out within five to seven years, the long atmospheric lifetimes of these chemicals mean that the environment could take up to a century to recover. To stabilize global concentrations of carbon dioxide gas, it will be necessary to cut global emissions of carbon dioxide by at least one-half. Burning fossil fuels releases most of the excess carbon dioxide III the atmosphere. Because no economical technology for removing carbon dioxide from waste-gas streams is now available, cutting back releases of carbon dioxide will require a lower total energy consumption and a shift in energy sources toward low- or noncarbon-dioxide-emitting technologies. Reductions in fossil-fuel use will also ease other environmental problems associated with current patterns of energy use, such as acid rain and local air pollution. Even with the most optimistic assumptions about economic growth, major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from industrialized countries can be achieved with energy conservation, efficiency technologies and renewable energy sources. For
example, the 1,200 kilowatthours per year used by a typical frost-free refrigerator can be reduced to only 500 with a state-ofthe-art model. Current technology can light an office building with an expenditure of only 0.55 watts per square meter, as little as one-fifth of today's average. It is now possible to produce motor vehicles that have fuel economies of up to 42 kilometers per liter, two to five times as efficient as those now on the road. Efficiency improvements have meant that the amount of energy used in the United States today is about the same as in 1973 despite a 40 percent increase in GNP during the same period. Application of existing efficiency technologies could reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 14 to 18 percent by the end of the century. Reversing deforestation and creating new forested areas will help to offset current levels of carbon dioxide emissions. New forests, in absorbing carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis, will contribute to climate stabilization by serving as supplementary reservoirs for carbon. Aggressive policies to conserve existing forests and create new forested areas will yield other environmental benefits, including erosion control and the preservation of species whose genetic potential is only now becoming accessible to humankind.
The role of developing countries An equitable response to the special needs of developing countries is crucial to removing greenhouse threats to the global climate. Although developing countries have caused little of the problem to date, as economic development accelerates they may account for the preponderance of greenhouse gas emissions by {he middle of the next century. At the same time, these countries, with fewer resources to adapt to environmental disturbances, stand to suffer dispropor-
tionately from a rapid climate change. For example, the productivity of common rice varieties falls off greatly at temperatures just a few degrees higher than those prevailing in many rice-growing areas. Tapping the tremendous potential for conservation and improved end-use efficiency in the developing world would contribute to a solution for greenhouse warming while meeting much of the Third World's growing energy needs. However, macro-economic policies III many developing countries, such as electricity price subsidies, discourage conservation and efficiency improvements. Firms III Brazil, where electricity prices are subsidized, manufacture energy-efficient air conditioners for export but cheap, inefficient models for domestic consumption. Investments III efficiency require less capital and less foreign exchange than do comparable amounts of new power supply, contributing to overall economic productivity. Through efficiency and conservation, developing countries could avoid at least $1,400,000 million in power supply expansion costs between now and the year 2008. Efficiency investments represent a major opportunity for donors like the United States and the World Bank to assist developing countries in making energy choices that avoid mistakes made earlier in the developed world and reduce risks to the entire planet from the effects of greenhouse warming. The World Bank, which controls an annual energy lending portfolio averaging $3,500 million, is one of the principal donors supporting power generation projects in the Third World. Through measures such as pricing reforms and improvements in the operation of existing power plants and distribution systems, the bank has already made a commitment to encourage conservation and the efficient use
of energy. There is, however, considerably more that the bank can do. Demand-reduction measures, such as end-use efficiency improvements, which are often economically as well as environmentally superior to investments in energy supply, have not been consistently considered as alternatives to conventional power generation projects by the bank. Demand-reduction options would help developing countries reduce the rate of growth in power generating and greenhouse-gas emissions without sacrificing energy needed for economic development. Forest policy is another area where development assistance can provide benefits to Third World countries while cutting emissions of greenhouse gases. Donor countries historically have devoted little capital to conservation of this crucial resource and have earmarked even less for the creation of new forest areas. Also, developed countries provide the primary market for tropical hardwoods, virtually all of which are unsustainably harvested, and firms based in industrialized countries often reap the profits of this trade. Governments of industrialized countries can take a serious look at controlling trade in tropical woods and compensate exporting countries for lost revenues through alternative investments. The Third World debt CrISIS presents major opportunities for encouraging better forest management in developing countries. As the market value of such debt has fallen, a number of private banks have sold debt owed to them by Third World governments to private conservation organizations, which have then forgiven the debt in return, for example, for a commitment by the governments concerned to conserve a particular area and to support its maintenance with a stream of payments in local currency. Such "debt for nature" swaps are already in place in Bo-
INDIAN SCIENTISTS studying the greenhouse
effect have published hundreds of papers detailing their findings. In 1982, A.P. Mitra, now director-general of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, published a monograph on "Human Influences on the Atmospheric Environment." A year later, an Indo-U.S. workshop on ozone was held at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in New Delhi. Among the many current NPL projects is the study of methane, a major climate-modifying gas. In the photo above, scientist Prabhat Kumar Gupta (left) and an assistant test the amount of methane produced in paddy fields in different regions in India under the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program.
livia, Costa Rica and Ecuador, and more are under negotiation.
A multilateral approach Coordinating policies on the international level to fight greenhouse warming will maximize environmental and foreign policy benefits. While unilateral reductions in releases of greenhouse gases by large emitters will go a long way toward arresting global climate disruption, a multilateral consensus strategy will further the crucial goals of creating incentives for universal participation and establishing an equitable balance of responsibility for solving the problem. Existing international mechanisms are an important part of such a strategy. A reassessment of the Montreal Protocol, a process that is provided for by the document itself, is the most expeditious way to eliminate the contributions CFCs and halons make to the global-warming
problem. The World Bank's institutional structure also includes mechanisms for member countries to redirect priorities in the critical energy and forest sectors. The remainder of the greenhouse problem could be handled most effectively through a multilateral treaty, with standards binding under international law that would require each country to take prescribed actions to reduce and halt greenhouse warming. A multilateral treaty to arrest global climate change should satisfy several basic requirements. First, it must require reductions in releases of greenhouse gases of a magnitude and at a speed sufficient to stabilize the Earth's climate. The most important gas to control is carbon dioxide. for which global reductions of at least 50 percent are necessary. Participating countries should accomplish these reductions by means of environmentally and economically sound technologies
that do not present unacceptable risks to public health or global security. The creation of new forested areas might be encouraged by allowing credits against reductions of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise be required and by provisions establishing or promoting forestry programs. Because the agreement would likely cover a large number of emission sources, it should mandate strict mechanisms for enforcement through reporting of emissions, on-site audits and internationally controlled remote sensing. Second, the responsibility for making reductions must be distributed equitably. Among the criteria that could be applied is relative national wealth as measured by per capita GNP. Another test could be per capita emissions of carbon dioxide, with the highest reductions required of those countries with the highest emissions per unit of population. A treaty should also require a commitment from the wealthier countries for increased research into non-carbon-dioxide energy supply technologies and development assistance to help poorer countries meet the requirements imposed on them by the agreement. One mechanism for generating the necessary capital is to require countries to contribute to a fund in proportion to their carbon dioxide emissions. Considering the importance of the resources at risk, it would be nothing short of reckless to continue with business as usual. A failure to respond to the .threat of greenhouse warming would amount to an affirmative decision to wager the health and well-being of current and future generations against overwhelming odds. 0
About the Author: David A. Wirth, a senior aflame)" wilh the U.S. Nalura! Resources Defense Council, Inc., is a former aflome)"adviser for oceans, inremalional environment and scienrific affairs H'ilh lhe U.S. Deparlment ofSlale.
In Tune With India An Interview With STANLEY SCOTT by SHANTANU SENGUPTA and BAMAPADA GANGOPADHYA
With his sandy brown hair, up for the night and so on. sunglasses, and his casual ways There are a lot of work songs Stanley Scott looks like a and love songs. typical tourist in India. But How did you become ininstead of carrying a camera, terested in Indian music? he wields a guitar or a do-tara; My interest was fired when sometimes a sitar. Beatie George Harrison began Scott is a singer, poet, learning Indian music under composer, guitar teacherJreePandit Ravi Shankar. I started to lance performer, recording study it privately from different artist, roving folklorist, and a Indian teachers in the United researcher and scholar. He States, and ultimately I studied it and his wife, Dorothea Hast, an in India. I have come a long way excellent instrumentalist, are from viewing it from a superficial in India on a fellowship from Stanley Scott giving a guitar recital at Kalyani University in West perspective to embracing it. the American Institute for Bengal (at left is Vice-Chancellor Kalyan Das Gupta) and... Did anyone personally inIndian Studies (AIlS)fluence you to take up Indian headquartered in New Delhimusic? to study the folk music of eastern India. We recently talked to Two men in my college had an enormous influence on me. Scott in Santiniketan, West Bengal, about his interest in music One was my voice teacher, Frank Baker. A master of Western and India. Excerptsfrom the interview follow. classical singing and a man of great imagination, he was interested in experimentation. So he had his students improvisQuestion: When and where did your interest in music begin? ing vocally. We would take a text of a Latin mass-a piece of Stanley Scott: I was born in a small town in upstate New York liturgical music-and improvise using the sounds and words in 1950. When I was a boy Bob Dylan was one of my heroes. based on the emotion of the text. Woody Guthrie became another hero because he was Dylan's The other influence was my guitar teacher at college, Gunnar idol. And I belonged to the generation in which most young Schembeck, a wonderful musical renegade. He is an instrument Americans took up the guitar because of the Beatles. builder, an inventor, a composer, a virtuoso clarinetist. He I began as a naive 13-year-old learning to play the guitar. I played everything. And he said, "If you are going to play string started with the popular rock 'n' roll songs and then gradually instruments then you should have some familiarity with all the went back farther and farther into folk culture and folk music. string instruments." He handed me a sitar and said, "Take this Today I have become something ofa folklorist, something of an for a few months." From these two men I received a certain anthropologist. amount of impetus to go in the Indian direction since the Indian Did your family have any role to play in your music career? vocal tradition is improvisational. It was the only South Asian My mother was an excellent classical pianist. I started singing form to which I had much exposure. That's another reason why to her accompaniment at a very early age. My father was a I chose Indian music. teacher. A very good teacher. So, from my parents I got my I spentthe winter of 1972 studying north Indian classical singing¡ interest in music and in education. with Lakshmi Tiwari who was teaching at Wesleyan University in What do you find distinctive about the folk music of America? Middletown, Connecticut. That was my first hands-on experience American folk music, like Indian folk music, is a vast subwith I ndian music. In 1973 I finished my BA in Western music. I ject. There are dozens of varieties. It is very difficult to spentthe summer of1974 at the Ali Akbar College of Music in Los generalize. If there is something distinctive about American Angeles, California. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan was my vocal instrufolk music, it comes from the fact that the first generation of ctor and Ustad Zakir Hussain was my rhythm teacher. They got people of European descent to live in North America really me very excited. But I couldn't continue there because I had thought of themselves as adventurers. So there was this spirit musical work back on the East Coast. I couldn't sacrifice that. So I of individual exploration. And a lot of our ballads are songs came back to the East, gave concerts, taught guitar, and began about outlaws who become heroes. Bad men who become studying with Sushil Mukherjee. He has been a major influence good. Pretty Boy Floyd, for example, robbing the rich and then upon my music during the past IS years. Mukherjee not only plays leaving a $100 note under the plate of a farmer who put him classical music on the flute and sings in the classical style but he
"Folk music deals with the gamut of human experience--Iove, work, social struggles .... My songs have a great deal to do with nature, with personal relationships, with people."
also sings folk songs. It was he the worst floods ever. At that time who stimulated my interest in you composed the song "Bharat Bengali folk songs. tumi sundoor." Doesn't that What are you doing now? sound a bit out of tune? Riaz, riaz and more riaz. I At that time I was staying have two parallel interests in with Sushil Mukherjee's family Indian music. One in north Inin Ranchi, Bihar. I found them dian classical singing, the other so generous about sharing their in the folk music of eastern Inculture, their life with me, weldia. Krishna Chandra Bandocoming me as a member of the padhya was my classical guru. family. My song does not When I first came to Calcutta in whitewash India. It doesn't say 1978, Mukherjee introduced me India is only beautiful. But the to him. At that time I wrote and basic message is "India, you are composed a song called "Bharat ...singing UBharat tumi sundoor" (India, you are beautiful), his beautiful." tumi sundoor." own composition, to children in a village near Santiniketan. In what way will you give Bandopadhya was better recitals of traditional Indian muknown as Keshto Banerjee. We sic in the United States? called him "mastermoshai." After the 1978 experience under Having traveled thousands of kilometers to learn traditional mastermoshai I returned to India on a Fulbright fellowship in music, my choice would be to perform it in as traditional a way 1984 and stayed nine months in Calcutta working on the folk as I can. music of Bengal. During that period mastermoshai introduced me What are the issues that have appeared in your songs? to my folk-singing teacher Kalidas Gupta. Then, in 1988, I Folk music deals with the gamut of human experience-love, brought a group of five American students, my students, to work, social struggles. My songs are dictated partly by the Calcutta to study with my mastermoshai. That was a short visitsongs I have learned. My first songs were all political songs. only six weeks. In October 1989, I returned once more with a When I was 15 I wrote many antiwar songs. As my composing senior research fellowship from AIlS to spend ten months improved I discovered that I could write best about things of studyingwithmastermoshaiand to document his way of teaching. which I had intimate experience. Woody Guthrie could write I also hoped to write something about how folk music is taught by about fruit-pickers in California because he worked in the one maestro. Unfortunately, he died a day before I landed in orchards. I haven't. So my songs have a great deal to do with Calcutta. Kalidas Gupta introduced me to my new guru Mohan nature, with love, with personal relationships, with people. Singh who teaches at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. Have you cut any records? What do you find so compelling about Bengali folk music? A couple in the United States. One is A Friend of the Wind, It is not so tangible that I can say this or that. I got involved in which includes "Bharat tumi sundoor" and another is The Indian music because it provoked me at an emotional level. The Lotus in the Rose, which has songs of travel in Ireland and India first thing that strikes me in a song, especially in a language that and some Bengali folk songs. I don't know well, is not the verbal imagery but the musical What are your plans after you return home? quality, the emotional quality. If a song has a beautiful melody Well, I am a free-lance performer so I can make plans in and a feeling of pathos, then I want to sing that song. Whether it fantasy. I plan to go back and continue giving concerts and is a bhawayia, chaatka, bhatiali, banulgan, or bihu does not making recordings. I will also finish my PhD so that I can move matter as long as the rasa is there. in a more scholarly direction. As a composer I have been How do you see yourself? composing some pieces that make use of some Indian elements Essentially as a folk singer and poet. And then as a guitar along with Western elements. This is exciting to me. I want to teacher, composer, and scholar. continue with it. Do you ever give performances? Any dreams? Yes. In style the songs I sing are closer to folk music than Coming back to India again. D anything else, although I studied Western classical guitar for many years. You first came to India in 1973 when Bengal was in the grip of
About
the Interviewers: Shantanu Sengupta Gangopadhya are Calcutta-based free-lance writers.
and
Bamapada
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE
"[t's the dangedest thing [ever seen, You just push this bu{{on, a bell rings, and a snack pops our." Reprinted
with permission
from The Saturday
a division of BFL and MS, Inc.
Evening Post Society,
1990.
"Gentlemen, 10 combat the grOll'ing menace of VCR machines, [rhink \re in television should restrict ourselves to no more than 45 mimiles of advertising in any given hour of programming."
"He was a man of simple tastes-baked macaroni, steamed cabbage, \I'ax beans, boiled onions, and corn Fillers."
The Santuario de Guadalupe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which has retained enough of its original character to give visitors afaithful glimpse of what inspired Willa Cather.
Although she is more frequently associated with the wide and windy plains of Nebraska, Willa Cather often turned to the American Southwest in her search for meaning. People, places and events related to the Southwest-its very air and lightassumed a special significance for her and influenced the composition of several of her novels and stories. It is appropriate, then, that the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial in Red Cloud chose the College of Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as the site of the fourth national seminar on Willa Cather: Multiple Traditions of American Culture. Under the direction of two energetic women-Susan J. Rosowski, a well known Cather scholar and professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Patricia K. Phillips, director of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial-the week-long event attracted most of the prominent Cather scholars. In addition, there were some 170 other participants. Most were from the United States, but several came from Canada, one from England and one from India. Although the participants came from different places and represented different ages and occupations, they were united in their enthusiasm for and interest in the life and work of Willa Cather. The seminar began on the afternoon of June 16, 1990, with a panel discussion moderated by Professor Rosowski and featuring keynote speaker N. Scott Momaday and principal lecturers Hermione Lee, E.A. (Tony) Mares and Sharon O'Brien. As each panelist described the nature of his or her involvement S. Krishnamoorthy Aithal is a professor of English at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. David Harrell, aformer instructor of English at Jefferson State Junior College in Birmingham, Alabama, is revising his PhD dissertation for publication. About the Authors:
with Willa Cather, a pattern of personal identification with some aspect of Cather's life and struggles began to emerge. For each panelist, Ca ther was more than a subject of mere academic interest. Even Tony Mares, who took Cather to task for distorting much of the Hispanic history of northern New Mexico, found much to admire in Willa Cather as an artist and as a person. Following the panel discussion, Momaday presented his keynote address, "Epitomes of the Wild West," which developed out of an imagined dinner conversation featuring Momaday, Cather, and Padre Martinez from Death Comesfor the Archbishop. Momaday's poetic evocation set the tone of cultural pluralism that characterized the seminar. As the week progressed, the lectures, paper sessions and discussions covered almost all of Cather's books and examined them for their biographical, psychological, historical, sociological, theological, feminist and linguistic standpoints. Each speaker-and there were more than 50-presented a convincing case. Question and answer sessions introduced other approaches, dimensions or directions that testified to the complexity of Cather's art. The seminar organizers arranged tours of Santa Fe and Taos so that we could experience the geographical locations associated with Cather's life and work. Highlights in Santa Fe included two places where Cather stayed while she was writing Death Comes for the Archbishop-La Fonda and the Mary Austin House (now Gerald Peters Gallery)-and a number of places mentioned in the book: St. Francis Cathedral, Loretto Chapel, San Miguel Mission, the Santuario de Guadalupe and Padre Gallegos House. Then at midday buses took us to Bishop's Lodge, a few kilometers ilOrth of the Plaza, where the historical bishop Jean Baptist Lamy built a retreat that suggested the one Cather ascribes to her fictional bishop, Jean
An interior view of Bishop Lamy's private chapel at Bishop s Lodge in Santa Fe. Outside the chapel is the Bishop's prized apricot tree that, although long dead, is still massive enough to evoke the image of its earlier life and the inspiration it gave Cather for her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop.
the priest's father. Part fortress and part homestead, this restored 19th-century Spanish residence gave us a good look at one of the lifestyles contemporary with Death Comes for the Archbishop. Afterward, we divided into groups according to our interests for a tour of Taos itself, a visit to the pueblo, or a drive over the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. Then we reassembled at Kit Carson Park for the return to Santa Fe, stopping first at the Sagebrush Inn in Taos for a hearty western barbecue. For many, this day was the highlight of the week. Like other places, New Mexico has changed considerably since the first decades of this century, when Cather made her visits. Unlike many other places, however, it has retained enough of its heritage to give visitors a faithful glimpse of what inspired this American writer. Just as Cather was transformed by the experience, so were the seminar participants. When one's nights are spent in a college dormitory room, it can be difficult to wake up feeling rejuvenated, as Cather's Bishop Latour always did: "In New Mexico he always awoke a young man." But one can still enjoy the "sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover"; one can still enjoy "a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'Today, to-day,' like a child's." This is part of the legacy of New Mexico. Its trustee is Willa Cather. Its heirs are the people she 0 brought together for a memorable week last June. Marie Latour. There we enjoyed a fine lunch, a tour of Bishop Lamy's private chapel and a view of the remains of the bishop's prized apricot tree. Though long dead, the tree is still massive enough to evoke the image of its earrlierlife and the inspiration it gave to Cather's book. Two days later, on June 20, we boarded four buses for a journey on the high road to Taos. The tree-studded mountains and spectacular views of the Sangre de Cristos recalled Ca ther's description in Death Comes for the Archbishop: Yes, Sangre de Cristo; but no matter how scarlet the sunset, those red hills never became vermilion, but a more and more intense rose-carnelian; not the color of living blood, the Bishop had often reflected, but the color of the dried blood of saints and martyrs preserved in old churches in Rome, which liquefies upon occasion.
We passed the Santuario de Chimayo, shrine of the famous healing dirt mentioned in Death Comes for the Archbishop. Then we arrived in Truchas, where we stopped for lunch at Los Siete, a cooperative of traditional Hispanic weavers and woodcarvers. The shop is located on the crest of a hill with breathtaking views all around. The first stop in Taos was at the Martinez Hacienda, home of
Thehorno (oven) in the courtyard of the house of Kit Carson, the famous western hero, in Taos, New Mexico.
Immigrants In Cather's America From the cultural and ethnic point of view, it is hard to find a roomier America in American literature than the one presented by Willa Cather (18731947) in her novels and short stories. In her works, Americans, the descendants of early settlers, share the land with more recent immigrants belonging to several nationalities and cultures: European, Japanese, Mexican and so on. None of these groups feels any strong urge either to shun its cultural ways, to cling desperately to them, or proudly celebrate them. Ethnicity comes naturally to them, and, as such, they carry it quietly, without drawing envy, jealousy or suspicion. Willa Cather's America enjoys an ethnic harmony that would be enviable anywhere. Immigrant experience is a frequent topic of discussion in Willa Cather scholarship. Cather scholars generally focus on her power of observation of immigrants, her understanding of their ways and her sympathetic portrayal of their struggles in the land of their adoption. The story "Flavia and Her Artists" in Cather's The Troll Garden (19,05) neatly illustrates her many-in-one America. The assembled guests at Flavia's house at Tarrytown, New York, have names that reflect a variety of European nationalities. The guests include Emile M. Roux, Jules Martel, Alcee Buisson; Professor Herr Schotte and Frau Lichtenfeld, Signor Donati; Ivan Schemetakin and Restzhoff. Though six different languages can be heard in the servants' quarters, producing a chaotic situation there, Flavia's honored guests all speak English. The differences in cultural backgrounds give rise to hardly any problems. The gathering in Tarrytown includes foreigners who have come in response to Flavia's special invitation. It can be argued that a meeting like this cannot be
taken to represent American social reality in any serious way. Roux, for example, hails from Paris. It may be safe to infer that Lichtenfeld lives and writes in Germany. As for others, it is difficult to say for certain whether they are visitors or permanent residents of America. Overall, the story presents a picture of a country where diverse nationalities and cultures mingle freely. Many Americans in the story have an overseas background or education, or are drawn toward foreign cultures, especially those of Europe. Imogen, Flavia's cousin, studied philology at the Ecole des Chartes. Arthur Hamilton, Flavia's husband, was born and brought up in the West Indies. Flavia is strongly attracted toward foreign artists. In order to find fascinating foreigners to attend her parties, she has persuaded her husband to move from Chicago to the port city of Tarrytown. The transfer from the Midwest to the East Coast can be taken as an expression of a desire to culturally annex America to Europe. An international setting shows how cultural differences give rise to conflicts between individuals and groups. Willa Cather's story, however, does not deal with intercultural conflict. Roux's vitriolic attack on the Advanced American Woman is not inspired by cultural prejudices, nor are Hamilton's biting remarks on Roux and his kind. Their attacks are directed toward common human weaknesses such as egoism, vanity, snobbery or ingratitude as exhibited by particular individuals. Cather's primary interest is the human being, his greatness and his smallness. Her focus of attention is the delineation of human nature, to the extent that she may even give the impression of being indifferent to the ethnic peculiarities of her characters. Cather's American West, the setting
of most of her stories and novels, is almost entirely populated by "foreigners"-first-, second- and third~generation immigrants. Bad feelings or conflicts between ethnic groups are rarely witnessed in any of those works. Half a dozen European nationalities, for example, inhabit the Divide in 0 Pioneers! (1913). They live in easy reach of one another, though sometimes they live in groups in separate, isolated pockets. The Bergsons, Swedes, have for neighbors a Bohemian couple, Marie and Frank Sabata, and, before the Sabatas moved in, there lived a German family on the farm, Carl Linstrum and his parents. The French are nearby, as are Ivar and other Russians who live across the county line. During her prosperous days, Alexandra Bergson employed Swedish maids and farmhands~ Ivar, and Barney Flinn, an. Irishman. The settlers face the hostility of the land, but there is no group hostility of any kind. In 0 Pioneers! Cather is careful to differentiate one group from another. References to the distinct physical features, dress, speech, temperament, manners and beliefs of each are interspersed throughout the book. They occur in many ways in many contexts and serve many purposes. Often, a member of one group expresses appreciation in some trait in another group; for example, Alexandra
In Willa Cather's America, an ethnic, no matter of what origin, is first a human being. Her concern for primary human values comes ringing through in all her novels and short stories.
says that the Bohemians "certainly know how to make more kinds of bread than any other people in the world." If an unflattering reference is made, the target group is often the speaker's own, as when Alexandra remarks, "Now that I think of it, most of my girls have married men they were afraid of. I believe there is a good deal of the cow in most Swedish girls .... We're a terribly practical people, and I guess we think a cross man makes a good manager." The foreign settlers on Willa Cather's Divide are sometimes shown to yield to the pressure of the Americanizing process. Alexandra's brother Lou and his wife Annie speak mostly English and only sometimes Swedish at home. When she happens to speak Swedish, Annie is "almost as much afraid of being caught barefoot." Oscar, Alexandra's second brother, "still has a thick accent but Lou speaks like anybody from Iowa." Oscar's children "do not understand a word of Swedish." Such examples of acculturation, though, are not numerous in 0 Pioneers!; the story's characters do not surrender totally their cultural identities. Even though 'Emil, Alexandra's youngest brother, has, as a student at the University of Nebraska, come under the influence of the outside world and is greatly changed in his outward behavior, Alexandra notices that he remains basically a Swede. Speaking to Carl Linstrum, she says, "It's curious, too; on the outside Emil is just like an American boy-he graduated from the State university in June, you know-but underneath he is more Swedish than any of us. Sometimes, he is so like father that he frightens me; he is so violent in his feelings like that." Cather's themes essentially are family obligation, commitment to land, struggle and sacrifice, strong will and resolute
determination, love, loss, grief and reconciliation. In these matters she seems to believe that all human beings are alike. Diverse peoples settle in Cather country, where there are no boundaries, walls or curtains, and where the national talents of each one are nurtured and developed to sing the song of all humanity. In Willa Cather's America, an ethnic, no matter of what origin, is first a human being. For example, Cather's concern for primary human values comes ringing through in My Antonia. In this work the writer traces the history of a Bohemian girl, Antonia, from her childhood and arrival on a farm near Black Hawk, Nebraska, to her life as a young woman in town and her seduction and betrayal there, and to her final return to the farm where she marries and raises a large family. Back on the farm, Antonia engages herself in hard work and undergoes a process of shedding American influences, including use of the English language. Compared to her friends, who have made it in the outside world, Antonia's life may appear to be a failure. But to Cather, through Jim, the Swedish narrator, Antonia remains special: She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something whichfires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races. However, on the basis of a few random remarks in her novel Death Comesfor the Archbishop (1927), some critics have argued that Willa Cather, for all her nobility and virtue, shared the antagonism of Americans of her day toward Mexicans and American Indians. If hostile feelings were widespread, it would be unfair to make Cather a secret sharer of these feelings, particularly when she showed, in novel after novel, great respect for different ethnic groups. Perhaps she wished away resentments that she portrayed between these groups in her earlier novels. But she nevertheless shows no erosion of her faith in love and understanding. Death Comes for the Archbishop dwells mostly on the themes of brotherhood and love-on how two missionaries win the people over by the goodness and purity of their heart. As the two complete their mission, different ethnic groups reconcile and quietly settle down to live their different lives. Clearly, behind Death Comes for the Archbishop lies Willa Cather's vision of America as a nation of nations. In conclusion, contrary to the meltingpot theory of America, according to which immigrants to the United States abandon their separate national and cultural identities to form a monolithic American society, Willa Cather's characters lose little of their national backgrounds while they make a new nation whole. Her novels and short stories confirm the provocative new theory of the roots of the American experience advanced recently by historian David Hackett Fischer in his book Albion's Seed, where he writes that America is "a land that from its very beginning was marked by diversity, not homogeneity." 0
Solar Power Comes 01Age Luz International has set up the world's largest commercial solar power plant in California's Mojave Desert. The company is exploring the possibility of building similar plants overseas, including in India.
Two hours by car from the smog-covered city of Los Angeles, California, in the middle of the barren Mojave Desert, a small but growing U.S. company offers a vision of the future-dear skies, fresh air and energy production that will never run out. At the remote crossroads of Kramer Junction, Luz International Ltd. is producing energylots of it-without air-polluting smokestacks and with no noxious industrial wastes or radioactive materials to dispose of. The energy source is the sun-inexhaustible and chemical-free. At the heart of the Luz operation is a power-producing unit called a Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS), which collects energy from the sun and transforms it through a series of operations into electricity. Luz has seven SEGS on line now, producing power fOf the South-
ern California Edison power grid, and plans to build five larger units at the Mojave site. The company's vision, though, extends far beyond its California location. It is looking at future sites in Brazil, India, Israel and Spain, wherever the sunlight is intense and the weather clear enough to permit solar electricity generation. Solar energy is not a new phenomenon, of course. For years, solar panels have been used in homes around the world to heat water for domestic use. A more sophisticated technology, photovoltaic cells, which convert light directly into electricity, is used to power watches and
small calculators, and is employed by many of the communications satellites circling the Earth. Photovoltaics are also in the developmental stage for industrial applications. What makes the Luz International installation so different is its size, its significant generating capacity and the relatively low cost of the electricity it produces. The cost factor becomes increasingly attractive as oil and other hydrocarbon fuel prices have steadily climbed upward on world commodity markets. The Luz complex is by far the world's largest solar power generating facility. Its output of some 200 megawatts of electri-
Luz International's facility in the Mojave Desert (below) produces 95 percent of the world's solarpowered electricity. Parabolic mirrors track the sun, focusing its
rays onto pipes containing a synthetic oil (right). The oil is pumped through heat exchangers to generate superheated steam that powers an electric turbine.
city represents nearly 95 percent of the world's solar-powered electricity. The cost of the power is currently 12 cents per kilowatthour (kwh), but planned expansion including larger SEGS units, will bring the price down to about eight cents per kwh, lower than the cost of electricity produced by nuclear-powered plants and nearly competitive with the six cents per kwh cost of electricity from conventional coal- or oilfired generators in America. When Luz completes its $1,200 million expansion program in 1994, its production of solar electricity will total almost 600 megawatts, enough to serve the residential needs of a city of 800,000 inhabitants. "There are no others of this magnitude anywhere in the world," says Paul Savoldelli, a Luz spokesman. The Luz Mojave installation, which sprawls over 400 hectares of desert, was begun in 1983 with the construction of one 14-megawatt SEGS unit. Until now, the company's most powerful generating unit produced 60 megawatts of power. A new unit now under construction at nearby Harper Lake, California, will have a capacity of 80 megawatts; two units in the developmental stage will have a combined capacity of 300 megawatts and another being negotiated will also produce 80 megawatts. The SEGS technology uses sunlight as its primary energy source to power a conventional steam turbine electric .generator. The sunlight is captured by a huge solar field composed of banks of curved parabolic mirrors that individually track the sun using microprocessors and light-sensing instruments. A central computer monitors and controls the hundreds of solar collectors in the field. Each mirror focuses the sun's rays onto specially coated steel pipes mounted inside vacuum-insulated glass tubes. The pipes contain a heat transfer fluid (a
synthetic oil) that is heated to 375 degrees Celsius and pumped through a series of heat exchangers to generate superheated steam. The steam powers the turbine-generator that produces electricity. To ensure uninterrupted power during peak demand periods, an auxiliary boiler fueled by natural gas is available as a supplemental source of power. But since 75 percent of the company's energy comes from the sun, Luz is able to avoid much of the expensive federally mandated paperwork involved with conventional energy production. Luz's research continues to improve its technology, enabling it to build larger units and reduce the unit price of the electricity it
"We are going to have to turn more and more [to solar energy] to extricate ourselves from the dangers of global warming and pollution and to save our exhaustible fossil fuels." generates. Recent developments include a more durable and efficient coating on the oil-bearing pipes, a third-generation design of the solar collectors and improved control software. The company was founded in 1979 by Robert Goldman, an American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of word processors, and Patrick Fran90is, a French-born financier. In its early years, the company was aided by federal and state tax incentives, favorable regulatory rules and a substantial power contract with Southern California Edison. As time passed-and in particular when world oil prices declined sharply in the early 1980s-the tax incentives began to disappear. Goldman and Fran90is were
not in business, however, to live forever off government handouts. They raised a total of $750 million from private investors and utility companies to construct their Mojave installation and as their technology improved, so did their productivity. In 1988, the company claimed revenues of $155 million and profits of $5 million. Investors in the company are getting a return of 13to 14percent on their investment after taxes. No other solar power generating company has a similar track record. Walter Smith, a Luz company vice-president, emphasizes that solar power is largely a supplementary energy source at this time, supplying additional power to its principal customer, the Edison company, to ease the strain during peak demand periods. To power-company analysts, Luz is a perfect complement to the Edison company, since it operates at maximum capacity when the southern California sun is beating down and the utility company's customers are running their air conditioners all day long, putting a huge drain on the power grid. "We'll never replace nuclear power, gas and coal," Smith acknowledges, "but we will have a market niche where we will be competitive with oil prices." The planned tripling of electrical output over. the next few years will make Luz an even more important factor in filling the growing power needs of southern California. In addition, the company is exploring possible solar generating sites in New Mexico and Arizona. The expansion of Luz's generating capacity "is making solar electricity affordable for utilities," says James C. Bazor, the company's senior vice-president. "It comes at a time when concerns about the greenhouse effect, oil spills and other forms of pollution relating to energy production are causing utilities to look for 'safe and clean' alter-
native energy sources. Luz is offering a safe, reliable and affordable alternative." For the same reasons, the Luz technology is drawing increasing attention from international sources. The World Bank, in particular, is looking closely at the Mojave operation as a possible answer to meeting power needs of developing countries. There are added advantages for developing countries. Luz executives say that a solar plant can be built much more quickly and more cheaply than conventional power plants. Luz puts up a new SEGS unit usually within 18 months of signing a contract, compared with the five to ten years required for the construction of a fossil-fuel or nuclear power plant. The technology looks even more attractive, company officials say, when developing-country governments add in the environmental costs of digging for coal or uranium or drilling for oil, and the air and water pollution associated with conventional power plants. The name "Luz" was given to the company by its founders, who recalled that Luz was the biblical site of Jacob's ladder, where Jacob saw angels commuting between heaven and Earth. But the name also means "light" in Spanish, fittingly enough. Light from the sun may prove at least a partial answer to the world's future power needs. "Solar energy is one of the most important energies of the. future," says Savoldelli. "We are going to have to turn more and more to these renewable sources to extricate ourselves from the dangers of global warming and pollution and to save our exhaustible fossil fuels." For Luz International, in its own limited .0 way, the future is now.
About the Author: Richard C.
Schroeder is a free-lance writer based in California.
New Shine On Steel Town In the 1940s when architect Frank Lloyd Wright was asked how Pittsburgh could be improved, he snapped, "Abandon it." Were he still alive, he would not say that today. In recent years Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has appeared near the top in surveys that identify America's most livable cities. The once grim, smoke-belching steel city, whose rivers-ringed by forests of smokestacks-had turned into industrial sewers, is today attractive and prosperous. The renaissance began in the 1950s when tough smoke-control ordinances, a sweeping building campaign (that replaced slums with modern buildings, parks and boulevards) and an irrepressible optimism set the city on a new path. When the steel industry, Pittsburgh's economicfoundation for more than a century, collapsed in the 1970s, citizens displayed a steely determination to go forward with urban renewal projects
while diversifying the city's economy. Renaissance II, a $4,500 million expansion program, steered the city into the corporate and high-tech world. Spin-offs from these efforts have produced a boom in almost every sphere of life--education, research, medicine, culture, sports, tourism. "Pittsburgh," noted The Nell' York Times Magazine recently, "can lay claim to being America's most promising postindustrial experiment." C1ockll'isefrom top left: An orchestra pelforms on a barge cruising the ciiy's once-polluted rivers; a mobile art studio sponsored by the city attracts office workers during the lunch hour; students at Carnegie-Mellon University test a remote-controlled vehicle they designed and built; this aircraft-tracking device was produced by one of Pittsburgh's 900 high-tech companies.