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Book Review by Randy Crutcher

How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond


Here is a brief review, followed by excerpts of the latest book by scientist and
author Jared Diamond titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 560 pages, Penguin Books, 2005. Diamond also authored a book titled, Guns, Germs and Steel and has appeared on popular television programs. Collapse examines numerous ancient societies around the globe through time and the choices they made based on what they knew about their world. And although fascinating in its time machine-like travel through several “mysteriously” vanished civilizations, more pertinent for today, author Diamond examines in detail the choices we are making in our own country and modern nations around the world; how in some cases these decisions and actions support our long-term survival while in other cases they don't.
In his seventh decade of traveling and working in diverse cultures and lands Diamond provides a uniquely broad but sharply focused view of the twelve types of threatening environmental challenges we face today with case studies of what is being done to address them and why he is "optimistically hopeful" we may pull out of the downward spiral our way of life has precipitated. Many will not be unfamiliar with some or most of the environmental problems addressed as well as having had personal involvement in addressing these problems. The following excerpts capture in a few paragraphs 12 major areas of challenge to the planet's natural systems and our own survival. Included here also are Diamond's list of common misperceptions about these challenges, and six areas of intervention we as individuals and collectively can become more actively involved in to make a difference. While the destruction of our planet proceeds at an exponential rate, the growth of awareness and organization to grapple with this crisis is also exponential. Diamond's commonsensical and action based approach is refreshing as is his cautious optimism.


Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Chapter 16 What Does It All Mean To Us Today (Excerpts Only)

Pages 487-498 The Twelve Groups of Problems

"It seems to me that the most serious environmental problems facing past and present societies fall into a dozen groups. Eight of the 12 were significant already in the past, while four (numbers 5,7,8,10): energy, the photosynthetic ceiling, toxic chemicals, and atmospheric changes) became serious recently. The first four of the 12 consist of destruction or losses of natural resources; the next three involve ceilings on natural resources; three after that consist of harmful things that we produce or move around; and the last two are population issues."

1. At an accelerating rate we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands and pastures, roads and golf courses. The natural habitats whose losses have provoked the most discussion are forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the ocean bottom. As I mentioned in the preceding chapter, more than half of the world's original area of forest has already been converted to other uses, and at present conversion rates one-quarter of the forests that remain will be converted in the next half century. Those losses of forests represent losses for us humans, especially because forests provide us with timber and other raw materials, and because they provide us with so-called ecosystem services such as protecting our watersheds, protecting soil against erosion, constituting essential steps in the water cycle that generates much of our rainfall, and providing habitat for most terrestrial plant and animal species. Deforestation was a or the major factor in all the collapses of past societies described in this book. In addition, as discussed in Ch. 1 in connection with Montana, issues of concern to us are not only forest destruction and conversion, but also changes in the structure of wooded habitats that do remain. Among other things, that changed structure results in changed fire regimes that put forests, chapparral woodlands, and savannahs at greater risk of infrequent but catastrophic fires.
Other valuable natural habitats besides forests are also being destroyed. An even greater fraction of the world's original wetlands than of its forests has already been destroyed..................................."

2. "Wild foods, especially fish and to a lesser extent shellfish, contribute a large fraction of the protein consumed by humans. In effect, this is protein that we obtain for free (other than the cost of catching and transporting the fish), and that reduces our needs for animal protein that we have to grow ourselves in the form of domestic livestock. About two billion people, most of them poor, depend on the oceans for protein. If wild fish stocks were managed appropriately, the stock levels could be maintained, and they could be harvested perpetually. Unfortunately, the problem known as the tragedy of the commons (Ch. 14) has regularly undone efforts to manage fisheries sustainably, and the great majority of valuable fisheries already either have collapsed or are in steep decline (Ch. 15). Past societies that overfished included Easter Island, Mangareva, and Henderson............"

3. "A significant fraction of wild species, populations, and genetic diversity has already been lost within the next half-century has already been lost, and at present rates a large fraction of what remains will be lost within the next half century.............................................."

4. "Soils of farmlands used for growing crops are being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 110 and 40 times the rates of soil formation, and between 500 and 10,000 times soil erosion rates on forested land. Because those soil erosion rates are so much higher than soil formation rates, that means a net loss of soil, For instance, about half of the topsoil of Iowa, the state whose agriculture productivity is among the highest in the U.S., has been eroded in the last 150 years................................."

5. "The world's major energy sources, especially for industrial societies, are fossil fuels;oil, natural gas, and coal. While there has been much discussion about how many big oil and gas fields remain to be discovered, and while coal reserves are believed to be large, the prevalent view is that known and likely reserves of readily accessible oil and natural gas will last for a few more decades. This view should not be misinterpreted to mean that all of ther oil and natural gas within the Earth will have been used up by then. Instead, further reserves will be deeper underground, dirtier, increasingly expensive to extract or process, or will involve higher environmental costs............"

6. "Most of the world's freshwater in rivers and lakes is already being utilized for irrigation, domestic and industrial water, and in situ uses such as boat transportation corridors, fisheries, and recreation. Rivers and lakes that are not already utilized are mostly far from major population centers and likely users, such as Northwestern Australia, Siberia and Iceland. Throughout the world, freshwater underground aquifers are being depleted at rates faster than they are being naturally replenished, so that they will eventually dwindle.................."

7. "It might at first seem that the supply of sunlight is infinite, so one might reason that the Earth's capacity to grow crops and wild plants is also infinite. Within the last 20 years, it has been appreciated that that is not the case, and that's not only because plants grow poorly in the world's Arctic regions and deserts unless one goes to the expense of supplying heat or water. More generall, the amount of solar energy fixed per acre by plant photosynthesis, hence plant growth per acre, depends on temperature and rainfall. At any given temperature and rainfall the plant growth can be supported by the sunlight falling on an acre is limited by the geometry and biochemistry of plants, even if they take up the sunlight so efficiently that not a single photo of light passes through the plants unabsorbed to reach the ground. The first calculation of this photosynthetic ceiling, carried out in l986, estimated that humans then already used (e.g. for crops, tree plantations and golf courses) or diverted or wasted (e.g. light falling on concrete roads and buildings) about half of the Earth's photosynthetic capacity. Given the rate of increase of human population, and especially of population impact (see pt. 12), since l986, we are projected to be utilizing most of the world's terrestrial photosynthetic capacity by the middle of this century. That is, most energy fixed from sunlight will be used for human purposes, and little will be left over to support the growth of natural plant communities, such as natural forests."

" The next three problems involve harmful things that we generate or move around: toxic chemicals, alien species, and atmospheric gases."

8. " The chemical industry and many other industries manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals, some of them "unnatural" and synthesized only by humans, others present naturally in tiny concentrations (e.g.mercury) or else synthesized by living things but synthesized and released by humans in quantities much larger than natural ones (e.g. hormones). The first of these toxic chemicals to achieve wide notice were insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, whose effects on birds, fish, and other animals were publicized by Rachel Carson's l962 book Silent Spring. Since then, it has been appreciated that the toxic effects of even greater significance for us humans are those on ourselves. The culprits include not only insecticides, pesticides, and herbicides, but also mercury and other metals, fire-retardant chemicals, refrigerator coolants, detergents, and components of plastic. We swallow them in our food and water, breathe them in our air, and absorb them through our skin..........................."

9. "The term 'alien species,' refers to species that we transfer, intentionally or inadvertently, from a place of where they are native to another place where they are not native. Some alien species are obviously valuable to us as crops, domestic animals and landscaping. But other devastate populations of native species with which they come into contact, either by preying on, parasitizing, infecting or outcompeting them. The aliens cause these big effects because the native species with which they come into contact had no previous evolutionary experience of them and are unable to resist them (like human populations newly exposed to small pox or AIDS). There are now literally hundreds of cases in which alien species have caused one-time or annually recurring damages of hundreds of millions of dollars or even billions of dollars. Modern examples include Australia's rabbits and foxes, agricultural weeds like Spotted Knapweed and Leafy Spurge (Ch. 1), pests and pathogens of trees and crops and livestock (like the blights that wiped out American chestnuts and devastated American elms), the water hyacinths that chokes waterways, the zebra mussels that choke power plants, and the lampreys that devastated the former commercial fisheries of the North American Great Lakes............."

10. "Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere, where their either damage the protective ozone layer (as do formerly widespread refrigerator coolants) or else act as greenhouse gases that absorb sunlight and thereby lead to global warming. The gases contributing to global warming include carbon dioxide from combustion and respiration, and methane from fermentation in the intestines of ruminant animals. Of course, there have always been natural fires and animal respiration producing carbon dioxide, and wild ruminant animals producing methane, but our burning of firewood and of fossil fuels has greatly increased the former, and our herds of cattle and of sheep have greatly increased the latter.............."

"The remaining two problems involve the increase in human populations."

11. "The world's human population is growing. More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources. Rates and even the direction of human population change vary greatly around the world, with the highest rates of population growth (4% per year or higher) in some Third World countries, low rates for growth (1% per year o r less) in some First World countries such as Italy and Japan, and negative rates of growth (i.e. decreasing populations) in countries facing major public health crises, such as Russia and AIDS-affected African countries. Eerybody agrees that the world population is increasing, but that its annual perecentage rate of increase is not as high as it was a decade or two ago. However, there is still disagreement about whether the world's population will stabilize at some value above its present level (double the present population?), and (if so) how many years (30 years? 50 years?) it will take for population to reach that level, or whether population will continue to grow.
There is long built-in momentum to human population growth because of what is termed the 'demographic bulge,'
or 'population momentum,' i.e., a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people in today's population, as a result of recent population growth. That is, suppose that every couple in the world decided tonight to limit themselves to two children, approximately the correct number of children to yield an unchanging population in the long run by exactly replacing their two parents who will eventually die (actually, around 2.1 children when one considers mortality, childless couples, and children who won't marry). The world's population would nevertheless continue to increase for about 70 years, because more people today are of reproductive age or entering reproductive age than are old and post-reproductive..........."

12. "What really counts is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment. If most of the world's 6 billion people today were in cryogenic storage and neither eating, breathing, nor metabolizing, that large population would cause no environmental problems. Instead, our numbers pose problems insofar as we consume resources and generate wastes. That per-capita impact--the resources consumed, and the wastes put out, by each person--varies greatly around the world, being highest in the First World and lowest in the Third World. On the average, each citizen of the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants of the Third World.
But low impact people are becoming high impact people for two reasons: rises in living standards in Third World countries whose inhabitants see and covet First World lifestyles; and immigration, both legal and illegal, of individual Third World inhabitants into the First World, driven by political, economic, and social problems at home. Immigration from low-impact countries is now the main contributor to the increasing populations of the U.S. and Europe. By the same token, the overwhelmingly most important human population problem for the world as a whole is not the high rate of population increase in Kenya, Rwanda, and some other poor Third World countries, although that certainly does pose a problem for Kenya and Rwanda themselves, and although that is the population problem most discussed. Instead, the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact, as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World individuals moving the the First World and adopting First World living standards............................"

"I have described these 12 sets of problems as separate from each other. In fact, they are linked: one problem exacerbates another or makes its solution more difficult. For example, human population growth affects all 11 other problems: more people means more deforestation, more toxic chemicals, more demand for wild fish, etc. The energy problem is linked to other problems because use of fossil fuels for energy contributes heavily to greenhouse gases, the combating of soil fertility losses by using synthetic fertilizers requires energy to make the fertilizers, fossil fuel scarcity increases our interest in nuclear energy which poses potentially the biggest "toxic" problem of alll in case of an accident, and fossil fuel scarcity also makes it more expensive to solve our freshwater problems by using energy to desalinize ocean water. Depletion of fisheries and other wild food sources puts more pressure on livestock, crops, and aquaculture to replace them, thereby leading to more topsoil losses and more eutrophication (silting in) from agriculture and aquaculture. Problems of deforestation, water shortage, and soil degradation in the Third World foster wars there and drive legal asylum seekers and illegal emigrants to the First World from the Third World.
Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years............................"

Pages 503-514 Dismissing the problems


" Most environmental problems involve detailed uncertainties that are legitimate subjects for debate. In addition, however, there are many reasons that are commonly advanced to dismiss the importance of environmental problems, and that are in my opinion not well informed. These objections are often posed in the form of simplistic "one liners." Here are a dozen of the commonest ones:

(Sorry, you will have to read the book to get Jared Diamond's clearly articulated responses to these one liners.)

"The environment has to be balanced against the economy"
"Technology will solve our problems"
"If we exhaust one resource, we can always switch to some other resource meeting the same need"
"There really isn't a world food problem; there is already enough food; we only need to solve the transportation problem of distributing that food to places that need it"
""As measured by commonsense indicators such human lifespan, health, and wealth (in economists' terms, per-capita gross national product or GNP), conditions have actually been getting better for many decades." Or "Just look around you: the grass is still green, there is plenty of ffo in the supermarkets, clean water still flows from the taps, and there is absolutely no sign of imminent collapse"
"Look at how many times in the past the gloom-and-doom predictions of fearmongering environmentalists havve proved wrong. Why should we believe them this time?
"The population crisis is already solving itself, because the rate of increase of the world's population is decreasing, such that world population will level off at less than double its present level"
"The world can accommodate human population growth indefinitely. The more people, the better, because more people mean more inventions and ultimately more wealth." (ala Julian Simon)
"Environmental concerns are a luxury affordable just by affluent First World yuppies, who have no business telling desperate Third World citizens what they should be doing"
"If those environmental problems become desperate, it will be at some time far off in the future, after I die, and I can't take them seriously"
"There are big differences between modern societies and those past societies of Easter Islanders, Maya, Anasazi, Greenland Norse who collapsed, so that we can't straightforwardly apply lessons from the past"
What can I, as an individual, do , when the world is really being shaped by unstoppable powerful juggernauts of governments and big businesses?"

Page 521 HOPE

"One basis for hope is that, realistically, we are not beset by insoluble problems. While we do face big risks, the most serious ones are not ones beyond our control, like a possible collision with an asteroid of a size that hits the Earth every hundred million years or so. Instead, they are ones that we are generating ourselves. Because we are the cause of our environmental problems, we are the ones in control of them, and we can choose or not choose to stop causing them and start solving them. The future is up for grabs, lying in our own hands. We don't need new technologies to solve our problems, while new technologies can make some contribution, for the most part we "just"
need the political will to apply solutions already available. Of course, that's a big "just." But many societies did find the necessary political will in the past. Our modern societies have already found the will to solve some of our problems, and to achieve partial solutions to others."

Pages 522-525 The importance of long term planning and core values

Referring to ancient societies, Diamond says, "Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping their outcomes towards success or failure: long-term planning, and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection, we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.
One of these choice has depended on the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they have reached crisis proportions. This type of decision-making is the opposite of the short-term reactive decision-making that too often characterizes our elected politicians--the thinking that my politically well-connected friend decried as "90 day thinking," i.e., focusing only on issues likely to blow up in a crisis within the next 90 days. Set against the many depressing bad examples of such short-term thinking in the past, and in the contemporary world of NGO's, business, and government. Among past societies faced with the prospect of ruinous deforestation, Easter Island and Mangareva chiefs succumbed to their immediate concerns, but Tokugawa shoguns, Inca emperors, New Guinea highlanders, and 16th century German landowners adopted a long view and reafforested. China's leaders similarly promoted reafforestation in recent decades and banned logging of native forests in l998. Today, many NGO's exist specifically for the purpose of promoting sane long-term environmental policies. In the business world the American corporations that remain successful for long times (e.g., Procter and Gamble) are ones that don't wait for a crisis to force them to reexamine their policies, but that instead look for problems on the horizon and act before there is a crisis. I already mentioned Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company as having an office devoted just to envisioning scenarios decades off into the future.
Courageous, successful, long-term planning also characterizes some governments and some political leaders, some of the time. Over the last 30 years a sustained effort by the U.S. government has reduced levels of the six major air pollutants nationally by 25%, even though our energy consumption and population increased by 40% and our vehicle miles driven increased by 150% during those same decades. The governments of Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Mauritius all recognized that their long-term economic well-being required big investments in public health to prevent tropical diseases from sapping their economies; those investments proved to be a key to those countries' spectacular recent economic growth. Of the former two halves of the overpopulated nation of Pakistan, the eastern half (independent since l971 as Bangladesh) adopted effective family planning measures to reduce its rate population growth, while the western half (still known as Pakistan) did not and is now the world's sixth most populous country. Indonesia's former environmental minister Emil Salim, and the Dominican Republic's former president Joaquin Balaguer, exemplify government leaders whose concern about chronic environmental dangers made a big impact on their countries. All of these examples of courageous long-term thinking in both the public sector and the private sector contribute to my hope.

The other crucial choice illuminated by the past involves the courage to make painful decisions about values. Which of the values that formerly served a society well can continue to be maintained under new changed circumstances? Which of those treasured values must instead be jettisoned and replaced with different approaches? The Greenland Norse refused to jettison part of their identity as a European, Christian, pastoral society, and they died as a result (though they did persist for 500 years). In contrast, Tikopia Islanders did have the courage to eliminate their ecologically destructive pigs, even though pigs are the sole large domestic animal and a principal status symbol of Melanesian societies. Australia is now in the process of reappraising its identity as a British agricultural society. The Icelanders and many traditional caste societies of India in the past, and Montana ranchers dependent on irrigation in recent times, did reach agreement to subordinate their individual rights to group interests. They thereby succeeded in managing shared resources and avoiding the tragedy of the commons that has befallen so many other groups. The government of China restricted the traditional freedom of individual reproductive choice, rather than let population problems spiral out of control. The people of Finland, faced with an ultimatum by their vastly more powerful Russian neighbor in l939, chose to value their freedom over their lives, fought with courage that astonished the world, and won their gamble, even while losing the war. While I was living in Britain from l958 to l962, the British people were coming to terms with the outdatedness of cherished long-held values based on Britain's former role as the world's dominant political, economic, and naval power. The French, Germans, and other European countries have advanced even further in subordinating to the European Union their national sovereignties for which they use to fight so dearly.

All of these past and recent reappraisals of values that I have just mentioned were achieved despite being agonizingly difficult. Hence, they also contribute to my hope. They may inspire modern First World citizens with the courage to mae the most fundamental reappraisal now facing us: how much of our traditional consumer values and First World living standard can we afford to retain? I already mentioned the seeming political impossibility of inducing First World citizens to lower their impact on the world. But the alternative, of continuing our current impact, is more impossible. This dilemma reminds me of Winston Churchill's response to criticisms of democracy: "It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." In that spirit, a lower-impact society is the most impossible scenario for our future--except for all other conceivable scenarios.
Actually, while it won't be easier to reduce our impact, it won't be impossible either. Remember the impact is the product of two factors: population, multiplied times impact per person. As for the first of those two factors, population growth has recently declined drastically in all First World countries, and in many Third World countries as well--including China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, with the world's largest , fourth largest, and ninth largest populations respectively. Intrinsic population growth in Japan and Italy already below the replacement rate, such that their existing populations (i.e. not counting immigrants) will sooon begin shrinking. As for impact per person, the world would not even have to decrease its current consumption rates of timber products or of seafood: those rates could be sustained or even increased, if the world's forests and fisheries were properly managed.
My remaining cause for hope is another consequence of the globalized modern world's interconnectedness. Past societies lacked archaeologists and television. While the Easter Islanders were busy deforesting the highlands of their overpopulated island for agricultural plantations in the l400's, they had no way of knowing that, thousand of miles to the east and west at the same time, Greenland Norse society and the Khmer empire were simultaneously in terminal decline, while the Anasazi had collapsed a few centuries earlier, Classic Maya society a few more centuries before that, and Mycenean Greece 2,000 years before that. Today, although we turn on our television sets or radios or pick up our newspapers, and we see, hear, or read about what happened in Somalia or Afghanistan a few hours earlier. Our television documentaries and books show us in graphic detail why the Easter Islandersk, Classic Maya, and other past societies collapsed. Thus, we have the opportunity that no past society enjoyed to such a degree. My hope in writing this book has been that enough people will choose to profit from that opportunity to make a difference."

Pages 555-560 How you can be effective

"Is there anything that a poor individual who is neither a CEO nor a political leader can do to make a difference?
Yes, there are a half dozen types of actions that often prove effective. But it needs to be said at the outset that an individual should not expect to make a difference through a single action, or even through a series of actions that will be completed within three weeks. Instead, if you do want to make a difference, plan to commit yourself to a consistent policy of actions over the duration of your life.

In a democracy, the simplest and cheapest action is to vote. Some elections, contested by candidates with very different environmental agendas, are settled by ridiculously small numbers of votes. Besides voting, find out the addresses of your elected representatives, and take some time each month to let them know your views on specific current environmental issues. If representatives don't hear from voters, they will conclude that voters aren't interested in the environment.

Next, you can reconsider what you, as a consumer, do or don't buy. Big businesses aim to make money. They are likely to discontinue products that the public doesn't buy, and to manufacture and promote products that the public does buy. The reason that increasing numbers of logging companies are adopting sustainable logging practices is that consumer demand for wood products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council exceeds supply. Of course, it is easiest to influence companies in your own country, but in today's globalized world the consumer has increasing ability to influence overseas companies and policy-makers as well. A prime example is the collapse of white-minority government and apartheid policies in South Africa between l989 and l994, as the result of the economic boycott of South Africa by individual consumers and investors overseas, leading to an unprecedented economic divestiture by overseas corporations, public pension funds, and governments. During my several visits to South Africa in the l980's, the South African state seemed to me so irrevocably committed to apartheid that I never imagined it would back down, but it did.

Another way in which consumers can influence policies of big companies, besides buying or refusing to buy their products, is by drawing public attention to the company's policies and products. One set of examples is the campaigns against animal cruelty that led major fashion houses, such as Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, and Oleg Cassini, to publicly renounce their use of fur. Another example involves the public activists who helped convince the world's largest wood products company, Home Depot, to commit to ending its purchases of wood from endangered forest regions and to give preference to certified forest products. Home Depot's policy shift greatly surprised me: I had supposed consumer activists to be hopelessly outgunned in trying to influence such a powerful company.

Most examples of consumer activism have involved trying to embarrass a company for doing bad things, and that one-sidedness is unfortunate, because it has given environmentalists a reputation for being monotonously shrill, depressing, boring and negative. Consumer activists could also be influential by taking the intiative to praise companies whose policies they do like. In Ch. 15 I mentioned big businesses that are indeed doing things sought by environmentalist consumers, but those companies have received much less praise for their good deeds than blame for their bad deeds.........big businesses adopting environmentalist policies know that they are unlikely to be believed if they praise their own policies to a cynical public; the businesses need outside help in becoming recognized for their efforts. Among the many big companies that have benefited recently from favorable public comment are Chevron-Texaco and Boise Cascade, praised for their environmental management of their Kutubu oil field and for their decision to phase out products of unsustainably managed forests, respectively. In addition to activists castigating "the dirty dozen," they could also praise "the terrific ten."

Consumers who wish to influence big businesses by either buying or refusing to buy their products, or by embarrassing or praising them, need to go to the trouble of learning which links in a business chain are most sensitive to public influence, and also which links are in the strongest position to influence other links. Businesses that sell directly to the consumer, or whose brands are on sale to the consumer, are much more sensitive than businesses that sell only to other businesses and whose products reach the public without a label of origin. Retail businesses that, by themselves or as part of a large buyer's group, buy much or all of the output of some particular producing business are in a much stronger position to influence that producer than is a member of the public. I mentioned several examples in Ch 15, and many other examples can be added.

For instance, if you do or don't approve of how some big international oil company manages its oil fields, it does make sense to buy at, boycott, praise, or picket that company's gas stations. If you admire Australian titanium mining practices and dislike Lihir Island gold mining practices, don't waste your time fantasizing that you could have any influence on those mining companies yourself; turn your attention instead to DuPont, and to Tiffany and Wal-Mart, which are major retailers of titanium-based paints and of gold jewelery, respectively. Don't praise or blame logging companies without readily traceable retail products; leave it instead to Home Depot, Lowe's, B and Q, and the other retail giants to influence the loggers. Similarly, seafood retailers like Unilever (through its various brands) and Whole Foods are the ones who care whether you buy seafood from them; they, not you, can influence the fishing industry itself. Wal-Mart is the world's largest grocery retailer; they and other such retailers can virtually dictate agricultural practices to farmers; you can't dictate to farmers, but you do have clout with Wal-Mart. If you want to know where in the business chain you as a consumer have influence, there are now organizations such as the Mineral Policy Center/Earthworks, the Forest Stewardship Council, and the Marine Stewardship Council that can tell you the answer for many business sectors.

Of course, you as a single voter or consumer won't swing an election's outcome or impress Wal-Mart . But any individual can multiply his or her power by talking to other people who also vote and buy. You can start with your parents, children, and friends. That was a significant factor in the international oil companies beginning to reverse direction from environmental indifference to adopting stringent environmental standards. Too many valuable employees were complaining or taking other jobs because friends, casual acquaintance, and their own children and spouses made them feel ashamed of themselves for their employer's practices. Most CEO's, including Bill Gates, have children and a spouse, and I have learned of many CEO's who changed their company's environmental policies as a result of pressure from their children or spouse, in turn influenced by the latter's friends. While few of us are personally acquainted with Bill Gates or George Bush, a surprising number of us discover that our own children's classmates and our friends include children, friends, and relatives of influential people, who may be sensitive to how they are viewed by their children, friends and relatives. An example is that pressure his sisters may have strengthened President Joaquin Balaguer's concern for the Dominican Republic's environment. The 2000 U.S. presidential election was actually decided by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision on the Florida vote challenge, but all nine Supreme Court justices had children, spouses, relatives, or friends who helped form their outlook.

Those of us who are religious can further multiply our power by developing support within our church, synagogue, or mosque. It was churches that led the civil rights movement, and some religious leaders have also been outspoken on the environment, but not many so far. Yet there is much potential for building religious support, because people more readily follow the suggestions of their religious leaders than the suggestions of historians and scientists, and because there are strong religious reasons to take the environment seriously. Members of congregations can remind fellow members and their leaders (their priests, ministers, rabbis, etc.) of the sanctity of the created order, of bibilical metaphors for keeping Nature fertile and productive, and of the implications of the concept of stewardship that all relgions acknowledge.

An individual who wants to benefit directly from his or her actions can consider investing time and effort in improving one's own local environment. The example most familiar to me from firsthand experience at my family's summer vacation site in Montana's Bitterroot Valley is the Teller Wildlife Refuge, a small private non-profit organization devoted to habitat preservation and restoration along the Bitterroot River. While the organization's founder Otto Teller, was rich, his friends who sensitized him to environmental issues were not rich, nor are most of the people who volunteer to help the Teller Refuge today. As a benefit to themselves (actually, to anyone living in or visiting the Bitterroot Valley), they continue to enjoy gorgeous scenery and good fishing which would otherwise by now have been eliminated for land development. Such examples can be multiplied indefinitely: almost every local area has its own neighborhood group, landowner's association, or other such organizations.

Working to fix your local environment has another benefit besides making your own life more pleasant. It also sets an example to others, both in your own country and overseas. Local environmental organizations tend to be in frequent contact with each other, exchanging ideas and drawing inspiration. When I was scheduling interviews with Montana residents associated with the Teller Wildlife Refuge and the Blackfoot Initiative, one of the constraints on their schedules arose from trips that they were making to advise other local initiatives in Montana and neighboring states. Also, when Americans tell people in China or other countries what the Chinese should (in the opinion of the Americans) be doing for the good of themselves and the rest of the world, our message tends to fall on unreceptive ears because of our own well-known environmental misdeeds. We would be more effective in persuading people overseas to adopt environmental policies good for the rest of humanity (including for us) if we ourselves were seen to be pursuing such policies in more cases.

Finally, any of you who have some discretionary money can multiply your impact by making a donation to an organization promoting policies of your choice. There is an enormous range of organizations to fit anyone's interest: Ducks Unlimited for those interested in ducks, Trout Unlimited for those into fishing, Zero Population Growth for those concerned with population problems, Seacology for those interested in islands, and so on. All such environmental organizations operate on low budgets, and many operate cost-effectively, so that small additional sums of money make big differences. That's true even of the largest and richest environmental organizations. For example, World Wildlife Fund is one of the three largest and best-funded environmental organizations operating around the world, and it is active in more countries than any other. The annual budget of WWF's largest affiliate, its U.S. branch, averages about $100 million per year, which sounds like a lot of money---until one realizes that that money has to fund its programs in over 100 countries, covering all plant and animal species and all marine and terrestrial habitats. That budget also has to cover not only mega-scale projects (such as a $400 million, 10-year program to triple the area of habitat protected in the Amazon Basin), but also a multitude of small-scale projects on individual species. Lest you think that your small donation is meaningless to such a big organization, consider that a gift of just a few hundred dollars suffices to support a trained park ranger outfitted with global positioning software, to survey Congo Basin primate populations who conservation status would otherwise be unknown. Consider also that some environmental organizations are highly leveraged and use private gifts to attract further funds from the World Bank, governments, and aid agencies on a dollar-for-dollar basis. For instance, WWF's Amazon Basin project is leveraged by a factor of more than 6-to-1, so that your $300 gift actually ends up putting almost $2000 into the project.

Of course, I mention these numbers for WWF merely because it's the organization with whose budget I happen to be most familiar, and not in order to recommend it over many other equally worthy environmental organizations with different goals. Such examples of how efforts by individuals make a difference can be multiplied indefinitely. "