"We make our beginning with a change which set in at the turn of the past century in the general evolution of the sciences. It concerns not the scientific character of the sciences but rather what they, or what science in general, had meant or could mean for human existence. The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the prosperity they produced, meant an indifferent turning away from the questions which are decisive for general humanity. Merely fact-minded sciences made merely fact-minded people."
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
We live in a world dominated by science and technology, their processes, products and social and environmental impacts. They provide a seemingly endless capacity to satisfy the real or contrived needs and aspirations of humanity, the collection of means for our collective ends. There is an intrinsic duality in these means in that they can be used both for constructive and destructive ends, while the ecological principle of the consequence of consequences asserts that ends never end. This implies that when a butterfly sneezes, the universe is altered. At the same time we live in a finite world whose sustainability and viability is governed by biospheric limits and ecosystem integrity. Increasingly, we are faced with the impact of the exponential growth of technology and the limits it reveals. Thus, more and more, economic growth and ecological limits confront each other in politics at all levels of society, from the community to the planetary. Moreover, the technologies at our disposal have led to economic and political globalization, reducing the distinction between the local and the global. No other human activity serves economic growth erroneously termed development more than the acquisition of high technology supported by advanced science.
Such growth cannot be sustained in a finite world. We must invent and then enact a sustainable future. Such sustainability has two faces the social and the ecological. Both must be supported simultaneously and in an integrated manner. In effect, sustainability, like peace, is indivisible. Social sustainability has much to do with justice, equity and peace for all people on our small planet. Without these, conflict social violence, including war will inevitably erupt. With the introduction of advanced technologies of destruction nuclear, chemical, and biological we have finally invented the means to our own end. The exponential has reached the point of possible omnicide. We can now murder a planet. We can no longer tolerate the huge slums of the economically developing world in our global village. Moreover, without ecological sustainability, life itself loses its support systems and its continuity is threatened. And, as ecosystems degenerate, social systems respond with an increase in incidents of conflict and violence. Thus we can perceive the manifold relationships among peace, equity, or social justice, and ecology, the three legs of the tripod of sustainability. This book will analyze and amplify the concept of integrated sustainability. It is important to point out that this book is not a work of anti-science, of neo-Ludditism, but rather anti-scientism, the ideology of alleged neutral and flawless rationality, a corruption of the true nature of science. At best, science is a way of certifying knowledge through methodological norms. It is not an exclusive way of knowing. Art and revelation are also ways of knowing. When science is reduced to a faith in perfectibility, its ethos of doubt is subverted. I will document this subversion with particular reference to nuclear science and the scientists who exhibit such an implacable faith that myth replaces legitimate inquiry and language itself is corrupted to accommodate these myths through semantic cosmetics. This is the ideology of nuclearism.
I will also describe two kinds of scientists, those who are consumed with the revelation of means without concern for their ends and those who guard against the misapplication of those means for hazardous ends. The former are driven by a technological vision in which facts are isolated from values, while the latter recognize the intimate relationship of facts and values. The former tend to favour elite accommodations, sharing the rewards of their organizational affiliation, whether government or corporate. The true scientist, on the other hand, exhibits the courage of independence, the maintenance of doubt, even to the point of recognizing the limits of science itself. The analysis will cover the physical, biological and social sciences, identifying a variety of flaws in reasoning, the seduction of discovery and the rewards of status. This book will also consider the social context of the issues of science, ecology and peace. A significant aspect of this context is the dynamic process of globalization driven by the new technologies of information processing and transferring.
In addition, we have globalized the technology of destruction by combining nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles. There is no hiding place in this new world except for those who dedicate themselves to acts of terror, their numbers increasing as the gap between rich and poor widens. There are two faces to globalization. One, epitomized by the international non-governmental organizations concerned with peace, justice and ecology, embraces a vision of global equality and global unity. People sharing this vision accept cultural diversity and, above all, support a dedicated program of aid by the North for the South, guided by ecologically sustainable technologies. Such a program requires fundamental changes in the attitudes of those in the North, and, even more, an acceptance of alternatives to their version of progress for the South and to economic and political domination, covert and overt.
The other face of globailization is the emergence of full-blown global capitalism which has brought with it a new form of neo-colonialism. Under this regime the North is imposing a world order based on unrestricted economic expansion and exploitation in pursuit of the economic imperative. The most powerful international institutions and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and the particularly pernicious policy embodied in the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, with their narrow focus on structural adjustment policies are attempting to impose a single unified developmental model on the entire world. They have, for example, restructured national debts in the South so that debt exceeds income, a process that can only lead to the deepening of the social and economic crises.
As a consequence of these policies, they are crushing the identity of indigenous peoples, local communities and alternative cultures, and widening the gulf between rich and poor. The huge international cartels and multinationals, more powerful than governments, are a manifestation of the new globalism. Their operations are planetary without any genuine restrictions. They are not tied to place but always moving to where profits can be maximized, indifferent to the real conditions of the lives of masses of people. The goal of the global business community is to create a homogeneous culture of mass consumption and to free the marketplace of all encumbrances to business activity, such as health protection, and safety and environmental regulations and standards. Globailization has brought dramatic changes in both the biosphere and the sociosphere. I shall be analyzing two cases of biospheric change, ozone depletion and global warming, and the most significant change in the sociosphere, the demise of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a unipolar world with the establishment of a new world order, Pax Americana. Given that the two major threats to life on our planet are nuclear war and global warming, they will be dealt with in considerable detail. Dealing with global change requires the intervention of global governance. An informal law of ecology applies, that the dimensions of the solution must match those of the problem.
For global problems, the medium of global governance is the United Nations. I shall assess its effectiveness in mediating and regulating the two cases of global change in the biosphere. I will deal in depth with the issue of peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons and the fatal link between civil and military nuclear power. A case study of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima will reveal many of the key aspects of this book which deals with the politics of science. The demise of the Soviet Union was not the end of an error, since the new Russia now the wild, wild East is compounding the errors of the past. Today, in economically liberated Yeltsin-land, there are some one million abandoned children, living in filth and poverty, and forced to beg. There are millions of workers waiting for back wages and an army in disarray. This is a prescription for social disaster. We are now experiencing the history of the devolution.
To complement the dominant themes of science and ecology in this book, I have included two contextual chapters, on science in history and ecology in history. Finally, in support of these chapters, I have included two associated chapters which employ stories, jokes, myths, folk tales, poems and aphorisms which reveal basic concepts of the social relations of science and ecology and highlight their themes. In the final chapter of this book, I will tackle the challenge of creating a sustainable future. In my teaching career of some forty years, I have found that an illustrative story or a piece of poetry is unexcelled in its capacity to illuminate significant concepts. There is a heightened learning value in this mode of storytelling, a method of cultural transmission in wide use by many indigenous peoples. Stories make a deeper imprint on our consciousness than abstract concepts and often they can be vehicles for revelation. The quotations frequently encapsulate an entire conceptual scheme or a behavioural mode, a world view or a socio-political insight.
While the analysis of the trinity of themes peace, ecology and social justice and the examination of the process of globalization, the phenomenon of global change and the issue of global governance represent the main course of this work, the stories provide the seasoning. Some of the stories in this book are drawn from events in my life and fall into the category of personal history. This is as it should be, as science, ecology and peace have been pivotal to my thinking and my action. In a way, therefore, this book is also an intellectual biography. These events from my life account for the title, Every Life Is a Story. This title is a variation of the subtitle, Every Life Has a Story, of the Arts and Entertainment TV show Biography. In choosing to change the verb, I wish to underscore the ongoing importance of the major concerns of my life, peace, ecology and justice.
This book is directed largely to university students in the arts and humanities who lack a firm grounding in science. It will also be useful to students in interdisciplinary studies, science policy studies or the social relations of science and ecology. It will have value for those in more traditional programs, such as the sociology, history or philosophy of science. This book is also directed to citizens concerned with the enormous social and environmental impacts of technology and the threat of nuclear war. I have often witnessed both students and citizens, armed with pertinent information, confront and confound narrow experts, particularly in the area of policy. Thus a major goal of this book is to provide citizens with the requisite understanding so that they may be able to examine policies effectively and influence decisions related to science, peace and environment and assist in discovering the path to a sustainable future.
Given the powerful social roles of science and technology and their impact on our economics, politics, culture and environment, a threshold of scientific and ecological literacy is essential for democratic participation. Finally, I wish to address two issues. The first is the question of providing adequate references and credits. It is not always possible to identify the sources of all the stories or give them a specific reference, particularly since I have been collecting them over a lifetime. Whenever the source of any quotation or story in this book is known, I will certainly provide it. However, many stories lose their original parent shortly after birth and, as they are told and related, the birth certificate is lost. I hope to be forgiven if I offend the originator of a story by inadvertently omitting the attribution.
Secondly, I have sometimes been accused by audiences, readers, students, and even the Canadian security services of being anti-American. In one sense of that term this is true. In the same sense I am also anti-Canadian and anti-Russian. I am opposed to certain foreign and many domestic policies of the governments of these countries. In fact, in general, I am anti-government, not because I am an anarchist but in the sense that some people are honest but all governments lie, as Linus Pauling once remarked. While I have been deeply opposed to every U.S. president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, I have also been opposed to every Canadian prime minister since Confederation. There are good things about America that I cherish, particularly its vigorous democratic traditions. In fact, my criticism of America springs from the rich culture of such opposition by American scholars, writers and social activists whom the reader will find represented among the sources for this book. In developing my conceptual framework, I was very fortunate to have had Ezra Mishan and Garrett Hardin as my office neighbours when I was a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1973-74. I would also like to acknowledge Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen for their contributions to the concept of sustainability, and of Barry Commoner, for his major contribution to the politics of pollution.
Some Final Thoughts
In the few months since this books was accepted for publication, certain critical events have occurred and important information has become available. By late summer of 1998, the Russian bear helped to create a bear market for the New York Stock Exchange. The economic downturn further exposed the huge social costs of unbridled globalization. The social safety net became increasingly shredded as a consequence of the orgy of downsizing and privitazation, andthe global market has created more losers than winners. The globalized conspiracy against justice and equity is more clearly apparent. We now live in a world with an economy dominated by a few enormous multinationals. Ford's revenue is greater than the gross national produce of South Africa; Toyota's than Norway; General Motors' than Denmark; Mitsubishi's revenue is larger than the gross national product of Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world. Joseph Stiglitz, the chief economist of the World Bank, stunned his colleagues by blasting the misguided policies of what he called the Washington consensus, the policies imposed by the U.S. on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which encourage economic growth at the expense of social welfare and equity.
The well-being of the economy is abstracted from the well-being of the people. Meanwhile, the U.S. commitment to absolute nuclear superiority has elicited the predictable Russian response. Copying the U.S., the Russians are modernizing their nuclear to include the development of a new sea-launched missile and submarine carrier. The one perennial impediment to modernization is, of course, the financial crisis which is producing social and economic chaos. These conditions have been accompanied by a resurgence of communism, so we could soon witness a return of a medium cold war environment.
On a more positive note, a huge majority of nations voted in Rome on July 17, 1998, to create an International Criminal Court. Predictably, the U.S. voted against this proposal, very likely because it or its citizens might be charged with criminal activities. And, once again, in October 1998, the UN voted to lift the trade embargo against Cuba. The vote was 152 in favour to two against, the U.S. and Israel, one more example of the U.S. showing its contempt for the UN and asserting its role as exclusive global police, judge and jury. Possibly the most frightening developments in recent months relate to the new evidence of global warming (see chapter 9). According to climate experts, 1998 will most certainly be the warmest on record.
The summer of 1998 in Canada was a full degree warmer on average than any other on record, leading David Phillips, a senior climatologist at Environment Canada to say, as quoted in the Ottawa Citizen (20 September 1998), If this isn't a warming trend, when you've got sixteen months [of record high temperatures] in a row, what is it? Equally ominous is the report in the 1995 May-June issue of Climate Alert, which states that American researchers have reported that two-thirds of the West Antarctic ice sheet has collapsed. This was followed by reports of the collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf and the Larsen Ice Shelf. The result, should these collapses continue, is the potential for an immense rise in the sea level, leading to devastating impacts on coastal areas and island states. Still another indicator of global warming is the receding shoreline of the Beaufort coast, by 100 metres in the past few decades. There are longer ice-field periods in the summers, while scientist document the weight loss of polar bears and their declining birth rate. Finally, there is a major security parameter to global warming. Acute conflicts could arise over water rights and a huge flow of ecological refugees across international borders.
Despite the magnitude of this threat, the anti-Kyoto agreement lobby is agitating strenuously in opposition to ratification by the U.S. of the Accord on Climate Change. The year 2000 problem (Y2K) has received increasing attention but not for the nuclear risk it poses. In chapter 5, I refer to a new nuclear response system which places a premium on response to time a perceived nuclear attack. The principle is launch on warning, or launch them or lose them. Now, not only are nuclear weapons subject to inadvertent, accidental or unauthorized use ( broken arrows ), but there is a history of false alerts-at least four in the past.
The possibility that computers involved in the Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence (C3I) system could fail in Y2K is not negligible, particularly so for the Russian technical systems which have been steadily deteriorating over the years. Budget cuts and pay arrears for nuclear commanders in Russia have further exacerbated the situation. The total cost of fixing the Y2K problem has been estimated at about $1 trillion (U.S.). The globaization of information multiplies the complexity of the problem and also makes it vulnerable to the weakest link failure scenario. Finally, with regard to chapter 10, there is a global movement for greener politics, from the new Green Alliance Party in Saskatchewan to the significant showing by the Greens in the German elections, where a social democrat, Gerhard Schroder overthrow the long-time conservative leader, Helmut Khol. The Greens won 47 seats in that election. Their platform includes the closure of Germany's nineteen nuclear power plants and the dismantling of NATO. Also, Massimo d'Alema, leader of Italy's largest leftist party, was selected on October 16, 1998, to form a new government, completing the ouster of conservative governments in the major countries of Western Europe.