Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
Building the road by the fall of this year, the road from Cairo to Beijing will be complete.
The fourth world conference on women slated for early September will take Cairo to the next level.
We'll have the story.
Also, what cost analysis?
Commentary from Judith Enk.
And the mystery of Easter Island.
Could it be our own mystery?
Easter Island is a metaphor for the world today.
And I'm afraid that if we don't take care, Easter Island is going to be a metaphor for what my son's generation is going to be like during the next century.
The Environment Show, a national production, made possible by Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
What has happened in a year?
Participants at last year's United Nations Conference on Population and Development in Cairo reached an historic consensus of opinion.
The assumption had been the wealthier the nation, the lower the growth rate.
This idea, stemming from the 1974 Booker Est meeting, has not worked.
By now, most are familiar with the statistical picture.
It was not until 1800 that 1 billion of us first walked the land.
Then only 130 years later, we had invited another 1 billion.
Today, even with our best efforts to limit the number of guests, we still add another billion every 12 years.
Aileen Gelbart is Director of International Programs at the Global Stewardship Network in Washington.
Gelbart says a new plan emerged from the Cairo meeting in September of 1994.
It shifted the rationale behind family planning programs for starters from a demographic rationale, which means that family planning was used,
or was seen as a means to reducing population growth and average family size, to one of promoting family planning in order to improve health.
The health of women and their children.
This was something that had been going on at a local and a regional national level in a lot of developing countries for many years.
But the international consensus had not acknowledged that.
And so it really bridged a gap between what was viewed at an international level about what we should do and why and how,
and what we should do at the individual level.
It bridged that gap and the reason it was so significant was because the gap was bridged by the participation of a much broader range of organization and interests than ever before.
Indeed, more non-governmental organizations and individuals went to Cairo than had gone to any of the earlier international gatherings.
The first meeting in Rome, for example, in 1954, 455 people convened from 74 countries.
By 1974, 136 countries were represented with 109 NGOs or non-governmental organizations attending.
The Cairo meeting comprised 180 countries and 1200 NGOs.
Gelpart says the more diverse voices, the more diverse views, and the greater a chance for a workable plan.
The Cairo conference grabbed headlines when delegates from the Vatican raised serious and seemingly uncompromising objections to certain elements of the so-called plan of action being developed.
Representing a sizable world population of Catholics, the Vatican held center stage over what Gelpart says was a misunderstanding.
The key issue was reproductive health, and well, there were other issues, but probably the most contentious was reproductive health because it included recognition that abortion is legal in many countries.
And that it acknowledged that what it very clearly stated and the public still perhaps doesn't really understand fully is that the document explicitly said, and in talking about reproductive health, explicitly said, that abortion should not be condoned as a means of family planning.
And the reason abortion even got into the document was because of the public health concern of many of the people framing the document initially over abortion.
Abortion causes a lot of deaths. It is public health problem.
So I think that that's what drew the church in, and then of course there were a lot of related issues about parental guidance and adolescent young adults.
So that's the education that the church was uncomfortable with as well.
Perhaps the greatest testimony to the workability of the Cairo plans as Gelpart is that in the end the Vatican literally agreed.
I don't know if people appreciate or even realize that the Catholic church did sign, the Vatican did sign the Cairo program of action.
It expressed some reservations, but this was the first time in the history of these conferences they've been going on for 30 years that the Vatican did sign on an international program of action on population, which means that there was a lot that it did agree with.
What emerged from the Cairo meeting was a 20 year plan outlined in a document called the Plan of Action.
Broadly speaking, the delegates to the conference agreed that successful control of population growth rates depends on how well individual human needs are met, health, education, childcare, and such, and not how well the nation's gross national product index is doing.
Left in place in the Plan of Action were sections bracketed, sections where somebody disagreed.
Gelpart says the Beijing meeting this year will work on those bracketed sections in order to start putting this Plan of Action into action.
What a lot of people are hoping for is that this conference will reaffirm agreements, particularly if they relate to women and there was a lot in both of those conferences that you just mentioned, and move to specific actions that can be carried out and a commitment to financial commitment to carrying out those actions.
For example, one of the issues is reducing inequality between men and women, boys and girls on education.
The Cairo conference came up with some estimates of costs for what that would take.
That's going to take additional financial commitment on the part of governments around the world, both those who are receiving development assistance from donor countries and international organizations and the donors themselves.
So what are the causes of higher fertility? Gelpart says there are many.
Well throughout the world we see higher fertility, which is our term for the number of births.
Women have among women who have lower levels of education and often income because of two are linked.
There are cultural factors to the extent that they encourage or offer few alternatives to child bearing for a woman to have status.
That encourages a woman and a man.
I mean that the couple, if they are encouraged culturally to have a lot of children, they do have a lot of children.
But that changes as they get more education and we see around the world that there is a relationship that shows that with higher levels of education the average number of children a couple has declines.
She says the more a mother or father or couple together knows how to care for the baby the greater its chances of survival, decreasing the need to have many babies as insurance against infant mortality.
In the past, Gelpart says conferences have concluded with a massive document and statement little of which has anything to do with what people are really thinking and really needing.
Cairo and thus it is hoped Beijing will be different.
Because this time this discussion and the document that came out with specific recommendations is closer to what people really feel they need to carry out their own decisions about how many children to have and when to have a baby.
They never before because they had a chance to say what those things are and those things are improving education for women giving them alternatives to child bearing.
Employment is a particularly important issue and a necessity today.
Giving them the means, the education, the information and the services to carry through once they have made a decision to space the birth of their children or not to have any more children or when to start importantly.
All of those things, they have to have the means to carry through on decisions that they have made but they can make informed decisions if they have appropriate information.
And those kinds of things are called for in this document and the mechanisms for getting them to them.
They also talk about the document contains things like having women involved in the design and implementation of programs that are supposed to serve them.
So there is an effort going on now, again addressing this link, you asked about what happened in the last year since Cairo and it may seem very slow to a lot of people but there are programs now that are being reviewed and modified at national levels,
that have happened in the United States, that have happened in other countries and it has happened in the World Bank level.
People are looking at how they can modify their programs of assistance and funding to correspond to the guidelines that are forced in the Cairo documents.
And this is exactly what people are hoping to be an outcome from the principal outcome from the Beijing Conference.
The Chilean Gelbart Director of International Programs with the Global Stewardship Network, after two years of planning delegates will gather in Beijing September 4 through the 15th for the fourth World Conference on Women.
The subtitle of the meeting being, Action for Equality, Development and Peace. This meeting will set the course for the next millennium. This is Bruce Robertson.
You are listening to The Environment Show, a weekly program about the environment. Cassette copies of the program are available by calling 1-800-747-74-44.
Ask for The Environment Show, program number 294. Yet to come, the awesome lesson of Easter Island. But first, what do you mean, what is it worth?
The question many in Congress are asking anymore is, what is the real cost of implementing this or that environmental regulation? Are the benefits really worth the expense?
In today's commentary, Judith Enk says, this is not the question we should be asking at all.
One of the many misguided proposals floating around Congress and in state legislatures is to use a cost-benefit analysis formula whenever a new environmental, health or safety regulation is proposed.
Lobbyus for various special interest groups describe cost-benefit analysis as a tool. If it is a tool, it is akin to using a nuclear missile to swat a fly rather than using a fly swatter.
In reality, it is not a tool. It is a ploy used to convince people that short-term economic costs are too high a price to pay for long-term environmental protection.
It is a good idea to know how much a new law or regulation will cost before it is approved. And there are existing regulations that provide for just that.
However, the use of cost-benefit analysis is often employed which mistakenly gives people the impression that we can estimate costs and benefits accurately.
We often cannot and that is rarely acknowledged. For instance, company X can tell you exactly how much money it will take to install a new air pollution equipment.
What cannot be accurately determined is the number of people who will get asthma if the pollution controls are not added.
Or the number of lakes that will be pushed just over the edge to turn acidic. Or the delight of enjoying a clear blue summer day free of smog.
Or take the example in my home county. A company has proposed blasting away an entire mountain over the next 150 years to extract hard rock for construction projects.
That company knows how much the hard rock is worth to the penny. But what about the local residents who will lose not only the beauty of the mountain but the enjoyment of nearby streams and local wildlife that has added immeasurably to the quality of their lives?
Just how much is the mountain worth these days? But perhaps the most glaring example which illustrates the severe limitations of using cost-benefit analysis is the proposal to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.
The area that has been targeted by oil companies and their friends in Congress has been the home to the Gwitchin people for 1000 generations.
The caribou is not only their major source of food but also the spiritual center of their lives.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been described as nature's nursery. The Gwitchin people report that, quote, each spring hundreds of thousands of ducks, geese and swans nest there.
Northern grizzly, wolves and other animals instinctively return to this area to bear their young, end quote.
Caribou are very reliant on the refuge and there is a real risk that the coastal plain may be invaded by airstrips, pipelines and oil rigs.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may contain enough oil to meet North American demand for a few months. And for that, an ancient culture and the ecology of the refuge will be jeopardized.
How do you think the cost-benefit analysis will be massaged on this one? This is Judith Hink.
Judith Hink is Senior Environmental Research Associate with the New York State Public Interest Research Group. Her comments are a regular feature on the Environment Show.
On the grassy bluffs, overlooking the sea, strange stone statues lie about and scatter disarray. Those lying prone stare with a stony glare into the cloudless sky above. A steady ocean wind buffets the terrain largely barren and silent.
This is Easter Island in the South Pacific. Visitors long have wondered what these statues are and how they got there. Aliens, some have suggested, how well to account for such technology when there is nothing else on the island indicating who or how or why they could have been left behind.
Dr. Jared Diamond says not so. Diamond, a professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine, says those statues got there very easily. What happened afterward is a story whose outcome we simply cannot afford to ignore.
The story begins about 400 AD when the first Polynesians are thought to have arrived.
When Polynesians arrived, each was not this barren wasteland, but it was a subtropical paradise covered with tall, forest, including gigantic palm trees, some of the biggest palms in the world, giant tree sunflowers, tree daisies, couple of dozen species of breeding seabirds, and even half a dozen breeding landbirds.
It was that rich weathor space that supported the development of their civilization and that they then proceeded to destroy.
What do we know about where the earliest inhabitants came from?
We can infer that from the language, the Polynesian language spoken on Easter Island, and also from the tools, for example, from things such as the forms of their adses and fish hooks, both the language and the adses and fish hooks.
We agree that the people of Easter Island were typical Polynesians originating from somewhere in eastern Polynesia, probably from Samoa or the Marquises, which were the area from which Polynesians spread out to colonize why in New Zealand and the rest of the Pacific.
When they arrived, they arrived to find almost the quintessential island paradise where there was a fairly rich soil, forest and plants, and even healthy fishing on the coasts around the island.
What kind of civilization do we know, thrived based on the very rich and diverse resources that were available on the island at that time?
We know how they subsisted and we know what they did with their subsistence wealth.
Archaeologists can identify bones in the, basically, the oldest garbage heap, garbage pits on Easter Island, and it turns out that the first inhabitants of Easter were eating especially porpoises.
Now porpoises live rather far out to sea, so obviously to catch those porpoises they were not crawling from the shore, but they had to have big news which they could make from the big trees on the island.
They also brought chickens with them, they had gardens in which they were growing Polynesian crops that they brought with them, such as yams and bananas and eventually sweet potatoes.
And so the number is multiplied, eventually the population of this island, which is only about 64 square miles, grew to at least 7,000, maybe as many as 20,000 people, and they developed a complex society that is gaged by the fact that raw materials, stone and fishing and stuff like that, got traded around different parts of the island.
In the early days of the year, I 1200 BC, I 1200 AD, they started to construct their giant stone statues on big platforms, and they had several centuries of statue building, which apparently got competitive.
As time went on, statues got bigger and bigger. It's just like here in Los Angeles where I live among these Hollywood tycoons.
One tycoon builds a 20,000 square foot house, so another says, wow, look at me, I'll build a 30,000, and then they're up to 56,000 square foot houses.
Well, similarly the East Royal, I'll start out probably with 20 foot statues, and then they got to 25 foot statues and eventually they ended up with 33 foot statues weighing 82 tons.
Back to the story then, with this rich, diverse base of resources that would be the envy of most civilizations, they thrived, the inhabitants thrived for a time, and yet by the time the island was, quote, discovered, at least by the European sailors and settlers, there was very little left, what happened?
They chopped down the forest for one thing. The island was initially covered with trees, but they fell the trees partly because the palm trees, the biggest trees on the island, furnished probably the logs that were used as rollers to erect the statues.
The palm trees also furnished nuts and sap that could be eaten and grunk.
On other trees furnished fiber that was used to make rope to pull the statues, trees furnished wood for knoos, trees were also cut down and cleared to make gardens in which to grow vegetables, and trees were burned for firewood.
As this went on and on, the island is isolated, the people had no way to go, nobody could arrive from anywhere else, and gradually the people cleared the forest until there were no trees left and the palm tree in fact was extinct.
With no trees, there was no wood to build knoos to catch the deep sea fish, many of the sea birds that used the forests on land for breeding lost their habitat and died off, some of these birds were a source of food for the islanders, all of the land birds also died off, faced with dwindling sources of food the islanders turned to shellfish, which quickly were over exploited.
With no trees left, wind carried off little topsoil that was available for gardening. Diamond says there are carvings and caves depicting inhabitants with protruding ribs from starvation.
Faced with starvation, Diamond says the Easter Islanders turned to cannibalism, the population crashed.
So it's a really spectacular case of a society that committed environmental suicide?
With just a very few changes in text, it would almost seem that we could be talking about any number of places here in the late 20th century.
What in fact is the lesson coming down to us through the ages from what we know happened on Easter Island?
Dissecure lesson, basically what happened on Easter Island was that you got more and more people tacking, increasing destructive power, living in the area, living on land where there was no way to go because Easter was surrounded by ocean.
And as they bred without regulation, they destroyed the resources on which they depended.
Well, think of the Earth today. Now all human societies are connected to each other.
And so the parallel to Easter Island is the Earth itself, which is as isolated in space as Easter Island was in the ocean.
As we are gradually mucking up our environments, there is no way for us to go. And there's no way from where we are going to get help.
So I would say the whole world today, Easter Island is a metaphor for the world today. And I'm afraid that if we don't take care, Easter Island is going to be a metaphor for what my son's generation is going to be like during the next century.
Dr. Jared Diamond, professor of physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. More on his Easter Island theory is contained in the August 1995 edition of Discover Magazine.
This is Bruce Robertson.
And that's our report on the Environment Show for this week, The Environment Show, a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people of our common habitat.
Our thanks this week to production assistant Wendy Loots.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for its content. Dr. Alan Shartock, executive producer.
This is Bruce Robertson. The Environment Show is made possible by Hemings Motor News, the monthly Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-CAR-H-E-R-E.
