[LST] Ecology Lessons From the Cold War - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/ecology-lessons-from-the-cold-war.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20130530&_r=0&pagewanted=print






May 29, 2013
Ecology Lessons From the Cold War
By JACOB DARWIN HAMBLIN
CORVALLIS, Ore. — TODAY the effort to preserve the planet's
biodiversity is often seen as a campaign to save the whales for their
own sake, or to give polar bears a few more winters on the Arctic ice.
But in the 1950s, when the concept was first discussed, it was
understood that far more was at stake. The "conservation of variety,"
as it was called during the early years of the cold war, was no less
than a strategy of human survival.

At that time, American military leaders and scientists were
contemplating the possibility of total war with the Soviet Union, with
not only civilians, but plants, animals and entire ecosystems as fair
game. The war planners imagined a brave new world in which biological
and radiological weapons would be considered side by side with crop
destruction, huge fires, artificial earthquakes, tsunamis, ocean
current manipulation, sea-level tinkering and even weather control.

Numerous approaches seemed feasible then: melting polar ice by
blackening it with soot, seeding clouds with chemicals to harass an
enemy with rain and mud, killing life-sustaining crops with deadly
cereal rust spores or radioactive contamination. Entire forests might
be set ablaze by the thermal radiation of a high-altitude nuclear
blast. Well-placed detonations might unleash the energy of the earth's
crust, oceans or weather systems. During the Korean War,
Representative Albert Gore Sr. went so far as to urge President Harry
S. Truman to contaminate an enormous strip of territory across the
Korean Peninsula with radioactive waste from plutonium processing,
hoping the poisonous landscape would deter Communist troops from
moving south.

By the early 1960s, NATO was calling these approaches "environmental
warfare." One of the important considerations in the calculus, not
surprisingly, was self-preservation. War planning would include
figuring out how to keep people alive beyond the initial devastation.
The best approach, scientists concluded, was coming up with ways to
protect ecosystems.

Today we call it biodiversity. One of its principal advocates was the
Oxford ecologist Charles Elton, whose book "The Ecology of Invasions
by Animals and Plants," argued that simplifying landscapes with
weedkillers, or planting single crop species over large areas made a
recipe for disaster. The best defense from diseases, other species or
natural catastrophes, he said, was to conserve as much biological
variety as possible in the fields and hedges of the countryside to
counterbalance any threat. In his book he called it the conservation
of variety.

Elton's approach not only inspired Rachel Carson to write "Silent
Spring," about the harm done by insecticides, it also resonated among
scientists in the defense establishment. Fantasizing about
environmental warfare in the early 1960s, NATO scientists tried to
imagine which links in ecosystems were vulnerable to manipulation.
Studies had recently shown radioactive fallout infiltrating reindeer
meat, a crucial part of Eskimos' diets. It was a revelation to think
that such a connection in the food chain was now targetable. But the
reverse was also true, and underscored Elton's point: the complexity
of an ecosystem made any particular "link" less important, making the
system less vulnerable.

This was the lesson defense planners took to heart. They decided that
a robust peacetime market economy provided variety, and thus security
in peace and war. If nuclear war ever came, a decentralized,
diversified society would be in better shape than a centrally planned
one like the Soviet Union's. The same logic applied to biological
variety. That is why strategic stockpiles of Western nations during
the cold war did not collect enormous stores of favorite foods but
samples of the widest range of species imaginable.

In the face of natural disasters, such diversity seemed to be the
West's ace in the hole. The variety of agricultural products in the
United States far outpaced those of the Soviet Union, and is a reason
that C.I.A. analysts predicted in the 1980s that global climate change
would cause more harm to Russia than to the United States.

We managed to survive the cold war, but the challenges to our
environmental security remain. We need to stop treating the idea of
biodiversity as a philosophical preference and embrace it as a
strategy of survival, just as it was for those who, more than a
half-century ago, planned for a calamitous total war.

Jacob Darwin Hamblin is an associate professor of history at Oregon
State University and the author of "Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of
Catastrophic Environmentalism."



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