I was reading reports of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit last week, thinking about how these two men were putting away the last vestiges of an old order. I used to live in Washington, DC; I was there when the Soviet Union went out of business, when the Warsaw Pact dissolved like a chalk drawing on a rainy sidewalk. I had an acquaintance who worked for a defense contractor. He said, “Now I have to make a living figuring out how to design a better plowshare.”

He need not have worried. As Bill and Boris discovered in Helsinki, just because a cold war ends, that doesn’t mean it goes away. Now I live in the other Washington, the one with the Hanford Reservation, where they built the bombs. A nuclear bomb is a troublesome thing, and not just for the people sitting under one when it drops. Among the many components of a nuclear bomb are plutonium, which is the bomb’s explosive, and tritium, which is the bomb’s trigger. Plutonium decays slowly, with a half-life of 24,000 years. If you have a pound of plutonium today, you will have a half-pound of plutonium in 24,000 years. But we don’t have a pound of plutonium; we’ve got 100 tons. Tritium decays quickly, with a half-life of 12.3 years. A pound of tritium today is a half-pound of tritium in 12 years. So we have a bunch of bombs that will be radioactive for what amounts to forever, but they will no longer qualify as bombs in 25 years.
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I’ve worked for Greenpeace for eight years and in that time I’ve had the opportunity to observe trends which may not be obvious to the average citizen. For example, many companies with environmental problems will hire a director of environmental affairs. When Greenpeace arrives, out comes the director of environmental affairs, all smiles and handshakes. I always make a point of asking the director of environmental affairs about his or her professional background. After all, if this company is going to pour complex chemical compounds into local waterways, you want someone with a good grounding in macrobiology. More often than not, the director of environmental affairs has a background not in science, but in public relations. Too many corporations see ? and treat ? the environment as a PR problem.

Notable among these corporations is Procter and Gamble, of Cincinnati, Ohio. Pee and Gee not only defends its environmental record, it goes on the offensive. Procter and
Gamble is the sponsor of the Planet Patrol Program, a curriculum supplement distributed to schoolchildren in grades four through six. There are posters, activity sheets, visual aids ??? all portraying Procter and Gamble as an environmentally responsible company.
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It was in the 1970s, in an essay by Kurt Vonnegut, that I first encountered the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine. In the intervening two decades, its status, for me at least, has slipped from metaphor to cliche. The edges are all worn down and it slides too easily through our conversations without leaving any meaning behind it. I plan to throw it away for good, but I want to shake it off and examine it one more time before I put it aside.

In centuries past, miners would carry canaries with them underground. If the air in the mine was unfit to breathe, the canary would fall over and die long before the miners’ health was in danger. Biologists refer to plants and animals which serve this function as “indicator species.” A canary in a coal mine is an artificial indicator species, as canaries do not occur naturally in coal mines. When an ecosystem is placed under stress, some plant or animal – some indicator species – will be the first to die off. The death of this species holds a portent for the other members of the ecosystem.
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One of the things I dislike about being an environmentalist is that environmentalists really can’t improve anything. A clean, free-flowing river is a natural phenomenon, we can’t improve on it. Far from that, we are bold if we imagine returning a polluted river to its natural state. The best we can hope for that river is to make it a little less polluted, a little less impounded. We can never create a virgin forest, we can only try to hang onto the precious few we have left. We cannot resurrect a species from extinction, we can only try to save those that remain among us. And when we win a battle for the environment, it is not a victory, but only a short reprieve. A tree that is cut is cut forever, a tree saved today will only have greater value for the merchants tomorrow.
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