TL: GREENPEACE MAGAZINE October-December 1987
SO: Greenpeace USA (GP)
DT: October 1987
Keywords: greenpeace periodicals us digests gp /


VOLUME 12 . NUMBER 114 ù OCTOBER-DECEMBER 1987 ù     
A QUARTERLY


LOOSE CANNONS: THE NUCLEAR NAVIES AND THE NEXT WAR
by Andre Carothers.

The vast oceans have long hidden what may be the most unstable
element of the military "balance"--the nuclear navies.

A FORGOTTEN WAR
by Joshua Karliner and Bill Hall.

Through the smoke and rhetoric surrounding Central America, one
truth is emerging: the real battle is to protect the
environment.

THE TOXIC CLOUD
by Michael H. Brown.

New discoveries have added fresh urgency to the fight against
air pollution.


RETURN TO SENDER

There's nothing like a letter from home to brighten up a long,
dark winter, particularly if it's an Antarctic winter. But the
team spending the winter at Greenpeace's World Park Base in
Antarctica won't be getting any of the letters sent by
supporters from around the world thanks to the U.S. government's
"long-standing policy" not to aid private expeditions to the
southern continent.

This policy's longevity is far less than the statement might
imply. In 1985 and 1986, the base had no qualms about delivering
to "In The Footsteps of Scott," another private expedition.
Apparently the mail ban is applied selectively. In a phone
conversation with Greenpeace representative Henk Haazen, U.S.
"Operation Deep Freeze" Commander Robert Harler complained about
Greenpeace's investigation into shoddy waste disposal practices
at the U.S. base at McMurdo. As far as Harler was concerned, the
Greenpeace camp was not entitled to any favors from U.S.
authorities.

Thanks to a flood of letters that resulted from a Greenpeace
Action Alert the mail ban was partially lifted. After August,
the Greenpeace Antarctic team's mail will be limited to personal
letters. "It's a small concession," said U.S. Antarctic Campaign
Coordinator Paul Bogart, "We must insist that the next mail drop
include all the team's mail."


PUTTING THE SQUEEZE ON THE PACIFIC

Having left its Pacific foreign policy in the hands of the
American tuna fleet for the decade, the Reagan administration is
scrambling to gain control over the shifting tides of Pacific
politics. One sore spot: New Zealand's Lange government has
taken the courageous step of making its opposition to nuclear-
armed ships a national law. In May, the New Zealand Parliament
voted 39-29 to ban port visits of any warships that will not
certify they are nuclear weapons-free. 

In Fiji the same month, anti-nuclear sentiments and democratic
institutions took a beating when the newly elected government of
Prime Minister Timoci Bavadra was overthrown in a bloodless coup
led by staunchly pro-western elements of the Fijian military.
The U.S government's distaste for uncooperative governments,
elected or not, has fuelled rumors of a CIA link to the coup.
According to press and intelligence reports, five Americans were
seen at the main airport of Fiji meeting with Lieutenant Colonel
Sitiveni Rabuka, who led the successful coup two weeks later.
One of the foreigners was subsequently seen with Rabuka's forces
when they stormed the Parliament.

General Vernon Walters, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and former
deputy director of the CIA, spent three days in early May in
Fiji, prompting New Zealand Member of Parliament Bill Sutton to
comment, "Wherever that character travels around the world there
always seems to be a transfer of power from a democratically
elected government to a military junta." The ousted Bavadra has
requested a U.S. Congressional investigation into possible
American involvement in the coup.

Meanwhile, the antinuclear Constitution of Palau, unique in the
world, is being forced to undergo yet another referendum under
severe U.S. pressure. Already defeated five times, the proposed
Compact of Free Association is once again being put to the vote,
effectively asking the Palauan people to choose between their
Constitution and massive U.S. aid.

Greasing the skids for the Reagan Administration's unpopular
Pacific policy is Palau's pro-American President, Lazarus Salii,
who declared his administration bankrupt in July and laid off
900 government workers. "As part of his effort to ensure Compact
approval," Santos Olikong, Speaker of the Palauan House of
Delegates testified in the U.S. Congress, "(Salii) squandered
and misused government funds." 

As we go to press, a referendum passed August 4 that allows
Palauans to amend their Constitution by a simple majority vote
rather than the 75 percent required in the past is being
challenged in the courts. If upheld, the vote will mean the end
of Palau's antinuclear constitution.



DRIFTNET FLEETS ON THE RUN

After a lengthy battle, the United States government recently
issued a permit to Japan for an incidental take of up to 6,039
Dall's porpoises over three years in their salmon drift net
fleet. The permit also bans the killing of any North Pacific fur
seals, requires continued observers on the salmon fleets and
access for observers to the previously unregulated squid drift
net fleet. "This (ruling) represents a step forward in the
effort to phase-out the use of highly destructive drift nets,"
says Greenpeace International Driftnet Coordinator Alan Reich
man. Annual takes of up to 5,500 Dall's porpoises and 450 fur
seals have been permitted in the past. 

The Japanese salmon industry immediately filed suit in the U.S.
courts to challenge the restrictive permit. But a coalition of
environmental groups filed their own lawsuit, calling for the
revocation of the permit. They contended that the Commerce
Department had ignored existing legislation aimed at protecting
marine mammals. The judge in the case said that it is likely
that Commerce had in fact ignored the intent of the Marine
Mammal Protection Act. Upon receiving word of the temporary
injunction, the Japanese mothership sailed for home port.

SOVIETS HUNT SEALS IN ANTARCTICA

Soviet sealers are not welcome in New Zealand's ports. Prime
Minister David Lange recently closed his country's harbors to
Russian sealing ships en route to Antarctica. The Soviets argued
that the seals were taken for scientific or educational
purposes, but Lange remained unconvinced. "We don't accept that
there is a need for 4,000 seals to be killed in the interest of
science," he said. 

But confidential sources revealed that the New Zealand
government knew about the hunt but kept silent until now because
a disclosure might jeopardize delicate negotiations over mineral
rights in Antarctica. New Zealand has been playing a key role in
a series of meetings of the Antarctic Consultative parties, of
which the USSR is a member, concerning oil exploration.

The Soviets have agreed to provide details of the hunt at an
October meeting in Australia. If the catch is label led
scientific, the Russians can take any amount of any species as
long as the plan complies with the Convention for the
Preservation of Antarctic Seals. But Greenpeace is concerned
that the seal hunt is an indication of further exploitation of
the Antarctic ecosystem. "The Southern Ocean has in turn been
strip-mined for seals, whales and fin fish over the last 150
years, and has had no chance to reach any kind of ecological
equilibrium," stated Kelly Rigg, International Antarctica
Coordinator. "Any new commercial seal catch could further
frustrate the process."

WASTE HANDLERS IN HOT WATER

Perhaps because they trace their corporate lineage to the
organized crime dominated trash hauling business, the now
"respectable" waste-handling giants, Brown Ferris Industries
(BFI) and Waste Management Inc., seem unable to shed old habits.
BFI faces legal action from the Justice Department and the State
of Louisiana for serious and repeated violations of federal laws
pertaining to the company's hazardous waste site in Louisiana.
Over a six-year period, inspectors uncovered more than 2,800
violations.

The state and the Department of Justice are seeking $25,000 per
day per violation, or $2.2 billion from BFI for such activities
as improper disposal of liquid and flammable wastes, failure to
maintain an up-to-date emergency plan, failure to provide
emergency response teams and failure to properly maintain
surface toxic waste impoundments.

Meanwhile, BFI and its corporate twin, Waste Management Inc.,
the biggest waste handling company in the U.S., are now the
subject of 11 state grand jury investigations for a variety of
antitrust criminal acts including price-fixing and bid-rigging.
The Los Angeles County district attorney charged the companies
with illegally operating a cartel, dividing up customers between
themselves, eliminating true competition and creating
artificially high prices. If convicted, the firms could lose the
right to do business in California and be fined $1 million
apiece.


LOOSE CANNONS
by Andre Carothers

The only thing that separates current naval practice from a
full-scale shooting war is that no one has pulled a trigger,
yet.

Freedom of the seas, vigorously defended as a fundamental right
for centuries, has taken an ominous twist in the nuclear age.
Without regional anti-nuclear sensibilities, geographical
obstructions and cities full of "non-combatants" to temper their
ambitions, the nuclear navies are free to act, and interact, as
they choose. At sea there are no borders and few rules-nuclear-
armed navy forces routinely play a deadly game of cat and mouse
in which the nuclear triggers are drawn so tight that the future
of the planet often rests on the discipline, and perceived
mission, of a single vessel and its crew.

Almost unnoticed, the nuclear navies have brought us to the
brink. More than a quarter of the superpowers' nuclear arsenals,
approximately 15,000 weapons, are based in the sea. Fitted to
slender surface-skimming missiles, torpedoes, depth charges and
towering intercontinental ballistic missiles, these weapons are
deployed on frigates, battleships, aircraft carriers and
submarines. Yet the naval arms race and naval strategy have long
escaped the type of scrutiny that citizens and policy-makers
direct toward land-based forces. Aside from certain limits on
sea-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons at sea are not
governed by any arms control agreements. They are not even being
talked about.

Through steady refinements of weaponry and strategy, the world's
nuclear navies are now considered the most sensitive and
unstable flash points in the increasingly tense global military
stand-off. "World War III win begin in the oceans, with the
nuclear navies," says William Arkin, director of the National
Security Program at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Every day of the year, a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine is
stationed a few miles off the Pacific coast of Washington state.
Other Soviet attack submarines watch the entrances to the U.S.
submarine bases in San Diego, Norfolk and Charleston, South
Carolina. Off America's eastern shore, a pair of Soviet
ballistic missile submarines patrol in the Atlantic, their
multiple-warhead nuclear missiles minutes from targets on the
U.S. mainland. Following them, with torpedoes ready for the
first sign of war, are U.S. attack submarines. 

When an American submarine leaves port, a Soviet submarine
trails a mile or so behind, watching in turn for signs that the
U.S. is launching its ballistic missiles. Often another American
sub will take up behind the Soviet sub, and the trio will
silently circle the ocean, "like lazy sharks," in the words of
one writer, testing their ability to shoot at, evade and outwit
each other in preparation for the next war.

Meanwhile, on any given day, the U.S. Navy might be conducting
naval exercises near the Soviet Union-in the northern Pacific,
the Arctic, in the Sea of Japan or the North Atlantic. Under a
Reagan administration policy called "flexible operations," these
exercises are increasing in number and boldness. In 1983, for
the first time in 13 years, U.S. combat patrols resumed in the
Sea of Japan near sensitive Soviet military installations at
Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island. Close to 100 exercises were
conducted in the Pacific in 1984. In 1986, the United States
sent naval vessels within six miles of the Soviet Coast in the
Black Sea. 

Although far less widespread than U.S. forces, the Soviet Navy
is deploying its ships farther and farther from home, conducting
maneuvers in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico as well,
mirroring as best it can the actions of the United States.

Soviet and U.S. forces use each other as opposing forces in mock
battle. In 1982, when a U.S. carrier group and 24 other surface
ships conducted maneuvers in the Sea of Japan 500 miles from the
Soviet coast, Soviet pilots conducted over 100 "bombing raids"
on the U.S. fleet. "We rub up against the Soviets every single
day," said John Lehman, former U.S. secretary of the navy, " ..
From the Baltic to the Caribbean to the South China Sea, our
ships and men pass within yards of Soviet naval forces every
day." 

Fear of misunderstandings or mistakes led the United States and
the Soviet Union in 1972 to agree to certain rules of sea
behavior, but now the U.S. Navy admits that 40 potentially grave
"incidents" occurred in 1982 alone, including a serious
collision between a Soviet Victor-1 nuclear powered submarine
and the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. Games of "chicken"
between U.S. and Soviet naval vessels also take place, once
described by retired Admiral Elmo Zumwalt as "an extremely
dangerous, but exhilarating running game. . . that American and
Soviet ships have been playing with each other for years." 

Despite the obvious hazards, more provocative and elaborate
maneuvers are planned for the future. According to Admiral
Watkins, although the U. S. and Soviet Union are "technically"
at peace, "our operating tempo is 20 percent higher than during
the Vietnam War." In fact, the U.S. Navy is spending more time
at sea today than it did during World War II. The only thing
that separates current naval practice from a full-scale shooting
war is that no one has actually pulled a trigger, yet.


"I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but,
by God, they terrify me."

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, UPON REVIEWING REINFORCEMENTS SENT FROM
SPAIN

On October 24, 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis,
the President of the United States ordered the U.S. Navy to draw
the Cuban blockade closer to the Cuban mainland, thus allowing
more time to pass before Soviet freighters steaming toward Cuba
met U.S. warships. It was thought imperative that the Soviets be
given room to maneuver with dignity rather than force them into
a position that might provoke war. 

The Navy didn't move the blockade. It remained at its original
distance from Cuba for 48 hours after the President's order.
Moreover, unbeknownst to the White House, the U.S. Navy hunted
Soviet submarines not only around Cuba but throughout the
Caribbean, the Atlantic and, some analysts believe, the Pacific
as well. Several Soviet subs were forced to the surface with
depth charges. In short, the U.S. Navy followed its rule book of
naval engagement and waged a unannounced global war.

"What might have been to the Soviet Union one of the most
compelling U.S. military actions," says John Steinbruner,
director of the Brookings Institute's Foreign Policy Studies
Program, "largely escaped (the White House's) attention. . . The
efforts to bring American policy under central direction must be
said to have failed." 

It is the nature of navies that they are not under strict
control. Communication with submarine crews, for example, is
difficult, requiring the submarines to keep "appointments" in
order to receive orders from their commanders. Moreover, whereas
land-based nuclear weapons require an executive order for them
to be unlocked and fired, naval nuclear weapons have no locks.
Although naval commanders are not supposed to fire nuclear
weapons unless they receive orders to do so, there are so-called
"defensive" and extraordinary situations where the commander may
be able to use nuclear weapons at his discretion.

The U.S. Navy is also adamantly opposed to any oversight of
their military operations. "One thing that bugs me is the Navy
is so damn unilateralist," said Ambassador Robert Komer former
undersecretary of defense, "The Navy doesn't really care what
the army is doing or what the air force is doing." It is a
tradition that goes back centuries, but one that takes on a new
meaning in the nuclear age. 

In the "anything goes" atmosphere of naval military operations,
even approved activities are dangerously provocative. Throughout
the 60s, a secret surveillance operation named "Holy stone"
often brought U.S. submarines within three miles of the Soviet
coastline. In November, 1969, the USS Gato, on a Holystone
mission 15 Miles from the Pacific coast of the USSR, collided
with a Soviet sub. In the tense moments that followed, the
Gato's weapons officer prepared to arm a nuclear antisubmarine
rocket and three smaller torpedoes and the submarine "was
maneuvered in preparation for combat."

That an uncontrollable chain reaction begun by aggressive and
independent navies could plunge the world into nuclear war is a
concern that dates to the dawn of the atomic age. But little has
been done to rectify it. In fact, the latest developments in
weapons technology and the superpowers' naval strategies
indicate that the goal of a stable peace is rapidly
receding. "Our hair-trigger nuclear weapons systems and
provocative naval activities demand that we take serious steps
to reduce the likelihood of a confrontation," says William Arkm,
"In fact, we are doing just the opposite."


"It is hard to believe that thoughtful military planners would
actually do this."

ADMIRAL STANSFIELD TURNER

Consistent among the common, if unlikely, scenarios envisioned
by the U.S. military for war with the Soviet Union is one
salient element--it would essentially be a land war, probably in
central Europe. In these plans the Navy is relegated to a
subordinate but vital support role: warships and antisubmarine
forces are to ensure that supplies from the United States make
it to Europe without being sunk or blown up, that in the heat of
battle the "sea lines of communication" remain open.

In 1982, all that essentially changed. In what is commonly
considered the most significant change of strategy of the Reagan
era, the Navy has adopted a new set of operating rules called
"the Maritime Strategy." Under this policy, at the first sign of
severe international tension the U.S. Navy would move quickly
toward the main Soviet Naval bases at Murmansk in the Barents
Sea and Petropavlovsk in the North Pacific. 

According to Admiral Nils R. Thunman, Deputy Chief of Naval
Operations, "during the transition to war stage, we will see
forward global movement of our navy, and our SSNs (attack
submarines) role in that movement is to go deep into the sea
control areas of the Soviet Union. . . we move immediately into
those areas, sink his fleet, bottle up that massive submarine
fleet." In the words of Admiral James Watkins, "We go for the
jugular." 

The other half of this radical shift of emphasis is "horizontal
escalation." It is now the Navy's stated policy that, should a
battle break out in Europe or the Middle East, naval ships would
automatically engage the Soviet Navy in other parts of the
world. "Regardless of how or where a war with the.Soviet Union
might erupt," then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas
Hayward testified in 1983, "our Navy will have a global fight on
its hands from the early moments of hostility."

Several factors make this strategy a dangerously provocative
invitation for nuclear war. First, the Soviet ballistic missile
submarines, based primarily in Murmansk and Petropavlovsk, are
considered by the Soviets to be crucial elements of their
strategic deterrent, just as the U.S. Navy stresses the
importance of its Trident ballistic missile submarines. A
conventional attack on intercontinental missiles would by
necessity be met with a vigorous defense. 

"States fight hardest, and may be willing to risk the most dire
consequences, when assets essential to the preservation of their
sovereignty are at stake," writes MIT professor Barry Posen,
"Thus conventional operations that threaten strategic nuclear
forces can be extremely provocative. . . Of all the possible
naval strategies, (the Maritime Strategy) is the most likely to
cause the other side to reach for nuclear weapons." 

The very success of the attack could be its own undoing, for, as
Walden Bello, Peter Hayes and Lyuba Zarsky point out in their
book American Lake, "The Soviets have emphasized repeatedly that
under conditions of local inferiority, they would have no choice
but to escalate to all-out nuclear war." Certainly a naval
commander from any nation, facing the possibility of losing a
battle, would be tempted to reach into his cache of nuclear
weapons. 

The second problem lies with the latest development in naval
weaponry - the Tomahawk cruise missile. Designed to travel at
the speed of sound over distances as far as 2,500 kilometers and
strike within 250 feet of its target, the Tomahawk can carry a
conventional or a nuclear warhead.

Though called a tactical nuclear weapon-- its "deterrent" value
is said to lie in its supposed ability to discourage regional
confrontations-- the Tomahawk's long range and mobility make it
a threat to intercontinental nuclear forces, opposing navies,
cities and any land-based military facilities as well-in short,
it is a war fighting nuclear weapon. "I don't see how the long-
range Tomahawk with a nuclear warhead is going to be part of
deterrence," points out Vice Admiral Ralph Weymouth, "It's going
to be part of war-fighting." 

More than 750 nuclear-tipped Tomahawks, each 14 times as
powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, will be deployed
on roughly 200 Navy ships. But exactly which ships will carry
nuclear weapons will remain a secret, making every navy ship a
potential nuclear threat. The cruise missile "complicates Soviet
planning by requiring them to consider every battle group ship
a potential threat," claims Admiral Stephen Hostettler, head of
the Navy's cruise missile program. And when the Soviet Union
starts deploying its own long range sea-launched cruise missiles
this year or next, planning on the U.S. side will presumably be
equally"complicated." 

Combined with the new Maritime Strategy, cruise missile
deployments on both sides only serve to draw the nuclear hair-
trigger even tighter. If, at the first sign of international
tension, U.S. Navy battle groups move aggressively into Soviet
waters, the USSR will be tempted to use nuclear weapons for
defense of their ballistic submarines. If every ship is
potentially a nuclear platform, the urge to preempt, to
completely destroy the opposing force before it uses its nuclear
arsenal, may prove irresistible. As a U.S. Congressional Budget
Office study concluded in 1982, "the temptation (to escalate)
would be great given the difficulty of defeating a battle group
using conventional weapons."

A nuclear exchange at sea is considered feasible, indeed
tactically desirable in some circles, precisely because it would
take place far from land. According to the Atlantic Council, a
conservative NATO lobby group, "It can be argued that the
restricted use of nuclear weapons at sea carries neither the
moral stigma nor the threat of further escalation that applies
to their use on land." 

But in fact, it is likely that a nuclear exchange at sea would
quickly escalate out of control. As Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger says, it is United States policy that a nuclear war
beginning with Soviet nuclear attacks at sea "will not
necessarily remain limited to the sea." Indeed, as Desmond Ball
of Australia's National University points out, escalating to
attacks on Soviet territory "is an explicit and integral
component of the 'horizontal escalation' strategy of the current
administration."

No one doubts that equipping hundreds of U.S. and Soviet ships
with nuclear weapons of all shapes and sizes will induce a
measure of caution into their actions. But does this added
increment of "deterrence," if it can be called that, justify the
profound dangers inherent in the galloping naval nuclear arms
race? As one recent writer on the subject points out, questions
like these give the naval status quo, and the Maritime Strategy
in particular, "the look of a fuse."


"When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled."

MALAYSIAN PROVERB

Few places on earth host as thick a concentration of naval
nuclear and conventional war-fighting facilities as the north
Pacific coast of the United States and Canada more specifically,
Puget Sound. It begins in British Columbia, with the 50-square-
mile Canadian Forces Maritime Experimental and Test Ranges near
Vancouver Island. Just south, Canada's Pacific Navy is
headquartered at the coastal city of Esquimalt. 

Across the border in Washington state, military installations
and related facilities are located in Bremerton, Everett,
Seattle and Tacoma. In nearby Bangor, the U.S. Navy docks the
Ohio-class strategic missile submarines carrying the new
multiple-warhead Trident ballistic missiles-nearly 400 nuclear
warheads are thought to be in the port at any one time. As an
example of how the nuclear infrastructure can dominate a region
and transcend national borders, Puget Sound has few equals.

Should a war break out, conventional or nuclear, the Pacific
northwest would be a prime battleground. It is a role many
Canadians are not comfortable with--and they are not alone.
Along with many people in the United States, Japan, Iceland,
Australia, Norway and several other countries, Canadians are
beginning to resent their partnership in a provocative military
strategy over which they have no control. As the dimensions of
the predicament become clear, people around the world are
understandably developing a healthy concern for the implications
of naval nuclear deployments from all countries. 

On March 1, 1985, the Pacific Campaign to Disarm the Seas was
launched in Honolulu. In Japan last year, 47 fishing boats
carrying scores of protesters met the U.S. battleship New,
Jersey as it tried to dock in the southern city of Sasebo. The
government of Spain closed its ports to an American aircraft
carrier. Port visits in Denmark, Canada, Australia and the
Netherlands have been met with similar protests. This May, the
New Zealand Parliament passed a law banning warships carrying
nuclear weapons from New Zealand ports. 

Even former Navy Secretary John Lehman admits that relations
with many allies have become "increasingly brittle,"
characterized by "factionalism and increased dissent." In short,
as historian Theodore Draper puts it, "the rest of the world
persistently refuses to play its assigned role in the American
scheme of things." 

The United States has responded by hardening its policy - it has
refused to sign the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone treaty and
threatened New Zealand with economic sanctions. Many observers
assume that covert U.S. operatives were involved in the recent
upheavals in the anti-nuclear Pacific nations of Fiji and Palau.
The U.S. dismisses legitimate concerns about the danger of a
nuclear arms race, further alienating nations that would
otherwise remain friendly to U.S. interests. "U.S. forces, non-
nuclear and nuclear, are indivisible," said Admiral William
Crowe, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command 1983-84,
"When someone says they are anti-nuclear and not anti-American,
that is an intellectual distinction that is not meaningful."


"We now live in the worst of all possible worlds. We plan
potentially escalatory conventional operations, but we do not
seem to understand their implications."


BARRY POSEN, PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT MIT

World War I, which devastated Europe and left millions dead, is
often considered the war that had no purpose. Without clear
justifications or military objectives, the countries of Europe
stumbled into the conflagration almost unintentionally. It was
the result, say historians, of military forces that did not
distinguish between real defense and highly provocative
offensive actions. It came about because of rigid war plans that
were deemed irrevocable. It came about because planners and
theorists did not understand the implications of their actions. 

Paul J. Bracken, author of The Command and Control of Nuclear
Forces, draws a parallel between Europe of 1914 and today. "A
nation's actions in a crisis are profoundly influenced by the
security institutions built years before the crisis occurs.
(The) nuclear command organizations in the United States and the
Soviet Union parallel the conflict institutions built in the
decade before 1914, but on a far more spectacular and quick-
reacting scale." 

The proliferation of naval nuclear weapons and adoption of
aggressive naval practices must be stopped. Striving to "enhance
deterrence," either through more aggressive peacetime maneuvers
and strategies of "offensive defense," or by arming every ship
with nuclear weapons, will only serve to bring about the war
these actions are intended to avoid. "Priority should always be
given to avoiding situations that lead to crises rather than
devising ways to manage crises that may well be inherently
uncontrollable," writes Michael McGwire, military analyst at the
Brookings Institute, "(We are like) a person who is obsessed
with the danger of a meteor strike and who steadily increases
the thickness of the roof of his house, until the entire thing
collapses."

The Greenpeace Nuclear-Free Seas Campaign

In 1987, Greenpeace launched an international campaign to alert
policy makers and the public to the dangers posed by the nuclear
navies. The goal of the effort is several-fold. First, the
nuclear navies must eliminate war-fighting nuclear weapons--all
varieties of ocean combat nuclear weapons and land-attack cruise
missiles--from naval arsenals. Development of submarine-launched
counter force ballistic missiles--the U.S. Trident lI and its
Soviet equivalent, and the French M5--should be stopped.

Limits on the scope and nature of naval exercises must be
established. Non-nuclear nations should resist the spread of the
naval nuclear infrastructure, refuse to participate in global
warfighting plans and suspend port visits of nuclear-armed
ships. For more information on the campaign, contact Greenpeace
offices in the U.S., Canada, Spain, West Germany, Denmark,
Sweden, the United Kingdom and Australia. 


A FORGOTTEN WAR

The Assault on Central America's Environment

By Bill Hall and Joshua Karliner

To the casual visitor, Central America might at first seem a
tropical paradise. From the peaks of its highest mountains one
can look east toward the Caribbean beaches lined with coral
reefs, and then turn west to face the Pacific Ocean's rugged
coastline. Lush tropical rain forests, cloud forests and dry
forests harbor leopards, monkeys, snakes and lizards, frogs and
other wildlife of almost infinite variety. The legendary Quetzal
bird glides through the region's highlands, while the slow-
moving manatee grazes in lowland swamps. Familiar North American
songbirds such as the thrush, warbler and flycatcher, spend half
the year in Central American jungles. 

Yet this image of Central America conceals a bitter reality of
poverty, violence, and environmental destruction. Two-thirds of
Central America's original rain forests have disappeared.
Rivers, lakes and the ocean are being polluted by silt and
chemicals, smothering the reefs and destroying fish and
wildlife. 

The yawning chasm between rich and poor and ill-considered
"development" plans are directly and indirectly ravaging what
remains of Central America's environment. Half of the region's
rural families don't own enough land to support themselves--or
they have no land at all. Vast acreage is devoted to growing
crops for export, enriching wealthy landowners and international
corporations and pushing the poor onto hillsides and into the
rain forest. And the multitude of wars - from internal counter-
insurgency campaigns to the United State's proxy war in
Nicaragua - obliterate crucial ecosystems and push thousands of
refugees onto overtaxed valleys and hillsides. Even the once
abundant songbirds are on the decline the victims, say
scientists, of the destruction of Central American rain forests.

The forgotten war being waged against the Central American
environment is more than scattered skirmishes fought with guns -
it is a relentless daily onslaught that poses an incalculable
threat to the health and security of the entire region.

Military activity dominates and supercedes all efforts on behalf
of Central America's ravaged environment. According to a World
Resources Institute report, Bordering on Trouble, U.S. military
assistance to El Salvador and Honduras alone in 1987 "will total
$220.8 million, or more than eighteen times what the United
States is spending to protect the entire (Caribbean) region's
environmental future." 

Gathered in camps all along the Honduran Nicaraguan border, the
U.S.-backed Contras conduct military operations that ravage the
countryside, displace villagers and damage the fragile ecology.
According to AHPROCAFE, a Honduran organization that represents
coffee growers and farmers in the border area, some 450 families
have been forced from their land as a result of contra activity
in the region. AHPROCAFE estimates losses worth $15 million and
has protested to the U.S. government. 

Along with its support for the Contras, the U.S. has over the
last six years built Honduras up to become "the aircraft
carrier" of Central America. Nearly constant U.S. military
maneuvers, national guard exercises and army construction
projects have left the country criss-crossed with military roads
and scarred with bases and airstrips, upsetting Honduras'
fragile tropical ecology.

Few environmental controls are placed on U.S. military projects.
Military activity is "less environmentally constrained," a U.S.
National Guard spokesperson told the Washington Post, "If you're
building a road, you don't have to worry about the width of the
culverts, about the Environmental Protection Agency, or about
the environmentalists. Those aren't the concerns down there."

With other arable land in the grip of the wealthy Honduran land
owning elite, families and communities displaced by military
activity have nowhere else to go but into the nearby Mosquiba
rain forest. Forced to resort to slash and burn agriculture,
refugees have already felled 45,000 hectares of rain forest.

Without the environmental regulations of more "developed"
nations, Central America is a prime market for pesticides banned
in the United States. For example, pesticides such as DDT, BHC,
endrin, dieldrin, Phosvel and DBCP, banned in the U.S., are
exported to Central America, where they are poured onto the
countryside by un-trained and unprotected agricultural workers.

In the 1970s, the region was the world's highest per capita user
of pesticides. As a result, 19,000 pesticide poisonings were
recorded in a five-year period in the late 70s, and DDT levels
in a Guatemalan cow's milk measured 90 times the maximum allowed
in the U.S. Contaminated fruits, vegetables and meat are
exported, ironically, to the tables of U.S. consumers,
completing what environmentalists now call "the circle of
poison." 

In the same way, producers of toxic waste are looking to the
financially strapped Central American nations as dumping grounds
for poisons whose disposal in the U.S. has become expensive -
again thanks to U.S. regulations. "It's enough that we have the
Contras," said Honduran United Federation of Laborers President
Hector Hernandez, "now they want to dump more garbage on us."

The city of Philadelphia recently signed an agreement with the
local government of Bocas del Toro in Panama to send boatloads
of fly ash residue from municipal waste incineration to
northeast Panama. The shipments, which contain dangerous
concentrations of dioxins and heavy metals, will be used to
build a jetty into the Caribbean sea and a road to connect the
city of Changuinola with a new hotel complex eight kilometers
away. 

The planned road will bisect an 82 square kilometer wetland that
is Panama's only habitat for the endangered manatee. These
swamps are also home for wild cats, tapirs and other rare
species. Sediments carried by the ocean from the proposed jetty
could threaten nearby coral reefs.

This practice, dubbed "garbage imperialism" by one writer, has
not gone unnoticed by Central American activists. At the
Changuinola airport, a band of young Panamanian
environmentalists spray-painted a wall with ecological slogans.
Fundacion Panama, a coalition of 24 environmental groups, has
also expressed opposition to the shipment, along with the milk
producers and local business people of Bocas del Toro. If it
continues as planned, the Philadelphia shipment will establish
a dangerous precedent: Central America, for a fee, will become
a dumping ground for the United States' hazardous wastes.

On the plus side, the Los Angeles-based Applied Recovery
Technologies Inc. (ART), has had little success with its plan to
use Central America's wetlands as a dumping ground for 10,000
tons of toxic sewage sludge daily. In the wake of heavy
opposition from the Honduran Ecological Association (AHE), which
pointed out the effects adopting Los Angeles' sludge would have
on tourism, mangrove swamps and the coastal ecology, Honduras,
Guatemala and Belize all rejected ART's bid. "If they thought
the waste wasn't dangerous," Rigoberto Romero, AHE's Executive
Director, "then they wouldn't be sending it to us in the first
place."


Thanks to rampant deforestation caused by cattle ranching, poor
agricultural practices and subsistence farming on hillsides and
marginal land, tons of Central America's topsoil are washed away
each day. This silt muddies streams and increases downstream
erosion. It is also threatening the future of one piece of
Central American real estate the United States considers vital
to national security--the Panama Canal. Over 70 percent of the
Panama Canal watershed is now denuded, and Panamanian government
environmentalist Stanley Heckadon estimates that by the year
2000 - when Panama regains control of the canal from the U.S.--
silt will have filled up as much as 40 percent of the waterway,
imposing severe limits on its operation. 

A plan to levy a penny-per-ton tax on canal traffic to restore
the watershed has been rejected by the Panama Canal Commission,
which manages the Canal Zone and is controlled by the U.S., on
the grounds that its charter does not permit charging canal
users for the cost of preserving the watershed, which lies
outside the canal zone. Heckadon explains, "The U. S. thinks the
security of the canal is just military. But the security of the
canal isn't just military, it's the same as saving the forests
and peasants of the canal watershed." 

Siltation is also wiping out the coral reefs of Costa Rica,
threatening the economies of coastal villages. Less than a
decade ago, the small Caribbean coast fishing village of
Manzanillo was a vibrant community whose people thrived off the
local reef, catching grouper, snapper, bass, and other fish
daily, and selling them in local markets. Today the town looks
as if a plague had struck. The big nets no longer cover the
beaches at late afternoon and the once-pristine coral reef is
now murky brown. Manzanillo has lost a large number of its
families, homes are abandoned, and fishing boats have been sold
off.

Up the coast from Manzanillo, the Estrella River flows into the
Caribbean, bringing runoff from the huge Standard Fruit
plantations which lie in the expansive Valle de Estrella. Each
day the Estrella river carries tons of soil into the ocean,
disrupting the life cycle of the 18 kilometers of coral reef
that line the coast. In 1987 the New Alchemy Institute estimated
that sedimentation has killed 75 percent of the reef building
corals on the coast south of the Rio Estrella.

The fish that breed at the reef, a staple of the Manzanillo
economy and that of dozens of other coastal communities, have
died off along with the reef. Ironically, many of the fishermen
put out of work by the death of the reef have been forced to go
to work for the same banana companies responsible for destroying
their traditional livelihoods.

In 1979, the then President of Costa Rica Rodrigo Carazo, sent
a letter to the Standard Fruit banana complex in the Valle de
Estrella. In it he asked the company to reduce runoff and help
replenish the 5,000-year-old coral reefs of the Cahuita National
Park and the surrounding area. When the director of the park,
Sigfredo Marin Zuniga, approached the Standard Fruit plantation
manager for his response, the manager asked him: "Do you want to
know what I think of this?" And without waiting for a reply, he
tore up the President's letter.

In 1954, the U.S.-based United Fruit Company and the Central
Intelligence Agency worked together to topple the democratically
elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz, who they
labelled a "communist." Arbenz' administration had nationalized
and then redistributed 100,000 acres of fertile land which
United Fruit was holding idle to prevent competition.

Had Arbenz' agrarian reforms been embraced instead of opposed by
United Fruit and the U.S. government, the country, and perhaps
all of Central America, would look much different today.
Instead, the U.S. overthrow was followed by 30 years of military
dictatorships. Instead of redistributing prime farm land, these
regimes attempted to ease social tensions by building roads to
colonize Guatemala's rain forest. Cattle ranchers followed
closely behind the colonists, pushing them deeper into the
receding rain forests. Today, the skewed structure of the
Guatemalan economy is the prime cause of poverty and
environmental destruction. 

Dominated by huge banana plantations (thus the term "banana
republic"), neighboring Honduras suffers under a similar
economic regime. Forty percent of Honduras' arable land is under
cultivation for the benefit of international corporations -
United Brands, Castle and Cooke and RJ Reynolds - and much of
the rest in the control of large Honduran estates.

Like many Guatemalans, landless peasants in Honduras are forced
to either work on a plantation for paltry wages, migrate to the
cities and try their luck on the streets, or search for
available land to farm on steep wooded hillsides or in the rain
forest, where soils are poor. The Honduran government has even
encouraged migration into the rain forest, with colonization
programs designed both to ease peasant pressure for land reform
and clear the land for cattle ranchers-who suddenly appear with
"deeds" to the land and push the peasants deeper into the
forest. 

One of Central America's most pressing needs is comprehensive
land reform, for both environmental and political reasons. In
Guatemala today, 2.1% of the population controls 80% of the
country's farmland; in El Salvador, less than 2% of the
population control nearly all the fertile land and 60% of the
national territory. In Honduras, poorest of all central American
nations, 44% of the rural poor own no land at all. 

The nature of the crisis can clearly be seen in the stark
inequality of the region's countryside. The white stucco and
iron grill haciendas of the big landowners stand alongside dirt
floored huts where the families of plantation workers are forced
to live. Conflicts between the powerful growers, who enrich
themselves on export crops that offer few benefits to local
people, and peasants who are trying to obtain and then survive
on land they can call their own, are at the root of much of
Central America's environmental problems.

Since 1979, Nicaragua's new Sandinista government has made an
attempt at agrarian reform similar to the efforts of Jacobo
Arbenz, 30 years earlier. Like its southern neighbor, Costa
Rica, it has also promoted environmental protections that are
lauded by ecologists around the world. It's successes, and
failures, provide much insight into the difficulties facing the
Central American environment.

The legacy of Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship was widespread
deforestation, which caused soil erosion, dust storms and flash
floods on Nicaragua's Pacific coast. In the eastern half of the
country, colonization and cattle ranching destroyed a third of
Nicaragua's extensive tropical rain forests. 

The new Nicaraguan government redistributed land owned by the
dictator and his cronies, much of which had been seized from
peasants years before. Land titles were granted to peasants who
were landless, farming on hillsides, or colonizing the rain
forest. In addition, the Sandinistas halted forest colonization
plans, nationalized all forest land and cancelled timber
concessions that Somoza had given to transnational timber
companies. 

The Sandinistas have shifted their agricultural development
strategy to support crops for local needs rather than for
export. They created the Nicaraguan Institute for Natural
Resources and the Environment (IRENA), the first organization of
its kind in Nicaraguan history. And while the rest of Central
America still sprays poisons outlawed in the U.S., Nicaragua has
banned DDT, endrin, dieldrin, Phosvel and DBCP. 

Nicaragua has also embarked on an ambitious national parks
program. The environmental agency IRENA has targeted 18 percent
of Nicaragua's territory for national park lands. The plan would
give Nicaragua one of the highest percentages of park lands in
the world.

But Nicaragua, like other third world nations, is caught in the
apparent dilemma between environmental conservation and economic
wellbeing. With an annual inflation rate in the triple digits,
a U.S. trade embargo and defense spending that consumes nearly
half the annual budget, Nicaragua is under intense pressure to
exploit whatever natural resources it has.

It was this pressure that led the Nicaraguan Vice-Minister of
Industry to give a private Costa Rican logging company a 3, 200-
square-kilometer timber concession in the San Juan River
watershed area. Just two months earlier, Nicaraguan President
Daniel Ortega had proposed a "peace park" for the lush rain
forest area which would serve the dual purpose of conservation
and promoting peace between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. 

Fortunately, after six months of pressure from international
environmentalists and vigorous debate in Nicaragua, Ortega
cancelled the concession and put plans for a "Peace Park" back
on track. But none of Nicaragua's progress on the environmental
front is secure as long as economic and political instability
rule Central America. 

Just as the militarization of neighboring Honduras is setting
back conservation efforts, Nicaragua's environmental programs
are crippled by the military campaigns of the U.S.backed
Contras. In the last five years the Contras have either
assassinated or kidnapped more than 75 government environmental
and natural resource employees. They have also burned deforested
areas and destroyed nurseries, jeeps and offices. 

In 1983, IRENA was forced to close Saslaya National Park, the
country's only tropical rain forest national reserve, when
Contras kidnapped the park's administrator and two rangers.
Benjamin Linder, a U.S. citizen, was working as an engineer on
an environmentally sound small hydroelectric project when he was
killed by the Contras in April, 1987.

On April 8, 1981, at Montego Bay, Jamaica, 25 of the 27 nations
and territories that comprise the Caribbean basin formulated a
policy called the Caribbean Action Plan (CAP) as part of the
United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) Regional Seas
project. Under CAP, the only regional conservation effort, the
25 nations have committed to working on such efforts as oil
spill contingency programs, watershed management, and marine
ecosystem protection.

But the United States, the sole Caribbean country with adequate
resources to get CAP off the ground, has refused to adequately
fund the effort. The reason? The participation of Cuba and
Nicaragua. The U.S. decision has stalled the project and
discouraged regional representatives, who had pledged $1.2
million for the initial 3-year phase of CAP. "It's so petty,"
said Arsenio Rodriguez, a UNEP official who helped organize CAP,
"just to keep a few dollars from going to Cuba."

"American priorities in the region are badly warped," say the
authors of the Bordering on Trouble, "Preoccupation with
military adventures. . . will obscure the truly threatening
problems in Latin America." Rather, the report recommends, U.S.
support for structural reform "could be one of the most
important contributions to long-term, ecologically sound
development in the region." The quest for peace and security in
Central America must rest on the understanding that
environmental, social and political issues are firmly
intertwined - excluding any one of these aspects will preclude
a real solution to the problems that plague the region. As
Salvadoran journalist Oscar Perez puts it, "Environmental
projects are necessary for peace, and peace is necessary for the
health of the environment."


Bill Hall is Program Director and Joshua Karliner Policy
Director of the Earth Island Institute's Environmental Project
on Central Amenca, based in San Francisco and New York City. For
more information, write 300 Broadway, #28, San Francisco,
California 94133.


FOUR DAYS IN MAY: THE FIRST CENTRAL AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL
ACTION CONFERENCE.

On May 13, the first regional conference devoted to solving
Central America's pressing environmental problems took place in
Managua, Nicaragua. Organized primarily by EPOCA and the
Nicaraguan Association of Biologists and Ecologists (A BEN), the
conference brought together more than 150 environmentalists from
the U.S., western Europe and Central and South America,
including observers from Greenpeace, the Conservation
Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters and the Earth
Island Institute. 

The conference, which had the support of the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature, the U.N. Environment Programme,
UNESCO and the governments of the Netherlands and Norway, was
the first of its kind in over a decade. After four days of
workshops and panel discussions on subjects as diverse as rain
forest protection, land use and appropriate development, the
representatives from the six Central American nations issued a
Declaration, parts of which are excerpted below.

"We live in a region that is bestowed with a high degree of
biological diversity and tremendous beauty. Our isthmus
separates the great oceans and serves as a bridge between two
continents. Our wilderness guards treasures as yet unknown to
science, the result of the fertile union of animal and vegetable
life from North and South America." 

"Our present model of development has been based on exporting a
limited number of primary products (sugar, bananas, coffee)
whose prices have been subject to the fluctuations of the
international market. While it is true that this model has
resulted in economic growth, it has not met the basic needs of
the majority of our population and has accentuated economic and
social injustice. At the same time, it has greatly degraded the
environmental heritage of Central America. "

"We especially want to emphasize women's roles as
environmentalists, and recognize that women play a valuable role
in scientific, technical and productive work to protect and
conserve our natural environment." 

"Unprecedented deforestation has resulted in soil erosion,
diminishing water resources, reduction of wilderness areas, loss
of genetic diversity and the alteration of aquatic ecosystems.
The export-based development model has also produced alarming
levels of toxic contamination from the abuse of agrochemicals
and the discharge of untreated waste waters."

"If the process of environmental deterioration continues, it
will make future development impossible and it will deepen
social instability. Given this, we must search for a new
development path. In order to guarantee sustainable development,
we must gain social and economic justice by diversifying
production and raising the standard of living, and at the same
time harmonize human actions with nature." 

"The representatives and delegates of this Conference have
decided to organize themselves into a regional network for
environmental action. The network will coordinate the
implementation of our recommendations and convert them into
action for peace and sustainable development, so that the people
of Central America can finally build a future of abundance,
social justice and harmony between human and nature." 
--Managua, Nicaragua - May 16, 1987


ACTION ACCESS

ENVIRONET: THE NEW COMPUTER LINK

Greenpeace USA has established a new 24-hour computer bulletin
board for public use. Among EnviroNet's offerings is a
conference section, allowing you to post information on events,
participate in discussions and share information on a variety of
topics; a private mail section for individual communications and
a press release and wire service section with up-to-date news
and commentary on the activities of Greenpeace and other groups.

EnviroNet can be reached by dialling (415) 861-6503. The system
operates at 300 and 1200 baud - your telecommunications software
should be set for 7 data bits, 1 stop bit and even parity. New
users will be asked to fill out a registration questionnaire in
order to gain full access to the system, which is usually
granted the day after the initial log-on. Questions should be
directed to Dick Dillman (415) 565-4609.


TOXICS AT SEA

The Greenpeace campaign to prevent ocean incineration of toxic
wastes, which for five years has helped keep U.S. waters free of
the waste-burning ships, is preparing for yet another battle
with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA hopes to
issue a new set of regulations for ocean incineration by the end
of 1987. No regulations, however, can mitigate the dangers posed
by at-sea burning of toxic wastes. 

Please let the EPA administrator know that the public does not
support ocean incineration. Our resources should be devoted to
reducing the volume of wastes through changes in production
methods, rather than a misguided effort to burn wastes in the
open ocean. Write to: Lee Thomas, Administrator, U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, 401 M Street, S.W., Washington,
D.C. 20460.


KANGAROO IMPORT BAN

The government of Australia set this year's quota for kangaroos
at 2,804,000 - once again making the Australian kangaroo hunt
the largest commercial wildlife slaughter in the world. Half of
the kangaroos are killed in Queens land, under a management
program ruled "grossly inadequate" last year by an Australian
court. Ignoring the ruling, the Australian government raised the
Queensland quota by over 350,000. 

Australia's three major commercial kangaroo species are listed
as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Congressmen
Robert Mrazek has introduced legislation, H.R. 779, reinstating
a ban on kangaroo imports that was lifted in 1981. Please write
to Congressman Gerry Studds and request that hearings be
scheduled. Write Congressman Gerry E. Studds, Subcommittee on
Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation, 543 House Annex 2,
Washington, D.C. 20515.

In Europe, a report commissioned by the European Parliament was
critical of the commercial kangaroo industry and recommended a
partial import ban. A resolution based on the report will be
before the European Parliament this fall. Please express your
support for the Muntingh Report to Claus Stuffman, Directorate-
General XI, Environment, Consumer Protection and Nuclear Safety,
Rue de la Loi 200, 1049 Bruxelles, Belgium.


ACID RAIN BILLS

This year both the U.S. House and Senate are considering
legislation that would reduce the nation's acid rain-causing
emissions. Both Senate bills, S. 300 and S. 321, would among
other things reduce U.S. sulfur dioxide emissions by about 50
percent and cut nitrogen oxide emissions. 

The House bill, H.R. 2666, would reduce sulfur dioxide emissions
by 10 million tons instead of the 12 million tons eliminated by
the Senate bills, but it includes provisions, such as rate
increase protection for consumers, designed to counteract the
opposition which has helped defeat House acid rain legislation
in the past. 

Last year utility groups opposing acid rain controls spent more
than any other special interest group in their effort to destroy
last year's House acid rain bill. We must send the message to
the U.S. Congress that we want acid rain and other air pollution
stopped now. Please write your congressmen and senators and urge
the passage of the strongest acid rain legislation as quickly as
possible.


BURGER KING BACKS DOWN

Thanks to pressure from environmentalists, Burger King, the
international fast food chain, agreed in August to stop using
Central American beef in its hamburgers. Cattle ranches
supplying the U.S. fast-food market are responsible for the
destruction of much of Costa Rica's rain forests. 

Please write a note of thanks to the CEO of Burger King, Jeff
Campbell, PO Box 520783, Miami, Florida 33152, and also ask his
company to contribute funds to the Costa Rican national park
system.


THE TOXIC CLOUD

by Michael H. Brown

A warning sign could be hung somewhere in every city: Danger,
Toxic Air Contamination. The poisons once thought to be a
serious concern only near a place such as Love Canal are now
known to be everywhere. They appear in the air of an alpine
forest, or over a Pacific island. They are also in the cabinet
under the kitchen sink. 

Solvents, refrigerants, methane, and oxides--all are among the
pollutants that are increasingly gathering in the atmosphere.
There they are dangerously altering the natural ozone layer that
protects us against harmful radiation from the sun, or they are
causing the "greenhouse" effect, blocking the escape of heat
from the earth's surface and, in so doing, threatening to raise
the planet's temperature to the point where lush farmland would
turn to dust bowls and polar ice would melt.

We live in an era during which life expectancy as a whole has
increased because of better health care for conventional types
of physical distress. While the majority of cancers are induced
by factors other than environmental toxics, we are also at the
point where cancer is contracted by 30 percent of the
population. Of Americans now living, 74 million will contract
the disease. The cancer death rate has increased 26 percent in
just two decades. Birth defects are also on the rise. Between
1970 and 1980 there was a 300 percent increase in reported cases
of displaced hips and a 240 percent increase in babies with
ventricular septal defects - a hole between chambers of the
heart.

Dave Haas Ewell, who used to hunt the swamps that surround his
home in Louisiana, knows first-hand what pollution means to
local communities. "It's unreal what they have done," he said,
nodding to the refineries and chemical plants that crowd the
Mississippi's banks. "And ya know what? It's our children who'll
pay for it. They will."

Dave Ewell's herd of cows was poisoned by chlorinated
hydrocarbons, solvents, and metals which had deluged the area
years ago, scalding the cypresses and turning alligators belly-
up. They came from a chemical plant next to his family's
plantation, and I remembered that upon my first visit there, in
1979, shiny globules of mercury oozed from the indentations my
foot made in the muck near a bayou. 

When the sun was hot, a thick, black sludge surfaced down by the
bayou, sending an oil slick toward the Mississippi, which
supplies drinking water to the city of New Orleans. There, the
environment and cancer rates are such that Dr. Velma L.
Campbell, a physician at the Ochsner Clinic, describes the toxic
poisoning of the region as "a massive human experiment conducted
without the consent of the experimental subjects."

Beginning two decades ago, the way we understand air pollution -
indeed all forms of pollution - changed radically. In the 1960s
and 1970s, scientists equipped with new analytical tools began
identifying an array of mysterious synthetic compounds in the
flesh of trout and other fish caught in the largest of the Great
Lakes, that 31,700 square miles of fresh water known, with due
respect, as Lake Superior. PCBs and DDT were among those found.
So was another potent chlorinated insecticide called toxaphene. 

In Superior's Whitefish Bay, infant birds began suffering from
cataracts and edema. Their necks and heads became so swollen
they could not open their eyes. Nor could some of them eat. They
suffered from a defect, called "cross beak syndrome," that
prevented their upper and lower bills from meeting.

In other parts of the Great Lakes, especially near Green Bay,
the problem was more acute. In some spots, terns soon would be
observed with club foot-like deformities that prevented the
birds from being able to stand. Mink and river otters were
disappearing from the south shore of Lake Ontario and around
Lake Michigan. Though they had been making a comeback, by the
mid-1980s bald eagles would have trouble nesting along Lake
Superior. The problem, it was suspected, was their diet of
chemically contaminated gulls. 

There was also concern about human infants along the lakes. In
one part of Michigan, some babies tested seemed to have lower
birth weights and smaller head circumferences than children born
to women who ate no fish. Some of the babies had what appeared
to be abnormally jerky and unbalanced movements, weak reflexes,
and general sluggishness.

While Lake Superior's vast shoreline could be expected to
receive some chemical runoff from farms and scattered industry,
the levels and character of its toxic ants did not quite fit
with what would be expected to enter the lake through the
sewers, creeks, and rivers that drain into her. 


Located at a relatively remote region between northern Michigan
and southern Canada, Superior had not been plagued by the same
problems that historically befell its little sister, Lake Erie.
Erie's water had been starved of oxygen by phosphates which
formed suds at outfall pipes and provoked wild overgrowths of
algae-causing bloated fish to wash ashore. That pollution had
taken no modern technical gear to detect: on Cleveland's
Cuyahoga River, fires had ignited the oil slicks into a biblical
spectacle of flames shooting up from the water itself.

But several hundred miles to the northwest Lake Superior still
had the aura of purity. Nearly the size of Indiana, the lake
serves as head waters for the greatest freshwater system on
earth, a system that contains 20 percent of the planet's fresh
surface water.

Yet suddenly, in the 1970s, its unsullied image was compromised.
The compounds being found in Superior were mostly invisible and
odorless in nature, but they posed much more of a danger than
the more familiar sulfides, raw sewage and oil. Among them,
toxaphene-a pesticide that possesses the widely recognized
capability of causing thyroid carcinomas in rodents. Though not
quite as persistent as DDT, it too accumulates in the ecosystem,
it too is biomagnified in animal flesh and it is every bit as
toxic as DDT, if not more so. Its concentrations in the lake
approached levels at which consumption of fish is banned. 

The pressing question: Where was the toxaphene coming from? 

In Canada it had been closely restricted, and on the American
side its major use was not near the Great Lakes nor anywhere
else in the Midwest - it was in two impossibly distant areas:
California and the Deep South. 

Had it somehow become a constituent of ambient air? Had it
descended like acid rain or nuclear fallout? Looking to test an
even more isolated ecosystem, scientists began journeying to
Siskiwit Lake in a national park called Isle Royale. The island
is situated in the northern part of Lake Superior, more than
thirty miles from Ontario's Thunder Bay, the nearest community
of any real proportion.

The only means of access from one part of Isle Royale to another
is by foot trails. There were no outfalls, no farm runoff, no
toxic dumps. Nor did any of the tainted water of Superior flow
into Siskiwit Lake, for Siskiwit's elevation, propped as it is
on the island, is nearly sixty feet higher than Lake Superior's.
All things considered, it seemed, there was no way at all for
toxaphene to get to Siskiwit. 

Yet to the shock of the investigating scientists, fish netted
from Siskiwit had nearly double the PCBs that had been found in
Lake Superior, and nearly ten times as much DDE--a breakdown
product of DDT. One might rationalize certain levels in Lake
Superior, with its vast shore and its exposure to at least some
modern effluents. But, now, how did the stuff get to the
isolated environs of Isle Royale in such high concentrations? 

Scientists hauled up their gas chromatographs to various parts
of the country and began searching for clues. One big hint was
found when rain was tested at an estuary in South Carolina.
Toxaphene was found in more than 75 percent of the samples. High
levels also turned up in Greenville, on the lower Mississippi
River. It was apparently lifting off the fields and into the
wind. Tracking it northward, air samplers also documented its
presence in St. Louis and up in Michigan.

For those who thought such compounds remain firmly earthbound,
or that what little bit does become airborne would simply
disappear in the troposphere, the numbers were startling ones
indeed. By the time it was 825 miles from Greenville and
approaching the neighborhood of Lake Superior, the toxaphene was
still at 4 percent of the Greenville level. At the same time,
toxaphene was also being tracked over Bermuda and the North
Atlantic, in the fish and water birds from Swedish lakes, in the
North and Baltic seas, in the Tyrolean Alps and in Antarctic
cod.

The conclusion seemed as obvious as it was momentous: we were no
longer talking about the long-range transport of just sulphur
and nitrogen but of the dreaded chlorinated pesticides - thought
previously to be a crisis only in lake and river sediments.
Chlorinates, the compounds Rachel Carson worried about in her
classic work, Silent Spring, were taking wing--in quantities
great enough to threaten distant wildlife and people. Soon,
chemists tapping their computers at the University of Minnesota
would start making somber estimates that would have seemed like
sheer nonsense just a few years before. Perhaps 85, perhaps 90
per cent of the total PCB input to Lakes Michigan and Superior
was not from sewers but through the air, they said.  

Whatever the number. it was a bad signal not just for cormorants
and herons but also, perhaps, for the 26 million people who
drink from the lakes. One 1981 estimate said about a million
pounds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a dangerous chemical
produced in the generation and use of complex synthetic 
chemicals, were falling into the lakes each year. Also found in
the lakes are substantial quantities of benzene hexachloride, a
common synthetic chemical sometimes used as a fungicide, and
DDT. Since it had been banned in the U.S. for a decade, the DDT,
scientists conjectured must have come over the poles from Europe
and Asia, or from Mexico and parts south.

In tests in places like California, the result showed that the
insecticides vaporized in great quantities right off the plants
themselves. One study reported a 59 percent loss of toxaphene
from a cotton field within twenty-eight days. Other experiments
in closed chambers indicated that 24 percent of toxaphene turned
into gas within ninety days of the last application, meaning
that, in 1974, at least 42.5 million pounds of it vaporized into
the American atmosphere. 

That meant we were directly breathing chlorinated pesticides and
PCBs, not just eating them with contaminated fish. Once the
emotional reaction subsided, more questions arose. For example:
If toxaphene and PCBs are so airworthy, what else is in the wild
blue yonder?

With this line of study came a new understanding of airborne
transport of toxic chemicals. We now know that pollution can fly
in the form of tiny droplets, small pieces - or particles - of
solid matter, invisible gases, or as a sort of mix of them known
as the aerosol. The particulates may be washed to earth by the
falling rain, or fall by simple gravity.

The gases, depending on how easily they dissolve in water, may
become part of airborne moisture, moving wherever it moves,
permeating vegetation, or condense into fine particulates that
can be seen only with an electronic microscope. Many chemicals,
including chlorinated pesticides, travel both as passengers on
a particle and in a gaseous state. Solvents such a benzene or
toluene, by definition "volatile" compounds that easily
evaporate, frequently find themselves in vapor states or
dissolved in other substances. Even metals, under the right
conditions, can turn vaporous Others, such as the deadly
dioxins, are not water soluble and prefer to cling to a
particle.

Most large particulates remain within five or ten miles of their
origin, but the smaller they are the farther they fly, and if
they are small enough they can remain aloft for days or weeks.
At times, if they get caught in the stratosphere, the weeks may
turn to months, the months to a year. Gases, if they decay
slowly enough, can travel still farther.

The question of atmospheric transport, once keen during
atmospheric nuclear bomb-testing, has found greatly heightened
currency in recent years with the introduction into public
consciousness of acid rain. The recent specter of lake fish in
Canada and upstate New York dying from acid that originates in
coal-fired plants along the Ohio Valley and other parts of the
industrialized Midwest has awakened us to the idea that our
atmosphere is not infinite. What you place into it does not just
disappear. 

In the words of meteorologist and textbook author C. Donald
Ahrens of California's Modesto Junior College, the atmosphere
"is a thin, gaseous envelope comprised mostly of nitrogen and
oxygen, with clouds of condensed water vapor and ice particles.
Almost 99 percent of the atmosphere lies within eighteen miles
of the surface. In fact, if the earth were to shrink to the size
of a beach ball, its inhabitable atmosphere would be thinner
than a piece of paper." Referring to the radioactivity tracked
around the globe from the damaged reactor at Chernobyl, Dr.
Kenneth A. Rahn, an atmospheric physicist at the University of
Rhode Island said "It was only eleven days from Chernobyl to
here. In terms of transport, this is a quite small planet."

It was the 1950s and the 1960s that medical researchers began
tracking blips that turned out to be sharp and steady upward
lines on the cancer graphs of Louisiana. Since cancer is
believed to take up to two decades to surface in the body, that
takes us back to the 1940s when, coincidentally, the
petrochemical industry was taking deep root along the lower
Mississippi, drawn there by cheap feed stock gas from the oil
fields, easy water transport, and lucrative tax incentives.

The government of Louisiana serviced the chemical makers as no
other government did - especially those that were offshoots of
the revered petroleum industry. As the older industrial states
in the North began controlling the wanton pollution there,
corporations looked to the South for relief from such costly
regulations. Down at the mouth of the Mississippi, a
manufacturing company could obtain up to ten years of exemptions
from property taxes.

Soon, companies making pesticides chlorine, rubber, antifreeze,
detergents plastics and a variety of chemical products sprouted
along the river and in the swamps. Virtually every major
American chemical corporation and several foreign ones have an
outpost along the river. By 1986 Louisiana was ranked third
nationally in chemical production behind New Jersey and Texas.

Today, the biggest splotches of black on the nation's maps of
lung cancer rates are in the south, allowing the lower
Mississippi to borrow from New Jersey the nickname "Cancer
Alley." While several Northeastern states still had higher rates
for cancer in general in the 1970s (reflecting, perhaps, a
longer exposure to industry), Louisiana lost 7,636 people to
cancer in 1983 alone, and the decade before, it led the nation
in lung cancer deaths with a rate of about eighty per 100,000
people - about 10 percent more than runners-up Maryland,
Delaware, and Mississippi.

In one study of lung cancer among white males in three thousand
American counties thirty-eight of Louisiana's sixty-four
counties (or parishes) were in the top 10 percent. In one recent
period, figures showed that 30 percent of state residents could
expect to develop cancer over a lifetime, including 33.1 percent
of those living in New Orleans. Noted a special report to the
governor in 1984, "Nearly one cancer death per hour in Louisiana
is reason to be gravely concerned." The reason: There were only
4.4 million people in the state.

There are dozens of other kinds of industries that contribute to
cancer, and by one estimate only 4 percent of the cancer
incidents caused by airborne toxics can be laid onto the lap of
chemical processors or the combination of toxics emitted by the
rubber and petroleum industries. The emissions of road vehicles
account for the most cases of toxicant-induced cancer.

But, for the most part, it is chemical firms that release the
most troubling types of molecules into the environment. In Baton
Rouge, according to company data, an Exxon Chemical plant was
leaking 560,000 pounds of benzene yearly, while just south of
there, according to a survey by the Sierra Club, eighteen plants
in and around St. Gabriel and Geismar dumped about 400 billion
pounds of toxic chemicals into the air during the first nine
months of 1986 (Editor's note: State health and environmental
agencies are investigating an alarmingly high number of
stillbirths in the St. Gabriel area. On August 5, Louisiana
Governor Edwin Edwards, who has been criticized for gutting
state environmental programs, called it "an emergency
situation."). 

Add together the evaporation from oil-field pits, the
volatization from ponds of waste liquids and from storage tanks,
the miasma rising from places such as Devil's Swamp, the
steaming, hissing valves at petrochemical plants all the way
down the Mississippi and the plumes of refinery smoke that form
their own cumulus strata across the horizon--and the picture in
southern Louisiana becomes one not of a low, lingering smog but
more that of a toxic tornado.

How can our society deal with the threat posed by toxic
pollution? Much can be accomplished, as the last decade of
environmental reforms suggests, through legislation, lobbying
and grassroots organizing to stem the tide of toxic pollution.
In the end, however, the solution must be pronounced at a
philosophical level. In the end highly toxic chemicals must be
treated with wary respect--and isolated handling--not unlike
what is practiced with radioactive elements.

Since industry has shown itself to be indifferent to public
risks it creates, we must move toward a policy by which no
company will be allowed to make or use any compound until the
firm proves that it can either disassemble that compound into
harmless, natural compounds --destroy it completely, with no
toxic residues--or proves that the compound has absolutely no
health repercussions whatsoever. Those compounds that fail the
test but already exist must be gradually phased out, if not
outright withdrawn.

Our society has two basic choices: to barter its health for
modern conveniences and stop worrying about this at all; or to
begin ridding the environment of compounds that threaten our
immune systems, that threaten ecosystems, that threaten the very
planet itself because of their potential to ruin protective
layers of the upper atmosphere. In other words, we must prepare
to ban a great many more chemicals than have so far been banned.
And we must wean ourselves from certain conveniences -
especially plastic - that cannot be made from biodegradable
products. Our selfishness, our uncaring, threaten to unravel us
all.


This article adapted with permission from The Toxic Cloud by
Michael H. Brown, 1987, Harper and Row, New York.


JAPAN'S WHALERS PERSIST

Before the International Whaling Commission finished its
deliberations last June in Bournemouth, England, the head of the
Japanese delegation had walked out. None of Japan's thinly
disguised efforts to sustain its whaling industry were
successful a proposal to kill 825 minke and 50 sperm whales in
the Antarctic under the rubric of "research" whaling was
dismissed as "nonsense" by Dr. Sidney Holt, a long-standing
member of the IWC's Scientific Committee. And when the Japanese
tried to reclassify small coastal whaling operations as
"aboriginal" in order to bypass the regulations imposed on
commercial hunts, the proposal was tabled for later review.

Instead, the IWC adopted a U.S. resolution severely restricting
so-called "research" whaling operations. By a vote of 19 to 6,
whaling nations' research proposals will now have to meet
specific criteria before the scientific committee will issue
permits. But despite international protests, Japan announced in
August it would kill nearly 900 whales in Antarctic waters
anyway, risking U.S. economic sanctions. 

Japan's position at the annual meeting was not enhanced by a
Greenpeace investigative report documenting an illegal pirate
whaling operation secretly owned by Japanese nationals. Green
peace investigators discovered that FISH, a dummy corporation
that owned the "Filipino" whaling boat, Faith 1, was actually a
front for the same Japanese businessmen who own Settsu Suisan,
the sole importer of Faith 1 's whalemeat. 

This same ship was investigated in the early 80s for possible
violation of IWC regulations. In 1979, the IWC prohibited the
use of factory ships for processing all species of whales except
minkes. So Faith 1, which took Bryde's whales, claimed that it
used a barge moored at Homonhon Island in the Eastern
Philippines. The IWC sent two Japanese inspectors as
international observers; their report, issued two years later,
confirmed that Faith 1 had complied with existing regulations. 

But subsequent investigations revealed that the only whale ever
butchered at Homonhon Island was taken there specifically for
the inspectors' visit, and the appearance of a land-based
processing operation was fabricated. The newly discovered
information raised serious doubts about the accuracy of the
inspectors' report.


Faith 1 's illegal activities also included the use of the
banned cold harpoon and the indiscriminate killing of pregnant
and lactating mothers--it is responsible for the deaths of at
least 400 whales during its three-year operation.


Despite the IWC-mandated moratorium on whaling that has been in
effect since 1985, over 6,000 whales were killed last year. The
IWC has no enforcement powers, so U.S. legislation provides the
muscle - specifically the Pelly and Packwood-Magnuson
Amendments, which impose embargoes and curtail fishing rights
within the U.S 200-mile zone. South Korea, after killing 69
minke whales in its 1986 season, recalled its fleet to avoid
U.S. sanctions. Iceland also put its plans for a "scientific"
hunt on hold in the face of U.S. economic sanctions. 

Norway, which pledged to end its commercial whaling activities
in 1987, did not submit a formal research proposal. Instead, the
Norwegian government commissioned an "independent review" of
minke stocks in the Northeast Atlantic. Not surprisingly, the
"Walloe Report" contends that 200 minke whales could be taken
indefinitely on an annual basis without affecting current
populations. This proposal, informally raised in Bournemouth,
was criticized by the IWC's scientific committee as a threat to
an already depleted species.


THE GARBAGE CRISIS

The United States has a garbage crisis. Like the owners of the
infamous garbage barge, which wandered 3 months in the Atlantic
and Caribbean before returning home, the U.S. is looking for a
place to put its wastes--and with little success. As the pile of
refuse mounts, cities are turning to one "solution" that may
prove as damaging as the problem it appears to solve:
incinerators.

Costly municipal incinerators, currently on the drawing boards
of virtually every major city in the U.S., threaten to add a
poisonous brew of airborne toxins to the already overburdened
atmosphere. Studies show that incineration of municipal wastes
releases dioxins, furans, lead and other heavy metals and at
least 217 different organic chemicals into the air, essentially
moving the wastes from one medium to another. Lead is of
particular concern as recent studies show that learning
disabilities in children occur at contamination levels already
present in 80 percent of American children. 

In June, Greenpeace activists targeted the Detroit trash
incinerator, a $438 million dollar facility that is expected to
produce 102,500 tons of contaminated ash each year and spread a
toxic plume that will endanger twenty-one communities in Canada
and the U.S. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources cancer
risk assessment for the plant, considered too low by many
researchers, is still nineteen times higher than any emission
rate the state of Michigan had ever before approved, and it
violates U.S.-Canada transboundary pollution agreements.

The city of Detroit called in police helicopters to arrest three
Greenpeace protesters who had scaled construction cranes at the
site of the city's proposed $438 million incinerator plant.
Using ropes and harnesses, police plucked the activists from
their 100 foot perch after the three had successfully hung a
"Ban the Burn" banner for more than 6 hours.

A second protest occurred the next day when two more Greenpeace
climbers scaled the Ambassador bridge, which spans the Detroit
River connecting the U.S. and Canada. The two camped out for
over 18 hours displaying a banner reading "Mayor Young: More
cancer is not the answer. Stop Detroit's Incinerator." This
time, the pair descended the bridge before they were arrested.

"Right now we're trying to get them to classify the ash left
over from these burns as toxic. If that happens, incineration
will be impossible. The EPA has imposed harsher restrictions on
toxic wastes in landfills, so there will be nowhere to put the
remaining ash," said Joyce McLean, Greenpeace Great Lakes
campaign coordinator. Greenpeace is conducting direct actions
across the nation to highlight the dangers of incineration.


SELLAFIELD CAMPAIGN ESCALATES

On June 3, a pair of divers from the MV Sirius descended into
the murky waters of the Irish Sea to block the discharge pipes
of British Nuclear Fuels' (BNFL) Sellafield reprocessing
facility. While Sirius waited nearby, the team cut the pipes
with torches and inserted inflatable rubber balls, temporarily
blocking the pipe that has over the years dumped over 500 pounds
of deadly plutonium into the Irish Sea. 

Greenpeace's decade-long effort to close Sellafield, the largest
single source of radioactive pollution in the world, now faces
a BNFL lawsuit asking over $400,000 in "damages." Some of the
activists involved also risk jail sentences for the action. An
injunction against tampering with the Sellafield pipeline was
obtained by BNFL just before the pipe was blocked.

The pipe-plugging effort came shortly after the meeting of the
12-nation Paris Commission, a group charged with the prevention
of marine pollution in the Northeast Atlantic. At the June
meeting, Ireland's resolution calling for Sellafield to be shut
down was scuttled by procedural questions and the firm
opposition of France and Britain. 

Sellafield, once known as Windscale, has been in operation since
the 1940s, at one time supplying plutonium for British
nuclear weapons programs. Today, Sellafield stores radioactive
wastes and reprocesses spent nuclear fuel from reactors in the
U.K., Europe and Japan.


In the process it contaminates the Cumbrian coastline and
spreads radioactive pollution throughout the North Atlantic.
Fish caught in the Irish Sea are routinely scrutinized for
tumors and categorized into edible and unedible piles;
deformities and deaths among livestock are common. Autopsies on
the bodies of local residents and workers at the Sellafield
plant have revealed concentrations of plutonium from 50 to 250
percent higher than the national average. Plutonium dust has
been found in homes 100 miles away. The incidence of childhood
leukemia along the coast is ten times the national average.

Not only are the plant's routine waste disposals a problem, the
facility is also notorious for its accidents and mishaps. A 1986
Greenpeace study cites over 300 reported "breakdowns" during the
plant's 35-year history. In 1957, the core of a reactor caught
fire, spreading a radioactive plume over the United Kingdom and
contaminating milk and cattle.

In 1983, a similar protest launched from the Greenpeace ship
Cedarlea uncovered a leak in a discharge pipe that was pouring
highly radioactive waste into the Irish Sea. Many observers
think that the incident, which forced authorities to close 25
miles of contaminated beach, would have gone unreported had
Greenpeace not been there. For that action, Greenpeace was fined
nearly $100,000 and warned that the court would not be so
lenient next time. Yet in 1985, BNFL was convicted of illegal
discharges of radioactivity from Sellafield as a result of Green
peace's discovery. The fine? About $5,000.