I felt there were alternatives to simply clearing the entire forest for those trees that have high market value, which is what Malaysian and Japanese companies are doing. We have to find ways of getting the money for that wood directly to the people who live in the forests. The resources belong to them, and they have the greatest stake in exploiting them in such a way that the forest will remain in perpetuity for future generations. If the head offices of the logging or mining operations are in Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, or New York, profits are drained to them, leaving little but dribs and drabs for the people who will have to eke out a living with what is left.
In Wewak, I was taken by motorboat several miles out to sea to a small island. As we slowed and approached the beach, my hosts pointed into the clear water. Below I could see the carcasses of trees lying on their sides. “Those were once on land,” I was told, “but the water has risen and that's why they are there.” Was it thermal expansion of the water due to global warming, they asked me, but I didn't know. I was taken snorkeling in wonderfully clear and warm waters that were filled with fish, and I was thrilled to follow a large sea turtle that swam below me and gradually sank deeper and deeper until it disappeared. Ecotourism was a pretty sure bet here, I felt.
Throughout my visit, my emphasis was not that the people should stay frozen in the past. They must decide on the importance of their traditions and the attraction of economic growth. One of the pilots of a small plane Nick had arranged for me on my first visit had huge holes in his nose and ears, where he clearly wore large plugs in his off time. In the pilot's seat, his appearance seemed rather incongruous, but Papua New Guineans have computers, video cams, and all the other accoutrements of modern society. The question is whether they will slavishly follow the path of globalization, which is reducing cultural and biological diversity all over the world, or whether they will keep their culture and knowledge as the basis for finding a sustainable future.
In my talks, I reiterated the priceless nature of their traditional knowledge, lore painstakingly acquired over thousands of years and, once lost, never recoverable. My message resonated strongly with the young activists I met, but not with the non-Papua New Guineans, who were there for the economic opportunities.
I was scheduled to meet various businesspeople, politicians, and other important folks for a breakfast on my last day. I was placed next to the governor general, a physically imposing Papua New Guinean who had no pretensions and was down to earth in his conversation with me. While he was eating, I looked at his profile and realized I could see through the cartilage of his nose between his nostrils. He must at some time have worn a nosepiece.
I was also scheduled to give a talk that would be broadcast live across Papua New Guinea, a terrific opportunity, because radio was (and is) still the principal means of communication. I gave what must have been an unusual, even radical, speech about the need for the people to decide for themselves what matters most to them and to protect that above all else. They shouldn't allow officials like the World Bank people to set the agenda for them. My talk was met with great enthusiasm.
Unknown to us, as my speech began, an Australian who was in mining in Papua New Guinea became so incensed that he drove to the radio station that was beaming my speech, walked in, and pulled the wires out of the console, stopping the broadcast! Blithely ignorant of this, I went to the airport after the broadcast and left the country. I heard only later that inflamed listeners called in, many saying the expat should be killed, and that he was subsequently kicked out of the country. In April 2005, I attended a conference of Pacific countries on tourism, held in Macao, where a Papua New Guinean came up to me and said, “I was there at your speech that morning.” Apparently it has become legendary.
FIFTEEN
KYOTO AND CLIMATE CHANGE
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE become so powerful that we are altering the chemistry of the very atmosphere that sustains us. Scientists have speculated on this possibility since the nineteenth century, but for the average person, it has only recently become a matter of concern.
We tend to assume that the atmosphere reaches the heavens. But air within which life can exist is only five or six miles deep; many of us can easily run that distance. When I interviewed Canadian astronaut Julie Payette for the film series The Sacred Balance, she said that each time she circled the planet on her voyage in space she could see with every sunrise and sunset the thin layer just above the earth — the atmosphere. “We were way above it,” she said. “Below that thin layer is where life flourishes and above it, there is nothing; it's a vacuum.”
If we were to reduce the planet to the size of a basketball, the atmosphere would be thinner than a layer of plastic we use to wrap sandwiches. And that is what we pour our effluents into every time we drive a car and every time our factories send pollutants through their smokestacks.
More than three billion years ago, plants appeared and began to photosynthesize, taking up carbon dioxide and combining it with water and energy from the sun to begin the process of carbon chain formation, which generates all of the molecules necessary for life. A byproduct of the chemical reactions in this process was oxygen. Before there were plants, the atmosphere was toxic for animals like us, since it was heavily laden with carbon dioxide and devoid of oxygen. Plants created the oxygen-rich atmosphere on which we depend and removed the carbon dioxide generated as part of respiration to keep the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at about 280 parts per million (ppm). But for more than a century, modern industrial activities have generated so much carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels that all the plants on land and in the oceans can't keep up with it, and carbon dioxide has been accumulating in the atmosphere.
The fundamental mechanism of global warming is not contentious. Naturally occurring molecules such as water, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide reflect infrared or heat waves. These molecules in the atmosphere act in the way glass on a greenhouse behaves, allowing sunlight to pass through but reflecting heat; hence these molecules are called greenhouse gases. On Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, temperatures ricochet between the boiling heat of day and the freezing cold of night because there is no blanket of greenhouse gases to keep the heat on the planet. In contrast, Venus is permanently covered with a thick cloud of carbon dioxide, so surface temperatures are in the hundreds of degrees. Earth has had just the right combination of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures between day and night and enable life to evolve and flourish.
Careful studies conducted in Hawaii for over fifty years have registered the unequivocal rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 ppm in preindustrial times to the present 362 ppm, a 32 percent increase. The upward curve in the rate of increase suggests that if we carry on with business as usual, we will double the concentration long before the end of the century. These studies also suggest that if we were to cut all our emissions by half overnight, thereby bringing our annual emissions to a level that can be reabsorbed by all photo-synthetic activity within the biosphere, it will still take hundreds of years before the temperature changes from what we have already added to the atmosphere will level out, first in the air, then on land, and finally in the oceans. In other words, we have already set in motion an experiment with Earth that will not be fully played out for many, many more generations of humans.