Reviewed for “Books at High Noon,” Cal Poly University, San Luis Obispo, March 20, 2001, by Steven Marx, Professor of English.During the discussion following, the two proposals offered at the end of this review were supported by representatives of the faculty union(CFA), the staff union(CSEA), students(ASI), and the Cal Poly Land Faculty Seminar. At a meeting on March 29, these proposals were supported by a representative of the Cal Poly Administration’s Centennial Celebration organizing committee.

Introduction

Thanks for coming. Not only are you taking time during finals week crunch, but attending a talk by a speaker named Marx on the topic of Capitalism sounds like risky business.

The book is Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. I read this book the first time last summer, after tuning into a talk on National Public Radio by Paul Hawken one night while washing the dishes. I put down the sponge, turned off the water and just stood there, not wanting it to end, feeling that this was the kind of speech that could change the world. I had a flashback to 1965, standing in the kitchen of my graduate student house in East Palo Alto listening to voice of Mario Savio coming through the radio from the Sproul Hall steps in Berkeley.

Then I remembered that Rob Rutherford, professor of animal science, kept talking about Paul Hawken–how his ideas are important, how great it would be if he could come speak at Cal Poly. So I went down to The Novel Experience and bought the book.

Before I read it I checked its website–http://www.naturalcapitalism.org–for information on the authors:

“Paul Hawken began his career as an entrepreneur in the 1960s, when he founded Erewhon Trading Company, a natural foods wholesaling business. He went on to co-found Smith & Hawken, the retail and catalog company, in 1979, and Datafusion, a knowledge synthesis software company, in 1995. His next book, The Ecology of Commerce (1993), has become a classic text on business and environment, and continues to have a large impact on government and business.”

“Amory and Hunter Lovins are visionaries who have been around long enough to see many of their ideas become reality“and as consultants and advisers to many of the world’s largest corporations, they have helped shape the futures of the electricity, oil, real-estate, automobile and semiconductor sectors. Co-CEOs of Rocky Mountain Institute a nonprofit natural-resource thinktank, they have written dozens of books on resource policy and business, including Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use (1998).”

All three of these authors can be classified as environmentalists, but what distinguishes them and their method of proceeding is that they are equally business people and economists. Much of the book is an argument about accounting, supported by numbers– like the opening section of Thoreau’s Walden, which he titled “Economy.”

Though it’s long, dense and heavily documented, the book is clearly organized, well written and crammed with lively anecdotes that made it hard to put down. I also found it profoundly unsettling–not so much because it documents familiar bad news about the dangers of our present course, but more because of its good news of promise and possibility. Reading it makes you ardent to do anything within your power to spread the word and to help bring about the changes it advocates.

Like Rob, I found that this book is particularly suited for where we are right now–at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Its message that “there is no true separation between how we support life economically and ecologically” and its revelation of the environmental, political, and moral significance of good engineering, design, resource management and business practices could lead our university to a new and higher mission statement for its second century of growth.

Each of its fifteen chapters can stand on its own, but cumulatively they build to a climax. The first chapter lays out the overall thesis with a historical perspective and an outline of general principles. Later chapters divide the subject into categories like Transportation, Real Estate and Construction, Agriculture, and Climate. The two penultimate chapters return to more general observations, and the final chapter ends with a discussion of the importance of disseminating the book’s ideas on university campuses.

Incidentally, the book can be downloaded chapter by chapter from the website.

Summary

Chapter 1, entitled, “The Next Industrial Revolution,” outlines the thesis developed in the rest of the book. The authors envision an industrial transformation occurring now as comprehensive and revolutionary as the First Industrial Revolution which began in the middle 18th century–the revolution which gave rise to modern industrial capitalism and vastly expanded the possibilities for material development.

The gains of this First Industrial Revolution have been achieved at immense cost to the earth.

• Since the mid 18th century, more of nature has been destroyed than in all prior history.(2)
• In the past 50 years, the world lost one fourth of its topsoil and one third of its forest cover.(4)
• In the past three decades, one third of planet’s natural wealth has been consumed.
• Every living system on the planet is losing ability to sustain the continuity of the life process.

The fact that stronger resource extraction technology still makes prices fall on natural commodities creates an illusion of prosperity because we are drawing our income not from earnings but from principal, from inherited wealth, or what the authors call Natural Capital.

What is Natural Capital? It’s the store of commodities produced by nature in its 3.8 billion year development process–commodities that we consume, like water, minerals, oil, trees, fish, soil, and air. It’s also all living systems–grasslands, savannas, wetlands, estuaries, oceans, coral reefs, riparian corridors, tundras and rainforests. These living systems supply not only nonrenewable resources but indispensible services, such as

• regeneration of atmosphere
• flood management, water storage and purification
• soil fertilization
• waste processing
• buffering against extremes of weather

Awareness of Natural Capital–the economic value of Nature as a system–extends the traditional economists’ definition of Capital as stored value. Added to their two forms of 1)financial capital–cash, investments, monetary instruments–and 2)manufactured capital–infrastructure, machines, tools, factories–are 3) natural capital–resources, living systems, ecosystem services and 4) human capital–labor, intelligence, culture and organization. Though it’s hard to assign monetary value to ecosystem services such as oxygen production by green plants, for which there are no substitutes at any price, the authors observe that the recent $200 million Biosphere experiment in Arizona was unable to maintain oxygen levels for 8 people. They estimate that these services worldwide are worth $36 trillion annually–about the same as the gross world product(5). They also report a recent World Bank study which found the sum value of human capital to be three times greater than all financial and manufactured capital.

Industrial Capitalism only includes financial and manufactured capital in its accounting and neglects to assign any value to our largest stocks of capital–natural and human. It portrays the creation of value as a linear sequence of extraction, production and distribution. Raw materials are introduced from “somewhere,” labor uses technology to transform resources into products, which are sold to create profits. Wastes are excreted “somewhere.”(7) This method of accounting leaves out the costs of extraction and of waste production to the environment. And the environment is not a minor factor but “an envelop containing, provisioning and sustaining the entire economy.”(9)

The new industrial system of Natural Capitalism employs an expanded set of values that include accounting for natural and human capital. It proposes four strategies to address its broader picture of economic activity.

1. Radical resource productivity–that is industrial efficiency. This slows depletion at one end, lowers pollution at the other end and creates more jobs in between. Through the use of industrial technology labor productivity increased 200 fold between 1750 and 1820. Today, the “Factor 10 club” of governments and business foresees a tenfold increase of productivity from resource use promoted by improvements in technology and design.
2. Biomimicry, which eliminates the very idea of waste by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines. “Spiders make silk strong as Kevlar but much rougher, from digested crickets and flies, without needing boiling sulfuric acid and higher temperature extruders. The abalone generates an inner shell twice as tough as our best ceramics, and diatoms make glass, both processes employing seawater with no furnaces. Trees turn sunlight and water into cellulose, a sugar stiffer and stronger than nylon and bind it into wood, a natural composite with higher bending strength and stiffness than concrete or steel. We may never grow as skillful as spiders, abalone, diatoms, or trees, but smart designers are apprenticing themselves to nature to learn the benign chemistry of its processes.”(16)
3. A service and flow economy. This involves shifting from a perception of wealth as goods and purchases to a perception of value as desired services and satisfaction of human needs. “Manufacturers cease thinking of themselves as sellers of products and become, instead, deliverers of service, provided by long-lasting upgradeable durables.”(16) For example, the Carrier Corporation now sells “coolth” rather than air conditioners–they own and service and upgrade equipment(17), and “Interface Corporation¦leases warmth, beauty and comfort of floor covering services rather than selling carpets.” In Europe, the principle of Intelligent Product Systems makes manufacturers responsible for waste if their product cant be recycled, so products are designed to be reincorporated into “technical nutrient cycles” in which nothing can be thrown away. Such systems use less energy than extraction of new materials and provide more jobs.
4. Investing in Natural Capital. This involves developing markets for activities which enhance and restore the environment, and it needs to be done internationally since degradation of environment“global warming and attendant storms, for example–is an international consequence.

The rest of the book describes “an array of opportunities¦that are real, practical, measured and documented” by which the second industrial revolution is going forward and the principles of natural capitalism are taking hold.

Chapter 2, called “Reinventing the Wheels,” prophesies an impending transformation of the automobile industry, the largest component of the modern economy worldwide. The technical and policy issues addressed by this chapter have direct bearing on the teaching and research carried out in Cal Poly’s Mechanical Engineering and Urban Planning Departments.

The authors claim that this industry is “well along the way to a Factor Four or greater breakthrough in resource productivity and is beginning to close its materials loops…”(22)

Modern cars are extremely inefficient, using only 20% of their fuel to turn the wheels and of that 95% moves the car, and only 5% moves the driver.(24) Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute designed a Hypercar (and put it into the public domain making it unpatentable), which reverses those efficiency ratios by being ultralight, low drag, and hybrid in propulsion. Once these cars, now in production, are successfully marketed, “oil will become uncompetitive even at low prices.” Even more radical resource productivity will be created by hydrogen fuel cell technology, which literally can take fuel out of the air and leave only water and oxygen as waste.

To realize this productivity and promote the sale of environmentally clean automobiles, the authors propose a system of “feebates” administered at no public cost by governments. Fees imposed on energy inefficient cars pay for rebates on those which which do less harm.

Other solutions to the “excessive automobility” which costs everyone involve reconfiguring transportation systems to make parking and driving bear their true costs–in road construction and maintenance, resource depletion, traffic jams, pollution, and accidents, fostering genuine competition between different modes of transportation. In addition to improving public transportation, sensible land use can be promoted over actual physical mobility.(41) “Most American building regulations require developers to provide as much parking for each shop office or apartment as people would demand if parking were free….diverts investment from buildings into parking spaces, making affordable housing scarcer.” Instead builders should be required to provide perpetual transit passes.

Chapter 3, entitled “Waste Not,” exposes the scale and consequences of Industrial Capitalism’s failure to follow the natural principle of recycling. This chapter’s topics represent the concerns of our Environmental Engineering, Facilities Planning and Operations departments.

“The critical difference between industrial and biological processes is that living systems are regulated by …feedback loops.”(49) In nature there is no such thing as waste. But our present economy consumes and disposes of unthinkable quantities of unrecoverable natural capital:

• “The US still gets 3/5 of its aluminum from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.”
• “The amount of waste generated to make a semiconductor chip is over 100 000 times its weight. Two quarts of gasoline and a thousand quarts of water are required to produce a quart of Florida orange juice 50
• “America wastes or causes to be wasted nearly 1 million pounds of materials per person per year. This figure includes 3.5 billion pounds of carpet landfilled…28 billion pounds of food discarded at home…3.7 trillion pounds of construction debris.”(52)
• Highway accidents cost us 150 billion a year
• Highway congestion 100 billion a year
• We spend 200 billion a year in wasted energy–just because we don’t employ same efficiency practices as in Japan
• We waste 250 billion on inflated and unnecessary medical overhead
• Our recordkeeping procedures for a ridiculous tax code cost us 250 billion a year.
• We also waste human capital: a billion workers in the world cant find jobs while “the U.S. has quietly become the world’s largest penal colony”–nearly five million men are in jail, awaiting trial or on parole.

Chapter 4, entitled “Making the World,” presents antidotes to this grim picture with principles and examples of industrial design that provide a better stream of services from smaller flows of stuff.(62) The kind of innovation described by this chapter is the concern of Cal Poly’s Department of Industrial technology.

The principle is fully developed in the German concept of extended product responsibility–the manufacturer has to take product back at end of its life. “In short, the whole concept of industry’s dependence on ever faster once-through flow of materials from depletion to pollution is turning from a hallmark of progress into a nagging signal of uncompetitiveness.”(81)

• Chemical engineers have cut US chemical firms’ energy intensity in half since 1970.
• The mass of an average European yogurt container dropped by 67 percent during years 1960-1990.
• Refrigerators now save 87 percent of their 1972 energy cost.
• High-temperature processes are replaced with gentler, cheaper ones based on biological models that often involve using actual micro-organizations–like those that Professor Cano at Cal Poly is developing for Bioremediation with Unocal.
• “Distributed intelligence” controls industrial processes with decentralized and sensitive instruments.
• Materials are saved with net shape manufacturing–rather than assembly
• “Disposable” cameras are actually recycled.
• IBM remanufactures computers.
• Xerox makes every part of its machines reusable or recyclable.

Chapter 5, “Building Blocks,” applies the principles of Natural Capitalism to construction and real estate development industries. This is a chapter for our Architecture, Construction Management, and Regional and City Planning departments.

Green buildings, like the high-rise Amsterdam bank described by the authors, use 92% less energy and create greater worker productivity and satisfaction by use of proper placement and orientation, passive heating and cooling principles, and full insulation. Such buildings are designed by a “charette” process of collaboration that crosses traditional professional boundaries.(87)

A major obstacle to true economy is created by the fact that architects and engineers are now paid on a percentage of the cost of buildings rather than on the basis of what they save in cost. The way to overcome such obstacles is to replace disincentives with financial incentives for conservation, for instance,

• overcoming the “split incentive problem in which one party selects the technology while another pays its energy costs,” for example with lease riders for fair sharing of savings between landlords and tenants
• changing the home appraisal process to evaluate a house’s energy efficiency
• requiring “feebates” for new energy hookups–energy efficient buildings get rebates paid by higher fees on energy inefficient ones.

The same kind of incentives–crediting developers for reducing automotive trips and numbers of cars per family–can promote real estate developments that “challenge the American habit of ceding community design to traffic engineering.” Such challenges are have been dubbed the “new urbanism,” and include neo-traditional village-style layouts, with neighborhood grocery stores, mixed-use occupancy, and narrower, tree shaded streets.

Chapter 6, “Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier,” and Chapter 7, “Muda, Service and Flow,” explore more abstract issues of economics that have to do with positive feedback loops in long term planning and financing of resource productivity. Both refute the generally accepted notion that increased efficiency is purchased at a rate of diminishing returns, and show rather that the tendency is toward incremental snowballing.

Chapter 8, “Capital Gains,” returns to the accounting principles of Natural Capitalism and proposes ways to overcome the obstacles to their implementation. Issues of accounting, subsidy and tax policy here are within the purview of Cal Poly’s faculty in Business, Economics, Political Science, and Natural Resource Management.

Economic benefits and services provided by natural systems include:

• oxygen production(183)
• biological and genetic diversity maintenance
• purification of water and air
• storage cycling and distribution of freshwater
• regulation of chemical composition of the atmosphere
• maintenance of migration and nursery habitats for wildlife
• decomposition of organic wastes
• sequestration and detoxification of human and industrial waste
• natural pest and disease control by insects, birds, bats etc
• maintenance of genetic library
• fixation of solar energy and conversion into raw materials
• management of soil erosion and sediment control
• flood prevention and regulation of runoff
• protection against cosmic radiation
• regulation of chemical composition of oceans
• regulation of local and global climate
• formation of topsoil and maintenance of soil fertility
• production of grasslands, fertilizers and food
• storage and recycling of nutrients

Yearly monetary values for such services can be calculated at

• $1.3 trillion for atmospheric regulation of gases
• $2.3 trillion for waste processing
• $17 trillion for nutrient flows
• $20.9 trillion from marine systems especially coastal environments

No matter how uncertain these specific amounts, establishing values for natural stocks and flows is the first step of incorporating them into planning, policy and public behavior–of getting people to recognize that these services require investment for preservation and replacement.

Obstacles to such investment in natural capital are perverse and often hidden subsidies by governments that promote abuse and waste–to the tune of $1.5 trillion per year.(161) For example:

• $6.7 billion paid by the German government to subsidize Ruhr Valley coal for jobs. It would be cheaper to pay off workers and close mines.
• $464 billion per year provided by the U.S. government for automobile industry subsidy–including road construction and the cost of the Persian Gulf war
• Subsidies to restrain surplus Agricultural production of $330 Billion year, including $800 million per year to tobacco farmers
• Huge grants to mining, logging and waste disposal industries, which encourage waste and discourage resource efficiency, including the U.S. Forest Service, “the worlds largest socialist road builder.”

At the same time government provides minimal support for clean technologies that can benefit the environment. One way of overcoming barriers to investment in natural capital is by tax shifting–a scheme that can appeal to conservatives and liberals alike. The authors propose to eliminate personal and employer taxes on labor–all income and payroll taxes–and to shift those taxes to sources of resource depletion, waste and pollution, like

• Emission of gases causing climatic change
• Nuclear power
• Toxic fuels
• Pesticides, synthetic fertilizers tobacco and alcohol, piped in water, old-growth timber, free-run salmon, irrigation water from public lands, all minerals from the ground, and waste sent to landfill or incinerator

Eliminating income tax would promote employment, since employees will not be as expensive to hire. Lower labor costs will reduce the rate of return required from investments and thereby benefit the environment, since the higher rate of return required on investment, the greater the likelihood of liquidation of natural capital.(166)

Chapter 9, called “Natures Filaments,” is of special interest to people in Cal Poly’s Natural Resource Management and Forestry programs, as well as to paper consumers in all departments and to building maintenance staff. It discusses the natural capital of forests, which is now being depleted for building materials and paper.

“The world consumes five times more paper now than in 1950”; we live in “a culture in which paper is universally available, priced at perhaps a penny a sheet and rarely paid for or thought about by its users.”(173) Sustainable forestry methods are known but not widely practiced.

Three ways for New Industrialism to deal with this waste of natural capital are to reduce demand, make production more efficient and increase recycling.

Chapter 10, “Food for Life,” raises issues that affect several departments in Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, including Soil Science, Crop Science, Animal Science, and Agribusiness.

Judged by raw output, the industrialization of farming–or the Green Revolution–has been a triumph of technology, producing larger and faster maturing crops with high yield seeds, biocides, irrigation and nitrogen fertilizers.

But, according to the authors, this triumph has created deepening problems. Actual returns are diminishing and harvests are volatile. Two fifths of food production energy goes to processing and distribution and another two fifths to cooking and refrigeration by final users. Only one fifth is used on the farm, half in chemicals. We use ten times as much fossil fuel energy to produce it as food returns. The costs and liabilities of this system to our Ecosystem are unaccounted for.

• Soil, “the ultimate natural capital,” which the Chinese call the mother of all things, is being lost to erosion faster than it’s being produced, and is suffering overall reduction of organic fertility.
• Genetic diversity of all food crops is being reduced. For instance, India is replacing 30,000 native varieties of rice with one super variety; seed banks are being neglected(195); agrochemical companies are seeking to makes themselves the sole lawful proprietors of the world’s legacy of plant diversity
• There has been a twenty-fold increase in insecticide use since 1948“up to a billion pounds per year– but today insects get 13 percent of yield compared to 7 percent then.
• “Organic farmers recognize that healthy systems needs enough pests to provide enough food to support predators to so they can hang around and keep the pests in balance.” (197) Genetic engineers now put the Bt toxins that are natural pesticides into plants, but pests quickly evolve resistance, thereby eliminating the original natural benefits.
• Widespread monoculture reduces resistance to disease and adaptation to climate change. “Monoculture’s chemical dependence requires enormous amounts of fertilizers to make up for the free ecological services that the soil biota, other plants and manure provide in natural systems.”(197)

Solutions to these growing problems are provided by alternative agricultural practices employing principles of natural capitalism. As opposed to the Green revolution, “Ecoagriculture” substitutes good husbandry and local seed for otherwise purchased inputs. Resource productivity can be increased in biomimetic, closed-loop, nontoxic innovations such as

• crop drying using a no energy windmill vacuum in silos to create dry air flow
• sustainable barn architecture
• community supported agriculture
• substituting information for resources with close monitoring of soil moisture and biota(203)
• attracting wildlife to harvest non-food crop residues instead of burning them
• reconfiguring livestock raising with biomimicry
• “Pioneers of ecologically based grazing are showing it is far better to restore and maintain grazing by cattle and other animals on grasslands that typically coevolved with grazing animals and cannot remain healthy without them.”(207)
• restorative and biological farming organized on traditional family or village scale

Chapter 11, “Aqueous Solutions,” deals with issues of fresh water use and conservation of special interest to Cal Poly’s Agricultural Engineering and Environmental Engineering departments.

Chapter 12 outlines the problems of global climate change, to which some people respond with denial and others with hopelessness.

The authors present a plan not only for solving the problems but turning them into a business opportunity. They claim that the growing urgency and cost of global warming will push us in the right direction. The primary cause, the release of carbon into the atmosphere from burning of fossil fuels, can be reversed. U.S. growth in efficiency has actually lowered energy use, in contrast to projections in the 1970’s. But there’s a long way to go: America’s power stations turn fuel, still mostly coal, into an average of 34 percent electricity and 66 percent waste heat. In contrast, Denmark converts 61 percent of its power-plant fuel into useful work.(247)

According to the authors, increased efficiency and reduction of emissions can be achieved largely through the creation of business credits and incentives such as those developed in the 1997 Kyoto agreement. The sulfur emissions credit program has reduced them 37 percent in a decade, and the same policy can work with carbon trading, especially with the use of higher rewards for “early adopters.”

Chapter 13, “Making Markets Work,” outlines other business strategies to make environmental sustainability compatible with profitability. This chapter again is directed specifically to concerns of Cal Poly’s College of Business. “The goal of natural capitalism is to extend sound principles of the market to all sources of material value…[and] to guarantee that all forms of capital are as prudently stewarded as money is by trustees of financial capital.”

The authors proclaim that the remedy for unsustainable market activities is adoption of sustainable market activities. Such activities include creating markets in avoided resource depletion and abated pollution credits which will maximize competition in saving resources.(261)

One example demonstrating the feasibility and success of this kind of market is the toilet retrofit program developed in San Luis Obispo county. [This program is attributed to the City of Morro Bay, but it was also carried out in the City of San Luis Obispo.] When the city ran short of water, it required developers to save twice as much water at another place in town to get building permits. Two fifths of the houses got retrofitted within four years.

Another method is for Utilities to make markets in negawatts, allowing energy saving to compete against against energy production. “Every form of avoided resource depletion and prevented pollution is a potential candidate for an entrepeneur to find and exploit inefficiencies…the bigger the problem, the bigger the potential gain.”(280)

Yet another example of making markets work to promote sustainability is provided by the collaboration of climate scientists, who “Greenpeace introduced…to leaders of the European insurance and reinsurance industry. They are now investing in climate protection.”

In “Human Capitalism,” the book’s next-to-last chapter 14, the authors dramatically shift emphasis from natural capital to human capital, applying the “…same design philosophy, to achieve the same elegant frugality, with which whole-system engineering meets technical demands by delivering multiple benefits from single expenditures.” This chapter in itself has the impact of a whole book. It’s a vivid and plausible description of a Utopia, one whose actual existence is confirmed by numerous city websites, another book by Bill McKibbon, and a video available locally at Insomniac Video.

Known as “the ecological city,” Curitiba is located in the Southeastern Brazilian state of Parana and has a population of about 4 million people–the size of Houston or Philadelphia. There, “responsible government in partnership with vital entrepenurship has succeeded better than most cities in the U.S.” They have implemented “hundreds of multipurpose, cheap, fast, simple homegrown, people-centered intiiatives…treating all its citizens–most of all its children–not as burden but as most precious resource.”

“Teasing apart the strands of the intricate web of Curitiban innovation reveals the basic principles of Natural Capitalism at work in a particularly inspiring way.”(307) Resources are used frugally. New technologies are adopted. Broken loops are reclosed. Toxicity is designed out, health in. Design works with nature, not against it. The scale of solutions matches the scale of problems. “The existence of Curitba holds out the promise that it will be first of a string of cities that redefine the nature of urban life.”(308)

Chapter 15, the final chapter of the book, entitled, “Once Upon a Planet,” leads right to where we sit today.

The change in accounting procedures which Natural Capitalism demands requires a change of mental models. The largest institution addressing mental models is our schools.(315) Colleges, universities and public schools can change their impact on the environment in two fundamental ways. “They create the citizens, MBAs, engineers and architects that create our world. At the same time they spend $564 billion a year to do so, including 17 billion annually in new construction on colleges and universities.” According to David Orr of Oberlin, a leader of the campus ecology movement, “…changing the procurement, design and investments made by our educational systems represents a hidden curriculum that can teach as powerfully as any overt curriculum.”

Conclusion

Many our University’s departments exist to address the subjects of this book. We are located where crucial intersections and practical applications can take place. We’re blessed with resources that are often treated with the outmoded attitudes of the old industrialism. If Cal Poly can turn around to become an “early adopter” of Natural Capitalism, we can help bring along the rest of the world.

I’d like to offer two proposals: First, that we follow Rob Rutherford’s suggestion and get one of the authors to speak here and start the ball rolling toward a campus conference on Natural Capitalism. Second, that we get Hunter and Amory Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute to be consultants on our recently adopted $500 million twenty-year campus capital expansion program known as the Master Plan.

Natural Capitalism is book thick with ideas, facts and figures presented by entrepeneurs and engineers. It’s a set of concrete suggestions for improving the way business gets done proposed by economists. It’s a diagnosis of what’s wrong with the planet and the way we’ve been treating it delivered by ecologists. It’s an exploration of the relation between nature and technology written by philosophers. Finally it’s a testament of faith that can awaken us to reality uttered by prophets.

That’s emphasized by the logo on its cover. What appears at first like a coiled steel spring, on closer examination turns out to be the springtime symbol of a fiddlehead fern. The book’s mission is confirmed by its epigraph, a short poem called “Loaves and Fishes,” which concludes: “People are hungry/and one good word is bread/ for a thousand.”

 

 

Renaissance Forum Vol. 1 #2 Fall 1996

 

 

At age 88, my father Henry was in good health and spirits, except for an episode of disorientation and seizure in early May. He participated in aerobics at the Y twice a week, was active in community organizations, went sketching regularly with the Thursday painters, and took hikes with me.

At the end of September, he started losing his memory and balance. Without the consent of his primary care physician, he consulted a neurologist, who ordered tests which showed terminal brain cancer. In the hospital for a biopsy, he fell and broke his pelvis after untying his restraints and getting up to pee at night. This injury left him unable to walk or to urinate. In the transitional care center he lost control over his emotions and would often break into tears. Troubled by persecution fantasies and hallucinations, he repeatedly thanked and apologized to those who were looking after him. “This is not me, I’m not myself,” he protested. He asked for a visit from his grandson Joe, who flew in from Idaho for a weekend. One morning when I visited Henry before work, he talked about how present his grandparents were to him now. Then he wept bitterly and said he wasn’t ready to die. To comfort myself, I answered that he would live on in me and in others, including his grandchildren, as much as his grandparents were now living in him.

(more…)

Published in Mapping American Culture, University of Iowa Press, 1992.

As soon as I moved to San Luis Obispo from the San Francisco Bay Area, I fell in love with the place–its creekside plaza, its downtown volcanoes, its nearby bluffs and beaches. But after several months of exploring idyllic attractions, I found myself drawn by a different feature of the local landscape: the spot at the center of the map on the Emergency Information brochure I received in the mail; the spot that the siren on my street corner blared about on Saturday morning; the spot that I was reminded of by stickers in the hallways at work that read “Radiation Shelter.” I wanted to put myself at ground zero and to experience a direct encounter with the source of energy that heats my shower, runs my computer and threatens my life.

So I called the electric company, PG and E, and signed up for a free tour of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. Two days later I parked in front of Sears and climbed into a van along with five other visitors. The guide handed me a security badge, a small brochure with a tasteful brush painting of a nuclear reactor on its cover, and a questionnaire asking me how informed I was on “power plant history, plant construction, wildlife protection, marine biology research, nuclear power production, Chumash archaeological site, public safety,” and asking my opinion on whether nuclear power was “generally safe, neutral, somewhat unsafe…generally efficient, neutral, somewhat inefficient.” I could see I was going to be tested.

On the drive to Avila Beach, the guide, who was also a ranking security officer, recounted the history of the plant’s construction as a series of rational calculations in the face of public hysteria and mob violence. After we gained clearance at the first security gate, the barrier went up and we crossed a wide blue line on the road. This, he pointed out, was the border that the demonstrators had tried unsuccessfully for decades to storm, the line at which order had stemmed chaos.

The roadway itself typified the cosmic energies mobilized for the creation of the plant: it was built of reinforced concrete four feet thick and 60 feet wide to accommodate the 192-wheeled “transporter” that carried equipment from barges in the bay to the construction site, and its curves were specially unbanked to keep the the 400 ton reactor containment vessels from swaying on the way. This road also typified the ultra-advanced technology that made the plant a showpiece of safety and efficiency– a totally computerized facility that runs by “paperless management,” fully monitors itself, and constantly “talks to you.”

He drove slowly along the unbanked roadway, winding twelve miles through a protective buffer zone of oak-studded hills and flowery pastures overlooking the sea –an 11,000 acre wildlife preserve where we sighted hawk, deer and a badger. He told us about the environmental study center built on site and maintained by the company to protect the endangered species of bird and sea life that make it their home and to study the uniquely rich ecosystem that thrives in the heated waters of the bay. He told us about the power company’s production of new fish habitat, like the artificial reef along Pecho rock made from concrete sections of the breakwater destroyed by 1983 storms, and about the salmon enhancement program at the mouth of San Luis Creek. It was an account of a symbiotic cocreation between nature and human artifice nestled in a suitably Edenic setting.

Soon we arrived at another gateway. Our guide explained that before we could pass this second barrier, the guard would have to examine our badges. There were two further and more thorough check-points that we could not penetrate: the entrance to the actual plant and within that, the entrance to the reactor area. I was disappointed by this exclusion, but the sense of crossing one threshold after another and the prospect of live nuclear reactions taking place in my presence stimulated my imagination. I was now on a pilgrimage, drawn, in Mircea Eliade’s words, by an “Ontological thirst… to take a stand at the very heart of the real, at the Center of the World–that is, exactly where the cosmos came into existence..as it was in the beginning, … fresh from the Creator’s hands, and… where too there is the possibility of communications with the gods.”1

Once cleared, we rounded a turn in the road and the forbidden valley suddenly came in sight. I felt strangely secured, as if I’d been snapped into a socket and reduced in size by the magnified landscape that surrounded me. The feeling reminded me of my first view of Yosemite Valley at age twelve, and of what a friend once tried to convey about arriving at the Delphic shrine in Greece. A mountain peak soared 1500 feet above a wide shelf of seaside cliffs. It was flanked by a canyon through which a stream crashed into a perfectly formed cove guarded by majestic headlands and a wave-sculpted island covered with sea lions. In the center, dominating this splendid panorama, stood an immense assemblage of rectangular monoliths, breastlike domes, and delicate webs that throbbed and hummed and crackled. It appeared to me as some vast temple, sucking matter from the unformed waters, reaching for the heavens with its observatory-like towers, and beaming out energy through high tension wires that ran from its heart and disappeared in all directions over the surrounding ridges.

We parked at an overlook above the plant while the guide explained the workings of the reactor: the fissioning uranium heats water to steam which heats other water to steam which runs the turbines that generate the electricity. Enough of it is produced here to supply two million people, 14 % of the PG and E system, the equivalent of 23 million barrels of oil per year. The fuel is a few tons of uranium; the waste, a few pounds of plutonium. He made it sound matter of fact, but to me it was pure magic : the production of limitless quantities of power in a clean, benevolent recycling process. What more appropriate use for such an awesome location?

As we drove around the back of the plant down through the canyon and emerged at its mouth above the cliffs, the guide pointed out a fenced area that surrounds the headland and remains off limits even to PG and E employees. Discovered in the process of excavating for the reactor, it was a major ancient village site and burial ground, containing evidence of nine thousand years of continuous habitation by the Chumash, one of the California Indian tribes whose existence was almost fully extinguished early in this century. He told us that photographs proving that the site has not been disturbed are sent annually to an intertribal religious organization who now use it occasionally for traditional celebrations of the Winter solstice.

As if bombarded by some stray neutrons from inside the plant, my imagination became more excited; I realized that this had been a unique power spot long before PG and E’s arrival. I had just been reading a new book on the Chumash, and in the concluding chapter on religion and mythology the author had described just such sacred spaces. The ceremonial ground I was looking at would have been demarcated by woven boughs, feathered banners and a fence of whale jaws to create a Siliyik or Antap. The mana or power concentrated in these spots was viewed as left over from the time of creation, an incorporeal force that allows one to travel out of body, transform the shape of objects, heal illness, make rain. Access to this space and its power was permitted only to priests and priestesses of the Antap cult. Organized as a grid uniting diverse regions and tribes, this priesthood shared ritual and practical knowledge, especially of astronomy and meteorology. One of their primary functions was to help the gods balance the contrary forces controlling nature at times when such equilibrium was threatened. The Winter solstice, when their remarkably accurate calendars predicted that the path of the sun would reverse direction, was the most dangerous of such times. Every year in their Siliyiks, they carried out elaborate three-day ceremonies to help pull the sun back from its southward moving path.2

I tried to imagine what the shamans who come back here think as they stand in this place on December 21 in the shadow of the reactor bedecked with Christmas tree lights. Is it that their power has been driven out by an alien power that is destroying their mother earth, or do they sense, as John Michell has put it, that ” strangers may conquer the land, imposing their own gods and cults on the natives, but the sacred places and dates of their festivals remain the same as before, the attributes of the new deities are accommodated to the old, and the invaders become in time subject to the traditions of the country.” 3

I wondered whether the electric company’s transformation of the landscape was not similar to what other native American shamans carried out in Aztec and Mayan cities, in the construction of temples and earthworks and river diversions as massive, impressive and intrusive on the landscape as this plant. I wondered whether the spiritual power that fuels and structures native societies is not similar to the occult power that fuels and structures ours; I wondered whether the Indian technicians of the sacred and our contemporary sacred technicians perform the identical function of mediating between the rest of us humans and the mysterious, dangerous and nourishing forces of the universe.

My reflections recalled those of another outsider who described an experience of awe in the face of such power. “The dynamo, [or electric generator]” Henry Adams wrote in 1900, became a symbol of infinity…a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross….Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force….He had entered a supersensual world…. Physics [had gone] stark mad in metaphysics. The rays…were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy…they were what, in terms of medieval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance.4 Like Adams at the Paris exposition, here at Diablo canyon I had received an epiphany.

The final stop on our tour was at the training building, where we were instructed about reactor safety. We entered the simulated control room, a large space filled floor to ceiling with thousands of dials, screens, switches and blinking lights which exactly replicates the real control room operating the plant from inside the fourth perimeter. Some men were reading printouts, leafing through manuals, talking on the phone, conferring briefly. The guide told us they were either trainees who study here for up to seven years before becoming licensed, or they were qualified operators who spend one out of every five weeks practising for emergencies. All systems in the plant contain multiple redundancy, so that any foulups can be bypassed. Thus, it is unthinkable that a disaster like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl could happen here. The evacuation procedures and sirens are only technicalities required by law.

What could I say? Along with my vision of power came a sense of acceptance and reconciliation with those who controlled it–the priests of PG and E. In the van, on the way back to Sears, I checked off the positive responses on the questionnaire, returned it to the guide, sat back, and left the driving to him.

Six months later a colleague in the history department handed me a call for papers for an academic conference he was coordinating on “Place in American Culture.” Suggested topics included studies of “American sacred places and pilgrimages” and “the ‘spirit’ and meaning of particular places…e.g., Diablo Canyon.” I took the lure and sent in a proposal outlining the story I have just told. When I received notice of acceptance, I got very nervous and decided to arm myself with a little research.

The further I proceeded, the less satisfied I became with my original approach.First I read some more about the Chumash priests. According to Thomas Blackburn, the power derived from the gods was regarded as less benevolent than I had thought. In most native accounts, “beings with exceptional power are characterized as dangerous or antipathetic to man.”5

According to Lowell J. Bean, those humans who held power were treated with respect and awe, but also with considerable caution, since they were “potentially amoral in their relationships with others. Their allegiance is to power, both the maintenance of power and the acquisition of more power, and thus primarily to other persons of power…[rather than] the claims of the local social order.” One’s relation to power determined one’s place in an elaborate social hierarchy, a chain of being which guaranteed privilege, wealth, status and leisure to those in possession of its secrets and exploited those who were excluded. “…priests and shamans…controlled the principal means of production and distribution of goods, owned monopolies on many goods and services… possessed the power to levy taxes, fines and establish fees to support institutions, and were able to charge exorbitant interest on loans, thus amassing further wealth.”6

Indeed, a study by Travis Hudson postulated that during the early period of European contact, Chumash priests willingly entered the missions in search of what they perceived as the Christians’ more potent magic and thereby hastened the destruction of their own culture before they discovered that the missionaries were merely leading them on.7

This information about Indian priesthoods spurred me to investigate their successors. According to Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley, utility executives control more assets than any other group of executives in the U.S.; power is the biggest business in modern America, and half of the income of major investment bankers is estimated to come from financing private power companies.8 These priests are also regarded with caution and skepticism. Amory Lovins characterized their rule as one of “friendly fascism,” while Fortune magazine categorized utility officials as “generally unimaginative men, grown complacent on private monopoly and regulated profits.”9

Studies of the industry concur that the utility priests reached a zenith of prestige and influence during the 1950’s, when visions of taming the destructive force of the bomb into atoms for peace proliferated prophecies that electricity would become so abundant it would be “too cheap to meter.” Encouraged by the federal government, which was eager to maintain American dominance over the international reactor market, the utilities assumed they could easily control the dangers and uncertainties of nuclear power. Demand for electricity was projected to grow indefinitely at a ravenous 7% per year, and liability insurance, which no private carrier would offer, was provided by Congress in form of the Price-Anderson Act, which absolved the companies from any financial responsibility for accidents.

By the late nineteen seventies, however, the vision had dissipated. Fundamental technical problems that should have been dealt with before any plants were built remained unsolved–problems like earthquake safety, what to do with worn-out reactors and the disposal of radioactive wastes. Of the more than two hundred nuclear plants ordered by utility companies, 180 had been cancelled, while the rest were plagued by construction delays, safety violations, objections of surrounding inhabitants, and financial losses, not to speak of hair-raising accidents. Rather than being reduced, the price of power had tripled, while demand actually shrank. Several companies went bankrupt while others defaulted on loans or skipped dividends to investors. The overall cost of the miscalculations was estimated as between $100 to $200 billion, to be divided among stockholders, ratepayers and taxpayers. Forbes magazine called the nuclear energy program ” the largest managerial disaster in business history” (Munson 7).

My reading revealed that despite these mammoth setbacks, in 1980 the industry attempted to resurrect itself with a lobbying and public relations initiative dubbed “The Second Coming of Nuclear Power” which had the full support of the new Reagan administration (Rudolph 239). Tax incentives for alternate energy development and conservation were phased out and replaced with government subsidies for the expansion of coal and nuclear fired technology. The licensing procedures of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were speeded up, the public was denied access to them, and the rapidly growing problem of waste disposal was declared solved with a report commissioned by Department of Energy. Produced by the Battelle Memorial Institute, this report recommended that all waste be transported to a central site called “the nuclear stonehenge.” There it would be guarded by

an “atomic priesthood” which would carry out a “ritual and legend”process to warn generations 10,000 years in the future of the danger of radioactive waste buried …three thousand feet down, under a large triangular area bordered by raised mounds. At the center of the site, three twenty-foot tall granite monoliths inscribed with warnings would stand on a concrete mat…. Because our language may be incomprehensible three hundred generations from now,the fatal danger located underground would be communicated by stick figure cartoons engraved on the monoliths. Other warnings might include a symbol resembling three sets of malevolent horns facing outward from a circle, or an undying artificial stench which people and animals would avoid…. The”atomic priesthood” would reinforce these warnings with oral myths that threatened violators of the site with “some sort of supernatural retribution.” (Rudolph 240)

As I marveled at this claptrap, I recognized how close it was to the language and mentality of my treasured epiphany. The equation of electric and spiritual power was not a product of my imagination or of my reading of Henry Adams; it was precisely the way the utility company wanted me to think. At that point, another definition of the word, “power,” came to mind: political power. I saw the shamans and the utility priests both clad in the vestments of what C. Wright Mills called “The Power Elite.” Rather than mediating between the impotent human and omnipotent divine, these priests concentrated power diffused throughout nature and among all people into sacred spaces and private preserves, thereby rendering the rest of the world profane, and the rest of humanity powerless.

I learned that during the last two decades the utility priesthood’s drive to centralize power was threatened by the failures of nuclear and by the concomitant successes of alternative, independent, sources of electricity, including cogeneration, biomass, wind, thermal, and solar. Because government regulations made it illegal for utilities to boycott such sources, they accounted for 40% of California’s energy generating capacity by the middle eighties. As a result a power struggle between the priesthood and its opponents has been taking place all over the country, in federal, state and local governments and also in the streets and in wilderness areas invaded by transmission lines and saboteurs. The power struggle is between what Langdon Winner has called a “political technology” supported by extremely tight security and authoritarian management that can force citizens to accept irreparable environmental damage and pay the astronomical costs of nuclear plants, and those who seek to develop decentralized, autonomous, local sources of power.10

A sample of that opposing power, in its own way as impressive as the priestly energy that created Diablo Canyon is the recent spectacle of decommissioning the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island New York. After twenty years of opposition by local citizens who refused to accept its threat to their lives, their environment, and their solvency, and despite the continuous support of the Reagan and Bush administrations, the $5.5 billion plant was abandoned last June before it ever started up and was sold to the state for one dollar as scrap (NY Times 6/29/89).

I discovered also that a similar twenty year power struggle between local citizens and a utility priesthood had taken place in my new home town of San Luis Obispo, but had led to an opposite outcome. In the county museum, documenting that struggle, I found a large archive collected by Mothers for Peace, the group that organized much of the resistance. Once again I saw that the real power was neither spiritual nor electric, but economic and political, that the plant was here against the will of those most affected by it because of the overwhelming money and influence wielded by the utility in Washington and Sacramento.

Among the clippings, I came across a very down-to-earth and local explanation of how the plant arrived at its magical site. Back in the middle sixties, PG and E wanted to locate it in the Pismo Dunes, but in order to preserve that sensitive area, environmental groups agreed to approve an alternate unseen location. The owner of the Diablo property, a rancher named Marre, was eager to develop condos and a hotel on his holdings in Avila beach, so he offered the company a ninety nine year lease on the 11,000 acres in return for their corporate guarantee of an open line of credit he could use to capitalize his project–the San Luis Bay Inn complex. A few years later, the project went belly up; PG and E sued to take full possession of the land as collateral for his bad debts, and Marre countersued, lending his support to the opponents of the plant. Had the environmentalists not accepted the original deal or had Marre been prevented from pursuing his plans, that sacred spot would have remained an Indian graveyard.

As I concluded my reading, I came across a quotation by a contemporary of Henry Adams that crystallized my changed perspective on the topic of priesthoods and power. In 1928 the conservationist governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot wrote:

We need not be surprised that the State and Federal authorities havestood in awe before this gigantic nationwide power monopoly, because beside it, as its creator, financial supporter,and master, stands the concentrated money power of the world….Therefore the electric power monopoly deserves the fullest public attention. The people ought to know what it is and why it is and how it affects them. All the facts about it ought to be publicly available either through government agencies or private effort. The people must learn to judge intelligently of its advantages and its evils. Everything about it should be investigated fearlessly and published fully, because we must learn to regulate and control it before it smothers and enslaves us.” (cited by Rudolph 263)

To goad myself into writing the conference paper, I went on another Diablo Canyon tour. This time the meeting place was the “Energy Information Center” near Highway 101, and I joined a group of 40 people boarding a lush tour bus. We were led by a pair of very smiling guides, who, it turned out later, could answer few questions that departed from their scripts; they were not PG and E employees but local residents newly hired by a company that contracted to do public relations with the utility. This time as we passed the blue line, they said nothing about the hostile demonstrations, but I remembered the picture in the archives of suited professionals, long-haired adolescents, parents with babies in strollers, and sign-carrying seniors facing off at this border with a line of helmeted, masked and club-bearing police.

As we crossed the second perimeter, I noticed the metal cutouts of human figures distributed up and down the hillsides, practise targets for the sharpshooters always on patrol. At the overlook we were told that unit two was shut down for refueling, that plutonium-rich spent fuel was accumulating underwater in the tank directly below us until the government figured out what to do with it, and that the radioactive containment towers would have to remain here permanently sealed after the plant’s retirement in twenty or thirty years.

At the Indian cemetery I looked backward and realized that layer upon layer of midden was buried under the twenty acre construction site, and I looked seaward remembering a recent statement by USGS geologists that the Hosgri Fault a few miles offshore could easily produce an earthquake larger than the 7.5 magnitude that the plant is built to withstand. In the simulated control room of the operator training facility, I fiddled with switches while two men wearing NRC badges joked with a PG and E employee. On the way out of the room, I noticed that the red light was lit on the coffee machine next to the control console. The water had boiled away leaving a charred and evil- smelling residue of coffee in the bottom of the pot. “Meltdown,” the person in front of me quipped. “Human error,” someone else replied.

On the bus ride back, one guide spoke briefly of the four levels of possible mishap and the four levels of planned response and then waxed enthusiastic about the future of nuclear power in general. The next generation of reactors, he said, will be smaller, less expensive, decentralized and safer than Diablo, which was really a white elephant– too big, too expensive, and too dangerous. I crumpled up my questionnaire and held my stomach as the bus swung too fast around the unbanked curves.

________________________________________

1. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York, 1959) 64-5.

2. Bruce Miller, Chumash: A Picture of their World (Los Osos CA: Sand River Press, l988), 121-8.

3. John Michell, The Earth Spirit: Its Ways, and Mysteries (New York: Avon, 1975), 11.

4. Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Edited by Ernest Samuels (Boston, 1973), 380-383

5. Thomas Blackburn, December’s Child, A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives (Berkeley, 1975), 69

6. John Lowell Bean, “Power and its Application in Native California.” The Journal of California Anthropology (1975) 2:1, 31.\

7. Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay, Crystals in the Sky: An Intellectual Odyssey Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology and Rock Art (Santa Barbara, l978), 17-22

8. Richard Rudolph and Scott Ridley, Power Struggle: The Hundred Year War over Electricity (New York, l986), xi,13.

9. Richard Munson, The Power Makers: The Inside Story of America’s Biggest Business…and its Struggle to Control Tomorrow’s Electricity (Emmaus PA, 1985), 182

10. Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago, 1986) 175.

 

 

My earliest memory is of walking through Fort Tryon Park in upper Manhattan trailing an unraveled roll of toilet paper behind me. I was surrounded by a throng of ecstatic strangers shouting “Victory” at the news of Germany’s defeat. It was VE day 1945. At three years old, I didn’t know what it meant to be a Jew, but I did know enough about Nazis and Swastikas to participate fully in the festivities. The very sounds of those words, and especially of the name associated with them, “Adolph Hitler,” were as terrifying as the huffing and puffing of the big bad wolf. Like the three little pigs, we were dancing because the wolf was dead.

As I approached elementary school age, I learned more about Nazis and Jews from my parents’ explanations of what happened to the people in the photograph albums I would pore through on rainy days. A few were “deported”–whatever that meant–the rest were dispersed all over the world, or occasionally came to visit us for coffee and cake on Sunday afternoons. For some reason, they never seemed as jolly as other people’s relatives.

Going to the synagogue in the storefront next to the A and P supermarket on Sherman Avenue deepened my sense of a heritage of gloom. It was a world of old people dressed in black, with ponderous expressions, chanting exotic and mournful melodies in strange languages. They had a comforting intimacy with one another, but the togetherness always seemed like huddling. On the one hand, I felt cherished and sheltered by them, on the other alienated and repulsed.

By the time I reached grade two, I had learned some things about anti-semitism. Pictures of the survivors of Auschwitz and of the crematoria were being shown in movie newsreels. And Hitler wasn’t the only one who hated Jews. I remember Ralphie and Vinnie, my friends in our tenement apartment house, coming home after catechism and announcing with great satisfaction that my Jews had killed their Jesus. I felt some obscure connection between the concrete statue of a man wearing a crown of thorns nailed to a cross on the front of the church and the stories about torture in concentration camps, but I couldn’t make sense out it.

I also couldn’t make sense out of the fact that our relatives spoke Hitler’s German. It bothered me that Adolph was the name of my mother’s father in Brazil, and that my middle name was Rudolph. I didn’t want to hear or speak the pursed and guteral sounds of that language and neither did my parents. They addressed me and one another in the English they had learned before leaving Europe; but I cringed at the taint of their accents. No matter how bad Hitler had been, I was grateful to him for arranging that I would grow up expressing myself with the clean and odorless sounds of American. The Nazis’ nastiness provided me with the best of possible fortunes in the world–to be born in the U.S.A.

Things changed toward the end of high school. Being an American had become boring and uncool. I wore a beret, went to the Museum of Modern Art, and hung out in Greenwich Village where my friends and I listened to jazz and talked about Kafka and Freud. For my language requirement in my first year of college, I chose German. Its sound didn’t bother me any more–especially orchestrated by Beethoven and Bach–and I liked the fact that I could actually understand some of it, though I still couldn’t speak a word. There were some very cool Germans, and quite a few of them were Jews. And being Jewish was fine too, because it was cool to be an outsider and rejected by the herd. Nazis were just the German herd.

After a year of college, I went through my sophomore identity crisis. I was in a relationship with a girl I had met as a co-counselor in a summer camp for emotionally disturbed children. She was also the child of German Jewish refugees, a soulful, serious, and brilliant person whose mother had died when she was very young. We found infinite depth in one others’ eyes, but that depth kept filling with horror. We saw ourselves in the film, “Hiroshima Mon Amour”–the story of an affair between a victim of atrocities in France and a survivor of the bomb whose love was haunted by images of mass death. My images were blended from shadows of childhood and from what I was reading in my Contemporary Civilization course at Columbia. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism made me begin to understand the scale of the Nazi crime. The intellectual effort it took to follow her dense political, economic and psychological analysis of the slaughter of millions forced me to absorb the reality of its horror in my mind, where I seemed to be able to suffer more than in my emotions or my imagination. I came to believe that the guilt was universal; not only was there no god, there was no good, there was no meaning, there was only chaos or self-deception.

I couldn’t sleep. I walked the city at night. I think I experienced some of the despair that finally drove people like Primo Levi and Bruno Bettleheim to suicide. I became obsessed with an image in a document quoted by Arendt called the Graebe Memorandum–an eyewitness’ description of a German soldier puffing on a cigarette while machine gunning rank upon rank of children at the edge of a mass grave.

The crisis passed after this relationship ended. I decided to become more healthy minded–to consciously resist the attraction of an abyss that was always close by. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this meant that I would no longer go out with Jewish girls. I fell in love with Europe when I went there the summer after my junior year–its cathedrals, footpaths and cafes. After six weeks of wandering through England, France and Switzerland, I finally made my way to Germany. With three years of language and literature courses at college, I could speak like a native, and I wanted to see the ones who had done it face to face. In one of the ancient beer-halls of Munich, where the Nazis did their first organizing, I struck up an acquaintance with a kid my own age in wire-rim spectacles and straight blond hair, a university student. His name was Eberhard Gloning. He was also staying in the youth hostel, and the next day he offered me a ride to Stuttgart, his hometown and that of my parents. His mother, father and sisters hosted me warmly for several days, while I walked around the town and countryside tracking down places in those old photo albums. There were no relatives left for me to visit, but the Glonings treated me like family. I called the darkly dressed grandmother “Oma,” just like my Oma in New York. Eating the same kind of apple pie she baked, one night at dinner I raised the subject of the Jews. It was a terrible tragedy, they said, part of the tragedy of the war and the starvation after the war. Hitler had brought about great suffering and they never liked him, but there was nothing they could have done. At that point I felt there was nothing I could do–neither condemn nor forgive. But at least, they didn’t have long teeth and I was not afraid.

Four years passed and I was in graduate school searching for a mate. At a poetry seminar in the Free University of Palo Alto I invited a girl who made smart comments to go to the pub afterwards. She looked surprised, then curious, and then agreed to get on the back of my Lambretta motorscooter. She worked with grape strikers in Delano on weekends and made costumes for the drama department. She grew up in Long Beach, but her Presbyterian family was from a small town in Missouri where they had lived for many generations. She had recently returned from a nine-months stay in Berlin and at a Stanford overseas campus located in Beutelsbach, a suburb of Stuttgart. She had gone to Germany because many of her high school friends were Jewish and she needed to confront the reality of Nazism herself. That night I knew my search was over.

If I try to understand the Holocaust, my mind gets dull; if I try to talk about it, my words sound hollow; if I try to divine its relevance to my life, I see everything and nothing. It’s much more comfortable to forget. That’s why I am here today.

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More material, uploaded December 26 2020:

1. Newspaper article about this event

2. Text of Henry Marx’s and Claire Marx’s talks at this event [4-page pdf]

3. Fritz Rosenfelder’s 1933 suicide letter and response from friends.