Did you know, or even want to know, that the dry weight of living tissue
in the biosphere is 1.2 to 1.8 x 10 ¹² tons? Or that at any one
time there are between 600 and 700 million barrels of oil being carried
at sea? This book may drive you dizzy with data, but stay with it, for there
are other data in the book that matter a great deal to any concerned Western
citizen. For example, the grain-equivalent of food consumed by the average
American is 1500 kilograms per annum, whereas ‘the population of the pre-industrial
world gets by on the consumption of somewhat less than 400 kilograms . .
. These averages conceal, however, the inequality of distribution . . .
not only of the estimated 400 million starving people but the additional
600 million men, women, and – especially – children who never have enough
to eat.’

The book is a tapestry of data like these, bewildering in detail, but
a picture emerges when you stand back from it. The theme of the picture
is familiar. Shelfloads of books have been written about it. They all ask
similar questions: will world population stabilise early in the next century?
Will supplies of food and energy be sufficient to sustain a stable population
of (say) 10 billion? What hope is there for a more equitable distribution
of food and energy? And what is to be done about the dark side of industrial
triumphs: abuse of the environment, destabilisation of urban societies,
unemployment created by devices that save manpower but not the welfare of
men?

The questions remain unanswered, and my first reaction to Only One World
was to wonder whether this is a reconditioned version of Only One Earth
(written by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos for the Stockholm Conference in
1972), put on the market to tie in with the Rio conference in 1992. Well,
it was written with the Rio conference in mind, but there the similarity
ends. This is an important book for two reasons: its style and its reinterpretation
of familiar data.

Piel has nothing fresh to report, but he reports it in a fresh way.
This is important, for the loudest voices in the environmental clamour come
from heralds of doom, naive Utopian prophets and hellfire preachers calling
for ecological repentance. They appeal to emotion more than to reason,
like a criminal lawyer trying to convince a jury. Piel’s style is that of
a corporation lawyer putting a case before the House of Lords, sober, severely
rational, every assertion framed in a verifiable fact. As founder and publisher
of Scientific American his reputation is one of impeccable integrity. He
can be trusted to be even-handed with facts and many of his data are from
his journal.

The first hundred pages set the scene: a lucid account of the evolution
of the biosphere, followed by a summary of man’s history in it, the ‘explosions’
of population that have followed each revolution in technology: the tool-making
primate, the cattle-herding farmer, the mill manager. He then presents the
hypothesis that birth and death rates converge in postindustrial societies;
that all societies will eventually reach this stage at a ‘steady state’
of about 10 billion (twice its present level); and that the production of
food and energy could be sufficient to support this population. ‘Could’,
but not ‘would’, unless resources are distributed with an equity unimaginable
today – witness the food surplus stored or jettisoned in the North while
millions starve in the South.

How to turn ‘could’ into ‘would’ is the theme of Piel’s book. It is
a cool and chilling account of the political tasks our descendants will
face in the 21st century. Societies in the postindustrial world, Piel believes,
have solved the problems of production. Theoretically there could be enough
food, fuel and consumer goods to be shared by everyone everywhere, but no
one knows how to turn theory into practice. Indeed there is something ominous
about the very triumphs of production. In the US it is reckoned that it
needs only 15 per cent of the labour force to produce 75 per cent of the
goods. The remaining 85 per cent in employment are carting the goods around
or selling them or providing public or private services. And now, even in
the service industries, jobs may melt away at the touch of a new microchip.
Mechanisation has disengaged production from work. But it has not disengaged
consumption from work: you need to have a pay cheque to qualify as a consumer.

Postindustrial societies, whether capitalist or communist, have given
only lukewarm allegiance to the vision of ‘to each according to his need’.
In societies emerging from the preindustrial state there have been great
improvements, but one billion people are still haunted by famine and suffer
the hazards of contaminated water and poor sanitation. ‘For all the successes
of these recent decades, the poorest people remain as poor and as numerous
as before.’

Piel illustrates his theme in fascinating detail, describing how different
societies are tackling, or failing to tackle, the challenge of the 21st
century. Among developing nations China comes out best: its birth rate
down, its food production up, 75 per cent of its children at school or university,
public health improved by the visits of ‘barefoot doctors’ to the most remote
villages. Sub-Saharan Africa comes out worst, with signs of premature decadence,
such as the emergence of an ostentatious yuppie culture in cities like Lagos,
alongside persistent poverty and deprivation, an ugly contrast exceeded
only in Latin America.

Piel’s calm conclusion is: ‘A system of values governing the distribution
of goods comparable to that for their production remains to be distilled
from experience still in the future.’ The future’s task is compounded by
the rise of a new force, which can (and does) act with indifference toward
national political issues: the force of transnational corporations. Three
hundred and fifty of them control ’30 per cent of the entire GNP of the
work market economy’. They are in business to save money on production
and to make money on sales. Below the southern border of the US, ‘US corporations
have come to employ 500 000 Mexican workers over the past decade. They pay
them less than $1.00 per hour’ to assemble products ‘for which Xerox, Eastman-Kodak,
RCA, IBM, General Electric . . . and other companies not long ago employed
US workers at much higher wages’ in American cities. The Mexicans live in
shanty towns.

Piel concludes: ‘We have not much more than a century to find our way
to the steady-state adjustments of our appetites, as well as our numbers,
to the finite dimensions of the planet and the vulnerable cycles of its
biosphere.’ Will the transnational corporations, which pander to our appetites,
cooperate? And will the politicians, who met to solve these problems at
Bretton Woods 48 years ago, and who are still dithering over a General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), be up to the task? Piel’s book offers a masterly
analysis of questions asked by himself and a score of other writers.

But there are no credible answers yet.

Eric Ashby was Master of Clare College, Cambridge, and the first chairman
of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.

AMONG THE predicted consequences of global warming would be an invasion
of Eastern England by the North Sea. Hundreds of square kilometres, from
Lincoln in the north to Cambridge in the south, lie less than 30 metres
above the present sea level; so does the network of lakes near Norwich,
known as the Norfolk Broads. For many people accustomed to hills it is a
depressing countryside, with farms scattered in a network of waterways,
looking in the distance like ships at sea. But for the people of the fens
(fenmen) who live in it, it has a captivating if sometimes ominous beauty;
and the skyscapes are wonderful. For naturalists it has a special fascination,
for the East Anglian fenland has a flora and fauna unmatched in Britain.
For this reason, and perhaps because of its proximity to Cambridge, geologists
and biologists have studied fenland intensively for more than a century.
Scores of books and hundreds of papers have been written about the fenlands.

Daniel Defoe, with the instinct of a master-journalist, explained in
1724 how this amphibious region came to be formed: ‘ . . . all the water
of the middle part of England which does not run into the Thames or Trent
comes down into these fens.’ And there it remained, a mass of swamps, until
the fens were drained in the 17th century, inhabited not only by plants
and animals but by communities of primitive farmers and peat-diggers and
fishermen, living surrounded by shallow water and travelling from one part
to another by boat. On the other side of East Anglia, by the sea, sand brought
down by marine currents blocked the exits of rivers, and this produced another
area of fen, since 1988 preserved as the Broads National Park.

For botanists the fens have been a laboratory for the study of plant
succession. In the 1920s there was enthusiasm for describing the way bare
soil or shallow water became colonised by pioneer plants. These pioneers
slowed down currents in water, leading to deposition of silt which in time
converted the open water to marshland and ultimately to exposed soil. At
each stage of this process specific plants colonised the site, which culminated,
if not interrupted, in woodland, the plant climax.

Changes in climate and the rise and fall of sea levels, and the activities
of Man, have interrupted successions in the fens over thousands of years.
The soil was dug for peat; it was dried by drainage; the sedges along the
banks were cut for thatch; the osier willows were pollarded for basket-making.
It came to be realised that much of the interest and charm of the fens was
because they had been managed by very skilled artisans. By analysis of vegetable
remains in the peat, and by carbon dating, the history of vegetation in
the fens, and much about the life of the fenmen, has been disclosed in astonishing
detail, mainly by the masterly studies of Harry Godwin and his colleagues.

The best way to describe Wetlands is to say that Bellamy and Quale have
written a ‘Radio 2 version’ of the ‘Radio 3 level’ publications of botanists,
geologists and archaeologists on fenland. In the cosy style of a guide conducting
a party of tourists, they make a tour, by boat, train, and on foot, through
the fens and the Broads. Much of this part of the book is as dull as a Baedeker,
unless you are on the spot and need to be told to take the left and not
the right fork in the river (unfortunately, the only map in the book is
worthless). Later on the book becomes much more interesting. It gives a
good account of the natural history, the bird life, and the dangers now
threatening from pollution and urbanisation; though all this has been done
incomparably better by Darby, Godwin, and Marshall.

The most rewarding part of the book is the gossip about the customs
and activities of the fenmen; the sort of talk you would hear in a fenland
pub over a pint (more likely, several pints) of beer in conversation with
the man who made fish baskets from osiers, and has had to turn to other
things because of the decline in the fishing at Yarmouth; and the man who
still does thatching and can tell you how to distinguish ‘a lovely steely
reed’ from a ‘woody old one’; and the man who still uses his boat to trade
on the rivers.

Wetlands is definitely light reading (though the book is a heavy coffee-table
product and ungainly to hold). It is sprinkled with cliches (you ‘feast
your eyes’ on wading birds, you ‘drown your sorrows’ in a pub at Geldeston
Lock). So it is not a book to be read as literature. But the authors are
amiable companions, enthusiastic, well informed, and with a good supply
of digressions about ghosts and witches and smugglers as condiments for
their tale of a unique landscape, less than a hundred miles from London.

Eric Ashby was formerly professor of botany in the University of Sydney
and the University of Manchester.