AN UGLY NEW FOOTPRINT IN THE SAND

A.B.C. Whipple

There were strangers on our beach yesterday, for the first time in a month. A new footprint on our sand is nearly as rare as in Robinson Crusoe. We are at the very edge of the Atlantic; half a mile out in front of us is a coral reef and then nothing but 3,000 miles of ocean to West Africa. It is a wild and lonely beach, with the same surf beating on it as when Columbus came by. And yet the beach is polluted.

Oil tankers over the horizon have dirtied it more than hundreds of picnickers could. The oil comes ashore in floating patches that stain the coral black and gray. It has destroyed the rock crabs and the crayfish and has coated the delicate coils of the conch shells with black sticky substance. And it has hardened upon itself, littering the beach with globes of tar that resemble the cannonballs of a deserted battlefield. The islanders, as they go beachcombing for the treasures the sea has washed up for centuries, now wear old shoes to protect their feet from the oil that washes up too.

You have to try to get away from pollution to realize how bad it really is. We have known for the last few years how bad our cities are. Now there is no longer an escape. If there is oil on this island far out in the Atlantic, there is oil on nearly every other island.

It is still early here. The air is still clear over the island, but it won't be when they build the airport they are talking about. The water out over the reef is still blue and green, but it is dirtier than it was a few years ago. And if the land is not spoiled, it is only because there are not yet enough people here to spoil it. There will be. And so for the moment on this island we are witnesses to the beginning, as it were, of the pollution of our environment …

Until the pollution of our deserted beach, it seemed simple to blame everything on the "population explosion." If the population of this island, for example, could be held steady at a couple of hundred, there would be very little problem with the environment in this remote area. There would be no pollution of the environment if there were not too many people using it. And so if we concentrate on winning the war against overpopulation, we can save the earth for mankind.

But the oil on the beach disproves this too easy assumption. Those tankers are not out there because too many Chinese and Indians are being born every minute. They are not even out there because there are too many Americans and Europeans. They are delivering their oil, and cleaning their tanks at sea and sending the remains up onto the beaches of the Atlantic and Pacific, in order to fuel the technology of man—and the factories and the power plants, the vehicles and the engines that have enabled man to survive on this planet are now spoiling the planet for life.

The fishermen on this island are perfectly right in preferring the outboard motor to the sail. Their livelihood is involved, and the motor, for all its unpleasant smell, has helped increase the fisherman's catch so that he can now afford to do away with the far worse outdoor toilet. But the danger of technology is in its escalation, and there have already been signs of that here. You can see the motor oil floating in the town dock. Electric generators can be heard over the sound of the surf. And while there are only about two dozen automobiles for the ten miles of road, already there is a wrecked one rusting in the harbor waters where it was dumped and abandoned. The escalation of technological pollution is coming here just as surely as it came to the mainland cities that are now covered in smog.

If the oil is killing the life along the coral heads, what must it not be doing to the plankton at sea which provide 70 % of the oxygen we breathe? The lesson of our stained beach is that we may not even have realized how late it is already. Man, because of his technology, may require far more space per person on this globe than we had ever thought, but it is more than a matter of a certain number of square yards per person. There is instead a delicate balance of nature in which many square miles of ocean and vegetation and clean air are needed to sustain only a relatively few human beings. We may find, as soon as the end of this century, that the final destruction of our environment has been signaled not by starvation but by people choking to death. The technology—the machine—will then indeed have had its ultimate, mindless, all unintended triumph over man, by destroying the atmosphere he lives in just as surely as you can pinch off a diver's breathing tube.

Sitting on a lonely but spoiled beach, it is hard to imagine but possible to believe.