Prologue: Lessons From Four Days In My Life
by Terry Tamminen
An excerpt from Lives Per Gallon by Terry Tamminen. Copyright © 2006 by the author. Reprinted by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. 
"Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.
President George W Bush,
“State of the Union Address”
January 31, 2006 1
Great beasts, fantastically shaped, armored skin. Lumbering giants that ceaselessly roam the land to plunder every natural resource within their grasp, devouring the weak, the slow. Their breath is hot, cloying, steeped in deliberate destruction and death.
Jurassic Park? A lost colony of tyrannosaurs left over from 65 million years ago? No, it’s any modern U.S. city and the inexorable daily stampede of steel machines on rivers of asphalt, belching toxic fumes that foul the lives of every living being, a beast that kills as surely as the senseless, serrated teeth of a T. rex.
Yet according to a growing body of evidence, petroleum-powered transportation is about to fade to black.We have profited much from the Oil Age, but for years have chosen to ignore its limitations and its true cost. Like an aging actor, the Oil Age will yield to players of greater gifts who even now wait in the wings to make welcome entrances, if we are smart enough to give the cue.
Innumerable clues indicate that change is urgently needed and that our window of opportunity to shape a future beyond oil addiction is narrowing. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, the price of a barrel of oil has shot past $75, tripling the average price that had prevailed for decades. Experts predict that this trend will continue, while overall uncertainty about the price of oil-and the ability of refineries worldwide to supply enough finished products-has already begun to erode international economic stability. Competition for these scarce resources may even foreshadow a new cold war, with China striding the globe in search of energy to fuel its torrid economic growth, while the United States seeks to checkmate those moves and guarantee supplies of its own to protect domestic prosperity. These dramas are beginning to play out against the backdrop of a steady stream of revelations that air pollution is shortening lives and costing governments billions of dollars, rupees, pounds, and euros in health-care costs.
Consider how much of your life is dependent, if not outright addicted, to petroleum, not only the daily commute and delivery of the kids to soccer practice, but the broccoli in the produce aisle that got there because of petroleum-based fertilizers, diesel fuel in the tractor and harvester, bunker fuel in the ship, and yet more diesel in the train and big-rig that delivered it to the supermarket. You probably can’t smell the petroleum fumes from the cars in the parking lot, polluting from their engines and gas tanks even when the engine isn’t running, but they’re in the air you are breathing. You take the broccoli home in a plastic bag and pop it into a plastic container, both made from petroleum, then store it in the refrigerator’s plastic perishables bin.
You buy those fresh fruits and vegetables thinking of your family’s health, but does a member of your own family suffer from asthma or emphysema that may have been caused or exacerbated by petroleum pollution? Perhaps a loved one or neighbor has died in a foreign war that was waged, at least in part, to protect our supply of the petroleum drug to which the President suggests we are addicted.
A century from now, will our descendants view this dependence on oil with bemused contempt in the same manner that we now scoff at those who thought the only way to cure disease was to bleed a patient to remove “ill humors” from the body? Will they also wonder why we didn’t step back sooner to see the true price we pay for this addiction, especially knowing that at some point petroleum’s wellspring would run dry?
It has taken me a long time to understand our oil addiction and to learn why it’s so difficult to shake. My passion for the environment and the urge to write this book grew out of a series of four “aha” days, the ones that make you see things more clearly. The realization on each of those days had something in common.
At the age of twelve I wanted to be Mike Nelson of Sea Hunt and took my first scuba dive off the coast of Southern California. I was truly awestruck by the towering
What I found instead was a desolate wasteland of rock and mussels, of purple urchins and Styrofoam cups. No densely populated kelp beds, sculpted by the unseen hand of ocean currents, just a moonscape of barren rock covered in silt. What had happened to the lush kelp beds, the abalone, the sea bass, the lobster, the octopus?
My second epiphany was at the time of the death of my father, Art Arndt. He served in the Marines at Peleliu and the other bloodiest battles of World War II in the Pacific. He died of emphysema at the age of seventy, after a decade of wheezing and dragging an oxygen tank behind him, the result of smoking and living in one of the world’s smoggiest cities. Not Los Angeles or Houston, but Milwaukee, Wisconsin, covered much of the time in green-gray smoke from upwind Rust Belt industries and millions of vehicle tailpipes. The day we buried him, aging veterans in bulging, faded uniforms offering their twenty-one-gun salute, I asked myself, How could this happen?
Then there was the day I met a Hopi elder named Vernon Masayesva. He opened the door for me to a civilization that has continuously occupied the same land, indeed the same dwellings, for more than 10,000 years, living sustainably in one of the most unforgiving, stingy landscapes on Earth. Of the many reasons for the Hopi’s remarkable success, two features of their culture exemplify their approach to life. First, the Hopi have no word or idea that describes “wilderness,” but they do have a word for wild, or crazy, people. To them, the land is not wild, but people who harm it are. The land is simply their home.
“Western science looks at the world in which we live, separates the human from the environment, and then studies the parts – the air, the water, the land, the animals – as if they had little to do with one another,” Vernon explained with a sad resignation. “But traditional science looks at the world in which we live, recognizes the essential connection of all of the parts – the air, the water, the land, the other animals, and the human – and from it develops culture and a way of being. The world is sacred and the human is its steward.”
Another trait that explains much about the Hopi culture of sustainability can be discerned from their simple daily customs. When they eat, they thank not only the person who cooked the food, but the land, sun, water, farmers, even their parents – all the elements that made the meal possible. They say something unpronounceable to the European ear, but it might look like kwak-kwak...eetem...new-new-sa, which means thank you, we have eaten. The Hopi recognize that if you don’t feed all living things, there would be no food to eat and no survival in the desert land. 2
The fourth of these remarkable days in my life was meeting Jo Anne Van Tilburg, the anthropologist whose team helped solve the mystery of the civilization that once flourished on an island off the coast of Chile. Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, is also home to the equally enigmatic tiki-like “moai,” effigies carved from volcanic rock, standing as much as 70 feet tall and weighing up to 165 tons apiece. 3
“I thought I was just studying an ancient civilization,” she told me, gazing out to sea from her home in Malibu, California. “Then I realized we were looking in the mirror.”
Rapa Nui today looks oddly like Ireland, green and tawny, although devoid of large plant or animal life to sustain any substantial human population. This island, though, was once a lush, subtropical paradise, reminiscent of the South Pacific islands that the first Polynesian settlers on Rapa Nui had once called home. Those lucky immigrants found abundant plant and animal life, including giant palms that made outstanding oceangoing canoes for hunting marine mammals. Every step brought fruits, edible roots, and medicinal plants.
So generous were the land and sea that a sophisticated, robust population emerged, including priests and artisans who carved, transported, and erected the moai, ultimately numbering nearly a thousand mute, forbidding sentinels. As the growing population depleted traditional food sources, however, islanders worked their way down the food chain, in turn exhausting the supply of shellfish, sea snails, even grasses. Porpoise bones suddenly disappeared from garbage heaps as islanders no longer had large trees to make ocean going canoes. Even garden crops declined as topsoil washed into the sea, a victim of deforestation. Ominously, the bones of birds, seals, and porpoises were rapidly replaced by those of rats and finally humans as islanders devolved into warring tribes, fighting over the only remaining food source of any significance – each other.
Did any islander see what was happening and try to warn others? One can only imagine that those who spoke out would have been ostracized by a complacent populace accustomed to seemingly endless bounty, unwilling to face the new reality. Vested interests of clan leaders, chiefs, and statue carvers might have drowned out the cries for moderation as the ruling class feared losing prestige and wealth. With no written histories, photos, or satellite views to guide them, islanders of one generation would have little idea of what life had been like in the land of their forebearers. Oral histories of great abundance may have seemed like myth instead of fact. At some point, no one would have even noticed the decay of the last ocean going canoe, the fall of the last great palm tree, or even the roasting of the last rat.
It seemed oddly appropriate to hear Jo Anne spin her tale in the shadow of Malibu’s sprawling palaces, 10,000 – square-foot McMansions, modern moai that dot the hillsides, each a greater display of clan wealth than the next, each erected on the dust of an earlier clan’s display of ostentation.
“Easter Island is Earth writ small,” says Jared Diamond, another UCLA researcher and author of numerous thoughtful books on how modern society has arrived at the brink of its own crisis. “Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources...and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean.” 4
That simple conclusion succinctly summarizes the lessons I take away from my four personal epiphany days and describes the crossroads where modern civilization now stands: rising population confronting shrinking resources, including the declining supply of fossil fuels and compromised supplies of clean air, clean water, public health, and a vibrant economic future. It reminds us that we are very mortal, clinging to life on a planet that may not remain hospitable to us and that certainly doesn’t care as much about our well-being as we must. It also highlights that natural habitats are shrinking and that populations of species are declining around the globe because of human activity.
Paleontologists estimate that some 98 percent of all plant and animal species that once lived on Earth became extinct before the dawn of Industrial Man. 5 Scientists agree that mass extinctions are linked to drastic changes in the environment, such as those caused by the effect of an asteroid strike or the warming of Earth’s climate by man-made pollution. Yet it can also be something as dim-witted as eating all the food or poisoning the air and water.
World-renowned paleontologist Richard Leakey tells us that five major waves of mass extinction have washed over Earth since the first living creature emerged from the primordial ooze, the most recent of which was the passing of the dinosaurs. The most startling face in what Dr. Leakey calls the “sixth extinction” is the rate of today’s extinctions. He warns that if the trend continues, we will lose half of all plant and animal life on Earth within this century. 6
“Whatever way you look at it, we’re destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies,” Leakey says. 7
The lessons of those four days in my life were a catalyst to a career as an environmental advocate, researcher, and the head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency, which in turn led me to the conclusion that the crossroads in question today are nowhere more sharply defined than with respect to our addiction to oil. Such thinking does not lead me to the conclusion that we must return to some idealized existence akin to our Native American ancestors, but rather that we need to choose the road to sustainable living in a twenty-first-century context.
Nor do I conclude that Homo sapiens is necessarily one of those species facing imminent extinction. The decline of civilizations like that of Rapa Nui and the loss of species from the planet are cautionary tales, offering us a chance to learn and adapt, to demand better thinking from our corporations, our government, and ourselves. The lost kelp beds of Southern California teach us how quickly things can change if we don’t pay attention to the evidence. The Hopi teach us that there is a better way to thrive on a planet with limited resources. Rapa Nui – and our fellow human beings today, who struggle with respiratory illnesses for each breath – teach us that there are some fates that may be worse than extinction.
The modern “asteroid” may not be a heavenly body that wreaks instant planetary disaster, but may instead be a steady erosion of our quality of life from the continued burning of fossil fuels, especially petroleum, if we fail to shake our addiction. The price we pay includes illness, death, a changing climate, and our own sustainability on this island we call Earth. The price may also include further injury to our body politic as we pursue ever more extraordinary lengths to secure another “fix” of oil.
How can we fail to see our civilization as heading down the path of the Rapa Nui islanders, a twenty-first-century version of warring clans clinging to life in caves and eating one another? We have started from the same place as they did – consuming our resources and fouling our nest without seeing the incremental losses – but unlike the ancients, we have written text, films, and science to know what we are losing and to enable us to make changes.
If we continue to burn oil for much of our energy needs, despite our science and foreknowledge, we could still end up like them. There are many alternatives to oil and many strategies we can use to ensure that those alternatives compete on a level playing field. But, like any addiction, we must first admit that we have a problem and then make the decision to solve it.
NOTES
1. President George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address,” January 31, 2006.
2. Black Mesa Trust, March 2006, http://www.blackmesatrust.org/.
3. Jared Diamond, “Easter’s End.” Discover August 1995, 64.
4. Diamond, “Easter’s End.”
5. “Questions of Mass Extinction,” Norman Myers, Biodiversity and Conservation, 2:2-17, 1993.
6. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction (New York: Doubleday, 1995). Excerpted at The WELL, http://www.well.com/~davidu/ sixthextinction.html.
7. Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction.