them as problems at all-are episodic rather than systemic; the scene dissolves, the camera moves on. But the present crisis will not disappear with a switch of channels. It was predictable-and predicted-decades ago. There is an all-but-forgotten history of dire portents, urgent warnings, and unsuccessful efforts by an earlier generation of environmentalists to deal with the social factors that underpin environmental problems. In many instances, they predicted with uncanny accuracy the results of ecologically insane policies pursued by the corporate establishment in the West and the bureaucratic establishment in the East. The earliest disputes around the dangers posed by the oil industry's expansion into oceanic drilling occurred even before the Arctic regions were opened to oil exploitation. They go back well into the 1950s, when larger vessels started being used to transport Middle Eastern oil. Long before spills came to public attention, environmentalists were voicing fears over hazards posed by growing tanker capacity.



No less serious than the possibility of "human error" in the operation of these huge vessels was the well-known fact that even the sturdiest ships have a way of being buffeted by storms, drifting off course, foundering on reefs in treacherous waters, and sinking. In lectures I gave decades ago on the Pacifica Radio network, I emphasized the sheer certainty of disastrous oil spills that would surely follow upon the growing size of tankers. The Exxon Valdez spill was, therefore, not an unforeseen accident but a dead certainty-and one that may yet be beggared by others to come. It was as predictable as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. No less predictable was the global warming trend. Forecasts that carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels

could raise planetary temperatures go back to the Nineteenth Century and have been repeated from time to time since then, though more often as atmospheric curiosities than as serious ecological warnings. I wrote as early as 1964 that increases in the "blanket of carbon dioxide" from fossil-fuel combustion "will lead to more destructive storm patterns and eventually to melting of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas." The possibility of acid rain and the systematic deforestation of the equatorial rain-forest belt, not to speak of the impact of chlorofluorocarbons on the Earth's ozone layer, could not have been foreseen in technical detail. But the larger issue of environmental destruction on a global scale and the disruptions of basic natural cycles was already on the radical agenda in the late 1960s, long before Earth Day was proclaimed and ecological issues were reduced to ridding city streets of cans, bottles, and garbage. P redictions of disaster come cheap when they are not derived from reasoned analysis of the sort that has become unpopular in this era of New Age mysticism. But we have no reason to re-