Fragilecologies Archives
1 September 2000
Recently I had a chance to visit people at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi, Kenya. During the visit, I was invited to lunch by three young interns who had just come to UNEP to work for a few months before the start of school in their respective countries. One young man was from Wales, another from Germany, and the third was a young woman from Zimbabwe. Each had an interest in the environment. Each was very enthusiastic about working to protect some part of the earthís surface or save endangered species or ecosystems. We chatted about the different environmental problems facing people in future decades (their future, to be more exact).
Listening to them talk so earnestly about their future, and their speaking openly about not really know what they wanted to do, caused me to flash back to the time when I was twenty-one and had just finished college. I realize now that it had been a very long time since I had thought about my first trip away from America to Europe. I thought about my internship in an old French steel mill in the Alps. I spoke to them about what France was like in the early 1960s, just a scant fifteen years after World War II had ended. I mentioned how carefree I was about where I went, where I slept, what I did; sleeping overnight on a park bench in Torino, Italy, or eating a pigeon for the first time with a French farmerís family at their mountainside farm house, or walking around Paris or Rome at night, and everywhere just absorbing the flavor of these countries.
I remembered how reluctant I was to speak French in France, despite good training (on paper, at least). I was reluctant, that is, until I was shortchanged at a restaurant by a waiter. Then I was forced to stand my ground . . . and speak up to contest the bill or forever be a victim of my shyness to use a language I had spent four years in high school sweating over. I won the argument, but in speaking French for the first time I could only imagine I sounded like an immigrant to America at Ellis Island speaking English to an English-speaking person for the first time: verb tenses wrong, jumbled construction of sentences, and even the wrong words in the wrong place. Nevertheless, feeling triumphant, I began to speak French without being self-conscious about it for the rest of the summer of 1961.
I asked the three interns what they thought would be in a history book about the twentieth century when they wrote it in the year 2020, when they would be 40. After all, I assume that they will look at the twentieth century as my generation looked at the nineteenth century while we were growing up. Their writing of this history would be totally different from mine. For example, the Ho Chi Minh Trail or Pork Chop Hill would hold little significance for them. The Great Depression ñ what was that? Transistor radios, computer punch cards, etc., all had little significance to them, even though they were of major importance to my generation.
All the time we spoke, I was happy for them. They were enthusiastic, risk-taking, caring souls who were about to leave the nest, so to speak, searching for the best place to apply their energies and identify their true interests. Not one mention was made of an interest in making money, or IPOs, or anything to do with the world of business. It was refreshing to me, and I was more than happy to have been able to daydream back to other happy times in my own life, ones I had not revisited in decades. Maybe thatís how things are after you turn sixty!
I was brought back to the present when the intern from Wales (Ben) asked me what it had been like growing up in the 1940s and 1950s when there was little or no collective interest in the environment! Needless to say, that question caught me off guard. Now that I have turned sixty and have been working with various environmental issues over the past thirty years, I realized that I was unable to recall what life was like growing up without news or concern about the environment. I remember having heard in newsreels and movie theaters about the killer fog in London, the devastating floods in Holland, and the famines in India during the early 1950s.
Ben then said to me that he had always been immersed in news about the environment and the need for attention to it. Although these three people were interested in different aspects of the environment, they acknowledged that they did not know what interested them most. They are still on a “learning curve” with regard to environmental issues. There is so much to learn, and they are wasting no time doing it. Their enthusiasm was contagious. I again thought about my own experience at their age. I remembered that at twenty-one I too had been an intern, but in a steel mill nestled away in the French Alps on the French-Italian border in the little town of St. Michel du Maurienne in Savoie, with about 700 families.
I had graduated from a university with a degree in Metallurgical Engineering. I worked for a while in some industries (Westinghouse, Ford Motor Company, Renault) that were in fact major polluters of the environment: a steel mill, an auto industry, a wire and cable manufacturing company. I mentioned to the interns a postcard that I had picked up in Pittsburgh when I was working for Westinghouse, my first job after college. It showed a major steel mill at night with pollutants emitted into the atmosphere at night, all lighted up. It was then (in 1961) a portrait of industrial beauty and progress, a symbol of jobs and prosperity. I am sure that postcard is not longer sold in Pittsburgh ñ or anywhere else.
Interest in the environment has surely changed in the past few decades. Today, it is on just about everyoneís mind, whereas in the “Leave It to Beaver” days, only a few prescient individuals spoke out about the mismanagement of the earthís land, oceans, and atmosphere. As I said “so long” to the young interns, I realized that my generation was in the process of passing the baton for environmental protection to another younger, more energetic generation. Soon the fate of the earthís resources will be totally in their hands.