Area of Research: Technology & Human Environment

This paper was originally published by the American Association of Engineering Societies (Washington D.C.), in a report “Production Efficiencies: The Engineers’ Report,” pp. 14-18, 1999.

It was republished in: IEEE Aerospace and Electronic SYSTEMS 14(10):3-6, October 1999.

The paper is based on a talk Jesse gave at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development meetings in New York in April 1999.

(Note: The figures are at the end of this document for easier online reading.)

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My message is my title: Because the Human Brain Does Not Change, Technology Must. That is, technology must change, must improve, to accommodate billions more people and to lift the standard of living. Engineers, receiving feedback from the market and regulated wisely in the public interest, do much of the improving. Thus, the chance for improving Earth’s environment hinges on engineers, and therefore their social context and technical vision. [1]

First I will explain what I mean by the unchanging human brain. Then I will exemplify technical change in energy and agriculture in the cardinal directions it must go.

The Triune Brain

In a remarkable 1990 book, The Triune Brain in Evolution , neuroscientist Paul MacLean explained that humans have three brains, each developed during a stage of evolution. [2] The earliest, found in reptiles, MacLean calls the snake brain. In mammals another brain appeared, the paleomammalian, with new particular behavior, for example, care of the young and mutual grooming. In humans came the most recent evolutionary structure, the hugely expanded neocortex. This neomammalian brain enabled language, visualization, and symbolic skills. But economical evolution did not replace the reptilian brain, it added. Thus, we share primal patterns of behavior with other animals, just as they share those brain structures. The snake brain controls courtship, patrolling of territory (including our daily 75-minute travel budget), displays of dominance and submission, and flocking. And makes most of the sensational news.

Our brains and thus our basic instincts and behaviors have remained unchanged for a million years or more. They will not change on time scales considered for “sustainable development.”

Of course, innovations may occur that control individual and social behavior. Law and religion both try, though the snake brain keeps reasserting itself, in crime and in punishment. Pharmacology also tries, with increasing success. Sales of new “anti-depressants,” mostly tinkering with serotonin in the brain, are about $10 billion in 1999, having penetrated only perhaps 10% of their global market.

Because, it seems to me, these forms of social control are unreliable, we should emphasis our greatest success, bettering technique. Since ever, homo faber has been trying to make things better and to make better things. During the past two centuries we have become more systematic and aggressive about it, through the diffusion of research & development and the institutions that perform them, including corporations and universities.

Let me now focus on two cardinal directions for technique, for engineering, decarbonization of energy and landless agriculture.

Decarbonization

Carbon matters because it burns; combustion releases energy. But burnt carbon in local places can cause smog and in very large amounts can change the global climate. Raw carbon blackens miners’ lungs and escapes from containers to form spills and slicks. Carbon enters the energy economy in the hydrocarbon fuels, coal, oil, and gas, as well as wood. In fact, the truly desirable element in these fuels for energy generation is not their carbon (C) but their hydrogen (H).

Wood is made of much cellulose and some lignin. Heated cellulose leaves charcoal, almost pure carbon. Lignin has a complex benzenic structure with an H:C ratio of about 0.5. Combining the pure carbon of cellulose and the 0.5 ratio of lignin, wood with 20% lignin effectively has an H:C ratio of 0.1. Said differently, wood weighs in heavily at ten effective Cs for each H. Coal approaches parity with one or two Cs per H, while oil improves to two H per C, and a molecule of natural gas (methane) is a carbon-trim CH ₄.

The most important single finding from thirty years of energy studies is that that for two hundred years the world has progressively lightened its energy diet by favoring hydrogen atoms over carbon in our hydrocarbon stew (Figure 1). We will and must continue to do so. The increasing density of end-use of energy in cities finally accepts only natural gas, hydrogen, and electricity. Office buildings and homes reject smoking coals or hay.

The spectrum of national achievements also shows how far most of the world economy is from best practice in decarbonization. The present carbon intensity of the Chinese and Indian economies resembles those of America and Europe at the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century.

Engineers must foster the unrelenting though slow ascendance of hydrogen in the energy market. We must squeeze most of the carbon out of the energy system and move, via natural gas, to a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen, fortunately, is the immaterial material. It can be manufactured from something abundant, namely water; it can substitute for most fuels; and its combustion to water vapor does not pollute.

Part of economizing on carbon is economizing on energy more broadly. Widgets work better than behavior modifications. The snake brain resists the carpool but grabs a lighter laptop. Fortunately, efficiency has been gaining in the generation of energy, in its transmission and distribution, and in the innumerable devices that finally consume energy (Figure 2). In fact, the struggle to make the most of our fires dates back at least 750,000 years to the ancient hearths of the Escale cave near Marseilles. A good stove did not emerge until 1744 CE. Benjamin Franklin’s invention proved to be a momentous event for the forests and wood piles of America. The Franklin stove greatly reduced the amount of fuel required. Its widespread diffusion took a hundred years, however, because the American colonials were poor, development of manufactures sluggish, and iron scarce.

Looking globally in 1999, nothing in the energy game has changed, only now the stakes are higher. But we should be encouraged by our inventiveness with the performance of motors and lights. For the next couple of decades, the context indicates that priority and profit will come to those who build a highly efficient methane economy, the next stage of decarbonization.

Landless agriculture

As we must spare carbon while producing our energy, so must we spare land for nature while producing our food. Earth cannot sustain humans if it sustains humans alone. The direction, inevitably, is landless agriculture.

Yields per hectare measure the productivity of land and the efficiency of land use. During the past half-century, ratios of crops to land for the world’s major grains-corn, rice, soybean, and wheat-have climbed fast on all six of the farm continents. Per hectare, world grain yields rose about two percent annually since 1960. The productivity gains have stabilized global cropland since mid-century, mitigating pressure for deforestation in all nations and allowing forests to spread again in many. A cluster of innovations including tractors, seeds, chemicals, and irrigation, joined through timely information flows and better organized markets, raised the yields to feed billions more without clearing new fields.

Fortunately, as Figure 3 shows, the agricultural production frontier remains spacious. On the same area, the average world farmer grows only about 20 percent of the corn of the top Iowa farmer, and the average Iowa farmer lags more than 30 years behind the state-of-the-art of his most productive neighbor. On average the world corn farmer has been making the greatest annual percentage improvement.

High-yield agriculture need not tarnish the land. The key is precision agriculture . This approach to farming relies on technology and information to help the grower use precise amounts of inputs-fertilizer, pesticides, seed, water—exactly where they are needed. Precision agriculture includes grid soil sampling, field mapping, variable rate application, and yield monitoring—tied to global positioning systems. It helps the grower lower costs and improve yields in an environmentally responsible manner. Ohio farmers recently reported using one-third less lime after putting fields on square-foot satellite grids detailing areas that would benefit from fertilizer.

We have had two revolutions in agriculture in this century. The first came from mechanical engineers. The second came from chemical engineers. The next agricultural revolution will come from information engineers, physical and genetic. What do the past and future agricultural revolutions mean for land?

For centuries land cropped expanded faster than population, and cropland per person rose (Figure 4). Fifty years ago farmers stopped plowing up nature. Meanwhile, growth in calories in the world’s food supply has continued to outpace population, especially in poor countries. To produce their present crop of wheat, Indian farmers would need to farm more than three times as much land today as they actually do, if their yields had remained at their 1966 level. By raising yields, Indian wheat farmers have spared nearly 50 million hectares, about the area of Madhya Pradesh or Spain. Let me offer a second comparison: a USA city of 500,000 people in 1994 and a USA city of 500,000 people with the 1994 diet and the yields of 1920. Farming as Americans did 75 years ago while eating as Americans do now would require 4 times as much land for the city, about 450,000 hectares instead of 110,000.

What can we look forward to globally? If during the next 60 to 70 years, the world farmer reaches the average yield of today’s USA corn grower, the ten billion people then likely to live on Earth will need only half of today’s cropland. This will happen if farmers maintain on average the yearly 2% worldwide yield growth of grains achieved since 1960, in other words, if dynamics, social learning, continues as usual. Even if the rate falls in half, an area the size of India, globally, will revert from agriculture to woodland or other uses.

Importantly, a vegetarian diet of 3,000 primary calories per day halves the difficulty or doubles the land spared. However, I trust more in the technical advance of farmers than in behavioral change by eaters.

So the challenge for the next decades in agriculture remains clear: lift yields while minimizing environmental fall out. Use less land.

And lift inhibitions on the imaginations of our food engineers. Let me offer a shocking idea to show how high we might raise limits. Going back to basics on food, we depend on the hydrogen produced by the chlorophyll of plants. With hydrogen, produced by nuclear power plants, for example, a plethora of micro-organisms can cook up the variety of substances in our diet. For decades, microbiologists have produced food by cultivating hydrogenomonas on a diet of H ₂, CO ₂, and a little O ₂. They make nice proteins that taste like hazelnut. A person consumes around 100 watts. A current nuclear power plant has a power of a couple of gigawatts, enough to supply food for a few million people, on perhaps 1000 hectares for the Power Park. So, the nuclear plant can feed 2000 people per hectare. Iowa’s master corn growers feed about 80. So, WITH CURRENT TECHNOLOGY, we can do 25 times better than the best Iowa corn field. And finally decouple food and land.

Conclusion

If behavior and technology do not change, more numerous humans will trample the earth and endanger our own survival. The snake brain in each of us makes me cautious about relying heavily on changes in behavior. In contrast, centuries of extraordinary technical progress give me great confidence that diffusion of our best practices and continuing innovation can advance us much further in decarbonization, landless agriculture, and other cardinal directions for a prosperous, green environment. For engineers and others in the technical enterprise the urgency and prizes for sustaining their contributions could not be higher. Because the human brain does not change, technology must.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Perrin Meyer for assistance.

Figure 1: World primary energy sources have declined in carbon intensity since 1860. The evolution is seen in the ratio of hydrogen (H) to carbon (C) in the world fuel mix, graphed on a logarithmic scale, analyzed as a logistic growth process and plotted in the linear transform of the logistic (S) curve. Progression of the ratio above natural gas (methane, CH ₄) requires production of large amounts of hydrogen fuel with non-fossil energy.

Figure 2: Energy efficiency is a term of modern invention, but the efficiency of energy conversion devices has been increasing for hundreds and probably thousands of years. Improvements in motors and lamps are analyzed here in the linear transform of the logistic (S-shaped) growth process.

Figure 3: The trends of maize yields grown by the winners of the Iowa Master Corn Growers Contest and of average yields of Iowa, World, and Brazilian farmers, and the average annual rise since 1960.

Figure 4: The average cropland per person since about the year 1700. The star shows the small amount of land required by an Iowa Master corn grower to produce the calories needed to sustain a person for a year.

Endnotes:

[1] Technical information and sources for the text and figures are found in papers on-line at phe.rockefeller.edu See, for example, “The Liberation of the Environment,” Jesse H. Ausubel; “Lightening the Tread of Population on the Land: American Examples,” Paul E. Waggoner, Jesse H. Ausubel, and Iddo K. Wernick; and “Energy and Environment: The Light Path,” Jesse H. Ausubel.

[2] Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions, Plenum, New York, 1990.

Evolving efficiencies in our use of resources suggest that technology can restore the environment even as population grows

(NOTE: The color figures are at the end of this document for easier online reading)

Technologies have enabled us to expand our range and transform the earth. In 1909 Peary sledded to the North Pole, and in 1911 Amundsen reached the South. Improved navigational aids and ships that could withstand the pack ice made the poles accessible to men and dogs. Less than a century later we worry about the environmental purity of the polar regions and the ozone that shields them. My fundamental question is whether the technology that has conquered the earth can also spare it. To answer this question, I shall examine secular trends in what technology does with four paramount resources: energy, materials, land and water. I focus on the evolving efficiency of use of these resources. Economists call such resources “factors of production,” along with labor and capital.

Customarily, technology’s relation to environment is considered by evaluating lists of devices and machines: cars, oil tankers, nuclear power stations, windmills, wastewater-treatment plants, spray cans and chain saws. My approach is more basic. I ask whether technology enables us to obtain services more efficiently and, if so, at what rates. The answers indicate the feasibility of greatly diminishing our environmental burdens by increasing the productivity of our resources.

Analysts, eager to assimilate the latest information, live life on the tangent, extrapolating brief fluctuations to eternity. To counter this tendency, I search for stable signals amid the noise of the daily news. The historical analyses shared here, many contributed to an ongoing project at The Rockefeller University on technological trajectories and the human environment, seek the inherent lifetimes of processes of technological development, which can extend generations and centuries. Recognizing and formally analyzing incomplete developmental processes and the rhythmic patterns of processes permits confident prediction.

Identifying secular trends also enables me to frame answers to a second question: what distinguishes the last half-century or so with regard to environment and technology. The years around 1970 marked the maximum rate of growth of human population in modern times. Have we more generally passed a point of inflection in the curve of human development? Finally, what present actions will wave us toward sweet, greener days?

Two basic arguments weigh against technology. One is that technology’s success is self-defeating. Technology makes the human niche elastic. If we solve problems, our population grows and creates further, eventually insurmountable problems. The cardinal case is the conquest of death in developing countries. Public-health measures and modern medicine defeat mortality, while fertility declines at a much slower pace, and so population explodes. Before dosing, I shall consider technology’s relation to population. Population is always the catch.

The second argument contra-technology is the paucity of human wisdom. Technology creates handguns and hydrogen bombs, and these kill. We can use science and technology to provide goods and services for human sustenance and comfort and other purposes worthy for the planet. But technology powers good and evil. Some would feel more comfort with less power. I leave it to others to discuss the cultural controls to assure constructive use of science and technology.

A subordinate, manageable argument is that unanticipated consequences of the introduction of technologies diminish their value. Chlorinated fluorocarbons solved the problem of explosive and inefficient ammonia based refrigerators, but turned out 40 years after their introduction to threaten life’s stratospheric filter. The appropriate response is a feedback system: Assess technologies early in their prospective social penetration, watch them thereafter for surprises and tailor designs to fit changing needs and tastes.

I outline a global picture, with most detail from the United States. For more than a century the United States has on average adopted technologies earliest, diffused them fullest and documented the outcomes. The symptoms and cures show.

Energy

Energy systems extend from the mining of coal through the generation and transmission of electricity to the artificial light that enables the reader to see this page. For environmental technologists, two central questions define the energy system. First, is the efficiency increasing? Second, is the carbon used to deliver energy to the final user declining?

Energy efficiency has been gaining in many segments, probably for thousands of years. Think of all the designs and devices to improve fireplaces and chimneys. Or consider the improvement in motors and lamps (Figure 2). About 1700 the quest began to build efficient engines, at first with steam. Three hundred years have increased the efficiency of generators from 1 to about 50 percent of the apparent limit, the latter achieved by today’s best gas turbines. Fuel cells can advance efficiency to 70 percent. They will require about 50 years to do so, if the socio-technical clock continues to tick at its established rate. In 300 years, physical laws may finally arrest our engine progress.

Whereas centuries measure the struggle to improve generators, lamps brighten with each decade. A new design proposes to bombard sulfur with microwaves. One such bulb the size of a golf ball could purportedly produce the same amount of light as hundreds of high-intensity mercury-vapor lamps, with a quality of light comparable to sunlight. The current 100-year pulse of improvement evident in Figure 2 will surely not extinguish ideas for illumination The next century may reveal quite new ways to see in the dark For example, nightglasses, the mirror image of sunglasses, could make the objects of night visible with a few milliwatts.

Segments of the energy economy have advanced impressively toward local ceilings of 100 percent efficiency. However, modem economies still work far from the limit of system efficiency because system efficiency is multiplicative, not additive. In fact, if we define efficiency as the ratio of the theoretical minimum to the actual energy consumption for the same goods and services, modern economies probably run at less than 5 percent efficiency for the full chain from extracting primary energy to delivery of the service to the final user. So, far from a ceiling, the United States has averaged about 1 percent less energy to produce a good or service each year since about 1800. At that pace of advance, total efficiency will still approach only 15 percent by 2100. Because of some losses difficult to avoid in each link of the chain, the thermodynamic efficiency of the total system in practice could probably never exceed 50 percent. Still, in 1995 we are early in the game.

What about the decarbonization of the energy system? Carbon matters because it blackens lungs, causes air pollution and oil spills and regulates climate. Carbon is also a surrogate for sulfur, heavy metals and other environmental bads that attach to it in the dirty fossil fuels. Carbon enters the energy economy bonded with hydrogen as wood (and other biomass), coal, oil and natural gas. Per unit of energy, wood weighs most heavily in carbon, followed by coal, and then oil, with natural gas following as much the lightest.

One can measure decarbonization in several different ways. The upper graph in Figure 4 shows the changing carbon intensity of primary energy for the world, where tons of carbon are divided by the total energy produced. This perspective shows that the long-term rate of decarbonization of the energy system is about 0.3 percent per year. Plentiful natural gas, efficient turbines and thrifty end-use devices promise more energy delivered with less carbon during the next decades.

Uranium also decarbonizes. At the end of 1993 432 operating nuclear reactors prodded almost 20 percent of the world’s electricity. Even if a fraction of the 48 listed in 1994 as under construction never operate, the remainder assure a continuing nuclear contribution to decarbonization. The radioactive reactor products, which are toxic and also hard and slow to degrade, and potentially powerful explosives, must of course be safely isolated. Solar sources also decarbonize but continue to stumble over obstacles in energy storage and transport.

Consider decarbonization also as the diminishing carbon intensity of the economies of a range of countries. Measured as the ratio of kilograms of carbon to gross domestic product and taking into account fuelwood and other renewable sources of energy, the decarbonization of dozens of nations studied, including Turkey, Thailand and China as well as the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, has advanced almost in parallel. Countries begin at different times from different situations, but once they begin to decarbonize, they advance at about the same rates, and irreversibly, so far. Between 1970 and 1993, even the gas-guzzling United States more than doubled the ratio of its income to carbon use, decarbonizing about 3 percent per year. The spectrum of achievement, from about 3 kilograms of carbon per dollar of output in China to less than 0.2 in Japan and France, shows the distance most of the world economy stands from leading practice. The carbon intensity of the Chinese and Indian economies resembles the Japanese, American and European at the outset of industrialization in the 19^th century.

Fundamentally, decarbonization tracks a technological competition between combustible elements. In the hydrocarbons, the truly desirable element for energy generation is not the carbon but the hydrocarbon. The evolution of the atomic ration of hydrogen to carbon in the world fuel mix displays the gradual and unrelenting penetration of the energy market by the number one element of the periodic table (Figure 4, bottom).

All these analyses imply that during the next 100 years the human economy will clear most of the carbon from its system and move, via natural gas, to a hydrogen metabolism, Hydrogen, fortunately, is the immaterial material. It can be manufactured from something abundant, namely water, it can substitute for most solid, liquid and gaseous fuels in use, and the product of its combustion, water vapor, does not pollute. The next decades will see a vigorous growth in the hydrogen industry. Nightly nuclear heat seeking a market outlet can efficiently steam-reform natural gas into hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the latter permanently reinjected into the gas fields from whence it came. Later, heat, nuclear or solar, can neatly decompose water.

Hydrogen, of course, requires a partner, electricity, to provide action at a distance in a clean energy system. Since Edison began the commercial industry in the 1880s, the electrical system has grown in two neat pulses each lasting about 50 years, synchronized with long cycles of economic growth. A new pulse of growth should soon begin, in which electricity powers not only more information products but also more of the transport system, using linear motors. The magnetically levitated train soon to operate between Hamburg-Berlin inaugurates the way.

Combining analyses of efficiency and decarbonization startles many with the fact that national energy systems ranging from India to South Korea to France are heading in the right direction, toward micro-emissions. The way is long, but we are on the light path.

Land

Of all human activities, agriculture transforms the environment most widely. Corps and pasture occupy at least one-fifth the land surface, at least ten times as much as cities, towns and roads. Agriculture has consumed forests, drained wetlands, erased habitats and favored some plants over others in fierce green warfare. Farms, of course, also feed us.

Yields per hectare measure the productivity of land and the efficiency of land use. To 1940, yields per hectare of most crops advanced little, and more mouths required more land to feed them. During the past half century, ratios of crop to land for the world’s major grains-maize, rice, soybean and wheat have climbed, fast and globally. The rise in wheat in India, Egypt, Ireland and the U.S. shows the inception and the spread of the trend (Figure 6, top).

A cluster of innovations including tractors, seeds, chemicals and irrigation, joined through timely information flows and better organized markets, raised yields to feed billions more without clearing new fields. In fact, since mid-century global cropland has remained stable. Expansion in developing countries has offset contraction in Europe and North America.

As the century draws to a close, the earth is at a historic turning point in land use. The continuing diffusion of high yields and efficient land use permits the absolute reversal of the destruction of nature that has occurred for many centuries.

Societies chronically fear exhaustion of the potential to increase food supply. In reality, the agricultural production frontier is still spacious, even without invoking the engineering of plants with new molecular techniques. For many decades in Iowa, while yields have risen steadily, the average corn grower has managed only half the yield of the Iowa master grower, and the world grows only about 20 percent of the top Iowa farmer. The production ratio of the performers has not changed much since 1960. In Iowa the average performer lags more than 30 years behind the state of the art.

Even where diffusion proceeds at a moderate pace, the effects accumulate dramatically. In India, for example, by raising wheat yields farmers spared 42 million hectares, about the size of Sweden or California, if we compare the land actually harvested in 1991 with the land the farmers would have harvested at 1961-66 yield for the actual production. Globally, the land spared since 1960 by raising yields of grain, which make up more than half of all calories, equals the Amazon basin (Figure 6, bottom).

A single-minded concentration on land raises concern that side effects will harm the nature we seek to preserve. In fact, land requires little more clearing, tilling and cultivating for high yields than for low ones. Protecting lush foliage needs little more pesticide and usually less herbicide than sparse foliage. Luxuriant foliage also protects soil better from erosion. The law of diminishing returns applies to fertilizers, which farmers tend to use abundantly. In many areas yield gains now come by optimizing inputs such as nitrogen and phosphorus in step and lowering total application. In sum, careful management of the land we do use is likely to diminish the total fallout from food production. Most fallout is coextensive with land used.

What is a reasonable outlook for the land cropped for future population? Future calories per capita will likely lie between the 3,000 per day of a vegetarian diet and the 6,000 that include meat (counting dietary calories plus the calories fed to food and draft animals and not recovered in milk, meet and so on). Let us consider, as Paul Waggoner has done (Waggoner 1994) how much cropland a population of 10 billion, almost twice the present, could spare for wilderness or other purposes with that range of calories per capita. If farmers fail to raise global average yields from the present 2 tons grain equivalent per hectare, people will have to lower their daily portions to 3,000 calories to avoid further land clearing. But Irish wheat and American corn now average 8 tons per hectare. If farmers can lift the global average to 5,10 billion people on average can enjoy the diet 6,000 calories bring, and spare a quarter of the present 1.4 billion hectares of cropland. The quarter spared is about twice the size of Alaska. If future farmland on average yielded today’s U.S. corn, 10 billion eating an American diet could allow cropland the area of Australia to revert to wilderness.

Per hectare, annual world grain yields in fact rose 2.15 percent 1960-1994. If dynamics continue as usual, farmers will grow 8 tons per hectare around 2060, at the end of the decade in which the United Nations projects population to reach 10 billion From the Great Plains of America to the Great Plains of China, reversion of farms and ranches to woods and grasses will be a spreading, major environmental feature of the next decades, and beyond. And governments will avidly seek rationales to subsidize agriculture to keep it from contracting more rapidly than culture will allow.

Materials

We can reliably project more efficient energy, decarbonization and effectively landless agriculture. What about a companion dematerialization? I will define dematerialization primarily as the decline over time in weight of materials used to perform a given economic function.

Dematerialization would matter enormously for the environment. Excluding water and oxygen, in 1990 each American mobilized on average about 50 kilograms per day. Reducing the materials intensity of the economy could preserve landscapes and natural resources, lessen garbage and reduce human exposures to hazardous materials.

Over time new materials substitute for old. Successful new materials usually show improved properties per ton, thus leading to a lower intensity of use for a given task The idea is as old as the epochal succession from stone to bronze to iron. Our century has witnessed the relative decline of wood and the traditional metals and the rise of aluminum and especially plastics (Figure 7, top).

Modern examples of dematerialization abound. Since the early 19th century, the ratio of weight to power in industrial boilers has decreased almost 100 times. Within the steel industry, powder metallurgy, thin casting, ion-beam implantation and directional solidification as well as drop and cold forging have allowed savings up to 50 percent of material inputs in a few decades. In the 1970s a mundane invention, the radial tire, directly lowered weight and material by one-quarter below the bias-ply tires they replaced. An unexpected and bigger gain in efficiency came from the doubling of tire life by radials, so halving the use of material (and the piles of tire carcasses blighting landscapes and breeding mosquitoes). Lightweight optical fibers with 30 to 40 times the carrying capacity of conventional wiring and invulnerability to electromagnetic interference are ousting copper in many segments of the telecommunications infrastructure. The development of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the 1960s eliminated sugar from industrial uses in the United States. HFCS has five times sugar’s sweetening power on a unit-weight basis, with a proportional impact on agricultural land use.

Certainly many products–for example, cars, computers and containers–have become lighter and often smaller. Compact discs selling for less than $100 now contain 90 million home phone numbers of Americans, equivalent to the content of telephone books once costing $60,000 and weighing 5 tons. At midcentury, glass bottles dominated. In 1953 the first steel soft-drink can was marketed. Cans of aluminum, one-third the density of steel, entered the scene a decade later and by 1986 garnered more than 90 percent of the beer and soft-drink market. Between 1973 and 1992 the aluminum can itself lightened 25 percent. In 1976 polyethylene terephthalate resins began to win a large share of the market, especially for large containers previously made of glass.

Recycling, of course, diminishes the demand for primary materials and may thus be considered a form of dematerialization. No longer limited to resource-poor individuals and regions, during the past couple of decades recycling has regained standing as a generalized social practice in the U.S. and other societies with huge material appetites.

Difficulties arise in the more complex “new materials society” in which the premium lies on sophisticated materials and their applications. Alloys and composites with attractive structural properties can be hard to separate and recycle. Popular materials can be lighter but bulkier or more toxic. Reuse of plastics may be less economical than burning them (cleanly) for fuel or otherwise extracting their chemical energy. Most important, economic and population growth has multiplied the volume of products and objects. Thus, total wastes have tended to increase while declining per unit of economic activity (Figure 7, bottom).

By weight, construction materials make up about 40 percent of the materials Americans consume and thus form a significant metric. Although absolute use of physical-structure materials by weight has fluctuated, consumption per unit of economic activity has trended downward since 1970. Because energy materials such as petroleum constitute another 40 percent of our materials diet, increases in energy efficiency could also markedly dematerialize economies.

As yet, trends with respect to dematerialization are equivocal. Better and more complete data on materialization and dematerialization over long periods for the United States and the rest of the world need to be assembled and analyzed. Moreover, the heterogeneity of purpose of materials will never permit the performance of the materials sector to be summarized as simply as kilowatts and carbon can summarize energy or tons per hectare summarize land. A kilogram of iron does not compare with one of arsenic. But the promise dearly exists for what Robert Frosch, I and our colleagues call a superior “industrial ecology,” in which the materials intensity of the economy declines, wastes lessen and the wastes that are created become nutritious in new industrial food webs.

Water

We can get more value from each unit of energy, land and material. Can we squeeze more from a drop of water?

Total per capita water withdrawals quadrupled in the United States between 1900 and 1970, and overall personal consumption increased by one-third between just 1960 and the early 1970s (Figure 9). However, since 1975, per capita water use has fallen appreciably, at an annual rate of 1.3 percent. Absolute water withdrawals peaked about 1980.

Industry, alert to technology as well as costs, exemplifies the progress, although it consumes a small fraction of total water. Total industrial water withdrawals plateaued a decade earlier than total U.S. withdrawals and have dropped by one-third, more steeply than the total. More interesting, industrial withdrawals per unit of GNP (in 1982 dollars) have dropped steadily since 1940, when 14 gallons of water flowed into each dollar of output. Now the flow is less than 3 gallons per dollar. The steep decline taps many sectors, including chemicals, paper, petroleum refining, steel and food processing. After adjusting for production levels, not only intake but discharges per unit of production are perhaps one-fifth of what they were 50 years ago.

In manufacturing, technology as well as law and economics have favored frugal water use. More efficient use of heat and water usually go together, through better heat exchangers and the recirculation of cooling water. Legislation, such as the U.S. Clean Water Act of 1972, encouraged reduction of discharges and recycling and conservation as well as shifts in relative prices. Although water treatment may cost only about 5 percent of production, wastewater-treatment systems are expensive capital investments.

Despite the gains, the United States is far from most efficient practice. Water withdrawals for all users in the countries making up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development range tenfold, with the U.S. and Canada the highest. Allowing for differences in major uses (irrigation, electrical cooling, industry, public water supply), large opportunities for reductions remain. In the late 1980s over 90 percent of measured U.S. hazardous wastes were still wastewaters.

In the long run, with much higher thermodynamic efficiency for all processes, removing impurities to recycle water will require small amounts of energy. Dialytic membranes open the way to such efficient purification systems. Because hydrogen will be, with electricity, the main energy carrier, its combustion (if from seawater) may eventually provide another important source of fresh water, perhaps 200 liters per person per day at the level of final consumers, about one-fourth the current withdrawal in water-prudent societies such as Denmark. Importantly, as agriculture contracts spatially and irrigates more frugally; its water demand will shrink.

Population

l have demonstrated a revolution in factor productivity, whether energy, land, materials or water. The game to get more from less is old. In energy, global progress is documented for centuries. With land, the Chinese started long ago, but most of the world began only about 1940. 1940 also appears to have marked a crossing point for new materials. In water, U.S. industry joined the search about 1940, and the population more generally about 1970.

The catch for homo faber is that our technology not only spares resources but also expands our niche. Technology further adds to population by increasing longevity and decreasing mortality. Although fertility has also declined greatly; the role of new birth-control technologies in the decline has been small. Feedbacks may well also occur between population growth and density on the one hand and invention and innovation on the other.

Population provides a multiplier that determines total consumption. So far I have stressed ratios, not absolutes.

To see graphically how technology can change carrying capacity, consider the population history of Japan. From the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate about 1600 Japan insulated itself from outside technology until 1854 when American Commodore Matthew Perry reopened trade. In 1868 the Meiji restoration lessened the isolationist policy of the former imperial party, and Japan entered a period of great borrowing from the Occident. As evident in Figure 10, Japanese population growth since 1100 sorts perfectly into two pulses of growth. Tokugawa technology (and culture) and its medieval predecessors accommodated a gradual addition of 28 million over about five centuries to Japan’s earlier population of about 5 million. Meiji and Western technology keyed the opening of the niche to another 100 million or so in one century.

Reasoning about the link between technology and carrying capacity from the Japanese case, my colleague Perrin Meyer and I have speculated about the growth of the population of the U.S. We hypothesize a sequence of overlapping pulses of population growth centered on times of rapid economic expansion, the midpoints of tentatively identified 50-yearlong waves of economic growth. Technological innovations affecting resources, processes and products cluster in each economic wave and expand carrying capacity. The first pulse of population growth associates with wood, iron, steam, canals, and wool and cotton textiles; the second with coal, steel, railways, telegraphy and early electrification, and the third with oil, plastics, autos, widespread electrification, telephony, computers and pharmaceuticals. The fourth, emerging pulse revolves around natural gas, aviation and a host of information and molecular technologies. Daring to extrapolate our reasoning with a “superlogistic” curve using the center points of the growth pulses as the base points, we find the U.S. population saturating around 400 million in 2100, a total consistent with projections made by conventional demographic methods.

Clearly the limits to human numbers keep shifting. In any case, analysis of historic population data shows that the global rate of growth peaked at about 2.1 percent per year around 1970, as noted near the outset of this article. Fertility rates, the key factor, have been falling in most nations and are below the levels needed to replace current population in Europe and Japan. The difficulty is that we have no logic to predict future fertility, and simply fitting an equation, as we did for the U.S., is chancy. Globally, the pervasive economic and social effects of the information revolution could allow the increase in human numbers to 15 or 50 or 100 billion, or influence the fertile to choose not to reproduce. The question of future population appears quite open, as reflected in the spray of projections.

Conclusion

Population frames the challenge for green technologists. To maintain current levels of cleanliness with the 50 percent increase in population I think likely for the United States and the current level and kind of economic activity, emissions per unit of activity would need to drop by one-third. That is an easy target. An improvement of 1.5 percent per year reaches the target by 2020, 80 years early.

The challenge is much harder taking into account growing consumption. If economic activity doubles per capita roughly every 30 years, as it has since about 1800 in the industrialized countries, the result is an eightfold increase by 2100. Multiplied by population, the United States would have 12 times today’s emissions and demands on resources, other things being equal. This scenario of the “dirty dozen” requires micro- or zero emissions per unit of economic activity to maintain or enhance environmental quality In other words, Americans need to clean processes by more than one order of magnitude. More reassuringly, the annual cleaning need be about 2.5 percent.

In Europe and Japan population is stable or even shrinking, easing the magnitude of their environ mental challenges. The rest of the world, where most people live, faces the twin pressures of enlarging economies and populations. So in absolute terms the technical gains must be enormous.

But we have seen the outlines of how the gains can be made. In the long run, we need a smoke free system of generating hydrogen and electricity that is highly efficient from generator to consumer, food decoupled from acreage, materials smartly designed and selected for their uses and recycled, and carefully channeled water. In short, we need a lean, dry, light economy.

In truth, I exaggerate the challenge. With respect to consumption, multiplying income will not cause an American to eat twice as much as today in 2020 or eight times more in 2100, and even a mouth moving today from Lima to Los Angeles only triples its original caloric intake. With respect to production, history shows that the economy can grow from epoch to epoch only according to a new industrial paradigm, not by inflating the old. High environmental performance forms an integral part of the modern paradigm of total quality. The past half-century signals the preferred directions: the changeover from oil to gas, the contraction of crops in favor of land for nature, the development of a new ecology of materials use in industry, and diffusion of more efficient water use to farmers and residents as well as industries.

Economists always worry about trading off benefits in one area for costs in another. Hearteningly, we have seen that in general efficiency in energy favors efficiency in materials; efficiency in materials favors efficiency in land; efficiency in land favors efficiency in water; and efficiency in water favors efficiency in energy. The technologies that will thrive, such as electricity, will concert higher resource productivity. Prone to fail is a technology, such as biomass farming for energy, which brings into conflict the goal to spare land with the goal to spare carbon.

Some worry that the supply of a fifth major resource, ingenuity, will run short. But nowhere do averages appear near the frontier of current best practice. Simply diffusing what we know can bring gains for several decades. Moreover, science and technology are young. Aggressively organized research and development (R&D) is another innovation of the past 50 years. Many industries have systematized their search for better practice (“endogenized R&D” in the economics jargon) and have the productivity gains to show for it. Other industries, including much of the service sector which now forms the bulk of modern economies, and the enlarging public and non-profit sectors have improved slowly. Overall, society hardly glimpses the theoretical limits of performance.

Inevitably, sectors and societies will advance at unequal pace. We will continue to have laggards as well as pioneers. Problems will arise from the distribution of goods, the actions and interactions of bads, shocking and poorly tailored innovations, and social traps such as the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” which today sadly entangles the wild stocks of fish. Yet the long history of technical progress and its reach into more sectors during recent decades encourage. Perhaps the first Earth Day in 1970 was an inflection point.

Policy can interfere wastefully with dynamics-as-usual, where they are benign. For example, decarbonization mandates the phasing out of the coal industry worldwide over the next decades; the political system might prudently assist those who lose their livelihoods, but not with dollars for actual coal. Wise policy favors science, experimentation and fluidity, while addressing inequity and insecurity and insuring against catastrophe.

Families named Smith, Cooper, and Miller people our nation because until not long ago most of us beat metal, bent casks, and ground grain. Now few workers hold such jobs. So far, except in video, we are not named Programmer, Sub-Micron, and Genesplicer. We easily forget how much the modem world has changed and yet how early our day is. We forget the power of compounding our technical progress, even at one or two percent per year. Knowledge can grow faster than population and provide abundant green goods and services. The message from history is that technology, wisely used, can spare the earth. You can click on it.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Arnold Grübler, Raphael Kasper, Robert Kates, Alan McGowan, Perrin Meyer, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Donald Rogich, Paul Waggoner and Iddo Wernick.

FIGURES

Figure 1. Advances in technology enable people to obtain services more efficiently. Greater efficiency in our use of energy, materials, land and water could help diminish the burdens people place on the environment. One possible future is captured by the vision of the “buffalo commons”: jobs would concentrate in urban areas (as, for example, at busy Dallas-Forth Worth Airport, above, where 37,000 people work) as vast lands in the interior of North America return to a wild state. Restoration of tall grass prairie in the Midwest, as at the Konza Prairie Research Natural Area in Kansas (also above), has been guided by conservation organizations and will accelerated as highly productive agriculture frees additional land. (Above photograph courtesy of Dallas Fort Worth Airport.)

Figure 2. Energy efficiency is a tern of modern invention, but the efficiency of energy-conversion technologies has been increasing for hundreds and probably thousands of years. Improvements in motors and lamps are analyzed here as a logistic (sigmoid) growth process with a linear transform that normalizes the data to ease comparison. (From Ausubel and Marchetti, in press.)

Figure 3. Decarbonization of the world’s energy mix moves the economy from dependence on carbon-heavy fuels, responsible for black lung, oil spills and large releases of climate-changing greenhouse gases. A power station in Bitterfeld, Germany (kft), burned lignite, or “brown coal,” contributing to Eastern Europe’s severe air-pollution problem. The author envisions a cleaner energy economy based on hydrogen, whose combustion produces water vapor. At right a California plant produces hydrogen by steam reforming of natural gas. (Right photograph courtesy of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.)

Figure 4. World primary energy sources have declined in carbon intensity since 1860. The evolution is seen in the ratio of hydrogen (H) to carbon © in the world fuel mix, graphed on a logarithmic scale, analyzed as a logistic growth process and plotted in the linear transform of the logistic curve (left). After Marchetti 1985). Wood has an effective hydrogen-to-carbon ratio of 0.1, coal 1, oil 2, and natural gas 4. Progession of the ratio above natural gas (methane, CH₄) requires production of large amounts of hydrogen fuel without fossil energy. Carbon intensity can also be calculated as the ratio of the sum of the carbon content of all fuels to the sum of the energy content of all primary energy sources (right). For such a calculation carbon emission in tons per kilowatt-year average: wood, 0.84, coal, 0.73; oil 0.55; and gas, 0.44. (From Nakicenovic, in press).

Figure 5. Much American land cleared by early settlers has reverted to nature as a result of changes closely related to technological progress and the increasing ability to grow more crops per acre. As better transport and machines made farming the rich soils of the Midwest highly profitable, New England farmers abandoned the rocky fields they had cleared. Dioramas on display at the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., document the return of New England to forest. This pair shows the landscape around Petersham in 1830, at the height of cultivation, and a century later, when volunteer pines and the maturing hardwoods that followed them filled the landscape. (Photographs courtesy of the Fisher Museum at Harvard Forest.)

Figure 6. Rising yields of wheat on four continents (top) illustrate progress in agricultural productivity. Improved yields have allowed the global area actually harvested for grain to remain stable at around 600 million hectares (bottom). “Land spared” is the amount of land that would have been needed to produce actual grain crops with the 1960 average yield. (Data from Mitchell 1980, Yearbooks of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “PS&D View,” a database.)

Figure 7. Countervailing trends can be detected in the use of materials in the US. In the top graph, production data are divided by the Gross National Product in constant (1982) dollars and normalized to 1940. The use of heavy materials such as steel has been supplanted in the economy by lighter materials, especially plastics. Since 1970 even aluminum and the agricultural minerals, phosphates and potash, have declined in relative use. Municipal solid-waste generation, however, has grown steadily on a per capita basis. In relation to GNP, solid-waste generation dropped 1960-19185 but climbed again recently. (From Wernick et al., in press. Data from U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975 and 1993; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1992.)

Figure 8. Auto manaufacturing today uses plastics and lightweight metals, exemplifying dematerialization, the trend toward higher materials and products per unit of economic activity. A Chrysler demonstration car, the Neon Lite, includes a lightweight instrument panel made of magnesium (left). Yet total wastes have risen in the U.S. with economic and population growth. At right, crushed automobiles pile high at a Philadelphia scrap-metal reclamation center. (Left photograph courtesy of Chrysler Corporation.)

Figure 9. Total per capita water withdrawals quadrupled in the U.S. between 1900 and 1970, and overall personal consumption (right) increased by one-third between 1960 and the early 1970s. Since 1975, however, per capita water use has fallen annually 1.3 percent. Industrial withdrawals per unit of GNP have dropped steadily since 1940, encouraged by technology as well as law and economics. Data from other nations show that the U.S. is far from most efficient practice. (Data from U.S. Bureau of the Census 1975 and 1993.)

Figure 10. History of Japanese population growth shows how technology changes carrying capacity. Under the Tokugawa Shogunate from about 1600 to 1854, Japan insulated itself from outside technology. The right-hand graph decomposes the population data into a pair of logistic growth pulses in linear form. The pulse the Tokugawa Shoguns took to its culmination was centered in 1537, required 516 years to grow from 10 percent to 90 percent of its extent, and saturated at 28 million people (on top of a pre-existing level of 5 million). The Meiji pulse, centered in 1950, required 95 years, and is saturating now with an addition of 103 million. (Meyer 1994. Data from Tsuneta Yano Memorial Society 1993 and Taeuber 1958.)

Figure 11. Growing consumption raises the challenge of saving resources through technology. Since about 1800 in industrialized countries, economic activity has doubled per capita roughly every 30 years. The contrast between consumption in developed and developing countries is illustrated by the “global family portrait” developed by the Material World project, which photographed typical families with their possessions around the world. Shown here are the Skeen family of Pearland, Texas, and the Yadev family of Ahraura, India. (From Material World, Sierra Club Books 1994.)

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Jesse H. Ausubel is director of the Program for the Human Environment and Senior Research Associate at The Rockefeller University and a program officer of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York City. From 1977 to 1988, he was associated with the National Academy complex in Washington as a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, then as a staff officer with the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and finally as director of programs for the National Academy of Engineering, where he developed and oversaw studies on the performance of technology-intensive sectors of U.S. industry and on the diffusion and globalization of technology. In recent years, he has helped originate industrial ecology, the study of the networks of flows of materials and energy in industry. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, Ausubel served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board. Address: Program for the Human Environment, The Rockefeller University, 1230 York Avenue, Box 234, New York, NY 10021-6399. Internet: phe@mail.rockefeller.edu.

I. Introduction and Definitions

Laborers have sought to shrink hours of work since time immemorial. Farm machines and external energy inputs to agriculture, culminating in the cheap and dependable tractor, provided the big break (Marchetti, 1979). With these, 80 percent or more of the population could live decoupled from the fields and move to town. As it turned out, the urban jobs to which people migrated initially demanded more time on an annual basis than the farm jobs.

Work time in the early period of industrialization increased dramatically, up to 14-16 hours per day (Nowotny, 1989). The factory schedule extended the peak periods of agriculture, such as the harvest, to an all-year norm in early industries, such as textiles. At the same time, a qualitative transformation, in particular, continuous monetary evaluation of work time, occurred in the transition to industrial time (Hareven, 1982).

With the increasing monetization of the economy, strengthening of government statistical offices, more systematic tax collection, and rise of labor movements, estimation of hours of paid work becomes possible for many countries in the middle to late nineteenth century. For well-documented industries such as manufacturing, railroads, and coal mining, the estimates appear accurate. Jones (1963) discusses in detail the methods used to make these estimates. We have not been able to locate reliable, consistent, continuous time series data on work time in agriculture and industry prior to the 1850s.[1]

Work time in this paper refers to the number of hours a person engages in contracted and compensated work, whether aggregated for a week, year, or lifetime. The work time data to be presented and discussed cover only this regular salaried or compensated work and include both part-time and full-time jobs. They omit paid vacations, holidays, and sick leave, which are included in the concept of total time paid for, a complementary series published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and similar offices. Neither do the work time data cover housework or unpaid voluntary work, which we will refer to as unpaid labor time. Total socially obligatory activities embrace formal paid work as well as unpaid, informal work, child care and housework, and voluntary activities. We will refer to the combination of work time and unpaid labor time as total labor time. In contrast, free time may be allocated to various other activities, including leisure. The combination of unpaid labor time and free time is referred to here as non-work.

The most complete and consistent long time series on work time we have found are for the United Kingdom (Armstrong, 1984; Matthews et al., 1982; Williams, 1983), so we rely heavily on these. Moreover, the UK’s long history of industrialization and leading position over much of this period make it an especially interesting subject of study.

The plan of the paper is as follows. First, we analyze the quantitative trends in work time in the United Kingdom and other industrialized nations, then we compare the changing shares of life hours allocated to work and non-work, next we examine total labor and free time, and finally we discuss causes and consequences of the trends. We make gender as well as international comparisons. The fundamental fact, as we shall see, is that lifetime hours at work diminish, both absolutely and relatively.

II. Reductions in Work Time: The UK

Total life hours of work are the product of years in a career, weeks worked per year, and hours worked per week. We will discuss these three variables in turn for men, women, and then the total labor force.

When the data begin in 1856, a career for a UK male averaged about 47 years (Figure 1). Before education became mandatory, work began young, often around 10, and healthy men labored until they died. Armstrong (1984) estimated that careers for male workers lasted as long as 55 years for the surviving cohort. However, few lived to experience the natural end of such a long working career, so on average the duration was much shorter.[2] At age 10 males expected only about 48 more years of life, and at age 20 about 40 more years. With a total life span of less than 60 years, few felt the need for pensions. The average male career lengthened to 52 years in the 1930s, as a result of increased life expectancy, and has shortened since. The current duration of the average male work career is practically unchanged from the middle of the 19th century.

Table 1. Changes in Lifetime Hours at Work UK 1856-1981 (in hours).

Measure	Men	Women
	1856-1931	1931-1981	1856-1981	1856-1931	1931-1981	1856-1981
“Working Less”1	-36,760	-12,497	-49,257	-18,845	-16,698	-35,543
“More holidays”2	-1,744	-8,534	-10,278	-720	-3,280	-4,000
Shorter/Longer Work career3	+11,674	-13,779	-2,105	-2,675	+19,268	+16,593
TOTAL	-26,830	-34,810	-61,640	-22,240	-710	-22,950

¹Changes in hours worked per week (lower values for women due to their shorter work career).
²Changes in weeks worked per year (lower values for women due to their shorter work career).
³Changes in years worked.

Lifetime Work Hours (1,000)

	1856	1931	1981
Men	149.7	122.9	88.0
Women	62.8	40.5	39.8

Vacations, holidays, and other reductions to weeks worked per year gradually increased from less than 2 to about 6 weeks between 1856-1981. Decreases in the number of weeks worked per year amount to about 17% of the total reduction in work time for UK males over this period (Table 1). More dramatically, the average weekly work time dropped by one-third from 63 to fewer than 42 hours between 1856-1981. Changes were both gradual and discontinuous, illustrating the importance of institutional and legal forces in the regulation of working hours.

Women in the United Kingdom, like men, work fewer hours per week and also enjoy more vacation, but notably, are lengthening their careers (Figure 2). Prior to World War II, the length of female careers averaged under 20 years. In 1950 the average female career began stretching and has now reached 30 years. The average female work week of some 29 hours in 1981 is 30 percent lower than for male workers due to the significant share of part-time jobs of women.

The average length of a career for the entire male and female UK work force has changed little (Figure 3). During more than a century 40 years remain the reference point. Reductions in career length of male workers have balanced corresponding increases in female participation rates and career lengths. The stable duration of a career sharply contrasts the strong decline in hours worked during the average career.[3]

Simple arithmetic on the data of Figures 1 and 2 yields estimates of life hours at work. Stable, long trends emerge (Figure 4). Lifetime hours at salaried work have been reduced for males by 42%, from 150 to 88 thousand hours, and for females by 37%, from 63 to 40 thousand hours. For women, most of the reduction came prior to 1931. Because 1931 was the nadir of an economic depression which brought high unemployment and restructuring of the labor force, we somewhat arbitrarily choose that year as the hinge to break the analysis into greater detail (Table 1). Since then, women’s lifetime work hours have shrunk only around 700 hours. The reductions from shorter work days and weeks as well as longer vacation periods have been almost offset by the rise in average female career length.

For the whole work force, the average per capita reduction in lifetime hours at work between 1856-1981 amounted to about 55 thousand hours, from 124 to 69 thousand hours. We have no information on changes in the variance or on subpopulations within the work force other than by gender. Our data and analysis are also limited to averages for the working population that may be quite different from what individuals would experience over their lifetime. We have not been able to identify similar long term data sets that would allow to follow many successive generations or age cohorts over time.

Extrapolating a linear trend would suggest that gradually both men and women will work less: in the year 2050 women possibly 30 and men about 70 thousand hours during a lifetime.[4] The hours worked by women and men seem to converge slowly, reducing the gender gap between male and female work roles in society.

In fact, when the data on work careers for women and men are examined together, women appear to be gradually substituting for men in the labor force (Figure 3). While in the middle of the 19th century some 30 percent of the work force was female, their share has increased to about 40 percent at present. This increase, together with the lengthening of female careers since 1950, multiplies the share of labor by women in the UK workplace when calculated over the entire work career period. The female share of career-years doubled from about 15% in 1856 to 30% in 1981.

If we hold constant at the 1980 value the length of the male and female careers at 46 and 30 years, work weeks at 46 per year for both genders, and female participation in the work force at 40%, and speculate that the trends of Figure 4 continue into the future, projected lifetime hours in 2050 would translate to a 33 hour workweek for men and a 22 hour workweek for women, or 27 hours for both men and women. Clearly, all the variables can change. As in the past their evolution will be much more discontinuous than suggested by a smooth trend line. We present this scenario because the duration of the workweek is probably most easily appreciated.

Consider briefly reasons for the steady reductions of life hours of paid work. Social scientists have long sought explanations for changes in work time. In A Theory of Wages, Douglas (1934) saw reduction in hours of work as an outcome of decisions by workers when rates of pay have increased. Workers choose to divide the benefits of productivity gains between additional income and leisure. Douglas also viewed reduction in years spent in the labor force as a consequence of higher family incomes and government expenditures on pensions. Owen (1978, 1979) reviewed and extended the economic argument, exploring how entrepreneurs in a competitive market will try to minimize their labor costs by seeking the hours schedule that will attract the best labor at the cheapest cost. He argued that changed preferences of employees will induce employers to shorten hours of work, all to minimize labor cost. Several economic studies pertain at the level of the household (e.g., Ghez and Becker, 1975; (Becker, 1976). Sociologists such as Dumazedier (1989) have emphasized the role of permanent scientific revolutions enabling workers to produce more in less time. The relative power of different social classes and groups then distributes the time thus generated, along with the wealth produced, according to historians such as Thompson (1967).

One might summarize by saying that several plausible theories contend to explain declines in working time, but difficulties also persist with their applications. From a phenomenological point of view, economists are hard-pressed to explain why the propensity for reducing work would persist over more than 100 years and a wide range of incomes. The market economics also do not explain adequately the similar trends we document later in nations where labor markets have been tightly controlled by government. Moreover, some empirical findings show that higher wages increase rather than decrease hours of work (National Commission for Manpower Policy, 1978). Among managers and professionals, evidence is mixed that higher wages reduce work hours (Harriman, 1982). Schor (1991) finds that annual hours of fully employed Americans increased modestly between 1969-1987. Other challenges arise in explaining the differing behavior of men and women. Can a pure economic argument explain the discontinuity that occurred in female work careers in the United Kingdom in the 1950s? There is also a question of heterogeneity. Aggregate data tend to mask large differences within the working population and also between generations as illustrated in the different life biographies of different birth cohorts (cf. Blossfeld et al., 1989, and Mayer, 1990). We agree with Sharp (1981) and Juster and Stafford (1991) that the economics of time are little studied and poorly understood. Common to the contending theories are the inexorable forces of technological change, as remarked by Leontieff (1978), a point to which we shall return.

III. Reductions in Work Time: International Comparisons

Should we generalize from the case of the United Kingdom to other countries? Although long time series data on lifetime work hours are unavailable, data on annual average hours worked[5] are available for numerous countries. Trends in annual hours worked should be revealing in view of the observed stability of the length of the work career. Szalai et al. (1972) and Blyton (1985) further reassure us by showing many similarities in time budgets in dozens of countries.

Until about 1930, reductions in annual per capita work time were similar in the industrialized countries, as shown in Table 2 and Figure 5. Thereafter, North America and Europe made larger downward adjustments in work time than Japan, with a re-convergence as well. Since the mid-1980s the decline in working hours appears to have slowed down, even reversed in some countries (Marchand, 1992). This has certainly been an additional factor accentuating the unemployment problems in a number of countries.Table 2. International Comparison of Hours Worked (effectively)⁵ per Person Per Year
(Source of Data: Maddison, 1991).

YEAR	FRANCE	FRG	UK	USA	JAPAN	RATIO OF JAPAN/USA
1870	2,945	2,941	2,984	2,964	2,945	0.99
1890	2,770	2,765	2,807	2,789	2,770	0.99
1913	2,588	2,584	2,624	2,605	2,588	0.99
1929	2,297	2,284	2,286	2,342	2,364	1.01
1938	1,848	2,316	2,267	2,062	2,361	1.15
1950	1,926	2,316	1,958	1,867	2,166	1.16
1960	1,919	2,081	1,913	1,795	2,318	1.29
1973	1,771	1,804	1,688	1,717	2,093	1.22
1987	1,543	1,620	1,557	1,608	2,020	1.26

It is interesting to note that between about 1930 and 1960, Japan largely resisted reductions in work.[6] Thus, the hours Japanese now work are shifted several decades compared to other industrialized countries. The Japanese work today some 400 hours per year longer than, for instance, Americans and approximately as long as in other industrial countries before mid-century.[7]

International comparisons of competitiveness often neglect the effect longer work time may have on Japanese economic performance. Surely the Japanese spending much more time at work profoundly affects production and consumption, savings, and firm organization. In terms of the dichotomy between production and consumption, the Japanese have chosen to stay in the workplace to support consumption abroad of automobiles, consumer electronics, and other goods. As seen below, a more complicated picture emerges when consideration is given not only to formal, contracted work, but also to other, primarily domestic types of labor activities. The fact that the Japanese work more does not necessarily imply that they enjoy less free time.

IV. Work Time versus Non-Work Time

Formal work is one aspect of social life. Obviously, if work time shrinks, the times of life that are not part of the formal work contract expand. During high unemployment in Western Europe in the early 1980s, experts in social research commented:

The formalized work contract has historically become the central issue in industrialized countries. It does not only regulate the standard of life, but is also the most important factor for social integration. The economic crisis and rapid technological change have created a shortage of jobs, and labor-market policies try to find new ways for redistribution (shortening of working time, more flexible working hours, job sharing). Nevertheless, formal work seems to lose its traditional unique and central place. One indicator for this are the growing discussions on the importance of other, ´informal’ sectors of work and service. When looking at work in such a general sense we are faced with the big problem of having to find a new equilibrium between the historically established sector of guaranteed employment and other (still) informal sectors. (Eurosocial, 1983).

Jahoda (1988) suggests to study those relatively enduring aspects of people and social institutions, which undergo only gradual, hardly perceptual changes, arguing that “employment as an institution whose time structure shapes the entire way of life of an industrial society has not changed; neither has the need of people for institutionally supported time experiences.”

Here we analyze quantitatively the eroding relative position of work time. Our hypothesis is simply that work time and alternative uses of time compete for the individual’s total time. To test the hypothesis, a standard of total life hours is necessary. Historical data on longevity (Flora et al., 1987) provide the standard for retrospective analysis. Demographic models are available to project future total life hours. Historical data (Figure 6) fit well to a logistic function, which projects life expectancy increasing by about 5% over the next few decades, to almost 80 years on average for men and women.

Comparing life hours of work to total disposable, active non-work hours yields the fractions of the lifetime time budget at work and other activities. Disposable hours are calculated by subtracting 10 years for childhood and first elementary education and also required physiological time. For the latter we have assumed (perhaps oversimplifying) 10 hours per day for sleep, eating, and personal hygiene for both genders. Between 1856 and 1981 disposable lifetime hours increased from 242 to 356 thousand hours in the United Kingdom, while, as we calculated above, the average working hours decreased from 124 to 69 thousand hours. Thus, non-work hours increased from about 118 to 287 thousand hours over a lifetime (Figure 7). While in 1856 50% of the disposable lifetime of workers was spent working, the portion has fallen to less than 20% today (Figure 8). Both reduced lifetime working hours and increased life expectancy caused the shift.

For men, this transition was crucial in both relative and absolute values. In 1856 about 150 thousand hours of a male’s lifetime were spent at the workplace and only some 91 thousand hours outside it (not considering physiological time). The former figure decreased to some 88 thousand hours, while the latter increased threefold to about 256 thousand non-work hours in 1981. In other words, from 1856 to 1981 the fraction of the disposable lifetime of a UK male spent working fell from three-fifths to one-fourth, with the crossover from a majority of work to non-work occurring around 1900.

Alternately, we can assess the ratio of non-work time to work time. In 1856 the ratio was around 0.6 for men, 2.9 for women, and 0.95 for the average working population. By 1981 the ratio of other to work time increased to 2.9 for men, 8.4 for women, and 4.2 for the average working population. All these measures dramatize how much consumption, or the non-productive sphere (to use a term formerly employed in socialist economies), dominates social activity in industrialized countries. The change is expressed throughout the economy, for example in the energy sector, where demand for personal transport and residential purposes exceeds industrial demand (Schipper et al., 1989).

V. Non-Work, Total Labor, and Free Time

What is the nature of the many hours of non-work? In youth activities center around education and recreation. Then, during the typical 40-year work career, one-third of the disposable time is spent at the work place and two-thirds are spent raising children, doing household work, and in leisure and holiday activities. After retirement, time is used for recreation, leisure activities, and, with aging, much expenditure goes for health maintenance.

We can further disaggregate the evolving lifetime time budget into hours spent in childhood and elementary education, higher education, work, non-work activities (i.e., other socially obligatory activities and free time) during the active working career years, and finally time after retirement. We always exclude required physiological time in the calculations. Again the changes in lifetime time budgets result from the combined evolution of two variables: changes in lifetime hours devoted to various activities (the numerator) and increasing life expectancy (the denominator). The latter explains the decreasing fraction childhood and elementary education account for in a male lifetime, from 17% to 13% (Figure 9). In the absence of data we have assumed childhood and elementary schooling to remain constant at 10 years. The decrease in fraction of time spent at work from over half of the total lifetime hours to less than one-fourth is another quantitative illustration of the transition from work to non-work discussed above. The increase in non-work activities allocates unevenly between different life stages. The smallest gains in non-work time are observed during the active working career. Non-work activities before (i.e., education beyond elementary schooling) and after (i.e., retirement) the work career have increased from zero to 20% of the disposable lifetime time budget of UK men.

The increase in the duration of higher education reflects the growing importance of pre-work preparation (see, e.g., Matthews et al., 1982:106). Following the Elementary Education Act of 1870, compulsory education of 8 years became mandatory in the UK. In 1972 compulsory education years were for the last time increased to a total of 11 years. Of course, the average value of 20% of a disposable male lifetime spent at education masks heterogeneity in the length of pre-work education from minimum compulsory schooling to doctoral degrees. After the turn of the next century as much as one-fourth of the lifetime of the average male worker may pass before starting on the job.

The component of the male non-work time budget which has risen the fastest is the time after the active working career: retirement. Whereas in the 1930s the average male life expectancy did not exceed the years spent at education plus the length of an average work career, the situation has changed drastically since. Retirement now accounts for about 13% of the average disposable male lifetime time budget in the UK. With increasing longevity of the population and further reductions in work time, the fraction of time in “life after work” (Young and Schuller, 1991) could increase to about one-fourth of the total work force life span during the next two to three decades.

If the trends should continue, after the year 2000 as much as half of the lifetime of the worker will be accounted for by pre- and after-work activities. Even in the remaining half of an individual’s lifetime, formal work will account for a decreasing fraction of time, 30% or less, and should leave more time for leisure and other activities such as caring for children and the home. Distribution of additional work-off times will be critical. Shortening of working hours may be useless unless synchronized with the rhythms of society.

To this point we have focused on contracted, compensated working time, treating other activities mainly as residuals. Now we define labor from a more inclusive perspective, encompassing all socially obligatory activities. These include, for example, raising and caring for children, household work, work (full-time and part time) and economically grey activities, whether these add numerical value to national income accounts or result in other forms of monetary or non-monetary compensation.[8] The data analyzed were assembled from Hungarian research on time budgets (Falussy and Boda, 1989).[9] Their span of 25 years is a shorter time than the data for the United Kingdom. They yield, nonetheless, insights into the division of time between total labor and free activities in several countries and between genders. Extension of the study of work time to socially obligatory activities also adds perspective on the gender gap, seen in the long analysis of formal contracted work in the United Kingdom. We have complemented and updated the data from the Hungarian source with information for Japan (Statistics Bureau, 1987), the United Kingdom (Gershuny, 1989), the United States and the former USSR (Gershuny, 1989, 1992; and Robinson et al., 1988).[10] Our main interest in the data is their evolution over time and less in comparing and discussing absolute differences between countries.

In the following we consider the ratio of free to total labor time, measured by the ratio of time devoted to the two activity categories and again excluding physiological time. A ratio of 0.5 means that one-half as much disposable time is devoted to free time (including leisure) as to total labor; a ratio of 1.0 means that free and total labor time are equal.

As societies become more affluent, free time steadily increases compared to the time devoted to all labor, as evident from Figures 10a and 10b,which show the trend in several countries of the ratio for the male and female population separately, plotted against per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The male population in the city of Pskov (Russian USSR) is an exception, with a stagnant free time compared to total labor time between 1965 and 1986. Another anomalous movement in the ratio is in Poland, where decreasing per capita GDP nevertheless accompanies the increasing free time seen in more prosperous countries. One interpretation of this anomaly is that the economic depression in Poland is a brief phenomenon, while change in the time budget rides through the ups and downs of economic performance. Perhaps the movement towards more free time that accompanies economic development cannot be reversed without large social disruptions even in periods of economic crisis, especially when these periods are marked by labor surplus.

The gender gap in free to total labor time in Figure 10a compared to Figure 10b appears smaller in more affluent societies, despite differences that remain between countries and cultures. In all but two societies assessed, women spend more total time in labor than men and thus enjoy less free time. The exceptions are the United States and the United Kingdom. In these countries, when considering all socially obligatory activities, women appear to enjoy more free time than men, perhaps because men devote more time to household work and raising children than in the other countries examined. The gender gap in the ratio of free to total labor time is particularly large in Eastern Europe. In Bulgaria, the gap even widened, as only men enjoyed more free time with economic development.

Also noteworthy is Japan, where the ratio behaves like other industrialized countries, despite a longer average paid time at the work place. Thus, although Japanese on average spend much more time in regular, compensated work, they nevertheless enjoy an amount of free time similar to people in other countries with a comparable degree of economic development. A basic budgetary principle in time allocation may be observed here, that people working more in formal economic activities appear to adjust time spent for housework and child care rather than free time proper.

Overall, the upward diagonal movement in Figures 10a and 10b resembles our earlier observation of the evolution of lifetime budgets for work and non-work. As societies become more affluent, the population spends less time in regular, salaried work at the workplace, and more time in informal work, at home, and for leisure.

VI. Observations and Questions

Earlier we pointed out that workers in the United Kingdom and similar countries formally work about 40 years and live close to 80. Workers do not work about half their lifetime, and the fraction of non-work keeps increasing. Moreover, within working years, the hours of work are diminishing. With increasing affluence, the ratio of free to all socially obligatory time could approach 1, eventually to surpass it. On average, even the total working population (including part time workers) will then spend at least as much time for free activities as for all other labor taken together.

We conclude by exploring a few of the causes and consequences of the reductions in work time and related phenomena. With respect to causation, we focus on technology. With respect to consequences, we consider the rise of the service economy. Then we pose some final issues and questions.

We mentioned earlier the inexorable role of technology in raising productivity and thus at least creating the possibility of liberating work time. The relations between technology and time are not simple. The complexity of the relations are demonstrated by considering technology and women’s labor. A logical hypothesis is that inventions easing household labor, limiting family size, and improving child health enabled women to increase their participation in the work force.

Recall some inventions affecting women. When the tin can was introduced in the 19th century, seers predicted that the reduction in time needed for meal preparation would lead to more time spent outside the home. Electrical appliances were forecast to have a similar effect: the iron (1882), sewing machine (1889), stove (1896), clothes washing machine (1907), and domestic refrigerator (1918) (dates from Desmond, 1987). When America’s Mr. Birdseye successfully marketed frozen foods in 1929, the tin can statements from 50 years earlier were repeated.

In fact, in the United Kingdom and the United States (see Harris, 1981) women did not lengthen their working careers until about 1950, when many household inventions achieved widespread diffusion. Innovations increase variety and quality of diet, improve cleanliness, and allow an individual to care for a larger amount of space. However, such innovations, at least before they became pervasive and complementary of one another, little altered the domestic labor time (Strasser, 1982; Vanek, 1974). Comparison of time use in the United States in 1965 with earlier studies showed only minor changes occurring since the 1930s (Robinson and Converse, 1967). Minge-Kalman (1980), reviewing studies of several industrial societies, found that women’s daily work outside the home decreased while work inside the home increased for an overall net increase. In contrast, Gershuny and Robinson (1989) reported that between the 1960s and the 1980s women reduced the amount of time spent daily in housework.

Regardless of effects of domestic technologies, innovations such as the oral contraceptive (1951) and measles vaccine (1953) which have made it possible to have fewer and healthier children, along with attitudinal changes and associated social innovations such as day care centers, superficially match well with the onset of the dramatic increase in years women spend in paid work. But, female fertility has declined gradually in the industrialized nations for over a century, without any downward discontinuity following World War II. In fact, this period was marked by a brief baby boom. We conclude that technology serves the revealed social goal of reducing life hours of work primarily via productivity increases at the workplace. In other fields of endeavor technology increases productivity, so to speak, but often without altering time allocation.

In any case, working less and living longer implies new balances and structures of production and consumption and new areas of economic growth. Consumption now dominates production as a social activity. A typical life of 80 years may be spent about 40 years consuming and 40 both producing and consuming. When consumption dominates production, we are in the service economy. The service industries are transport, communications, entertainment, retail, banking, education, and health, and not manufacturing, mining, and agriculture.

When consumption is the main activity of a day or a life, most work in restaurants, hotels, schools, media, fitness centers, banks, and health care organizations. Service dominates employment and over the long run may especially favor medicine and recreation as well as information handling. In a society which lives longer and works less, people can worry more about youth and beauty and health.

Gershuny (1989) argued that leisure in the so-called leisure society makes the work and that the non-work activities enable the consumption of ever increasing outputs of products and services of affluent societies. It is uncertain to what extent the more individuals produce, the more time they need for consumption. We can spend money fast, purchasing costly items in a twinkling. An expensive one-week tour takes no more time than a cheap one-week camping. Nevertheless, if technology makes a society with more productive potential but insufficient time to consume more, then balancing the system requires more time for consumption as well as the money to pay for it.

Numerous policy issues emerge. A fundamental issue is whether society yet reflects in its employment, pension, and educational policies the dominance non-work and free time have obtained over work. Policy, for example, with respect to reform of welfare, still appears geared to the primacy of the formal work contract. Our knowledge of the time patterns of the non-working population, including the elderly, needs to be deepened.[11] The observed persistence in average work career length of around 40 years also raises policy issues, for example, about workplace change and performance. The jobs evolve, the work force turns over, working hours are reduced, but years of work and the length of social memory of the workplace remain roughly constant. This regularity may be valuable for employers and government to recognize in developing policies for education and re-training, especially in conditions of rapid technological change and corresponding changes in skill requirements. With further work time reduction within these 40 years, new organizational models of distributing work activities should be possible. For instance, like just-in-time inventory, a just-in-time labor force may be assembled (Kutscher, 1988). The 27-hour average work week may match well with lots of temporary workers.

Research questions also abound. Why does the system at the macro level exhibit stable behavior over more than a century despite discontinuities in underlying individual variables such as weekly working hours or female career lengths?[12] Why do we partition the additions to non-work between education, retirement, and other options as we do? Why have most countries adopted the same divisions between work and non-work at different stages of their industrialization? Will the historically observed rates of change continue? If not, what will slow or speed them?

The closing question must be how far reductions in work time will go. Our response is to look back. Recall that in hunter-gatherer tribes men worked only three hours each day.[13] Perhaps 10,000 years after the invention of farming humanity will come full-circle. If the earth’s environment can be preserved and our social structures improved, then in another 200 years or so we may return to the leisurely life of the Garden of Eden.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Helga Nowotny for interesting us in this topic, Sir Bruce Williams for sharing data and pointing out critical issues, and Eli Ginzberg, Cesare Marchetti, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Paul Waggoner, and Michael Young for helpful comments.

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FIGURES

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Click here for all the figures on one page. (Then you can print all of the figures at once.) This page is large, about 600K in size.

Figure 1. Working Time Indicators (hours/week, weeks/year, years at work) for Male Working Population in the UK, 1856-1981. Data Source: Armstrong (1984), Matthews et al. (1982), Williams (1983).

Figure 2. Working Time Indicators (hours/week, weeks/year, years at work) for Female Working Population in the UK, 1856-1981. Data Source: Armstrong (1984), Matthews et al. (1982), Williams (1983).

Figure 3.Years at Work of Female, Male and Average Working Population in the UK 1856-1981. Data Source: Armstrong (1984), male data corrected for average life expectancy.

Figure 4. Lifetime Hours at Work of Female, Male and Average Working Population in the UK 1856-1981.

Figure 5. Average Annual Hours Worked in Selected Countries 1870-1987. Data Source: Table 2.

Figure 6. Life Expectancy at Age 10, UK 1870-1980, in 1000 Hours and Years. Data Source: Flora et al. (1987).

Figure 7. Disposable Lifetime Hours (Excluding Physiological Time and 10 Years for Childhood and Elementary Education) for Work and Non-work for Average Working Population, UK 1856-1981, in 1000 hours.

Figure 8. Fraction of Disposable Lifetime Spent at Work and Non-work of Female, Male and Average Working Population, UK 1856-1981.

Figure 9. Allocation of Lifetime to Different Activities for Male Working Population in the UK 1856-1981, in Fraction of Disposable Lifetime (excluding physiological time).

Figure 10a. Free Time to Total Labor Time Ratios Versus per Capita GDP for Male Population of Selected Countries, 1961-1986.

Figure 10b. Free Time to Total Labor Time Ratios Versus per Capita GDP for Female Population of Selected Countries, 1961-1986.

TABLES

Table 1. Changes in Lifetime Hours at Work UK 1856-1981 (in hours).

Table 2. International Comparison of Hours Worked (effectively)⁵ per Person per Year (Source of Data: Maddison, 1991).

ENDNOTES

[1.] Wilensky (1961) provides estimates of work time in eras ranging from the Roman to the 20th century, but no continuous and comparable data series. Imhoff (1981) presents a scattering of interesting facts about changes in time budgets over the past 300 years. See also Schor, 1991, p. 45.

[2.] Only by 1930 was the male life expectancy at age 10 long enough to allow the average male in the United Kingdom to live until the end of a typical working career of some 52 years prevailing at that time. Age 10 may sound today like an early starting point for the analysis in this paper. However, child labor was normal in the 19th century. In the United Kingdom Ashley’s Act excluded girls and boys under age 10 from the mines only in 1842. Fielden’s Act of 1847 established a “normal” working day of 10.5 hours for young people (and women) in factories.

[3.] If schooling lasts 10-15 years and a work career 40 years, then the lifetime of the human capital stock (its formation, integration, and use in the production sphere of the economy) is about 50-55 years. This clock sets the speed of social learning. The ultimate limits to the speed of diffusion of innovations are human minds. Individuals and groups early on often become locked into particular procedures and technical know-how and unable to accept new ideas or practices. Replacing entirely a workplace organization or any other human system that is no longer satisfactory can require some 50 years, if the system is fixed in the minds of the current managerial and labor force and is taught to the young.

[4.] Fourastié (1965) proposed that early in the 21st century the working career would already be reduced to 40,000 hours. According to our analysis, Fourastié’s forecast was several decades early.

[5.] Data source: Maddison (1991). Data refer to annual hours worked effectively (i.e. contractual working time plus overtime minus holidays and sick leave). Other definitions are also used frequently in international working time comparisons, e.g. contractual working time (excluding overtime and sick leave) or actual working hours (derived from detailed time budget surveys, including e.g. also “informal” overtime). Definitions and data sources are discussed in detail in Maddison, 1991:255-258. Methodological issues (and resulting uncertainties) in international comparisons are also discussed in Marchand, 1992:33-38.

[6.] Although relatively early retirement is customary for employees of some large Japanese corporations, we have not been able to find evidence that length of careers on average in Japan differs significantly from that in other countries examined, so the use of annual hours should be representative.

[7.] For accounts of Japanese attitudes toward work time, see the New York Times, 6 August and 31 December 1988.

[8.] Minge-Kalman (1980) uses the terms “productive” and “reproductive” (or domestic) labor to span total labor time.

[9.] For reviews of literature on time budget surveys and analyses, see Andorka (1987), Harvey et al. (1984), and Juster and Stafford (1991).

[10.] The data on the then Soviet city of Pskov may not be precisely comparable to national average data in other countries and are affected also by the problems of estimating comparable USSR Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures as indicators of economic development (see Krelle, 1988, on this point, from where we derive the GDP estimates for the USSR).

[11.] On the use of time of the non-employed see Harvey (1989); for economic research on the elderly see Hurd (1990); for a sociological perspective see Young and Schuller (1991).

[12.] Young (1988) has sought deep mechanisms in the temporal behavior of human society.

[13.] Studies among many foraging groups give comparable results; see Sahlins (1974) and Gross (1984:526).

From Technology in Society, Vol. 14, pp. 187-198, 1992. Copyright ©1992 Pergamon Press Ltd. Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. An abbreviated version of this essay appeared in The Sciences, Vol. 31, No. 6 (1991).

I visited Chernobyl in December, 1990. A little time and much history have passed in the former USSR since then. A blasted nuclear reactor and its fallout remain. In this essay, I convey how economic deterioration and political metamorphosis bear on one of the world’s most important environmental sites.

Some of the drama and gloom of my visit had to do with winter. No one vacations in northern Ukraine in December. The days are gray, cold, and short. It is easy to remember why the grandparents of many Americans left those lands behind and harder to understand why people have fought so hard over them. Sometimes people fight most where the stakes are low. Certainly rural northern Ukraine is poor, and in some ways undeveloped. The underdevelopment accounts for some of its ecological interest.

I will narrate my visit, sharing impressions and drawing lessons along the way. Though my purpose was science, not journalism, I remarked images and forces. For a photographer or sociologist the trip would be rich, but I almost hesitate to describe it. I felt rather as I would taking notes in a devastated American neighborhood such as the South Bronx or a strip-mined region of West Virginia. I felt rude as a scientific guest to record too much.

Why was I invited? I study climate change and the energy systems that may cause or prevent it. I began work on climate change in 1977, when the fraternity of interested scientists fit comfortably in one conference hall and almost as many thought that the world was entering a new ice age as the greenhouse century. Climate is a global question, and those in the network of researchers included several capable Soviet scientists.

One place to study global climate was the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a US-USSR “think tank” near Vienna, Austria. I spent two years there, and my first supervisor was a Russian, a hydrodynamicist from Siberia. In those years there was some suspense for an American in having a Soviet boss. Andrei Sakharov was in exile in Gorki, and I was working at IIASA while the Red Army moved into Afghanistan. Brezhnev was in power. A kind of bond was established during the Cold War between Soviet and American scientists who worked together fruitfully that may now be harder to achieve. If individuals collaborated under the old adverse conditions, the bond tended to be lasting. The invitation to visit Kiev and the nearby Chernobyl site can be traced through these international links antedating glasnost and perestroika, as well as the April 1986 accident.

In the spring of 1990, reports showed patches of radiation effects persisting around Chernobyl. One might think regular lines of effects would circle the reactor, indicating decreasing concentrations or effects from the accident. In fact, the pattern looks more like Swiss cheese, with all kinds of spots and circles here and there.

Members of the group of scientists in Kiev whom I came to know discovered the pattern. A scientist directing the study visited me in April 1990 at The Rockefeller University. He said he would invite me to Kiev and Chernobyl. Sure enough, in June a letter arrived, saying, “Come discuss matters of mutual interest whenever the time is good for you.” Both the prompt arrival and informal tone of the letter indicated the different world we have come to enjoy, and which was threatened by the August 1991 coup. A scientist directly invited a scientist: no delegation, no workshop, no approval from Moscow. I wrote that I would like to come in early December, and my Ukrainian host telexed saying, “That is fine.” My letter and the telex with a visa application to the USSR consulate won a visa without any problem. That was that.

The easiest flight from America to Kiev is still via Moscow. In fact, scenes in Moscow helped me understand some current and potential problems at Chernobyl. Visiting Moscow anew, I was struck most by the absence of authority. The dog didn’t bark. I encountered virtually no passport control or customs inspection. Formerly, if you were lucky enough to be designated important, someone from the USSR Academy of Sciences might meet you and whisk you through a special side channel. Normal channels meant long delays. In 1990, I passed in without an escort in minutes for formalities, hardly different from arriving in Germany and probably easier than Heathrow Airport in England or Kennedy in New York.

The disappearance of authority is accompanied by the disappearance of goods, which many travelers and, especially, the Russians themselves note. Moscow had no butter, no beer, no cooking oil, and hardly a children’s toy. Store shelves were genuinely empty. People seemed to spend their time foraging.

Russians have a sense of humor. One joke: A long line of people were waiting in a grocery store, a “gastronome.” The only items on sale are jars of pickled peppers and boxes of biscuits. A surly man behind the counter faces the frustrated customers. The line is moving slowly; one person asks for two boxes of biscuits and three jars of peppers, another person for one of each, and someone for three jars and five boxes. A very old man in line finally gets to the front and faces the counterman, who is dressed in a white coat to provide protection against spills and stains, which are most unlikely to come from the goods in stock. The old man announces, “I’d like a kilo of beef, two chickens, two dozen eggs, two kilos of tomatoes, a box of raspberries…” When the counterman says “Old man, you’re crazy,” the person behind in line says “No, he just has a good memory!”

If before the main impression in the USSR was tyranny, now it is poverty. There is begging, and there are shanty towns in Moscow, one of which was bulldozed in early 1991 to some outcry. Popular religious shrines are set up in public squares. Prostitution is less subtle than in the past. The black market exchange rate appeared to make the average monthly Russian salary about 10 or 20 dollars, income as in poor, developing countries. In the past people said that the USSR is a developing country with rockets; with immediate currency convertibility that would be the case.

In Kiev, capital of the Ukrainian Republic, the situation was somewhat better. One reason is that Ukraine effectively has its own currency. Coupons are required to purchase most mobile goods other than bread or milk, or most anything that costs more than one ruble. I tried to buy a record. I was not succeeding. Finally somebody in the line spoke in English and explained that I had to have a Ukrainian coupon along with the rubles. The coupon system instituted in October 1990 to keep goods within the Ukrainian Republic appears to be succeeding somewhat. However, it emphasizes what an artificial economy is functioning.

The Ukrainian Parliament, relatively new or revitalized, was in session day and night while I was there, debating and sometimes passing laws on all kinds of matters, from environmental protection to private property. The sessions, broadcast hour after hour rather like a cable network, seemed to be watched with interest and pride. Ukrainians repeatedly stressed to me that they were Europeans, gesturing about Moscow as if to suggest the partly Asiatic origin of Russia. Two people talked to me about the historic ties of the Ukraine with Greece, Constantinople, and Vienna. The mood is certainly to look west rather than northeast.

The desire to distance themselves from Russia and bring more change seemed the general tone in public, and also within family circles, especially among women, who have the hardest lot. The scientists have a somewhat complicated view. They worry about the fortune of science. Science, in the former Soviet Union, as in the United States, has been funded mostly on an “All-Union” or national basis. With diminished national funding of research, most institutes face large layoffs, and the country perhaps an intellectual migration. Scientific organizations are thus trying to diversify their sources of support, seeking support outside the USSR. The alternative is local money. But economic activity is shrinking and changing in the Republic, at least for the interim, so it will be difficult for Ukraine or other republics to provide from local tax revenues.

A grant or contract from former state or privatized enterprises for either basic or applied research will be hard to get. The Soviet equivalents of IBM or General Electric are likely to restructure dramatically or go out of business in the next few years. In eastern Germany only a few of the old enterprises appear to be surviving. Thus, academic research can look to the nascent Russian or Ukrainian private sector for little. For comparison, suppose California proposed to secede from the United States. How would Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory maintain itself? Almost 100% of its support is federal tax money.

Thus, many Soviet scientists seem little impressed by nationalistic arguments. They know that for 75 years the USSR has set up a national system of research with large units. For example, in Ukraine there are large centers for computer science and cybernetics in Kiev and for materials research in Kharkov. These will shrink if they are supported only by the Ukrainian Republic. Political fragmentation runs counter in practical ways to the scale and integration that are themes of modern research. Nationalist tendencies can also run counter to the universalist ethic of science.

These comments about the complex political situation preface my evaluation of environmental issues. Three days of meetings and briefings in Kiev preceded my day at Chernobyl in the “restricted zone.” Much of the science shared with me was good. I mention some impressive modeling of regional ecosystems, especially integrated ecological modeling of soils, forests, atmosphere, and hydrology. The hydrology was particularly advanced.

The Chernobyl accident made data available to Soviet environmental scientists for their studies. Until recently, Soviet scientists, even in their own numerical models, often used data from Western Europe or North America. For example, this was true for acid rain. They frequently did not have data, sometimes they did not have access to Soviet data that did exist, or, if the data did exist and were being used, the scientists could not share them openly. The urgency of Chernobyl caused many data to be collected and released. So, the models I saw were running on actual data, something different from the past and more motivating for everyone.

Computing power continues limited in Soviet research, which in key respects is a benefit. Scientists were concentrating on scientific issues rather than programming gimmicks. True, the Soviets have a strong hacker culture. A PC is treated in Kiev the way a car enthusiast in Southern California treats a vintage Volkswagen beetle. It is souped up to do everything it possibly can. Fortunately, for much of the needed ecological modeling, a souped-up PC with intellectual fundamentals is sufficient. Fancy color graphics may help communication but do not change the calculations.

Where to begin to describe Chernobyl itself? Amid the beet fields and the mud and marshes of Ukraine, you come to a huge concrete sarcophagus, encasing the damaged reactor. Certainly, the impression is stronger in December. The image is not the warm waving golden wheat of Ukrainian summer. The area around Chernobyl has the ecological appeal of flat wetlands, the low, quiet mystery of marshes. But it is not a wealthy agricultural region, or a spectacular, panoramic landscape. Although grains grow, the impression to an American is more like rural Maine than the expanse of Kansas or Iowa. Poor, now abandoned, villages look much as a hundred years ago, except electricity runs to them, and the main road is paved.

And then you have the larger towns with the typical East Bloc construction. Concrete buildings stand six, eight, or ten stories, built shabbily and without ornament. And, of course, in the evacuated zone buildings are cracking and crumbling, reverting to nature in a weedy, uneven way. At times, Chernobyl evokes the 1959 film of Neville Shute’s novel On the Beach — it has the look and feel of desertion after nuclear war without the blast damage.

Some 125,000 people lived in the main restricted zone around the four reactors of the Chernobyl power station. Some subsidiary zones in Byelorussia and in the Russian Republic are also restricted. The main restricted zone extends roughly to a 30-kilometer radius around the damaged plant. The zone, it is estimated, will require special management for 100 to 150 years.

At the restricted zone, a two-hour drive north of Kiev, you are stopped by a road block and transfer into cars used only in the contaminated area. My colleague from Kiev and I were given a car for the day, a large black limousine that reportedly had belonged to Prime Minister Ryzhkov. Several months before, Ryzhkov had been down to tour the site and was reportedly not warned that once he drove around the site, the car would be contaminated and its use restricted to the site. So, the so-called “Pripet Research Industrial Association” (PRIA), which now manages the site, has one more property besides the sarcophagus.

Another joke: Gorbachev was in his dacha outside Moscow for the weekend and suddenly received word of more trouble between republics. So, he calls a cabinet meeting for all ministers at the Kremlin in half an hour. Gorbachev goes out and calls to his driver, gets into his limousine, and says, “Take me to central Moscow.” The driver starts, but is only going 90 kilometers an hour. Gorbachev says, “Go faster, go faster.” And the driver says, “I can’t. You have put in new laws that we must drive properly and even the big wigs must obey to set a good example.” Gorbachev says, “Well, I’m chairing a meeting, and I have to be at the Kremlin in 20 minutes, and I’ll drive.” Gorbachev takes the wheel. Sure enough, two motorcycle policemen take up the chase. One policeman says to the other, “Look here, we’ve got one! Look at this big limousine.” One of the policeman speeds up and pulls the limousine to the side. The car window rolls down, there is an exchange, and the motorcycle policeman returns to his colleague, who has been waiting behind the limo with his hand on his gun. The limousine speeds off. The policeman who had remained at a distance says, “Did you give him the ticket?” The second says, “No, I didn’t.” And the first, disappointed asks, “Why not?” His colleague responds, “Well, it was a real big wig.” The disappointed officer asks, “How did you know? Who was it?” “Well, I am not sure, but Gorbachev was his driver!”

The PRIA was established to manage decontamination and research on the site. As one might expect, intense turf battles after the accident involved several organizations. Perhaps a hundred altogether have participated in the clean-up. The most important ones: the Ministry of Atomic Energy and the Ministry of Machine Building, which are responsible for building and operating reactors in the Soviet Union; the military, which had much of the capability to respond quickly, including helicopters, trucks, earth movers, and personnel; the Hydrometeorological Service, which had data about where the radiation was going; and the Soviet Academy of Sciences, which had expertise about materials, health, and other matters. Also immediately after the accident some special commissions were set up to investigate and advise on various issues.

Apparently, chaos ensued. Out of this chaos came a new, so-called Combinat to operate the three enormous 1,000-megawatt reactors that continue to generate electricity at Chernobyl. And, more interestingly for science, came the PRIA, which had 6,000 employees and some 350 million rubles in 1991, a large organization for environmental clean-up, even on the Soviet scale. This institutional creation is analogous to some US experiments for dealing with hazardous waste. In particular, it is reminiscent of Clean Sites, Inc., a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization that sets up independent entities to manage properties and do research on hazardous waste sites in ways credible to government, industry, environmental groups, and local people.

The first lesson from Chernobyl is that existing organizations in the circumstance of a major catastrophe will not likely have the competence or the credibility to do what is needed. In such a situation government and industry both lack credibility. A third party is needed to clean up, foster settlements, and resolve technical disagreements. The Soviets took three years or so to work out the structure of the PRIA. I was impressed with the seriousness and dedication of the people of PRIA and, more important, it seems satisfactory to concerned parties.

PRIA has its headquarters in the town of Chernobyl, about 10 kilometers from the reactor itself, in a small three-story building built after the accident. Employees live outside the zone, although about 1,000 people have returned to live inside the zone, mostly pensioners who expect the risks of Chernobyl to matter less than old age. People who work for the Combinat and PRIA live either in existing towns outside the zone or in new towns built around the zone for the new work force.

After briefings at the headquarters from experts in decontamination, we went together to visit several places in the central zone. We changed into blue cotton trousers, shirts, and jackets, as well as green coats and hats that would be collected upon departure. No masks or special gear are required for protection of health for routine work on site. The uniforms, in addition to minimizing contamination carried out of the zone, do impart a feeling of safety and solidarity. My measured radiation exposure for the day was considerably less than during a chest X-ray.

We visited several places in the restricted, or “contaminated” or “dead” zone; several phrases are used to describe it. Everything seemed open to visit, and my hosts were open and flexible. I had said I was interested in environmental aspects and hazard management. One could easily spend equally interesting days and weeks on health and medicine, or mechanical engineering and materials.

We drew close to the reactor itself, impressive for its scale, massive in absolute terms and in relation to the low woods, flat lands, and water around. We visited the so-called “Red Forest,” the most damaged ecological zone. We visited several temporary waste disposals. Some 600 shallow trenches were dug for storage of soils, trees, cars, almost anything that needed to be “localized” in the site. We went to the abandoned city of Pripet, whose movie theater, restaurants, shops, and amusement park, complete with bumper cars and ferris wheel, decay, empty and still. Human presence shows only by an occasional truck passing through, small and hurriedly built booths to monitor radiation, and classical music playing over loudspeakers on the main streets. We also stopped at one high-level waste depository, a wall of concrete slabs and razor wire on the surface surrounding dozens of containers resembling those used for marine shipping. My guides were two of the leaders of the decontamination effort, one of whom had been there since a few days after the accident in April of 1986. He was on the roof of the reactor early when vapors were still rising from the fire.

The second lesson I would draw from my visit is that imagining practical preparation for accidents as serious as this is hard. How can one seriously prepare to remove, contain, and bury the topsoil from areas extending over hundreds of square kilometers? The PRIA estimates that they have moved a million cubic meters of soil. It is hard to envision a serious exercise in the United States to plan what you are going to do (whoever “you” turns out to be), how you are going to scrape up a million cubic meters of soil, or how you are going to dig 600 trenches. Openly preparing and publishing maps showing where 600 trenches would be on Long Island or in New Hampshire or the Sacramento Valley is unimaginable. If done, it would almost certainly foreclose siting or operating a nuclear plant.

Replacing the water supply is also a vast job. The water supply for much of the area needed to be temporarily replaced. Hundreds of artesian wells were drilled. Still, water problems continue. Pulses of radionuclides, especially cesium-137 and strontium-90, washed down through the entire Dnieper basin, where tens of millions of people draw their drinking water.

Another vast job is recruiting and keeping the many skilled workers needed, whether the 600,000 who are estimated to have participated in the clean-up altogether, or the 6,000 now at the PRIA. I came away thinking that the question of evacuation and response plans as debated in the United States is not meaningful. If an accident this serious happens, what you have thought about does not encompass the scope of what needs to be done. How can you prepare to think about decontaminating every structure in a 2,000 square kilometer zone? My conclusion is not to abandon emergency preparedness, but to concentrate on engineering systems in which the maximum conceivable accidents are not of the dimensions of Chernobyl.

The third lesson that I took away has to do with longevity. Organizations need to last, both for safe operation of nuclear reactors and to deal with wastes, accidents, and their consequences. How does one design enterprises to operate reliably and robustly for generations and longer? PRIA still has a massive decontamination job for several more years to handle obvious, acute problems and then, if it survives, it must turn to chronic, lesser problems and, no doubt, surprises. A looming question is whether to replace or strengthen the sarcophagus around the damaged reactor in perhaps another 20 years. The sarcophagus was built in haste, and now its walls—180 feet high and from 18 to 55 feet thick—have begun in places to turn brittle and crack, a consequence of irradiation and the temperature difference between the hot inner and cooler outer face.

How must organizations be designed to perform such tasks amidst the breakdown of government? Americans have had the same government since 1790 and take stable governance for granted. A handful of countries can say the same–Switzerland, Sweden (allowing for Norway’s separation), the United Kingdom (allowing for the Irish troubles), and perhaps a few others. Even the US had a war between the States.

Experts have speculated at length about improbable threats to nuclear reactors, such as earthquakes and terrorism. I think these are less serious than “normal” political and economic threats. If one thinks back 100 years, the area of the Soviet Union has had two major invasions, two World Wars; it has had a Civil War in the Ukraine in the 1920s; it has had two or maybe three great depressions. Such fluctuation and change is the case for most countries, including in the West–for example, Germany and France. France, which is heavily nuclear, has had several republics, invasions, and uprisings since 1870. How can one build and maintain organizations that will endure competently through long periods of economic and political fluctuations that occur in almost all parts of the world? Suppose Moscow does collapse and there is a lapse or decline in the money coming to Chernobyl. If the 350 million rubles are not there for 1992 or 1993, what is to be done?

Amidst these problems, the Ukrainian Parliament has debated a decree shutting down the three operating blocs at Chernobyl and possibly all nuclear facilities in Ukraine by 1995. Because five other nuclear centers operate in Ukraine, a large fraction of the electricity in the Republic would be lost. Because most of the rest of the electricity in Ukraine comes from coal-fired plants, increasing their output would have high environmental cost. Moreover, the coal mostly comes from the mines in southern Ukraine, where mine workers have been striking to get basic goods such as blankets, shoes, and soap. So, the energy picture is complicated in Ukraine.

The initial response to the Chernobyl accident was the heroism, communitarian behavior, and sacrifice characteristic of many disasters. Now that some years have gone by the pendulum is swinging, and one hears recriminations and accusations. These are tied to the national political and economic situation, as well as shortcomings of the PRIA and other responsible groups. In Ukraine and elsewhere in the former USSR, there is a strong local desire to find people to blame for everything that is wrong, and it is best to blame people from Moscow.

There is an effort to move management of the Chernobyl site from Moscow, where it is still headquartered, down to Kiev. The Ukrainian nationalists have a slogan “no inch of soil to Moscow.” This is written as graffiti. But for Chernobyl what local responsibility is appropriate? Is decontamination and protection of the site not an “all-union” or even global responsibility?

The major ecological problem for the next few years is expected to continue to be that of radionuclides in the soils. As mentioned earlier, the area is wet, the soils are sandy and porous, and the basin holds numerous large reservoirs and rivers. It was considered a good site for a power center partly because of the availability of cooling water. The soils near the plant still hold much strontium, cesium, and plutonium. In the spring when the ground thaws, snow melts, and the water floods into the Pripet River and down into the Dnieper, it carries pulses of contaminants. This is expected to be serious for a few more years. Building underwater dams on the bottom of the reservoirs and the rivers to stop sediments is debated. Whether any proposals of this type will make the situation better is unclear.

Chronic as well as acute problems are being monitored. Every ache and pain in the Ukraine is now attributed to Chernobyl. For example, several hundred kilometers away, in the city of Chernowitz, some 200 children are reported to have begun to lose their hair a couple of years back, and the loss was blamed on Chernobyl. It might have been associated with the accident or with other, probably local factors. The PRIA, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and others are trying to sustain research to examine health and environmental consequences of the accident.

This leads to the fourth lesson, a positive one. At least among scientists, the view is that Chernobyl should be turned into an international laboratory, a world heritage site. Governments have accepted the designation of world heritage sites such as the Pyramids of Egypt and biospheric reserves such as the Everglades. Chernobyl is as significant an environmental site as now exists on the planet. In that sense it does belong to everyone. It is an Ur-site of the new green religion.

PRIA has taken first steps to set up an international research center, establishing agreements with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Officials of PRIA repeated that they no longer need approval from Moscow or Vienna to invite people and permit certain kinds of research. PRIA wants direct ties with individual scientists and with other organizations around the world. PRIA lacks money to pay external collaborators, so visiting researchers would mainly have to support their own way. Such research has been difficult or impossible on USSR sites for foreign scientists until recently. It is a new, serious opportunity.

International arrangements have become customary for astronomical observatories and atom smashers. International arrangements for governance, funding, and access to the Chernobyl site are worthy of discussion and could set precedents for research on technological hazards.

The fifth and last lesson is about environmental technology. I asked several engineers what turned out to be the environmentally important technologies for Chernobyl. Environmental technologies are more than the obvious ones such as catalytic converters for auto exhaust or “superbugs” to eat oil spills. They include others that are often overlooked. Chernobyl had answers about what technologies mattered. Among them were: sorters, compactors, and compressors for large amounts of material; furnaces that could heat or burn large amounts of material; and finally, dredgers that can operate on complex relief. None of these technologies is quickly, commercially available in large numbers, especially to be plunked down in the middle of the muddy fields and marshes of Ukraine, brought by the Soviet system for delivering goods and services.

On the theme of delivery of goods, a final, telling joke: It has always taken a very long time to order and receive anything in the Soviet Union. Moiseev was inscribed on the list to buy an automobile and had been waiting for many, many years. Then one day the call comes: “Mr. Moiseev, please come down to the office of the automobile company in Kiev, we have some news for you.” Moiseev hastens. At the office, the factory representative says, ‘We are very pleased, Mr. Moiseev, your car will be delivered on April 14, 1995.” Moiseev smiles and says, “Good, okay,” but then frowns and asks, “Can you tell me will it be in the morning or the afternoon?” The man from the factory replies, “Yes, in the morning, but why do you want to know?” Moiseev says, “Oh thank God, the plumber is coming in the afternoon.”

A society that is not set up to respond flexibly in supplying cars and fixing pipes is trying to decontaminate Chernobyl. It is now a land without markets or hierarchies.

In the end, I review the five lessons drawn from the visit. First is the importance of the design of organizations to clean up hazardous sites and perform research related to these sites. The question is initially the invention of temporary or bridging organizations needed in an emergency, organizations that will be effective and credible, and perhaps not so temporary after all.

The second lesson is the limited use of preparedness and evacuation plans. In the late 1950s and early 1960s in the United States, a great debate concerned the viability and value of civil defense. The main conclusion was that not much could be done. My impression from looking at the 600 trenches and seeing first-hand the scope of what actually needed to be done at Chernobyl is that such planning is largely vain. Deterrence, prevention, and inherent safety deserve the emphasis they receive and more.

The third lesson is the importance for environmental management of the longevity of risks and consequences. How can environmental institutions be built and maintained to survive the rises, changes, and falls in political and economic systems?

Fourth is the need to consider the international status of sites of environmental hazards as well as environmental beauty. Scientists and environmentalists are accustomed to advocate the Himalayas or Amazon as part of a common heritage. Chernobyl is equally important. Governments and researchers need to examine the governance, access, funding, and management of such environmentally significant sites.

Fifth, there are the surprises about what prove to be environmentally significant technologies. There is much room for better understanding of important environmental services that should enhance our appreciation of, and influence research on, a range of technologies.

I will conclude by describing the moment that gave me a sudden, intuitive grasp of the challenge of Chernobyl amidst and after perestroika. Trying to relate to the foreign visitor, a villager in the Ukrainian countryside inquired in simple and striking fashion, “Do you have mud in America?”

Bibliography

Haynes, Viktor and Boicun, Marko (1988): The Chernobyl Disaster. Hogarth, London.

Marples, David R. (1986): Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR. MacMillan, London.

Medvedev, Grigori (1991): The Truth about Chernobyl Tauris/Basic Books, New York.