David Peat

156 From Certainty to Uncertaintyting that it would wipe out not only the human race but also most lifeon earth, would follow.The tension of the cold war is now behind us. But in a differentform a nuclear threat still exists, not so much from the big superpowersbut from smaller and less stable nations, and even organized criminalgroups. Half a century of international tension has made us moreaware of the fragility of life on the planet. Science has revealed otherthreats, from viruses to drug-resistant microorganisms. Recently aSwedish hospital discovered that hepatitis C had found a way of spreadingto hospital patients not through the normal routes of intravenousinjections of contaminated blood but as an airborne virus.Ebola first emerged from the Ebola River region of Zaire in 1976.The death rate from the disease is 50 to 90%. There is no known treatment.AIDS is taking a terrible toll and its effect in Africa is proving tobe as devastating as the Black Death that swept across medieval Europe.Yet the AIDS virus can only survive under optimum conditions.Imagine what would happen if such a virus could be transmitted by aflea or mosquito bite? Or if it were airborne, as was the case with hepatitisC in Sweden? Would that spell the end of our global civilization?Human life may be far more vulnerable than we imagine.The second key image of the twentieth century, a photograph takenby American astronauts, is of planet Earth as a blue ball suspended inspace. The fact that the earth is finite is something we all knew at anintellectual level, yet it required all the billions of dollars spent on thespace race to remind us in a forceful way that we are all brothers andsisters. Native Americans say “all my relations,” meaning humans, animals,fish, birds, insects, trees, plants, and rocks. That image from spacereminded us all that we are inhabitants of a single earth and that itsresources are not infinite. What is done in one place affects another.Smoke from the smelters in Sudbury, Northern Ontario, pollutes thenortheastern United States. The rain that fell on my car in central Italylast night left a fine dusting of white mud—sand from the SaharaDesert carried by the wind.When it comes to ecology and environmental pollution, there isno room for national politics. Wind does not acknowledge nationalboundaries, rain falls on international treaties. The destruction of the