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in the course of this thousand years. Such a relaxed attitude might give mankind, and the other mutually dependent creatures in the environment man is part of, a better chance at the succeeding thousand-year period. Perhaps we should not plan for a period beyond that. even though bristlecone pines do.

It is not the example of the bristlecone, however, that suggests a plan of this magnitude. It is the nuclear di lemma, the strange. self-centered behavior that allows us to deposit high-level radioactive waste (a term from the AEC's Honeybucket Glossary in the global ecosystem. waste that some one hundred billion future men must take meticulous care of in order that a multitude of us today

may enjoy our own brief pass at the planet with all the

conveniences we are accustomed. to. This waste is the

dirtiest garbage of all. Forgetting its thermal pollution ("enrichment") for the moment, we know it is mutɔgenic, teratogenic. and damnably long-lived. We have already produced a great deal of it and this productivity is proliferating while we watch-or better, while we read ads calling it clean and look the other way. Our children must know where we left it and keep away. So must theirs, and theirs, by oral tradition if all others means fail. All this for at least a thousand years, with no fail-safe technique devised yet for the warehousing, no one putting up bond. no one prepared to write the insurance, no long-lasting Directions for Survivors chiseled in stone tablets. buc with plenty of people willing to sell and install the machinery and merchandise the electrical power, and with all hands in the first, second, and third worlds eager to buy it without limit and without asking what it really costs.

The least we can do, if morality and ethics are still in our fiber, is to plan a thousand years of amenities for our progeny while they mind our nuclear garbage.

So a thousand good years, and an aim. Mere survival is not enough in the world we seek. Our institutions need to accommodate an optimistic vision of man's future, to believe that if the golden rule is all right in religions, it should not be avoided in life.

A thousand-year plan for oil, with particular respect to the immediate foreground in Alaska, would recognize the contribution of those who discovered the North Slope oil resource, appropriately cover the costs they cannot cover, reward them, pay the state for storage underground, then record the oil reserve as part of the inventory to be budgeted to last a thousand years. The Plan would contemplate that oil may one day serve a more important purpose than fueling automobiles and supersonic transports. Precipitate exploitation would be discouraged and

extravagant use would be prohibited. Studies of potential dangers of removing and transporting the oil in and across fragile ecosystems would be exhaustive and not an exercise in salvage ecology. The costs of perfecting spillproof transportation would be met and development would await the meeting. the oil remaining safely stored underground until then, in situ. Whatever the costs were would be passed on to the user. who has always paid the costs anyway although he has not always known it. If this materially raises the price, that increase in itself would make economically feasible the development of more efficient oil-using devices. We would pollute far less because pollution would be too wasteful and too expensive. This would be a residual advantage and a welcome one. since the Plan would not only expect oil to be available for a millenium, but also would expect the air to remain breathcable for the duration.

Applied to people, the Plan would celebrate and hold hard to the diversity that makes them strong, beautiful. and interesting.

Applied to land use it would obliterate laissez-faire. In forestry, it would eradicate monoculture. In agriculture, it would stop decimating organic diversity three billion years in the making.

It would recognize that if population continues to grow at the present rate. mankind will outweigh the earth and there are better things to do with both.

Applied to pace. the Plan would encourage people to

slow down and live, to take time to look for the real show. heeding Robinson Jeffers:

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