January 2011

This is the beginning of a three-part series by Barbara W. Tuchman on the encounter of two giant nations, a story whose ending is not yet known. Her theme, she writes, “is the relation of America to China, in a larger sense to Asia. The vehicle of the theme is the career of General Joseph W. Stilwell. Why Stilwell? Because he combined a career focused on China with background and character that were quintessentially American; because his connection with China spanned the period that shaped the present from the dramatic opening moment of 1911, year of the revolution, to 1944, decisive year in the decline of the Nationalist government; because his service in the intervening years was a prism of the times—as language officer from 1920 to 1923 in the time of the war lords, as officer of the 15th Infantry in Tientsin from 1926 to 1929 at the time of the rise to power of Chiang Kai-shek, as military attaché from 1935 lo 1939 at the time of the Japanese invasion, as theater commander in World War II; because in the final and critical years of this period he was the most important figure in the Sino-Amencan relationship.

Inevitably, but with unseemly haste, the advertising avant-garde has infiltrated the conservation crusade. Madison Avenue, the Maginot Line of the industrial establishment, is now artfully camouflaged in the current mode to resemble an innocent outpost of the Audubon Society; and many of its corporate clients are coming on like long-lost cousins of Henry David Thoreau.

The new recruits have come up with some ingeniously beguiling campaigns. If we are to believe recent ads, oil refineries are bird sanctuaries in disguise, highways are adornments to hillsides, and an endless army of saplings in military formation is a facsimile forest.

ENGINEERING SOUVENIRS CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS THE OLD SHELL GAME

The civil engineer is often fingered these days as Ecological Enemy No. 1 for his enthusiastic participation m the rape of the environment. But to an earlier, less beset society, with fewer people and afar less potent technology, the engineer was more than a popular hero; he was the epitome of an age. The conquest of nature was the national ambition, and the civil engineer was the man who kept the state of the Union up to the state of the art.

In 1966 the American Society of Civil Engineers began a project to designate surviving souvenirs of the fruitful nineteenth-century collaboration between engineering and entrepreneurship.

Included in the list of seventeen railroads, canals, bridges, tunnels, and dams so far designated:

Along about election time, the nation’s billboards blossom into a rogues’ gallery of aspiring politicians. This year, in California, at least three candidates succeeded in the spring primaries and headed for the fall election without resorting to billboard advertising. Whoever wins the congressional race between Paul McCloskey (Rep.) and Robert E. Gomperts (Dem.) in California’s nth District, and whether William T. Bagley (Rep.) goes ,to the State Assembly from the yth, the public is already ahead.

“Its vapors reach into every nook and crack, every hiding place, to seek out and kill small flying insects,” boasts the Shell Chemical Company of its popular NoPest insecticide strip. Constantly vaporizing a potent nerve gas, 2,2-dichlorovinyl dimethyl phosphate, nicknamed DDVP or vapona, one cardboard-caged Shell strip poisons flying insects in an average room for up to three months. It attacks innocent insects as well as mischievous ones, and it operates constantly and continuously, whether there are any insects in the room or not.

This is a celebration of weeds. A bouquet of unappreciated, misunderstood, and hence unwanted flora. Aliens, mostly, though many came to these shores with the first colonists and have long since qualified for American citizenship.

This is a celebration of weeds. A bouquet of unappreciated, misunderstood, and hence unwanted flora. Aliens, mostly, though many came to these shores with the first colonists and have long since qualified for American citizenship.

The letter excerpted below seems an eloquent way to introduce the article on the following pages by Walter Sullivan, science editor of the New York Times. The writer of the letter, Samuel Wnght, is a professor of social ecology who resigned his post to live with his wife m an isolated l2-by-l2foot log cabin in Alaska’s Brooks Range, north of the Arctic Circle. There they are writing and filming the story of “this last great wilderness.” “A Letter from the Arctic,” relayed by bush pilot, first appeared in The Living Wilderness, the quarterly publication of The Wilderness Society. It is with the society’s and Mr. Wright’s kind permission that we present it here.