Good intentions up in smoke: environmentalism's accidents

Forget six counties overhung with smoke, Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke, Forget the spreading of the hideous town . . .

And William Morris never even saw a Jersey strip! We might well want to forget, or rather reverse, but the revenge of unanticipated consequence is especially cruel in its response to ecological do-gooders.

There recently appeared in the Times an article documenting the notable ecological degradation of some hyperborean Canadian landscape effected by the successful eco-assault on the fur trade. The human component of this particular frigid ecosystem used to make an adequate living by clubbing the odd furry critter now and again and merchandising the pelts. The leftovers might on occasion help bulk out dinner. When the market for fur collapsed in the face of the most high-minded of social activism, according to Clifford Krauss of the Times, these folks were forced to attempt "to replace their lost incomes by welcoming into unspoiled areas the oil, gas and mining interests they once opposed." The article was accompanied by a photograph. In the foreground was a team of huskies hauling a sled with its seal-skinned driver across an ocean of pristine tundra. But jarringly rising against the horizon behind the dogsled were some dark satanic mills, indistinct but hideous, apparently imported from the surplus Victorian stock of the Five Towns in the industrial Midlands of Britain.

Commenting on this unlikely wilderness of smoke and snorting steam, the once happy hunter Zacharias Kunuk of Igloolik (I make none of this up, not a single word) attributed his people's ecological misery to "a bunch of Hollywood rich people." I suppose that it is possible that Jane Fonda consciously prefers indigent indigenes to flayed phocidae, but I rather doubt it. In fact I doubt that many people have thought consciously about the trade-off at all, aside from the likes of the Igloolikers. Do-gooders never premeditate the evil they achieve; but the bad consequences of intended benevolence are nicely captured in an immortal book title: "The Helping Hand Strikes Again."

Please do not be so inattentive as to think that I am straying from my theme of the Princeton intellectual climate. All of us 'Prince' columnists recently received a pointed memo from the editors encouraging us to focus on local issues, and the issue I am dealing with here concerns the very intellectual heart of our shared enterprise — Firestone Library.

Firestone Library now has a strict "no smoking" regulation. Health benefits may not be the only ones driving the zero tolerance policy. Recall the fate of our sister institution in Alexandria. In my undergraduate days at Oxford — at a time when incipient lung cancer was nearly a requirement for admission — I still had to swear an oath that I would "kindle neither flame nor fire" within the Bodleian. Yet for decades, Firestone was one of the chief flashpoints of the campus. I myself have been around long enough to recall a time when smoking was permitted, or as some apparently seemed to believe, required, in the seminar rooms of Firestone, as well as in certain other places. There was for example on B-floor a nifty little nook called the "Kienbusch Sporting Collection" that practically required a gas mask to enter. The collection was mainly devoted to fly-fishing and archery, as I recall, but it annoyingly incarcerated the chess books as well. Of course you didn't actually have to go into such smoking areas — only if you wanted to teach a graduate seminar or review a game of Alhekine's — so that it was technically possible to spend a smoke-free day in Princeton's cathedral of learning. But the law of unintended consequence has changed all that.

What is the result of the well-intentioned ban on smoking in Firestone Library? The good news is that once within the building I am free from secondhand smoke. The bad news is that to enter or exit the building I am required to make a forced march, ankle-deep in dead butts, through the cloud of pre-respirated fumes more or less permanently overhanging the portico of the building's only site of public ingress and egress. What was once avoidable has now by legislation become unavoidable. Actually the atmosphere is usually still fairly breathable at eight, when the building opens, especially if the night has been blustery. But from nine a.m. until eleven p.m. you are likely to encounter a cordon of furtive and in recent weeks freezing fumigators respecting Firestone's smoke-free environment by a whole six inches. And even when they are not there, their smoke-signals linger. I entertain no extravagant expectations. It is too much to hope that they might congregate as far away, say, as Madagascar, or even Lipchitz's "Song of the Vowels"; but could they at least back up behind the three-point line to take their foul shots? John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English.