The CIA’s literary lapses…

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Short Cuts

– J. Hoberman

From the London Review Bookshop, courtesty of Lew Rockwell.

In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own operatives as unwitting guinea pigs), ran literary journals and produced the first general-release, feature-length animation ever made in the UK.

It was Howard Hunt who broke the story that the CIA funded Animal Farm, John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 version of George Orwell’s political allegory of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, played out in a British farmyard. Cashing in on his Watergate notoriety, the rogue spook and sometime spy novelist took credit in Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent (1974) for initiating the project, shortly after Orwell’s death in 1950. The self-aggrandising Hunt may have exaggerated his own importance in the operation – possibly inventing the juicy detail that Orwell’s widow, Sonia, was wooed with the promise of meeting her favourite star, Clark Gable – but, as detailed by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of ‘Animal Farm’ (Pennsylvania, $55), the operation was real.

Leab is a historian who has done extensive research into the production of Hollywood’s Cold War movies; the central figure in his account is Louis de Rochemont, the former newsreel cameraman who supervised Time magazine’s innovative monthly release The March of Time and, beginning in 1945 with The House on 92nd Street, produced a number of so-called ‘journalistic features’ for 20th Century Fox (which were praised by James Agee, among others, for their extensive use of location shooting). De Rochemont was also well connected to various government agencies. The House on 92nd Street dramatised the FBI’s role in arresting Nazi agents; its 1946 follow-up, 13 Rue Madeleine, celebrated the wartime exploits of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, but a dispute between the studio and the OSS director, ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, resulted in the organisation’s being disguised as an intelligence outfit called ‘0-77’.

De Rochemont subsequently became an independent producer affiliated with the Reader’s Digest. In 1951, while preparing a new FBI collaboration, Walk East on Beacon (adapted from an article by J. Edgar Hoover originally published in the Digest), he was recruited by the CIA’s blandly titled Office of Policy Co-Ordination to produce an animated Animal Farm. The CIA was already engaged in spreading the Orwellian gospel – as was the clandestine Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office. (Both agencies had been engaged in making translations and even comic-book versions of Animal Farm and 1984.) Nor were the CIA and the IRD the only interested parties: according to Leab, both the US Army and the producers of Woody Woodpecker cartoons also made inquiries as to the availability of Animal Farm’s film rights.

The trade press reported that de Rochemont financed Animal Farm with the frozen British box-office receipts from his racial ‘passing’ drama Lost Boundaries; in fact, Animal Farm was almost entirely underwritten by the CIA. De Rochemont hired Halas and Batchelor (they were less expensive and, given their experience making wartime propaganda cartoons, politically more reliable than American animators) in late 1951; well before that, his ‘investors’ had furnished him with detailed dissections of his team’s proposed treatment. Animal Farm was scheduled for completion in spring 1953, but the ambitious production, which made use of full cell animation, was delayed for more than a year, in part because of extensive discussion and continual revisions. Among other things, the investors pushed for a more aggressively ‘political’ voice-over narration and were concerned that Snowball (the pig who figures as Trotsky) would be perceived by audiences as too sympathetic.

Most problematic, however, was Orwell’s pessimistic ending, in which the pigs become indistinguishable from their human former masters. No matter how often the movie’s screenplay was altered, it always concluded with a successful farmyard uprising in which the oppressed animals overthrew the dictatorial pigs. The Animal Farm project had been initiated when Harry Truman was president; Dwight Eisenhower took office in January 1953, with John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state and Allen Dulles heading the CIA. Leab notes that Animal Farm’s mandated ending complemented the new Dulles policy, which – abandoning Truman’s aim of containing Communism – planned a ‘roll back’, at least in Eastern Europe. As one of the script’s many advisors put it, Animal Farm’s ending should be one where the animals ‘get mad, ask for help from the outside, which they get, and which results in their (the Russian people) with the help of the free nations overthrowing their oppressors’.

Animal Farm’s world premiere was held at the Paris Theatre in December 1954, then as now Manhattan’s poshest movie-house, and was followed by a gala reception at the United Nations. The movie received respectful reviews – as it did when it opened several months later in London – but performed poorly at the box office. (Its major precursor as a ‘serious’ animation, Disney’s 1943 collaboration with the aviator Alexander de Seversky, Victory through Air Power, was also a flop.) Halas and Batchelor did achieve a reasonable approximation of stretchy, rounded Disney-style character animation but, as the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther observed, ‘the shock of straight and raw political satire is made more grotesque in the medium of cartoon.’ This was a dark cuteness. While praising Animal Farm as ‘technically first-rate’, Crowther concluded his review by advising parents to not ‘make the mistake of thinking it is for little children, just because it is a cartoon.’

Actually, Animal Farm was ultimately seen mainly by schoolchildren – particularly in West Germany. Possibly the movie was perceived by this captive audience as an unaccountably dour and violent version of Walt Disney’s Dumbo. But, however the CIA’s fervent call for an anti-Soviet revolt (with ‘help from the outside’) was received by the world, it was rendered moot some eighteen months after Animal Farm’s European release by the much encouraged and subsequently abandoned Hungarian uprising.”

I did a piece on this in Countercurrents on the CIA and modern art.

A Comment on the Finkelstein tenure situation

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Arguments about the use of the Holocaust in public debate don’t constitute an “intra-Jewish fight.” It would be much more accurate to say that they involve questions of state policy in this country (and in Israel) and of propaganda in the west at large — an issue which affects ALL writers, journalists, thinkers, intellectuals, scholars and even citizens who just want to be informed accurately — not simply Jews.

It amazes me how so many Anglophone intellectuals (even well-meaning ones) feel completely qualified to analyze atrocities and abuses anywhere in the world, loudly and superfically (if not downright incorrectly), often with the sketchiest and most second-hand knowledge (gleaned from the English language writings of their own DC-N. York journalist buddies or from scholars at various “prestigious” universities, all sharing exactly the same myopic viewpoint ).

A notable recent example is Martha Nussbaum, whose latest book on India (preparatory, I imagine, to humanitarian bombing, somewhere down the line) can only annoy anyone who knows anything about the subject. When it comes to their own backyard, however, these soi-disant arbiters of universal values frigidly ignore views that aren’t self-selected, insular and distinctly obsequious to their pet theories about life outside hard cover. Prizes, tenures, sinecures, reviews, cocktail parties and the rest of the glitz of intellectual life follow in lock step. A nice system….

Now, good for those who make their living from it – I don’t knock them.
As long as they remember that’s all it is – a living. A way of paying their bills that has little do with the real life of the mind — which might sooner take place in some scorching megapolis abroad or ghetto stink-hole here than at one of their blow-dried soirees. And might take place silently as much as it does vocally.

On the outside, we know this. On the outside, we know it is their self-regarding attitude that makes mainstream idealogues less than credible, less than admirable in the eyes of ordinary human beings. The criticism of these “smatterers” is always within a select framework, in which they and they alone are true subjects.

A fitting response is to hold their opinions in equal disdain. A favorable review from one of them should be treated much as one treats an alarming bug of some kind….you hope you’ll get through, but it might be the beginning of a fatal contamination…

Is this a viable position for a struggling writer? Yes, indeed.

Blogging makes it possible for books to sell and sell well even without reviews from the establishment. Fellow bloggers and dissidents are willing to say a good word here and there. A reader. An unknown collegaue. The pleasure of having the good will and encouragement of those who share your sympathies and your aloneness is something surely far more satisfying than the brittle praise of people whose main concern is pleasing the right people and stepping on the obscure in their frantic rush to the limelight.

In fact, a new ambition — I hope to forego a publisher altogether and publish directly. Perhaps those two lengthy chapter on media ownership in this country that were cut out summarily (would offend too may people, they said), will see the light that way.

So, what has this to do with Finkelstein?

Everything.

The central issue in this country and in many western countries is not globalization or imperialism; it is not torture or the CIA; it is not humanitarian intervention…or realpolitik…or peacekeeping.. or even war.

The central issue is brainwashing. Whether it is at universities or in the press or in think-tanks; whether in war or in peace-time. Whether the subject is Israel or imperialism or the family or women or money or IQ tests or immigration or race.

The issue now is how we think. Or don’t. And what we get to think about. Who does it for us. Why. And where it is leading us.

9-11 compensation director to give $7 mill to V-Tech victims…

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“Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Washington lawyer who directed the federal program to compensate relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will oversee the distribution of the $7 million that has been donated to Virginia Tech after the April campus massacre, university officials said Thursday.”

More here at the New York Times.

Well, now, this is nice ‘n all…but is 7 million serious money, taking into consideration everything? Let’s see. Our math skills are a wee bit rusty — so please correct us, if needed — but here’s what we figure:

“32 who were killed, about 30 people who were injured during the incident and an untold number of people who sustained psychological harm , ” says the Times gravely.

That would be 62 physically injured… plus, let’s say, six hundred (that’s the ‘untold’ part) for the others. 700 altogether. OK – that’s 7 million minus two zeros (pardon my antiquated methods here…)- which is 70,000. Divided by 7, that would be $10,000 apiece.

A pittance.

But, obviously we have to increase that sum for the dead and physically injured and cut it down by an equal amount for the others. Let’s say we give a $1,000 each to the psychologically damaged. That’s 600 times 1000 or $600,000 there, which is $6,400,000 for the rest. Now we get $64,000 for each physically injured victim.

Hmmm.. that’s more than many sparrows, for sure, but in the circumstances, not too much more.

Are there any other sources that might be tapped?

Says the Times, “state funds typically pay between $2,500 and $5,000.”

Not so good.

Especially when the Times also tells us that 1 million of the 7 has already been spoken for:

“Approximately $1 million of the total donations have been designated by donors toward specific uses, leaving the balance for general use, including distributions.”

Oh?

What’s ‘general use’ ? Who knows. ..more ceremonies…a fund to keep the President’s PR machine going…more pepper spray for the police….could be anything.
But, let’s be charitable and assume that it’s all meant for the victims.

So back up a bit and do that whole divvying with 6 million, not 7. Or, easier yet, just make it 500 psychologically injured and 100 physically, or 600 altogether. And we still only get about $55,000 for each physically injured person.

That’s a rough and ready calculation. But you get the picture. A lawsuit would do a whole lot better for the victims.

Oh, but unlike the 9-11 deal, the victims could still sue, says the Times.

True. But, considering how high the barriers to suing are in the state school already, I wonder if paying off the victims doesn’t just raise them just that much more.

And the point isn’t only money, is it? These parents know that nothing is going to bring back their children. But a lawsuit might make the state and the school accountable. It might prevent other parents losing their children in the same way again.

And it might tell us what really happened at V-Tech on April 16.

Senate, house fight over habeas corpus coming up…

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“Center-stage in the upcoming debate are two pieces of legislation that would amend the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006 to “restore” the habeas corpus rights banned by that law.

In the Senate, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and the Committee’s top Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, have introduced the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007. The measure would restore habeas corpus protections by repealing provisions of the MCA. The legislation was favorably reported out by the Judiciary Committee in May.

In the House, Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) and Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) have introduced legislation that would uphold the principle of habeas corpus by amending the MCA to allow individuals detained, often for many years without formal charges, to have their day in court.”

More at The World According to Bill Fisher.

What the new bills seek to do is to undo the worst part of the Military Commissions Act, under which the executive (i.s. the President and his advisors) got to determine — on their lonesome — who an enemy combatant was and got to strip him of all protection of federal laws.

That meant, he or she could be “disappeared” without so much as a by-your-leave.

Which is exactly what makes a police state….

Habeas Corpus, by the way, is the centuries old jewel of common law that has gone strong from 1215 to….well, until 2006….

“The MCA was rushed through Congress in September to overturn a Supreme Court decision that struck down Bush’s military tribunals and scorning of the Geneva Conventions. The new law -far more dangerous than the more controversial Patriot Act- is perhaps the biggest disgrace Congress has enacted since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Stephen Grey, the author of Ghost Plane, notes, “The act grants fewer rights to defendants than the Nazis got at Nuremberg,”

said James Bovard in December 2006 at the American Conservative.

My Comment:

It’s interesting that John McCain, who was tortured in Vietnam, doesn’t think torture is the way to go. Guess he wouldn’t know, but a bunch of armchair theorists would.

The US managed to survive a world-wide communist threat (complete with a nuclear arsenal and super power status) for several decades without dismantling the constitution at home or violating anti-torture laws; but a few home-made bombs now — .and the big brave government is quaking. I don’t buy it. The anti-terror laws are a power grab…..nothing more or less, and people are too riled up by propaganda to see it.

By the way, do read the recently released CIA papers (far from exhaustive, of course, and heavily redacted) and you can see just how well covert ops and so-called extra-constitutional methods work (forget about the legality or morality, for a moment). Short answer is — they don’t. There is no information torture can get, which you can’t get from good research and analysis. Before dismantling the constitution and subverting the laws, why don’t they try hiring some trained Arab speakers. Do you know how few people they actually have? Here’s a quote from an article about it:

“Of the 1,000 employees of the massive new US Embassy inside the Green Zone bubble in Baghdad, there are – wait for it – SIX who are fluent in Arabic. In a very real sense, that pitiful number could be a metaphor for one of the most serious flaws in the entire Iraq adventure. We invaded a country about which we knew virtually nothing. Not only didn’t we know the Arabic language, we knew nothing about Iraq’s religious sects, tribes, culture, sensitivities, customs, traditions, mores, or the Byzantine interrelationships among all these attributes. And that predicament is not limited to the State Department, which runs the new embassy. It is also true of the armed services, the CIA, and all the many other parts of our national security apparatus.”

That’s from The World According to Bill Fisher, who’s run economic development programs in the Middle East for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years.

The experience of countries who’ve suffered years of terrorism (about ten times more than the US or UK has) – such as India — shows that terror laws don’t work, as I point out in this article; they end up harming innocent people and letting the government control the population even more. Other countries are not setting out on unending wars and dismantling all the legal protections of their citizens just because of a few terror attacks. I thought the west was supposed to be the model for civil liberties. Guess it isn’t any more.

The working rule is — the means you use to tackle a problem have to be proportionate to the crime. When you have a murderer loose, you don’t bomb the entire neighborhood to catch him. You also don’t torture people to get information about him.

Terrorists aren’t even simple murderers – they are political actors, mostly. So those rules should go double for them.

They are – whether we see it that way or not – people with political grievances, who are conducting war by other means…..just like those pilots who go into countries whose air defensives have been destroyed and carpet bomb civililans. I guess if that happened in the US – people here would fight back by any means too. One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

We did not torture a psychopath like Ted Bundy. Why should we torture terrorists who are rational actors? Here’s the logic — terrorists are out to destroy our freedoms, so let’s give our freedoms up on our own, before the terrorists take them away – that’s a rather odd argument, I think.

And where are those freedoms now, anyway? Besides running our mouths on blogs, I can’t off-hand think of many ways we are all that free these days. Your property can be confiscated, the government can open your mail, tap your phones, look up your financial information, deny you work, prosecute you and jail you – under so-called terror laws – for just about anything — without due process. And they can strip you of all your rights and declare you a non-citizen, while they’re at it.

Who benefits?

And why worry about terrorists wanting to dismantle this country, when its own citizens –from its financiers and politicians down to the population – are doing a pretty good job on their own……

London bomb hysterics, anti-terror laws, and Gordon Brown’s resume(updated 6/30)

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“CNN adds:

Explosives officers discovered the fuel and nails attached to a “potential means of detonation,” inside the vehicle. Officers “courageously” disabled the trigger by hand, he said. Security sources told CNN that the “relatively crude device” in the first car contained at least 200 liters, or about 50 gallons, of fuel in canisters.

You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.”

More from terrorism expert Larry Johnson at No Quarter

and a word of caution from John Chuckman at Counterpunch.

Just a coincidence, of course, that all this happened just after Gordon Brown, taking over from Tony Blair, made it clear that he was no slouch either in the occupation of Iraq or in the anti-terrorism department.

Only to be expected from a buddy of Henry Kissinger, as this piece by Craig Murray points out:

“Gordon Brown has been a personal friend of Henry Kissinger for a long time, and the last time Kissinger came to London, Brown and Kissinger spent two hours alone together in 11 Downing St discussing Kissinger’s latest book. That should disillusion those daft enough to believe that Brown’s five year support for Bush’s wars was a aberration forced upon him by circumstance.”

(Hat tip to Murray also for this tidbit in the same piece:

“Meanwhile Blair, for whom the House of Commons was never more than a vehicle for personal interest, has quit it even sooner than decently possible, so not a penny of the tens of millions of pounds about to flow his way from corporate America will have to be declared in the register of member’s interests.”)

Here’s an article from February 2006 by Brendan O’Neill (spikedonline.com) that takes on the new transatlantic national insecurity states.

Brown has urged more funding for experts to tackle the financing of terrorism. Translated, that means more snooping into financial accounts of all sorts of non-terrorists.

Joe Citizen, besides having to foot the bills for government-funded panic attacks, also has to clutch his bank statements closer to his heart – lest the larcenous fingers of the feds get into them.

Meanwhile, while Brown wants more tax-payer money for anti-terrorism, he’s not letting on too much about what he’s done with tax-payer moolah before — like losing a wad of it ($4.8 billion) when he sold off Britain’s gold reserves — against the advice of Bank of England officials – at only the bottom of the market between 1999-2002. Nice trade.
Maybe, just maybe, that ought to be a tad more worrisome to people than some half-cocked bomb scare.

Who were the lucky buyers, you ask? Why, none other than the Chinese.

So much for Brown’s national security cred…..

However, that might not carry much weight when measured against his pro-Israeli qualifications, noted in this Jerusalem Post report.

Several of his appointees also seem to share this pro-Israeli bias, James Purnell, for one, who is now secretary of state for culture, media and sport. In that role he’ll have oversight over the BBC and the rest of the British media. Here is Purnell on the subject of criticising Israel and anti-semitism in a letter to Prospect Magazine, in December 2004:

“Israel is a democracy, suffering terrorist attacks, surrounded by countries that don’t recognise its existence, the victim of well-funded terrorist organisations that preach antisemitic hate. The Palestinians deserve a viable state, and are suffering real poverty and hardship. There is suffering on both sides-neither can solve this problem without the other.

 

 

 

 

“So when some people talk as if Israel is entirely to blame, I ask why. The only answer I can find is that there is something deep in our cultural memory that makes us disposed to blame Jews. That tendency was put in its box by the Holocaust. But today it re-emerges-occasionally, but persistently. I would call it passive, or unexamined, antisemitism.” I wonder what Purnell would call it when anti-Zionist Jews are targeted by pro-Zionist Jews —

 

 

 

 

 

 

anti- antisemitic pro-semitism? Yes – that’s how ridiculous these word games are: “Hate-speech” laws, ” anti-terror” laws — nothing but pretexts for increasing control over people, their money and their lives….

 

 

Why “hate crime” laws are a bad idea

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From the Orlando Sentinel’s Kathleen Parker:

“The Duke and Knoxville cases cast serious doubts on that premise. It is human nature to resent groups and individuals deemed more special than others.

Signaling through laws (or media treatment) that one group’s suffering is more grievous than another’s — or that one person’s murder is worse than another’s — is also likely to fragment communities, as well as to engender the very animosities such laws are meant to deter.”

An American Conservationist…..

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The original link to MSN has disappeared so I’m linking this to a blog where I found the article reproduced:

“Eustace Conway is probably as close to Rousseau’s ideal of the “noble savage” as it’s possible to be in modern-day America. The product of a middle-class American family, Conway decided at an early age that being at one with nature was more important than being at one with conventional society.

So he left home at 17 and moved into a teepee. He wore buckskins and lived off the land. Still, he managed to earn a college degree with honors from Appalachian State University.

Within a few years he had begun to acquire acreage in the North Carolina mountains that eventually would become the 1,000-acre Turtle Island Preserve, a working 19th century Appalachian “heritage” farm that also serves as Conway’s environmental pulpit. His original audacious vision was that Turtle Island would be a green beacon lighting the way for a large-scale return to nature — think of John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” but in reverse.

Along the way, Conway, 45, has had the sort of adventures that rank him among the great outdoorsmen of all time. He has crossed the continental United States on horseback in a record 103 days, hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail and kayaked Alaska’s south shore, always living off the land or sea and carrying equipment more befitting a 19th century explorer than a modern-age adventurer. The details of his extraordinary life, as well as its whys and wherefores, are chronicled in Elizabeth Gilbert’s celebrated biography, “The Last American Man.”

But what of his vision? With Turtle Island recently turned 20, MSN asked writer Philipp Harper to talk with Conway about the way his vision — and his level of environmental optimism — have changed over the years.

MSN: Does how you live give you a greater respect for the earth?

CONWAY: Oh, my gosh, so much greater! It’s made an inestimable difference.

MSN: What was your goal when you retreated to Turtle Island 20 years ago? Did you see yourself having a profound impact on society?

CONWAY: I’m not exactly sure what was on my mind. I’m not sure I had a grand scheme. But basically the idea was that I’d show folks something invaluable and they’d see the light, that what they were doing was killing themselves and the planet.

MSN: Has this changed over the years?

CONWAY: Yes, but only because I’ve failed at the larger goal. I’ve gotten more in touch with the realistic perspective that masses of folks aren’t going to change because of my showing them the light.

MSN: How about changing behavior in small, practical ways?

CONWAY: There are so many possibilities. The main thing is to motivate people to reevaluate some basic assumptions. As far as practices, it’s about getting closer to some of the basics in life, not only where they come from but where they go.

For example, if you save your urine and put it in a sawdust bucket you produce compost, something which goes back into the life cycle. Now, take that compost you made and go grow something, even if it’s one tomato plant on a window sill.

It’s all about taking individual steps. Without that you can’t go any further, and the first step is usually the hardest.

MSN: What else?

CONWAY: Well, composting food waste. What is food waste and where would it go if I didn’t compost it? Start weaving a thread of consciousness. See waste turned around.

If we say we want to take better care of the planet, let’s just take five minutes a day thinking about compost or looking at our trash.

We’re the most wasteful people who’ve ever existed.

MSN: Describe your relationship with the environment.

CONWAY: Everything is about relationships. Everything is connected to everything else, all aspects of life. Every movement has an opposite and equal reaction. Every move we make as human beings results in consumption and degradation.

For 27 years I’ve used leaves instead of toilet paper because I think toilet paper is detrimental. As you get in touch with the natural world, the environment that’s the source of all things, you understand how life in modern America puts us so far away from it.

Personally, I am in touch. I went right out to where food comes from. I made my own shelter and my own clothes. I found out about the roots of existence. I feel the weather and I taste the fruit of my labor. I have really fresh food because I grow it and harvest it. My milk is fresh squeezed from my goats. I have a very deep conscious and unconscious oneness with the earth.

MSN: Some self-described environmentalists have criticized you in the past for killing and eating animals and clothing yourself in their skins. How do you respond?

CONWAY: When I shoot a deer and take its meat and skin, I’m intensely connected to the forest. Manufacturing blue jeans and T-shirts decimates the environment. So the environmentalist who wears blue jeans and a T-shirt and tells me I’m not doing a good job by killing a deer is missing the point.

MSN: What’s the energy situation like at Turtle Island?

CONWAY: For nearly 20 years we had no electricity but now I have a small hydroelectric plant and some solar on the edge of the compound at my shop. But in the main part of the preserve we have no electricity. We use fire for lighting and cooking and heating.

MSN: But in burning fossil fuels aren’t you producing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming?

CONWAY: Well, firewood is a renewable resource, plus our level of consumption is extraordinarily different from what’s commonplace in modern America. Here you walk 30 feet and pick up some firewood instead of shipping it from the other side of the world. Also, it puts people back in touch with their roots.

MSN: Are you more or less optimistic than you used to be about man’s ability to save the environment?

CONWAY: Unfortunately, I’m less. I’m the last one who wants to give up, but the writing on the wall says that we’re going downhill. And it’s pretty indelible ink on that wall.

MSN: You haven’t lost your will to fight, have you?

CONWAY: No, I haven’t lost my will to fight, but I haven’t got as much will to fight as I used to. And I don’t have nearly the hope I used to have.

MSN: But isn’t there more awareness of the need to be

“green” than there used to be?

CONWAY: Yeah, there’s more information about it, but people aren’t doing more. If information is all over the place and people still aren’t doing one-twentieth of what’s needed, that’s a reason for deep concern, isn’t it?

MSN: Ok, then, what’s the answer?

CONWAY: One of the main things is education, especially starting with young people. Each individual has to have the dedication to care about what’s right. My hero, Jacques Cousteau, pointed out that people only care about what they understand. If people don’t understand the sources of life, how can they put a lot of energy into loving the planet? My argument all along is that we have to be interested.