WGBH Journal; Lester Brown; Glasses

Whatever non welcome the dbx journal I will get us. Three interviews make up a Lego. We'll start with a discussion list Lester Brown hair the Worldwatch Institute an independent research group operating out of Washington DC. Then we'll hear an interview with Harvey Mudd did a blind man whose sense of perception has increased due to a pair of sonar glasses and the clothes will have an interview with a New York artist commissioned to do some work in the north end in Boston. The Worldwatch Institute is a nonprofit research organization which was created to focus attention on global problems. One of the areas of greatest concern to the institute has been much of the world's growing population. The director of

Worldwatch Institute is Lester are brown. Mr. Brown is also an author whose book The twenty ninth. He recently discussed with me live. With me in the studio Mr. Lester Brown author of a book the twenty ninth day which the subtitle is common dating human numbers to the U.S. resources. Mr. Brown the book is that we haven't accommodated it and are over consuming all of the resources forests fisheries and oil and the result is going to be the Sastre unless something is done about it you say the economists don't understand inflation because they don't understand the ecology. First on the inflation point. Economists do understand I think rather well some sources of inflation indeed many sources of inflation of the more traditional and institutional sort. And what I am arguing

in the book is that the fact we were overrunning the 4 billion plus people in the world now are over running the the sustainable yields of our biological systems of the fisheries the forests our crop plants grasslands and I would note that these four biological systems provide not only all of our food prices which is rising now but all the raw materials for industry as well except minerals and petro chemicals. That is to say our economic system depends heavily on these biological systems and we cannot can we can no longer separate the health of the economy from the health and condition of the biological systems and the fact is that forests are shrinking fisheries are deteriorating. Grasslands are being overused and in many parts of the world and I think we've got to come to grips with this reality if we don't do this then the chances of ever bringing inflation under control are probably nonexistent for the foreseeable future.

You speak of a global distribution of wealth a national distribution of wealth as in both cases really amount of distribution and you show that they are the poorest people with the greatest problems of production and the least resources to deal with it. Also having the greatest pressure of population increases while others you speak of a global and national distribution of wealth. You don't propose it and it leaves one a little of a riddle about what your answer is how. How radical a governmental change short of totalitarianism. Well what I did not formally address at least not in detail mechanisms for redistributing wealth at the international level for the simple reason that I have a feeling that much of the. Redistribution of wealth that does occur is not going to come about because of an international plan to do it but rather is going to be the

product of raw materials becoming more scarce and leading to improvement in the terms of trade between the pre-industrial exploiters are raw materials and the industrial countries that import those raw materials. And we certainly have seen this dramatically in the case of energy which is affected in an important way a dozen developing countries. And what I see over time is a possible convergence of economic levels of living and I cited in support of that one simple example that in Jakarta today the ratio of automobiles to bicycles is increasing and rather rapidly. In Washington D.C. The ratio of automobiles to bicycles is declining and a fairly steady rate. If these two trends continue then one day Washington and Jakarta will be very close together in terms of transport systems. You would pretty well agree with what we call a council of Rome the Club of Rome Club of

Rome are the more alarmist perhaps than you have. Well. The the Club of Rome published their first study in one thousand seventy two as I remember it was entitled The Limits to Growth and what they said was that economic growth as we've known it over the past generation particularly cannot continue indefinitely into the future without running into problems. And if one looks back at the years since then at the time they published that study oil was about 65 a barrel at the time they published that study fish was still relatively cheap at the time they published that study. Housing had not gone up very much in price but since then we've seen a lot of things happening and we could go on for for a long period of time talking about some of these events. I don't think one could question the basic premise of that study which was economic growth as we've known it since the beginning of dust revolution particularly since World War 2 cannot continue indefinitely.

What about the waste. Every year they hear the billion obsolescence or a refrigerator is a horrible meal and so you've got to keep get you know I think the the days of the society or the economic system based on Planned obsolescence and throwaways is numbered. I think it's going to change and probably much sooner than we realize. Yesterday I read a report from Denmark that indicated that the Danish parliament is probably going to pass by early fall. A law that will require all municipalities in Denmark to collect and recycle all raw materials whether that be paper metals glass everything's going to be recycled be required by law. In addition they are giving serious thought as to how to redesign things so that they can be used over and over again in this country in some states we've gotten to the point where we're passing a deposit tax on on returnable bottles. So we're just about to feed

it. Unfortunately in this day and in some I think of this pre-primary is an anti litter Bill cleans up. It is that it is that as well. But in Denmark they have gone so far now as to begin thinking about how to design liquid containers so they'll all be standardized and you can use the same bottle for milk or for fruit juice or for wine or what have you. So you take it back to the store it'll be very simple to get it back to the food processors to be used again. Advancements in scientific technology are creating amazing tools for people who are

physically handicapped. One such device is sonar glasses designed by a blind people and sensing the objects around them. It is a blind man who wears a pair of these glasses when he talks with her responder David Cronenberg. He discusses his sense of perception. When I walk without these glasses what I do is I imagine I convert to what I hear and what I feel and sense and smell into a kind of visual image. I converted. But with these glasses that doesn't work I hear hears sounds all around me. It's almost a feel kind of kind of learning to operate very rhythm. I tend to feel as if I'm surrounded by music when I use these glasses as if the universe is sound and I have to make choices. To me turning left or right or trying to find out what is this particular. Because a person is treated as an excitement

and emotionality to attach to it that I don't understand but it draws me to them. Hard to imagine blinded by an accident at age 15. Seems well on the road to mastering the craft of mobility. Since last March when the Massachusetts commission for the blind bought him with $2000 a specially equipped pair of glasses. Margaret has been exploring his surroundings in much the same way as does a bat with sonar a small round transducer in the center of the glasses emits high pitched sound waves which bounce off objects in the immediate environment and then return to two tiny receivers. Each of these is attached to an earpiece that hangs from the glasses allowing the wearer to hear background noise as well. Different objects depending on their location and physical characteristics produce different sounds here for example is how modules would sense the presence of a metal door.

Now listen closely for contrast as we cut to the sound produced by a north pole behind. Her. It is these subtle distinctions that constitute a new language with its own diversity a statics and for a hardy margin its own profound meaning. As a Harvard graduated economist studying aids to the blind Magid was intrigued after first trying on the Sonic guide glasses last year. He has since spent three months training at the Boston College School of purpose. A science that helps the handicapped to travel in one exercise his instructor would arrange two poles in a gymnasium leaving Dr Magid to find the place where they sounded equally distant and to form an equal lateral triangle with a third pole. He learned to do so accurately. Another skill is judging motion as objects across the field of sonar.

This was the effect as I walked toward and then away from the sonar glasses. The inventor of these funny guy glasses is Lesli Kay an electrical engineer now living in New Zealand who has developed a series of devices for the blind since World War 2. Officials from several states are observing Dr. margins progress to determine if this form of mobility might have wide application. I sometimes go on for example in the middle of into traffic I want to cross the street but instead of crossing I may have started drawing so I can't. I wander off somewhere into the middle of traffic and that's got a disconcerting usually. Without these glasses getting back into I manage but it's kind of it was that intuitive process of making the most of whatever I sense around

me. But with these glasses I can pick up that out and say they do. The metal pole that usually at any corner of a street from 20 feet away so that I can you know as soon as I pick it up I know where I am and I am for it. So it gives me a lot of information about what's beyond my cane which I use now and I still use with these glasses. You can order reaches out to a couple of feet whereas this reaches out to 25 feet maybe 22 feet. So my way of traveling I mean of making choices is significantly different. It's not always easy to interpret these things because the glasses are in stereo and they display all the things that come come at me and that can be quite numerous. It's also each of these objects varies in pitch to the far object has a high pitch. A nearby object has a low pitch. In addition to these that each object has a different quality of sound a tree will sound

softer leaves or sound softer glass world with someone harsh in their life that every every object has its own kind of quality and characteristic. But all of that is coming into into the glasses and into my senses and it's. It's. It takes a lot of a lot of effort and experience to try to make sense of all of this. You've been at this now for only half a year. Is it fair to assume that with a couple more years practice your ability to discriminate between this array of sounds will be refined and you'll have a fairly clear notion of where everything is and one of the I'm sure it will be refined but I see it as more of a five year process. If I had been a musician I suspect that these glasses would work better for me more quickly. A lot of the things are a matter of

distinguishing one one sound from another which are very close together. For example if I walk along the street and I want to find a particular entrance doorway. That doorway would probably have knobs are different from the door when they're there next to it. These glasses can generally do that distinguish between you know the knobs that are significantly different from one another around up from straight up and down now that will make it sound differential but for me to hear that and to know that and to recognize and say yeah that's the you know that's the up and down rather than the round one. That's a tough thing and I suspect a musician would be it would be much better at it. It's affected my own musical interests so I've bought since I've worn these glasses or become them. I've become kind of deeply interested in learning each other. I've never had a desire before but there's something about the pitch of the cello or it may be likened to the sound kind of penetrates into me the way the glasses do. When I listen to orchestras differently I listen to the

pieces more of the instruments much more I'm much more aware of the instruments and where they are what are interesting things to listen to. Through your sonar medium I think I like pool sounds you know what that is is that the edges of things where there's a little angle Earth reflects a lot of sound so the volume is in there and the signal is very clear. Now as I walk along past the row of windows lets you know on a long long city street which has lots of windows right up to the wall or are a series of polls as they come towards me and disappear. The guts out of coming towards me getting lower and lower in pictures we get nearer of having two or three pulls in in you know coming at me. It's a fantastic sound. Is there a sense of symmetry to it the coming and going and coming and going and is that what's appealing is it a massaging symmetry it is that

I think that's very much the rhythm of it yes and the tone and the rhythm of the tones changing coming going deeper and deeper and another one coming. It is a rhythmic you're right but it also sounds very eerie. It has a strange quality of being somewhere else of of sound without location although it has a location it's ahead of me and it's a little to the right or left. It still has that kind. Of quality of of coming from nowhere having no spatial dimension using these glasses is sometimes a little bit like listening to an oracle you know quite sure what it means but to me that's the that's the essence of music and the essence of of of of an active life. And I would like to have it remain there. Could you tell me something of your feeling in walking down the street with that uncertainty.

Well that it is a feeling of never quite being sure of having signals come and having a little doubt as to whether I have recognized it right. There's always that doubt as to what it means in a doubt as to what to do about it that are ever present with me. And I suspect that that is almost inherent when one makes choices outside of pictures you know makes choices in a in a domain of sound where sound is a logic where emotion dramas the logic there is there's apt to be always there's some doubt you know I think what I'm sensing is that inherent difference between between. The temple of lies in motion in the temple of something still like objects. Do you regret being sightless. No I know I don't. I sometimes get annoyed at being

so into this that it bothers me I sometimes get laid and seeing things. It's troublesome sometimes and it gets in the way of things. But I don't think I regretted my good I did regret it when I first lost my sight for the first two years but I have basically accepted and it hasn't made that much difference to me I think. I don't think life is any harder than then and it would have been otherwise were more easy or different to be significantly different. Have these glasses change that. They make no difference to me I meddle where I've always been a good traveller and they don't really they help me there and that's just to make me make me feel more secure. They make me feel I'm better equipped to make it and I feel little that I'm on the road to being entering a craft of

mobility gives me a sense of of of something that has developed over the years like a crafted. It offers an interesting avenue of research and devices. I think it poses a very important question that always exists on devices and in technology I think is at its most important role when it tries to enhance or how a person functions or what a person is when it's when the technology and the person kind of meld together. Here in the you know area of the handicapped that's very vital and important to be done right. Technology tends to be too practical and I think it is fielded by and large in being very helpful to the handicapped a very very few good advanced devices. These glasses are one of them. And the reason I think is that the inventors have neglected and not really understood the ethical implications the value implications and the impact on the life and relationship between people but all

the way down on and on on the technological side and have not known how to integrate it in here is here is to me that when I wear the glasses I think that is one of the intriguing parts here is a device that does both. It is it does a static fortuitously by accident but that doesn't matter. How do you imagine a pioneer in Sonar directed travel making his way across a bridge between practical technology and a wondrous new realm of perception says David Friedberg in Boston. Ground personnel is a New York they still are best known for his paintings of New York

neighborhoods singing hymns at the present time he's living and painting in the north end in Boston on a grant from the Massachusetts Council on the arts and humanities doesn't have to work for much of his life was a gas station attendant and was active as a union organizer. He was only discovered by the art world in 1972 when he was 58 years old. At times his paintings of an political appointee discussed with reporters with the new guys. You had a career a political life which you then didn't sort of tone down in order to get into painting because you need what was there while there was a really I toned down a bit from a union's racial political work something out the case by which I was a little too. Well you got to do these things and somewhere about it there's not an emotional contact to your organization people you're talking about masses and you're really you're you're restricted because you talk about economic and political issues and you can never quite child suddenly how you

feel about a particular thing. And that kind of a thing would always just open mike my belly and my friends and it didn't quite make it right so I. Luckily I was able to find painting and so on painting and I know you were not only able to you know express my ideas about the outside world but for the first time I can put it down the way I feel about it. So the color of the emotions come out in the painting. Well many people think in terms of my paint job political I don't think that what sustains him. Thing that sustains my work is the emotion the call of my attitude toward the thing that's why I think my pain should have been well received by mostly working people and rest of America where it's at. And I always tell people that there you know when you know this isn't how I feel toward a thing and I do it that way is to beauty that makes the art not the politics. You have a family president thing this political thing turned a beautiful thing. And I'm not talking beauty as used today humanity I'm not saving the world I'm not God. I'm

just talking about the direct beauty that people have contact every day the eyes the lips the legs the bricks the street. Also as life itself is beautiful again I'm not saying in an abstract way life is beautiful. I'm not William Blake making a whole world I see in that gorgeous thing. I'm often asked on the street. It's aches and pains its problems you know. I'm never I've never sat down when I'm going to make a thing this is a conflict and preconceived idea that if I do about it we failed. What happens if I I find out I get a pain if I want to come with some idea. It fortified doesn't work where you think time is people. Yes well I was working in shops or gas stations and you paint right in the subways and seen these things and painted all these things a lot of times I painted baseball scenes.

I painted people going to work. I put seven years in a machine shop 14 years in a gas station I couldn't get a job in this really goes I was being fried country by the CIA. Her last job after job. You know but that didn't take me away from what I was doing. I set a goal in my mind I was going to paint you know what I thought was right and I stay to my guns and that's where I'm at now watch watch or waitress work. I should pick up or wipe and one time the rhythm to pick up the plate and put everything into That's a ballet that's fast moving. Watch a truck driver pick up drop it down. Gets a hand truck snaps. Door pushes the lever locks it up Bing bing bing. Second that's the ballot that's a double plated triple play that the ballet that we see up there anymore that ballet intellectual beautiful you want to spend a Monday night through the night but I'll never get the masses because the ballet of the masses they'll like the rhythm of how to go to work every note a train to get off they go on a push.

That's what we're talking about not the ballet that these people are giving your paintings reach them. My pain of HMS is no one can reach my shop on whom I can reach the masses. You know in a sense that the only break that I got more alas. I had a show on automation house and cut off my axe and put my book I don't understand it. And well he said he put out 50000. I get letters throughout America that the best contact I've had. It's only recently that I'm getting the message from unions and I got I may go with the auto workers union I spoke to somebody going to speak to they had a real auto worker union. I got a phone call from the United Mine Workers the other that it won't lead to a job with down the mine is union beholds. What do you think that the content and the content of your paintings know reaches the masses as opposed to all the other more intellectual kinds of IP really against. Yeah they work at a very strange guy. He hath be pulled body emotion he has to

like it but still a look at a woman look at a child like it you're pulled into it then I think what my pain to him that makes him think. They make him think that I've done what I have to do. And. Most people look at my work to look at it. Some of them look at it and kind of I'm a surrealist and I'm quite grab the thing. I come from a different world I'm able to put things together. But all in a sense you know what I'm talking about the world we live in in a way I'm much more successful than the coke so-called revolution guy who trying to propagandize the masses I don't try. But it comes out that way I do say something and the something comes out a highly highly for me the static value very emotional. I have a content to it that doesn't drive me to cunt that is the thing that bugs my ear bug me because I'm annoyed with the outside world

but it's really a static thing that makes me go onto what the loving thing the discovery the color the emotion that makes me do it I just can't sit down and write straight politics. I don't put up with I'm not a propagandist. I got a gut feeling that I go for telling cold emotion guys lips nose whatever it is that's what I want to do. The money for Thursday the 18th of May 1978 that's a journal a radio news magazine heard Monday through Friday employ 30 producer and editor for The Journal is Michael Hurd. Today's engineer Margo Garza and I broke up news. Have a thing all of us Thursday. From.

The home. I hope I hope I hope. Long. Long.

The world. Long long long. Long. Long time AND AND AND AND AND AND AND AND.