1823 



A striking example of what Bullis is referring to is given in an article 

 by Peter Osnos, in the Washington Post for September 26, 1975, 

 entitled "Ecology and Pride Save a Soviet Lake." The article relates 

 how, "In the name of progress, Soviet authorities decided a few decades 

 ago to empty one of the world's largest and most beautiful mountain 

 lakes," Lake Sevan in Soviet Armenia. "They reasoned that the 

 water could be better used to irrigate the valleys nearby and provide 

 electricity for much of Armenia. But that challenge to nature proved 

 to be a mistake," seriously disrupting the ecological balance of the 

 area, "and now, at enormous cost, Lake Sevan is being saved. . . . 

 Reversing any ambitious [electrification] project ... in the Soviet 

 Union is hard enough, but doing so on primarily environmental 

 grounds is a substantial tribute to popular will." 



It takes scientists to diagnose a condition of pollution, technologists 

 to correct it, and political decisionmakers to give the order. Increas- 

 ingl}^, as the communications process grows technologically more 

 sophisticated and knowledge is more widely disseminated, the public 

 may also be involved. 



Yet there is irony in the fact that the IGY, as a foremost demon- 

 stration of scientific interdependence and cooperation, was also the 

 occasion for a resurgence of technological competition for nationalistic 

 objectives. The Soviet scientific achievement of an orbiting sattllite, 

 employing military missile technology for the purpose, galvanized a 

 U.S. response in both military missile development and the "space 

 race." While, on both sides, the development of nuclear-armed 

 ballistic missiles brought about an unusable but terrible threat to 

 civilization, the huge outlays for technology to penetrate outer space 

 contributed to the emerging view of the shared planet as "Spaceship 

 Earth." Both directions of technology, in different ways, added to the 

 compulsion upon the two superpowers to accept the technological 

 consequences that continue to force them and the rest of the world 

 toward some form of rational accommodation — in other words, to 

 yield up bits of sovereignty toward interdependence. 



CASE four: the MEKONG PROJECT 



Regionalism — characterized in the Mekong study ^^^ as the applica- 

 tion of technology on a geographic rather than politically defined 

 basis — is inherenth^ an expression of interdependence. It acknowl- 

 edges the need of an area which transcends the boundaries of local 

 (city and county), subnational (state or province), or national juris- 

 dictions in pooling its human, material, and financial resources to 

 share economic, securitj^, environmental, and other benefits. On a 

 small scale, the numerous regional councils of government and 

 "Metro" systems which have been established in the United States 

 in recent years bear witness to both the dependence of geographically 

 related local jurisdictions upon each other for the successful manage- 

 ment of problems of common concern (for example, ground and air 

 traffic control, provision of adequate public transportation, solid and 

 liquid waste management, air and water pollution reduction, and 

 crime control) and the difficulty of attacking such problems through 

 traditional intergovernmental channels. 



4S0 Huddle, The Mekong Project, vol. I, p. 434. 



