A week later, one of Amis’s buddies, Robert Conquest, explained to another, Philip Larkin, just why the witness was absent: “He was at the time participating in an adulterous rendezvous. Pity he didn’t just make it, breathing heavily, smeared with lipstick and fly-buttons mostly undone, to testify that Lady C was a sacred monogamous work.”

Amis’s escapade might have served as a motivation for Lar­kin to kick his own personal life up several notches. That, in any event, is an inference one might take from the reference to the trial in the most famous lines of one of his most famous poems “Annus Mirabilis”:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

The result of Regina v. Penguin was, indeed, the end of the Chatterley ban. Exactly 50 years ago, for six days in late October and early November of 1960, Penguin Books was tried in the Old Bailey for having attempted to bring out a paperback edition of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned since its 1928 publication. It was not only the most sexually explicit novel Lawrence ever wrote, it is probably the most sexually explicit novel ever by a canonical author. Although his stated theme was a portrayal of the dehumanizing effects of industrialization, a part of his goal was a more honest description, or at least acknowledgment, of this area of life. He wrote to his agent, “I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I’ve gone.”

And pretty further he went. In charting the love affair between Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her (wheelchair-bound) husband’s estate, the book describes their 13 sexual encounters in meticulous and unflinching detail. Arguably even more transgressive was the language that Lawrence, in his quest for realism, allowed his characters to employ. As the prosecutor in the 1960 trial, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, was to note in court: “The word ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’ occurs no less than 30 times. . . . ‘Cunt’ 14 times; ‘balls’ 13 times; ‘shit’ and ‘arse’ six times apiece; ‘cock’ four times; ‘piss’ three times, and so on.”

Lawrence, who spent the last years of his life in Italy and died in France in 1930, was aware that the book could not be published in England, at least not in the form he intended. Since 1868, obscenity had been a common-law offense, (unhelpfully) defined as any material whose tendency “is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” No one seemed to have any doubt that Chatterley would fall in the dead center of that definition. Lawrence acted as his own publisher and had the book composed, printed, and bound in Florence. Britain’s intrepid John Bull magazine, a venerable repository of conventional wisdom, got hold of a copy and characterized it as “the most evil outpouring that has ever be­smirched the literature of our country. The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness.” Britons smuggled the book past customs inspectors for decades, and from time to time copies were seized and burned.

Remarkably, this was the way matters stood until 1959, when liberal members of Parliament, under the leadership of Roy Jenkins, passed a new Obscene Publications Act. It kept the “deprave and corrupt” language for defining obscenity, but characterized the potential objects of corruption more generally, as “persons who are likely . . . to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.” Crucially, the act provided that the work in question be “taken as a whole”—that is, merely reading out the naughty bits would not suffice—and held that a defendant “shall not be convicted . . . if it is proved that publication of the article in question is justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of general concern.” Moreover: “the opinion of experts as to the literary, artistic, scientific or other merits of an article may be admitted . . . either to establish or to negative [sic] the said ground.”

These developments—along with a 1959 U.S. trial legalizing publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—led Sir Allen Lane, the founder and chairman of Penguin Books, to write a memo to his colleagues in November 1959:

When in America I saw an Anchor or Vintage edition of Conrad which struck me as being a very good way of tying up the works of an author in such a way that these editions are readily identifiable.

I wonder whether we might not consider doing this with D. H. Lawrence and include the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover as one of the group?

(The Chatterley acquittal elicited a droll book review in the outdoorsman’s magazine Field and Stream:

This fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the occasional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeper.)

The certain controversy over Chatterley would offer the kind of publicity that cannot be bought. Penguin envisioned a 200,000 first printing.

But the government, as it turned out, was not greatly impressed with the new law and was not inclined to give Penguin a free pass. Treasury Counsel Griffith-Jones wrote in a memo that in his opinion, the book was “obscene and a prosecution for publishing an obscene libel would be justified. Indeed if no action is taken in respect of this publication it will make proceedings against any other novel very difficult.” Members of the Director of Public Prosecution’s (DPP) office put on their literary critics’ hats and had a go at the book. An official with the Dickensian name Maurice Crump called it a “trashy novelette” and said of Lawrence, “Not only is his characterization poor, but it is in places also inaccurate or ungrammatical.” He went on to criticize the author for not saying whether Connie Chatterley “rode, hunted, played tennis or golf. . . . She is little more than a female body into whose acts of love-making we are invited to pry.”

The attorney general, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, dipped into the book himself on the train from Southampton to London and scribbled a note to DPP Sir Tobias Mathew: “I have read up to Chapter IV and if the remainder of the work is of the same character I have no doubt that you were right to start proceedings.”

Penguin didn’t expect such an aggressive response. By the second week of August, 165,000 copies had come off the presses, of which 55,000 had been delivered to bookstores. After an August 12 meeting in which solicitors made clear the certainty of prosecution, distribution was immediately halted. There remained the issue of how the police would take action. On August 15, Rubinstein wrote to a Detective-Inspector Monahan of Scotland Yard,

Our Clients have . . . instructed us to inform you that, as from noon today, 12 copies of the book will be available to be handed to you at their offices. . . . Please let us know at what time you propose to call on our Clients at their London office when one of their Directors would make himself or herself available at an hour’s notice to hand the copies to you.

Penguin’s chief designer, Hans Schmoller, helpfully put together a handwritten timeline of the events of August, in which he noted that the books were collected and the summons served at noon the following day. “Extraordinary atmosphere of false bonhomie,” he noted.

The Crown was meanwhile finding out that prosecution would not be easy. Under the new act, testimony was allowed on the literary or other merits of a text. However, as a May 1960 article in The Modern Law Review noted, “ex­pert evidence is not available for any other pur­pose, for example, the prosecution could not call expert evidence to show the tendency to deprave and corrupt. This is a matter on which the jury or bench must execute their own judgment.”

Even if a jury found the book to be obscene, this would not be sufficient grounds for conviction under the new law. The prosecution would also have to demonstrate that publication was not “in the public good,” and in order to show that, expert testimony was required. Consequently, Mathew wrote to potential witnesses that he would be “grateful for your opinion as to the literary structure” of the novel. It is hard to know what kind of answer he was looking for. The mere fact that he found himself asking about so innocuous a matter suggests the depth of the water he was in.

Nor were the responses propitious. Two noted critics, Noel Annan and Helen Gardner, both replied that they were strongly in favor of publication. Annan helpfully added, “I would of course be happy to receive your representative, but you may feel, in view of this statement, that it would not be a profitable journey.” He and Gardner both ultimately testified for the defense.

Equally unsuccessful was the approach to John Holroyd-Reece, the founder of the Paris-based Pegasus press, who had at one time declined to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and who reportedly had once described it as a “bad book.” By this date, however, he fancied himself a sort of mole for the defense, and in a letter to Lane duly reported back on his interview with the government. He described the DPP’s representative, a Mr. Leaf, as “an elderly young man, tall, slim, and more highly educated than I had assumed from my previous telephone discussion. Intellectually no giant. But rather pathetically well meaning.”

Holroyd-Reece went on: “He explained that the famous four-letter word occurs in Lady Chatterly [sic] 44 times;—that he was pleased that you had elected to go to trial by jury, apparently because he thinks that the use of this word, particularly in that frequency, would horrify the jury and condemn the book.”

Holroyd-Reece told Lane he was confident Leaf “would come back and try again” to persuade him to be a witness. He raised the “painful” possibility of consenting, for strategic reasons: “circumstances could arise in which . . . your leading counsel might find it most convenient to be able to cross examine a witness who, from his point of view, is obviously the Trojan Horse in the enemy’s camp.”

But an invitation was not forthcoming. In his own report, Leaf opined that the publisher would be wanting as a witness: “While Holroyd-Reece is an extremely interesting and knowledgeable person to talk to, he makes it almost impossible to get a word in edgeways, and as a result it was impossible to keep him to the points on which we require information.”

Eventually, Mathew gave up hope of finding authorities willing to testify. He wrote to Griffith-Jones, “There is a general feeling in the literary world that this prosecution is in principle repressive and unwarranted and in these circumstances people, whatever their views on the book may be, are not prepared to assist.” The defense, for its part, had to contend with refusals as well. Rubinstein approached everybody who was anybody in the world of letters and culture: some 300 people in all. Quite a few demurred, notably Oxbridge-educated members of the generation after Lawrence, literary lions now in their 50s or early 60s, to whom the older author was an antique, slightly embarrassing figure, with his earnest commitment to High Principles. The novelist Anthony Powell said of Lawrence, with characteristic understatement, “I do not find myself tremendously in sympathy with his personality.” Graham Greene wrote that it was “absurd” for the novel to be classified as obscene but noted, “I am myself dubious how far Lawrence was successful in his intention. I find some parts of the book rather absurd and for that reason I would prefer not to be called as a witness in case I was forced into any admission harmful to the Penguin case.”

Evelyn Waugh’s reply was characteristically etched in acid:

I have not read Lady Chatterley’s Lover since it first came out. My memory of it was that it was dull, absurd in places & pretentious. I am sure that some of its readers would be attracted by its eroticism. Whether it can ‘corrupt’ them, I can’t tell, but I am quite certain that no public or private ‘good’ would be served by its publication. Lawrence had very meagre literary gifts.

But there was no shortage of eminences that were enthusiastic about the possibility of appearing in the Old Bailey to stand up for Lawrence, modernity, sexual liberation, and good sense. Among those who responded affirmatively to Rubinstein were Harold Nicolson, Aldous Huxley, Stephen Spender, Peter Opie, John Lehmann, John Wain, David Daiches, John Betjeman, A. J. Ayer, Philip Toynbee, J. I. M. Stewart, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and Laurence Durrell. As it happened, none of these was called as a witness. The reason, in at least some of the cases, can be inferred from an observation by one man who did testify, the young lecturer and critic Richard Hoggart. He described his fellow witnesses as “so un-Bohemian that we felt like a stage army of earnest Guardianreaders. There were eminent and elderly men of letters, none of whom would frighten a jury with farouche manners and beliefs; no Kenneth Tynans.”

The final roster included professors of literature (Raymond Williams and Vivian De Sola Pinto), bellelettrists (Rebecca West, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Potter), novelist E. M. Forster, men of the cloth, journalists and editors, a schoolmistress, and a 21-year-old recent Cambridge graduate, Bernardine Wall. Hoggart observed, “The whole thing was very well stage-managed with a splendid cast.”

Literally waiting in the wings for Penguin was 72-year-old T. S. Eliot, the most distinguished man of letters of all. In the early 1930s, in his book After Strange Gods, Eliot had offered a devastating critique of Lawrence and especially Lady Chatterley’s Lover. His string of dashes made him seem to sputter with fury: “The social obsession which makes his well-born—or almost well-born—ladies offer themselves to—or make use of—plebeians springs from the same morbidity which makes other of his female characters bestow their favors upon savages. The author of that book [Chatterley] seems to me to have been a very sick man indeed.”

But Eliot had changed his mind since then. He told Rubinstein he would be willing to testify for the defense and sent a statement in which he took back his earlier criticisms of Lawrence, calling them “too violent.” He typed, but then crossed out, two paragraphs: “I should mention that there were circumstances in my private life which I can see in retrospect, affected my critical judgment and made me more sweeping and violent in my assertions than I now feel.

“One of these particularly unhappy periods was from about 1929–1934 and during this period when I lectured about Lawrence and prepared After Strange Gods for publication in 1933, I should have realised that I as well as he, should have been described as ‘a sick soul.’” (During that period, Eliot contemplated and then em­barked on a separation from his wife Vivienne.)

Wisely, Rubinstein decided to hold Eliot “in reserve” as a witness (he would confide to Forster), “in case the Prosecution cross-examined any of our other witnesses upon After Strange Gods or any other of Mr. Eliot’s writings about D. H. Lawrence or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, critical of him or of it.”

Rubinstein, a master strategist, set about preparing his witnesses for Griffith-Jones’s parries. He warned Rebecca West that she would likely be asked, “What ‘loss to literature’ is occasioned by the absence of this fuck or that drooping john thomas?’” Absent the quaint slang, this would be precisely the prosecutor’s tack.

On October 20, the London Evening Standard reported, “The queue for the public gallery began at 7:45 a.m.” The press has always loved, and always will love, an excuse to devote many column inches to scandalous matters, and the trial—being an event of actual cultural importance, involving eminent authorities testifying in a court of law—was a tailor-made spectacle. The trial was covered in great detail by all the national dailies and weeklies, as well as by such foreign periodicals as Esquire and The New Yorker. To help reporters with their work, Rubinstein provided all of them with copies of Chatterley under covers that said Sons and Lovers.

The New Yorker’s correspondent, Mollie Panter-Downes, described the No. 1 Court, where the trial would take place, as

an unexpectedly small chamber, full of light woodwork, at one end of which the judge sits in a high-backed chair with a sword in a velvet scabbard hanging on the wall behind him. The general public sits in a gallery that looks like a shallow cupboard and is so close to the ceiling that, glancing up from below, one feels that at any moment the people perched on its shelves may come toppling down on the learned counsels’ wigs.

Griffith-Jones, she wrote, had “the sort of well-boned good looks—full-chinned and brought into period by his wig—that you often see in English eighteenth-century family portraits of country squires and their spaniels regarding each other with mutual satisfaction.” In his opening statement, he tried to defuse the antiquated impression he must have realized he made, assuring the jury they were not being asked to “approach this matter in any priggish, high-minded, super-correct, mid-Victorian manner.”

He went on to pose a series of rhetorical questions, the last of which, in the judgment of many commentators, doomed his case. Supporting this judgment is a document the defense had prepared, now in the Penguin archives. It is a list of the members of the jury and alternates, including their occupations. Among them were driver, cabinet fitter, dock laborer, teacher, dress machinist, none, housewife, butcher, and timber salesman. It is amusing to imagine the reaction of, say, Robert F. Bowman, the driver, as Griffith-Jones asked his questions:

“Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

There was a titter in the courtroom, immediately silenced by the judge. To Panter-Downes, it was as if

the 18th-century portrait stretched to include not only a spaniel but a wife and a row of blooming, mobcapped maid­servants, all literate but needing to be sheltered, and in slight bemusement we stared at Mr. Griffith-Jones, who could thus make the centuries roll back from the Old Bailey and leave us with Sir Clifford Chatterley at unchanging Wragby, dressing to go down to dinner.

At the end of his statement, Griffith-Jones called Detective Inspector Monahan, who testified that 12 copies of Lady Chatterley were delivered to him. Then he said, “My Lord, that is the case for the prosecution.” There would be no additional witnesses.

For the defense, the lead barrister was 60-year-old Gerald Gardiner, known as an opponent of the death penalty and for his recent unsuccessful defense of the Daily Mirror in the American entertainer Liberace’s libel suit against the newspaper. (The Mirror’s article had described Liberace as a “deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” The case hinged on the term “fruit-flavored,” which was held to impute homosexuality. Liberace was awarded a settlement of 8,000 pounds, leading him to comment, “I cried all the way to the bank.”) In his opening statement, Gardiner presented his various arguments, but the nub of his case came at the end. It was relatively simple and hard to dispute:

While parts of the book may, and I do not doubt will, shock you, there is in my submission nothing in it the reading of which could in fact do anyone any harm.

In a case like this one it is perhaps permitted to reflect that nobody suggests that the Director of Public Prosecutions becomes depraved or corrupted; counsel read the book; they do not become depraved or corrupted; witnesses read the book; they do not become depraved or corrupted. It is always somebody else; it is never ourselves.

The defense’s first witness was Graham Hough, a Lawrence scholar, who made a case for the artistic purpose of Lawrence’s explicitness in sexuality and language. As soon as Griffith-Jones began his cross-examination, it became clear that his strategy would consist, as Rubinstein had predicted to Rebecca West, of presenting a defense witness with especially dirty and/or inept bits from the book and demanding that he or she defend them. After apologizing for his “miserable attempt to pronounce the local dialect,” Griffith-Jones read aloud, to Hough and the jury, a passage in which Mellors, the gamekeeper, is talking to Connie Chatterley:

“‘Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit of cunt left on earth. When ter likes! When th’art willin’!’
“‘What is cunt?’ she said.
“‘An doesn’t ter know? Cunt!’”

“I need not go on reading,” said counsel. “Just glance down. ‘Cunt’ appears again. ‘Fuck’ appears . . . all in the space of about 12 lines. Is that a realistic conversation, even between the gamekeeper and the baronet’s wife?”

Hough averred that it was not. Griffith-Jones pressed on, reading aloud what Malcolm Muggeridge had recently deemed “the most hilariously fatuous dialogue ever to be written in the English language,” contained in a scene in which Lady Chatterley’s father, Sir Malcolm, is buying Mellors lunch at his club:

Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. . . . “How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?”

“Good!”

“I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!” He rolled his eyes to heaven. “But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right.”

Griffith-Jones set the book down. “Do you think future generations reading that conversation would get anything approaching the kind of way in which Royal Academicians conducted their conversations?”

Some defense witnesses, unwittingly or not, transferred their zeal for publication to zeal for the novel, and consequently overstated the case for Chatterley. The Bishop of Woolwich, Dr. John Arthur Thomas Robinson, testified that Lawrence was trying “to portray the sex relationship as something essentially sacred.”

On reexamination, he was asked by defense counsel, “Is this a book which in your view Christians ought to read?
“Yes, I think it is,” the Bishop replies.

The front page of one of the evening papers carried the banner headline: A BOOK ALL CHRISTIANS SHOULD READ.

By consensus, Hoggart was the most effective witness, in part because of his northern accent and unpretentious demeanor; as a young lecturer at the University of Leicester, he couldn’t very well put on airs. “I was the rugged provincial, a bit like Lawrence himself,” he would later write. He also had a sense that his testimony was critical. The book still had the capacity to shock; it was possible, the defense felt, that Griffith-Jones’s salacious quotations were hitting home.

As Hoggart approached the entrance to the court, he recalled later, a defense lawyer whispered, “Things are not going well. Do dig in hard.”

Dig in he did. Asked by Jeremy Hutchinson, for the defense, about Griffith-Jones’s characterization of the novel as “little more than vicious indulgence in sex and sensuality,” Hoggart begged to differ: “It is not in any sense vicious; it is highly virtuous and, if anything, puritanical.”

“I thought I had lived my life under a misapprehension as to the meaning of the word ‘puritanical,’” Griffith-Jones said, playing into Hoggart’s hands. “Will you help me?”

Indeed the witness would. “In England today and for a long time the word ‘puritanical’ has been extended to mean someone who is against anything which is pleasurable, particularly sex,” he explained. “The proper meaning of it, to a literary man or to a linguist, is somebody who belongs to the tradition of British Puritanism, generally, and the distinguishing feature of that is an intense sense of responsibility for one’s conscience. In that sense, the book is puritanical.”

Griffith-Jones retreated to sarcastic condescension: “I am obliged for that lecture upon it.” He proceeded to recite to Hoggart a series of sexually explicit passages from the novel, each time asking if it was “puritanical.” Each time Hoggart answered in the affirmative, and the lecturer’s calm and unshakeable assuredness effectively defused the ironic bombshells the prosecutor was trying to hurl.

Later that day, the usher called on “Edward Morgan Forster.” It took some of the jury a few minutes to realize that this was the famous novelist E. M. Forster, 81 years old, the author of A Passage to India and A Room with a View. “One felt like standing up in respect,” Hoggart would write, “as that small bent figure in an old-style, but certainly clean, mackintosh walked slowly to the witness-box.” Hutchinson said to him: “I think you knew D. H. Lawrence quite well?”

“Yes, I saw a good deal of him in 1915,” Forster replied. “That was the time when I saw him most, but we kept in touch.”

It was a remarkable sweeping away of the literary sands of time to reveal a moment when the century was young. Of the trial’s many striking scenes, perhaps the most touching was that of Forster, the only witness who knew Lawrence well, six years his senior, and in nearly every respect his opposite, standing up to speak for him. Lawrence had written fiction almost until the moment of death; after Forster published A Passage to India in 1924, he gave up on novels and confined himself to occasional articles and reviews, every word of which exuded the sort of gentility and propriety Lawrence went into exile to escape. And where Lawrence was avidly heterosexual, Forster was gay and closeted. His one novel with homosexual themes (also featuring a gamekeeper, as it happens), Maurice, was written in 1913 but would remain unpublished until after his death in 1970.

One can only imagine what was going through Forster’s mind as Hutchinson reminded him, “When he died I think you described Lawrence as the greatest imaginative novelist of your generation.” The quote came from an obituary notice, one of the very few sympathetic ones.

“Yes, I would still hold to that,” Forster said.

Forster went on to testify that Lady Chatterley’s Lover “had very high literary merit. It is, perhaps I might add, not the novel of Lawrence which I most admire. That would be Sons and Lovers, I think.”

In their closing statements, on the trial’s fifth day, Gardiner and Griffith-Jones rehearsed their familiar arguments. Then came the judge’s charge to the jury. After he made it, anyone who had assumed this would be an open-and-shut case, in Penguin’s favor, stood corrected. In truth, throughout the trial, Byrne had given the impression (in Hoggart’s words) “of being truly and deeply shocked by the book.”

Now he asked the jury, “Reading the book, do you find it is a book in which the author is trying to portray sex in a real sense as something sacred, as an act of holy communion? . . . Well, is adultery an immoral relationship? It is a matter for you to consider.”

“Don’t think for one moment I am asking you to take any particular view,” he added, protesting too much. “It is entirely your province.”

The summing up, according to Panter-Downes, “cast gloom on everyone from Penguin.” In the lobby as well, “the general opinion . . . seemed to be that the jurors would not take long to come up with a verdict against Penguin.” However, after just under three hours, the dock worker, the installation inspector, and the others filed back in and the foreman announced a unanimous verdict of not guilty. “There was an outburst of clapping,” noted The Times, “instantly silenced by the usher.”

Penguin was off to the races. It printed 50,000 additional copies of the novel in seven days, then two million over the next six months. By the following year, Chatterley had brought it a profit of 112,000 pounds, the equivalent at that time of $310,000.

The end of the Chatterley ban did not mark an immediate end of literary censorship in Britain. Within a few years of the trial there were successful obscenity prosecutions of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (also known as Fanny Hill), banned since John Cleland wrote it in 1748 and brought to market by a publisher emboldened by the Chatterley ruling. But both rulings were overturned on appeal, and in fairly short order the practice, in both Britain and the United States, became the present one, where the publication of more or less everything (child pornography excepted) is more or less permitted.

It all started with the Chatterley case. In the flush of victory, exhilaration prevailed among the enlightened, simply to no longer be under the thumb of Mervyn Griffith-Jones and all that he represented. Barbara Barr, Lawrence’s stepdaughter, told a journalist, “I feel as if a window has been opened and fresh air has blown right through England.” Wayland Young, in The Guardian wrote grandly, “Time will show, but I think it is possible future generations may say that on November 2, 1960, a giant who had laid in chains, the English imagination, was at last unshackled.”

In fact, time has shown that in the 50 years since the Chatterley trial, the English imagination has proved roughly equivalent to its state in the centuries before, certainly no more vigorous, probably not much worse. The verdict and the new expectations, standards of taste, and level of artistic license it engendered appear inevitable in hindsight; going back to the restrictions of yore would be unthinkable. But sometimes inevitable changes don’t come easily.

In this case they required a literary show trial, with a comic-opera Podsnap forcing literary scholars to overpraise a deeply flawed if not actually bad novel, and blunt the intricate and subtle distinctions by which they had become used to defining themselves. They can be thankful there hasn’t been another such spectacle since. Their profession would probably not be able to survive it.

Cultures of War is an untidy book. Dower juggles so many themes and stories that repetition is unavoidable and easy summary impossible. It might be read as several smaller books nested inside a larger one. The chapters on the U.S. incendiary and atomic bombing of Japan and the start of the nuclear arms race could stand alone as the wisest current treatment of that vexed history. Dower’s comparison of the U.S. occupations of Japan and Iraq and his critique of how Iraq War policymakers misread, “cherry-picked,” and ignored the Japan story—“in this case, ransacking not raw intelligence data but history itself”—is another book. That “not a single American was killed” during the seven-year U.S. occupation of Japan (or of Germany) was the most obvious difference, though there were also strange similarities: the occupation, beyond Japan, from Korea to Indonesia, of a war-ravaged and decolonizing Asia entailed enormous  carnage. “The only place in Asia where the guns were really stilled and peace prevailed was Japan.” Even readers who reject Dower’s comparative enterprise will find much of interest here.

Cultures is a loose, catchall term for what he’s getting at, for he examines not the stuff of culture broadly but the nitty-gritty of policymaking and decisions, which he sees as usefully understood in cultural, not just political, terms. Yes, in 1941 American and Japanese leaders made political and strategic calculations, which Dower attends to carefully. But beyond those calculations lay attitudes, assumptions, and stupidities that no policy history can be ex­pected to explain. At the same time, Dower re­sists generalizations about entire cultures. For him, blame for war making does not rest on timeless Japanese, American, or Islamic attraction to war and destruction (he has no truck with those who contrast Western “rationality” to “an illogical ‘East’”). It rests with political and other elites and their responses to circumstances.

Dower compares the entries of the United States and Japan into World War II with the U.S. bombing of Japan, Al Qaeda’s and America’s war making before and after 9/11, and the Iraq War. He pays particular attention to torture and other alleged war crimes during the subsequent U.S. occupations. His effort to compare such things, and his conclusions, will infuriate some critics. But Dower is careful to show that comparison does not mean equivalence, only enough “convergences of a sort” among disparate acts of war and occupation to make comparison useful. As the book’s title suggests, for Dower there is no single culture of war across time and space and circumstance, even within one country. The American culture of war in 2003 differed from that of 1941 or 1965. The robust American systems of war and occupation that grew out of World War II—fallible but full of smart people—had all but disappeared by the time of the Iraq invasion, when the U.S. government “bore only shadow resemblance to that of 1945.” Still, even different systems have things in common—above all, in Dower’s view, their capacity to produce strategic and moral “imbecilities,” not least because leaders grossly misunderstand or simply ignore their enemies, their own impulses, and history itself.

Among Dower’s gifts is a striking ability to embed provocative conclusions within such rich analysis that they cannot be dismissed as outrageous, however much they may outrage readers who skip the analysis. “In practice,” Dower argues, “the imperial presidency under George W. Bush was in certain critical respects more absolute, inviolate, impenetrable, and arbitrary than the militaristic government that took imperial Japan to war.” Fox News won’t like that claim, nor Dower’s assertion that the “unitary executive” presidency that climaxed with Bush “amounted to what Americans call authoritarian governance when practiced by others, even dictatorship of a sort.” But Dower amasses too much evidence, analysis, and careful qualification (“in certain critical respects”) for such claims to be rejected out of hand.

Among many things that the war makers have had in common was their “arrogation of God”—their “abiding sense of a concentrated moment in which mortals found themselves playing God, both destroyer and creator,” as Dower writes of the scientists and policymakers who rushed to use atomic bombs against Japan (and as a shot across the bow to the Soviet Union). To be sure, the Japanese who authorized war, the atomic bombers, Osama bin Laden, and George W. Bush arrogated God to different purposes, which Dower does not equate, and under different circumstances. But despite those differences, what fascinates Dower is how much they sounded alike and unleashed de­struction as a consequence. Arrogation took varied forms, some nominally secular (“history begins today,” one U.S. official declared on 9/11), some expressing a “theocratic vision of good and evil,” as with bin Laden. Perhaps Dower takes expression of that arrogation too much at face value—surely at times it was a rhetorical gloss, an insecure leader’s nervous assertion of authority, or a cynical play to audiences, not a sincere belief. Still, Dower’s job as a cultural historian is to understand how language works, not to measure the sincerity of those who mouth it. And that arrogation went far, even among agnostic scientists, as with the “precious narcissism of [Robert] Oppenheimer’s aestheticism,” as Dower acidly calls it. While scientists regarded the bomb’s effects as supernatural and hellish, “Visualizing hell on earth does not preclude finding it attractive. It may even invite drawing closer.”

Ultimately this is a treatise on the madness of war and terrorism—the madness that precedes war, propels it once started, and gets left in its wake. Dower understands that madness as a cultural historian, not as a psychologist, but his evidence suggests that leaders and systems were often also plain mad, as in crazy-deluded or demonically possessed by the power they wielded and the ideals they proclaimed. In turn, their victories bore them only short-term benefits: for Japan, a few years of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, then destruction; for the Americans (and the Allies), the defeat of Japan, then a globe-imperiling orgy of nuclear weapons. Al Qaeda had the delicious satisfaction of seeing the Twin Towers fall and America humiliated, yet it seems not an inch closer to the goals it professes. For the United States, the most war-prone nation of the post-1945 era, war making has been frustrating at best, dismaying at worst: the Korean War ended in stalemate, the Vietnam War in defeat, and the first Gulf War in an outcome that pleased few, while the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now seem endless and inconclusive. Only intervention in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars produced some satisfaction, a reminder that wars of limited goals and means succeed more often than those of megalomaniac goals and titanic means. Even political benefits have been scant: every president who engaged in major war making after 1945 found his presidency and his party soon discredited.

Why, then, did the United States persist at war, when so little was accomplished and so much horror inflicted? Its primary response to frustration and defeat in war has been, apart from a post-Vietnam pause, to double down—to try war again, usually invoking World War II, even as previous failures get swept aside. Now President Obama has done so in Afghanistan. This failed instrument of policy has shown remarkable persistence. One reason for it was that no U.S. failure entailed the national humiliation and occupation that Germany and Japan experienced. America has suffered defeat too lightly, just as it wages war too cavalierly, to force a strong reexamination of its culture of war.

Still, the persistence is fascinating. Why some nations or groups learn from defeat and others do not is another book. Dower would be the one to write it. “Cultures of Defeat” would be a fitting sequel to Cultures of War, pointing toward “the possibility for shared cultures of peace and reconciliation,” that “distant shore that lies opposite the cultures of war.”

I came here by car, searching for some high-octane profundities. I still love mobility, even with qualms. Such love is one of many entrenched meanders of human habit—all too often unbeautiful—that have put our species and others at risk.

In Utah, for example, estimates suggest that climate change will raise average temperatures from between 6.5º and 9.4º F. The American West has experienced warming that is “70 percent greater than the world as a whole,” according to one report, and the Colorado River Basin, of which the San Juan River is a part, “has warmed more than any other region in the contiguous United States.”

But we humans are not only consumers, travelers, destroyers. We’re not only believers or questioners or skeptics or deniers or hedonists. We are also toolmakers, and this may be our saving grace.

In his science fiction story, “The Weather Man,” Theodore L. Thomas imagines a future in which a Weather Congress carries the “fearful responsibility” of deciding not only what weather occurs where but which regions face punishment for political sins. As the Weather Congress considers leveling a drought against Northern Australia for an illegal trade policy, one delegate says: “It is a thing we should do only with the greatest of caution. It is a terrible thing to make men suffer, and even worse to do it to women and children.” From a room that contains “two hundred huge desks, the raised President’s chair, the great board that show[s] the weather at the moment on every part of the Earth’s surface, and the communications rooms,” the Weather Congress meets as “the supreme body of Earth, able to bend states, nations, continents, and hemispheres to its will . . . [able to] freeze the Congo River or dry up the Amazon . . . flood the Sahara . . . thaw the tundra, and raise and lower the levels of the oceans.” The Congress also digs into local details: The Lovers of the Lowly Cactus Plant request “less rainfall and more desolation in Death Valley to keep the Barrel Cactus from becoming extinct,” while a farmer in Africa protests a neighbor’s water allocation. In California, a dying man wants to see snow in July; that man is the inventor of the “sun boats,” Thomas writes, “those marvelous devices that made the entire Weather Congress possible. Sliding on a thin film of gaseous carbon, the sessile boats safely traverse . . . the hell of the sun’s surface, moving from place to place to stir up the activity needed to produce the desired weather.” The inventor gets his snow.

The cover of the “science fact and fiction” magazine Analog for June 1962 shows a godlike hand above the Earth, the forefinger poking into the eye of a hurricane, a more dramatic rendering of the control fantasy at the heart of Thomas’s story. This fantasy plays into the long history of humans seeking power over the weather, from invoking the mercy of ancient gods to the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius’s early 20th-century speculations about combusting fossil fuels in order to keep the next ice age at bay. Research into weather modification and even large-scale, long-term climate control received more than cursory attention by both sides during the Cold War. Three years after “The Weather Man” appeared, President Lyndon Johnson received a report from his Science Advisory Committee called “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” which suggested that fossil-fuel-induced climate change be mitigated by dispersing particles on the ocean surface. These particles would reflect sunlight and cool the planet. Years later, Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, chimed in with other climate-modification proposals. Such schemes would be discussed in various reports in the 1980s and 1990s. No one paid attention. No one thought we needed to.

That was then. In the past four years, planetary climate modification, or geoengineering, has become the subject of intense inquiry. What exactly is geoengineering? First, consider the distinction between weather and climate. Weather is what’s happening more or less right now. Climate is the accumulation of weather over a standard average of 30 years. What geoengineering proposes to do is to modify climate, to deliberately intervene in natural processes, lowering global average temperatures and thus ameliorating the human effects that are warming the climate. There are two broad ways to do this: carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and solar radiation management (SRM). Carbon dioxide removal would use various methods to reduce anthropogenic CO2 levels in the air. Solar radiation management would send more sunlight back into space, reducing the input of what scientists call radiative forcing and what laypeople call heat. The former method works slowly, while the latter method can work within months. The authors of a 2009 Royal Society report said that geoengineering “is very likely to be technically feasible,” although it is not a substitute for reducing emissions in the first place. But the lack of political will to reduce emissions, the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the present and future effects of climate change, and the need to act fast to counter these trends have led a number of scientists and policymakers to give geoengineering serious consideration as a research endeavor and as a potential partial solution to near-term climate change.

The questions this endeavor raises are foundational, even though the parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide seem so minuscule and the predicted temperature increases don’t seem, in a daily context, to be so daunting. And yet. Just what is the sweet spot for the Earth’s global average temperature—or, rather, the temperature we want the Earth to have? Keep the warming to about a 2°C rise? Should the parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric CO2 be 350? 450? We’re already pushing 400 ppm. At 450 we might avoid warming the planet above the 2°C mark. But that’s a 50-50 proposition if we rely solely on reducing emissions, according to Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and, he says, “any pathway to 450 looks rather optimistic.” The Royal Society says that “it seems increasingly likely that concentrations will exceed 500 ppm by mid-century and may approach 1000 ppm by 2100.” Such levels could lead to civilization-ending global warming.

What should trigger our use of geoengineering? Five hundred ppm? A series of sudden and strange weather events? Rapid release of ocean methane, which is frozen now but if thawed would dump massive amounts of this greenhouse gas in the air? No one knows and no one yet agrees. Should geoengineering proceed as one in a suite of options while we wrangle with cutting emissions? Or is it a last resort when Iceland no longer lives up to its name? Here, too, disagreement reigns.

In its largest sense, geoengineering is not just an attempt to cool the planet’s atmosphere or to make our agitated climate happier. It’s an attempt to extend the lifespan of the Holocene, our current geologic epoch—which began about 12,000 years ago—so that humans and other creatures might last a bit longer than otherwise. Of course, some scientists call the current geologic period the Anthropocene—the era of global, human-induced changes to the atmosphere and biosphere. If that’s the case, then geoengineering is the ironic pursuit of vast technological means to return us to the Holocene. It’s a form of technological nostalgia.

Scientist Paul Crutzen, who invented the term Anthropocene, blew the lid off what had been a fringe science in a 2006 letter published in the journal Climatic Change. Crutzen, a Nobel laureate and a soft-spoken lover of opera records, argued that our collective failure to reduce emissions now required scientists to take geoengineering seriously, especially the most exotic SRM idea of all: injecting sulfur in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. Conveniently, sulfur injection is relatively cheap—no more than $50 billion a year, Crutzen suggested—and it works quickly. We know this because when volcanoes spew sulfur the planet cools.

Scientists have begun researching CDR and SRM techniques. Congress and the House of Commons have both held hearings. And John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, won’t rule out geoengineering “if we get desperate enough.” Later he backpedaled from this sentiment, but the word is out.

Desperation was in the air when some 200 scientists, policymakers, activists, students, and reporters gathered in California at Asilomar Park near Pacific Grove for a meeting that one of the organizers said “we all wished was not necessary.” Margaret Leinen, a researcher formerly with the National Science Foundation, opened the March 2010 conference with that statement and a tone of voice that meant it. At the woodsy Asilomar Conference Center, the Pacific Ocean just steps away, participants tried to get a sense of where geoengineering stands and what it could do for, and to, the planet. I was one of the attendees, a nature writer and science-fiction fan, someone sick of hopelessness but wary of blithe technophilia. I’d come to listen to very smart people consider the future of the planet.

Not only was the meeting’s subject controversial, but the meeting itself garnered criticism from Stanford’s Kenneth Calderia, among others. Calderia has done pioneering work on geoengineering climate modeling. He criticized Leinen and her nonprofit group, Climate Response Fund, for its ties to Climos, a company that Leinen and her son, Internet entrepreneur Dan Whaley, had founded to do ocean research with an eye toward making money in the carbon-offsets market. Calderia boycotted the Asilomar conference. Some observers wondered if the event was a way to fundraise for the Climate Response Fund, and many were appalled that one of the meeting’s sponsors was the Australian state of Victoria, the world’s biggest producer of dirty coal.

As the conferees began to meet beneath the high ceiling of rustic Merrill Hall, these concerns faded before the hard work of understanding just how bad the climate crisis is and how geoengineering might help solve it. At times, it felt like we were in a kind of church, albeit one with laptops, bottled water, and yawning international travelers. Researchers set up posters with brightly colored images, graphs, and long lists of co-authors along one side of the wood-floored hall. Audience members lined up at a microphone to grill presenters. Slides loomed on a screen like stills from a disaster movie filmed with charts instead of actors.

During my week in California, I tried to become, in Leinen’s words, one of the “ardent pupils” needed to understand the ramifications of geoengineering. I learned about CDR and SRM, about the ethics and possible governance of geoengineering. And I tried to think about how geoengineering could change our relationship to what we still call nature.

I learned that one CDR technique is relatively uncontroversial: planting trees, as long as forests are managed not only for carbon but also for bio­diversity. More controversial is sequestering CO2 from coal plants; the idea is to inject CO2 emissions into stable underground formations. Engineers acknowledge that this could be very expensive but remind us that coal isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. A report in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering suggests that the method will require more underground capacity than previously thought and calls sequestration “profoundly non-feasible.” Some speculative ideas include the disposal of crop residues in deep-ocean sediments and the manufacture of cement that traps CO2. Meanwhile, the University of Calgary’s David Keith and Columbia University’s Klaus Lackner are working separately on artificial trees meant to suck CO2 out of the air, after which it can then be stored underground or bound to other chemicals to neutralize its greenhouse effect.

The geoengineering approach that’s gone the furthest is ocean fertilization—dumping iron particles into the sea to stimulate the growth of plankton. This has been done on a small scale for research mostly not related to geoengineering. The plankton chow down on the iron, grow, suck up more CO2, then when they die they and their waste—in which the CO2 has been fixed—sift down to the ocean bottom. There, presumably, they’ll stay. Oceanographer John Martin once said of this process, “Give me half a tanker of iron, and I’ll give you an ice age.” It’s more complicated than that, but research suggests that ocean fertilization can sequester enough CO2 to make it worth pursuing in concert with other methods. How long the CO2 remains on the ocean floor and other possible ecological consequences are unclear. Only large-scale tests can address those questions, but activists have opposed further iron-seeding.

The oceans play a role in another proposed CDR technique called “enhanced weathering,” which would speed up the chemical processes by which silicate rocks—the most abundant type on Earth—suck up CO2 to create carbonate rocks like limestone. Enhanced weathering is likely to be energy-intensive and expensive, which underscores the need to examine geoengineering projects for their own greenhouse gas footprints. Nonetheless, some scientists have also proposed heating limestone, sequestering its CO2 underground, and taking the other byproduct to “lime the oceans.” Liming the oceans would be another kind of fertilization, helping ocean life uptake more CO2. Because lime is alkaline, adding it to the sea would also reduce ocean acidification. The Royal Society says this approach is “expected to be reasonably effective, with costs and environmental impacts broadly comparable to those of conventional mineral mining. . . . The risk of unanticipated consequences should be low, since the processes . . . are similar to those occurring naturally.”

Although CDR methods have the advantage of tackling the essential problem of excess CO2, they’ll take years, even decades or more, to work, while solar radiation management can cool the planet very quickly. The planet reflects about a third of the sunlight that reaches it; the rest penetrates the atmosphere and warms things up. A slight increase in albedo—reflectivity—would give the climate system less heat to work with, which can lower the global average temperature. Mundane but eminently doable SRM ideas include painting roofs white and planting more reflective crops. The former is likely to have little significant effect, but the University of Bristol’s Andy Ridgwell believes that planting lighter-colored crops could cool North America and Europe by about 1°C during summer, with no diminishment of harvests. Stranger ideas include covering the Sahara in a giant shroud, an idea that perhaps only Christo could like, and launching trillions of tiny mirrors into space. Harvard physicist Russell Seitz proposes “bright water”—aerating lakes, reservoirs, and oceans with bubbles to make the water more reflective.

For many, though, the term geoengineering is synonymous with two other SRM techniques. The first would use seawater to brighten clouds above the oceans so they reflect more light back into space. The second would send sulfur aerosols into the atmosphere to do the same. Each would seek to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight by about 2 percent, which would cool the atmosphere by about 2º C, thus canceling out much global warming.

Marine cloud brightening would quite simply spray ocean water into the lower atmosphere, seeding the sky with droplets around which clouds could form. The operation would need a fleet of hundreds of “Flettner” ships, which use rotorsails housed in cylinders that look like smokestacks. The ships run on wind power and the Magnus effect (a propulsive force created by the spinning rotorsails). This method has several attractions: spraying seawater into the sky involves no pollutants, other than those emitted during the manufacture of the ships; the project can be demonstrated on a small scale; and if it was ever shown to have unhappy side effects, the fleet could be shut down quickly. Brightening clouds off West Africa and the American Pacific coast could negate 50 percent of the warming from higher levels of greenhouse gases, one model predicts. Which is, as we say, huge.

There are challenges. Jeff Goodell, the author of How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, points out that the water particles have to be under a micron in size, which is half that of bacteria. Anything bigger and the droplets attract too much water, forcing rain and breaking up the clouds. Anything smaller and, poof, the droplets disappear into the air. There’s another problem, a big one. Though models show that this approach could increase albedo enough to significantly cool the planet overall, the regional effects on rainfall are hard to predict. This is an ongoing bugaboo in geoengineering climate models: If we do cool the planet on average, who gets drought, who gets flood, and who gets weather that’s just right, Goldilocks-fashion, and straight from the Theodore L. Thomas Weather Congress control room? Will storms grow more severe due to cooler ocean waters and warmer land? There isn’t enough sensitivity in regional climate models to answer these questions with much confidence.

Questions about the regional consequences of flood and drought also dog the most intimidating and perhaps most promising SRM technique: the spraying of reflective sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere. Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko proposed this idea some 40 years ago, and the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines confirmed its potential by cooling the planet by a half degree Celsius in just a few months. Up high, sulfur isn’t the dangerous pollutant it is nearer our lungs, and models show that artificial aerosol injections would lower the global average temperature. But injections likely would lessen monsoons over Asia and Africa with potentially disastrous effects. Predicting regional consequences, let alone knowing how to mitigate them, is work yet to come, but a planet with sulfur aerosols injected in the stratosphere, even with increased CO2 emissions, looks more like the world we know now than a world ravaged by the greenhouse effect. The models tell us that. Delivery methods (probably for sulfuric acid, which then forms proper-sized particles) could involve balloons, airships, rockets, even artillery or, most likely, high-flying airplanes. Regular injection of sulfur—to keep the albedo from fading—would only cost tens of billions of dollars a year. It will also cost us blue skies, turning the air into a whitish veil.

We may know more, science writer Oliver Morton reports, when the cargo shipping industry comes under stricter emissions regulations in about 10 years. Oceangoing ships emit a lot of sulfur, which helps to brighten marine clouds. By reducing such emissions, the shipping industry “will inadvertently commit the world to significant extra warming,” he says.

Reporter Eli Kintisch points out that the Mt. Pinatubo eruption ate away at the ozone layer (bad) but also encouraged plant growth because sunlight became more diffuse (good). Diffuse light spurs photosynthesis and doesn’t dry out dirt as quickly as direct sunlight. How this would play out over all the years needed to keep the sulfur screen in place is unclear. It seems that acid rain would not increase, in part because it doesn’t take that much sulfur to reflect more sunlight back into space. No more than five megatons would be needed.

Global deployment of sulfur aerosols or cloud-brightening or both will “create an artificial, approximate, and potentially delicate balance between increased greenhouse gas concentrations and reduced solar radiation, which would have to be maintained, potentially for many centuries,” concludes the Royal Society report. “It is doubtful that such a balance would really be sustainable for such long periods of time, particularly if emissions . . . were allowed to continue or even increase.”

Rutgers climatologist Alan Robock, a vociferous critic of sulfur aerosol geoengineering, has a list of 20 reasons why SRM “may be a bad idea,” including ozone depletion, the consequences to regional climates, the psychological effects of a white sky—even though the aerosols will create spectacular dawns and dusks—and potential commercialization of SRM technologies. He does, however, favor continued use of computer models to study the field.

The greatest caveat concerning any significant deployment of either marine cloud brightening or stratospheric aerosols is the “termination problem.” Simply put, once you stop SRM, the climate returns sharply to the temperature that the SRM has been hiding. Unmask the sun, and the world bakes. In a world where CO2 has not been reduced, unmasking the sun will bring on an extremely rapid rise in heating. An SRM world with a lot more CO2 is thus a very bad idea.

Rather than deploying aerosols globally, scientists might limit distribution to above the Arctic, as physicist Gregory Benford first suggested. This could restore summer sea ice, cooling the region and reflecting more sunlight. He and others say we need limited trials to test particle size, verify the best altitude for dispersal, examine what happens when the particles reach the ground, and understand the effects on temperature at different locations. Benford calls the Arctic “our first focus” and says geoengineering should “attack . . . incoming sunlight now, carbon dioxide later.”

Not one person at the Asilomar conference hinted, at least out loud, that geoengineering is a substitute for reducing emissions. It’s seen either as a complement to current strategies to reduce CO2 or as an emergency measure. What is needed now, many argued, is not only more sensitive climate models but actual field research of the type Benford has suggested. In a Nature column, David Keith and his co-authors wrote, “it would be reckless to conduct the first large-scale SRM tests in an emergency.” (They also wrote that “it is a healthy sign that a common first response to geoengineering is revulsion.”) The day after their opinion appeared, Science published a piece by Alan Robock and his coauthors arguing that aerosol geoengineering “cannot be tested without full-scale implementation,” a prospect that “could disrupt food production on a large scale.”

Thus, the field is fraught with uncertainty, and public perceptions of geoengineering reflect this. Yale polling expert Anthony Leiserowitz told the Asilomar meeting that only one percent of the American public has even a basic understanding of “geoengineering,” a term, he added, that “stinks.” The word doesn’t even translate into Chinese, said the University of Maine’s Fei Chai. Eli Kintisch has gone so far as to invent a new term for it, planet hacking, which he uses in news articles for Science.

What about metaphor? Writer Graeme Wood says geoengineering is “like fighting obesity with a corset, and a diet of lard and doughnuts.” Jeff Goodell compares geoengineering to industrial agriculture, a kind of souped-up gardening of the air. One Asilomar presenter called geoengineering “painkiller for the planet,” which seemed too mild a metaphor for most. The late Stephen Schneider offered “planetary methadone.” Princeton’s Robert Socolow, co-director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, suggested “epinephrine,” which connotes a single, life-saving shot, not a continuing treatment, as geoengineering surely will be. One scientist told me at dinner that he compares geoengineering to baby food spooned to the climate—“and then we get a lot of shit.”

I think of geoengineering as Prozac for the planet. The methadone metaphor implies that our addiction to fossil fuels requires a replacement for them. This is accurate, but the replacement isn’t geoengineering; it’s sustainable energy development. Epinephrine implies a life-or-death emergency, which humans and other animals are indeed confronting, but the planet itself will adjust to whatever course the climate takes. So if we are to use a pill or medical metaphor, let it be “Prozac for the planet.” Prozac is prescribed to patients who are manic-depressive or obsessive-compulsive or both. The contemporary symptoms of this are everywhere, and now the climate also betrays this clinical condition. The climate’s mania? More frequent storms—with the promise of worse to come—and the jumping back and forth between different kinds of weather extremes. The climate’s depression? The long and changeless droughts in Australia, the American Southwest, Africa. The climate’s OCD? The ceaseless shedding of ice. Prozac is also prescribed for panic, which would describe the state of many climatologists and the state of the climate itself: panicked cycling of heat and water in order to reach a happy place.

Who prescribes the right dose for our jittery-frantic-bleak atmosphere is another question, a matter of control and expertise, which is also raised by the metaphor that won’t go away: geoengineering as a thermostat. This metaphor raises the question: Whose hand is on the control? This is in its favor, but the thermostat metaphor also connotes that planetary engineering is a matter merely of comfort and convenience, and not sanity. In any case, writers, researchers, and activists have all started to use the comparison. To think of a thermostat, invented in 1883, is to think of the Industrial Revolution, the age in which human influence on the global climate most emphatically began.

At Asilomar, there was not only desperation in the air but a stunned sadness that it’s come to this. One session crystallized this feeling more than any other. Pablo Suarez, a climate scientist and humanitarian worker, spoke about the plight of local indigenous populations who are also “scientists.” His example was a Mozambique settlement where the villagers know floods will come if they see ants on the move. But now the floods come so fast that, by the time the ants move, the people don’t have time to evacuate. “We have screwed up their science,” he said.

Suarez criticized the meeting’s lack of discussion about real people in real places, calling the unwanted effects of geoengineering “an externality”—“a successfully transferred cost”—that will shift the price of success from the rich to the poor. Or, as he passionately and sarcastically put it, “Let them eat it—let them eat risk.” How, he asked, will the most vulnerable people help make geoengineering decisions? “It won’t happen.” Who will pay for the humanitarian work, the compensation for the afflicted, in a geoengineered world? “Nobody.” Suarez’s speech galvanized the crowd, which cheered and praised his warnings. “I hope,” he said, “we prove me wrong.”

One student at the conference objected to using acronyms like GCM—Global Climate Model—saying, “I beg you to realize that the acronyms are real things, not just screens on our computer.” Another invoked Aldo Leopold’s dictum that “to keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

Again and again, in public and in private, people used the word humility. Robert Socolow said, gloomily, “We are doing something solemn.” Scientist David Keith agreed. “You want,” he said, “to engage in talking with nature,” even though he admitted “it’s not a natural world anymore.” Keith, a quoter of Edward Abbey and the nephew of legendary ornithologist Stuart Keith, agreed when I asked him if he thought geoengineering could be considered the ultimate form of restoration ecology. He’d made the same argument at a recent meeting of the Ecological Society of America. Restoration ecology is exactly what its name suggests, but those in the field struggle with the questions of what an ecosystem should be restored to and what the historical information tells, or doesn’t, about the prior condition of a place now sullied. Restoration ecology is time travel. Keith says that though most people “don’t care about nature,” those who do care must give voice to the animals and plants that could be saved or destroyed by geoengineering.

Leaving the talks behind, conferees sometimes took their breaks on the boardwalks set among the sand dunes. Gulls, wrens, and sparrows called, sang, and flew. In the swales grew the vivid yellow blossoms of Menzies’ wallflower, one of the most endangered plants on the planet. The flowers were caged in chicken wire so they wouldn’t be grazed or crushed. Above, the sky was usually milky overcast—an “SRM sky,” someone joked.

Where has evolution equipped us to locate our sense of wildness? With the animals that geoengineering might save or with the air above us? A geoengineered world would save many animals on the brink—the polar bears who lack ice from which to hunt, the lizards too hot to hunt—but it would turn the sky white and still leave us with the termination problem. A non-geoengineered world, one with continuing high emissions, would destroy many animals, both those on the brink and those that are coping for now, but we would not have gardened the sky. It would still be blue.

Some of the basic insights of Buddhism—that there is suffering, that the world is impermanent, that what we think of as “self” is a matrix of elements far beyond ego—offer ways of looking at the world that help me understand my own conflicted responses to geoengineering, responses that include disbelief, optimism, concern, and hope. Is it compassionate or is it selfish to try to extend the lifespan of the Holocene? Is it grasping? Is it an opening? Or some inevitably muddled combination of the two? Will we resort, as we typically do (and by “we” I mean the powerful and the wealthy) to Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number?

Rutgers philosopher Martin Bunzl says that we should worry about “people being worse off [with geoengineering] than they would be with climate change. . . . So what is the alternative to letting the numbers count? It is to treat fairness or justice as procedural . . . to echo Kant ‘to treat people as ends in themselves and not as means to an end’ . . . to treat them as having an equal chance to both benefits and burdens. That is why, when distributing a scarce resource, we draw straws.”

Asilomar also featured disagreement about such philosophical concepts as “moral hazard,” which postulates that a person recently insured is more, not less, likely to engage in dangerous behavior, and “the precautionary principle,” which suggests, in its various guises, that the entity proposing a potentially harmful action be able to prove or persuade that the action will not be harmful.

These questions of ethics and emotion become, in the realm of action, questions of norms and governance, and these questions loom large. Who governs an endeavor that by its nature would cross national boundaries? The United Nations? A coalition of the willing? What treaties are needed? How to enforce them? Who compensates the “losers” in a geoengineered world? There is no existing transparent international framework for moving ahead even with small-scale experiments. That will have to change, and Oxford University’s Steve Rayner reported that the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee recently endorsed regulating geoengineering as a “public good,” by keeping data open and transparent, assessing independently the impacts of geoengineering research, developing “governance before deployment,” and forbidding the militarization of the field.

Calls for openness and fairness must also force attention on a range of nonscientific agendas. For example, the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute, which has received almost $3 million in funding from ExxonMobil from 1998 to 2009, had participants at Asilomar. Geoengineering brings together strange bedfellows, because the line of reasoning that says this endeavor gives us time to develop carbon-neutral technologies is one shared by liberals and conservatives alike. The role and enthusiasm of the wealthy and of corporations will need to be scrutinized carefully. Sir Richard Branson and the Superfreakonomics cult have embraced geoengineering as a way to put off CO2 reductions. Business often commodifies nature for its own purposes, from naming cars for wild places and creatures (Sierra, Mustang) to underwriting environmental projects (museums, land purchases) while we drill, baby, drill. Would we want brightened marine clouds in the form of a swoosh—today’s mild weather brought to you by Nike—or sulfur aerosols distributed by government subcontractors—this evening’s sunset courtesy of Halliburton? Many at Asilomar were wary of the military becoming involved in the deployment or defense of geoengineering, even while acknowledging that some nations and billionaire eco-rebels could launch geoengineering on their own pretty much right away. After all, Russia wants ice-free summer shipping lanes, and there are very wealthy people who might be, in David Victor’s phrase, “Greenfingers.”

Geoengineering in any form looks downright dangerous to Colby College historian James Fleming, whose latest book is Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control. Fleming does not mince words: “Geoengineering is in fact untested and dangerous. We don’t understand it, we can’t test it on smaller than planetary scales, and we don’t have the political capital, wisdom, or will to govern it. Planetary tinkering is not ‘cheap,’ as some economists claim, since the side effects are unknown. It poses a moral hazard by possibly reducing incentives to mitigate. It could be attempted unilaterally, or worse, proliferate among rogue states, and . . . learning from history, it would be militarized. Geoengineering could violate a number of existing treaties.”

The Sierra Club’s Josh Dorner told me that “we don’t have time to worry about pie-in-the-sky ‘solutions,’ because we have . . . solutions that are environmentally sound and economically feasible right now.” Nonetheless, Sierra Club leader Paul Craig was at Asilomar. So was Whole Earth Catalog visionary Stewart Brand, and representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.

Will the prospect of an overcast scrim, forests of artificial trees, and robot ships spraying seawater into the Pacific sky and dumping loads of lime into the oceans be enough to frighten us to change? Enough to force a sudden and massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? Or will the prospect of geoengineering allow us to continue our profligate ways?

“What will happen when we get an unambiguous signal of a climate emergency?” asked Socolow. Whatever the signal is, Socolow concluded, “We are not ready.”

One October afternoon I stood before a fossil display at the College of Eastern Utah’s Prehistoric Museum, in Price. Before me was a slab of fossilized mud labeled “Bird Trackways with Raindrop Impressions.” I’d seen fossil footprints and trackways many times before but never the turned-to-stone concave impressions of raindrops.

What was that day like, in the warm and wet Eocene, beside Lake Uinta, 57 million years ago? Near what is now Soldier Summit, dew speckled the earth and across the shore walked a Presbyornis, a long-necked water bird, rather like a whooping crane topped with the head of a freakishly billed duck. At that moment, rain fell. Soon, blowing sand filled in the three-toed tracks and the raindrop dimples, thus preserving their impressions. Once the sand eroded out, the tracks and little craters remained, recording, across the ages, the weather of that moment.

We’ve too long mistaken the present for some version of a human forever. We say we want to save the world. What we really want to save is the Holocene. We want to cast the world in amber, to preserve it as it has been, more or less, for the past century or two. We want to stay alive. More, to hold onto our economies, our life styles, our civilization. These impulses, if not always their consequences, are laudable, but let’s not delude ourselves: trying to extend the lifespan of the Holocene is selfish. We humans are not forever, nor is the time in which we find ourselves. Most of us would like for all of us, including wolves and tadpole shrimp and yellow-eyed penguins, to stick around for a while. Trying to extend the lifespan of the Holocene is also, in a way, compassionate.

Geoengineering may be the earthly pinnacle of our toolmaking ways and an expression of our animal will to live. Certainly it can be more than an attempt to control the future of the climate and civilization; it can be a way to understand our relationship to the nature of time and mortality, a way, perhaps, even to manufacture, or to finally recognize, kinships. But if we extend the lifespan of the Holocene by retooling the air yet fail to retool our own ways, our revels will end sooner than they needed to.

Geoengineering is often called plan B because plan A is emissions reductions. They’re no longer separate plans. They can’t be. We need research into geoengineering; we need emissions reductions; we need to adapt to the changing climate; we need to decide now about the regulatory framework that will govern large-scale deployment of geoengineering techniques, especially cloud-brightening and stratospheric aerosols. There is only one plan, all of the above. Of course we can’t permanently geoengineer the climate and expect good things from that. If geoengineering is Prozac for the planet, it could calm the climate just long enough for the rich to get addiction therapy and some help with their—with our—dysfunctional relationship with the poor.

Perhaps it comes down to this: In an era of scientific illiteracy, commodity fascism, political shortsightedness, minute attention spans, and hyperactive media, the only overarching narrative about climate change may be, ironically, the weather itself. We may have to wait for truly heinous and bizarre weather to capture public and political attention. The lived, daily experience of global weirding may be what leads to the fraught denouement of geoengineering, which itself will be the beginning of another narrative about who we are, what time is, what the climate means, how nature matters.

Some time ago I wrote down this quote from Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: “Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.” I suspect that we will say goodbye to the blue sky and live awhile beneath the pale aerosols. Stars we can see from the countryside will hide. Might an iron-addled ocean change color too? Will all of this alter the migrations of birds? Those we condemn to die from eating our risk will curse us. Some things may yet be saved. What claims our loyalty as we try to reclaim the Holocene?

I wish that the fossil footprints of the extinct Presbyornis could help me answer these questions. Right now, all I can do is close my eyes and see those little dimples that recorded rain, those tracks of a single bird, a single life, walking, a feather-wet body moving away from something and toward something else.

Charles Darwin’s words, near the end of The Descent of Man, might have echoed Erasmus: “I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper . . . as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.”

In his engaging book The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, Oren Harman, a professor of the history of science at Bar Ilan University in Israel, presents a wealth of scientific research bearing on forms of cooperation, helpfulness, even self-sacrifice among many species. Altruism was “an anomalous thorn in Darwin’s side,” Harman argues, a conundrum that Darwinians would need to solve, given their view of the ruthless struggle among living beings for survival:

Why do amoebas build stalks from their own bodies, sacrificing themselves in the process, so that some may climb up and be carried away from dearth to plenty on the legs of an innocent insect or the wings of a felicitous wind? Why do vampire bats share blood, mouth to mouth, at the end of a night of prey with members of the colony who were less successful in the hunt?. . . And what do all of these have to do with morality in humans: Is there, in fact, a natural origin to our own acts of kindness?

Harman offers vivid accounts of the lives and writings of a number of evolutionary biologists who have sought answers to such questions, showing how they have intersected with the remarkable career of one man who took questions about altruism to heart as few others have: “the forgotten American genius George Price, atheist-chemist and drifter turned religious evolutionary–mathematician and derelict.” Born in 1922, Price earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago, even as he worked on uranium enrichment in the Manhattan Project. He went on to do research at Bell Labs, then at the Radioisotope Lab at the Minnesota Veterans Administration Hospital, and later at IBM, while engaging in often vehement controversies about topics such as extrasensory perception and U.S.-Soviet relations. It was only in 1967, after he moved to London and was appointed to a position at the Galton Laboratory, that he focused ever more intensely on problems of altruism.

In titling his book The Price of Altruism, Harman points to the central part that George Price has come to play in the scientific study of the subject. Exchanges with biologists such as John Maynard Smith and W. D. Hamilton were crucial for Price as he perfected what is now known as the “Price equation.” Harman describes (with three appendices that set forth and elucidate the stages of the equation itself in the context of related ones) how Price arrived at his equation, aiming to explain how natural selection works at different levels at the same time, whether among genes, cells, individuals, families, groups, or even species.

The book’s title also bespeaks the personal cost for Price himself of his struggles during the London years. In 1970, he converted from being a fiercely outspoken atheist to an evangelical Christian on unusual grounds. He felt that there were just too many coincidences in his life to be mathematically possible. They had to have been intended by God, who must have chosen him not only to convert others but also to continue with his research. How did he square his scientific views about evolution with the creation story in Genesis? Providentially, perhaps, he had concluded that God had commanded him not to sign on to belief in that story.

A second conversion experience led him to feel that God wanted him to express his love for others without concern for his own well-being. In a vision, Jesus whispered to him that he should give to all who asked of him and never ask those who took anything from him to return it. He sought out alcoholics and homeless persons, sharing what money and possessions he had, inviting some to share his living quarters. His health deteriorating, hungry and emaciated, sometimes homeless himself, he came to despair of knowing what God meant for him to do or be. In January 1975 he cut a gash in his throat and bled to death on the floor of a desolate squat. Among the notes he left, one read: “To Whom It May Concern: I guess I’ve had it. George.”

Scientists familiar with the debates among evolutionary biologists about how to explain altruism will find the book absorbing from beginning to end, not least its careful elucidation of all that Price went through as he worked out his equation. Other readers, however, may feel bewildered by the profusion of individuals and events seemingly presented without discernible order. They may wonder why the book’s focus shifts back and forth from one decade to another, from one country or laboratory to another—the more so as they learn only gradually and, at first, only in a piecemeal fashion about aspects of Price’s life.

Those who want a clearer view of the book’s structure might begin by turning to the acknowledgments at the end of the book, where Harman tells how he became interested in Price’s life and came to see it as a missing link in a much larger quest for the origin of altruism. He recognized the difficulty in conveying both the theoretical and the personal challenges in this quest as it affected the lives not only of Price but of so many others. As a result, he decided to create a “double helix–like structure” for his book: one in which Price’s “own personal tale and the greater problem of the evolution of altruism would reflect and resound off each other, finally becoming inextricably interwoven.”

Reading the book with this double-helix structure in mind makes it easier to follow the intertwining accounts of lives, events, discoveries, challenges, and disagreements. With his meticulous research and his sympathetic attention to Price’s difficult last years, enriched by interviews with persons who had known Price, including his daughters, Harman brings the aspects of Price’s life together to form a profoundly moving portrait.

Whereas the double-helix metaphor does help readers piece together the different segments of Price’s life and of those with whom he interacted, it does not serve the same function when it comes to crucial distinctions among altruism and other moral concepts. Instead, Harman speaks variously of the attempt to fathom kindness, or to crack the mystery of altruism, or to understand true, genuine selflessness in man, or to arrive at the origin of altruism, sometimes of virtue or all of morality, indicating that all of these enter into the “history of a much larger quest.” Yet neither kindness nor altruism should be conflated with virtue, much less with all of morality. And even altruism itself is subject to many interpretations that should be sorted out in any effort to arrive at its roots. Some view altruism as an emotion, of kindness, perhaps, or empathy; for others, it must entail action.

When biologists speak of animal practices of self-sacrifice, altruism, kindness, and cooperation, or of infanticide, murder, slavery, or warfare, they are using a technical vocabulary, not meant to be taken literally. There is nothing problematic in using the terms in such shorthand fashion. Too often, however, these terms are casually extended to moral assertions about such practices in a manner that obscures important questions.

References to self-sacrifice on the part of amoebas, for example, are hardly meant to imply that they act out of kindliness or altruism or concern for the survival of others. It would be sentimental in the extreme to speak of their having a sense of self or of others or of what it would be to sacrifice that self for those others. But what about Darwin’s heroic monkey? Or the partridge in one of La Fontaine’s fables, who sees her young in danger and feigns being injured, dragging her wing to attract the hunter and his dog, thus saving her family, and then, when the hunter believes his dog is attacking her, flies off, laughing at the man who “pursues her in vain with his eyes”?

Scientists are still debating whether some species, apart from humans, have a “theory of mind” —whether chimpanzees, for example, can envisage what goes on in the minds of others. As John Maynard Smith and David Harper put it in Animal Signals, the question is whether they can conceive of others having a mind like their own—say in sending a misleading signal as to their whereabouts. A different question comes up with respect to altruistic acts by human beings who do have both a sense of self and a “theory of mind.” Can such acts ever be entirely selfless? Or is it the case that even seemingly altruistic choices are either wholly or at least in part self-interested?

Harman makes the dumbfounding claim that the question of whether true selfless altruism exists is one that “every human since Adam and Eve has sought desperately to answer.” Every human? But regardless of how few humans have actually sought to answer that question over the millennia, it is surely the case, as Harman persuasively shows, that Price himself had grown increasingly desperate on precisely this score:

But if becoming selfless somehow trumped the logic of genes and reciprocity, then something was amiss. If true, pure giving, neither beholden to propagating more of its kind nor dependent on the promise of being paid back, nor even, as his own equation showed, made possible by groups having to triumph over others, was a heroic slap in the face to everything science had taught him, then obviously he had not cracked any riddle.

Price felt that he had been divinely commanded to undertake such true, pure giving. Like the early alchemists seeking to distill pure gold, he hoped to find a formula or algorithm that would combine science, religion, and morality. When that effort failed, he grew to doubt God’s intentions for him. His mind spiraled into exalted, increasingly despairing states, until he finally gave up.

For Darwin, the question of human morality never had to do with pure selflessness. In The Descent of Man he expressed his considered conviction that cultural factors such as “the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, &c.” play a much more important role than natural selection in advancing what he called the moral qualities of human beings, “though to this latter agency the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense, may be safely attributed.”

Harman, in his closing pages, underscores the role that culture and education still play in human altruistic behaviors, despite claims by biological determinists that genes run the show. His book is an important contribution to the collaborative work on altruism as it relates to self-interest now increasingly under way, not only in the natural sciences but also in philosophy, political science, economics, and anthropology.