Come on Bill, blow the whistle on nukes in space

The cost of Life has been put at pounds 20 trillion. Or at least that is the value some enterprising boffin has attached to Earth's resources: the water, minerals, gas, food, even the scenery that we all use for free. So now we know what the bill would be, should there be anyone left to pick up the tab once the military industrial complex has finished tinkering with nukes in space.

The letters I've had since I first wrote about plutonium are proof that this is one issue where passion doesn't persuade. I've been given all sorts of reasons why firing this bloody plutonium makes sense. I guess there will always be people who can rationalise the unthinkable. I can only hope that time - and plutonium - will allow them the luxury of their rationalisations. But this legacy of "the age of physics" clearly has absolutely nothing to do with the common good.

Should I feel reassured that Bill Clinton pledged science to that noble notion with his announcement that the next 50 years would be "the age of biology"? I want him to think about Nasa's plutonium-powered Cassini probe and the common good. They don't go together. So Bill, why not cancel Cassini and order Nasa to pursue alternative power sources? We cannot allow nuclear power to proliferate in space. We've got enough to worry about with the half-life of its legacy on Earth.

IF WE spent the 20th century trying to find out where we are in the universe, it looks like the next century is going to be all about determining what we are. We can define and refine all we like the 11 qualities of living things - respiration, circulation, responsiveness and the rest - but it's the indefinable spark of life that is becoming the grail as we slip towards the millennium.

People are literally soul-searching. I had a startling glimpse of how far such a search might take us when the Oglala Indians invited me to the Rosebud Reservation in the Badlands of North Dakota to see if there was any economic initiative we could come up with. The reservation is the site of the Wounded Knee stand-off in the 1970s, a watershed in American Indian activism.

The first thing I saw was sage bushes everywhere. Sage oil is very good for the hair, so it made sense that if we could bring in some form of alternative technology, we would be able to extract the oil and then show the Oglala how to use it in hair-care products. When I pitched the idea, the Oglala said they would have to "do a sweat" to ask permission of the plant nation. So we went through a couple of sweats, six Oglala and me, packed into a tent with one man pouring water on hot rocks to generate a suffocating steam - a terrifying experience for me because I'm so claustrophobic.

The verdict was a No. The plant nation had rejected the idea, therefore the Oglala did too. This was more than plain respect. It was a veneration of the natural order so ingrained as to be alien to our own carpe diem culture. For a nanosecond, my western business head spun, then wonder took over. We understand respect, as in "respect for the environment", but we've lost our sense of true reverence.

ANOTHER of life's little mysteries is the public relations industry. One cliche of the beauty business is the hordes of ladies who lunch and are "in PR". It seems almost benign in its ineffectiveness. But remember PR is the industry whose early figurehead, Edward Bernays, claimed at the beginning of the century it was possible "to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it". So now you wonder why US businesses spend over $10bn (pounds 6.25bn) a year on PR? It's all in the spin. Ivy Lee, another early PR guru, suggested pitching the Nazi rearmament programme as a plea for "equality of rights" among nations. Lee's spirit guides the cynical "optimists" who gloss the pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco giants, the petrochemical multinationals.

The output of these sultans of sleaze is best summed up in the title of a book on the subject, Toxic Sludge is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. Polluters use PR to drape their business practices in environmental friendliness, with the Internet providing new and limitless opportunities for multinationals to achieve another PR aim: clog every corner of public space with your message - and co-opt the medium wherever possible.

I VISITED Shell's web site and was treated to reams of information about the good things Shell has been doing in Nigeria. There was a press release marking the anniversary of Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution by the Nigerian dictatorship, and an open letter from one of Shell's Nigerian workers, chiding me for my stand against the company.

When the hailstorm of international criticism struck, Shell painted itself as the real victim, in this case of sabotage in Ogoniland, until the Advertising Standards Authority ordered the company to stop making such a claim on the grounds that there was no evidence to support it. But after Ken's murder, the Nigerian government could scarcely claim victimhood, so it simply hired eight PR companies in the US and threw $10.7 million at them. But Shell's spin was a sophisticated testament to the frightening success of greenwashing. People hear more about the environment from the polluters than they do from activists like Greenpeace. This is how they do it.

Shell Canada and three other oil companies have donated 320,000 acres of exploration rights near the Queen Charlotte Islands to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and in return they have been nominated by the World Wildlife Fund for the British Columbia 1997 Minister's Environmental Award. Which looks awfully grand on the corporate resume and just goes to prove that, in the world of PR, corporate resources count for more than commitment, conscience and candour.