29 OCTOBER 1977, Page 8

A special sea

Peter Nichols

Rome There was once a play in which Gertrude Lawrence, looking as glamorous as only she could, made her entry from the garden with the husky announcement: 'I am mother'. And the sensitive artist who has arrived as guest in the house immediately begins to forget the daughter. It was called, I think September Tide, which is a pity because it spoils the analogy with the immense attraction of the mother-sea, the Mediterranean, which is tideless.

I can also remember, even further back, being given an explantion for this tidelessness. Being at the centre of the earth, the Mediterranean is subject to all natural pressures at the same time, including the pull of the moon, and the combined effect is to keep it firmly in its place. This imposed languor is one of the physical reasons why pollution is more difficult to face, an aspect of the sea's life — and potential death — which is now being faced with more realism than in the past. Hopefully, this realism is all part of a revival of the Mediterranean's fortunes.

Whether the explanation is correct about its tidelessness, the Mediterranean is obviously a very special sea. No other has given its name to a whole outlook on life. 'Mediterranean Man' is a recognisable type. No one talks about 'Atlantic Man', and even 'North Sea Man' is unlikely to prove a rival. The eighteen nations around its shores are factious and often violent in their feelings about each other. But it has an extraordinary unity and its own pull: what the moon does not do to it, the Mediterranean does to a notable section of the human race. I have just encountered a new detail attesting to its unity: thanks to William Mann's splending book about Mozart's operas, we now know that Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's brilliant Venetian librettist, spoke Hebrew in his youth and the local dialect. As for the pull: 'I have joyfully dedicated long years of study to it, much more than all my youth'.

Its hundred million inhabitants are doubled in the course of each year by a hundred million who come to enjoy the Mediterranean, to pass that palpable meridian which is marked in so many ways. The sun is not just stronger, it penetrates life more deeply; the coffee is blacker and the geraniums grow in old oil cans instead of flower-pots. And by the end of this century its resident population will be double what it is today. That naturally means that its problems of pollution will be proportionately greater, including the problem of pollution which has already made it a sick sea and one which could in fact no longer support life if something decisive is not done reasonably quickly.

So far little has been done because the Mediterranean has been through some bad years. Despite the fact that it is far and away and most popular sea for those who search for pleasure, it has not been popular in other ways. Until quite recently it was regarded as politically retrograde. Mussolini's 'Mare Nostrum' lived on as a concept as did the long years of Franco's dictatorship.

The Italians for many years offered the only sizeable functioning parliamentary democracy in the Mediterranean area and they treated their sea more shabbily than any one. Italy's postwar economic expansion was based on the explicit theory of leaving the Mediterranean behind because it was a baleful influence on a young democracy. 'Scale the Alps' was the slogan. There, to the North and the West, lay the proper if not the good things of life, an industrial and democratic society to which the Italians wanted to belong. The Mediterranean had to be shaken off as a corrupting, reactionary mortmain. The British fleet abandoned it. Even the Israelis at times seemed to be getting lethargic and Levantine.

Now the emigrants are moving sadly home from the North and the West. The high-spirited Hannibals in reverse, who though that a crossing of the Alps was the answer, have learnt a bitter lesson about the costs of that march in social terms. And the Mediterranean itself of course having disposed of its European dictators, is forcing its own new balance of Europe. Strategically it is providing the one massive confrontation on a daily basis between the two superpowers in the form of the Soviet naval squadron and United States sixth fleet.

Suddenly it is back being mother again. And very properly attention is being paid to appearance and health, to the fact, for instance, that 90 per cent of sewage from 120 cities flows or is dumped into the Mediterranean untreated or inadequately treated. Poisonous effluents from factories and from refineries are dumped into the sea. Hundreds of tons of waste including oil waste are released into the sea each day by oil tankers, passenger liners and naval vessels. Thirteen of the eighteen Mediterranean countries finished a conference in Venice last weekend in an attempt at drafting a treaty aimed at controlling the discharge of industrial waste, municipal sewage and agricultural chemicals into the sea's coastal waters. Results were described as encouraging. The meeting was convened by the United Nations Environment Programme. It is best seen as a symptom that the Mediterranean is looking up again and being looked up to again, which is better for everyone concerned.