Cleansing the Environment

For all the tragedy and frustration the Vietnam war has brought, it may also give this nation a great dividend, if we are willing to take advantage of it. In the mirror the war has held up to America, we've seen a draft system that takes more of the poor than the well off; a Government so involved in trying to carry on the foreign and domestic policies of the past that it has been blind to the new priorities of the present; an affluent society with hunger in its midst; a democratic, egalitarian system increasingly torn by generational, racial and class conflict. Thus the most valuable immediate legacy of the war in Southeast Asia may not be money but a new American understanding of the challenges and dangers facing our society here at home. To quote a Pogo observation: "We have met the enemy, and he is us"--an already classic aphorism that applies most acutely to the megacrisis of our damaged environment.

Because it involves a whole range of interrelated concerns--from consumerism to human rights to the relevance of contemporary institutions--the environmental issue has succeeded in gaining the support of a remarkably broad spectrum of American society, left to right, old and young, Democrat and Republican. And though they may not have stopped pollution yet, the past year's anti-litter campaigns, product boycotts, protests in corporation stockholders' meetings, burials of automobiles--and Earth Day itself--have dramatized for the entire country the consequences of Progress, American Style, the creed by which, with science and technology as the New Testament and gross national product as the Holy Grail, we manage each year to produce 200,000,000 tons of smoke and fumes, 7,000,000 junked cars, 76 billion disposable containers and tens of millions of tons of raw sewage and industrial wastes.

The great ecology debate has already accomplished what decades of conservationists' anguished cries about the rape of nature could not. "It has made the connections in the public's mind," says writer Garrett De Bell: He cites the taxi driver who now understands how automobile emissions are causing smog in his city and the housewife who knows that the algae scum on the nearby lake is, in part, brought on by the high-phosphorus-content detergent she may use. National opinion polls show the environment ranking near the top of all issues on the public's mind. Viewing the citizen furor over an industry's failure to ask the community where a major new plant should be located, a company official remarked candidly: "Public opinion has changed the rules without prior notice--and industry has been caught short."

This dramatically increasing public awareness that the American pursuit of quantity at any price is making the country a polluted, ravaged wasteland has not escaped the attention of those responsible for government and corporate policies. In recent months, pollution has been unanimously condemned in politicians' speeches and corporation advertisements. But in view of the gap between ecological rhetoric and actual performance, it is obvious that--though the public may be catching on--our institutions and their leaders have yet to accept the fact that putting a stop to the assault on the environment is going to require tough decisions and unprecedented changes in national priorities. The fact is that city hall is barely out of the starting gate in mobilizing to clean up our environment. In government and industry, the attitude of business as usual still prevails, as evidenced by the following four examples of the environmental performance gap:

The Mercury Disaster: When mercury from industrial plants was found in Lake Erie fish last spring, water-pollution-control and health officials were stunned. This element is so poisonous that they had naively assumed no one would knowingly put it into the environment. (A Federal sampling of U. S. water supplies showed that millions of people are drinking either inferior or potentially hazardous water.)

Sewage Treatment: Today, in the nation that has put men on the moon, less than one third of our population is served by an adequate sewage-treatment plant and sewer system. Even though Congress several years ago declared a national commitment to clean water, appropriations have lagged seriously and this year totaled one-quarter billion dollars less than authorized.

Air Quality: In the seven years since Congress passed the first national clean-air act, only one court action against a polluter has resulted. And according to recent information, no enforcement has resulted yet from the 1967 Air Quality Act. Under this Federal law, exhaust standards were set on the automobile. But while the pampered prototype cars that were tested for compliance did just fine, pollution from cars off the production line quickly soared above the limit.

The truth is that the internal-combustion engine, the greatest single source of air pollution in America (up to 90 percent in some cities), could have been cleaned up years (continued on page 150)Environment(continued from page 147) ago. But rather than put any significant money into pollution control, the automakers have been spending one and a half billion dollars annually on style changes in their cars. Until they were halted by a Federal court, the U. S. automakers--according to a Justice Department complaint and suits now pending on complaint of others--had actually been engaged for over 15 years in an illegal agreement to delay the development and installation of air-pollution-control equipment in their products.

Introduction in Congress in 1969 of an amendment to require a 90 percent reduction in automobile pollution by 1975 and of a resolution urging a moratorium on auto-styling changes to free the cleanup money brought a torrent of protest from the auto industry. It was the decades-old argument: "We're working on it, but we need more time."

The Automobile-Highway Complex: Though it has brought unquestioned benefits, our massive and continuing highway-building program now threatens to become the greatest environmental and social disaster this country has ever known. It is the epitome of the American pursuit of quantity run rampant, a self-defeating cycle of building more roads because more people are buying cars, then building and selling more cars because there are more roads. The disastrous results of this apparent effort to enable us to drive from coast to coast without encountering a traffic light are mounting accident deaths, a gross consumption and waste of resources, air pollution, noise, traffic jams, human dislocations, destruction of city neighborhoods and the uglification of both the urban and the rural scene.

No one is arguing that there should not be an adequate highway system in this country. But die single-minded emphasis on highways has effectively squeezed out any alternative means of ground transportation, mass transit or otherwise--a tragedy especially for the poor, the old and the young, whom the automobile-highway system simply fails to serve. But we all share the problems of the automobile-highway glut. Its pervasive consequences refute the notion that environment is not a black man's concern, or that the destruction of our cities is not the worry of the suburbanite.

The Administration's budget request for 1971, dedicated to the goal of a "balanced" transportation policy, would allocate nearly two thirds of the 7.5-billion-dollar outlay to highways. Though recent appropriations for mass transit have increased, they still are a pittance compared with highway funding--and with the need for more and better mass transit. Yet the highway lobby--which ranges from the automakers and oil companies to the state highway officials and is as potent as the military-industrial complex--says the U. S. road program will need up to 320 billion dollars more in the next 15 years and has mounted an aggressive campaign against using Highway Trust Fund monies for any other purpose.

In sum, the leadership of this country thus far has brought little more than cosmetic rhetoric to the environmental crisis. The politicians and the heads of industry haven't even begun to discuss seriously the scope of the problem or the kind of action that is going to be necessary. At the heart of the matter is the old, tragically mistaken assumption that if private enterprise can turn out more automobiles, airplanes and TV sets than the rest of the world combined, it can do our social planning for us, set our national priorities, shape our social system, even establish our individual aspirations. We are still pursuing the philosophy articulated by Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson back in the mid-1950s, when he said: What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country.

Winning the war against the incredible waste and environmental destruction that is resulting from present national attitudes and policies is going to require a sustained ethical, financial and political commitment by the whole country on a scale without parallel in our history. The price tag to meet the challenge will be gigantic: as a beginning, 20-25 billion dollars a year over and above the current environmental spending level.

By not budgeting the necessary money, the nation is suffering a cost far greater than any cleanup bill could ever be. In effect, we've been paying a tax of 12-15 billion dollars a year on air pollution alone--that's what the property damage figure comes to. If we invested that much money in solving the air-pollution problem, we would have it licked in just a few years. Water pollution causes an additional 12-billion-dollar property-damage loss. And Dr. Paul Kotin, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, estimated in October 1970 that our misuse of the environment is costing Americans 35 billion dollars a year in ill health and related losses. But no one has successfully estimated the total environmental damage bill we pay each year in ruined health and property, spoiled recreation, devastated resources and diminished quality of life for all.

For any hope of success over the long range, the war to stop environmental degradation must be waged on two fronts--the philosophical and the physical. The first must involve adopting a new attitude of respect for ourselves as a species and for all other living creatures. We must accept the fact that the earth is a finite system incapable of being endlessly exploited, a relatively insignificant particle in a tremendous galaxy, with a thin envelope of air and a much thinner coating of soil, with limited water and minerals--and with a limited capacity to support life. We must recognize that when we upset the balance of nature, we start a chain reaction that ultimately affects all living things, including ourselves. When we drive other species to extinction, we should recall John Donne's classic lines: "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

If we are to achieve a decent, livable environment, we are going to have to adopt new policies of a kind that will interfere with what many have considered their right to use and abuse our air, water and land just because that is what we have done throughout our history. Getting the job done will involve major responsibilities on the part of the individual, on the part of local and state governments and on the part of the nation itself. The entire campaign rests on a concerned and involved citizenry. Only if the people themselves compel change through the political system--by electing informed and committed candidates, by bringing suits against polluters--can the fight be won. Many of the battles will be fought on the local and state levels. But as a United States Senator, I am especially concerned about what can be done by the Federal Government. The following are what I consider the steps necessary to a minimal beginning:

A National Policy on American Growth: We must establish a national policy that reconciles our powerful drive for growth in quantity with the need to preserve and enhance the quality of life. Such a policy must include establishing far better measures of our progress dian sheer numbers of consumer goods produced or the gross national product alone. As economist Robert Lekachman has noted, the present G. N. P. goes up even when a new pulp mill pours wastes into a river and people downstream have to pay to treat the dirty water.

To establish a true measure of this country's actual growth, we must require that the costs of protecting the environment be made a part of doing business. As an example, we ought to consider Lekachman's proposal to require airlines (continued on page 259)Environment(continued from page 150) to pay property owners for the right to route flights over their land. We also ought to consider setting a luxury charge on electric power; the threatened brownouts and black-outs around the country from the power- and fuel-supply squeeze ought to be fair warning that we must begin to regulate American growth and resource use. As another example of building environmental costs into the balance sheet, we ought to impose prohibitive penalty charges and court injunctions immediately on the manufacturers of detergents, pesticides and other products who have consistently refused to take into account the environmental and health consequences of their goods.

The question of how much of the cost of the environmental cleanup should devolve upon the consumer is a difficult one. I don't think there's any doubt, for example, that the consumer would have to bear some of the cost of the expensive cooling systems we should be attaching to all nuclear power plants. Yet it is also true that the free-enterprise system that invented mass production surely must be capable of minimizing such cleanup costs. As an example, the country's power industry could be compelled to complete a national power grid that would shift energy from one coast to the other as peak requirements shifted. In the crucial matter of cleaner automobiles, we have a case where competition should work to the consumer's advantage: My guess is that such countries as Japan will be able to meet stiff Federal standards for auto pollution without tremendous price increases. If they can do so, Detroit will have to follow suit.

At the Federal level, the President's Council on Environmental Quality should have the power to hold up any Government project that threatens environmental destruction. The Government has been one of the worst offenders in encouraging America's pursuit of quantity without regard for the consequences.

The powerful tools of the Federal budget must also be used to encourage an environmentally sound distribution of investment, growth and population. Our cities must be revived in human terms; new towns must be opened in our neglected rural areas. The top priority must be the elimination of urban and rural slums, the worst environments in America. Any environmental effort that does not confront the intolerable way of life in the slum--the rats, poor housing, ill health, immobility, lack of parks and recreation, congestion, noise, pollution--is a cruel waste.

The idea that a new growth policy and environmental control are going to destroy our economy is a myth. Water-and air-pollution-control technology alone will be a several-billion-dollar-a-year business very soon--and a significant addition to the G. N. P. Building the urban transit we so urgently need would create a huge demand for new technology, capital and jobs. And cleaning the environment will, as already pointed out, result in immense savings.

A National Land-Use Policy: We must establish a national policy for land use with enough teeth to halt the kind of development lor industry, commerce, highways and housing that is needlessly ravaging the countryside. We desperately need a tough Federal statute regulating and requiring restoration in the strip-mining that has already laid open lands equivalent to a lane 100 feet wide and 1,500,000 miles long. We should enact comprehensive coastal-zone-management legislation--such measures have been proposed--and use the Army Corps of Engineers' powerful regulatory authority to halt the reckless dredging and filling that have obliterated 900 square miles of our vital coastal wet lands in the past 20 years and is cutting a key link in the life systems of the sea.

We must launch a massive program to buy up for the public or protect by easements the remaining ocean and Great Lakes shore lines. Already, 95 percent of the recreationally useful shore line has been gobbled up for private homes. And we need a national lakes-restoration program to stop the poor development and waste-treatment practices that are destroying the Great Lakes and thousands of other inland lakes. We must set tough new controls, carried out with all the powers of Government, to regulate the laissez-faire urbanization that is devouring 420,000 acres of land a year, wiping out everything in its path and causing widespread visual blight. Achieving rational land use in this country will, of course, require new metropolitan and regional authorities that have the power to implement plans, to eliminate the conflicts among the thousands of state and local agencies and to veto programs that violate environmental guidelines.

A National Policy on Air and Water Quality: We must establish a policy with standards tough enough to result in the actual enhancement of the environment. Very simply, the standards must require every industry, municipality and Government facility to install immediately the best pollution-control equipment available. And as better waste-treatment systems are designed, they must be installed without delay. The penalties for violation of these pollution-control standards must be, again, prohibitive fines and court injunctions.

Because of the ever-increasing quantity and complexity of our wastes, the national goal in the near future must in most cases be treatment approaching 100 percent effectiveness. Nothing short of a Federal-assistance program to municipalities on the gigantic scale of the Interstate Highway Program will achieve this objective. Further, we must immediately conduct a national industrial survey to determine the exact breakdown of the wastes from every plant in the country and vastly increase our monitoring-and-surveillance program. We must also set a national deadline of 1975 for a near-pollution-free engine in all new cars.

A National Policy on Recycling Solid Wastes: We must find new uses for wastepaper, bottles, cans, jars and other trash, turning them into valuable new resources. There is really no alternative, for we produce seven pounds of waste per capita per day in the United States. That's 145 pounds annually for every man, woman and child in the world. It is estimated that by 1976, wastes from packaging alone will come to 661 pounds per year for every American; that's a grand total of more than 66,000,000 tons.

A National Policy on Resource Management: We need a national policy to halt the plunder of our mineral, timber and public-land resources. This rape of the earth is being carried out with utter disregard for recreation, wilderness and the preservation of the life-support systems on which our survival depends. We must declare a moratorium on the drilling of any new undersea oil wells on the outer continental shelf until we need the oil and have the technology to avoid Santa Barbara--type disasters. Each year, there are more than 10,000 spills of oil and other hazardous materials in the U. S.

We must also maintain the policy of protecting our national forests in perpetuity. These are now threatened by intensified industry pressures to vastly increase national forest timber-cutting. And we should act immediately to implement the National Wilderness Act of 1964 to preserve the remaining shreds of America's wild lands, a program now bogged down in the Federal bureaucracy.

A National Oceans Policy: To avoid the greatest disaster of all, pollution of the sea, we must establish a national oceans policy outlawing the use of the oceans by cities, industries, vessels and the Federal Government as dumping grounds for everything from nerve gas to junked automobiles--a step I proposed last February in the first such legislation. Most marine scientists say that if we continue to use the sea as the trash can for the world, all edible and otherwise useful marine life will be destroyed in 25 to 50 years.

A National Policy of Technology Assessment: A new national policy also must be established declaring that pesticides, detergents, fuel additives, the SST-- all the plethora of products turned out for a consumer society--will not be allowed in the market place until they are tested and meet both environmental and health standards. A national technology review board should be established immediately by Congress to formulate those standards. We must also take immediate steps to eliminate slow-degrading "chlorinated hydrocarbon" pesticides and find an environmentally safe alternative for the phosphate base in detergents.

A National Transportation Policy: We must establish a national policy that will offer mobility for Americans without the social and environmental consequences of the present emphasis on more and more automobiles and more and more highways. In order to preserve the flexibility and freedom provided by the automobile, it is essential that we have adequate mass-transportation systems to relieve the pressure; as a first step, we should earmark monies from the Highway Trust Fund for such a program.

A National Policy on Population: We should establish a national policy whose objective is stabilizing our population growth, with a program of intensive research into all the means of effective and safe family planning, and a broad educational effort making this information available to all who desire it. In all likelihood, it will be impossible to preserve an environment of quality if world population continues to double and redouble every few decades. By any standard of environmental measurement, the United States is already overpopulated. If this country cannot manage the wastes produced by 205,000,000 people, it will be catastrophic if we reach 300,000,000, as is possible within the next 30 years.

A National Policy of Citizens' Environmental Rights: Finally, a national policy must be established that recognizes every person's right to a decent environment, that gives the citizen standing in court to protect this right against abuse by other individuals, by industry or by public agencies. As matters now stand, the individual often finds himself with no remedy in the face of the pollution of a lake that belongs to the public or the dirtying of the air he must breathe or the shattering din to which he is subjected. To strengthen every individual's hand, I propose amending the Constitution to read: "Every person has the inalienable right to a decent environment. The United States and every state shall guarantee this right."

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These are the specific first steps that should be taken at the Federal level. But they can't possibly work without the great weight of public concern and commitment behind them. In the past few months, we've seen environmental action groups organizing nationwide, building from the local and state levels up, to launch a sustained environmental effort.

We should now declare an annual Earth Week, to be held the third week in April, as a time of assessment in which every community, every city, every state--and the nation as a whole--could spell out the specifics of the environmental performance gap. The environmental groups should take inventory of local and regional problems, testify at hearings for tough standards and enforcement and campaign for candidates who will take strong environmental stands.

Up to now, the decisions that have destroyed our environment have been made in the board rooms of giant corporations, in the thousands of Government-agency offices protected from public scrutiny by layers of bureaucracy--and even in the frequently closed committee rooms of Congress. Now the public is rightfully demanding that these matters be brought out into the open and insisting that environmental and consumer advocates be installed in the Federal agencies and on the corporation boards. To those who will say it can't be done because "profit" and "progress" as we know them may have to suffer, I say that the cost of not acting will be far greater than anything we have yet imagined.

We have seen American institutions turn tail in the face of the grave new challenges of the modern age. Government, industry, the universities and even the churches have become patrons of the American cult of abundance--at the sacrifice of our most precious national heritage. Millions of citizens of all walks of life, all ages, all political persuasions are heavy with doubt about the ability of our system to perform. Their confidence and hope in the American way of life have been breached by the sad history of our recent past. And because of this new disillusionment and a glowing impatience, it is highly doubtful that we will be permitted the time to muddle through--until the oceans are so polluted that they won't sustain life, until the air is so unbreathable that our cities will have to be domed, until the water becomes too filthy to purify for bathing, let alone for drinking. The question is whether we can join together in a massive, cooperative effort to preserve the integrity and livability of our environment before it's too late. We have the means, but only if we have the will.