Issue of the Year: The Environment

THE astonishing achievement of the year," says Ecologist Lamont Cole of Cornell, "is that people are finally aware of the size of the problem." They can hardly avoid it. In 1970, the cause that once concerned lonely crusaders like Rachel Carson became a national issue that at times verged on a national obsession; it appealed even to people normally enraged by attacks on the status quo. With remarkable rapidity it became a tenet in the American credo, at least partially uniting disparate public figures ranging from Cesar Chavez to Barry Goldwater and New York's conservative Senator-elect James Buckley.

At the root of this phenomenon were the dire warnings of ecologists that man's heedless outpouring of noxious wastes is overwhelming the biosphere's ability to cleanse itself. As the year began, the public's foreboding was bolstered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which devoted 40 symposia at its annual meeting to environmental dangers. Later in January, President Nixon stressed the subject in his State of the Union address, which he followed up with a February special message. Soon the press issued almost daily reports on assorted ecological disasters--oil spills, fish kills, nuclear radiation.

By April 15, fears about herbicides had forced the Pentagon to suspend the use of Agent Orange (2,4,5-T) as a chemical defoliant in Viet Nam. Ecological idealism inspired the young and pleased the old as evidence that youth was finally doing something constructive. By the time Earth Day dawned on April 22, ecoactivists of all ages were suffused with a quasi-religious fervor. Many were also armed with petitions and pickets against a growing list of alleged villains of pollution, including Dow Chemical, General Motors and Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co.

For a time, a backlash developed among Americans who viewed the environment as a digression from pressing concerns like poverty, racism and the war. They noted that ecologists, with their holistic view of nature, proclaimed dangers on every front but failed to set clear priorities for action. Ghetto blacks were incensed when white collegians buried perfectly good cars as a protest against smog. Others wearied of the apocalyptic warnings of the "New Jeremiahs" --ecologists with an almost masochistic appetite for doom, and demographers with passion for slogans ("Stop at two"). Even ecologists scoffed at faddists who denounced colored toilet paper on the theory that the dyes polluted rivers. "Poppycock!" said Du Pont's chemists, and no other experts disagreed. UNIVERSAL YEARNING. Yet the backlash soon waned. Whatever exaggerations may have been committed by the environmental evangelists, no one could really scoff at the new American concern with "the quality of life," the universal yearning for clean air and water, quiet cities and communion with nature. That yearning gave rise to scores of new environmental books, from The Tyranny of Noise to The Politics of Ecology. It spurred myriad official responses, from the advent of car-free streets in New York City to a mammoth suit filed by 15 states, accusing Detroit automakers of willfully delaying emission devices.

In the November elections, U.S. voters discarded six of the twelve Congressmen with the worst environmental records, and approved $1 billion in bond issues for pollution controls. In December came the Senate's remarkable --and unexpected--vote against funding that ecological nemesis, the SST. Last week a Harris poll showed that Americans now regard pollution as "the most serious" problem confronting their community--well ahead of crime, drugs and poor schools.

Surely this represents a momentarily askew estimate of what Americans most fear in their own lives and families. The relatively sudden passion about the environment seemed to spring from two different sources. On the one hand, it represented the response to a problem which American skills, including technology, might actually solve, unlike the immensely more elusive problems of race prejudice or the war in Viet Nam. On the other hand, it represented a creeping disillusionment with technology, an attempt by individuals to reassert control over machine civilization. In 1970, the abuses were real enough. Last summer the dangers of dirty air were dramatized by the smog that shrouded most of the Eastern Seaboard for days. After a nationwide sampling, the Bureau of Water Hygiene reported that 5% of the water was contaminated and 11% was smelly, discolored or foul. Many cities fought a losing battle to get rid of their garbage. Philadelphia and San Francisco may run out of landfill dumps by the end of 1971.

GLOBAL PROBLEM. Because some pollutants are killers, fear has begun to reinforce a vague feeling that life is slipping out of control. Take mercury, a poison that can destroy brain and nerve cells. Last spring dangerous concentrations of the metal were found in fish from the Great Lakes region. By year's end, mercury had also turned up in tuna, swordfish and Arctic seals. Suddenly it seemed clear that the poison, an industrial waste, had tainted the oceans to an alarming if still unknown degree.

Other human pollutants showed up in the remotest areas. After sailing across the Atlantic in a reed boat last summer, Explorer Thor Heyerdahl reported that stinking nodules of oil covered a 1,400-mile stretch of midocean. Apparently the oil was dumped by ships cleaning their tanks. Since 1950, warned Jacques-Yves Cousteau, pollution and overfishing have killed 40% of marine life in the oceans. Meeting in Malta and Rome, scientists charted ways to save the seas --provided international cooperation can be achieved.

Many foreign countries began to discover environmental problems. Russia, Sweden and New Zealand banned DDT. The Japanese in particular were enraged by the effects of forced-draft industrialization on their lovely country. After 48 schoolchildren were felled by photochemical smog in Tokyo last summer, kogai (environmental disruption) became the nation's top issue. Last week Japan's Diet responded by enacting 14 tough new laws aimed at sending big polluters to prison.

If disaster spurs a belated environmental consciousness, national pride apparently does not. Italy, once "the garden of Europe," is now choking in litter and traffic congestion. Of its 5,000 miles of glorious coastline, 4,320 are polluted by municipal and industrial wastes.

But Italians barely notice the mess. West Germans give low priority to the fate of Lake Constance, the country's biggest source of fresh water. Last summer the water turned reddish-brown; experts say that Constance is going the way of "dead" Lake Erie. Communist countries are also racing for industrialization, with scant care for the impact on nature. Even Red China admitted last year that its cities had environmental problems. The official dispatches sounded almost smug--as if combatting pollution was a badge of progress.

For its part, the U.S. faced hard choices between ecology and economics. President Nixon set the pattern for official action: a zigzag between environmental reforms and worries about the recession. He supported the SST, partly to help save 20,000 aerospace jobs and ordered more timbering in national forests despite objections of environmentalists and Congressmen. To soothe oil producers, he opened up 543,897 acres in the oil-polluted Gulf of Mexico for oil exploration and drilling.

Conservationists winced when Nixon fired Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel for his abrasive style and disagreement with Administration policies. Hickel had become the unexpected hero of episodes Jike the battle to halt a jetport that endangered Florida's Everglades National Park. Though a former Governor of Alaska and thought to be friendly to the oil interests, Hickel delayed construction of the ecologically questionable 773-mile oil pipeline from the state's North Slope to a southern port. He cracked down on oil drillers fouling the Gulf of Mexico, and even put eight kinds of whales on the official Endangered Species list before he got on it himself.

In firing Hickel, though, Nixon replaced him with a potentially tougher law enforcer: the new Environmental Protection Agency under William Ruckelshaus. Nixon also named Russell Train, a respected conservationist, to head the Council on Environmental Quality. He proposed an international treaty to control development of the ocean floors, and signed a bill making oil polluters liable for damage. MORE HIGHWAYS. Congress often matched Nixon's ambivalence. The Senate produced ample environmental crusaders, notably Edmund Muskie, Philip Hart and Gaylord Nelson, the instigator of Earth Day. But except for passing Muskie's Clean Air Act, which focuses on auto pollution, and the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act, it was business as usual on Capitol Hill. Even the Highway Trust Fund was routinely extended, its bulging coffers still devoted solely to paving the nation without a thought to the consequences.

In some ways, many state and local governments outdid Congress. Though Maine and Vermont yearn for new industry and jobs, both states chose to risk scaring away developers by enacting new laws that, if enforced, firmly protect their largely unspoiled natural resources. Buffalo, N.Y., started to phase out the sale of leaded gasolines. Akron and New York's Suffolk County spotted a way to combat both the money shortage and water pollution. Instead of building costly new sewerage and treatment plants, they banned the sale of detergents containing phosphates, prime source of water contamination.

The year's key protectors of the environment were the courts, which paid unusual attention to a new breed of conservationist lawyers. Despite a threat by the Internal Revenue Service to take away their tax-exempt status, groups like the Environmental Defense Fund pressed suits against governmental agencies and private industries. Legal actions prodded the Departments of Agriculture and HEW to expand --and start enforcing--an existing ban on DDT. In Alaska, the controversial pipeline was delayed in part by a private suit citing the Environmental Quality Act of 1969, which requires federal agencies to study the environmental impact of any new project--and make the studies public.

For conservationists, the biggest legal victory was the growth of their "standing" to sue polluters, a right that historically was limited to plaintiffs who had a personal stake in a suit's outcome. Michigan passed a law permitting all residents to sue polluters. The Supreme Court upheld a lower court's ruling that gave standing to a coalition of conservationists who had won a suit blocking a highway project along the Hudson River. In New York, other conservationists successfully invoked the 1899 Refuse Act, one of the toughest federal anti-water-pollution laws on the books.

SIGNIFICANT STEPS. Last week the 1899 law became the basis for a new federal executive order, requiring factories to get permits to discharge any effluents into navigable waters. Industry, in fact, is increasingly besieged by Washington.

Last year the Justice Department prosecuted both Chevron Oil Co. for spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Power & Light Co. for dumping hot water into Biscayne Bay. Detroit reeled after the Clean Air Act mandated pollution-free cars by 1975 --an order that automakers called technically impossible and downright absurd.

Industry's first response to the legal crunch last year was a Hood of advertisements that depicted factories as environmentally kind, or shifted the blame for pollution to the growing population's demands (spurred by advertisers) for more and more products.

But business soon did more than issue defensive propaganda. The industries most under fire for pollution--power, autos, chemicals and paper--all made significant steps in controlling effluents.

Many container companies are beginning tentative experiments with recycling glass, paper and aluminum.

Industry's problem is almost as complex as an ecosystem. Because many environmental standards differ from state to state, industries in lenient states have an economic edge over competitors in tough states--and thus an incentive to resist pollution abatement. If they close polluting plants, moreover, they throw employees out of work, and employment is part of a corporation's social responsibility. Beyond this is the problem of who shall pay for anti-pollution devices. Ultimately the consumer, of course, but how much will he accept?

Despite such pressures, however, "the decade of the environment" got off to a good start last year and the pace seems unlikely to slacken. Citizen groups have already identified 1971's targets, including strip-mining companies that destroy the landscape and cause water pollution. Washington, for its part, plans to set new noise regulations on industrial equipment and will press for new bans against dumping wastes in the oceans. What 1970 proved is that the environment issue cannot be dismissed as a fad. By changing national values, it may well spur a profound advance in U.S. maturity and harmony with nature, the parent of human life.

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