United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
Office of
Public Awareness (A-107) Mi--
Washington DC 20460
r/EPA JOURNAL
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Ethics and the
Environment
n this issue EPA Journal has
called upon a distinguished
panel of contributors to talk
about the emergence of an en-
vironmental ethic in our society
and its impact in such areas as
energy, the economy, and
human health.
Lester Brown, President of
WorldWatch and an internation-
ally recognized authority on
food and population problems,
says in an interview that an en-
vironmental ethic has corne to
the fore in the '70s because our
long-term survival depends on
it. Such an ethic, he explains,
requires a stable relationship
between ourselves and the nat-
ural systems that support us.
R. Buckminster Fuller, the
celebrated inventor of the geo-
desic dome, declares in an-
other interview that Nature
gave us a safety cushion, a time
factor to make mistakes and
learn how to adjust to the en-
vironment—but time is running
out. "It's absolutely touch and
go whether we're going to make
it," he says.
Interestingly, both Brown
and Fuller note that of all na-
tions in the world, China has
one of the strongest environ-
mental ethics today.
Barbara Ward, world-famous
economistand environmental-
ist, warns that organic life on
Earth is vulnerable and delicate,
and that both scientists and
philosophers are emphasizing
that we must be a "conserving
and caring society" if mankind
is to survive.
Long before environmental
issues had widespread popular
support. Supreme Court Justice
William 0. Douglas was ex-
pressing an environmental ethic
in his judicial opinions. Monty
J. Podva, who has worked
ctoseiy with Justice Douglas,
describes in an article the many
cases where, in pungent and
forceful language, this re-
nowned jurist has defended the
environment against despolia-
tion.
Is the golden era over for
environmental improvement?
Administrator Douglas M.
Costle thinks the obituaries are
a bit premature. What has
changed, he notes, is the nature
of the battle against pollution.
He declares that we have seen
a change in troops, "from the
ragged squad of citizens' militia
to the disciplined platoons of
lawyers, scientists, and civil
servants who know how to
translate passion into the tedi-
ous but essential minutiae of
the statute-books."
Joan Martin Nicholson, Di-
rector of EPA's Office of Public
Awareness, discusses in an in-
terview the need for a well-
informed citizenry in dealing
with environmental problems. A
world authority on conservation,
S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary of
the Smithsonian Institution,
writes eloquently about this
problem.
Other notable articles in-
clude a description by Pulitzer-
Prize-winning author Robert
Cahn of the search for an envi-
ronmental ethic in America.
Joan Z. Bernstein, former
EPA General Counsel, recounts
the development of mediation
to offer flexible, creative solu-
tions to costly environmental
disputes. G
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United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
Office of
Public Awareness (A-107)
Washington DC 20460
Volume 5
Number 1 0
November/December 1 979
&EPA JOURNAL
Douglas M. Costle, Administrator
Joan Martin Nicholson, Director, Office of Public Awareness
Charles D. Pierce, Editor
Truman Temple, Associate Editor
John Heritage, Chris Perham, Assistant Editors
Articles
EPA is charged by Congress to
protect the Nation's land, air and
water systems. Under a mandate
of national environmental laws
focused on air and water quali-
ty, solid waste management and
the control of toxic substances,
pesticides, ; radiation,
the Agency strives to formulate
lead to a compatible balance be-
tween human
ability-of natural systems to sup-
port and nurture life.
A Premature Requiem
for the Environment
EPA Administrator Costle
emphasizes that the environ-
mental movement remains
strong, but the nature of the
battle has changed.
Conservation —
A Moral
Responsibility
S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution, de-
scribes the need to study and
record for future generations
the many subtle changes occur-
ring in our environment,
A Search for an
Environmental Ethic
Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist
Robert Cahn notes that environ-
mental citizenship is essential if
we are to preserve the quality
of life.
The Environmental
Ethic of Justice
William O. Douglas
An insight by a close associate
into the many judicial opinions
by this celebrated jurist on
environmental and conservation
issues.
Departments
News Briefs
People 32
Environment
and Energy Futures
Robert 0. Anderson, Chairman
of the Board of Directors,
Atlantic Richfield Co., discusses
the need to balance environ-
mental and economic issues.
Covi
French Al|
world.
Threats To
Biological Systems
14
Lester Brown, President of
Woridwatch Institute, discusses
food and population problems,
environmental degradation, and
resource exhaustion.
Spaceship Earth-
Is It In Trouble?
R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor
of the geodesic dome, warns in
an interview of the hazards in
our trial-and-error approach to
solving environmental problems.
Science and Values
on a Small Planet
Barbara Ward, President of the
International Institute for
Environment and Development,
suggests that Western civiliza-
tion still can use its accumulated
wisdom, to head off environ-
mental destruction.
Around the Nation
Update 38
Where Are We
Growing?
Maurice Strong, former Execu-
tive Director of the U.N. Envi-
ronment Program, stresses the
need for society to shift to a type
of growth less demanding of
energy and raw materials.
The Energy-Environment
Dilemma
The "new scarcity" in resources
and the deterioration of the
environment require new social
choices, according to Willis W.
Harman, Associate Director of
Stanford Research Institute
International.
Environmental
Mediation
Joan Z Bernstein, former EPA
General Counsel, describes how
mediation can offer a different
approach.
The Need for a
Well-informed
Citizenry
An interview with Joan Martin
Nicholson, Director of EPA's
Office of Public Awareness,
concerning the philosophical
basis for helping the public to
understand environmental
problems.
Almanac
Crisis
.
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Environmentally Speaking
A Premature
Requiem
for the
Environment
By Douglas M. Costle
EPA A dm in istrator
A few months ago the President talked
to the Nation about our energy
problem, and told us what he proposed to
do about it. A majority of us—72 percent,
according to an ABC-Lou Harris poll—
were impressed by his note of resolve,
and approved of his program.
Among the environmental community,
however, the President's speech got a
decidedly mixed reception. "It is clear,"
Dr. Barry Commoner told the Chicago
Tribune, that the President and his advisers
"have decided to attempt to override
environmental legislation." Any effort to
cut "red tape" on energy facilities, Amory
Lovins wrote in the Washington Post, is
likely to be a disguised end-run around
environmental law. A headline in the
New York Times read, "Environmentalists
See End to a Golden Era." The "golden
era," of course, is the last decade—a
period that saw passage of the National
Environmental Policy Act, and of the
EPA JOURNAL
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Clean Air, Clean Water, and Toxic
Substances Acts.
But such gloom was not universal. Brock
Evans, Washington director of the Sierra
Club, pointed out that the basic environ-
mental laws are on the books. "From
now on," he said, "our movement will
need fewer rabble-rousers like me, and
more technicians. The coming struggles
will be within the bowels of the Environ-
mental Protection Agency—and in the
courts."
I think Mr. Evans is much nearer to the
mark than those who believe that the
President's energy proposals sound a
death-knell for environmental improvement
and the environmental ethic.
The "golden era" may indeed be over
for those who regard rabble-rousing and
hell-raising as the ecological equivalents
of the Boston Tea Party and the essence
of environmental protection.
Once upon a time they were—but not
any more. The hell-raisers have done their
work—and important work it was. We
would never have gotten the environmental
movement launched without the spontane-
ous outrage of hundreds, then thousands,
ancl finally millions of American who just
plain gotfed up, watching inadequate
economics turn our country into a garbage
dump. Perhaps we will need their outrage
again.
In the meantime, however, their anger
has been expressed in law. That is the
essence of environmental protection.
Anti-climactic as the shift may seem, the
burden of environmental improvement has
passed—as Mr. Evans suggests—from the
rebels to the technicians; from the ragged
squad of citizens' militia to the disciplined
platoons of lawyers, scientists, and civil
servants who know how to translate
passion into the tedious but essential
minutiae of the statute-books.
This transition—from the zest of
guerrilla warfare to the hum-drum of walk-
ing a beat—inevitably entails a drop in
emotional temperature. Yet such a cooling-
off is part of the natural maturing process
of any successful public movement, from
our own Revolution through labor-union-
ism and civil rights. As in the case of these
earlier social changes, the feisty, raucous
youth of the environmental movement
must give way to a sober, rational
adulthood.
One characteristic of the maturing
process for any social movement is a tran-
sition from outright, all-or-nothing conflict
in its early days, to a competitive sort
of bargaining in its later days.
This latter process will operate as the
Nation marshals its resources to achieve
the goals of the President's energy plan.
Ambitious as it is, that plan need not mean
any substantial retreat on environmental
policy. Nor do I see any reason or need
to alter or abandon the environmental ethic
that has served us so well in the past
decade as a foundation for all our legisla-
tive achievements in controlling pollution.
For one reason, the President has put
himself on public record as rejecting any
such retreat. To choose one of several
quotes that might be cited, he said this on
July 31—after his energy speech on
television:
"We will also protect our environment.
I will not permit America to be forced to
choose between breathing foul air and
having our waters filthy on the one hand,
or mortgaging our future to the OPEC oil
cartel. We don't need to do either one....
With commitment, with imagination, with
courage, with America's technological
genius and with our vast resources given
to us by God, we can meet our energy
goals while we preserve the quality of our
precious land, air, and water."
That is a strong statement—one made
so forcefully that it would be politically
impossible for the President to withdraw
it. But there will be no need for him to
do so—for the fact is that there is room
for plenty of innovation in the competition
between energy and environment.
Regulatory innovation offers real
promise for speeding achievement of our
energy goals without compromising
environmental quality. But a much more
important factor in our successful pursuit
of these equally important goods will be
technological innovation.
I am not a believer in what is known as
the "technical fix." That concept—well-
illustrated in the case of nuclear wastes—
typically leads people to proceed with a
troublesome action now, out of a convic-
tion that somebody else will figure out a
way to deal with its harmful side-effects
before a difficulty becomes a disaster.
By refusing to take this intellectually
anemic way out, however—by accepting
the need to build energy facilities right in
the first place—we will accelerate the
development of true, environmentally
benign innovation.
Some executives have been candid in
admitting that environmental regulations
led them to discover profits that they
would not have found otherwise. Through
process-innovation, one glass manufac-
turer reduced his energy bill by 10 percent,
simultaneously boosting production to
an all-time high. He later testified, "If EPA
hadn't put the squeeze on us, none of
this would have happened."
Well ... our American honeymoon with
cheap energy, brought to such an abrupt
halt by foreign oil-producers, has put
the squeeze on all of us. But that pressure
will not force us to abandon our environ-
mental goals. On the contrary, it will force
us to use our brains as well as our billfolds
in the imaginative pursuit of a self-reliant,
environmentally sensible energy future.
Far from compelling us to abandon
environmental objectives, our energy
situation—and President Carter's response
to it—will stimulate a host of innovations
that would otherwise languish in an
economic limbo. The need for energy con-
servation—the cheapest, most readily
accessible "supply" of energy—has
already stimulated efficiencies in business,
new building codes, new courses for
architects, and a flurry of attic-insulating
by homeowners; it will become a way of
life for all of us. The development of solar.
energy will pick up in pace, as will our
exploration of unconventional gas and
heavy oils. Oil shale poses real
environmental problems—principally the
competition for water between shale-
development and agriculture; our percep-
tion of those problems, coupled with
adequate financial resources and the
determination to safeguard our water and
food supply, will force us to solve those
problems before any national damage
is done.
We have known for years that the
oil-wells would start pumping dry one of
these days, and that we would have to
find new ways to fuel our lives. But we
have limped along from crisis to crisis,
shouting for action when the gasoline-
lines appeared, and lapsing back into
apathy as soon as energy supplies resumed.
The President's new energy plan signals
his determination that we will postpone
action no longer; we will come to terms
with our needs now. But he has also
pledged that our quest for energy will not
be carried out at the expense of the natural
biological systems that support our very
existence.
Those who believe the President's
energy proposals signal an end to the
"golden era" of environmental progress are
wrong. The requiem they hear—whether
with delight or dismay—is quite pre-
mature. Our national push for new energy
supplies will undoubtedly lead, as the
President has said, to "trade-offs." Those
of us whose principal concern is environ-
mental protection can expect to lose a few
battles. Those whose sole concern is energy
production without environmental controls
can expect to lose even more.
But this is as it should be. An insistence
on winning every fight, on getting one's way
all the time, is a characteristic of children.
Environmental protection has passed out of
its childhood, and entered upon its social,
political, and legal maturity. And though
childhood is fun, anyone over the age of 21
knows that maturity is the real golden
era.D
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
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Conservation:
A Moral
Responsibility
ByS. Dillon Ripley
Secretary, The Smithsonian
Institution
S. Dillon Ripley holds a Bald Eagle chick.
The problem of speaking about conser-
vation in almost any rational terms is
that the subject is one that people always
want to put off—next year, the year after.
Museums have traditionally tended to neg-
lect conservation, so busily have their
curators been acquiring things. It is far
more exciting to collect than it is to con-
serve what we already have. Most museums
of an older day have a farcical amount of
space devoted to conservation care or lab-
oratories. Conservation seems unglamor-
ous, like housekeeping. The need for it only
comes home to us slowly. It creeps up on
one, over the years. It cannot be measured
easily in terms of time.
Year by year, textiles fragment, paper
crumbles, glass decomposes chemically,
bronze becomes "sick" with its own
strange disease, metals rust, and wood
crumbles into dust. It all happens gradu-
ally, but not number by number in an arith-
metic sense. Materials decline by the
power, in an exponential sense, doubling
instead of merely adding. And yet the time
involved stretches ahead in an unfathom-
able way, a limitless horizon of trying to
make up, to put things right. These objects
we possess are all we have of history, the
history of ourselves, the history of the
planet. When they are gone we will have
lost the evidence. In our own case the poor
fragments of history, like the bundle of a
man's possessions gathered up after his
death, a suitcase full, are the merest rem-
nants of all the power and the creations of
mankind. And yet every fragment is pre-
cious to us as a testament to creativity, to
the impress of culture and civilization on
our history, and its example for ourselves.
And so we have planned for ten years,
and for a number of these have pressed our
case with the Congress. At last it appears
that our urgency has been repaid, for we
have had hearings, planning money has
been awarded for a new support facility to
house our overflow, provide area space for
research as well, and, what is perhaps most
important, provide additional space for
work in conservation.
If long-distance time is so difficult to
care about, how much more so is environ-
mental conservation. Just as the Smith-
sonian is concerned with the preservation
of artifacts, objects made by the hand of
man, so we must be concerned with natural
objects and the evidence that they repre-
sent. Ecology is the study of the environ-
ment. For years ecologists have rather
placidly been tabulating natural phenomena
in order to develop principles for under-
standing the gradual changes in that en-
vironment under whatever conditions of
climate, of terrestrial or aquatic setting in
which this may occur. A whole dramatic
field has developed in which the interplay
between the living organisms, animals and
plants, and the chemical and physical
setting in which they play out their roles
can be measured. History is involved, and
evolution, as well as adaptations caused by
external pressures leading to rapid expan-
sion, or to extinction.
Today the measurements taken by ecolo-
gists seem to have been so speeded up by
the changes wrought by mankind, the pro-
liferation of chemical compounds, the
release of oil, nuclear activities, the de-
struction of forests, especially in the tropi-
cal zones of the world, that time, which is
essential in ecology, is being abandoned.
Ecologists thus seem to be driven to meas-
uring changes brought about by people,
rather than by nature. This is not the way
the science began, nor is it the healthiest
way of proceeding. Unfortunately we are
witnessing today the aftereffects at short
range of our own ability to change the en-
vironment in a monumental sense. For the
first time people have the technological
means to create mega-changes in the en-
vironment. Ecologists have been nearly
caught short in this race against time, be-
fore their science has fully matured, and
before public understanding and apprecia-
tion of the time involved in ecological re-
search has had a chance to evolve.
Environmental impact studies are largely
fruitless uniess performed over a period of
years. But we are too impatient for results
to be able to afford the extra time. Such
studies cannot be rigorous in an ecological
sense for the most part.
Where then to turn? There is no such
thing as a quick fix in an environmental
impact study except in the very simplest
or more direct form such as a known single
chemical measured already over years for
its effect in a limited environment. But even
here the ramifications and side effects may
be unmeasured, the mosaic of interactions
uninterpreted. How then can we possibly
develop answers, for the long haul, to
reactions in nature which will satisfy
American impatience and lack of a real
sense of time? It is part and parcel of our
instinct in regard to government policy to
put out the brush fires which were develop-
ing last year rather than attempt to plan for
where the next ones may break out three or
four years from now.
In such an atmosphere government
activity occurs by inertia. Only a shock of
EPAJOURNAL
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some sort will produce a response, often a
twitch as if the body were asleep. Collec-
tively perhaps this is a wise maneuver, for
over-reaction sometimes exacerbates the
cause of the trouble in the first place.
Meanwhile, however, conservation itself
is overlooked. The influences which affect
conservation adversely continue to grow
and develop. Human population pressure
increases relentlessly, and at the same time
human expectations continue to rise as
education and the spread of communica-
tions develop.
In this climate there is perhaps one final
moral responsibility left for us collectively
as human beings. Aside from any personal
ethical responsibilities which we may
have as individuals, kindness to others, a
faith, self-discipline as we occupy smaller
and smaller niches of space, is there a
single aspiration to which we should sub-
scribe? For while we delve and span, the
planet spins, time passes, each day there
is change, and in all there is the pressure
of life itself, the heartbeat of self in us all.
I believe there is one ethic, one principle
left out of our consciousness. It is conser-
vation. It is perhaps the last larger
responsibility, bigger than us all. Museum
people are singularly reminded of mor-
tality, like priests and doctors, by the
deterioration of objects created by the hand
of man. Is it possible to transfer this
reminder to the rest of our known space,
the Earth itself? Conservation of that in
which we ourselves had no part in creating
is an even greater moral charge. It is a
harder task for it is all the more impersonal.
We can care for our own possessions, our
house, our cave, and we can fight for our
allotment, our quarter acre, but can we
bring ourselves to feel responsible for all
of nature in the context of time? It is an
impersonal, larger responsibility, but it is
incumbent on us all, now that we know
for the first time we have tipped the scales,
changing it all inexorably in a time frame
which is not apparent to our generation.
The planet may spin but we are not
aware of it. In the slow turning of the Earth
the ineffably minute changes that collec-
tively make a difference become meaning-
less to us. So what if we read that fifty acres
of tropical forest are being destroyed each
minute, or each hour, or each day? What
does that have to do with us? Someone
else will notice it eventually. It seems as
inconceivable that such a statistic could
ever affect us as that some day we would
be issued the last gallon of gas that we
would use—ever.
A museum keeps a roster and a tally of
extinction. The Smithsonian maintains
the National Herbarium. Five years ago we
were charged with developing and main-
taining a list of the endangered plants of
the United States. We can also tell how
many plants have gone extinct in the last
hundred years, and of those how many
have disappeared in the last twenty-five
compared to the preceding seventy-five.
We can do the same for a number of ani-
mals as well. Abroad we can support some
evidence of the numbers of species that
are probably going extinct before we have
even discovered that they exist. The rate
of extinction is a matter of the deepest
concern. It means that our environment is
becoming impoverished, even as there are
more of us humans with our expectations
to coexist with it. But the diversity of
species is a measure of the tolerableness
of the environment. Impoverishment means
a harsher and harsher atmosphere and
space in which to live. And so at the same
moment that humans are doubling and
trebling, the world is being robbed of some
of those very expectations on which our
future may depend. Cannot conservation
then be described as the ultimate responsi-
bility for us all? Museums have it in their
power to act as long-range environmental
impact advisors, monitoring the rates at
which species may be expected to tell us
of the survival value of our allotted space
on Earth. D
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
-------
A Search
for an
Environmental
Ethic
By Robert Cahn
Walking up a gentle hill away from the
fog-shrouded lake where we had
camped on the North Slope of the Brooks
Range, I stepped into clear, mistless
beauty. The incredible green vastness of
Alaska's wilderness enveloped me. The
sun cast a goiden glow that failed to warm
the early morning chill. An Arctic tern
circled overhead.
The breeze ruffling the foot-high willows,
alders, birches, and berry bushes that
emerge in summer from the heavy snows
of fall, winter, and spring was the only
sound that broke the great silence. 1 felt
awe tinged with uneasiness at the sense
of tota! aloneness in this untamed region
hundreds of miles from civilization.
I could almost imagine I was the first
white man to set foot on this particular
spot, except for the team of scientists back
at the base camp. I picked my way through
the thick tundra toward the crest of the
little hill. What new view would unfold
from there?
From the top I looked down on a stark
reminder of civilization ... a jumble of oil
drums, gasoline cans, wooden crates, piles
of tin cans and other trash, and a number of
bare, ugly gashes cutting across the tundra
leading to and from this deserted campsite.
The gashes, two-to-three-foot deep gullies
running parallel to each other, had been
•. •..--'. v V:---.,
' ift ^ - -.••
.•.:•'- ' !&*'-
EPAJOURNAL
-------
started years ago by the wheels of a vehicle.
Little did the driver know—or care—that
his tire tracks would erode into gullies,
leaving deepening and damaging imprints
on this fragile ground.
Looking at the trash lying just where
some oil exploration crew had left it years
before in this deep freeze, where things do
not readily decay, I couid imagine the crew
thinking: "What's the harm of some litter
in the midst of millions of desolate acres
of land? Probably no one will ever come by
here again."
For me the trip was part of the research
for a series of articles I was writing for The
Alaska
Christian Science Monitor on the proposed
oil pipeline across Alaska. I had hitched
a ride with David Hickock on one of his
inspection runs as senior resource scientist
coordinating Federal planning activities in
Alaska. We had landed in a small float
plane on one of Alaska's three million lakes,
this one known only as Lake 2900, denoting
its elevation. Hickock had come to check on
the work of a team of scientists hired by oil
companies to conduct ecological studies on
soil and wildlife conditions.
My Alaska experiences impressed upon
me as never before that new laws and en-
vironmental agitation, while needed and
encouraging, would not be sufficient to
offset the difficulties ahead. As a Nation
and as individuals we were finding that
our decisions and the steps being taken by
leaders in government and business and by
average citizens were making footprints on
our planet that would scar it, perhaps for
centuries. And what was being called the
advent of the environmental era was really
the dawning realization by millions of
Americans that we need to consider the
impacts of our decisions in our daily activi-
ties and try to determine whether we can
choose alternative actions that will have
less, little, or no harmful effects. It was my
first glimmer of an ethical approach to man-
kind's relation to the Earth and its creatures
and resources.
In an essay, "The Land Ethic," from "A
Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here
and There" (1949), Aldo Leopold noted
the need for an ethic dealing with man's
relation to land and to the animals and
plants which grow upon it.
The land ethic simply enlarges the
boundaries of the community to include
soils, water , plants, and animals, or
collectively: the land . . . changes the
role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of
the land-community to plain member and
citizen of it. It implies respect for his
fellow-members, and also respect for
the community as such.
Reading Leopold's essays in the "Alma-
nac" and his "Round River," I realized for
the first time the urgent necessity for every
citizen to have a feeling and awareness
that the Earth is not here for humans to
manipulate but that we exist as part of an
interrelated world. "We abuse land because
we regard it as a commodity belonging to
us," he wrote. "When we see land as a
community to which we belong, we may
begin to use it with love and respect."
It became clear to me that an environ-
mental ethic based on a knowledge about
our relationship with and impact on nature
and natural systems is vital to our everyday
life. Ethics do not suddenly bring about a
new vision of right and wrong that we did
not have before. They help us to understand
more clearly what we already sensed or
felt but had not yet molded into a clear
basis for actions. Ethics are composed of
"oughts." They remind us how we ought
to think about things, what values we ought
to have, what kind of actions we ought to
take, and the kind of life we ought to live.
Aldo Leopold once wrote that citizens
must "examine each question in terms of
what is ethically and esthetically right, as
well as what is economically expedient. A
thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability, and beauty of the whole
biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
otherwise."
I wondered when first reading Leopold,
and have wondered many times since, how
much damage I myself am doing to the
environment inadvertently by my daily
decisions and actions. What impact are the
actions of all citizens having? And what
responsibility do we have—whether as
writer or banker or government official or
corporate president or secretary or home-
maker or student or mechanic or architect
or scientist—to tread lightly wherever we
go and not leave footprints that mar our
planet?
Reviewing the impressions collected
over the 10 years since I became aware of
the environmental ethic and started look-
ing for it in places where decisions are
made, ! find some conclusions forming as
to how the ethic is faring, especially in the
business sector, where I feel that its pres-
ence can have the greatest effect on the
quality of life.
Some of the examples I found would
indicate that the seeds of an environmental
ethic are at work. But they may be a long
time sprouting. For the predominant ethic
of business, centered around short-term
results and a narrow identification of its
interests, largely overlooks environmental
concerns. The cases where some corpora-
tions are making efforts to include the en-
vironmental impacts in decision-making
are greatly in the minority, and even those
few examples were difficult to find.
Some economists may argue that it is
wrong to expect business to include envi-
ronmental concerns other than those re-
quired by law, because to do so would eat
into profits. That would be altruism, which
is not legitimately a part of the business
ethic, the argument runs. Some go so far as
to argue that it is morally unethical for a
business executive, entrusted with the
funds of stockholders who expect the
maximum profit, to practice any form of
altruism.
Other economists argue that corpora-
tions have a responsibility to serve the
social good of the community, that histori-
cally charters under which early American
corporations were formed encouraged pri-
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
-------
vate capital to promote ends regarded as
serving the public interest.
My biggest disappointment, however,
was to find so few companies with an ade-
quate institutional structure for environ-
mental decisions, other than a unit charged
with pollution control matters. In most
large corporations today the chief execu-
tive officer's personal conviction for—or
bias against—environmental responsibility
sets the policy for the company. Rare is the
company that includes in its corporate
structure a system that allows for the envi-
ronmental impacts of all major decisions to
be brought to the attention of top manage-
ment where options can be presented for
less environmentally harmful alternative
solutions.
This review of an environmental ethic in
government, business, labor, education,
and religion indicates that although there
are scattered instances of an ethic being
accepted and applied, they are rare. The
many good State and Federal laws are not
fully effective. Most business, industry, and
government agency decision-makers seem
to feel they have done enough if they simply
stay within the letter of the law, and some
of them even evade, resist, or seek to delay
compliance with environmental laws.
Understaffed State and Federal Govern-
ment pollution control agencies are unable
to enforce their own laws adequately. Some
government officials, under the pressure of
re-election and changes in administration,
or corporate managers, believing that their
own careers may depend on short-term
gains, avoid accepting responsibility for
the long-term environmental consequences
of their products or processes. As for the
general public, polls continue to show that
the majority of Americans give a high prior-
ity to environmental values. When con-
fronted with choices that affect their imme-
diate self-interest, however, many of these
same people opt for environmentally harm-
ful courses of action. The evidence indi-
cates that although an environmental ethic
does exist, it hasn't enough strength at
present to produce a real difference in the
choices of most people, especially those
who make the big decisions that affect
much of the Nation.
I did find in government, as well as in
corporations and other entities of the pri-
vate sector, a few organizational structures
through which environmental effects could
be factored into decisions before actions
were taken. But those structures proved
effective only when some individual in the
organization was sufficiently imbued with
an environmental ethic to give force to
environmental concerns—an individual
business leader, a lawmaker, a public offi-
cial, or a local citizen activist who cared
enough to lead the way.
Wherever I encountered these environ-
mentally caring decision-makers I found
that their actions resulted from a kind of
enlightened self-interest. Instead of acting
only for "me" (their own restricted, per-
sona! interests), they were considering
"us" (their neighbors, their community,
and the natural world) in their decisions.
And they had widened their span of interest
from a preoccupation with "now" to con-
sideration of a "now that includes the
future." They were practicing what might
be called "environmental citizenship."
Considering the impact of their decisions
and living as responsible members of na-
ture's system amounts to environmental
citizenship much the way abiding by the
law, voting, paying taxes, and acting re-
sponsibly toward the community constitute
political citizenship.
Relatively few decisionmakers, how-
ever, are practicing environmental citizen-
ship. Those who are doing so have a per-
sonal sense of values that is essentially
different from the prevailing value system.
This sense of values makes them willing to
go against the power structure of their com-
munity or town or company or legislative
body or government agency. Environmental
citizenship will not be widespread, there-
fore, until a major shift in values takes
place.
An environmental ethic is essential in'
decision-making. But it certainly should
not interfere with a social ethic—our social
responsibility or obligations toward fellow
humans and their needs and rights. An
environmental ethic must be integrated into
our overall systems of beliefs and coordi-
nated with our economic system; it should
not displace or override these beliefs and
systems. The environmentalist who be-
comes so single-minded about defending
the community as to act with a tyrannical
Puritanism that ignores social values such
as justice, compassion, and equity is bound
to fail. Environmental advocates need to
consider the full consequences of their ob-
jectives just as they demand of others the
consideration of the environmental con-
sequences of their objectives. Those con-
cerned primarily with ecological justice
must be certain that they do not gain it at
the expense of social justice. And those
seeking human justice should avoid gaining
it at the expense of harm to the ecosystem.
It makes no sense to preserve the environ-
ment at the cost of national economic col-
lapse. Nor does it make sense to maintain
stable industrial productivity at the cost of
clean air, clean water, parks, and
wilderness.
Our society harbors a belief that tech-
nology can solve all of our problems. This
belief is incompatible with both an environ-
mental ethic and a social ethic. Technology
that does not provide adequate protection
against environmental and social impacts
may bring more problems than solutions.
We have seen time and again in recent
years that what looked like technological
panaceas have brought with them unfore-
seen and undesirable side effects and as
yet unknown future consequences. Uncer-
tainty about the effects of humanity's activi-
ties is one of the reasons for treading lightly
on the planet.
In the face of this uncertainty we need
above all to act with a sense of humility.
This applies equally to those of us for whom
the environment is of prime concern. What
we may believe is the environmentally cor-
rect way of acting may itself bring unfore-
seen consequences in the future. There is
no more excuse for arrogance on the part of
environmentalists than among technocrats.
Thus the several key values and beliefs
need to be given their due weight and
woven together into a balanced whole.
The sense of values leading to environ-
mental citizenship will be increasingly im-
portant as population pressures, material
growth, resource depletion, and the effects
of technology carry the threat of ever more
destructive impacts on the planet. The
presence of an environmental ethic in our
everyday decisions could be more impor-
tant than we realize. Our decisions as in-
dividuals—at home and at work, as citi-
zens, workers, professionals, or corporate
or public officials—taken together, deter-
mine the hopes and quality of life for
everyone.
With the predominant values in society
weighted toward narrow self-interest, the
role of those who seek the environmentally
ethical route is difficult and often unpopu-
lar. Yet if we do not make our choices on
the side of the environment now, our op-
tions will narrow rapidly as the pressures
of population growth, resource depletion,
and pollution irreversibly alter the quality
of living on the planet. Each of us, individ-
ually, can look for ways of making fewer
demands on nonrenewable resources. We
can seek to live in harmony with the natural
order. We can replace a self-only, short-
range outlook with universal, long-term
values. And we can bring environmental
considerations into our decisions, from the
smallest to the greatest. Our enlightened
self-interest can evolve into an environmen-
tal ethic that will work toward protecting
and enhancing the quality of life for all of
us, as we seek to share John Muir's vision:
"We all dwell in a house of one room—
the world with the firmament for its roof—
and are sailing the celestial spaces without
leaving any track." O
Robert Cahn. a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist and Washington editor of Audu-
bon Magazine, is the author of Footprints
on the Planet: A Search for An Environmen-
tal Ethic. (Universe Books, 1978, $5.95
paperback.) The above article excerpted
from this book appeared in the Christian
Science Monitor.
EPAJOURNAL
-------
*
The
Environmental
Ethic of
J ustice
William O.
Douglas
By Monty J. Podva
In 1960, long before environmental
issues were popular concerns. Justice
Douglas began expressing an environ-
mental ethic in his judicial opinions. From
that time forward he refined and often
reiterated his concern for the ecology in
his judicial writings. His views on the
interpretation of the law invariably favor
the preservation of the rapidly dwindling
natural environment.
The ethic he espouses calls for tighter
controls over the use of our air, water, and
land resources. He suggests that all per-
sons living within a watershed should be
al lowed to vote on a proposed dam before
it permanently changes the landscape. He
suggests that inanimate objects should be
allowed their day in court when they are
threatened with destruction. He strongly
urges society to take heed of the price of
"progress." He challenges the desirability
of more river-ruining dams, more land-
leveling highways, and more air and water
polluting poisons in the form of insecti-
cides or radiation from nuclear power
plants. Although the basis for his environ-
mental philosophy grew from his own
appreciation of the outdoors, he is very
much concerned that the needs of future
generations will not be met unless we
launch a conscious effort to insure a safe
and healthy environment for them.
Prior to the adoption by Congress of a
formal policy respecting the environment,
Justice Douglas relied heavily upon the
long-standing "public interest" doctrine
when confronted with a case involving the
damming of a free flowing river which
would have a devastating effect on migra-
tory fish.
"The test is whether the project will be
in the public interest, and that determina-
tion can be made only after an exploration
of all issues relevant to the 'public interest',
including future power demand and supply,
alternate sources of power, the public in-
terest in preserving reaches of wild rivers
and wilderness areas, the preservation of
anadromous fish for commercial and rec-
reational purposes, and the protection of
wildlife."
The Justice was always cognizant that
the ecology of a river varied considerably
from that of a reservoir created by a dam.
Armed with this information he consist-
ently emphasized,
"The importance of salmon and steel-
head in our outdoor life as well as in com-
merce is so great that there certainly comes
a time when their destruction might neces-
sitate a halt in so-called 'improvement' or
'development of waterways'."
Justice Douglas' concern for the sal-
mon was not restricted to the impact of
dams on their migratory pathways but
against other perils as well. In 1962 the
Court decided against the use of fish traps
by native Alaskan Indians, but allowed
them to be used until the end of the fishing
season. Justice Douglas agreed that such
"nefarious and destructive devices"
should be banned, but urged that the
ban be ordered immediately to prevent
any further unnecessary demise in the
salmon spawning population.
In cases where the Nation's waterways
were being threatened by pollution the
Justice often referred in his opinions to the
teaching of Mr. Justice Holmes that "a
river is more than an amenity, it is a
treasure."
It was in one such case that an oil com-
pany had allowed gasoline to flow into the
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
-------
St. Johns River. The company's contention
was that such commercially valuable gaso-
line was not "refuse matter" and thus did
not fall under the jurisdiction of the Rivers
and Harbors Act. Justice Douglas, writing
for the Court, quickly pointed out:
"Oil is oil and whether useable or not
by industrial standards it has the same
deleterious effect on waterways. In either
case, its presence in our rivers and har-
bors is both a menace to navigation and a
pollutant."
He consistently applied this straightfor-
ward approach when handling specious
arguments where the sanctity of the en-
vironment was in jeopardy.
In another instance a lower court held
that a State statute providing for strict
liability for any oil spill damage was pre-
empted by Federal laws relating to oil
spills. The lower court was unanimously
overruled and Justice Douglas made a
special effort to point out that oil spills were
"an insidious form of pollution of vast
concern to every coastal city or port and
to a!! the estuaries on which the life of the
ocean and the lives of the coastal people
are greatly dependent."
He firmly upheld the right of the States to
protect their coastlines and waterways
independently of any Federal sanctions
against pollution.
Perhaps the clearest expression of his
environmental philosophy appears in his
ringing dissent to an order issued by the
Court in 1974. The air and water of Lake
Superior were receiving dangerous dis-
charges of asbestos fibers from mining
operations. The lower court had issued an
injunction halting the discharge and effec-
tively closing down the operations. The
appeals court stayed the action of the
lower court and the Supreme Court refused
to vacate the stay. Justice Douglas vividly
describes the reasons for his opposition
to the Court's inaction:
"If equal Justice is the Federal standard
we should be as alert to protect people and
their rights as the Court of Appeals is to
protect 'maximizing profits'. If as the Court
of Appeals indicates, there is a doubt, it
should be resolved in favor of humanity,
lest in the end our judicial system be part
and parcel of a regime that makes people,
the sovereign power in this Nation, the vic-
tims of the great god Progress which is
behind the stay permitting this vast pollu-
tion of Lake Superior and its environs. I am
not aware of a constitutional principle that
allows either private or public enterprises
to despoil any part of the domain that be-
longs to all of the people. Our guiding
principle should be Mr. Justice Holmes'
dictum that our waterways, great and
small, are treasures, not garbage dumps
or cesspools."
The depth of Justice Douglas' concern
for the Nation's waterways was again
expressed when the court refused to grant
original jurisdiction to decide whether or
not a public nuisance was created by
dumping toxic mercury into Lake Erie. He
was dismayed when the Court refused to
accept the responsibility for making an
important decision respecting the purity
of interstate waterways. His exasperation
was reflected in his dissent when he wrote,
"I can think of no case of more transcend-
ing importance than this one." Later
when the Court held that the franchise
could be limited to property owners in the
creation and maintenance of a watershed
improvement district, Justice Douglas
spoke out in dissent on behalf of the
lessees and tenants within the district
who would have no vote on future water
projects:
"The enormity of the violation of our
environmental ethics is only increased
when the ballot is restricted to or heavily
weighted on behalf of the few who are
important only because they are wealthy."
Justice Douglas first expressed his
environmental concern in a judicial opin-
ion in 1960 in a dissent from a denial of
certiorari. The case arose over DDT being
dropped from airplanes in an effort to con-
trol the gypsy moth infestation of trees.
When it came to highway construction
that would invade inner-city parklands,
Justice Douglas used the same arguments
he had dramatically presented a decade or
so earlier when he led the drive to save the
C & 0 Canal from becoming a freeway.
He pointed out:
"One need not be an expert to realize how
awful the consequences are when urban
sanctuaries are filled with structures, paved
with concrete or asphalt, and converted
into thoroughfares of high speed modern
traffic."
On the question of litter. Justice Doug-
las saw an opportunity to implement his
environmental ethic. He would have eased
the freight rate structure for recyclable
material. He explained it this way:
"Rates affecting litter, like rates affecting
other commodities, obviously are relevant
to the ease and expedition with which it
will be transported. To get the litter to
appropriate recycling plants in the quan-
tities needed to protect our fast depleting
forests and our non-renewable resources
and to relieve our landscape of the litter
that plagues us may need special incentive
rates."
As in other areas, in his discussion of
nuclear power plants Justice Douglas had
an eye on the future. He knew that once a
power plant was built, economic factors
would compel its usage despite potential
flaws in its safe operation. He was adamant
in his dissenting opinion that the safety
issue had to be resolved before a construc-
tion permit was granted and not merely
before the completed plant was licensed
to operate. He condemned the Court for
going along with the Atomic Energy Com-
mission's decision which he witnessed as
being "a light-hearted approach to the most
awesome, the most deadly, the most dan-
gerous process that man has ever con-
ceived."
Clearly there is one opinion issued by
Justice Douglas that epitomizes his en-
vironmental ethic, and that dissenting
opinion came when the Court ruled that
the Sierra Club failed to show why it
should be allowed to bring suit to prevent
the commercial development of the pristine
Mineral King area in the Sierra Nevadas.
Douglas would have none of this and sug-
gested that the "standing" requirements
be changed to fit the needs of the times:
"Contemporary public concern for pro-
tecting nature's ecological equilibrium
should lead to the conferral of standing
upon environmental objects to sue for their
own preservation."
He did not stop there. He went on to
fashion such a rule that would allow those
who possessed intimate knowledge of
an inanimate object to be its spokesman.
He decreed:
"The river as plaintiff speaks for the
ecological unit of life that is part of it.
Those people who have a meaningful
relation to that body of water—whether it
be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist,
or a logger—must be able to speak for the
values which the river represents and
which are threatened with destruction."
Not only does Justice Douglas reveal
an environmental ethic in his judicial
opinions, he also calls for a renaissance
in legal thinking when the environment is
at stake. He warns against the longstand-
ing policy of listening solely to the manu-
facturing-industrial complex as they call
for "progress" by urging us to strip our
land and use "our rivers, lakes, and
atmosphere as technological sewers." He
calls for a greater sensitivity to our
ecology that would enhance our own lives
as well as the lives of successive genera-
tions. "Ecology," he wrote in the Mineral
King case,"reflects the land ethic." The
land ethic he referred to was Aldo
Leopold's notion that the community of
mankind must be expanded "to include
soils, water, plants, and animals, or
collectively: the land." D
Monty Podva has served as Law Clerk to
retired Justice Douglas since 1977. He
previously served as emergency planning
analyst with the California Energy
Commission.
10
EPAJOURNAL
-------
News Briefs
Radiation Control
President Carter has approved the establishment of a Radiation Policy Council to
advise on broad radiation policy, coordinate Federal activities that use or control
the use of radiation, resolve problems of jurisdiction, recommend legislation, ensure
effective liaison with the States and Congress, and provide a forum for public comment.
The council will be chaired by EPA Administrator Douglas M. Costle and made up of
high-level officials from other agencies. EPA Administrator Costle said the new council
would be a "forum for discussing vital radiation policies, and we will ensure that it
operates in such a way that vital decisions will not be delayed."
Fire Retardants
Companies intending to manufacture or import two well-known fire-retardants, PBB's
(polybrominated biphenyls) or TRIS (tris (2,3-dibromopropyl) phosphate), would be
required to give advance notice to the EPA under proposed regulations. The Agency
then would determine whether manufacturing or importation of the toxic compounds
threaten human health or the environment and, if necessary, could take action to
prevent serious risks. At the moment EPA has no information that anyone is manufac-
turing or intending to resume production of PBB's or TRIS. One company is importing
plastic pellets containing PBB's and will be required to notify EPA under this rule.
Manufacturers of PBB's and TRIS stopped producing the chemicals in 1977 because of
increasing evidence that both chemicals were health and environmental hazards.
Publisher Honored by EPA
EPA recently honored Sherman Briscoe, Executive Director of the National Newspaper
Publishers Association. Briscoe received a plaque in recognition of his work on a
series of four workshops sponsored by EPA and conducted by the NNPA on the effects
of environmental pollution on minorities. (Briscoe died as this issue of EPA Journal
was going to press.)
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] 1
-------
Environment
and
Energy
Futures
By Robert 0. Anderson
n spite of the future shock we have ex-
perienced in the past two decades,
this country remains committed to the
democratic process. Before new ideologies
can percolate into law, they must command
popular consent.
Environmentalism is no exception. The
National Environmental Policy Act, the
Clean Air Act, sundry other acts, and the
agencies that administer them express an
environmenta! ethic secured by years of
fact-gathering and public debate.
To my way of thinking, that is as it
should be. By raising fundamental ques-
tions about industrial development, the
environmental movement has performed an
invaluable service. Businessmen and con-
sumers alike can no longer act with uncon-
cern for environmental consequences. For
example, I believe that while the debate
that occurred over the Trans-Alaska Pipe-
line resulted in unnecessary delay, the
finished project has design and construc-
tion that will preserve Alaska's physical
beauty and unique ecology.
Unfortunately, however, this Nation
faces a very shaky energy future. Has the
legal edifice we've raised to protect our
air, water, and land become too draconian?
Does it bar development of badly needed
domestic energy resources? Certainly,
current environmental legislation and regu-
lation severely restrict our ability to bring
the new energy projects onstream that will
be vital if we are to protect our existing
standards of living.
Recognizing this dilemma. President
Carter has proposed that Congress create
an Energy Mobilization Board to cut
through some of the legal and procedural
obstacles to critical energy projects. Envi-
ronmentalists see the Board as a threat to
years of hard-won progress, and their con-
cern is understandable. Before the argu-
ment escalates out of hand, it seems
worthwhile to examine the situation to
decide what remedies, including the En-
ergy Mobilization Board, might be useful.
The Cost of Delays
To begin with, the fact is industry can live
reasonably well with most environmental
laws. But it is also true that delays in ad-
ministrative decision-making, lengthy
judicial review, and retroactive application
of standards have severely distorted the
economics of a number of energy projects.
A recent Business Roundtable study, for
example, concluded that regulatory delays
on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System re-
sulted in a production loss of 1.8 billion
barrels of oil over four years. This "lost
oil" worsened the U.S. balance of trade
deficit by $20 billion—money that could
have been well spent at home. Low-sulfur
coal development in Wyoming and other
Plains States was delayed for years by
redundant environmental challenges.
Sohio tried for five years for the 700-odd
permits, many environmental in nature,
needed for its PAC-TEX line from Long
Beach, Calif, to Midland, Tex.—and finally
gave up. Can the country afford these en-
ergy delays when we're spending $50-60
billion a year for foreign oil? I think not,
unless we are willing to accept continued
erosion inthe value of the dollar.
I do not mean to imply that we should
retreat from the environmental gains made
in the past decade in order to solve our
I.'
EPA JOURNAL
-------
energy problems. We must not destroy the
country to save it. But such an ethical ab-
surdity remains possible so long as we
continue to pursue Byzantine regulatory
procedures with little regard for their eco-
nomic and social consequences.
Today, 90 Federal agencies issue and
interpret about 7,000 regulations annually
—at astounding cost to the regulated in-
dustries and, of course, their customers
who ultimately must bear those costs. The
Business Roundtable also examined the
1977 costs to 48 firms caused by just six
Federal regulatory agencies and programs.
Such costs totaled $2.6 billion—16 per-
cent of the companies' net profits, 10 per-
cent of their capital expenditures, and 40
percent of their research and development
budgets—not including costs attributable
to dela'ys, misdirection of capital, and so
forth. We simply have to rethink and re-
form the regulatory system so that environ-
mental protection is more compatible with
rational economic growth. The pastoral
romance inherent in "hands off" or "no
growth" policies is a luxury this Nation
cannot afford. We must be able to offer job
opportunities as well as vertical advance-
ment to our young and minority groups if
our very system is to survive.
Streamlining Regulations
Rulemaking should proceed from what is
technically feasible, not from goals con-
cocted under laboratory conditions. Regu-
lation should be coordinated among agen-
cies and levels of government. It should
encompass due process within reasonable
time frames. Its principal methodology
should be analysis of costs and benefits for
society, as both are likely to result from
rule and decision making. I am convinced
such basic reforms would strengthen our
national commitment to environmental
care.
The Energy Mobilization Board should
be an important first step in streamlining
the environmental permitting process and
pinpointing regulations that are contrary,
redundant, ambiguous, economically or
technically inf easible, open to punitive
retroactive application, or motivated by
other than environmental concerns. The
Board will not in all likelihood become the
agent of overall regulatory review, but it
could function as a catalyst for such a
review.
The Need for Mediation
Reform of the regulatory process is a long-
term matter. Meanwhile, the courts will be
jammed with expensive, time-consuming
environmental litigation, some of which,
perhaps, could be avoided by means of a
very simple expedient: talking to one an-
other. !t seems worth the effort, if only
because extended litigation can inflate the
cost of a needed energy project past the
point of economic viability.
Clearly, industrial and environmental in-
terests need arbitration procedures. Organ-
izations like John Busterud's RESOLVE, an
environmental mediation group in Menlo
Park, Calif., substitute mediation for litiga-
tion and can provide valuable assistance
in developing reasonable assurances of
finality. Given full and speedy disclosure
of information about a project, mediation
models could achieve a real credibility.
In that case, "loyal oppositions" might
look at general reform of the regulatory
process with enthusiasm—and find them-
selves making real contributions to one
another's stated interests.
The Oil Superfund
Finally, what can business do to help clear
away the obstacles to needed development
without harming the environment in the
process? Corporate managers, it seems to
me, must commit themselves to environ-
mental responsibility and be held account-
able for the environmental consequences
of their operations. For that reason my
company supports the Comprehensive Oil
Pollution Liability and Compensation Act,
introduced by Congressman Mario Biaggi
of New York. This legislation would con-
solidate all current oil spill funds into a
federally administered oil "superfund" to
assure prompt cleanup of, and compensa-
tion for, oil spills. The fund would be sup-
ported by a fee on crude oil refined in the
U.S. and would cover events such as the
recent oil spill from the Mexican well in
the Gulf. The oil superfund is a good ex-
ample of ordering environmental respon-
sibilities in the interests of efficiency and
equity.
In the area of energy development, in-
dustry has to balance the attractiveness of
conventional energy resources with uncon-
ventional possibilities, emphasizing con-
servation technology, cogeneration, gas
from biomass conversion, the array of in-
cipient solar energy systems, radically
redesigned automobiles, and mass transit
—even when the economic payoff remains
open to serious doubt. Social responsibility
has to become a significant factor in bot-
tom line considerations.
The future will not wait while we fritter
away opportunities to balance environmen-
tal and economic issues. Whatever our
differences, to remain unchanged in the
face of the future is to risk that we shall
not survive it. D
Robert O. Anderson is Chairman of the
Board of Directors and Chief Executive
Officer of A tlantic Richfield Co. He also is
a nationally known civic leader, co-chair-
man of the International Institute for Envi-
ronment and Development, and has served
as Chairman of the Aspen Institute for
Humanistic Studies since 1960.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
13
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Threats to
Biological
Systems
Interview with Lester
Brown, President of
Worldwatch
Lester R. Brown is President
of the Worldwatch Institute, a
non-profit organization dealing
with analysis of global prob-
lems. He is author of numerous
books on food, resources, and
population, and has degrees in
agriculture, economics, and
public administration. In the
1960's he coordinated U.S.
Department of Agriculture pro-
grams to increase food produc-
tion in 40 countries. The Wash-
ington Post has described him
as "one of the world's most
influential thinkers."
A few decades ago. the ques-
tion of an environment ethic
was almost nonexistent. Why
has it come to the fore in the
The reason for it is fairly funda-
mental. The values that a so-
ciety has must be consistent
with its well-being and long-
term survival. If we fail to
evolve an environmental ethic,
which is simply a behavior pat-
tern that's consistent with a
stable relationship between our-
selves and the natural systems
and the sources that support us,
then society as we know it may
not survive.
What's the number one envi-
ronmental problem in the
world today?
That's not an easy question to
answer, but I would be inclined
to put at the top of the list the
progressive deterioration of the
basic biological systems on
which we depend, namely fish-
eries, forests, grasslands, and
croplands. These four systems
provide not only all our food
but also all the raw materials
for industry with the important
exception of minerals and
petrochemicals We are now in
a situation where the growth in
world population, the increase
in human demand for products
of these systems, is beginning
to exceed the sustainable yield.
The result is overfishing, de-
forestation, over-grazing, and
soil erosion. The bottom line is
what's happening to per capita
production of the principal com-
modities of biological origin.
What we're now beginning to
see, as world population has
gone from 3 billion to 4 billion,
is a decline in the per capita
production of almost all the
commodities of biological
origin including fish, wood,
leather, beef, mutton, wool, and
most importantly, cereals. This
is obviously not a situation that
can continue indefinitely. At
some point the stress will be-
come economic in the form of
inflation, or perhaps physiologi-
cal in the form of malnutrition.
Would yc.
are declining
Most of these commodities are
declining in per capita terms
though some of them, at least in
some situations, are declining
in absolute terms. The produc-
tion of wood in some countries
is declining in both per capita
terms and in absolute terms,
because the rate of deforesta-
tion means the amount of forest
land is shrinking rapidly. With
fish, the overall production has
been essentially static since
1970. That is, the world fish
catch over the last eight years
has been fluctuating rather nar-
rowly around 70 million tons a
year. But the per capita catch
has been declining.
Am we solvinq any aspects of
this problem?
There are occasional encourag-
ing signs around the world. The
Chinese, for example, are prob-
ably far ahead of other densely
populated areas of the world in
recognizing the need to stabilize
population growth. They are
now talking about stabilizing
population growth sometime
between 1985 and 2000.
They're talking about all sorts
of incentives and disincentives
to reduce family size, such as
providing economic bonuses to
families who have only one
child. They think this is going to
be essential for getting the
brakes on the population
growth. It's interesting because
the Chinese apparently have
begun to see very clearly that
continued population growth
will undermine and erode the
hard-earned gains of the past
quarter-century in raising
their living standards.
Are there some nations that
you would single out as hav-
ing a stronger environmental
ethic than the United States?
China is probably one of those.
I would say some of the Euro-
pean countries—the Nether-
lands. Denmark, Sweden, and
Norway—probably all have a
stronger environmental ethic in
the sense of a much better de-
veloped sense of the relation-
ship between people and nature
and the extent to which human-
ity depends on natural systems.
One of the countries with the
poorest sense of the nature of
the relationship with the envi-
ronment is Brazil.
What are they doing wrong ?
Almost everything. I was in
Brasilia a few weeks ago talk-
ing about population with the
chairman of the Department of
Economics of a Brazilian uni-
versity. He seemed to think the
population growth was not
much of a problem for Brazil.
I asked him a couple of ques-
tions. What's Brazil's popula-
tion now? Hesaid110million.
How fast is it growing? He said
nearly three per cent per year.
I said, if it grows at that rate for
the next century, how many
people will Brazil have? He
thought it would be two or three
times what it currently is. But if
Brazil's current population of
110 million continues to expand
at 3 percent per year for the
next century, it will have about
two billion people, more than
India and China combined
today.
Yes. A three percent rate of
growth doubles every 24 years.
So over a century that's a nine-
teenfold increase. One dou-
bles in 24 years making two;
then by 48 years, it doubles
again, so that's four. By 72
years it doubles a third time,
making eight. And then by 96
years, when it doubles again,
you've got 1 6. When most peo-
ple see that calculation they
think it's a typographical error,
but it's not, it's the basic nature
of exponential growth. The pop-
ulation in Brazil is today grow-
ing exponentially at nearly 3
percent per year, or about 2 bil-
lion people in a century.
There is an effort in some
quarters to impose criminal
penalties and to jail polluters,
particularly those who dump
toxics that cause cancer and
birth defects. How do you
feel about this?
I've not thought a great deal
about it, but one point that
comes to mind is that we have
14
EPAJOURNAL
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a system of law that deals
rather forthrightly with personal
assaults of one sort or another.
If someone is walking down the
street and throws acid in some-
one else's face, that's viewed
as a rather serious crime and
is penalized accordingly. If, on
the other hand, someone dumps
something carcinogenic in the
river from which most of our
drinking water comes and some
of the people who drink the
water develop cancer from it,
chances are that those respon-
sible will get little more than a
reprimand. I think that simply
points out a fault in a legal
system that has not developed
fast enough to keep up with
some of our new legal prob-
lems.
How do you feel about U.S.
Federal incentives to stabilize
population growth, such as
Senator Packwood's proposal
to limit tax deductions to two
children? Are there other
measures government could
take?
What I have said a number of
times is that we've got to figure
out ways of getting the brakes
on the population growth, and
sooner rather than later. As you
look around the world, you
discover that a great many
countries have policies that are
designed to encourage large
families. Underthe U.S. income
tax policy, for example, individ-
uals can claim deductions for
as many children as they can
have, whether it's two or seven-
teen. It seems to me that's a
pro-natalist policy. Some gov-
ernments are already beginning
to impose limits on the number
of children for which income
tax deductions can be claimed.
Nepal is one. You can claim
tax deductions for no more
than two children in Nepal to-
day. The Philippines, I think,
have also imposed limits on the
number of children for whom
tax exemptions can be claimed.
I think in that case it's four
children. These are only a few
examples. Poland, on the other
hand, has very strong pro-
natalist policies with all sorts
of baby bonuses and benefits
for having children, and at the
1 • • '^troyint tut
/tlantat/ans in Brazil,
same time it's faced with po-
tentially unmanageable infla-
tion. One gets the impression
that the Polish public officials
and political leaders simply
have not recognized that Poland
has one of the fastest-growing
populations of any industrial
country in the world today, and
that such pressures on re-
sources contribute to inflation.
I think we've got a lot of work
to do in reshaping economic
and social policies in all coun-
tries, affluent as well as Third
World ones, so that we can
discourage large families, en-
courage small ones, and thereby
improve the quality of human
existence.
Fertility levels are dropping
drastically in 41 countries.
according to a recent news
report. Should the U.S. en-
courage the trend?
The decline of fertility in the
41 countries is something that
has been under way for some
time. What it means is that in
a country like Mexico, for ex-
ample, the population growth
rate that was three and a half
percent is now down to three
percent per year. That still
means that at the current
growth rate Mexico would
multiply by nineteen times dur-
ing the next century. That's
certainly an improvement over
multiplying by 24 times in the
next century but it's not exactly
a stable population yet. So,
about all we can say is that
fertility levels at last have
begun to move in the right
direction but have a long, long
way to go. The role of the U.S.
is many-fold. First of all, we
ought to have a national popu-
lation policy ourselves—not
only a policy, but as an explicit
goal: the stabilization of the
U.S. population.
Secondly, we have more
information than any govern-
ment in the world on what's
happening in the balance
between people and resources,
food, energy, and so forth, and
I think we have an obligation
EPA JOURNAL
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to share that information and
analysis. One of the encourag-
ing U.S. Government initiatives
in this area is the Global 2000
study jointly sponsored by the
Council on Environmental
Quality and the State Depart-
ment and scheduled for com-
pletion by the end of this year.
It sketches out the global trends
in the relationship between
people and natural systems and
resources in a way that has not
been done before. It's going
to be a very important contri-
bution to global public educa-
tion about the need for popula-
tion policy.
In terms of contraceptive
technology, we're probably as
far advanced as any country in
the world. Two of the important
modern contraceptives, the pill
and the IUD, were both de-
veloped in this country, and we
should have some information
to share in that sense. We do
have in this country a reason-
ably good nationwide family
planning program. Probably not
the best in the world, unfortu-
nately, but one of the better
ones.
Does our Christian-Judaic
heritage teach us about pro-
tecting the environment?
We certainly find throughout
the Bible instructions on being
good stewards of the resources
of the Earth and the living
things on it that we have
inherited. I expect that before
very long we're going to see the
churches become much more
involved in looking at the rela-
tionship between people and
nature. We have for some time
been hearing from the pulpit
about the military situation,
about the person-to-person rela-
tionship and the abhorrence of
war. I expect that particularly
with the younger generation of
theologians, we will hear more
and more concern in the
churches about the deteriorat-
ing relationship between people
and nature.
Do you sense any change or
slackening in the environ-
mental movement since the
early 1970's?
There's been a tendency of late
to say that there's a strong
backlash against the environ-
mental movement or that peo-
ple are losing interest, or that
it's a matter of environment or
jobs. There are obvious situa-
tions where sometimes it's a
matter of two steps forward and
one step backward. But in look-
ing at the relationships between
ourselves and the natural sys-
tems and resources on which
we depend, the question is not
whether we protect them or
have jobs. If we don't protect
those systems, there won't be
any jobs. In fact there won't
be any people needing jobs, so
that problem will take care of
itself. I think we've lost sight
of what environmental concerns
and the movement are ali about
if we start talking about a trade-
off between environment and
jobs. It's sheer nonsense.
Your writings warn that
environmental degradation
along with energy shortages
and inflation pose a greater
threat to the security of
nations in the future than
military power Would you
explain why?
We've been saying for some
time here at the Institute that
the real danger to national
security in the U.S. and many
other countries is much less
the threat of military attack
than it is ecological deteriora-
tion and resource exhaustion.
There are a great many other
countries in North Africa and
the Middle East, for example,
where encroaching deserts pose
a far greater threat to long-term
national survival and viability
than any foreseeable military
invasion. I would go so far as
to say that new energy systems
in this country are far more
essential to our long-term sur-
vival as a Nation than new
weapons systems. It seems to
me that inflation could become
one of the most destabilizing
forces of the late 20th century
if we don't begin to understand
its origin better and what needs
to be done about it. Economists
still seem to think that if we
could just adjust monetary and
fiscal policies and get them just
right, we somehow could
effectively manage inflation. I
would say very straightfor-
wardly that if we don't get the
brakes on world population
growth, I don't think inflation
will be manageable under any
foreseeable circumstances. We
delude ourselves if we think
that we can do it with monetary
and fiscal policies.
Fiscal policy is a great way
of coping with inflation if you're
running huge budgetary defi-
cits, and monetary policy is
useful for fine tuning of the
economic system through the
size of the money supply. But
neither of them are of any use
at all in trying to preserve a
fishery where stocks are being
depleted because of excessive
demand and overfishing. Fiscal
policy isn't very helpful in
trying to arrest deforestation
if the level of population pres-
sure and the demand for forest
products greatly exceeds the
sustainable yield of the forest.
When we eventually begin to
understand this, then I think
we have a chance effectively
managing inflation, but until
those who are formulating
policy do, not only will inflation
continue to be a problem but I
think it will get progressively
worse.
Is it possible to shift em-
phasis in the next decade or
two to using the quality of
life as a measure of success
rather than the Gross National
Product? Are there any seg-
ments of our society that are
already making that shift?
We certainly have found in
recent years that the traditional
ways of measuring human well-
being in the form of national
income accounts, that is per
capita income and GNP, have
become less and less satis-
factory. We now find ourselves
in a situation where if you
create a serious pollution prob-
lem and contribute to the GNP
in the process, you can then
contribute further to the GNP in
efforts to clean it up. Or if we
think of energy, for example,
as long as the energy that heats
the water in that office building
across the street comes through
the electric meter, it's part of
the GNP and it gets counted.
But if it comes from the sun
and lands on those collectors,
it doesn't get measured at all
and it doesn't enter into the
accounting. If we switch all
the hot water heating in the
country from electricity to solar
collectors, the GNP would drop
sharply but the water would be
as hot as it was before. So I can
see a lot of difficulties develop-
ing with GNP and eventually
we'll devise some new meas-
urement techniques.
I would point out that the
Overseas Development Coun-
cil has developed an alternative
measuring device to per capita
income: something called the
PQLI, or Physical Quality of
Life Index. It's an aggregate of
several different indicators like
life expectancy, infant mor-
tality, literacy, and nutrition
level. And what they find with
these basic social indicators
of human well-being is that
some countries have very high
incomes but very low levels
of well-being. Brazil, Mexico,
Continued on page 27
Population,
Environment
and Lily Ponds
Lester R. Brown has been
warning for a long time
that the global population
is fast outstripping our
food supply and degrad-
ing our environment. But
many people don't under-
stand the speed at which
population grows.
Brown recounts this
anecdote in his book,
The 29th Day, to explain
the problem:
"The French use a
riddle to teach school-
children the nature of
exponential growth. A
lily pond, so the riddle
goes, contains a single
leaf. Each day the num-
ber of leaves doubles—
two leaves the second
day, four the third, eight
the fourth, and so on. 'If
the pond is full on the
30th day,' the question
goes, 'at what point is it
half full?' Answer: 'On
the 29th day.'
"The global lily pond
in which four billion of
us live may already be
at least half full. Within
the next generation, it
could fill up entirely."
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
17
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Spaceship
Earth:
Is It In
Trouble?
An Interview with
R. Buckminster Fuller
R. Buckminster ("Bucky")
Fuller is perhaps best known as
the inventor of the geodesic
dome, a lightweight structure
of honeycombed triangles.
A uthor of numerous books on
environment, energy, educa-
tion, mathematics, and world
planning, he is currently a
World Fellow in residence at
the University City Science
Center in Philadelphia.
In your book. Approaching
the Benign Environment, you
emphasize that not only is
man altering his environment.
but the environment is alter-
ing man too. Do you believe
we are being altered for the
worse by this process?
I don't believe anything. The
word "believe" means to me
accepting explanations of
physical phenomena without
any experimental evidence.
I am a hard realist. I am a
ship's captain. I was a regular
United States Naval Officer.
I was an air pilot. I'm a navi-
gator. I'm a mechanic, an
engineer. I will not tell people
I'm going to get across the
ocean if I didn't know howto
do it, and so I talk always in
terms of evidence. The fact
that we have options—
and I'm often able to make
clear to humanity that we have
options they didn't know we
have—should not make us
optimistic. When I'm making
them understand that humanity
has a chance to make it on this
planet, when they've become
so dismayed and assume things
are really going to pieces, I
don't ask them to believe a
thing, I explain exactly how I
arrived at those results, and
they feel better and say "Your
optimism brushed off on me,"
but I'm anything but optimistic.
To know that we have the op-
tion doesn't tell me that we're
going to make it at a!I. I know
all the reasons why we may not
make it.
It seems very touch-and-go
whether we're going to make
it on this planet. So, I'm any-
thing but an optimist.
Do you see any hopeful signs
at all?
Human beings are born delib-
erately by design. A universe
that can design 92 chemical
elements is utterly unique, a
universe that can design the
eternal principles such as mass
interaction of celestial bodies,
such principles as leverage,
optical refraction, such a uni-
verse deliberately designs
human beings with incredible
equipment. Our eyes could not
be more incredible, our brain
could not be, but humans are
also designed to be born naked,
absolutely helpless for
months—with no experience,
absolutely ignorant, but hun-
gry, thirsty, and curious, and
we are designed to learn only
by trial and error. Humanity
after millions of years of finally
developing words to commu-
nicate with one another, is able
to compound experiences by
written words, where the dead
can speak to the living, so we
have made enormous advances.
Nature put humans on this
planet but let people make
some very bad mistakes such
as environmental pollution.
People are now becoming very
excited by pollution, and prob-
ably nature gave them enough
margin to really get things
under control. But we don't
make moves until things get
absolutely horrendously bad.
Humanity doesn't move unless
it can see things moving. And
when you don't see something
moving, you don't know you're
going to be run over. So it's
only when they push us that
we begin to really holler.
Humanity is going through that
right now, so I'm delighted.
The worse news I get about
environment and so forth, the
better 1 feel because I knew
those things were going on all
the time 50 years ago. I said
then, how can we get humanity
to move? Now we're getting
to the point where everybody is
terribly excited, and the kids
are getting even more excited,
which is the most important
thing.
In your book, Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth,
you mention that there was a
big safety factor designed
into this planet when man
came on the Earth that gave
him time to learn how to
operate this spaceship and
adjust to his environment.
Nature gave him an enormous
cushion—a life support system
with time to learn by trial and
error.
Are we running out of time
on this now, as far as this
cushion is concen-
As I've said, it's absolutely
touch and go whether we're
going to make it. I do know we
have the option to make it.
You write and speak a great
deal about problems in the
cities—particularly their pol-
lution problems. What rem-
edies would you suggest that
we do that we're not doing
I'd like to review the city and
pollution problem. Of course
a very famous one was the
London fog. That was because
people had been burning coal
in their grates and mixing it up
with the fog. But today there's
no London fog anymore. All
those chimneys are there, but
no smoke is coming out of any
of the chimneys in London
anymore.
Then we come to Los Ange-
les, which has had this very
famous smog problem.
On the Pacific Coast along
the mountain coast range,
mists are made by the tempera-
ture differential of the sea and
the mountains. When industry
began to come in, particularly
the oil refineries of Los Angeles.
the fume got impounded in that
mist and made it heavy as it
came down. So, it made more
and more of a curtain impound-
ing that industrial fume.
The people of Los Angeles
before World War II com-
plained a great deal about this
to their city government. The
government said they were
going to do something about it.
The city management was
pretty sure that this fume from
the industry was causing the
trouble so they said the corpo-
rations were going to have to
stop this pollution.
IB
EPA JOURNAL
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The industries replied there
are ways of precipitating all
right, but it costs a lot of
money, and if we put it in, we
couldn't compete with the com-
panies that are not operating
under controlled conditions.
We are going to have to move
out of Los Angeles. The city
said, don't go, we need you
very much for the taxes, so
people it's your fault, all of
your backyards are incinerating
and making smoke. So, they
passed a law against it and
Los Angeles had no more
incineration. But just about the
time that was working well, an
enormous influx of new people
came in after World War II.
The city began to look at that
and said, "People, it's your
fault, it's the fumes from your
cars."
Now, what I'll simply say,
and this holds true for every
city in one way or another,
industry won't pay any atten-
tion to this industrial fume.
The air doesn't stay local to
any place, the wind just simply
moves around the country, the
air belongs to everybody, and
the only way we're going to
lick this is the following. I have
observed, for instance, that the
amount of sulfur coming out
of all the chimneys around the
world annually matches the
amount of sulfur we take out
of the ground to keep industry
going.
So government may have to
say to every corporation, you
are going to have to put in fume
precipitation.
All this waste is recoverable.
I was asked to give the annual
dinner talk to the Edison Elec-
tric Generating Management.
They have precipitation for all
the fumes coming out of the
electrical generating plants,
and the company engineers
said it would cost the generat-
ing companies only 25 percent
more to precipitate. But the
industry would not cooperate.
From now on government is
going to have to say to every
corporation, "Well, here's
equipment, you must put it in
and precipitate. No matter what
it costs you, we'll rebate that
as taxes at the end of the
year—your income tax.
"But you must turn over all
the metals and all the valuable
chemical products to us which
are recovered this way and we
in government, then, will see
that the sulphur gets where the
sulphur is needed."
You first coined the metaphor
that the Earth is a spaceship,
ou not?
Yes. I'm the one who gave you
the name "Spaceship Earth."
:ithropologist, Mar-
garet Mead, once questioned
this phrase. She thought of
the Earth as kind of a livinq
organism, not a spaceship.
't that if it were a space-
ship you could just push a
button and solve things, but
instead she liked to think of
it as a living, breathing, orga-
nism that has to be nurtured.
Would you quarrel with that?
If she wanted to, she could call
it an organism. But it is an
entity, going around the sun at
60,000 miles an hour and I
think a very good name for it
is Spaceship Earth.
Margaret and I were very dear
friends. I knew her very, very
well and she liked to get up
little arguments with me.
You have warned often about
over-specialization both in
man's activities and in nature,
whore very often when an
organism gets overspecial
ized, it becomes extinct. Do
you think over-specialization
by man is part of our environ-
mental problem today?
Definitely, yes. I find every child
is born an inherent compre-
hensivist. He asks the most
beautiful questions about mi-
crocosms, and macrocosms—
and the parents say, "No I can't
answer, wait till you go to
school, they'll answer you."
The child gets to school and
they say "Never mind, we're
going to give you one, two and
three. You handle that and we'll
give you four, five and six, and
give you the ABC's." Children
are put into what's called ele-
mentary school where they're
given the parts instead of the
whole.
I find that the only difference
between humans and other
organisms is that every other
living organism has some built-
in special equipment that gives
it special advantage in some
special environment.
Whether it's a little dog
that's cut very close to the
ground so he can foflow a trail
or whether it's the special vine
that only grows in the Amazon
because it does it beautifully
there, or a bird in the sky using
wings, but then, when it's not
flying, it cannot disembarrass
itself of its wings and it finds
that its walking is very greatly
hampered.
Humans have, however, phe-
nomenal brains and they are
able to discover a relationship
existing between special cases.
We have eternal principles
which only human minds have
the capability to discover.
What is different is we
understand principles and are
able to be objective to the
principle rather than having
built-in special equipment. If
Nature wanted humans to be
specialists, she'd have them
born with a microscope on their
eyes as she does with many
other creatures.
Here in Philadelphia about
25 years ago, the American
Association of Advancement
of Sciences had its annual con-
gress and there were two re-
ports turned in, one in anthro-
pology, the other in biology.
There had been a team of
biologists for years that had
been studying all the known
cases of the biological species
that became extinct.
The anthropologists had been
reviewing all the case histories
of human tribes that have be-
come extinct. Both teams found
completely independently that
extinction was a consequence
of overspecialization. For in-
stance we can inbreed by
marrying two fast running
horses. With the concentration
of these fast running genes,
you're liable to get a fast run-
ning horse as an offspring, but
as you do, you outbreed adapt-
ability. You have to look out
for that horse more and more.
You find inbreeding and spe-
cialization always have their
price: the loss of general
adaptability.
You have today all of hu-
manity so over-specialized that
no one in the end will know
whatto do about anything. Man
knows he's in trouble, so he
leaves it to a politician and the
politician can't do a thing about
it. It turns out the politician as
an individual is absolutely sty-
mied by this.
So, we're at a point where
we're that close to becoming
extinct by virtue of overspecial-
ization rather than the general
capability of humanity.
You have made a great con-
tribution to architecture in tho
use of lightweight materials
in your geodesic dome and
other structures. When you
were creating these buildings.
using your philosophy of
"doing more with less," did
you consider yourself an
environmentalist in the sense
that you were using fewer
I set out deliberately in 1 927
to pay attention to ecology, to
seethe complete interrelated-
ness of everything. That is,
instead of being a specialist,
to look at the total planet Earth,
never look at a local country.
I wanted to look at the total
resources, the total tools of
know how, and to use them for
the total success of the genera-
tion of life on our planet.
I saw something going on in
our technology that society did
not appreciate or understand.
When I was born, reality was
everything you see, smell,
touch and hear which is the
same reality the newspapers
deal with today. But we had
come into a new era of elec-
tronics where you couldn't see
things. We came into the era
of chemistry and metallurgy,
where no one could see the
difference between two pieces
of metal weighing exactly the
same but this one was exactly
twice as strong as that one.
World War I had been a
war of alloys, doing more with
less. Suddenly there's a ship
coming, same tonnage as
yours, same number of guns,
same size guns, but what you
don't know is he has a kind of
steel in his guns so that his
guns will fire accurately one
mile further than yours. And
your ship goes to the bottom.
Nobody tells it. So, the most
guarded secret of World War I
was this "doing more with
less." When I hear architects
talk aesthetically that "less is
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
19
-------
more," I'm not interested. I
am talking about physically
doing greater performance with
less volume of material and
ergs of energy for each func-
tion.
I saw that it was only going
into the military. We were put-
ting it in the airplane, into
ships, we had all this priority
in light weight metals and
alloys going to the military.
In 1927 I found that the
building of the home, what
I call "livingry," was many
years behind the arts of de-
signing military equipment for
the sea or control for the sky.
In 1 927 there was an article
about a single family dwelling
published by the American
Institute of Architects in their
Journal—a house in Illinois
which they considered opti-
mum for that year.
I took the total floor area and
volume, the number of win-
dows, all the plumbing it had,
and so on, and I found its total
weight including the pipes was
1 50 tons. I took the problem
then of producing equal en-
vironment controls to a new
floor area, same cubage, same
number of functions, equally
performed and using the most
advanced aircraft technology.
I came up with three tons
against 1 50. I saw then, by im-
mediately applying the most
advanced science and tech-
nology to the home front, there
was a good possibility we might
do so much with so little and
itmightbeabie to take care
of everybody.
Russia and the United States
for the last 30 years have been
spending over $200 billion a
year focusing on how to de-
stroy humanity most expertly.
But I knew when I came to my
studies of environment control,
I could take care of the living.
Between 1948 and 1950 I
was giving a general lecture
series at MIT. They had a de-
partment of architecture and
it was considered by the other
departments there as sort of a
department of liaison with
idiots.
Now, what are you going to
do with this technology? I said
I think right now we ought to
change the name of the archi-
tectural department to Depart-
ment of Environmental Design.
Bill Wurster was head of the
MIT architectural school at that
time and later moved out to
the University of California at
Berkeley.
I got a letter from Bill about
five years after that. He said,
"Bucky, I'm changing the name
of our department here to De-
partment of Environmental
Design." That's how the
word "environmental" got
going so much in architecture,
really out of my suggestion,
because I've been at it 52 years.
Many years ago you wrote an
article in Fortune about the
world energy resources.
Yes, in their tenth anniversary
issue, in February 1940.
Did you anticipate at that
time th<* mess we would be in
now in energy?
Excuse me, but I can show you
that in 1927 it was absolutely
clear to me that we were in
trouble. Automobiles were just
getting to be popular. The cars
were proliferating, and quite
clearly, you were using up a
savings account in energy and
obviously your savings account
was going to run out some day.
But over the years I have
found that neither big govern-
ment nor big business was in-
terested in anything for you to
get energy directly from nature;
only what comes through a
pipe and a wire, so they put a
meter on it and tax you for it
and make a profit out of it. So,
there's no earnest attention
being paid, really, to wind
power—to cleaner water power,
tidal power. Big business is so
powerful today, and it keeps
saying, "We're not interested."
At the time of World War II,
the grand strategy against Hit-
ler was to cut off his energy.
We succeeded in cutting off
all his petroleum. Meanwhile,
the German scientists went to
work and found they were able
then to develop four kinds of
alcohols. They made a high
octane gas from the alcohol.
Continued on page 27
Workers pick tea leaves in China.
20
EPAJOURNAL
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We have just lived through the most
triumphant period of scientific and
historical discovery known to the human
record. We have never—not even in com-
parison with those supremely inventive
creatures, Neolithic men and women—
learned so much so quickly and in such
depth about the material aspects of the
universe and about the particular historical
development of man in the midst of his
small planetary post in that universe. The
time since Bacon and Descartes has been
a sort of sunburst of discovery. Bacon
first caught the glimpse of science's
potential role as tool and instrument for
"the use and betterment of man's estate."
Descartes saw that if the continuum of
reality could be broken up into "discrete
particulars," they could be grasped and
repeated and by experiment we could come
to understand the nature and working of
all natural objects—from ants to elephants,
from atoms to galaxies. And once under-
stood and mastered, they could fulfil the
Baconian dream of being useful to man-
kind
The degree to which these visions did
in fact lead to new mastery led to a second
profound conviction or shaping idea—that
our life on Earth would be, if not improperly
interfered with, one of steadily evolving
material progress in which each generation
would build and improve on the efforts
of the past. The digging up all around the
world of past civilizations (some of them
of considerable material sophistication)
did not dampen this optimism. Their rise
and fall seemed less important than what
was seen to be later giant strides forward
in discovery and material innovation; their
co Ha pseeven enhanced the18thand 19th
century conviction of certain "progress".
Bythe 19th century, whole philosophies—
the "why's" of life—began to be built on
the "how's." Marx saw inevitable progress
to Utopia in the abolition of property which,
passing from slavery to feudalism to
capitalism to socialism, would end in
perfect justice and equality. He of course
placed all evil on property; forgetting
power, that most potent agent of what I
would call, for its sheer banality, "un-
Science
and Values
on a
Small Planet
By Barbara Ward
original sin." Also, by one of history's
cosmic ironies, he took his ideas of the
incorruptibility of the dispossessed
straight from the Bible: "He has put down
the mighty from their seat and exalted
them of low degree", But then for all the
"progressive" form of his thought—the
preconceived idea again—he was in fact
the last of the great Jewish prophets.
At the same time, Darwin's incredible
synthesis of his own and others' geological
and naturalist discoveries led to the vision
of evolution by natural selection, the "fit-
test" surviving and this too validated the
profound conviction of irreversible prog-
ress—and also a lot of extremely un-
attractive ideas about the necessity of
force and competitive violence in order
to survive at all.
And from this whole mood grew a third
master idea. This is less easy to define
and has been less generally held in a rigor-
ous way. Yet it has dominated the subcon-
scious thinking of millions. If science
explains ail phenomena, and if material
evolution guarantees progress, then in a
sense the two "hows" add up to the
"why"—humanity exists to experience a
full material Utopia on this evolving planet
and all other older "whys" are simply
the wish-fulfilments of a less knowledge-
able and affluent age. Why worry about
future paradise when you can get to
Bermuda tomorrow?
'A Sense of Unease'
So there we have three major ideas of the
centuries between the Renaissance and
our own day—science as the tool of
betterment, material progress as the certain
outcome of evolution, and non-material
aims, values and aspirations as simply
the expressions or hangovers of pious
hopes from pre-scientific and pre-techno-
logicaf societies.
But there is not one of these precon-
ceptions that can any longer be easily
and comfortably accepted. We are begin-
ning to look at our planet and universe
from new angles of vision and since, as
Walter Bagehot once said, "Nothing is
more painful to change than an idea,"
we are caught in a sense of unease and
apprehension unequalled perhaps since
the Reformation. Science as the certain
instrument of betterment? We think of the
fast breeder reactor powered by a fuel
that is a lethal carcinogen and can with
little difficulty be used to make a nuclear
bomb. We think of the creation of com-
pounds unknown in nature—for instance
some of those with carbon-chlorine bonds
which, concentrating up the food chains,
can disrupt ecosystems, turn the eggshells
of osprey to paper, end up in the fat of
antarctic penguins, and conceivably help
to explain the pandemic growth of cancer
in industrialized societies. We think of
recombining the basic building blocks of
life, DMA, and feel a certain sympathy
with the Mayor of Cambridge, Mass, who
said: "You can produce Frankensteins if
you must, but not in my city".
The Perils of Population
Then take the belief in inevitable material
progress. We are suddenly confronted with
the fact that world population which
reached only ha If a billion by 1 600 A.D. is
now over four billion and may well be six
in twenty years time. Such a vast growth
of people, consuming, wasting, polluting,
demanding, and moving about like, say,
the Atlantic peoples, could extinguish a
large range of resources forever, and put
food supplies at general risk. Nor does the
fact that 80 percent of material wealth
today remains obstinately with 25 percent
of the people—mainly us—give one a very
secure feeling about the social stability
of the next decades.
And this of course raises the third
point—the ability of the material "hows"
to produce the answer to the "why."
The socialist Utopias become Gulag Archi-
pelagos. Adam Smith's "hidden hand"
ends in capitalist struggles which, in two
world wars, decimated "the sons of
Europe one by one." Only the extraordinary
post-war bonanza of material growth based
upon fossil fuel consumption with oil at
little more than a dollar a barrel has
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
.'I
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allowed us to keep the illusion going a
little longer—with our cars, our conven-
ience foods, and that holiday in Bermuda.
But now these material joys become pre-
carious. The day turns cold. Is it dusk ap-
proaching? And what gives light when
science, material resources, and the
assured achievement of Earthly Utopia
all begin to fade away? Are we caught—
between the renunciation of the rational
hopes born of fantastic scientific discovery
and historical research on the one hand
and the blind sense of none of our "hows"
giving us the faintest clue to a "why"
on the other? Are four hundred years of
superb intellectual achievement of no
value when, now at the bleak end of an
aging century, we turn to "reality" and
find the answers all stained with risk and
blood? Is this the dilemma of all who
think or seek or try to teach?
But I believe, on the contrary, in spite
of the new uncertainty and pain of our
questionings, that not only do the last
four hundred years of search and experi-
ment and scholarship not point to an in-
escapable collision between our "hows"
and our "why," but something much more
stirring and even exhilarating is coming
within our range of vision. It is that the
painful divorce between how and why,
between facts and values, between science
and religion, between secular aims and
ethical systems may in part be ending
precisely because of the scholarship and
scientific research of which we are the
heirs. I see this possibility in two great
strands of knowledge which have only
been fully unfolded to us in the last
hundred years. The first is historical—the
vast new understanding we have gained
of the civilizations which have risen and
fallen on the wheel of human history. The
second is the extension of science to grasp
more and more of the exact nature of
material things and their evolution, their
interdependence, their diversity and fra-
gility. Two great fields of human knowl-
edge, of the "how" of our development,
appear to me to be pointing to the same
kind of "why" and in doing so restoring
to our society what no civilization in the
past has ever lacked, its values, its ethical
purpose or to use Erik Erikson's moving
phrase, its sense of "the Sacred Order."
Take first the cultural history of our
attempts at civilization. From the first
days of Sumeria and the invention of
the city, the need to bring together men
and women of different clans, tribes, and
races in new large mixed communities led,
internally, to the glorification of kingship
as a centre of loyalty and the multipli-
cation of power-wielding bureaucracies
as a means of imposing order. And this
combination, in its external relations,
turned out to be the recipe for competitive
struggle and war, first between cities, then
between states and empires. It is difficult
to exaggerate the horrors of this cycle of
aggression unleashed by man—a still
unfinished cycle. Perhaps my unfavourite
vignette is that of Assurbanipal, King of
the Assyrians, having a picnic with his
wife under a tree from which hangs the
severed head of the defeated King of Elam.
Unchanging Ethics
But then comes the paradox. It was pre-
cisely in the midst of the rise and fall of
these violent systems that, all around the
"civilized" world, the voices of sages,
saints, and prophets were raised to say,
in essence, that these ways of violence,
aggression, personal aggrandizement, and
frenetic greed always would lead to dis-
aster. Such excesses contradicted the
fundamental laws and needs of human
living—which are community, restraint,
modest claims on life, and the ability to
see in other human beings other "selves"
with the same needs that we feel within
our own minds and hearts. "Do as you
would be done by" is only a homely version
of the sublime "Love your neighbour as
yourself" and these insights into the basic
nature of our existence—the fundamental
values of social order, the "why" of our
human condition—were not "pie in the
sky" nor even commandments of stone.
They could almost be said to be "scien-
tific" in that they represented humanity's
whole concrete experience of the conse-
quences of aggression, self-assertion,
greed, and butchery and the equal experi-
ence that these horrors of human behavior
do not work and have within them what
we should no doubt call a "self-destruct
mechanism."
Whether it is Lao Tzu, Confucius and
Mencius in China's long and terrible civil
wars, or the Upanishads and the Lord
Buddha during the invasions and wars
of Northern India, or the Jewish prophets
among a people tossed from imperialism
to imperialism or Greek philosophers
caught in the rivalry of Athens and Sparta
or Christ killed like a slave in the "high
and palmy state" of Roman power, with
disgraceful imperial decline not more
than two or three centuries distant—the
ethics they teach us do not change. They
cannot change. Aggression and greed do
not work. The Sacred Order is not an ab-
straction but lived to the utmost in the
historical experience of every civilization.
And where it is most lacking—as with,
say, the Assyrians or Ghengis Khan—the
whole historical episode sinks into noth-
ingness, for it is chiefly by their "sacred
works" that any traces of civilization sur-
vive.
Our insights have been equally enriched
by the development of our scientific re-
search. On the one hand, it is true, we
22
EPA JOURNAL
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The urban poor crowd into slums on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
have the vision of overwhelming power-—
the primal explosion some ten billion
years ago scattering 1,000 billion stars
round 100 million galaxies, some of them
many thousand times more powerful than
our own sun by which alllifeonthis
planet in our small corner of the Milky
Way is sustained. For the explosion itself
set in motion the fusion of hydrogen nuclei
which now fling off—since energy is
matter's mass multiplied by the speed of
light squared—the four million tons of
"energy" from the sun which every second
pervades our solar system and powers
every living thing.
New Insights Into Nature
All this seems to be on what you might
call the "Ghenghis Khan" side of material
reality, the flood of almost incompre-
hensible and seemingly destructive energy
upon which nonetheless, by a paradox,
our delicate life depends. But what mod-
ern science has deciphered—rather like
the archeologists and historians decipher-
ing the evidence of records and ruins—
is on the contrary—particularly in the
biological sciences, that this power is only
a part of the equation.
Only when the oceans filled up and
provided a shield from the sun's searing
radiation could organic life begin to form
from infinitely minute and complex mole-
cules. Then photosynthesis, in minute
phytopla.iKton, helped build up the con-
centration of atmospheric oxygen and the
ozone layer which, by excluding the sun's
lethal wavelengths of ultra-violet rays,
mediated the sun's energy in such a way
that it could support the further develop-
ment of organic life, first in the seas and
estuaries and then on land, with the
movement of animal and vegetable life to
the once bare rock. The power that sus-
tains life may be overwhelming. But
organic life itself is a thing of the utmost
vulnerability and delicacy. Life first devel-
oping within the protection of the oceans,
plants increasing the atmospheric shield
through photosynthesis, animals protected
by the care of parents and pack, the new-
born child—wherever we look, life itself,
in scientific terms, is based upon the
infinitely small and vulnerable. For all its
toughness, it demands care, restraint,
respect, and—yes, love—if it is to survive.
From the first desert created by careless
farming to the last accidental nuclear
explosion the lesson is the same. Only
with the utmost care and understanding
and modesty of purpose can the experi-
ment of organic life continue. The "how"
and the "why" in science, as in history,
are coming together and both teach the
same lesson. Thrift, conservation, un-
greediness, the acceptance and care of
other life-systems and other selves are
the precondition of survival itself. The
"Sacred Order" cannot be mocked. It
is the very nature of reality.
There are thus new guides to survival
in our own day and perhaps a truce to the
sterile debate between the scientific
and ethical systems. An end to aggression
between states; controlled disarmament; a
sharing of planetary resources with greater
justice for all those billions of "other
selves" who live in desperate poverty;
care and conservation instead of the
"throw-away economy;" the personal ded-
ication of citizens, particularly affluent
citizens, to a philosophy of restraint, con-
servation, and sharing; the utmost vigi-
lance in all the big bang technologies—
nuclear power, chemical transforma-
tions—banning the totally unacceptable
experiments such as basing power systems
on plutonium with both it and its wastes
remaining dangerous for hundreds of
thousands of years—all these things follow
from our new insights into the nature—
the how—of reality. All reinforce our new
understanding that the "hows" re-echo the
saints' and sages' vision of the funda-
mental "why."
It is for this reason that in one sense
there is nothing very new to say about the
"why." We have always known that hu-
manity cannot live without the Good, the
Beautiful, and the True. What we have
learned in our own day is that the sup-
posedly rationalistic and materialistic
systems and experiments of the last 400
years end by saying exactly the same
thing. Today from both our scientists
and from our philosophers our new
society—which must be a conserving and
caring society—receives a common
lesson. In the words of W. H. Auden, "We
must love each other or we must die". [ I
Barbara Ward (Baroness Jackson of
Lodsworth) is President of the Interna-
tiona/ Institute for Environment and
Development. The author of numerous
books on world economics and environ-
ment, she was decorated with the Order
of the British Empire and created Baroness
in 1976. The above article is excerpted
from an address at the Oxford Conference
on Education.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
23
-------
Where Are
We Growing?
By Maurice F. Strong
The environment issue has, more than
any other, made us aware that the
planet Earth is a single system in the
physical sense, that the future survival and
welt-being of the whole human family
depends upon the continued health of this
physical system, and that technological
man now has the capacity to make changes
in this system which could be decisive
for the human future.
The United Nations Conference on the
Human Environment held in Stockholm in
June, 1972, was the first major step in
recognizing that these realities require a
response at the political level which is
beyond the capacity of any individual
nation-state or group of states and require,
in fact, co-operation on a global scale.
But, what has happened since Stockholm
can give us little cause for confidence that
these new perceptions of the need for a
global approach to the human future are
influencing to any significant degree the
attitudes and policies of the leaders of
nation-states.
»
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EPA JOURNAL
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It is true that the United Nations
Environment Program, the expansion of
environmental activities by other interna-
tional agencies and scientific organizations
together with the establishment of environ-
mental organizations and policies by most
national governments have provided the
basis for a Significant increase in national
action and international co-operation on
specific environmental issues.
It has also been demonstrated that many
environment problems—for example,
various kinds of air and water pollution—
will respond to technological solutions if
we are prepared to spend the money.
And most industrialized societies have
shown a good deal of willingness to accept
these additional costs.
This is encouraging. But it is not nearly
enough. Indeed, there is a danger that
because of this activity, people will be
lulled into feeling that protection and
improvement of the environment are now
well in hand. Nothing could be further from
the truth.
Although the political force of the
environmental movement has remained
encouragingly strong as evidenced by the
successful efforts in many countries to
slow down the development of nuclear
energy, environmental considerations are
still viewed largely as an added cost to the
economy and an irritation to governments
rather than a central element in their
national objectives. The truth is that the
environment issue cannot be dealt with as
separate and distinct from others, any more
than we can deal in isolation with such
issues as inflation, unemployment, energy,
and rich/poor disparities.
The Problems of Growth
I am convinced that the heart of our
dilemma is the growth process itself. It is
through the growth process that we create
the economic means for meeting so many
of our social needs, that we impact on the
environment, that we use energy and
natural resources, that we create employ-
ment, and make possible leisure. The
inflation, unemployment, environmental
degradation, social conflicts, and economic
disparities which now bear in upon us with
increasing intensity are not isolated
phenomena. They are manifestations of
fundamental deficiencies within the growth
process which are central to our present
economic, social, and political systems.
It is based on the premise that growth in
the purely material sense, in the production
and availability of material goods and
services, will bring about a corresponding
increase in human satisfaction and
well-being.
Of course, that has been true up to a
point. The explosion of our capacity to
produce a multitude of material goods and
services which accompanied the Industrial
Revolution has brought unprecedented
benefits to the peoples of the industrialized
world. It has also made it technically
possible to make vastly improved condi-
tions of life available to the entire human
population.
Despite this, economic and political
barriers continue to prevent the two-thirds
of the world's people who live in the
developing countries from realizing these
benefits. But the response of our industrial
machine is to expand its markets by creat-
ing new wants and new appetites among
the people who can afford them. We are
thus caught in a paradox in which we have
created an industrial system capable of
meeting the basic needs of all the world's
people but are in fact using it largely to
foster further growth in the demand by the
wealthy minority for goods and services
well beyond what we need or is good
for us.
We are now in a transitional period
which is almost bound to be more turbulent
and difficult than what we have experienced
in the past several decades. The pressures
on our present economic, social, and
political systems are bound to escalate.
It could well be a period of degeneration
for western industrial civilization.
Societies and Sewers
In 17th and 18th century France, the decline
of the monarchy and its society was first
marked by apparent obsession with quality
under Louis XIV. However, this was a false
and superficial obsession which was
merely the decoration or facade which
surrounded the court and everything it
stood for. There was a very real decline in
the actual quality of life during that period
as exemplified by the disappearance of
adequate sanitation and water supply
systems, even in the palaces.
Interestingly enough, the decline of
efficient sanitation and water systems has
symbolized the decline of societies since
before the Greeks. One of the effects of our
society's concentration on linear produc-
tion has been the abandonment of water
systems in the Third World, the pollution
of our own water systems, the decline in
the quality of water available for consump-
tion, especially in urban areas, and a •
massive growth in the sale of bottled waters
which bypass the system.
During a long siege, Athens eventually
fell to Sparta because of an epidemic
caused by the polluted running water
throughout the city.
Medieval Europe's inability or unwilling-
ness to deal with the waste produced by
a growing urban population led to an
increase in rats which carried the plague
which in turn proved so destructive to that
society. Degradation of water systems in
China in several periods led to disastrous
floods, rivers changing routes, agricultural
disasters, followed by revolts and the
collapse of the empire. Similar circum-
stances affected the histories of Rome and
Egypt.
The question is not whether pollution,
especially water pollution, was caused
or produced by degenerate societies.
Pollution simply is and always has been one
of the signs of social decline. Following
all of the historical precedents, our
present pollution problems could point out
the degenerative entities now operating
in our societies.
We must face the fact that the long
period of rapid growth experienced
primarily in the industrialized world since
the advent of Industrial Revolution is
both unprecedented in history and
unsustainable.
In order for all of the present population
of the world to reach a standard of living
equivalent to that of the United States in
1970, it would require extraction of some
75 times as much iron as is now extracted
annually, 100 times as much copper, 200
times as much lead, 75 times as much zinc,
and 250 times as much tin, and increases
of simMar orders of magnitude in the
production of many other basic resources.
As for energy, such a standard of living
would reou're the equivalent of 7 times as
much oil, 8 times as much gas, and 9 times
as much coal as are now produced
annually. All of that at a time when, as a
recent international report by the Workshop
on Alternative Energy Strategies pointed
out, iust keeping up with the growing
demands of the more developed world may
brinq us to a supply pap of 20 million
barrels of oil a day equivalent of energy by
1990 and that gap may begin as early
as 1982.
While large supplies of some of these
materials might theoretically be made
available through extraction of the minute
quantities which exist in much of the
Earth's surface and the oceans, as well as
a total commitment to recycling of metals,
it is unlikely that the environmental
impacts of such a vast increase in indus-
trial activity could be kept within tolerable
limits. And it is inconceivable that such
levels of industrial activity could be
achieved without a degree of political,
economic, and social mobilization and
regimentation which would be incom-
patible with the maintenance of free socie-
ties and the rights of the individual.
In short, I believe that the present
approach to growth is simply not viable,
that basic changes are necessary. I also
believe they are possible.
We should accept as basic factors for
a "new growth" approach the need:
1. To assure that every person on the
planet has access to the means of pro-
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
25
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viding the basic needs required to assure
a life compatible with human dignity and
well-being; and
2. To assure that our collective activities
do not transgress the "outer limits" of the
capacity of the biosphere to sustain human
life at acceptable levels.
Conservation must become a prime
element in the new growth system. Waste
must be reduced to a minimum by
redesigning industrial processes and care-
ful planning of plant location to assure
that the residues of one process become
the raw materials of another. Technologies
for recycling and reuse of materials and
abatement of pollution must be integrated
into production systems and not merely
added on to them.
This is already a practical goal in many
areas. For example, steel can be produced
from steel scrap with a 75 percent energy
saving over production from iron ore.
And aluminum produced from discarded
cans conserves 95 percent of the energy
used to produce it from bauxite.
The logical way to measure progress is
by the length of time the stock of processed
materials is in active use; not by the
speed of product turnover. Governments
can encourage this in many ways, such as
offering incentives for recycling facilities
and removing or reducing depletion
allowances for mining industries.
It is industrialized societies for whom
the "new growth" concept will require the
most radical changes. It will require a
major transition to a less physical kind of
growth, relatively less demanding of
energy and raw materials.
Helping The Third World
The industrialized countries must also be
prepared to help and support the establish-
ment of most new industrial capacity,
particularly that which is resource or
labor intensive, in the less developed parts
of the world. This, of course, must be
done under conditions which enable
developing countries to avoid many of the
environmental and social costs we have
paid for our industrial development.
The marriage of ecology and economics
which I call "ecodevelopment" would be
designed to assure that the precious natural
resources of soil, forests, water, plant
and animal life of the developing world are
exploited in ways which make best use
of their own skills and labor and harmonize
with their own cultures and value systems
to produce maximum benefits for their
people without destroying the resource
base on which sustained development
depends. It means, too, assuring that they
have full access to the latest technologies
and support for the development of their
own scientific and technological capabili-
ties so that technology will serve rather
than determine their own growth patterns.
The most advanced technologies today,
particularly in the fields of information
processing and communication, are moving
dramatically in the direction of less
material and less energy intensiveness.
For example, the same computer capacity
which in the 1950's required a machine
that would fill a moderate-sized room is
now available for a few hundred dollars on
a hand calculator. Similarly, it is techno-
logically feasible to reduce energy con-
sumption by some 50 percent without sig-
nificantly impairing present standards of
living. And technologies are available to
make even further significant reduction in
the energy requirements of many produc-
tion processes.
Similarly, I believe that the public policy
levers which governments can today
deploy are capable of altering the system
of incentives and penalties to which our
economic life responds so as to make it
profitable to carry out those activities
which are environmentally sound and
socially desirable and unprofitable to do
those things which impair environmental
quality, destroy resources, and detract
from social goals.
The arms industry is the industrial
sector to have shown the greatest growth
over the last years. In the arms industry,
our physical growth oriented society has
found its most dependable crutch.
In 1975, the world spent almost $300
billion a year on arms, and the developing
countries spent more on arms than on
health and education together.
If governments can create markets for
arms, they can surely create markets for
other things which society needs but
cannot translate into economic demand
through the operation of the free market
alone.
Also, if expenditures on war materials,
which are inherently wasteful/whether
they are used or not used, can be a major
stimulus to the economy, surely expendi-
tures on building better and more liveable
cities, improved cultural and educational
facilities, recreational areas and oppor-
tunities for meaningful leisure, can be just
as stimulating to the economy while at the
same time adding positively to the real
capital stock of our societies.
So I believe it is feasible to make the
transition to the new growth society. But
that does not mean it will be easy, for it
requires basic changes in the attitudes,
values, and expectations of people—in
effect a cultural revolution. Governmental
action will not be possible unless it is
supported by this cultural change. It must
be a culture that places highest value on
quality rather than quantity, on conser-
vation rather than waste, on co-operation
above competition. It requires that we
learn to applaud and look up to those who
adopt lifestyles that are modest in terms
of the amount of space they monopolize or
the amount of materials and energy they
consume; that ostentatious, wasteful, and
indulgent living become socially
reprehensible.
Needed: Citizen Participation
The conditions which determine the
optimum balance between individual
freedom and collective constraint will be
complex and decision-making will not be
easy. It will call for a vastly improved
method of evaluating the interactions
between private and public interests in
particular situations, of presenting and
disseminating information, and of assuring
a maximum degree of citizen participation
in decisions which affect them.
Up to now the human species has
changed its ways significantly only after
having been chastised by bitter experience.
Man's history has been based on repeated
cycles of advance, tragedy inflicted by
nature or by war, collapse, and rebuilding,
often for many centuries on a lower level
than that which was destroyed, and often
without rediscovering its most advanced
aspects, such as the architecture and
democracy of Greece or the porcelain
of China.
Now that, for the first time in our history,
we possess the means of total self-destruc-
tion, can we risk repeating these cycles?
Even if we could, it is surely doubtful
that the wholly unprecedented scale and
nature of risk we now face would enable
us to have another chance if we were
to wait until eco-disaster or economic and
social collapse is imminent.
Our present growth process which is
based on greed and conflict is a cancer
which is now eating away at the body and
soul of society. It will destroy the very
fabric of our society if we do not bring it
under control. We must know where we are
growing. We must become masters of the
growth process and not its slaves. We must
use it to expand our unlimited potential
for human growth and not subordinate our
humanity to its requirements. It is not
only our survival as a race which is at
stake, but the survival of those very quali-
ties which distinguish us as human. Q
Maurice F. Strong served as Secretary-
General, U.N. Conference on the Human
Environment 1970-72 and as Executive
Director, U.N. Environment Program
1973-75. The above remarks are excerpted
from an address by him at the University
of Uppsala, Sweden, on the occasion of
its 5th Centenary.
26
EPAJOURNAL
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Ethics and the
Environment
Continued from page 7 7
and Algeria would be cases in
point. They have fairly high
levels of per capita income but
fairly low levels of per capita
well-being as measured by
these social indicators. Sri
Lanka, on the other hand has
rather low per capita income
and a rather high PQLI rating.
So I think there's a great deal
to be said for considering
alternatives to per capita GNP
as a measuring device and that
the Overseas Development
Council is making an important
step in the right direction.
You hav
-------
The Energy-
Environment
Dilemma
By Willis W. Harman
We often hear these days of the coming
"two transitions in energy supply."
One is from the present dependence on
oil and natural gas to more use of uncon-
ventional fossil fuels, such as synthetic
crude made from coal and shale; synthetic
gas, heavy oil, and tar sands. The other is
the eventual major dependence on "inex-
haustible sources" such as solar energy,
deep geothermal energy, and possibly
fusion and breeder technologies. There is
a tacit assumption that in the period be-
tween the two transitions our problems will
be solved if only we dig out the fossil fuels
fast enough and spend enough money on
anti-pollution equipment.
Well, maybe. But there are dissenting
voices, who speak of environmental and
social problems with accelerating use of
energy, particularly hydrocarbon fuels.
They argue that more fundamental changes
are required than simply changes of energy
sources. There is not a simple solution to
the debate. But let us look at some facts
about which there will be little dissent, and
then see their relevance to the energy/
environmental choices before the Nation.
The conventional portrayal of the eco-
nomic process as a self-sustaining, circular
flow between "production" and "consump-
tion" is seriously misleading in one re-
spect. It encourages neglect of the fact
that the economy requires inputs from the
environment—energy and resources—
and spews back into the environment waste
heat and waste materials. This important
general property of the economy is related
to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
This law, the Entropy Law, states essen-
tially that (a) all kinds of energy are gradu-
ally transformed into heat, and heat flows
by itself only from a hotter to a cooler
region (never in reverse), so that it tends
to get more and more dissipated and un-
available to do mechanical work; and (b)
matter, too is generally subject to an irre-
vocable dissipation.
Recyclingand "pollution control" may
convert noxious wastes into less undesir-
able ones, but do not eliminate the waste
(although they may cause it to accumulate
in a less undesirable location).
Industrial Trends
Among the trends characteristic of indus-
trial society, which have accounted for its
benefits and achievements but also lead
toward the most basic problems, are the
following:
Industrialization of production, i.e., sub-
dividing work needed to produce goods
and services into elemental increments,
and organizing and managing these incre-
ments toward the goals of productivity
and efficiency;
A utomation, the further organizing of work
so that it can be performed by energy-
driven, self-operating machines;
Rising influence of science, i.e., the search
for materialistic knowledge guided by the
principles of objectivity and causality and
embodying the prediction and control
values of technological exploitation;
New concentrations of power, especially
economic power in the expanding indus-
trial corporations and associated financial
institutions, and intellectual power in the
scientific and technological elite;
Rising levels of education with strong
emphasis on preparation for entering the
industrialized economy;
Pragmatic values predominating, with the
individual free to seek his own self-interest,
as he defines it, in the marketplace;
Material progress, both as an observable
trend and as a declared goal, implying
man's expanding control over nature and
his unlimited ability to understand the
universe from the data provided by his
physical senses.
These trends are intimately related to
an underlying image of man-in-the-uni-
verse involving materialistic values, scien-
tific principles of objectivity and causality,
focus on the outer world (in contrast to
the medieval inner-world foe us), and an
ethic of man dominating the rest of nature.
Numerous signs of challenge of the long-
term suitability of this pattern have been
evident in the last decade.
A New Scarcity
The industrial-era trends have brought us
to a new scarcity of:
• Fossil fuels and other sources of energy
• Mineral and non-mineral resources
• Natural fresh water
• Arable land and habitable space
• Waste-absorbing capacity of the natural
environment
• Resilience of the planet's life-supporting
ecosystems
Although they are somewhat interde-
pendent and exchangeable, we are simul-
taneously approaching the planetary limits
for all these resources. This is not neces-
sarily to say that shortages in all of them
are imminent, but neitherare the limits
infinitely far away.
The new scarcity differs fundamentally
from age-old scarcities of food and shelter.
The latter were solved in the past through
geographical expansion and technological
advancement. The new scarcity is more of
a consequence of technological and indus-
trial advances.
As a consequence of the above develop-
ments, concern has been growing over
various questions. What are ultimate reso-
lutions to the problems represented in the
new scarcity? What are wise energy sup-
ply and use patterns for the future? What
are our options in the long-term ?
There are major uncertainties involved
in attempting to arrive at answers to these
questions—uncertainties of two types.
One is the technical kind, those we are
used to resolving through research. The
other is about future public attitudes, value
commitments, preferred life styles, and
interest-group political actions. The sec-
ond type we typically leave out of our cal-
culations. As a result,time and a gain in
recent years careful forecasts made with
the best data have been confronted by
unexpected changes in these "soft" vari-
ables. Examples include changes in atti-
tude with respectto:
• Family size, unexpectedly bringing U.S.
population growth below replacement fer-
tility rates in the mid-1970's;
• Environmental quality, which, reflected
in legislation and public actions, delayed
large construction projects and hence
affected both energy supply anticipations
and economic forecasts;
• Desirability of urban/suburban life,
resulting in a net out-migration from urban
areas for the first time this century, con-
trary to demographic forecasts;
• Science and technology, resulting in
major departures from past trends in
Federal funding of basic research, affecting
all post-SST technology forecasts, and
bringing an unprecedented insistence by
the public to be involved in major
scientific decisions.
Three Views
Consider the "facts" outlined above,
each of which represents propositions that
all informed persons could agree upon—
more or less, and up to a point. When they
are examined together and implica-
tions drawn, there are violent disagree-
ments.
The first perception is that which might
be inferred from Federal energy policy
thus far. The entropy argument simply
28
EPAJOURNAL
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doesn't seem relevant. The situation it
describes, where energy used in the proc-
ess of getting out resources mounts higher
and higher—as does the pile of refuse
from the workings of the economy—is a
picture of some far distant time. Mean-
while, we may develop fusion power, or
something else, which will push it still
further off. For the time being there is lots
of coal, and when people realize what the
issues really are, they will put up with a
little environmental degradation to keep
the economy roiling and unemployment
down.
A second perception finds the entropy
argument an interesting one, but only one
of many (and not even the most compel-
ling) pointing to the need for drastic cut-
backs on energy demand. Social, environ-
mental, and ecological costs of continued
energy use expansion are becoming in-
creasingly intolerable. Expanding use of
hydrocarbon feedstocks to provide nonbio-
degradable fibers, plastic gimmicks, and
detergents has aggravated the environ-
mental problem. Energy demands—and
that means demands on economic output
gene/ally—need to be reduced greatly.
This can be accomplished through volun-
tary choice and cultural change, made
more equitable by supporting legislation.
Thus we need more understanding and
action involving voluntary frugality, "doing
more with less"—the simple life, engag-
ing together in a search for meaning and
commitment; pursuing handcrafts and
gardening with "appropriate technology;"
identifying with nature, fellow man, and
future generations. There must be a "fair-
ness revolution" in the world, with the
rich nations learning to consume less and
the poor nations achieving a more equi-
table redistribution of the Earth's re-
sources. The planet cannot stand the
resource binge of the industrialized na-
tions, and it is not clear that humanity can
stand it either.
A third perception is in contrast to the
first two. It perceives the entropy argument
as fundamental ar.d the "new scarcity" as
a sign the industrial era is approaching its
end. The industria I period, with trends as
indicated earlier, is most properly in a his-
torical sense considered a brief transition
period, of two centuries or so, following
the long pre-industrial period during which
man's control over this external environ-
ment was very limited, and preceding a
period in which that environment is very
much more a matter of social choice im-
plemented through technology.
The environmental and resource crisis;
the growing sense of careening ahead
faster and faster with less and iess con-
sensus on what is worth getting to; the
widespread alienation and anomie; the
growing challenges to the legitimacy of
corporate economic power concentrations
and scientific-technological-manipulative
intellectual power concentrations—all
these^re signs of a forthcoming wrenching
around of society, a reorganization around
a new trans-industria I pattern. The charac-
teristics of the reorganization are far from
clear, but they will emerge out of the
nature of the challenging forces.
Perhaps the salient characteristics of
this new pattern are represented by a shift
in emphasis:
from economic individualism toward
reassertion of the brotherhood of man;
from an isolated, exploitative attitude
toward nature toward a unitive, steward-
ship attitude toward nature with an
ecological ethic taken for granted;
from subservience of other values to eco-
nomic values toward reassertion of trans-
cendent social values and relegation of
economic values to a subservient, instru-
mental role;
from discounting the future by economic
logic toward direct involvement with the
welfare of future generations;
and from the predominant quest for knowl-
edge (science) biased in favor of knowl-
edge leading to technology, toward a more
balanced search for understanding both of
the physical universe and of man's spiritual
being and his relation to the whole.
Alternative Realities
It is important to stress that these three
perceptions are ways of seeing based
essentially on the same data.
We introduce it here as an aid to under-
standing some of the conflict surrounding
energy-related issues, and also to help im-
prove communication and reduce conflict
—to lift the issues to a more fruitful plane
of discourse than adversary confrontation.
If the various perceptions of the issues
surrounding crucial energy decisions can
be made legitimate, and then explored
together in the public dialogue, it may be
possible to move toward establishing con-
sensus on which perception, with the ac-
tions that follow from it, is most in accord
with a long-term desirable future.
At the same time it is necessary to honor
different perceptions of our energy situa-
tion, since each "fits" the observations of
our environment as made by the person
holding that view. It is also important to
note that these patterns of perceptions are
not equal in their consequences. They lead
the society to a different future. Thus the
choice among them is not arbitrary; in the
long run they are not equally serviceable.
So it is extremely important which one
society chooses. Yet one of them cannot
be proven, in the ordinary sense of the
term, to be "right" and another "wrong."
There appear to be at least three tests
that can be applied—not to whether a pic-
ture of reality is "correct," but to whether
it seems to be a wholesome one for a so-
ciety to hold. These are:
1. Does the view in the long term lead
toward societal or system adaptability, and
hence toward survivability? There are cer-
tain laws of nature and universal properties
of systems that a society ignores at its
peril. After all, the laws of thermodynam-
ics, the fundamental principles of ecosys-
tem behavior and adaptability, do obtain—
regardless of the opinions of men. Some
conditions for adaptation, for preservation
of options, are in fact inevitable. They
operate whether or not they are included
in society's picture of reality.
2. Does the view lead toward fruition of
the long-term trend of human civilization?
Does it tend to move us in the direction of
such traditional values and goals as demo-
cratic liberation from oppression by insti-
tutions, reverence for nature, the brother-
hood of man, and man's further spiritual
development?
3. Is the view compatible with whatever
can be discovered to be man's most funda-
mental nature? Among the powerful criti-
cisms of the day is the protest that to be
"economic man"—Homo economicus—
is not his most fundamental nature.
Social Choices
From what we have seen, the Nation's
choice of future energy supply and use
patterns involves far more than technical
or even economic criteria. The most basic
goals of society are at the heart of the
issues. And yet it is precisely here that our
present society is more confused. Subtly
but steadily, economic goaSs have gradu-
ally substituted for social goals and eco-
nomic rationality has come to prevail over
social rationality. We have gotten it back-
wards. What are properly a means—tech-
nology and the economy—have been ele-
vated to the rank of ends. The plurality of
values and norms that characterize political
rationality have been overshadowed by the
single-valuedness of economic logic.
And so the examination of what may
have appeared to be a technical issue of
energy/environmental tradeoffs has led us
to several related but more fundamental
issues: the need to make legitimate and
deal with alternative perceptions of reality,
the critical nature of our present energy
decisions, and the need to restablish the
precedence of social choices over eco-
nomic ones. D
Willis Harman is Associate Director of the
Center lor the Study of Social Policy.
SRI International.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
29
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Environmental
Mediation
By Joan Z. Bernstein
Our society has developed several ways
to resolve conflict. Perhaps the old-
est is the use of force, physical or eco-
nomic. More formal methods created by
legislators include the court system.
All of these methods have been used in
attempts to resolve environmental con-
troversies, with varying success. A sub-
stantial number of environmental conflicts
are not successfully resolved by the usual
methods. There are too many parties with
different interests to be neatly aligned into
opposing sides for a court battle or a show
of power. The issues may be too local for
Federal legislation, but too far-reaching for
adequate resolution by State or municipal
legislation. The real issues are often prac-
tical or policy issues rather than questions
of interpretation of law, so the courts are
unable to reach and resolve the center of
the controversy. The parties to environmen-
tal disputes are thus increasingly turning to
a new alternative—environmental
mediation.
Mediation is a voluntary process in
which those involved in a dispute jointly
explore and reconcile their differences.
Unlike a judge or an arbitrator, the media-
tor has no authority to impose a disposition.
The mediator's role is to assist the parties
in resolving their differences, in creating
an opportunity to exchange promises. The
mediator helps the parties define the frame-
work within which they will negotiate,
facilitates the substantive negotiations, and
assists them in the creation of the means
to implement the agreement, particularly
important if the parties had no prior work-
ing relationship. The mediated dispute is
settled when all of the parties reach what
they consider to be a workable solution.
And, all of the parties know at all times that
no solution will be forced on them.
For example, some dispute almost al-
ways occurs whenever someone plans to
build a dam. Several years ago, the resi-
dents of the middle valley area of the
Snoqualmie-Snohornish River Basin in
Washington wanted a dam to provide flood
protection for their homes and businesses.
The farmers in the lower valley also wanted
the dam, to provide flood protection for
their crops. But environmental and citizens
groups opposed the dam. They objected to
interrupting a free-flowing river, and they
feared that the dam would open the flood
plain to urban sprawl. They charged that
the costs of building the dam were greater
than the costs of repairing damage caused
by floods, and that the plans were therefore
not economically sound.
The courts are not set up to decide
whether building a dam is good public
policy. The construction of the dam could
be challenged by an attack on the environ-
mental impact statement, for example, but
the technical legal points they would have
raised would have had no relation to their
specific concerns. After long, complex
litigation, one side or the other would have
"won," and the dam would either have
been built as planned or not built at all.
Instead, the dispute was mediated. The
controversy over the dam had continued for
over twelve years when the Governor ap-
pointed the Office of Environmental Media-
tion in Seattle to aid in resolving the dis-
pute. That was in May of 1974. In early
December all of the participants signed a
set of joint recommendations. The Gover-
nor endorsed the agreement, and it was
implemented.
The agreement provided for a multi-
purpose flood control hydro-electric recrea-
tion and water supply dam on the North
Fork (rather than the Middle Fork), set-
back levees in the middle valley for national
flood storage and recreational use, control
of patterns of development through the
purchase of floodway easements and
development rights, and the establishment
of a basin planning council to coordinate
the plans. By working together, with the
help of the mediator, the parties were able
to develop a plan which protected each of
their concerns.
Instead of the limited yes/no, win/lose
of litigation, mediation produced a creative
compromise that was acceptable to every-
one. The environmental and citizens groups
supported a major flood control structure,
and the farmers and urban dwellers made
a commitment to substantial limitations on
the use of their land. The agreement pro-
vided that it was acceptable only as a
package, that no one portion could proceed
without the others. Thus, even though an
elected body cannot bind its successors,
the agreement was designed to apply even
if there was a change in the State or local
administration.
The Snoqualmie-Snohomish River Basin
dispute met all of the requirements for a
conflict which may be mediated, as estab-
lished by the Office of Environmental Medi-
ation. The issues were defined, and were
amenable to compromise. The parties
were visible and involved. There was a
sense of urgency and a relative balance of
power among the parties, to insure that
mediation would not be used by one side
as a delay tactic. There was a reasonable
assurance that responsible authorities
would implement an agreement reached by
the disputing parties. And there was an
objective, but concerned, mediator to
facilitate resolution.
These factors are often found in environ-
mental disputes. For example, the Office of
Environmental Mediation also aided in
resolving a dispute over a highway, another
standard environmental controversy.
The commuter cities supported the pro-
posed 10-lane highway as a way to de-
EPA JOURNAL
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crease rush-hour traffic. The County Tran-
sit Authority supported any reasonable
design which would increase traffic ca-
pacity by use of designated transit lanes.
The City of Seattle opposed the plan, sup-
porting development of the mass transit
system instead. Citizens groups opposed
the highway'for a variety of reasons, from
fear of noise, air pollution, aesthetic blight,
and urban sprawl to opposition for the sake
of leverage in unrelated disputes with the
Highway Department.
The citizens groups had delayed the
project through litigation, and the cost of
the project was estimated to increase at a
rate of $140,000 a day. Several parties
called in the Office of Environmental Medi-
ation. The mediation and formal negotia-
tion sessions were open to the public, and
some of them were televised. Ten months
later, the twenty year-old dispute was
resolved. The agreement called for a con-
figuration with special access to the transit
lanes for carpools and traffic originating
on Mercer Island. The improvements were
to be accomplished in conjunction with
major transit improvements in other urban
corridors and transit inter-connections to
the central cities of Seattle and Bellevue.
Automobile access was limited during
peak hours in the areas east of presently
developed suburbs. The connector was
designed to be covered with parks, homes,
and commercial establishments.
Mediators have also helped to resolve
other environmental controversies. In one
case, environmentalists protested the lum-
bering in Francis Marion National Forest in
South Carolina because it endangered the
Bachman's Warbler. The mediated agree-
ment made the bottomland swamp, where
most of the birds nested, off-limits to lum-
berers. In another, local residents protested
plans to build two 20-story residential tow-
ers,charging that they would cast massive
shadows and be inappropriate in an area of
scattered, single-family housing. The
mediated agreement provided for a low-
level townhouse complex of 80 units,
instead of the planned 400.
In Washington State, the Office of Envi-
ronmental Mediation helped the Lummi
Indians and Watcom County to resolve one
of their.many long-term disputes. The
agreement gives the Lummi Tribe the option
to purchase the County's interest in land
within the reservation. The tribe will then
have the right and responsibility to develop
it into a public park according to the guide-
lines of the Washington State Interagency
Committee for Outdoor Recreation.
EPA has participated in two mediation
efforts. The first was the National Coal
Policy Project, where some sixty partici-
pants, half from coal-mining and coal-
using industries and half from environmen-
tal groups, were able to agree on how
and where coal should be mined and
burned, and how it would be transported,
priced, and conserved. In my opinion, the
most significant of the long list of points of
agreement was the environmentalists' sup-
port of streamlining of utility licensing and
siting proceedings. In the past, environ-
mentalists had supported complicated
licensing procedures because they pro-
vided more points for technical and proce-
dural challenges to tie up construction.
In return, industry promised to notify the
public before applying for powerplant
licenses and to support public financing of
qualified public-interest groups' participa-
tion in hearings. The existence and success
of the National Coal Policy Project con-
vinced both sides that they could talk to
each other, and that it was not necessary to
battle over procedures when they could
discuss substance.
In the other case, EPA was a more active
participant. The Agency was already in liti-
gation over its pretreatment regulations
when, under a new requirement of the
court, it had to meet with the other side to
clarify the issues. At that meeting, when
industry lawyers brought in engineers to
discuss the practical problems, both sides
realized that the industry's real concerns
were narrow and specific, and unrelated to
the compliance or enforcement scheme of
the regulation. EPA was able to make some
relatively minor adjustments which made
both sides happy, and was able to save in-
numerable hours of preparing for litigation.
EPA is sued on virtually every regulation
it promulgates. Congress enacts broad
statutory schemes, and leaves the details
to the administrative agencies because of
their expertise in the field. The Agency
establishes policy, within the statutory
limitations. Once the regulation has be-
come final, if the industry or environmental
groups do not agree with EPA's policy, they
have few alternatives. They can lobby for a
statutory change, which is expensive and
chancy. Or, they can go to court and
challenge the regulation, to prevent its
implementation.
EPA has not found a better system for
determining correct statutory interpreta-
tion or credibility of witnesses than court-
room litigation. But challenges to the
Agency's regulations are most often based
on practical consideration or policy ques-
tions. The court only has jurisdiction to
decide whether the regulation is invalid,
based on whether EPA has done something
illegal in promulgating or drafting it. So
the parties cannot challenge the regulation
on policy grounds. Like the environmental-
ists who delay construction by challenging
the technical adequacy of an environmental
impact statement or the labyrinthine pro-
cedures of a licensing proceeding, the
challengers to EPA's regulation must pre-
pare creative technical and legal attacks in
order to get the court to throw the regula-
tion out. If they win, and the court finds
that all or part of a regulation is invalid,
a new footnote is added to administrative
law textbooks, but the challengers still have
no guarantee that the next time around the
regulation will be any closer to what they
want.
Often the regulatory process is cumber-
some and confining. Mediation during this
stage would allow the Agency to have a
more informal dialogue with interested
parties. Perhaps EPA could encourage
more compromise, as it did with the pre-
treatment regulation, without waiting to
be sued. Even if EPA was not ableto please
all sides, elimination of one issue or one
party to litigation or just a joint establish-
ment of the factual basis for its regulation
would be a major saving. Mediation after
rulemak'mg, when both sides have some-
thing to lose from engaging in litigation,
can be particularly valuable.
During my tenure, I was active in pro-
moting the application of mediation in the
Agency. My office transferred funds to the
Office of Environmental Mediation through
the Federal Regional Council in Region 10,
and helped to arrange matching funds from
the other agencies represented by the
Council. A number of EPA attorneys recent-
ly participated in an all-day seminar on
mediation, led by Thomas Colossi of the
American Arbitration Association and John
McGlennon, former Regional Administra-
tor for Region 1 and now with Clark-
McGlennon Associates, a Boston media-
tion firm. Our new grant appeals procedures
specifically provide for the appointment of
mediators to resolve grant disputes with-
out going through a formal appeal when-
ever possible. EPA is also attempting to
design a mediation procedure for deter-
mining proper levels of reimbursement for
test data under Subsection 4(c)(3) of the
Toxic Substances Control Act.
I believe that too many of EPA's law-
suits are argued on issues that are not the
real concerns of the parties. Mediation
opens a new line of communication for
discussing those issues and developing
flexible, creative solutions. Mediation
requires an ethical, good faith attempt to
understand and compromise, rather than
the adversary posture imposed by litiga-
iton, which is only appropriate for the kinds
of issues courts were designed to resolve.
I hope that increased application of en-
vironmental mediation to conflicts will
allow EPA to argue both policy and law in
appropriate forums. D
Joan Bernstein served at EPA as General
Counsel 1977-79. She recently was named
General Counsel for the Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
31
-------
People
<
President Carter presented the
President's Environmental
Youth Award to Michael Biriew
of Argyle, Texas, and 1 5 other
youngsters in a recent ceremony
at the White House Rose Garden.
Deputy Administrator Barbara
Blum (behind podium) an-
nounced names and achieve-
ments of recipients. Biriew was
one of those honored for their
work in the special Energy,
Education, and Conservation
Program. Some 3.5 million
Scouts and 1.5 million adults
will be working in this area in
1980.
The President noted that
more than 200,000 young
Americans have been given
awards thus far for outstanding
work in protecting the quality
of life. Their projects pay rich
dividends as they are carried
out, he declared, and they also
"can add a sense of innovation
and a freshness of thought that
a more senior American would
never contribute, and they lay
the ground work for themselves
in their own lives to continue
this work in the years ahead."
Anyone interested in more
information about this program
can write Mary Faye Dudley,
the President's Environmental
Youth Awards (A-107), U.S.
Environmental Protection
Agency, Washington, D.C.
20460.
• Deputy Administrator Barbara
Blum was principal speaker at
the dedication of the Nation's
first solar-powered sewage
treatment plant September 28
in Wilton, Maine.
Hailing the development as
EPA's "first major effort to
support new and functional
uses for solar technology in
pollution control processes,"
Blum said the Wilton plant
marks a beginning of the Na-
tion's journey toward energy
independence "in a way that
sustains a clean environment
and a healthy economy."
The facility is capable of
handling nearly half a million
gallons of wastewater per day
and has received a national
award for engineering innova-
tions. Blum noted that the plant
(EPA Journal, October '77) is
now serving as a model for
similar projects elsewhere.
EPA contributed 75 percent of
the cost of the project, with the
State and local community pay-
ing the remainder.
Clarence Hardy
He has been named Director of
Personnel for the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency. He had
been head of personnel at the
National Bureau of Standards
during 1 979. Hardy served as
Personnel Officer at the Depart-
ment of Energy in 1978, plan-
ning and directing personnel
operations for the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commis-
sion. Earlier he had held a
number of personnel positions
in Federal agencies. He was
Chief of Personnel Management
Services in the Department of
Energy 1977-78; Chief of Per-
sonnel Operations at the Energy
Research and Development Ad-
ministration 1 976-77, and a
management analyst at that
Agency 1975-76. He was Per-
sonnel Officer for ERDA in
Albuquerque, N.M. 1973-75
and a personnel management
analyst for the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission 1970-73.
Hardy began his Federal career
in 1969 as a management in-
tern with AEC. A graduate of
North Carolina Central Univer-
sity where he received a BA
degree in 1 967, he also re-
ceived a Master's degree in
Public Administration in 1969
from the Maxwell Graduate
School, Syracuse University.
Inez Smith Reid
She has been nominated EPA
Inspector General, and is the
first person to fill the position,
which was created by a new
law. Reid has served since
1977 as Deputy General Coun-
sel for Regulation Review at the
Department of Health, Educa-
tion and Welfare. Previously
she served as General Counsel
for the New York State Division
for Youth. She also is former
Associate Professor of Political
Science at Barnard College,
Columbia University, and was
Executive Director of the Black
Women's Community Develop-
ment Foundation in Washing-
ton, D.C.
She received a B.A. degree
from Tufts University in 1 959
and a law degree from Yale
University in 1962, as well as a
Master's degree from U.C.L.A.
in 1963 anda Ph.D. from
Columbia in 1968 in political
science. She istheauthor of a
book and several article deal-
ing with black studies, law, civil
rights, and African politics.
32
EPAJOURNAL
-------
The Need
fora
Well-
informed
Citizenry
An Interview with
Joan Martin Nicholson
Joan Martin Nicholson is
Director of EPA's Office of
Public Awareness.
Why does EPA or any govern-
ment agency need an Office of
Public Awareness? Can't the
Agency's actions speak for
themselves?
Thomas Jefferson once said
that people are inherently ca-
pable of making proper judg-
ments when they are properly
informed. Many of EPA's ac-
tions can be judged by the pub-
lic only if the public has an
adequate understanding of en-
vironmental problems and of
the laws Congress passed to
solve them. Without this basic
information, citizens might see
EPA's actions as unrelated to
their basic welfare.
What is the philosophical
basis for the operation of the
Office of Public Awareness?
Its philosophical basis is Jeffer-
son's observation—the need
for a well-informed citizenry
in a democracy. The U.S. Con-
gress has given EPA eight major
laws to implement on behalf of
the public. These laws address
air and water quality, drinking
water, radiation, noise, solid
and hazardous waste, pesti-
cides, and toxic substances.
All ultimately relate to funda-
mental life support systems
and address areas of consider-
able public concern. Not only
do these laws relate to broad
social issues in our society,
they relate to specific people in
different ways. Farmers may be
primarily concerned with water
pollution, acid rain, and pesti-
cides; members of minority
groups are often the first victims
of air and noise pollution; urban
consumers may be particularly
concerned with drinking water
problems or the pollution of
recreation areas; business man-
agers and industry foremen
worry about the effects of regu-
lation on production; labor
leaders are concerned with
worker health and safety both
at the work site and within the
community; senior citizens
watch with concern as open
spaces disappear along with
fresh air and clean rivers;
women worry about environ-
mental problems that affect
their reproductive capabilities;
and young people are concerned
about the quality of their tomor-
rows. All of these people have
very tangible connections to
EPA's laws and activities. Their
needs for information, as well
as their involvement with EPA
policy development may vary,
but I think their potential for be-
ing responsive to EPA's regula-
tions and activities is much
greater than appreciated. When
you realize that the 'implementa-
tion of environmental laws
relies heavily on voluntary com-
pliance, the folly of not provid-
ing adequate public information
is obvious.
How is the office organized to
reflect that philosophy?
It is a more precise view of
these different publics and their
potential that caused the Office
of Public Awareness to be re-
organized two years ago. We es-
tablished nine constituency
positions dedicated to provid-
ing information specifically to
labor, agriculture, business/
industry, women/consumer,
minority, urban, environmental-
ist, youth, and senior citizen/
health groups. In addition, we
established a client service
systems between our office and
EPA's major program divisions
—air/noise/radiation, toxics
and pesticides, water and waste
management, planning and
management, and enforcement.
Each "program client" is served
by an associate director who
acts as advocate, planner, im-
plementor, and resource to the
Assistant Administrator's pro-
gram. That associate director,
in consultation with program
staff, our deputy director, and
myself, designs and implements
a public information and citizen
participation support plan in re-
sponse to program activities.
The associate director's re-
sources include a portion of our
budget, constituent staff sup-
port, support from the informa-
tion production unit of our
office, and from our regional
awareness offices.
This structure permits the
Office of Public Awareness to
(1) serve the programs in con-
sonance with their priorities,
(2) link program information
and participation activities with
specific constituencies, (3) re-
late environmental information
to other national issues such as
health, energy, and economics,
and (4) increase information
flow from Federal to regional,
State, and local audiences.
In all our information activi-
ties, we are committed to honor-
ing the differences among pub-
lics and their environmental
orientations.
Is there an ethical difference
between propaganda (p.r.)
and public awareness
activities?
A profound one, and one that
has troubled Congress over the
years. As early as 1913, Con-
gress banned any Federal office
from being called an Office of
Public Relations. Since then it
has tightly restricted the Execu-
tive Branch's access to tele-
vision, radio, and paid adver-
tising. Quite correctly, Con-
gress draws a distinction
between activities designed to
inform citizens so they can
monitor an agency's perform-
ance, comply with its laws and
regulations, or participate in its
programs; and activities which
market an agency's image. Un-
like organizations in the private
sector. Federal agencies are
not competing for profits in the
marketplace. Federal agencies
are implementors responding to
public mandates.
Congress fundamentally sup-
ports the information function
of government agencies. But
public information offices of the
Executive Branch are particu-
larly vulnerable to external
pressures; so Congress gives
those agencies close and
constant scrutiny.
If an office such as ours is
truly doing its job, the informa-
tion we provide should help
prepare a citizen to assess the
type and extent of environmen-
tal protection being provided.
Based on that assessment, the
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
33
-------
citizen can choose to comply
with and support EPA's actions,
challenge them in the courts, or
attempt to modify them through
legislative action.
What do you think the <
can do to get a bigger v
envii
An important first step is to be
become familiar with environ-
mental problems on the local
level. Second, identify which
agency or department has juris-
diction over these matters—
local, municipal, county. State,
regional, or Federal. Third,
become familiar with the laws,
regulations, and standards that
these various entities should be
implementing. An understand-
ing of local environmental is-
sues is invaluable to both con-
cerned citizens and EPA, as
local solutions to environmental
problems can often prevent the
development of more wide-
spread environmental problems.
However, there are many dif-
ficulties for citizens wishing to
become involved. Too often
they cannot meet with the staff
directly responsible for making
environmental decisions. Often,
they are referred to the informa-
tion office, which is all too will-
ing to serve as a guardian at the
gate or as a sophisticated bar-
rier between the public and the
public servant. I do not desire
the Office of Public Awareness
to serve that function. If we can
fill an information need, we
should; but we should not co-
opt healthy dialogue between
the public and the public
servant.
Another problem for citizens
is that although an agency may
be dedicated to producing help-
ful information, it may not be
equally dedicated to investing
in adequate dissemination. In
our office we now not only send
out information through the
Regional Offices, we distribute
information on a monthly basis
to States and municipalities as
well. In addition, we are making
information available through
supermarket distribution ar-
rangements, and through spe-
cial mailings to constituent
organizations. We prepare
calendars of events that differ-
ent public constituent groups
have scheduled and dissemi-
nate the calendars within EPA
to encourage program people,
regions, and States to make
EPA information available in
these constituent forums.
Another barrier the citizen
faces in seeking timely and use-
ful information is that we an-
nounce many of our actions, as
well as opportunities to par-
ticipate in the Agency's busi-
ness, only in the Federal Regis-
ter, and too often in language
unique to Washington. The Fed-
eral Register is used by a highly
selective readership and is too
expensive for many who have
need of it. Another example of
inadequate communication is
the production of technical and
scientific documents without
providing a lay translation. And
even in our public information
documents, we often fail to
start with the basics—drawing
the relevance of environmental
laws to the world of those af-
fected. To rectify this is a goal
of our constituent approach.
awareness and >
'pation arc broad terms.
An uninformed public is an un-
involved public. I am distressed
when 1 hear public awareness
and citizen participation de-
scribed as "either/or" agendas
or as competitive. Public aware-
ness and public participation
are the opposite ends of the
same stick. They are the begin-
ning and end of an evolving
process. You can have public
awareness without citizen par-
ticipation, but you cannot have
meaningful citizen participation
without public awareness. Pub-
lic information activities should
lead to the empowerment of the
citizen. With adequate informa-
tion the citizen is empowered to
participate. Citizen participa-
tion is the accommodation of
that informed citizen in the
Agency's development of policy
or programs.
ot Public
•less?
Public information offices are
often perceived as mini-adver-
tising offices, or as creative
havens for journalists, movie-
makers, and writers. While
creative talents are certainly
needed, we also must make sure
that these abilities relate direct-
ly to agency and public needs.
We need people who are intrin-
sically courteous, as informa-
tion offices are often the first
and sometimes the only point
of contact between the Agency
and the public. Our Office of
Public Awareness handles over
20,000 inquiries a year. Cour-
tesy, of course, is not enough.
We also need public informa-
tion officers committed to be-
coming knowledgeable about
both EPA's programs and the
public's programs. This is an
important prerequisite if the
staff is to be able to serve both
EPA and the public. Third, we
need people who understand
how to relate Agency informa-
tion to our other national priori-
ties, such as energy, econom-
ics, health, and regulatory re-
form, as well as to the different
regions of the country.
It should be emphasized also
that our office must be much
more precise in speaking for a
regulatory agency than a public
relations firm representing
some campaign, for example, in
driver education or community
fund-raising.
We also need people at Head-
quarters who view the regional
public awareness operations
and State public information
officers as equals and as allies
in our efforts to implement na-
tional initiatives. We need peo-
ple who can speak and write
clearly. We need people who
can design innovative forums
for the dissemination of infor-
mation. The Office of Public
Awareness must serve as a
facilitator between the public
and the Agency.
What are some of the specific
tools that your office uses in
The EPA Journal is a tool that
reaches an estimated 100,000
readers before it goes into
selected reprint. Each issue ad-
dresses the environment as it
relates to a specific topic or
audience. We produce mate-
rials which make the essence of
complex technical programs
and data accessible to the lay
public. We award contracts and
grants for information and citi-
zen participation activities. We
produce public service an-
nouncements. We have pre-
pared—and update twice a
year—guides to specific publics
so that EPA officials can more
knowledgeably provide EPA's
information to affected citizens.
We provide support to the re-
gions. Through our program
plans, we anticipate the need
for various information tools as
they relate to constituencies:
publications, audio-visual ma-
terials, information for the
media, and formal public
participation documents.
In reference to the ethics
issue, could you expand a
little on your answer on the
distinction between propa-
ganda and public awareness?
There are constant ethical ques-
tions facing information offi-
cers. We must always be aware
of the fine line between em-
powering citizens so that they in
turn can monitor the perform-
ance of government, and issu-
ing propaganda that has a
hidden agenda. We are not try-
ing to "sell" the agency as one
sells a product in the competi-
tive marketplace. The competi-
tion in government is among
competing national priorities.
Our task is to provide the infor-
mation citizens need to make
intelligent choices concerning
these national priorities. The
challenge in an evolving, open-
ended society such as ours is
how national priorities can be
met and reconciled. Informa-
tion is an important factor in
this process. Government ac-
tions have a lot to do with
values: how people value their
lives, see their roles, and deter-
mine their life styles. The use of
information tools by govern-
ment must always be governed
by an awareness that they are
meant to serve citizens in a
democratic society.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Looking at ethics from a
slightly different vantage
point, do you see any hopeful
signs that society is begin-
ning to act on environmental
principles or on environ-
mental ethics?
No question, although I think
people have been put in a very
difficult position. They have
been put in the middle of too
many strident rhetorical con-
frontations over the last twenty
years. Confrontation politics is
a legitimate element in a de-
mocracy, but when it is pro-
longed and so intense, both
sides lose credibility. The con-
tinuous barrage of conflicting
"information" and media over-
load has contributed significant-
ly to a national inertia and a
sense that all issues are too
complex. In the absence of
serious efforts to clarify issues,
the claims of the "experts" on
both sides are overwhelming.
Many citizens don't feel they
have the expertise to choose,
and therefore decide not to
respond at all. This situation
has certainly affected the public
in its attempt to adopt an
environmental ethic.
I think one of the main sup-
ports of an environmental ethic
is that many times it does not
matter what the experts say, a
person has enough expertise to
know when one can't breathe,
or when the water tastes bad,
or when children are getting
sick from some kind of toxic
chemical or pesticide. Many
times, the expertise is within
oneself.
How does the question of
environmental ethics apply to
the energy-environment
issue?
Regardless of pronouncements
of having to sacrifice environ-
mental standards to energy,
most Americans reject having
to choose between being able to
breathe and being able to work.
1 think most people are saying
yes, we do want energy, and
yes, we want to be able to
breathe and drink water and
swim and eat safe foods and
have recreation out of doors.
Environment and energy
shouldn't be an either/or
agenda. What are the ethics of
borrowing against our child-
ren's futures for the sake of
energy which we use in a very
wasteful fashion? We had bet-
ter be well informed before
acting.
Rather than seeing environ-
ment and energy as competi-
tive, we should call on a re-
source which is abundant in
Americans—their ingenuity.
Americans do remarkably well
when innovation is needed.
EPA should take the lead in
getting people to think about
their own potential in marrying
environmental solutions to
energy savings.
There is a real need for a
national conservation ethic
which embodies such concepts
as energy saving, using less
water and other natural re-
sources, recycling, and harbor-
ing lands for food production
and recreation. Adopting a con-
servation ethic could help us as
a society to sort out our
"needs" from our "wants."
For the things we need—
breathable air, adequate water
supplies and water quality, and
productive land—ultimately
give rise to our economic capa-
bilities—the capacity to meet
our "wants." The needs must
be met first. This assessment is
part of developing a conserva-
tion ethic—an ethic which in-
cludes a conservation commit-
ment and makes good economic
sense.
Do you think the drive for
synthetic fuels is going to
cripple the environmental
cause?
No, but our national orientation
is important. The decade of the
80's should be viewed as a very
exciting decade, supportive to
widespread technological in-
novation, a "frontier" decade
in terms of synthesizing knowl-
edge in new and different ways.
The challenge of the 80's is the
challenge of harmonizing en-
vironmental, economic, and
energy agendas. Meeting this
challenge could provide a
much-needed impetus for fun-
damental changes in both cor-
porate and government
institutions.
To contemplate the crippling
of the environmental cause is to
create the wrong focus, because
it presumes a win/lose orienta-
tion rather than a win/win ori-
entation. A win/win orienta-
tion is one of accommodation,
synthesis, and innovation—
a critical orientation, if we are
to solve, in the public's interest,
key environmental, energy, and
economic problems. I don't
think the push for energy—or
for anything else—can cripple
the environmental movement.
The environmental movement
is too well integrated with broad
social values. Many who would
never perceive themselves as
environmentalists want to be
able to fish, to swim, to breathe
easily, to see a sunset or a sky-
line clearly, to eat safe foods,
to be able to sleep in quiet, or
to drink a glass of water safely.
Can dedication to these funda-
mental elements of living be
crippled? ! think not, and that is
why the environmental move-
ment cannot be crippled.
What environmental i:>
most urgently need public
understanding now?
Hazardous waste handling and
the negative effects of toxic
substances are key areas of con-
cern at both the local and na-
tional levels. A related issue is
drinking water quality. It could
become an increasing problem
in our society, because water is
so vulnerable to municipal
waste disposal, industrial ac-
tivities, food production, and
energy development. Both the
supply and quality of water are
going to become an increasing
concern.
How do we deal as a Nation
with achieving compliance with
air standards over the next de-
cade is another critical matter
in terms of public health and
other hazards of global con-
sequence, such as acid rain.
Do you think the environmen-
tal movement has changed
over the past decade?
Environmental organizations
have changed and I think they
have changed in a positive way.
A decade ago the primary tactic
was confrontation politics, an
important tactic to bring the
environmental agenda into the
mainstream of national priori-
ties. But you can only yell so
long, then you've got to take the
next step and help solve
problems.
Environmental groups are
becoming much more sophis-
ticated about problem solving.
They are actively increasing
their knowledge about technolo-
gies, health, energy, economics,
science, and law—a necessity
if the environmental leadership
is going to serve as facilitators
for environmental solutions in
the 80's.
Do you think the operation of
the Public Awareness Office
fits citizens?
It is dedicated to that. Our suc-
cess, however, relates to the
level of responsiveness from
within the Agency, the profes-
sionalism of the individuals in
the Office of Public Awareness,
and the resources available.
! think the way we are organized
is the right prescription for suc-
cess. We now operate within a
coordinated framework of pro-
grams, publics, regions, and
States.
The bottom line is that we
are public servants, supported
by public funds. Our absolute
priority is to serve the public.
That is our paramount obliga-
tion. In serving the public well,
the Office of Public Awareness
will, in the long run, be serving
the Agency best. D
This article is one of a continu-
ing series of interviews with top
EPA managers.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
35
-------
Around the Nation
Noise Abatement Grants
Region 1 has awarded
grants to the State of
New Hampshire and two
Massachusetts commu-
nities for noise abate-
ment projects. New
Hampshire received
$25,000 for a program
to develop greater uni-
formity in community
noise control efforts and
to assist those commu-
nities in the State that
are facing increased
noise problems due to
recent development. The
Massachusetts commu-
nities of Brookline and
Newton have been
awarded a combined
grant of $12,000 to
develop and implement
techniques for noise con-
trol in the communities.
Included under both
grants will be the train-
ing of local officials in
noise monitoring and
control efforts. These
grants are the first in
New England awarded
under the Quiet Commu-
nities Act of 1978.
Asbestos Violations
Region 1 has issued
enforcement orders for
asbestos-handling viola-
tions to three companies
involved in the demoli-
tion and renovation of
buildings in Somerville,
Mass. The companies
cited were East Bay De-
velopment Corp. and the
Cory Wrecking Co., both
of Massachusetts, and
the Cleveland Wrecking
Co. of Pennsylvania. The
orders require the com-
panies to submit written
notices to EPA before
they begin any future
work involving asbestos
and to comply with the
EPA asbestos handling
procedures.
IRLG Seminar
Over 400 industry and
health representatives
attended a lead seminar
hosted by the Interagency
Regulatory Liaison Group
(IRLG). The IRLG is com-
prised of five Federal reg-
ulatory agencies—EPA,
the Occupational Safety
and Health Administra-
tion, the Food and Drug
Administration, the Con-
sumer Product Safety
Commission, andthe
Food Safety and Quality
Service. The seminar
gave attendees an over-
view of lead standards
established by the IRLG
agencies. Theseminar
was co-sponsored by the
Associated Industries of
Massachusetts. A similar
session dealing with as-
bestos is planned for the
spring.
PCB Fines
The General Electric
Company was fined
$14,SOOfor violations
of PCB regulations at its
facilities in Fort Edward
and Hudson Falls, N.Y.
This is the second action
brought by EPA against
GE. In October of 1978,
GE agreed to pay $25,000
for burning PCB's at its
Waterford, N.Y. plant,
which was not approved
for disposal at the time.
The recent fine brings to
$75,300 the total of pen-
alties collected in Region
2 under the regulations.
Water Grants
Region 2 has awarded
nearly $130 million in
grants to New York City
for three water projects.
The grants, which are for
electrical, mechanical,
and structural equipment,
are the latest in a series
of Federal allocations to
the City.
Construction Grants
Under an agreement be-
tween Region 2 and the
State of New Jersey, the
State's Department of
Environmental Protection
will assume management
of its multi-million dollar
wastewater treatment
works construction pro-
gram. The agreement
provides for a six step
takeover by the State
and should insure suffi-
cient time to acquire and
train new employees for
the program. During the
initial phase, the State
will be responsible for
administrative raview
procedures and manag-
ing a controlled informa-
tion system. Afterward,
the State will have
greater involvement
and control over the de-
velopment of programs,
operations, and related
grant activities.
The agreement was
made possible by a 1 977
Amendment to the Fed-
eral Clean Water Act giv-
ing States up to 2 percent
of their annual Federal
wastewater funds to
manage the program.
State/EPA Agreement
Signed
Region 3 and the State
of West Virginia have
signed a State/EPA
Agreement designed to
streamline the manage-
ment and reduce the
costs of environmental
cleanup. The agreement
was signed by Governor
Jay Rockefeller and EPA
Regional Administrator
Jack J. Schramm.
Schramm said the
Agreement, "demon-
strates a joint commit-
ment to more effectively
manage our environ-
mental programs." The
agreement will channel
$4 million in Federal
grants to West Virginia.
The grants are made un-
der provisions of the Re-
source Conservation and
Recovery Act, the Safe
Drinking Water Act, and
the Clean Water Act.
Additional Federal pro-
grams will be included
under such arrangements
in future years.
Resource Recovery
Grant Made to D.C.
Region 3 has awarded
its first resource recovery
grant to the District of
Columbia to conduct a
feasibility study for solid
waste recycling and en-
ergy recovery. The
$102,628 grant was
madeaspartof Presi-
dent Carter's urban pol-
icy. Itwill providefunds
to study the feasibility
of several recycling and
energy recovery technol-
ogies. Following these
studies, further grants
will be made for the con-
struction, planning, and
environmental assess-
ment of a resource re-
covery facility for the
District.
Region 3 Fights Spill
Personnel from Region
3's Environmental Emer-
gency Branch are con-
tinuing to oversee the
cleanup of an oil and
chemical spill in the
Susquehanna River near
Pittston, Pa. The waste
was first spotted pouring
into the river in July from
a coal mine drainage tun-
nel. Investigation has re-
vealed that the wastes
come from illegal dump-
ing into mine boreholes.
As much as 300,000 to
500,000 gallons of waste
per month may have been
put into the abandoned
mines by illegal interstate
dumpers. The waste con-
tains high levels of di-
chlorobenzene, a known
carcinogen.
Efforts by EPA person-
nel removed 95 percent
of the waste before it
could enter the river. No
one knows how much
waste remains in the
miles of interconnected
mine shafts. To prevent
further contamination
of the Susquehanna, the
tunnel will be sealed and
mine drainage will be
piped through a treat-
ment plant. Cleanup
costs have already run
over half a million dol-
lars.
Dumper Sentenced
A Louisville businessman
is appealing the stiff sen-
tence he received in a
Federal pollution case.
Donald E. Distler, former
president of Kentucky
Liquid Recycling Incor-
porated, of New Albany,
Indiana, was sentenced
to two years in prison
and fined $50,000 for
dumping toxic chemicals
into Louisville's sewers
in 1977. The chemical
dumping caused a three-
month shutdown of the
city's principal waste-
water treatment plant.
Contamination was so
heavy it took the Metro-
politan Sewer District
until August of this year
to clean out the sewer
lines. Total clean-up
costs were estimated at
$2.25 million. In hand-
ing down the sentence,
Federal District Judge
Charles Allen said, "No
defendant to come before
this court had exhibited
a more callous and fla-
grant disregard for the
safety of vast numbers
of citizens of this area."
M-
EPAJOURNAL
-------
Biomonitoring
Conference
Region 5 recently hosted
a conference on biomoni-
toring; the use of fish,
plants, and insects, to
detect the presence of
minute quantities of toxic
wastes in the environ-
ment. Midwest
industrial representatives
attended the seminar,
which was held in Chi-
cago. Region 5 Adminis-
trator John McGuire ad-
dressed the meeting,
followed by twelve speak-
ers from EPA facilities
across the country. The
presentations outlined
various biomonitoring
tests that can be used for
effluents, sediments, and
other aspects of determin-
ing water quality. The
seminar closed with a tour
of EPA's biomonitoring
facilities at the Central
Regional Laboratory in
Chicago.
Administrative Order
Issued to City of
Fort Worth
The region has issued an
administrative order to
the City of Fort Worth
because of continuing
problems with operation
and maintenance of the
Village Creek Treatment
Plant. The order requires
operators to comply with
effluent limitations; to
treat as much water as
possible when it rains,
rather than resorting to
unscheduled by-passes;
and to clean up operation
and maintenance proce-
dures that contribute to
odor problems. Operators
must develop a schedule,
to be in operation by Jan-
uary 1, 1980. for reduc-
ing the pollutants dis-
charged into the Trinity
River.
Adjudicatory Hearing
Asked
The Georgia-Pacific Com-
pany has requested an
adjudicatory hearing on
a proposed National Pol-
lutant Discharge Elimi-
nation System permit for
the firm's pulp and paper
mill at Crossett, Ark. At
issue is whether Coffee
Creek, the receiving
stream, should be classed
as a waterway of the
United States. EPA and
the State are discussing
water quality standards
changes for the creek that
would directly affect the
Georgia-Pacific permit.
EPA Goes to the
State Fair
At the State Fair of Texas
EPA's Region 6 joined 26
other Federal agencies in
a government exhibition.
Featured in the EPA
booth was a slide-sound
presentation on the mas-
sive inter-agency govern-
mental response effort to
an oil spill. Slides showed
the control, containment,
and cleanup of oil impact
along the U.S. Gulf Coast,
from the lxtoc-1 well
blowout in Mexico's Bay
of Campeche.
Graduation Exercises
Held
Betti Harris, Public Par-
ticipation Coordinator,
Office of External Affairs,
spoke at graduation exer-
cises held recently at the
Water & Wastewater
Technical School in
Neosho, Miss. Ms. Harris
represented Dr. Kay Q.
Camin, Region 7 Admin-
istrator, at the cere-
monies. Twenty-one
students received di-
plomas certifying them
as skilled Wastewater
Treatment Plant Oper-
ators, following a year of
intensive study at the
facility where students
from all over the world
are trained in this highly
technical field.
Highlight of the cere-
mony was the news that
EPA had approved $500.-
000 to extend the capa-
bilities of the Missouri
State Environmental
Training Center which is
located on campus. The
new funds will be used
to equip a laboratory in
the new building, con-
struct an oxidation ditch
and associated building,
establish a pump center
in one of the existing
buildings, to face with
brick another building on
campus, and to establish
a cross-connection cen-
ter. The new grant covers
all the costs of the
projects.
Noise Center Set
Noise control grants
under cooperative agree-
ments totaling $178,598
were recently awarded to
the States of Colorado,
North Dakota, and Utah,
the University of Colo-
rado, and the City of
Thornton, Colo. Receiv-
ing the largest grant,
$90,000, is the Univer-
sity of Colorado for the
establishment of a re-
gional noise Technical
Assistance Center which
will supplement Region
8's efforts in providing
technical assistance to
State and local officials
throughout the Region.
Funding is made possible
under the Quiet Commu-
nities Act of 1978. Re-
gion 8's Noise Control
Program has received a
$63,000 grant from the
U.S. Department of En-
ergy. This first-of-its-
kind grant will help pio-
neer development of a
solar powered noise
monitoring system to
demonstrate the applica-
bility of such a power
system in quiet areas.
Noise Control Plans
Region 9 is assisting the
City of Torrance, Calif, in
developing a noise con-
trol program at its munici-
pal airport. The airport,
which is used by thou-
sands of private pilots.
has established an Airport
Noise Abatement Center
to teach pilots how to
minimize the noise impact
of their aircraft. The Cen-
ter operates a noise mon-
itoring system, which is
unusual for a non-com-
mercial airport, and which
includes the use of in-
struments that identify
excessively-noisy aircraft.
Region 9 offered funds to
the State of California,
National City, and the
University of California at
Berkeley to further de-
velop noise control
programs.
Under the agreement,
the State of California
will receive $28,000 to
develop a technical as-
sistance program and
train approximately 500
local law enforcement
agency personnel in ve-
hicle noise control and
enforcement.
National City, Calif..
located near San Diego,
will receive $12,000 to
expand its existing pro-
gram. The expansion in-
cludes finalizing a noise
control ordinance, imple-
menting it, and publi-
cizing the start-up of
enforcement procedures.
The University of Cali-
fornia at Berkeley, with its
$90,000, will establish a
Regional Technical As-
sistance Center and train
State and local noise con-
trol officials to identify
and quantify problems,
analyze abatement and
control strategies, and
draft appropriate legisla-
tion.
PCB Problems
Region 10 and the Food
and Drug Administration
are working together to
investigate the contami-
nation of thousands of
chickens and eggs in
Franklin, Idaho. Also,
more than a million
pounds of PCB-contami-
nated tallow has been
found in the Seattle-
Tacoma area. Since much
of the inedible lard-like
material contained PCB's
at levels of more than 50
parts per million, provi-
sions of the Toxic Sub-
stances Control Act came
into play, requiring EPA to
insure that the tallow not
be re-used and that it is
disposed of in compli-
ance with TSCA regula-
tions. A Montana packing
plant, where a spill of
PCB transformer oil was
discovered, is believed to
be the source of the
problem.
Water Ills
Region 10 inspection
teams surveying drinking
water systems in Oregon
have discovered bacteria
in excess of national
standards in three sys-
tems. Residents of Sum-
ner and Eddyville and
people served by the
Northwoods Water Dis-
trict have been advised to
boil their water before
using it.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1979
37
-------
A review of recent major
EPA activities and devel-
opments in pollution con-
trol program areas.
Air Rules
As a result of a Federal
court decision, the EPA is
proposing air pollution
regulations that will sig-
nificantly affect new and
modified pollution
sources planning to con-
struct in either dirty or
clean air sections of the
country.
A major impact of the
proposed changes is that
fewer new sources will be
subject to Agency regula-
tions, according to EPA.
On the other hand, the
proposed rules increase
the number of pollutants
that must be monitored
and for which best avail-
able control technology
must be applied.
In June, 1978, EPA
issued prevention of sig-
nificant deterioration
regulations for new and
modified sources locating
in areas of the country
where air quality is better
than national atmospheric
air quality standards.
Industry and environmen-
tal groups sued EPA over
these rules and on June
18, 1979, the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the District
of Columbia issued a rul-
ing upholding some of the
requirements, but over-
turning others.
The proposals involve
the review of new sources
prior to construction, or
existing sources prior to
modification, to make
sure that when they are
built their emissions
won't significantly de-
teriorate clean air or make
dirty air worse.
ENFORCEMENT
Tampering Cases
The Department of Jus-
tice has filed civil com-
plaints in Federal District
Court against six auto-
mobile dealerships and
three independent repair
facilities for tampering
with the emission con-
trols on cars.
The complaints cite
violations of the Clean
Air Act and ask that a
total of $67,500 in pen-
alties be levied against
the violators.
The tampering charges
involve alteration of the
air pollution controls on
new cars before they were
sold and on other cars
brought to dealers and
repair facilities for
maintenance.
EPA said violations oc-
curred in the areas of
Boston, Philadelphia.
Baltimore, and Detroit.
The majority of the cases
resulted from consumer
complaints to EPA.
Under the Clean Air
Act, new car dealers can
be fined up to $ 10,000 for
each tampered car. Repair
facility owners, commer-
cial mechanics, and fleet
operators are subject to a
penalty of $2,500 for each
violation.
Requests Refused
EPA Administrator Doug-
las M . Costle has turned
down the majority of
requests by three U.S. and
three foreign automakers
for a two-year delay in the
tougher 1 981 auto emis-
sion standard for carbon
monoxide (CO).
The Agency granted a
"waiver" or postpone-
ment, however, for cer-
tain company models,
giving them until 1 983 to
achieve the new clean-up
level. EPA granted this
relief because effective
technology for meeting
the standard does not
exist for certain models
and because the public
health would not be sig-
nificantly harmed by the
delay.
The current CO stand-
ard is 7 grams per mile
(gpm). The 1981 stand-
ard is 3.4 gpm. The cur-
rent standard will con-
tinue to apply to those
1981 and 1982 models
given waivers.
Gasoline Standard
Final rules extending the
compliance deadline for
reducing the amount of
lead in gasoline have been
issued by the EPA. Orig-
inally, refiners were to
meet the 0.5 grams per
gallon (gpg) standard in
October this year. Under
the new rules, refiners
may produce gasoline at
a lead content of 0.8 gpg
until October, 1980. This
change implements the
one year delay announced
by President Carter in his
April 5 energy message.
During the one year
period, refiners who elect
to take advantage of the
relaxed standard will
either have to increase
their production of un-
leaded gasoline by six
percentage points or pro-
duce more than 45 per-
cent unleaded gasoline.
Refiners then must meet
the original 0.5 gpg stand-
ard by the new deadline.
Because the standard
is measured quarterly
averaged over all grades
of gasoline produced at a
refinery, both leaded and
unleaded gas will remain
available to consumers.
EPA estimates the one-
year extension will allow
production of up to
340,000 barrels of gaso-
line per day that could
otherwise not be pro-
duced. Approximately 50
percent of all gas pro-
duced by October, 1980,
will be unleaded.
NOISE
Labeling Program
A program designed to
provide consumers with
information about the
noise characteristics of
new products through a
labeling system has been
established by the EPA.
A new regulation will
require manufacturers to
affix labels to products
that produce noise ca-
pable of adversely affect-
ing public health or wel-
fare and products that are
sold to reduce noise.
The labels on noise-
emitting products will
provide the consumer
with a Noise Rating. This
will be a number showing
the number of decibels of
noise the product emits.
The label also will pro-
vide the range in decibels
of noise emitted by the
same products made by
other manufacturers. The
lower the rating the
quieter the product will
be.
The labels for noise-
reducing products will
bear a Noise Reduction
Rating. This will be a
number giving a measure
of the product's effective-
ness in reducing noise.
The label will also provide
the range of noise reduc-
tion ratings for competing
products. The higher the
rating the more effective
the product should be.
The first products select-
ed for ratings are hearing
protectors.
PESTICIDES
Death Daisy
The shortage of a natural
insecticide used around
the home and extracted
from a flower sometimes
called the "death daisy"
has prompted the EPA to
speed up approval of
synthetic substitutes.
The natural bug-killing
substance, called pyre-
thrum, is obtained from
certain chrysanthemum
flowers grown mainly in
Kenya and other African
countries, and to a lesser
extent in South America
and Japan. But unfavor-
able African weather con-
ditions and the greater
profitability of other crops
grown in these countries,
such as coffee, have de-
creased worldwide pro-
duction of the flowers and
led to declining exports
to the U.S.
This situation has
threatened to reduce sup-
plies in this country of
several thousand EPA-
registered insecticides
containing pyrethrum.
These are commonly used
to control cockroaches
and other insects in the
home, to kill fieas and
ticks on pets, to protect
food in storage, and in
certain agricultural
applications.
However, to ensure
continued availability of
these products to con-
sumers and to prevent
market disruptions, EPA
recently hastened the
approval of manmade
substitutes for pyrethrum,
called pyrethroids.
The Agency also is
willing to let farmers
make emergency use of
synthetic pyrethroids,
such as resmethrin and
allethrin, to control flies
in poultry houses and
dairy barns. None of the
insecticides containing
pyrethroids may be
sprayed in areas where
food is exposed because
no tolerance or safe resi-
due levels for food have
yet been set.
Herbicide Action
EPA has decided to allow
the continued use of tri-
fluralin, a widely used
herbicide sold under the
trade name Treflan, if its
producers agree to main-
tain production standards
that minimize its con-
tamination with nitro-
samines, some of which
are potential cancer caus-
ing agents.
EPAJOURNAL
-------
The Agency's decision
follows an intensive re-
view of the risks and
benefits associated with
the drug, which is used in
controlling many kinds of
weeds in cotton, soy-
beans, fruit and vege-
tables, and other crops.
Nurseries and home
gardeners also use the
herbicide in growing
ornamental trees and
shrubs, some flowers, and
fruit and nut trees.
This decision is not
final, however. It still
must be commented on
by the Department of
Agriculture, environmen-
talists, industry, and other
interested parties, as well
as the Agency's scientific
advisory panel. After re-
ceiving all comment, the
Agency will reassess the
situation and make a final
determination.
Benomyl Allowed
EPA has decided to allow
growers to continue to
use the fungicide benomyl
on condition that sprayers
and others handling rela-
tively large quantities of
the fungicide wear cloth
face masks and take other
precautions.
EPA said that before
deciding whether to give
the fungicide full approv-
al, it needed the follow-
ing additional information
from the manufacturer,
E. I. DuPont De Nemours
and Company:
• Data from another study
on benomyl's potential to
cause point mutations
(changes in cellular
hereditary units).
• Data from the monitor-
ing of waters where the
fungicide is used on rice
fields to make certain it is
not killing fish and other
water animals.
DuPont isthe sole man-
ufacturer of benomyl
(brand name: Benlate).
Growers use the product
to control plant rot and
molds on rice, oranges,
apples, pears, peaches,
cherries, peanuts, toma-
toes, beans, and other
vegetables.
Benomyl is used also
for home lawns, elm trees
(to control Dutch elm
disease), and gardens,
but in such small amounts
that the restrictions re-
garding self-protection
will not apply to these
uses.
RESEARCH AND~
DEVELOPMENT
New Strategies
EPA is awarding $3 mil-
lion to 1 5 universities to
develop new strategies
to control pests that dam-
age the major crops of
cotton, soybeans, apples,
and alfalfa.
The techniques the
universities will be devel-
oping are known as Inter-
grated Pest Management
(IPM). IPM usesa sys-
tems approach to reduce
pest damages to tolerable
levels through a combina-
tion of control practices,
including natural preda-
tors and parasites, genet-
ically resistant plants,
modified farming prac-
tices, and chemical
pesticides.
The 1 5 university con-
sortium research project
on IPM will be adminis-
tered through the Texas
A&M Research Founda-
tion in College Station,
Texas, under the direction
of Dr. P. L. Adkisson and
R. E. Frisbie, EPA
announced.
This program also
launches a new coopera-
tive effort with the U.S.
Department of Agricul-
ture, Science and Educa-
tion Administration
(SEA). Using this project
as a prototype, EPA and
SEA are developing a
unified, interagency IPM
research and implementa-
tion program. Beginning
with the 1981 budget,
EPA and SEA will present
to Congress a coordinated
IPM prograrrCdesigned to
improve the environment
and increase the output
and profit of the Nation's
farmers.
Waste Streams
EPA has proposed adding
45 industrial waste
streams to the list of 1 68
waste streams proposed
last year for control as
hazardous wastes under
Federal law. An industrial
waste stream is the total
wastes produced by a
type of industry. In addi-
tion, EPA is proposing the
inclusion of 33 known
and potential cancer-
causing substances to this
list.
Over half of the newly-
proposed hazardous
wastes streams are from
organic chemical produc-
tion processes and the
remainder are from other
industrial processes in-
cluding those from iron
foundries, aluminum
smelting, photographic
processing, newspaper
printing presses, and from
the manufacture of coated
fabrics, paperboard
boxes, and electrical
equipment.
Under regulations pro-
posed last year and ex-
pected to be in effect in
thernid-1980's,the Fed-
eral government or States
would track the move-
ment of hazardous wastes
and would approve all dis-
posal facilities. The haz-
ardous waste regulations
were proposed under the
Resource Conservation
and Recovery Act of
1976.
Open Dumps
The EPA has published a
standard which will lead
to the identification and
elimination of open
dumps which can pose
hazards to public health
and the environment.
"Criteria for Classifica-
tion of Solid Waste Dis-
posal Facilities and Prac-
tices" has been issued for
use in evaluating the en-
vironmental and health
aspects of solid waste
disposal activities. De-
velopment of the regula-
tion involved extensive
participation of the pub-
lic, State and local gov-
ernment, industry, and
environmental groups.
State and local govern-
ments will use this stand-
ard to evaluate facilities,
identifying for closure or
upgrading those which
are open dumps. The
standard will also help
assure that new disposal
facilities will be sited and
designed to protect public
health and the environ-
ment. The Resource Con-
servation and Recovery
Act of 1976 prohibits
open dumping of solid
waste.
ported nine cases of adult
poisoning, two resulting
in death and one a sui-
cide. It is now unlawful
to sell Vacor products in
California. In other states,
products may be sold
until current supplies run
out.
TOXICS
Rodent Poisons
The Rohm and Haas Com-
pany of Philadelphia has
voluntarily requested EPA
to cancel registration of
its rat and mouse prod-
ucts in the United States.
These toxicants contain
the active ingredient
Vacor. The company also
told EPA that it had vol-
untarily stopped sale of
these products worldwide
and had instituted a recall
from all distributors. The
EPA said that it will can-
cel the four registrations
in this country.
The Agency was in the
process of making a toxi-
cological review of all
Vacor products after con-
cerns were expressed by
the California Department
of Food and Agriculture.
Their concerns arose be-
cause of the potentia I
toxic effects of these
products and their pack-
aging, which appealed to
children.
Since its initial market-
ing in 1975, there have
been several documented
human deaths from eating
Vacor, mainly in South
Korea. While marketing
of Vacor in California has
not resulted in cases
where children exposed to
Vacor developed signifi-
cant signs of poisoning,
California officials re-
WATER
Municipal Cleanup
EPA has adopted a Na-
tional Municipal Policy
and Strategy to deal with
what the Agency says is
the alarming failure of
so many municipalities to
achieve compliance with
applicable water quality
standards. The strategy
was announced by
Eckardt C. Beck, the
White House nominee for
Assistant Administrator,
EPA Office of Water and
Waste Management.
First, Beck said all major
treatment plants will be
classified according to sev-
eral criteria, including
variables such as funding
eligibility and water qual-
ity impact. Second, non-
complying plants will be
put on specific schedules
for meeting applicable
standards. Third, the final
cleanup schedules will be
closely coordinated with
theavailability of con-
struction grant monies.
Funding will be allocated
first to projects complying
with the law, to the extent
legally possible.
Clarification
Because of an editing
change made by EPA
noise officials during pro-
gram review, the article
"Curbing Construction
Noise" in the October
EPA Journal contained a
misstatement. The sen-
tence about back-up noise
devices on vehicles stat-
ing "The necessarily high
level of the warning sig-
nal, however, often dis-
turbs residents nearby."
should have read, "The
necessarily high level of
the warning signal actu-
ally violates Federal law."
NOVFMBER/DECEMBER 1979
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Environmental Almanac: November/December 1979
Winter
of the
Monarchs
|\/] illions of monarch butter-
**' fiies are now tightly clus-
tered on towering trees in the
Sierra Madre mountains of
Mexico where they will spend
the winter in a state of semi-
dormancy before instinct will
command them north in the
spring to splash their gold and
black beauty across the Eastern
United States.
The flight of these fragile
monarchs to Mexico and their
return to this country is one of
the great natural wonders of the
world because they are able to
migrate thousands of miles and
find their way to a winter rest-
ing place they never visited
before.
Unlike young birds, which
can accompany their parents
and other older birds on migra-
tion trips, the monarchs are
guided only by an inherited
genetic pattern on their
astounding voyages.
For many years the winter
resting place of the monarchs
from the eastern United States
was a mystery to scientists.
To help resolve the puzzle,
Dr. Fred A. Urquhart, a Cana-
dian zoologist, started a pro-
gram of tagging butterflies so
that their travels could be
understood.
With the help of many volun-
A Glimpse
teers thousands of monarchs
have been caught in nets. Tiny
adhesive labels were applied to
their wings. The tags carried
identification numbers and let-
ters and a mailing address for
Dr. Urquhart's office in
Toronto.
The tagged monarchs sent to
Dr. Urquhart included one
killed by a California golfer who
was about to drive his teed-up
ball when a monarch alighted
on it. Although the golfer could
not brake his swing, he sent the
remains to Dr. Urquhart.
The data from the tagging
program led Dr. Urquhart to
believe that the monarchs were
spending the winter somewhere
in Mexico.
A lepidopterist, Kenneth
Brugger, who was working in
Mexico, heard about Dr.
Urquhart's request for help in
finding the wintering site. With
encouragement from Dr.
Urquhart, Brugger finally found
onJan.9,1975,a mountain
forest site where millions of
monarchs were clustered.
In 1976, Dr. Urquhartcli-
maxed a four-decade study of
the monarchs when he visited
the wintering location.
"I had waited decades for
this moment," Dr. Urquhart
wrote in the National Geo-
graphic magazine. "What a
glorious, incredible sight."
The monarchs at these Mexi-
can mountain sites gather in
such enormous numbers that
sometimes tree branches crack
under their weight. The winter
temperatures at these locations
hover around freezing. Since
the monarchs are inactivated by
the chiM they burn up almost
none of the fatthey will need
on their return journey to the
Eastern United States.
Monarchs in the United
States west of the Rocky Moun-
tains migrate to winter roosting
sites with similar climatic con-
ditions in California. One of
these sites is Pacific Grove,
which has passed an ordinance
forbidding anyone to interfere
with the monarchs' roosting
site, a major tourist attraction.
The monarchs, after flying
north in the spring, lay pin-head
size eggs on milkweed plants.
One of the remarkable things
about this insect is that the first
generation of new butterflies
lives a little more than a month
and does not migrate south. But
these butterflies produce
descendants which at the end
of summer will fly south.
Sometimes the monarch
eggs are laid in August and in
the five-week period when the
egg hatches and the emerging
caterpillar metamorphoses into
a butterfly, the weather can be-
come too cold for a successful
voyage south. One monarch
admirer who had been observ-
ing the metamorphosis of a
monarch on a milkweed plant
kept in a vase at her home be-
came concerned about the fate
of the creature because of the
rapid approach of winter.
She drove to the airport and
persuaded a stewardess on a
west coast-bound flight to carry
the monarch in a small con-
tainer without charge. When the
plane landed in a chilly rain at
San Francisco, the thoughtful
stewardess took the traveling
monarch to a friend who was a
stewardess on a plane bound
for the Monterey Peninsula,
some 80 miles further south,
where this butterfly was finally
released into warm sunshine.
One of the protections mon-
archs have is that while in the
caterpillar stage they absorb
strong natural chemicals from
feeding on milkweed plants.
These chemicals carry over into
the creature's butterfly adult-
hood and often sicken the birds
or animals which eat a mon-
arch, discouraging further
predation on these insects.
Dr. Lincoln P. Brower, a biol-
ogy professor at Amherst Col-
lege and an authority on mon-
archs, told EPA Journal that he
is concerned about the fate of
the monarch's wintering sites.
He said that in Mexico big
trees are being cut on the
fringes of some of the areas
where these insects rest. He
added that in southern Califor-
nia new developments in Santa
Cruz and elsewhere are threat-
ening some of the "butterfly"
trees.
"The migration of the mon-
archs is unique," he stated.
"The grandeur of this migration
is one of the great natural
wonders of the world and could
be lost."
He noted that Mexico where
the majority of monarchs spend
the winter could reap economic
benefits from tourist visits if the
butterfly sites were properly
protected.
Discussing the future of the
monarchs. Dr. Brower con-
ceded some people might take
the attitude that the fate of
these butterflies is of little
importance.
"Yes," he commented, "and
you could also burn up the
Louvre in Paris and destroy the
Mona Lisa."—C.D.P.
Opposite: Clusters of migrating
monarchs enshroud the tree
that supports them in Mexican
Mountains. Photo by George
Lepp.
Back cover: Wind sculpts the
snow at the base of gnarled
trees.
40
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