News in Perspective; 119; You and the Environment, or The Fight Against Pollution

. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. from Washington, D.C., news in perspective, you and the environment, presented by National Educational Television and The New York Times, with Clifton Daniel, Associate Editor, Walter Sullivan, Science Editor, Gladwin Hill, Environmental Specialist, and Special Guest, David D. Dominic, Commissioner of the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, and Dennis Hayes, Harvard University student, and National Coordinator of Next One Environmental Action Teaching. Now, Mr. Daniel,

the earth is our home. Every day it gets dirtier, uglier, and more crowded, indeed it is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. What are we doing to the earth? What should we do about it? What can we do as individual citizens? Around this table are four men with answers to these questions. First, Gladwin Hill, National Environmental Correspondent of the New York Times. Glad what's the problem as you see it? The environmental problem can be stated very simply, I think. As you say, we've made an awful mess of the place where we live. The place where we live is the earth, a ball only about 8,000 miles in diameter, spinning through space with a thin layer of air surrounding it. Three and a half billion people are living on that ball. The number of people in

their collective wastes are seriously contaminating that thin layer of air, the limited amount of water on the surface of the ball, and the soil on which we live. The huge number of people, which is now doubling every 30 years, and their rather poor distribution over the face of the globe, are causing severe overcrowding and a pec of other troubles, like noise, lack of open space for recreation, poor use of land for growing food. Millions of the world's people are dying every year of starvation. Millions more, perhaps a majority of the people in the United States, are dying slowly and more subtly, from bad air, from chemical pollution, who's affects we aren't sure of, from the constant nervous strain of things like noise and overcrowding. Let's look at one example air pollution. It's no longer just a local regional, state, or even national problem. It's become

international. Through all our combustion processes, we're putting so many ways to gases into the air that they threaten to disrupt the globe's whole heat balance. Add to the air pollution problem all the other sorts of environmental degradation, and you have a truly scary situation. Hundreds of reputable scientists, men who are not fanatics, not alarmists, are telling us that this reckless ravaging of our environment, if not corrected quickly, can lead to only one end, the extermination of the human race, possibly within a couple of generations. There's one bite side of this grim situation. The solutions are staring us right in the face. Solutions, I believe, that are technically and economically possible. Next, Walter Sullivan, Science Editor of the New York Times. Walter, do you agree from a scientific point of view that remedies are available and

that they are feasible? Well, they certainly can be found. I'm not sure that we have the best remedies in here now, scientifically and technologically. But to clear up our air and our water and our environment, we'll require such revolutionary changes in our ways of doing things that I think one cannot isolate the scientific part of it. It's going to be a combination of sociological, social and political as well as scientific processes. And our first guest, David D. Dominic, a conservationist and a lawyer who at the age of 33 is Commissioner of the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration. He was one of the team of young men who helped President Nixon put together his message to Congress on the environment. Commissioner Dominic, what is the federal government doing? All proposing to do to solve our environmental problems, to apply the available

solutions? Well, first, the federal government must look to reform, reform internally. Then it must mobilize itself, mobilize all of the existing agencies to solving the environmental problem. I think also it must make itself more responsive to citizen concern and to citizen pressure. And finally, where new regulations are needed, where new laws are needed, these must be proposed to the Congress. The opening shot for the Nixon administration was the president's environmental message of February 10, and I hope we can talk more about that on this program. We certainly shall. Meanwhile, another guest, Dennis Hayes, 25 years old, who comes from Canvas, Washington, a small paper milling town. Mr. Hayes is a graduate of

Stanford University and former president of the Stanford student body. He was attending the School of Government at Harvard until last January when he left to become a national coordinator of the day of environmental action, they call it Earth Day, scheduled for April 22. Mr. Hayes, aside from government efforts or parallel with them, what should ordinary citizens be doing about the environment, especially young people? A good part of it, I think, can be summed up in a response to something. Mr. Dominic said, among the things that he is attempting to do and that the federal government is attempting to do is to make that federal government more responsive to citizen pressure. What we're attempting to do is to generate as much citizen pressure as possible. The environment has now become the new fashionable issue. It's what everybody's talking about, including a great many politicians. All of the key industrialists were having all sorts of newspaper ads and all sorts of messages from Congress, and a few fairly hollow messages, I think, from the administration. We're going to try and make

some of those messages begin to hold some more significant kinds of content. We hope that we can begin addressing some issues, not on the basis of a series of scientific remedies, but rather that we can begin to question some of the fundamental value judgments that we believe the American society is making that are heading us in the wrong direction. Back to the problem. Well, to how acute is it? Is this the big issue of the 70s or is it the big issue for the rest of our lives, for the rest of the century? Well, it certainly both, really. It just becomes more acute as time goes on as we continue, as Glad said, to dump more and more of our waste of our garbage into the air and the water and so forth. I don't think we really know how acute it is. We don't know, for example, why we don't know clearly why emphysema and lung cancer have increased at such a rate. It would appear that smoking for the primary blame, but there are a lot of people who are

getting lung cancer who don't smoke, is this because of environmental pollution. We know that the climate is changing. The simple explanation was that we were changing the climate by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, which changes the radiation balance, which made the world get warmer. But over the last decade or so, the world has been getting colder again, apparently. Now you can say that's because of the dust that's going into the air. But the truth is that we really don't know what we're doing to the environment in many respects. Well, how soon will the vital elements, particularly air and water, be consumed or made useless at the present rate of destruction or degradation? Well, they're not really being made useless. Again, you come back to the economic problem. After all, you can take the dirtiest water in the world and to still it and get the still water out of it. It's an economic problem as to whether it's

practical to do this on a large scale. We talk a lot about desalamentization, for example, taking seawater and removing the salt from it. When people also unbalance the ecology? Not of the ocean. No, because the ocean is so big. Please, for a long, long, everything else would run out before the oceans run out. But the economics of desalamentization, even with fusion, power and nuclear plants on a huge scale, the economics are such that only in very special cases could this water be cheap enough for agriculture. You can, you can, these salt water for drinking for industrial purposes, but to water the land is an awfully long way off to do that economically. It's an economic problem, especially anything. How does, but do you think the situation is conventional and looked at from the federal government point of view? Well, I was about to break in there. I, I feel we've got to define desperate in two ways. First, we have to look at the incremental damage that is being done, the daily damage. And then we should look at potential

catastrophic damage. Two days ago, I was up in Alaska looking at a severe oil pollution problem we had up there. I come from Wyoming myself. I'm not familiar with the oceans or coastal zones, but I was impressed by the fact that we had incremental damage being done to the Gulf of Alaska by continued oil spill. The consequences of that we simply don't know. In addition, had this severe spill come during a migratory period for say the black brand and had it occurred in Bristol Bay, we might have wiped out the entire black brand population. And I think when we talk about disaster, we should look at two very different types of disaster. Will you talk about catastrophic damage and disaster? And a few minutes ago, Gladwin Hill was talking quite casually about the

extermination of the human race, possibly within a couple of generations. He's not the only one who talks that way. Listen to the voice of Dr. Barry Kamina, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, perhaps the most arresting and persuasive voice being heard on this subject. A lot of us haven't realized it yet, but we, the people of Earth, have come to a turning point in our habitation of this planet. The only thing that keeps men alive is a thin, delicate layer of air, soil, and water, which we have been degrading, spoiling, and plundering recently at an unbelievable rate. I think we are headed for a terrible disaster, unless we stop polluting and stop it soon. The Earth can't take much more and keep us alive. We worry about saving endangered species of animal life like the alligator. Right now, men is an endangered species. Dr. Kamina's voice was recorded for a series of film strips on the environment produced by the

Book and Education Division of the New York Times. Dr. Kamina says we are headed for a terrible disaster, unless we stop polluting soon. How soon, glad? How much time do we have to save men the endangered species? Well, I think one of the real scary aspects of this question is that we don't know. We like a huge group of people groping through a dark tunnel, not knowing what's underfoot, and with possible pitfalls right ahead of us. The air pollution situation for instance is over the country is severe enough. The concentration of contaminants that have a chance of flooky combination of meteorological circumstances could bring another donora Pennsylvania type disaster to any one of a dozen cities very suddenly. We're just flirting

with disaster. In regard to water pollution, some of the ableists people in the government tell us that although as water points out you can know it's still water and purifying, that isn't the way we do it now in our water supply plants and cities. We do it by various sorts of chemical treatment. The experts say that our backs are right to the wall on cleaning up a lot of this water because it now has not only human waste in a community sewage, but all sorts of esoteric industrial chemicals. And then you imply that one of these days, one of these plants will get a batch of water that they can't clean up. We don't know for instance everything there is to know about the virus kind of the water which is not remedied by conventional chemical treatment.

Those are the sort of things we're flirting with that make that question of how much time do we have to save man? A big anxious ex. I think we all like to dramatize problems and I think to say that the human race faces imminent extinction because of pollution is exaggerating the situation. And I don't think that's a good idea. I think we have to be realistic. Man, there's an ingenious, a very ingenious animal. That's why he survived the ice ages and he can survive a good deal of challenge today. But we are confronted with the possibility of setting in motion processes that are irreversible. It is quite conceivable and these could be disastrous to man but they wouldn't happen in years but they might happen in decades or centuries in that we could set in motion climate changes that would start a new ice age. We could all

hear the habitability of many parts of the earth. I don't think man would become extinct but the changes would be would be drastic. The population experts say that we've already set in motion a dangerous and irreversible trend and just the rate that we're multiplying where all the world will not become excruciatingly overcrowded presumably for another 30 years. As early as 1975, this excessive population and its strains may start causing all sorts of havoc around me. Did it say yes? Yes, I think that I'd probably take some rather rigorous exception to the calming although I can understand a reason for a desire of a moment of calm and sort of a passionate strum that's beginning to brew in this country. But we kind of look some very legitimate reasons for that passionate strum which is beginning to brew. As you suggest, there are great

many things that we don't know and we're really unsure how close we might be to extinction. Now for saying extinction simply due to pollution I guess the probabilities are somewhat debatable. If we're going to be throwing in probabilities the result from all of the toys that we're giving our Pentagon strategists to fool around with, then the probabilities become somewhat greater. As everyone around this table knows and the listening audience is rapidly becoming aware, land areas of the earth are incapable of producing enough oxygen to sustain the animal life that is on it. We're counting upon the sea in order to produce enough oxygen to be able to support living populations on the earth sections of the planet. We're rapidly cutting down the capacity of the sea to accomplish that. The Torrey Canyon had it been tearing pesticides or herbicides instead of the oil which eventually washed up on the white cliffs of Dover. Had it been tearing pesticides it would have wiped out all marine organisms probably in the North Sea that would have caused us a very sort of oxygen shortage. These are all whole series of things. We've created a dead sea off the coast of New York between New York and New Jersey. We've got Monterey Bay which is rapidly turning into a dead sea due to the high level of

a whole series of chlorinated hydrocarbons that are being used as pesticides. In area after area after area we're wreaking a high degree of disastrous destruction of our environment. Like areas dead, the cayenne hooker rivers and flammable. These are the sorts of things that you know we're talking about emphysema rates and what's causing them could it be smoking, could it be a whole series of environmental concerns? Well there's a very close correlation between emphysema rates and rates of urbanization. New York cities where they're very high they've been increased their 500% in terms of fatalities in the last 10 years. In the state of California the death rate from emphysema has increased 12% a year for the last 20 years. These are the kinds of things that are scaring people and scaring them quite legitimately. Now Dennis Hayes talks about dead seas, the mission of Dominic mentioned the possibility of catastrophic damage, you well to recall the ice age. Are we threatened with any of these imminent classic catastrophes, another flood, another ice age, massive suffocation of some sort of mission? I don't think we know what the next catastrophe may be. Well are you a member

of the doomsday school which Dennis Hayes seems to belong to? No and I'm not sure the Dennis Hayes is either but I think the doomsdayers have served to focus attention. But I think in order to get beyond simply crying doomsday we've got to look at individual environmental problems. We've got to look at the disposal of radioactive waste. We've got to look at unification in a given lake. We've got to look at the total use of energy in the country of water pollution which is my area of responsibility is really just a very small part. If we if we consider that it is predicted that energy demands will increase by twice in the next 10 years. What is going to supply those demands? Fossil fuels? Nuclear? What is it going to be?

How are we going to dispose of the pollutants from those energy fuels? We've got to focus on specifics. Well when we talk of specifics and solutions, what would you say that our priorities are? What should we do first? What's the simplest thing? The cheapest thing is you mentioned economics of the matter. What's the simplest thing to do? What's the first thing we should do? What's going to kill us quicker or damage us most? I can't really answer that. I just seem to be taking refuge all the time and saying we don't know and we don't know and I think it's but if you were in Commissioner Dominic's position. Well then I'm responsible for war. I know about war. There's also fields of responsibility. I'm sure for the whole environmental program that the federal government has eased up to shape it. Well I just made it clear to that. And then what the priorities are. All right let's let's return quickly to the president's

message on the environment. It dealt with water pollution, air pollution, solid waste control, recreation land, reorganization of the federal government, and the air of water pollution control. The president tried to break out different areas of responsibility, responsibility for treating municipal waste, human sewage, responsibility for treating industrial waste, responsibility for treating agricultural waste, non-point source waste. As to the latter he said we don't have answers yet. As to industrial waste, the basic premise is that the treatment of industrial waste must be done by industry. And the cost of that must be a cost of doing business. The municipal waste, this is a situation that is now facing us which is in building for the last 100 years. We simply have not taken care adequately of human sewage. So we've got to build

municipal waste treatment plants around the country. And the president proposes spending four billion dollars of federal money, match by six billion dollars of state and local money for this purpose. And these are the raw bare bones of his proposal. You raised the question earlier Dennis of whether the government was fully responsive to the present public interest and concern in this question. You think the federal program in monetary terms, just mentioned by permission Dominic is adequate, is it sufficiently bold, sufficiently best? I think that the monetary program suggested by Mr. Dominic and by the president can only be characterized as hilarious. But in view of the kinds of things that we're dealing with, that hilarity begins to lose a little bit of its impact, because we're talking about some things which have drastically terrible effects upon people. The priorities which are reflected in the president's message as well as in the president's budget I think are absolutely outrageous. We're

not spending 53% of the money to the federal government is taking in on means of defense. Defense is not what that's really all about at all. It's not at all national interest. We're spending it to build ABMs, we're spending it to build MIRVs, we're spending it to build fighters. And we're talking about programs now in the environmental area where we're giving it a little bit of seed money on the $4 billion is going to actually result in an expenditure next year of summer between $40 and $50 million. And that's a seed grant cash outlet, right? That's a seed grant which perhaps might grow up to $4 billion provided it can be matched by $6 billion, which the states and local governments are supposed to be raising, which they're going to have great difficulty raising because they can't feel funds anymore. We've tried to take care of that with the environmental financing. Which is going to be financed only to the degree of $100 million, which doesn't do anything. Obviously you're in time for $2 billion. But if I could sort of throw this up. I mean, we're really not talking about that. That's good. I'm sure his rebuttal will come out later. I'm sure his rebuttal is going to be coming later and I like a chance to reverb his rebuttal because I think that's all the programs go all about. The problems with all of these things are that when we're assigning the responsibilities for various people to administer tasks,

we're putting the wrong sorts of people, I think many cases, into those administrative positions. We have a series of laws that are being passed with regard to environmental quality. But by and large, they don't begin to have the kind of stringency which is required. We talk about industrial responsibility. Well, industries have shown us how responsive they've been for the last century in this country and they're just not responsible. We have to tell them what has to be done for to protect the environment. We have to have a good rigorous legislation and it's simply not being passed. It's not being pushed for by the President administration. We, over and beyond this, I'd like to suggest that maybe, while it's very desirable to look at the trees as the commissioner suggested, we have to look at specific environmental problems. I'd like to suggest that sometime in the course of this program, we stop looking just at the trees and we start looking at a whole istic view. If we're talking about where the President is putting his funds, we have to be talking not only about the, what is it, 1.2 cents of the dollar that he's spending upon natural resources or something like that once you drop out the social security and the other things. There was a massive shuffling of the budget this time when the President is showing the gigantic pie up there and he's showing how we're splitting it up. That's a different pie than we were looking at before. Now,

we've stopped and we've said that veteran's pensions would used to be considered as part of defense because it was paying for previous wars and now it's over here in natural resources. We've done all of these kinds of shufflings with social security and other things and it's phony. The whole administration has been doing a whole series of terribly phony things. It's prime thrust on the driving crucial issue of the day of Vietnam really amounts to a totally non-existent plan to end an undi-cleared war which is backed only by a silent majority. I mean, how far can this pony in this to go? There's got to be some kind of a limit. The President, if he wants to really talk about environmental concerns, has to start talking about the trans-alaskan pipeline system, the SS start talking about the SST which he increased the funding for just enormously. And these are the kinds of things. We can't look just at these one specific little proposal here when we're talking about the environment. We have to start looking about where this country is going, where it's placing its priorities. And I think that holistic picture is terribly depressing. I don't think the Commissioner Dominic can probably end the Vietnam war, at least not immediately, but what about the other points? This hay is raised. All right, I think that the answers should not be complicated. And when we get into budget questions, they do become

complicated. Let me give a simple answer to the budgetary process, and that is the federal Water Pollution Control Administration, which I head up, is the only agency in the Department of Interior that has had a significant budget increase and has had a significant increase in personnel. Now, there are being imposed upon the Department of Defense budget decreases. Perhaps we can say they're not enough. I'm not here to debate that question, but I can verify that the President is extremely serious and extremely committed to giving environmental quality priority attention in his administration. And a $4 billion program over the next four years is not an insignificant program. It's a very substantial commitment of the federal budget.

An unfortunate legislation. The President has gone forward for very tough, swift, equitable enforcement procedures. We're going to have a tough time getting him through the commons. We call for affluent standards. We call for jurisdiction, federal jurisdictional. We're all navigable waters. We call for injunctive relief against instances where we have potential pollution that would cause irreparable damage. These are things which are controversial, and they're going to be hard to get through the Congress. The President committed himself to cleaning up the federal agency. He issued an executive order, and more important than the order is to go behind it and look at what monies are committed to do the job. I think Mayor Lindsey said every budget is a political document, and the executive order, which said to the federal

agencies, clean up the accordance with state standards, wouldn't mean anything if there wasn't money committed by the President did do it. And I, as you mentioned, Mayor Lindsey and State Standard, I think we ought to make the point that it isn't only the federal government that's concerned here. Glad you've been tabbing around the country, going one coast to the other, seeing this problem at the local level. State and local governments sufficiently aroused, are they spending enough money? They may have the most one, and not all awareness on these things, but from an organizational standpoint, I think they are woefully inadequate. The President's message in regard to water pollution presupposed a great degree of collaboration between the federal government and the states, and that was plausible. It's been going on along with it. A similar sort of collaboration was set for it, implied in regard to air pollution.

You look around among the states, and there's hardly a, not a state that I know of, that has a proper or anything like adequate, probably air control organization laws, and that sort of thing. We're back in the dark ages on air pollution. And the picture of the handling of solid waste in the communities of the country is just ridiculous, the way it's done. It's a wonder we all haven't ground in that long sense. Every community has a different system. It all involves a very, very dubious Chinese bookkeeping. It's no wonder that in a number of places, the underworld has gotten in it as an open invitation for stealing these sloppy things. Well, those are some of the things where we get that shape up very quickly, and even to start moving forward, didn't it? I could respond to the commissioner very briefly. I don't want to

turn this just into a two-person debate, but I do think that there was some significant sorts of misrepresentations that were put out. I'm certainly the last person to contend that $4 billion is an insignificant figure, and when you're saying that it's not insignificant, yes, I can agree with that, but you have to look at that $4 billion in regard to the magnitude of the federal budget and the enormous magnitude of national problems. I've been talking with a number of scientific people and a few governmental people and certainly an awful lot of faculty members and students across the country. I haven't met a single person that doesn't contend that that $4 billion is less than one sixth of what it will take to clean up our water. Let alone our water, which is the only thing that, as you say, just has been increased within the context of your estimate, $100 billion, didn't you make that estimate? I said it's the element cross will be somewhere out of sight over $100 billion. The commissioner has one $50 billion item, I think you'd be glad to want to like that. One item alone, that's 50 billion dollars.

Yes, let's define what the $10 billion total figure should do. It should build waste treatment plants and interceptors who are in the municipal sector. It doesn't deal with industry, it doesn't deal with agriculture, it doesn't deal with asset line drainage, it is not going to clean up the water. The $20 billion figure that I was citing and that everyone else is citing is a minimal figure is also giving with municipal treatment plants. Well, I would like to see those figures and animals. When you can look at them, they're in 1966 report to President Johnson, and we're a little bit late to start to bring up that report, that's extrapolated. In the latest issue, Fortune is the Bentley, Jean Belinsky, both say scientists are saying that this multibillion dollar program to treat waste water in the same old way is to use his word sheer insanity. He says that the conventional technology that we are now using cannot possibly cope with phosphorus and many other pollutants that won't be touched by President treatment methods, is that true? Well, that gets us into advanced waste treatment, which is a developing

technology for removing phosphorus, nitrogen, nutrients from the water. We are putting advanced waste treatment in certain places, particularly in Washington, D.C., where you have the Potomac River, which just sloshes up and down, it's an open estuary, it doesn't flush itself out, you get algae blooms, so you've got to remove phosphorus and nitrogen. Now, as to what technology is best, that's one of the hardest questions any public administrator has to face, and I think you have to go with what you've got. You can't wait around until somebody develops a black box, which is going to take care of all our problems. We're going with the best technology we have. We're going very slowly with that technology. And in the whole point that I was trying to make, could I respond to another thing that the commissioners talked as well? One, when we're talking about cash out laser from this four billion dollars, we've already pointed out that that's not going to be matched, it can't be matched by the local areas, because of the administration's

anti-inflation policies, which are making it surely impossible at this point to be selling the bonds that are necessary. But even if that were to be done, it's going to be financed during the course of the first year as you suggested yourself to a total outlay of 53 million, which doesn't begin to scratch the surface at all, and it's not going to be paid for over the course of four years. That's an extrapolation, which is to be going on over the course of, I believe, it's seven or eight years if I'm correct, Commissioner. But there was one suggestion in your speech that was, I think, very misleading, that doesn't really relate to the set all, but you threw it off casual, and I think we really have to respond to it. We were talking about a decrease, a fairly small decrease in the Pentagon budget during the course of this next year. The degree that we're having a decrease in the Pentagon budget is supposedly going to be a reflection of the fact that we hope to be decreasing the scale of the war in Vietnam. But what's really significant in the Pentagon budget, I believe, is what's happening to non-Vietnam expenditures. And non-Vietnam expenditures this next year are going up, not only a little bit, they're going up $5.3 billion. And most of that is going into projects, which are largely seed projects, which are going to require a fantastic extrapolation of budgetary figures over the course of the next five to 10 years. It includes $1.5 billion for an ABM system that the minimal estimates say will cost $10 billion.

Most people say if we really put a dental cost $50 billion. It includes $1 billion sitting for a new Navy plane, which is going to be in the end cost of $36 billion. It's $370 million. And almost insignificant, I'm not for development of an Air Force plane, which is going to cost us $25 billion. You start throwing those kinds of figures around you. When we start talking about $4 billion over four years, only $53 million next year, the figure is kind of pale into insignificant. And Dennis Hayes talks about this problem in budgetary and political terms. You were at the recent University of Michigan teaching where these problems were debated. And you reported that there were quite a number of heretical ideas heard there. Do we have to give up our American standard of living, our luxuries, our gadgets, change our whole economy in order to deal with this problem? What are the things that the people at the University of Michigan thought we would have to do? Well, the interesting thing about what was said there were that

not that things were suggested that never been suggested to be poorly. As the zero population growth for the United States and the whole world, the fact that they were discussed in a very matter of fact way as if they were almost inevitable. And the fact that as Dennis has indicated that as far as industries concerned, the whole problem cannot be measured in terms of dollars and cents. He's got to be measured in terms of a new ethic. There was debate, for instance, your radicals contend that the capitalist free enterprise system and a pollution free environment are essentially incompatible because industries of main concern is making money, not keeping things clean. The other school of thought on that is that one of industries obligations along with making money is of being lost. And if you apply the proper laws to them, that their corruption of our environment can be avoided within the framework we have now.

There was a great deal of discussion about the means of stabilizing the population and as an opening abortion, a wide-up lifting legal restraints on it. Anybody who wants it can get it and those who don't want to be involved in that sort of thing will have to be. One more question about science and what it can do. Hasn't science let us down? Hasn't science betrayed us? Science and your view and mine I think was supposed to make the world better and better. Instead of which, all we've heard around this table is that the world is getting worse and worse. Science gives society tools, science and technology offer to society tools to do things. But science has such, which is the quest for knowledge essentially, does not determine how those tools are used. Society, whether it's the big business and industry, whether it's the government or the Pentagon

or the voters. It is society who decides how the tools will be used. So we really can't blame science for how things have worked out except insofar as we can blame ourselves. We can blame ourselves. You can, of course, side of society and they're becoming much more activist because of this now. You can say yes if the clock is still and we have never discovered nuclear energy and we've never discovered the steam engine or the internal combustion engine and the right brothers had stuck to making bicycles. We wouldn't have any of these problems. We'd be living as we did a century ago or two centuries ago. But of course, time does not stand still. Neither does man's ingenuity and the problem is to use man's ingenuity in a constructive way. And we have reached the stage in human history where we can no longer move forward in a

haphazard way. The oceans and the atmosphere and the water was capable of absorbing just so much junk and we've reached that point where it can't absorb any more. You've mentioned big business and industry. Commissioner is private industry fully alert to our peril and what are they proposing to do? Mr. Hayes thinks that they aren't doing nearly enough. Would you agree? I agree that they're not doing nearly enough. I don't think that in our present system industry is going to do enough until they're told to do so and told by government, by the federal government. Well, the president has made a very dramatic choice. He has sought strong federal legislation, legislation that will extend across the board, across the country. And I think his reasoning is sound. You've got to set the rules. You've got to get every industry complying with

those rules before you're going to get the job done. Glad you come from Los Angeles where the automobile is the villain of the piece if I'm not mistaken. Automobiles count for nearly half of air pollution in the United States. In Los Angeles and in Detroit, do you see early solutions for this terrible pollution? On the part of industry, what's industry doing? Well, you mean the automobile industry? The automobile industry. The automobile industry is making great claims to the effectiveness of the pollution controls. It's building onto cars now. They're claiming 80% reduction in hydrocarbons and 70% in carbon monoxide, something like that. They haven't touched yet the problem of controlling a third big family of contaminants, oxides of nitrogen. But these numbers are subject to a great deal of skepticism because they are based on tests of a very tiny

number of automobiles coming off the assembly line and the automobiles are not tested cold as they come off the assembly line. They are allowed to tune these test cars beforehand. They say the rationale is, well, this is the tuning that the dealer would give the car, which is not necessarily true. Secondly, they've been allowed to average the results of these different test cars. So that one test car may be way over the limits, but another one is under that balance of it now. So the reality of these film reductions, the auto industry is claiming, which is a name of own name here, is somewhat dubious. Unfortunately, there's no way outside of requiring much more comprehensive testing that we will know whether they're right until another four or five years have gone by and we get all of the, all along the deal for you, this type of new control of the car.

It is. Yeah, so I think that you've opened up a very interesting door that we might look at a little bit with the internal combustion engine and talk just briefly about the possibilities for a flexible response within our present economic and governmental systems with regard to it. We presently have in the United States about 3.6 million miles of roads. That's that's one mile of road for every square mile of land surface in the country. That's sort of a vested interest in favor of the automobile. We have billions of dollars invested in Detroit. That's another vested interest. We have billions of dollars invested in the petroleum industry, which is now being even increased with the Alaskan North Slope and the TAPS, the trans-Alaskan pipeline system, which is probably going to be going through it if Secretary Hickel has his way. That's going to be another series of vested interests. All of these people are responsible for a great deal of advertising, which is going on having a tremendous impact upon the American public. How do you have control over that kind of a media? How do you begin to challenge all of these billions of dollars? All of these sort of patterns of behaviors and behavioral assumptions that sort of permeate the society? What exactly can be done? Well, as Mr. Hill if suggested earlier,

there's a reasonable probability that in Los Angeles or Detroit or any of a number of other cities in the very near future, we're going to have what's known as a thermal inversion. A lot of these people who have emphysema or who have asthma are going to be dying. It's entirely possible that in one brief encounter, we could have 30, 40, 50,000 people die. As a result of the internal combustion engine, and there is absolutely nothing being done within the context of the present system to try to reverse that. Commissioner? May I respond to that, Dennis, and I don't usually find myself on the side of defending industry, but I do believe that the automobile industry has agreed to go to non-letted gas, and the significance of this is that catalytic converters can be placed on the automobile, which will be effective in removing certain types of emissions. The oil industry, hopefully, will come along and say they will sell a non-letted

gas, so have to, if all the cars go that way. Now, before you go on, yes, what that really means, if you're going to non-letted gas and most people's interpretation is that we're going to nickel instead, and nobody knows for sure, but there's a high probability that nickel is supposed to let is going to be even more dangerous. And the responsiveness of the automobile industry, I think, can be shown with regard to the state of the mystery hill also major, with regard to auto emissions and the kinds of devices they're not putting on. It's true that indeed they are reducing by some percentages, and it's very debatable what percentages they are actually reducing. Well, that's some of the things we've been trying to do here, but they're actually not only not having any impact in terms of reducing the amount of nitrogen dioxide, which is a very, very dangerous auto pollutant. As a result of these things, they are actually increasing the rate of nitrogen dioxide by 100%, or doubling the rate. Besides, there's also a planned obsolescence in these devices that are expected to wear out after slightly less than 8,000 miles. And as you know, the life expectancy of a car is appreciably. Well, it's getting to be less and less, but it's a bit more than 8,000 miles even today. Well, you've prefaced all this with some statements that

these are debatable, and I think that's hopeful and that's helpful that we were focusing in on what is debatable. Now, the president in his message said that he was going to seek legislation, which would allow him to inspect vehicles off the assembly not blind, not this particular prototype inspection, which Gladwell and Hill mentioned. In addition, he had announced on the same day that the mission standard for 73 and 75 would be drastically tightened up. Finally, he said in his message, I as president with responsibility for the help of the people cannot take the risk that we will solve pollution, pollution problems from the internal combustion engine in time. And so he is instituted a program federal money to develop unconventional engines,

and I think it's very helpful and very hopeful. No, I don't. We've talked now about private industry, government, federal and local. But I think myself that everyday citizens are also this boilers. Pollution is a very largely a product of consumption. I think we should ask ourselves what can ordinary citizens do, especially young people. Last week, I got a letter from room 213 at Lafayette School in Waterloo, Ohio. It was signed by 24 pupils, and that teacher Mrs. Christine Sinopoli. The letter said in a child handwriting, please tell all God-fearing people in this country to change their wasteful ways now. We 10-year-olds and our kids want to have something

left. With the letter was a list of 20 things ordinary people can do to reduce waste and pollution. For example, by low phosphate detergents, ask for returnable beverage containers, use cloth napkins, don't leave your motor running, do not burn trash, do not use insecticides such as DDT, work for population control, and my favorite, and discourage junk mail. Dennis, do you think that the wasteful, heedless, affluent American people will ever respond to such appeals? I think that they have to. Not only the wasteful American people, but as we were suggesting, this is something which is probably a function of western civilization, a whole set of ingrained values that can probably be traced back over several thousands of years. You suggested earlier, Mr. Daniel, that I was dealing with this whole set of issues in terms of economics and in terms of politics.

I don't think that those are necessarily the crucial variables, although I think that they are crucial variables. I was trying to deal with them on those terms because they're the terms that Mr. Dominic was able to respond on, and I think that the present governmental structure can be pretty well defeated by debating them on their own terms, economic and political terms. I think that most of these programs are very hollow, dealing with the internal combustion engine, I don't think that we're talking about a different sort of private vehicle. I think we've got to be talking about public transportation. We're talking about public transportation. We're talking about trains, and if you look at the way that the federal budget is going with regard to trains, you find that it's going down. But basically responding directly to your question, there are, yeah, I think that there are an awful lot of valued conflicts that have to begin to be resolved when Mr. Hill was talking about zero population growth. He wasn't talking simply about developing a better contraceptive. The contraceptive is a partial answer, and the Lord knows that we need a better pill, but that's not going to do the problem. That's not going to solve it as long as the typical American family wants to point to children. We allow you and your group organizing a day of, I suppose, propaganda and

enlightenment, you might call it, on April the 22nd. What kind of activity is a plan for Earth Day, as you call it? It's a day of enlightenment. I'm not sure I would characterize it as a day of propaganda, but I think that probably the issues can be characterized truthfully with the dubious areas being well-defined, but the factual areas being also well-defined, and they're scary enough. As an effort to try to bring the American public to come to a much fuller understanding of how badly it is messing itself up in the institutions which permeate it, are messing it up. There are a wide range of activities that are planned. What we're really doing is having a totally decentralized operation. We're not setting down any policies from the office in Washington. We're asking local groups to assess their own particular environment to find out what the greatest abuses are within the context of their environment, to then start pointing some fingers to start figuring out what they can do to make things a little bit better. Well, incidentally, I should say that national educational television will, on April the 22nd, have a special all-day coverage of this teaching or this day of national

agitation and demonstration. Incidentally, you say, point the finger. That is certainly fine. It's indignation as I'm sure very useful, but it mostly puts the blame, it seems to me, on somebody else. What are the universities and university students doing to develop practical programs for dealing with pollution? How many young activists, for example, are planning careers in the environmental science? Are they going into science? Are they going into politics? A great money that we're going into science and into the environmental science. There's one of the problems within the context of working university structures that you're allowed to take what courses exist and in most areas these courses simply haven't been developed. They're being developed now almost entirely, or it's the response to student as you termed it agitation, I think I would term it student education. What we're doing is in university after university after university and a number of colleges developing good sound environmental programs that are now beginning to get some funding. Once again, we're dealing not though with specific

types of piecemeal solutions that most of us would do as being largely bandages that are having little impact upon actual causes. The kinds of questions that have to be asked are, are the kinds of questions that perhaps most appropriately would be asked in philosophy courses? A lot of us believe that what is happening is not at all an aberration or a mistake, but a logical sort of out to us, a great many of the natural tenants. The greed which tends to permeate western civilization, the desire for more and more material acquisitions, and the capacity to rely without questioning upon a series of institutions that time after time after time of the leading us down the wrong path. We have to start developing a new kind of, well if you want to use the word and you kind of politics. Well I think almost mentioned politics because there was a political disagreement or there is a political disagreement, isn't it? Yes, but I was going to pick up the philosophical cue there. I've heard this referred to as the Garden of Eden syndrome that at least at a conference on our last guinea commentary that I was at recently. It was suggested that perhaps our whole tradition, the Judeo-Christian ethic, is based on an assumption

that the world was put here for our benefit as opposed to some of the eastern philosophies which see more men living in a compatible association with nature. And that we have to start thinking in these terms. I think if you really go back and read the Bible carefully you will find that it does see man as living in harmony with his environment. Well the Garden of Eden you see was put there to make life pleasant for us. Well as we're speaking of man and making life pleasant for him I think we should have said that of course we are not only entirely destroying and wastefully consuming our environment. We are overburdening it with people. Here are some facts that the New York Times produced in for that film strip. It took nearly 1 billion years for the Earth's population to double from the year 1 million BC to the year 6,000 BC. The population

doubled every thousand years after that and by 1650 AD the estimated world population had grown to 500 million. Only 200 years elapsed however before the population doubled again to 1 billion in 1850 AD. In only 80 years the Earth's population doubled again to about 2 billion in 1930. In less than 40 years it has almost doubled again to nearly 4 billion people in 1970. Doubling time has shrunk from nearly a million years to 40 years. What will happen if we don't slow down the pace of human reproduction water? We'll all starve today. Happy property. But obviously other factors will come into play. One of the things that I think hasn't been thought about a great deal is that when man lived in a rather primitive environment he lived in

isolated communities that provided a natural quarantine in terms of pathogens of disease-causing organisms. Today as the population increases we become more and more vulnerable to epidemic and I think that's just one of the many dangers of overpopulation. I think another one of course is neurotic. We're all getting more and more nervous all the time simply from the the conflict of crowding. What's the remedy? There's one urgent question that I'd like to ask transcends all of these things about how much rain has the dominant expanse of how much Mr. Nixon spends. That is a question that tampering with the confinement. I've heard it said confirm this or deny it well that the difference in the worldwide mean temperature between now and the time of the ice stage was only a tiny thing like about 4 degrees and we're already ordering it by a fraction of a degree at least when is science going to give us the answer on how to

we arrest this alarming trend and since it is a worldwide global problem rather than even international it implies that emotions and things how do we get out of politically and how do we get at it in human terms I would say how do we get that the problem of population control who has a ready answer? I think the only answer is that we have to revolutionize our whole way of doing things. Well thank you Walter that's all too short I'm afraid but our time is up. While we were talking during the past hour 14,400 babies were born. Four new babies every second of every minute. By this time tomorrow 24 hours from now there will be another 350 000 before news and perspective returns in two weeks. Four million 900 000 babies will be born

and in a year more than 125 million. How will they all survive? Quite frankly they won't. From news and perspective thank you and goodbye. News in perspective you and the environment has been presented by National Educational Television and the New York Times with Clifton Daniel, Walter Sullivan, Gladwin Hill, and special guests David D. Dominic and Dennis Hay. Two weeks from tonight news and perspective journeys to St. Petersburg, Florida, training base of the world champion New York men. Tom Seever met pitching ace and Stan Musil, St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame great, joined Clifton Daniel and the New York Times

sports experts James Roach and Joseph Dursel for a look at the big business of sports. This is N.E.T. the public television network.