page 6 the Carolina journal april 22, 2970
Reprinted from Newsweek Jan. 26, 1970
The Ravaged Environment
It seems the curse of modern
man continually to confront new
possibilities of self-destruction. He
emerged from World War II armed
with nuclear weaponry that soon
gave him the power to obliterate all
human life. His population has
since grown at a rate that could
threaten disaster on a global scale.
And now he has come face to face
with a new man-made peril, the
poisoning of his natural
environment with noxious doses of
chemicals, garbage, fumes, noise,
sewage, heat, ugliness and urban
overcrowding. Nearly unnoticed,
the scourge of pollution has already
spread so far that a few scientists
say only a drastic cure can prevent
devastation as thorough as that of
nuclear holocaust. Even to less
doleful prophets, the danger seems
sufficient to warrant a sudden
boom in the science of ecology,
which examines the precarious
relationships between living things
and their surroundings. Most
important of all, the general public
has been seized with such anger and
alarm as to goad political leaders
into proclaiming conservation of
the environment the chief task of
this decade —and perhaps of the
rest of the century.
carp that has adjusted to living off
poison. Louisiana's state bird, the
brown pelican, has vanished from
its shores (600 of the birds remain
in an island colony off the
California coast, but last year they
produced only five chicks; the rest
of their eggs collapsed with
weakened shells that contained high
concentrations of DDT).
Cleopatra's Needle, the Egyptian
obelisk brought to New York in
1881, has been vastly more worn
and scarred by its last 90 years of
existence than by its first 3,000.
Man has always been a messy
animal. Ancient Romans
complained of the sooty smoke
that suffused their city, and in the
first century Pliny described the
destruction of crops from climate
changes wrought by the draining of
lakes or deflection of rivers. But in
the past, man could always leave his
own depredations behind and move
on to some part of the planet still
unspoiled. Today, there is no
escape. Thor Heyerdahl, navigating
the mid-Atlantic in a papyrus boat
last year, discovered plastic bottles,
oily blobs and other detritus of
civilization adrift on huge patches
of ocean far from the nearest ship
or shore. The tissues of coastal
For every American,
environmental decay has become a
personal experience—a glass of
water bitter with impurities, a
mountain view obscured by haze,
the acrid smell of industrial smoke
or automobile exhaust, the boom
of jet or the rumble of truck
piercing the 85-decibel level beyond
which noise can do damage to the
ear. What he cannot see, hear,
smell, taste or touch for himself, he
discovers in a grim new sort of
obituary dotting the daily press. A
few years ago-nobody was paying
close enough attention to tell
exactly when—Lake Erie died;
acidic wastes from the surrounding
factories have strained its water of
virtually every form of life except
sludge worms and a mutant of the
wildlife in Antarctica harbor traces
of pesticides that have never been
used on the continent.
Rachel Carson pointed the way;
later the Torrey Canyon and the
Santa Barbara Channel thrust
environment into the headlines.
Now, with a suddenness that
prompts some conservationists to
fear the whole thing may be one of
America's periodic fads, the
country is raising a clamor about
pollution and its perils. In Houston,
a television station that invited
residents to send in comments on
local pollution was swamped with
80,000 responses in a month. The
tiny coastal town of Trenton,
Maine, which stood to gain
much-needed jobs and huge revenue
from a proposed aluminum-
reduction factory and nuclear
power plant, rejected the project
last year by a vote of 144 to 77.
Just last week the Federal
government, under pressure from
conservation groups, arranged with
Florida authorities to ban
construction of a jetport near the
Everglades which would have
imperiled flora and fauna in the
national park.
American college students have
seized on the antipollution drive
with nearly the same degree of
fervor that they brought to the
civil-rights campaign and the
antiwar movement (they will hold a
nationwide teach-in April 22).
Research scientists seem anxious to
join the fray. Even some leaders of
U.S. industry, the most massive
befoulers of the nation's air, water
and land, have pledged themselves
to reform. Last week. General
Motors president Edward Cole
echoed the heads of Ford and
Chrysler in committing his
company "to eliminating the
automobile as a factor in the
nation's air-pollution problem," if
necessary by abandoning the
gasoline engine itself.
"Ecology," says Jesse Unruh,
Democratic leader of California's
Assembly, "has become the
political substitute for the word
'mother'," and Unruh himself is
locked with Gov. Ronald Reagan in
a battle for the governorship that
features claims and counterclaims
as to who can do most to preserve
the state's considerable natural
splendor. President Richard Nixon
has embraced the environment as a
major project for the '70s: much of
his State of the Union speech this
week will be devoted to a program
to enhance "the quality of life,"
and he has already declared that
this must be the decade "when
America pays its debt to the past
by reclaiming the purity of its air,
its waters and our living
environment. It is literally now or
never."
Even the ponderous mechanisms
of international cooperation are
beginning to come to bear on the
issue. The United Nations has
arranged a World Conference on the
Human Environment, to be
convened in Sweden in June 1972.
Every nation, large and small, is
confronted with environmental
hazards. The Rhine River may be
even more polluted than the Ohio.
The archipelagoes of the South
Pacific are threatened by a plague
of starfish that consume their vital
barrier reefs.
Man has already paid a fearsome
price for his carelessness: the lung
disease emphysema is the
fastest-growing cause of death in
the United States; unborn babies,
some medical researchers suggest,
may be damaged by excessive noise
from everything from power
mowers to rock bands; the sheer
aggravation of crowded city life is
taking an ever-higher toll in nervous
and psychic affictions. How has it
all been allowed to happen? What
explains man's extraordinary
brutality toward his environment?
Injuction
Sought
WASHINGTON-(CPS>-Dr. Margaret
Mead locre in conjunction with Ralpl'
Raider has announced her latest battle i"
the fight to stem the population
explosion.
The duo will seek injunctions against
the Ultra White and Plus Bright
Toothpaste Companies, Hai Karate
Cologne Co., Scope and Bianca
mouthwash companies, and Charmin
Itathroom Tissue Co. for aiding anti
abetting the population explosion
Amerika by inducing increased sexual
relations.
Specific allegations are:
Ultra White toothpaste gives “your
mouth sex appeal” encouraging all sorts
of sexual perversions, not to mention
intercourse. Plus Bright likewise make*
“pucker power the power of the hour,
encouraging similar promiscuity.
Hai Karate Cologne turns normally
self-controlled women into mad fathcf
rapers.
Scope and Bianca have, ^s
demonstrated in the 60-second pubik
information television research filn**
released by these companies, cause
typical bad-breathed Americans
become sexually irresistable.
And Charmin Bathroom Tissue has
made millions of American women tu
“.squeeze crazy” in public pbces.
Dr. locre says more companies will he
added to the injunction as she has time tj’
research the effects of the products, “k ^
great work if you can get it...” she saiJ-
The Daughters of the AmercaU
Revolution, seven of whom have been the
victims of Scope and Charmin, have
joined the bandw^on terming the n^'*
crusade “the strongest hope yet for saviu?
our ecology.”