CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE

August 8, 1969

Page 23008

WHO IS NEXT? A BRIEF LESSON IN ECOLOGY

Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, public concerns frequently become cliches, losing their impact through repetition. One such concern is environmental contamination which we frequently describe as ecological disaster. We say the words, but the meaning is lost when we do not relate them to our own experience.

Fortunately, from time to time an imaginative and perceptive writer puts the problem in focus and gives it life, as Stewart Alsop did in his column, "Small Thoughts," in the July 21, 1969, issue of Newsweek magazine. I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the RECORD and commend it to my colleagues.

There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:

SMALL THOUGHTS (By Stewart Alsop)

WASHINGTON -- Sometimes it is a relief for a political writer to take a mental vacation -- to stop trying to think large thoughts about international and domestic affairs, and to think small thoughts about small matters. Here are a couple of small thoughts.

A few weeks ago, I took a plane from Washington to Boston, and spent the night in a huge motel near the airport. It was a horrible night.

The room was the usual impersonal beige box, a people-coop. On the desk there was a folding cardboard sign: WHO CARES? Opened, the sign read: WE DO. There followed one of those guest questionnaires: Were your accommodations kept spotlessly clean? Was the telephone service prompt, courteous? And so on.

The accommodations were clean enough. The trouble was that they stank. They stank mostly of stale cigar smoke, but there was also a strange amalgam of human odors. The reason for the stink was that there was no fresh air in the room, and there had been none for a long time.

I have a thing about air, perhaps because as a boy I had asthma, and there were times when I couldn't get enough air into my lungs. Soon after the bellboy took his tip and closed the door, I began to feel that faintly frantic, throat-clutching sensation all ex-asthmatics remember. It was a warm spring day, and the room was very hot, as well as smelly. I looked anxiously for some opening. The window was hermetically sealed. I switched a switch, but no breath of air came through the ceiling vents. When I opened the door, there was no draft, and besides I couldn't sleep all night with the door open.

VOICE WITH A SMILE

I telephoned the front desk. The telephone was answered promptly, and the voice of the lady who answered was courteous -- it was a "voice with a smile." Could I have the window opened?

Sorry, sir, the windows had to be kept closed "for correct temperature and maximum comfort of the guests." Then could I have some sort of air conditioning in the room?

"I am sorry, sir, but it is not warm enough to justify the activation of the air conditioning."

"But my God, woman, I'm dying of heat and there's no air in this room and it stinks." "I am sorry, sir, but the air conditioning cannot be activated until June 10." The smile was gone from the voice now.

"Then, can I at least have a fan to stir the air up a bit?"

"I am sorry, sir, but there are no fans in the building. There is no requirement for fans."

THE FRONTIERS OF PANIC

The telephone clicked. Verging now on panic, scuttling about the small room like a laboratory rat whose accustomed exists have been blocked, I found beneath the window a small aperture, about 9 inches by 6, with a glass plate held in place by screws. The screws yielded easily to a pen knife.

For some time I sat crouched by the little hole, breathing God's air, oblivious to the screech of the jets that helped contaminate it, feeling like a survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta.

During the night, sleepless by reason of the screeching jets, I found myself wondering whether that motel might not be what the young, so mysteriously to the middle-aged were making such a fuss about. When the middle-aged were young, hotel rooms (or cabins, as motel rooms were called in the early days) were by no means always spotlessly clean. But at least you could open the window, and the manager (who was also, usually, the proprietor) would supply you with a fan, or an extra blanket if it was cold. Above all, there was some give-and-take, some genuine human contact, between the guest and the man who ran the place.

The young lady with the smiling voice was as powerless as I was to do anything about my situation -- more so, for I had my pen knife. The motel was one of a chain, and the chain in turn was doubtless held in fief by some vast conglomerate. Somewhere, far up the line of command, far from the screech of jets and the stench of stale cigar smoke, somebody had fed a lot of "input" about mean average temperatures and occupancy turnover and profit and loss into a computer. The machine had spewed out the answer -- no air conditioning before June 10. It would cost the young lady her job to challenge this deus ex machina.

More and more, in the United States, there is a feeling of being trapped by a machine you can't talk back to, a machine with a logic of its own, unrelated to human feelings and human needs. If this machine is what the young revolutionaries are revolting against, I trust there is room for one aging journalist at the barricades.

Perhaps they are also revolting against the chemical murder of the human environment, and that is another revolution worth joining. Because of my thing about air, I like to be outdoors as much as possible. In the summer, in the evening, I like to read on the porch. The reading light, of course, attracts bugs. The other evening, when the bugs became really bothersome. I found a spray-can bug-killer in the house. I attacked the bugs with the bug-killer, and went on reading.

DUSTY DEATH

I had put the light on a glass table top, and soon it presented the spectacle of a most terrible carnage. The smaller insects -- the aphids, the tiny moths, and the like -- died quickly and quietly, so that soon the table top was dusty with death. The larger bugs -- the June bugs, the things that look like flying cockroaches, the bees from a nearby bee tree -- were slower and noisier about dying. The bees buzzed angrily round and round on the table top for long minutes before they died.

Beneath the glass table top, a spider had woven his net, and he had reaped a rich harvest. The insects, attracted by the light and poisoned by the spray, lurched drunkenly into the spider's net.

With a macabrely graceful upward flinging motion of a long leg, the spider methodically entwined the still-fluttering bodies of his dying victims.

When I returned from the kitchen with my third beer, there was nothing left alive in the small world created by the circle of light, except the spider and myself. Then the spider too began to act strangely, hanging tipsily on his tiny ropes like a drunken sailor in the strands of a swaying ship, waving his long darning-leg like a distress signal. As I up-ended my beer for the last mouthful, the spider gave a long, convulsive shudder, and then, together with his rich collection of victims, he too was dead.

Suddenly, I felt lonely in the small circular world of light on the porch. Perhaps it was that third beer, but I heard my own voice, asking loudly of the surrounding darkness: "Who's next?"