July 14, 1969
Page 19403
CITIZEN ACTION FOR CLEAN AIR
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, on June 19, 1969, Mrs. Carter F. Henderson, honorary trustee and former chairman of New York City's Citizens for Clean Air, Inc., spoke at a Citizens Workshop on Air Quality at the University of Massachusetts, Waltham, Mass. Mrs. Henderson has made a major impact on the air pollution control program in New York with her dynamic and articulate leadership. Her speech at Waltham was an example of her insight, her grasp of the air pollution problem and her sense of how the need for citizen action on air pollution relates to the broader question of democratic government in a technologically complex and crowded society. I commend Mrs. Henderson's remarks to the Senate and ask unanimous consent that her speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
CITIZEN ACTION FOR CLEAN AIR (Remarks by Hazel Henderson)
Why must citizens participate in the fight for clean air? Or to take the larger view, why must citizens participate in social decision making in a democratic society?
Well, we all know from our history that the notion that an informed citizenry should participate in every phase of national decision-making is the central premise of the great social experiment that is America. Our founding fathers modeled many of their ideas on those of the Greeks, and the key phrase in all of these formulae was "informed citizen." Not just citizen, you will note, but informed citizen.
I think that this central premise that an informed citizenry is capable of self-government is just as valid as ever. But in a mass, technologically advanced society like ours, with 200 million citizens, it needs reinventing. And the machinery to channel participation efficiently needs over-hauling. The big problem for the citizen today is that the hand-tools available to him, the ballot box and the letter, have not kept pace with the increasingly automated decision-making now used in other sectors of the economy, whether private industry, the military, space, the multi-versity, big labor unions and all the other highly organized bureaucracies which now characterize our economy. Haven't you all experienced the standard put-down whenever you, as laymen, try to evaluate an issue and make your point? Some expert whether from city government, or a corporation or from whatever bureaucracy you are trying to get an answer, will tell you that you can't possibly judge because you don't know the facts. Then he will wave a printout from his computer to settle the argument. The point is that the citizen seems to be the only guy left who doesn't have a computer! Being an informed citizen gets harder all the time, as we valiantly struggle to dig up facts for ourselves; when our little, under-financed civic organizations can't afford enough researchers, lobbyists, public-relations men, advertising budgets and all the other panoply available to the big boys.
And yet, we may have reached a point where participation by laymen in our increasingly specialized, fragmented society is not only more vital than ever, but could be the only means left to save our society from becoming fossilized and eventually decaying. Because laymen and ordinary citizens provide what in computer terminology (yes, the computer boys have brainwashed me!) they call "feedback." Without feedback to correct errors, a computer system goes haywire. Feedback serves the function of regulation, like a thermostat. In our vast, pulsating, computerized America of today, we have thousands of so-called "experts", each with an understanding only of his own narrow discipline, or what is often called "tunnel vision". They are all making momentous decisions on deploying technology in hundreds of new ways, without any real understanding of the big picture. A famous sociologist once studied these people, and called them "technological idiots." You know them too, I'm sure. They are the highway planners who build roads by destroying neighborhoods and scenic values; the economists who understand fiscal policy but not social values; the computer analysts who only know how to feed their computers with facts and figures that can be quantified, and then wonder why their plans do not work in the real world of people.
This is where "citizen feedback thermostats" are so vital, and because things are happening so fast today that managing change has become almost impossible, we need the "inputs" of non-specialized laymen more now than at any other time in our history. The Conservation Foundation has wisely understood this need, and that is why we are all here today. For laymen tend to judge the nation's allocation of resources by broad, humanistic standards. They tend to ask those two vital questions "what will this program do for people and how will it affect the quality of life?" And since these two yardsticks are really the basic legitimation for all forms of government, we need to hear them asked today on a massive scale. Millions of citizens from all walks of life raising these two old-fashioned questions are the best countervailing force possible to all the more powerful faster-on-their-feet organizations who constantly plead special interests with all the weapons at their command. For instance, we are told by the aviation "experts" with vested interests (whether economic or intellectual) that the supersonic transport plane will be good for our balance of payments position; good for our national image; good for the aviation industry; that it will provide jobs. Almost everything except whether it will be good for the majority of our people and whether it will enhance the quality of their lives.
In the problems of environmental pollution it is the same. Specifically, when I and my colleagues first started Citizens for Clean Air, we were barraged with "experts" who confronted us with figures and formulae calculated to intimidate and confuse us. We soon caught on to these cheap tricks and went right on with the job of educating the engineers, lawyers, businessmen, and even doctors to our broader interpretation of their facts. We found that one had to get these experts off their territory and on to ours. When they quoted chemical formula, we quoted Pericles, Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson; when they quoted Adam Smith and the "invisible hand" of the marketplace we quoted the higher authority of the Almighty. So when you next stand up at a company's annual meeting to ask whether the new product they are going to market might pollute the environment or be hazardous in some way to the consumer; announce proudly that you are a layman, a generalist and a humanist. For as the country becomes more and more specialized, the generalist, who sees the total system becomes the key man. He is the man who asks when a new plant is thinking of locating in the area, "Yes, I know it will provide employment and tax revenues, but will they be offset by pollution which could lower property values and be costly for the town to clean up?"
When we of Citizens for Clean Air began asking these sort of questions concerning air pollution in New York, it was surprising how many experts from various affected industries would volunteer to teach us what we as citizens could do about it. "The citizen’s responsibility" they said; "was to refrain from burning leaves and to keep their car well serviced to minimize pollution, and to support their local control officials" – and that was about it. We soon realized that as long as our local power company generated power in the same old way, and the oil industry continued selling the same high sulphur fuel oil and leaded gasoline, and the
real estate developers kept building apartments with the same old fashioned incinerators and Detroit kept producing the same old poisonous cars – our little individual efforts at controlling our own contributions to the overall pollution, although necessary, were not going to make much difference.
We realize that the targets for change must be the biggest polluters – not the smallest. The convoluted logic of the big polluters became transparent and clearly self-serving. Typical of the sort of red-herring arguments they would try to foist on the public was that of the auto industry.
They insisted that the individual citizen was responsible for automobile pollution, merely because he had bought the car and then turned the ignition key to drive it. No mention was made of the manufacturer's responsibility not to sell a product that was a health and safety hazard. I'm happy to say that since then, they, have become slightly less negative about their own responsibility for the some 60% of America's air pollution problems. If they would stop spending millions trying to doctor up the outmoded internal combustion engine, it has been estimated by a Senate Committee that they could have developed a pollution free external combustion engine twenty years ago!
Similarly the power companies, if criticized, would simply buy full-page ads to refute charges, and play down their contribution to pollution. But we had no money to buy full pages in the papers to set the record straight. Another shocking example of this sort of thing was the so-called public service ad run recently by a major oil company. The double-page spread claimed that "by 1978 auto pollution would be less of a problem than it was in 1928." This is a subtle form of deception – but enough to prompt Senator Warren Magnuson to protect the public from such self-serving propaganda by filing a complaint with the F.T.C.
We finally realized that the only way to get equal time in the court of public opinion was to use the same tools of advertising and public relations that the companies were using – but we would have to get help as a free public service. This was the genesis of the trail-blazing Citizens for Clean Air all media advertising campaign, which almost single-handedly ushered in the age of "social-protest advertising" now so common on issues like race relations, urban problems and the anti-cigarette crusade. We found a generous, concerned agency, Carl Ally Inc. of New York, willing to donate the campaign to us, and they found us a public relations firm also willing to handle us as a charity account. Our little group, which began in 1965 with half a dozen people putting a few dollars in the kitty at our meetings, suddenly blossomed into the public's awareness with full pages in Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, Reader's Digest, as well as a battery of radio and television commercials. In all, we were given at least $350,000 worth of space and time.
So a good rule of thumb for any new citizens group is to start by finding out what the biggest sources of pollution are in your area. Then investigate what air pollution laws you already have on the books and how they are enforced You will often find, as we did, that administration and legal procedures can render the laws useless. Sometimes it is lack of sufficient inspectors, sometimes it is the log jam of court cases, sometimes it is judges who don't take air pollution offenses seriously and only give token, wrist-slapping fines. And sometimes, as is currently; happening in New York City, a whole industry; (in our case the real estate industry) will, openly defy a newly-passed law, and even take the Air Pollution Commissioner to court.
This is why citizens have to be able to pinpoint who the big polluters are in their community and in the nation. Because in this way they can be a public watchdog to make sure that large powerful groups do not try to obtain special dispensations from the enforcement agency.
Constant vigilance is needed to prevent organized interests from actually rolling back new laws on the books. In New York state, local town officials from upstate districts actually pressured a bill through the state legislature to re-establish open burning of leaves and garbage, because it was too much of a problem for them to find other disposal methods!
So the role of the citizens group, as I see it, is to be polite and firm, and not to get too friendly or understanding with anyone. Once you become too friendly with that nice public relations man from the XYZ company or even sometimes, with your own control officials, you will become so sympathetic to their problems that you lose sight of the larger public interest. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have a research group constantly obtaining the best information from all sources, but remember that your safest ground is to speak as humanists and generalists; to advocate the public interest and to ask the right questions. Best of all, if your group is able to point the finger at a recalcitrant polluter or group of polluters in the community, you will greatly strengthen the hand of your control official. Now let's look at the politicians to whom we delegate the job of implementing our collective will on these national and local decisions.
They are supposed to hear all sides of the issue, and then determine a compromise. In a mass highly-organized society, here again, they hear the opinions of all those groups who are well enough organized to press their views. But the countervailing voice of the public as a whole must be heard too if the right decision is to be reached. A simple, but wise man once defined how a statesman differed from a mere politician. "A statesman," he said, "is an upstanding man, who stands upright due to equal pressure on all sides." This isn't cynicism, its pragmatism, and this is why the citizen’s voice must be heard as effectively as other organizations who have special interests to plead. And the larger and more organized the special interest groups become, with their national advertising campaigns and expensive Washington lawyers, the more citizens are needed to countervail this power with their own numbers. The citizen, undercapitalized and non-automated, still forced to use the tools our forefathers devised for the small, folksy agrarian democracy they knew must shoulder an ever larger burden of involvement to redress the balance.
This massive involvement of ordinary citizens is the best hope we have for overhauling the creaking machinery of government, making it more responsive and flexible, so that it may evolve and survive.
This evolving form of democracy will be based on the rapid and undistorted flow of information.
Information is what is lacking when decision-makers make the wrong decisions. It isn't malice; it's lack of all the facts. Not only the facts bearing on the current issue, but those facts projected into a picture of how the situation will look in the future under various anticipated conditions.
Here again, public decision-making needs the computer. In computerese, they call this projecting into the future, simulation. Here again, the voter is at a loss. Scarcely any of our large bureaucracies, whether government agencies, corporations, labor unions, make any important decisions without the use of computer simulation techniques. But nobody has thought of computerizing citizen feedback so it arrives as fast as all the other information on the issue. Too often it arrives too late to be factored into the decision. This data is collected just as it was 200 years ago, through voting at periodic elections and by letters penned laboriously by harried citizens to their elected representatives. This leisurely pace cannot hope to keep up with all the other information from our computerized society, which is collected and processed at electronic speeds. So until we start tackling the problem of increasing the citizen's voice by applying our technology equally to speed his views, the citizen will have to be more involved than ever before just to keep up.
How can we develop methods to speed the vital citizen input of data, which the computer people would call "random access feedback"? Well, first we must wake up to the urgent need for it. We must realize that our decision makers must have access to it simultaneously with all the other data bearing on the issue they are trying to resolve. Otherwise, we will be stuck with our current problem of having the citizen feedback arriving too late: after the decision has been made; after the law has been passed.
At the same time we also re-examine how the citizen gets his information, so that he can make his decision meaningfully. Here again, the little man is on the short end of the deal. The amount of information he must absorb in order to use his vote wisely is doubling every ten years, and the decisions he must make are based on understanding more and more complicated, often technological data. In the old days, word of mouth, the town meeting, handbills tacked up on the barn door worked pretty well. Now the voter must rely on the mass media and their inevitable editorial biases and selection of what news to present, to try and glean some understanding of what's going on. Here again, an organization with sufficient money can buy time and space in the mass media to get its message across; but the citizen must rely on the mimeograph machine and word of mouth, or attending small meetings. And this is not to mention his problems in sorting out the facts from the propaganda!
So we have to find more efficient ways of communicating, of opening up more channels of communication in our mass media, so that they will pay as much attention to a citizen's organization as to the government press release or the corporation press handout. We at Citizens for Clean Air besieged our local newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, not to cover our activities, but to help uncover the local problem and pinpoint the sources of pollution.
We helped provide local news media with sources of medical information and what the current technology offered by way of solutions. In some cases, we almost bullied publications and broadcasters into covering the air pollution problem. We must develop ways to speed two-way communication between voters and their representatives, citizens and business, alienated young people and their teachers and parents, blacks and whites, urban and suburban dwellers. I have tried to elaborate on these problems of mass communication in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. After all communicating is what we are all doing here today. We are trying to compromise our views by exchanging data and providing diverse information inputs to determine what criteria should emerge for the quality of Boston's air. But see how few of us there are!
We are here developing decisions which will affect the lives of millions of residents of Massachusetts and their children. They cannot be here, but you are speaking for them. This is the great responsibility you bear. Do you really know what they want? How best can you advocate their interest, their health and well-being which is entrusted into your care in developing standards for the air they must breathe? This is the burden, and if humbly and faithfully executed, the glory of citizenship. The task is to set your sights above the meanness of petty self-interest, to broaden your perspective from the narrow view of one facet of the problem; to climb high enough to see the whole panorama, the actual reality of the big picture. What is best for the whole, metropolitan region surrounding Boston and the millions of real, flesh and blood human beings who know little of what is in the air they breathe, and must rely on you and your high-mindedness and decency to protect their interests and those of their children. Until we discover new technological tools to help re-enfranchise all those fellow human beings out there, we must accept the responsibility. We must inform our decisions not only with hard facts and figures, but with human concern for our dis-enfranchised brothers, with love for the land and desire to conserve its precious resources for our children. This is mature citizenship, the noblest responsibility in a democracy.! Not the easiest, but the most demanding role at least until our think tanks and scientists develop the tools we need to make its functioning more effective.
As we look into the future, we can take heart. Because scientists are at last beginning to harness technology to the problem of perfecting the democratic process itself, as a form of government.
As luck would have it, the collecting, storing and analyzing of individual viewpoints is an almost perfect computer application.
For instance, one day, I hope, a computer system could be applied to the job of determining Boston's Air Quality Criteria. The computer could store all the relevant information even vaguely bearing on the issue. For instance how much additional tax money would be needed to upgrade municipal incinerators; haul compacted garbage by rail to sanitary landfills; how much would property values increase if pollution were cut 25%, 50% or more; how much money is currently being spent to clean up the effects of pollution and how much would be saved if particulates were reduced by 10% or 50% or whatever the figure. At the flick of the button the terminal could display any combination of this information for each citizen to evaluate for himself, with the help of a trained programmer who would serve the same sort of function as a lawyer does in interpreting statutes. Then on the basis of the information, the citizen might punch in his choice of the available options to be tabulated by the computer and fed back into the program.
Is all this pie-in-the-sky? I hope not. Maybe one day, we shall even see every issue of local or national importance handled in similar ways, like a speeded-up, vastly more efficient and feasible kind of electronic referendum. Why have we been so slow in harnessing this kind of computer technology to the service of the voter? Is it that we are afraid of getting too close to a real working democracy? Are some of our current decision makers afraid that if the citizen gets too much undistorted information, he may start making too many informed, intelligent decisions which might result in all kinds of disconcerting changes in how we allocate our national resources? Or is it the legitimate fear shared by our founding fathers that our citizens might not be sufficiently sophisticated to cast an educated vote?
Democracy certainly is a dangerous experiment. But it seems that we are committed to it, and that the alternative is in ever increasing alienation, apathy and powerlessness that our citizens feel and which is tearing our country apart. I believe that we must not draw back from enhancing democratic participation, by computer, mass media, or any other way. Instead we must make sure that the citizen is better informed. And here, the mass media have the greatest responsibility.
Already, our children by the time they are sixteen have spent more hours in front of the television sets than in the classroom. Over 50% of our citizens now receive their news from TV rather than from newspapers. We must persuade our broadcasters, who are licensed to use the public airwaves only as long as they serve "the public interest, convenience and necessity," to devote much more time to cover the national and community issues of the day; to initiate TV town meetings like those pioneered by WGBH-TV here in Boston, where citizens get a chance to talk back through community TV "listening posts," which deliver instantaneous citizen feedback on the issues covered in the program. We must insist that stations devote more children viewing hours to "Headstart"-type programming and shows exploring the world of nature and science, rather than the endless bang-bang-you're-dead cartoons. That they emulate the pioneer work of radio stations like WMCA and RVR in New York in developing open-mike "Talk-in" shows and serve the function of civic ombudsman like the new Action-Line programs are beginning to do.
In short, we must re-involve citizens in running this country. If we don't, the whole concept of democracy will have been a failure. Winston Churchill once remarked that democracy was a terrible form of government – until you tried everything else! We must succeed with the democratic experiment because apathetic, alienated citizens too easily become bored and irresponsible. The alternative can only be a retrogression to rule by the few – an authoritarian, centralized government; even bigger, more remote corporations and unions, all slipping quietly out of the control of the many who are governed.
The increasingly alienated "little man" will become in his powerless frustration, an "anti-citizen"; one of those who says plaintively, "I only work here," or "I was only obeying orders." This sort of non-citizenship can only lead to a police state. So I urge you all to get involved in the fight for clean air for Boston. I hope that during the discussion, I can answer specific questions and try to share some of our experiences; some of our mistakes, which may be relevant to your situation here in Boston.
It won't be easy, I promise, but it won't be boring either. If you involve your friends and neighbors; recruit the energy and enthusiasm of your sons and daughters (remember even 5 year olds are great stamp lickers) you will find that you are not just setting a good example of civic leadership but that you might also find yourselves having fun as well!
Good luck to you.