March 24, 1969
Page 7256
ADDRESS DELIVERED BY HON. DAVID S. BLACK
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, Mr. David S. Black, former Under Secretary of Interior, recently addressed the convention of the Soap and Detergent Association on the necessary partnership between Government and industry in the control of water pollution. It is an excellent speech and I commend it to my colleagues.
Mr. Black comments:
Expediency and short-range economics often have the upper hand over reasoned and rational deliberation of values, alternatives, and consequences.
This is a particularly timely point in light of the consequences of the Government's decision to grant oil drilling leases in the Santa Barbara Channel.
It must be the duty of the Government to assure that a proper balance among conflicting values is maintained, but the job of Government will be easier if the industrial community exerts responsible control over itself.
I ask unanimous consent that the text of Mr. Black's speech be printed in the RECORD at this point.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
REMARKS OF HON. DAVID S. BLACK, FORMER UNDER SECRETARY OF INTERIOR, AT THE SOAP AND DETERGENT ASSOCIATION CONVENTION, NEW YORK CITY, JANUARY 23, 1969
I don't know if the invitation to address this meeting (which I received prior to the election) was extended on condition that when January 23rd rolled around I would still be Under Secretary of the Interior. And I haven't inquired. I can assure you that it was my desire to appear in that capacity. But, I was deprived of my title through the conspiracy of an obscure group of individuals known as the Electoral College. I suppose I should have demonstrated the good grace to step aside and make room on the program for someone whose views might still influence the Federal water pollution control program. But for some reason my speaking invitations fell off rather sharply along about the second week in November, and I decided I'd try to hold onto this one.
As Under Secretary I have been keenly interested in Interior's vastly important water pollution control program. I have worked with Charlie Bushman in connection with the Joint Task Force on Eutrophication. I have become increasingly aware of the responsible efforts by the Soap and Detergent Association and its member companies in the battle against pollution of our Nation's rivers and lakes. You are to be commended for the progress you have made and for the social responsibility you have acknowledged and assumed. President Johnson several months ago directed each department to prepare thorough briefing materials for use of a new administration. As a prime example of the value of Interior-industry cooperation we pointed out in the briefing books to be used by the new Secretary the work of the Joint Task Force, with the hope that this relationship will be continued and strengthened.
Your cooperation with the Interior Department and your continued research efforts are vital if Interior is to succeed in its mission to preserve and enhance our natural environment. As you know, Interior is, essentially, the Department of Natural Resources, and during the past several years under Stewart Udall's leadership we have brought about, I think, a whole new understanding and philosophy of conservation in America. It emphasizes the total environment and the interrelationship of all the pieces that make it up and that are affected by it.
But success for this growing determination to preserve the quality of life available to the American public is not assured. Our personal health, security and well-being are increasingly dependent upon the decisions of the men and the institutions which are the custodians of our technology. This is a technology which even today is capable of poisoning our environment from the ionosphere to the depths of the oceans. We are faced in many cases with seemingly irreconcilable conflicts between technological and economic progress on the one hand and the interests of preserving the integrity of our habitat on the other.
These conflicts have sharp focus in Interior's relationships with the private economic interests whose responsibilities in one manner or another impinge upon and in one degree or another adversely affect the nation's resources which the Secretary is entrusted to protect. The mining industry, the power industry, the timber industry, the petroleum industry, the real estate developers, the manufacturers of soap and detergents. Members of all of these industries show responsibility, social conscience and statesmanship. And some of them do not. Expediency and short-range economies often have the upper hand over reasoned, and rational deliberation of values, alternatives and consequences.
We see the results daily: In worship of the automobile and in the name of progress we rip corridors through our cities, parks and wilderness. To increase the productivity of the land, we aimlessly proliferate the use of pesticides and chemicals without knowing the consequences. In a single generation our quest for prosperity and industrialization has left barren and dead rivers and lakes that previously served the needs of man for countless generations.
Ironically, this same technology, along with the population explosion, has changed our whole pattern of life. More leisure time and increased spending power have brought a dramatic escalation in outdoor recreation and travel. More and more people have, therefore, reached a direct confrontation with the grim realities of vanishing open space, streams without fish, forbidden beaches – all beneath the cloud of a sulfurous atmosphere.
If we are to halt man's headlong race to extinction all facets of our modern society which have an effect on the environment must undertake a continuing long-range assessment of the technology which has built that society. Some of this is taking place. There has been, in the past few years, a
marked growth in industry of an environmental conscience. The modern industrialist, whose predecessors regarded pollution as a necessary concomitant of profits and beyond their responsibility, is becoming increasingly alert to the virtues of pollution control and abatement.
Growing support in the board rooms of the Nation's great corporations for better environmental management is especially evident with respect to water pollution control. We see a greater realization in the industrial world that there is a distinct relationship between water pollution control and economic progress. The main concern has long been the simple, direct cost of controlling pollution. But now there is evidence of a new appreciation that in the end, pollution itself can cost far more than its control. As a nation so dependent upon water we are coming to realize that along with its many other and manifest drawbacks, uncontrolled pollution, from whatever source, is simply false economy.
It is a hopeful sign that business and government are moving in the same direction of solving social and environmental problems perhaps for different but equally important reasons.
Your soap and detergent industry is a very good example of the increasing environmental concern and social awareness of industry. Your manufacturers became concerned in the 1950's with foaming effects on surface waters of their products. So you launched a program to discover a substitute. You were successful, and voluntarily 100 per cent of the industry replaced that ingredient which caused the problem. You spent millions of dollars for the protection of the environment.
One of the toughest current pollution problems which we currently confront is eutrophication. Man-made nutrients – phosphates and nitrates – from municipal sewage, land runoff, fertilizers, detergents and other products, are pouring into our lakes and speeding up the process of aging so that rich water sources are prematurely lost to our use. Again, your industry is taking a progressive, responsible approach in a quest for a solution to the problem.
A task force was set up last year by the Soap and Detergent people, their suppliers and the Department of the Interior to investigate the problem and work together towards solutions. The fertilizer industry and the Department of Agriculture have joined the task force, and the Corps of Engineers is an ex officio member. Together we have worked out significant steps toward understanding and controlling eutrophication.
A eutrophication information center has been set up to store and evaluate information on this scientific phenomenon. To assist this effort a provisional procedure has been devised to measure the algae growth potential of various chemicals and water. The project is experimental at this stage, but findings are being confirmed in laboratories and in the field. It is a significant step toward identifying those effects that man's activities will have on his environment.
Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of the Joint Task Force is improved communications between industry and government, we are sitting down, sharing information, and seeking answers together as equal partners. I think this is an important key to effective management of the quality of our environment.
Better communications and such joint action as this will be essential to solution of other pollution problems; pesticides use and disposal, salinity buildups from agriculture return flows, animal feedlot wastes disposal, thermal pollution from electric power plants, oil pollution, silt and erosion from construction sites and farming activities.
All this that we have seen on the water pollution front in the last few years – the development of water quality standards, the research, the construction of needed waste treatment works, the enforcement actions, the cleanup on federal installations and the new sense of corporate responsibility and joint action with government – all of these things I count as pollution control successes. But we've experienced failures, too. The greatest of these, I think, is the clean water legislation of last year. It was critically needed then – even more so now – and it failed of enactment by Congress, even with total floor support in the Senate and the House.
Different versions of that bill – the Water Quality Improvement Act of 1968 – passed both the Senate and the House but the differences were not worked out in the last hours in the 90th Congress and the legislation died. Had it been enacted it would have provided the necessary funds to meet the construction schedule for critically needed waste treatment plants and the means to control pollution from oil and other hazardous substances. It would have stopped pollution from ships, added funds for research into acid mine drainage and lake eutrophication; and made it mandatory that Federal agencies assure that installations built under their licenses be equipped so as to prevent pollution, particularly thermal pollution.
It was a tragedy when this bill failed to pass. All the features that I've mentioned are essential, but if I may single one out as being particularly critical, I would point to the provision for funding of waste treatment plant construction. Interior has required each State to guarantee that municipalities will have secondary treatment in operation within the next five years. To do this will require staggering sums of money. But many of the States have already raised their matching share, and, indeed, a number of them are pre-financing the Federal portion. And yet the Federal Government, which imposed this requirement, has not kept its side of the bargain. The new Congress must provide the means for the Interior Department to keep faith and meet its obligations. I would urge your help as well as that of responsible industry throughout the country in seeking Congressional action on this vital legislation as early as possible in the new session.
I have mentioned waste treatment, and I would also like to point out one additional situation that I know would be of interest to you. Many of you are aware that the Lake Michigan and Lake Erie Enforcement Conferences have adopted a requirement that all communities discharging wastes into those lakes must remove at least 80 percent of the phosphates. I am told that this is both practical and economically feasible. This requirement should be extended to most of the lakes and many of the rivers in our country during the next few years. It is a weapon that we have today with which we can fight eutrophication. Your investigation into possible substitutes for phosphates can greatly assist this effort.
Earlier this year, in a message to Congress, President Johnson declared:
"Today, the crisis of conservation is no longer quiet. Relentless and insistent, it has surged into a crisis of choice.
"Man – who has lived so long in harmony with nature – is now struggling to preserve its bounty.
"Man – who developed technology to serve him – is now racing to prevent wastes from endangering his very existence.
"Our environment can sustain our growth and nourish our future. Or it can overwhelm us."
This theme of concern with total environment, to an ever increasing degree, has emerged through this decade as the central necessity of a modern conservation movement. No longer can we concentrate solely on the protection of one facet of Nature's gifts – whether that single focus be on forests, or wildlife, or soil, or water. We now see all of these as interrelated in a matrix that
involves many disciplines, many industries, and a wide span of our whole social and economic structure.
The pesticide that controls forest insects may also destroy other useful forms of life, a stream impoundment that checks floods and conserves water may alter downstream temperatures or estuarine salinity to the detriment of fish habitat. If we reject a dam project to preserve a scenic valley in favor of thermal power generation, the resulting air pollution may threaten an even wider area.
These are the complex issues that give meaning to the President's description: a "Crisis of Choice" is indeed with us. A conservation program for this era of technology and population concentration must address itself to the total ecological balance that nature provides – and most particularly to man's impact upon it.
Unlike the early mission of conservation pioneers, the current task is not restricted to the outdoorsman, the naturalist, the forester or the field engineer. In fact, the major part of the job is now focused elsewhere.
The big decisions will come from our legislative halls, courthouses and corporate board rooms. Answers to major problems will be found in laboratories as often as on a wooded hillside.
Congressman Emilio Q. Daddario of Connecticut has written a very penetrating article in the July George Washington Law Review entitled "Technology Assessment – A Legislative View". He pleads for a new concept of long-range advance assessment of the technology which more and more controls our destiny and this is the thought I would like to leave with you – an industry which can and does indeed have a significant environmental impact.
"The need", writes Mr. Daddario, "is to find out how, why and what we – humans – are doing to the natural rhythms of earth and to the life and environment upon it ... what apparently is happening is that man, through his cunning and acquisitiveness, his desire for comfort and security – and through the technology he has developed to help meet these ends – has engendered the capability to telescope nature, to alter it, to foreshorten it, to accelerate its natural cycles – and very possibly to destroy many of its life supporting characteristics."
He goes on to say that "Historically, assessment [of our technology] has usually occurred well after the technology was introduced and when undesirable consequences had reached serious proportions. For example, the intensive cultivation of grasslands in the Great Plains precipitated the dust storms and erosion during the drought of the 1930's. As a result, studies showed the way to corrective action through windbreaks and other soil conservation measures – too late to prevent hardships to the farmers involved.
"Frequently, the call for assessment has come from inspired social critics and writers. This was the case with environmental and human health hazards from pesticides. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring brought the realization of how quickly we had accepted the pest control properties of certain chemicals without questioning what the consequences of their widespread dissemination might be to valuable insects, fish and wildlife.
"Countless times a radical change was made to a locality or region prior to any assessment of all potential consequences. Invariably, some adverse condition arose which took time and effort to combat....
"Many unwanted consequences have been labeled as the price of progress. But even in a nation as affluent as ours, these prices all at once seem too high. And at the same time, mature reflection suggests that the price need not have been paid at all if a thorough understanding had been gained of what was happening in the ecological system at an earlier date."
Your industry has shown itself to be progressive and forward looking in terms of the effect your products have on the Nation's lakes and streams. But as population spirals upward and as ever more new products competing in the market place find their way into our homes and industries and – inevitably – into our waters – the need for greater advance knowledge of their impact becomes critical.
So let me plead that your efforts in this direction be intensified and you as an industry will contribute importantly to the preservation of our earth.