February 17, 1970
Page 3527
COMMITMENT – NOT RHETORIC – NEEDED TO IMPROVE THE ENVIRONMENT SAYS SENATOR MUSKIE
Mr. EAGLETON. Mr. President, the task before us as we seek to control the forces that degrade our environment is becoming increasingly clear. Support for efforts to improve the quality of life in our cities and in our rural areas has begun to come from heretofore uninterested individuals and organizations. The public demand for increased action to deal with the problems of air and water pollution, disposal of agricultural and solid waste, and adequate recreational areas and living space is beginning to have an effect.
The Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) perceived the necessity for action to meet these needs long ago. As chairman of the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution of the Committee on Public Works since 1963, he has worked to develop effective programs for the control of air and water pollution and the disposal of solid wastes.
Last month, in Chicago, Ill., Senator MUSKIE provided a lucid exposition of the threat posed to our environment and the requirements needed for effective action. His message is especially significant in light of the rhetorical shroud which has begun to engulf public demands for action. I ask unanimous consent that the speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE ENVIRONMENT: CAN MAN PROSPER AND SURVIVE?
Adlai Stevenson once said: "It is the urgent duty of a political leader to lead, to touch if he can the potentials of reason, decency, and humanism in man, and not only the strivings that are easier to mobilize."
Today is the anniversary of Martin Luther King's birth. His death was a setback for the forces of reason, decency and humanism. It came at a time – still with us – when men tended to yield to "strivings that are easier to mobilize" – fear, suspicion, prejudice, hatred.
It would be well to pause a moment to consider a thought expressed by Einstein: "Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received."
It is a thought which has its application as well to the question of man's relationship to his environment.
At least since Franklin's time, men have debated the blessings and the dangers of technological progress.
In 1843 Thoreau said of machines: "They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws. How many fine inventions are there which do not clutter the ground?"
Unhappily, perhaps, a different thought prevailed – one expressed in 1909 by city planners Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett in these words: "The rapidly increasing use of the automobile" would promote "good roads and (revive) the roadside inn as a place of rest and refreshment. With the perfection of this machine and the extension of its use, out of door life is promoted, and the pleasures of suburban life are brought within reach of multitudes of people who formerly were condemned to pass their entire time in the city."
With the benefit of hindsight, which view would we say was nearer the truth?
This much – surely – we know: that material affluence exacts a price of the natural environment man needs to survive.
This much more we should know: that unless we change our ways, the price is one that threatens man's survival.
This, I believe, is the reason environmental protection has become such an important social and political issue.
It is important because the threat is real and present. It is important because it strikes at some cherished illusions about our society and about ourselves. It is important because the world which our children will inherit is in serious trouble.
The pollution problem is not new. Ancient societies sensed it. The Romans grappled with it. The British were plagued with it when they tried to use sea coral. Well over a century ago Henry Thoreau was warning us against damage to the natural resources of New England.
But until very recently, man has been willing to accept pollution as "the price of progress." Now he is not certain that "progress" is worth the price.
Lord Ritchie-Calder observed recently that "the great achievements of Homo Sapiens become the disaster-ridden blunders of unthinking man – poisoned rivers and dead lakes, polluted with the effluents of industries which give something called 'prosperity' at the expense of posterity."
Americans, today, young and old, are putting more stock in posterity than in the general dream of prosperity. They have been frightened by the prospect of nuclear war and appalled by the destruction of conventional war. Their confidence has been undermined by the findings about cigarettes and health, the side-effects of certain drugs, the long-term damage of pesticides and insecticides, and the potential hazards of diet sweeteners which are supposed to keep you slim and trim.
They have learned a great deal about these threats through the media from television specials and newspaper and magazine articles, and even from advertisements placed by companies eager to prove how concerned they are about the environment.
As always, men and women will lash out against the obvious threats to their health and well-being. They will attack nuclear power plants and oil refineries, paper mills and automobile factories, tanneries and steel mills. At the same time, unfortunately, very few will ask questions about their own demand for electrical energy, for fuel, for paper, for automobiles, shoes and steel products. Very few will question the damage they are causing as part of a consumption oriented society.
We must understand that we cannot afford everything under the sun. Since our technology has reached a point in its development where it is producing more kinds of things than we really want, more kinds of things than we really need, and more kinds of things than we can really live with, the time has come to face the realities of difficult choices.
The time has come when we must say no to technological whims which pose a greater threat to the environment than we can control.
We have come a long way in alerting the public to the danger of pollution. We still have a long way to go in getting individuals to accept their own responsibility for improving the environment – whether they are industrialists, developers, public officials, or private citizens.
In 1963 the Congress enacted the Clean Air Act over complaints that “there is no need for the Federal government to become involved in air pollution."
In 1965 we moved to establish Federal control over automobile emissions while the Department of Health, Education and Welfare argued that a mandatory program was premature.
In 1967 we enacted the Air Quality Act establishing a regional approach to air quality improvement and were told by private industry that there is not sufficient evidence to demonstrate a relationship between health and air pollution.
Much the same legislative history accompanies enactment of Federal water pollution control legislation. Even though 15 million fish died last year from water pollution, even though water supplies are increasingly threatened, and even though demands for water recreation increasingly go unmet, industry leaders have resisted a minimal requirement to apply economic and technically feasible control technology for pollution abatement.
Very recently the soap and detergent industry contended that because it is not the only cause of lake eutrophication, it should not be asked to find substitutes for phosphates in its detergents.
The public is not prepared to accept such arguments any more. Neither is it prepared to accept empty political promises on environmental quality. And the public is right.
Too often our environmental quality legislation reminds us of unkept promises and unmet needs.
We talked about $6 billion of Federal funds for community water pollution facilities and in 1966 the Senate voted that amount. The Congress finally agreed to $3.25 billion. But two Administrations have asked for only $620 million of the first $2 billion.
As the author of most of this legislation, I hope that new programs will be requested, that the Congress will respond, and that new commitments will be made. But I am concerned that new promises will be broken, because we are not prepared to back up those promises with the commitment of resources to the fight against pollution.
To those newly aroused about the dangers, let us make clear that the mere rhetoric of alarm is not enough.
To put it bluntly talk will not be cheap if its objective is further delay.
We cannot expect to whip the public into a fervor of anticipation and not deliver the environmental improvement our words promise.
Statements of national policy, appointment of advisory councils, reorganization of Congress or the Federal bureaucracy, and talk of incentives are cake when the people of the United States, especially the young people, would like to see some bread.
ABC's William Lawrence put it this way in summing up the nation's domestic needs: It is time to "put our purse where we put our promises."
This is the critical issue on which the success or failure of an effort to control and improve environmental quality will be devised. There is a tendency to assume that programs to attack existing pollution problems do not exist. They do – but they have not been funded.
To date no substantive environmental program has received meaningful support from President Nixon or his Cabinet. The Administration's effort has been slogan-rich and action-poor. Rhetoric has taken us in one direction, while inaction has taken us in the other.
Let's look at the record.
Water pollution control demands are high. The Federal government owes communities and States more than $760 million in due bills for projects now being built or completed, and new projects will need $2.3 billion Federal dollars this year. But this past year the Administration requested only $214 million of an authorized $1 billion. $800 million was voted by the Congress but indications are that nearly $600 million of these funds will be impounded.
Solid waste, responsible for numerous health and aesthetic problems, threatens to engulf us. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, Robert Finch testified to the critical nature of the nation's solid waste problem during hearings on pending bi-partisan legislation – legislation which would move toward recovery, recycling and reuse of the vital resources which today the nation burns, buries or dumps. After providing an excellent critique of the immensity of the problems, he flatly opposed making available the funds required to fund and implement solutions.
A stirring State of the Union speech, based on thousands of man-hours of research on the problems of the environment will be just another contribution to environmental pollution if it does not include a firm commitment of manpower, money and back-up authority to attack the backlog of pollution problems and give us the capacity to prevent a greater disaster.
I want to underscore the importance of dealing with today's problems while we attempt to head off the threats of tomorrow. Because of the romantic appeal of combating tomorrow's problems in their infancy, there will be a temptation to focus attention on the projected dangers at the expense of today's needs.
Romance is a necessary ingredient in motivating people to act, but it can turn to disillusionment if we find that we have protected ourselves against the dangers of DDT while our rivers and lakes have turned into cesspools.
We need an environmental policy which is designed to correct the abuses of the past, to eliminate such abuses in the future, to reduce unnecessary risks to man and other forms of life, and to improve the quality of our design and development of communities, industrial units, transportation systems and recreational areas. Such a policy must be carried out in the context of an increasing population which, because of the leisure and affluence available to it, will make greater demands on resources and the natural environment.
As a step toward implementing such a policy I have recommended the creation of a watch-dog agency responsible for Federal environmental protection activities. Such an agency must be independent of Federal operating programs and it must have authority to develop and implement environmental quality standards.
There are those who favor the creation of a Department of Natural Resources or a Department of Conservation to handle such functions. Whatever the merits of such a department to serve other purposes, such a move for these purposes would be a mistake, because it would ignore the fact that our environmental protection problem involves competition in the use of resources – a competition which exists today in the Department of the Interior and would exist in any department which must develop resources for public use.
The Department of Transportation is not the agency to determine air pollution control requirements for the transportation industry. The Atomic Energy Commission is not the agency to establish water pollution control requirements for nuclear power plants. The agency which sets environmental quality standards must have only one goal: protection of this and future generations against changes in the natural environment which adversely affect the quality of life.
The problems of environmental pollution will not be solved by picking up the rhetoric of anti-pollution concerns and then assigning the control of pollution to those responsible for the support or promotion of pollution activities.
The focus of our environmental protection effort must be man – man today, man tomorrow, and man in relation to all the other forms of life which share our biosphere. And man's environment includes the shape of the communities in which he lives, his home, his schools, his places of work, his modes of transportation and his society.
Our environmental concern must be for the whole man and the whole society, or else we shall find that the issue of environmental protection is another one of Don Quixote's windmills.
Last week I participated in hearings on our disaster relief program as it related to Hurricane Camille. Of all the lessons I learned from those hearings, one of the most important was the need to build better than we have when we have encountered a natural or man-made disaster.
The disaster of environmental destruction, which is all around us, should be turned into an opportunity to rebuild our society. We can make that opportunity if we reorder our priorities.
The economic imbalance which has caused the population shifts which now so deeply trouble our American cities.
The adequacy of housing and services both in urban and rural America.
The availability of health services.
The conservation of natural resources.
The availability of recreational opportunities in and around our cities.
All of these are high on the list of domestic priorities and none of these can be said to be any less important or basically more important than the crisis of the environment. They are, indeed, a part of the environment.
If we see man as a part of his entire environment, and if we see more clearly our relationship to each other, we may be able to make America whole again.
It is the crisis of division and distrust in our society which, left unresolved, will make achievement of our other priorities meaningless.
We cannot live as two societies or four societies; and government, State, local or Federal, cannot bring us together. Today is the anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, who spent a lifetime trying to weld black and white together and who was lost before he won. He gave his life to avoid this deep division and to eliminate hatred of man against his fellow man.
I think it is well to recommit ourselves today to the goals set forth by Martin Luther King, and to make that commitment in the spirit of the American dream, which is not simply affluence and physical comfort, but a society of healthy men and women free to achieve their own potential.