February 4, 1970
Page 2390
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES AND THE FUTURE OF MAN – ADDRESS BY SENATOR MUSKIE
Mr. SPONG. Mr. President, the distinguished Senator from Maine (Mr. MUSKIE) recently underscored his continuing commitment to environmental protection and control in a speech delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Mass.
In his remarks, Senator MUSKIE underscored the need for a more organized effort to protect our resources of air, water, and land. The Senator, chairman of the Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, has emphasized that rhetoric is not a substitute for action and that we cannot afford to depend solely on voluntary efforts by the private sector.
I ask unanimous consent that Senator MUSKIE's speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES AND THE FUTURE OF MAN
Eighty-six years ago, Henry Augustus Rowland told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that "American Science is a thing of the future, and not of the present or past."
Today we may well ask whether science which has given us much of our past and our present – has prevented the future – or whether it will make possible worthwhile future for man.
Until very recently the question of man's future was related to the threat of nuclear war. That threat remains, but it has been joined by the threat of environmental contamination. Man has so misused the fruits of scientific endeavor, he threatens his own existence.
Some threats come in bits and pieces, the by-products of our industrial economy. The daily newspapers carry samples of such threats, as in the following two examples published during the weekend before Christmas:
“When the sulfur dioxide content of the air in New York City rises above .2 parts per million, ten to 20 people die as a result. In the past five years, sulfur dioxide has reached this level at least once every 10 days." ("Intelligence Report," PARADE Magazine, December 21, 1969)
“The modern industrial economy dependent upon hazardous materials that are shipped throughout the country . . . in the last five years, over 50 cities and towns have had to be evacuated as a result of accidents involving hazardous materials." (Joshua Lederberg, The Washington Post, December 20, 1969)
Some threats come from defense projects designed to protect our national security, as noted in the following item:
“The President's statement (on germ warfare) has not ruled out the production of toxins. The Department of Defense does not find in the President's directive any specific prohibitions to the production of toxins." (The Washington Post, December 20, 1969).
Some threats are the result of efforts to dispose of wastes from the conversion of materials and energy. Outside Denver, for example, a farmer's well produces the weed killer, 2,4-D. His neighbor's well flows gasoline. In Ponca City, Oklahoma, springs bubble refined motor oil into residential basements.
The culprit in these cases is called deep well disposal. Under this system billions of gallons of salt water mixed with oil and other liquid wastes are being pumped back into the ground. Texas alone has 30,000 such wells.
On the East Coast, one scientist has proposed the construction of a 48-inch, 80 mile long pipeline to carry municipal and industrial wastes from the lower Delaware River basin out into the Atlantic Ocean. The discharge of up to four million gallons a day would be beyond the continental shelf.
The scheme would reduce pollution in the Delaware basin – at the expense of the ocean. It is like so many other examples of pollution control programs: it proposes to dump the load on someone else, downstream.
We are learning, however, that there is no one else downstream from us. We have made the world smaller with our population increases and our transportation advances. We have contaminated the land and water we use and the air we breathe, with wastes of our own making.
We have gone beyond the point where the issue of conservation is limited to those who want to protect a stream, or forest, or stretch of shore. That protection is still needed, but it is not the central issue. The central issue is the health of man, wherever he lives and whatever his station.
1. This is the issue the young people understand.
2. This is the issue which has placed the environment at the center of campus concerns following the Vietnam War.
3. This is the issue which cuts across economic, social and racial lines. It binds the suburbs to the cities, in a common life-related problem.
Such an issue – touching as it does the lives of the young and the old, the rich and the poor – is a deep and strong political issue. It is real, and therefore susceptible to emotional appeals. It is broad, and therefore subject to many uses.
When such an issue arises, would-be leaders and voters will look for scapegoats; and those who resist change will dismiss environmental complaints as "uninformed demagoguery."
Scapegoats will not be hard to find.
1. There are business and industrial leaders who reject any responsibility for pollution or its cleanup.
2. There are public officials who avoid the unpleasant encounters so necessary to change.
3. There are managers of public programs – civil and military – too "mission oriented" to admit any responsibility for protecting the environment.
4. And there are scientists whose commitment to their own projects has been so complete they have ignored the environmental consequences of their work.
Protection of man and his environment cannot be achieved by casting out scapegoats; neither can it be advanced by scorn for environmental complaints.
The pollution of our environment is not the product of a small band of men, and it is not the product of our particular economic system. It is the special product of any society which places the consumption of goods and services high on its scale of values, and which has the means to provide those goods and services in abundance. It is not who owns the means of production, but how the means of production are managed, that determines the impact of an industrial technological society on the environment.
Pollution is a worldwide problem, which will not give way to political code words. It can be excised only through intelligent public action, based on an understanding of its causes, an appreciation of its constantly changing aspect, and a comprehension of its implications.
From my comments it may appear that nothing has been done to protect man from the follies of his waste. This would be an inaccurate appraisal, and a misleading one.
Since the latter part of the 1940's we have been chipping away at the obvious sources of water pollution from municipal and industrial sources.
1. The greater part of our limited success in this area has come in the last six years, with the development of our water quality standards program, a substantial increase in our commitment to build sewage treatment plants, and attacks on specific problems such as oil pollution, thermal pollution and vessel pollution.
2. Work on the problems of air pollution came later, because its threats were not so obvious and because we did not make the connection between it and public health. Nevertheless, we have launched a program which is designed to achieve high standards of air quality in all parts of the nation. It is a program which deals with moving and stationary sources. Most important, it is organized to build on scientific data and to stimulate the gathering and use of such data as it relates to public health.
3. Finally, we are in the process of converting the solid waste control program from an exercise in the disposal of waste to an attempt to reduce the volume of waste in our society and to encourage the more efficient use and reuse of materials and energy.
These are programs dealing with the obvious and straightforward problems of pollution, the physical by-products of our activities and our production. They are, if you will, the first-stage problems of an environmental protection program. The next stage will involve the organization of our public institutions to deal with the more subtle and pervasive questions of (1) land and resource use, (2) of population distribution and industrial location, (3) of hazardous substances, (4) of noise and aesthetic pollution, (5) of ecological balances and urban design.
Such questions affect the way we organize Federal, State and local governments, planning decisions, systems of taxation, public works projects, support of research and development, and even decisions of defense policies. Increasingly such questions will involve our relations with other countries, in this hemisphere, in Europe, Africa and Asia.
Efforts are underway to provide a base for this second-stage effort in the Federal Government. The Congress has, for example, (1) sent to the President the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. That act presents a statement of national policy on the environment, (2) directs all Federal agencies to comply with that policy, (3) provides the President with a Council of environmental quality, and (4) requires the President to submit to the Congress and the people an annual environmental quality report.
The Water Quality Improvement Act of 1969, now in conference between the Senate and the House of Representatives, complements the National Environmental Policy Act in two important respects. First, it expands the requirements for Federal compliance with water quality standards to include activities and projects supported or authorized by the Federal Government. Second, it establishes an office of environmental quality to provide staff support to the President, the Cabinet-Level Environmental Quality Council, and the newly-created Council on Environmental Quality.
Those of you who are sensitive to the implications of words for politicians have probably noted our shift from "pollution control and abatement" to "environmental quality."
The object of our proposals for expanding the President's capacity to deal with Federal responsibilities in environmental protection is (1) partially a recognition of the increasing complexity of the problem, and (2) partially an admission of the confusion which has hampered various pollution control efforts in the past. We face a similar problem in the Congress.
Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, recognizing the need to expand their own understanding of environmental problems and the need to coordinate more closely their efforts to improve the environment, are proposing the creation of a non-legislative joint committee on environmental quality. This is an outgrowth of my own proposal for a select committee on Technology and the Human Environment.
These proposals are based on recognition of the fact that environment protection concerns cannot be isolated from other concerns. Membership on the proposed committee would be drawn from the several legislative committees whose activities affect the environment. Those committees include Public Works, Agriculture, Interior, Government Operations, Banking and Currency and Labor in both Houses, Commerce in Senate, and Merchant Marine and Fisheries and Interstate and Foreign Commerce in the House of Representatives.
Such a committee should develop a body of knowledge which would guide our Legislative Committees in their activities, and give more visibility to environmental concerns on a day to day basis. It would provide a forum and a clearing house for those who question, those who want change, and those who have ideas for the betterment of Man's place in the universe.
In the Executive branch, a more formal reorganization is needed to insure proper status for environmental protection. I am not the first to note the way in which pollution control and abatement protection programs are scattered through several departments and agencies.
(1) The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration is housed in the Department of Interior.
(2) The Air Pollution Control Administration is part of the consumer protection and environmental health services program in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, along with the Environmental Control Administration.
The Congress has assigned responsibilities for pesticide control to the Department of Agriculture, which also promotes the use of pesticides for increased Agricultural production. The Atomic Energy Commission supervises radiological protection from the uses of nuclear energy, which the Commission promotes. The Corps of Engineers is responsible for some pollution control on navigable waters, which the corps dredges and into which it authorizes the dumping of spoil. Some responsibilities for solid waste programs are lodged in the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Mines, which has as its primary mission the promotion of mineral resource development and use.
We have also given authority to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Farmers Home Administration in the Department of Agriculture to make grants and loans for the construction of sewage systems.
Such proliferation of activities and overlap of responsibilities are not unique to environmental protection programs in the Federal Government. But, increasingly, such proliferation and overlap are intolerable because of their adverse effects on our efforts to improve the environment.
The time has come for us to create an independent, watchdog agency to exercise the regulatory functions associated with environmental protection. Bureaus, divisions, and administrations housed in separate departments cannot marshal the resources required to combat the interlocking assaults on our air, water and land resources. They have neither the status nor the manpower to deal with one of the fundamental and insidious threats to our society, even with the new staff support we are providing the President.
I am not talking about a new department of natural resources or Department of Conservation. Environmental protection is not the same as conservation, although sound conservation practices should enhance the environment. For example, some conservation projects developed and promoted by the Soil Conservation Service, the Bureau of Reclamation or the Corps of Engineers are not consistent with broader societal needs and the quality of life. Consider what we have done to Southern Florida and the Everglades with our conservation projects in south-central Florida.
There is an additional reason for not proposing a Department of Natural Resources or a Department of Conservation to manage environmental protection programs. The traditional concerns of conservation activities have been too closely identified with the protection of natural resources separated from the population centers. Our primary concern must be man where he lives and the interrelationship between the natural environment and his man-made environments.
An Independent Agency, charged with responsibility for (1) developing and implementing Federal environmental quality standards, (2) supporting basic research on problems of environmental quality, (3) stimulating and supporting research on control techniques, and (4) providing technical assistance to State, interstate and local agencies, would reflect the National commitment we need if we are to avoid ecological disaster.
The establishment of such an agency must be backed up by a commitment of resources to (1) eliminate the discharge of municipal and industrial wastes into our public waterways, (2) to a drastic reduction in air pollution emissions from stationary sources and moving vehicles, (3) to prevent the distribution of materials and products which threatens man and other species, and (4) to stand up and be counted on environmental questions which have risen at home.
The commitment of resources means money and manpower, and hard decisions on where to allocate those resources and where not to allocate them. It means making environmental protection and improvement more than a conventional political issue.
Environmental protection is too important to be left to the emphases of public opinion polls, or the prospects of political action, confrontation and court suits. It is too vital to man's survival to be dressed up in new committees, councils and agencies – unsupported by a willingness to invest in that survival.
In the final analysis, the administration, the Congress and state and local governments, will move to improve the environment in direct proportion to the degree of public awareness of the problem, the determination of the public to be heard, and the amount of informed opinion which is brought to bear on the problem. This is particularly true of those subtle threats to man's health and well being which do not result in immediate death and obvious damage, but which lower our capacity to resist disease and accidents and interfere with our ability to live up to the full potential of our capacities.
Scientists have a special responsibility to society in meeting that need. We have relied on science for generations to teach us more about our world and the universe, and to increase our capacity to use the resources of our planet. Now we have found that in exploiting scientific knowledge and the secrets it has unlocked we have been exploiting ourselves. The time has come for us to adapt our scale of values and our approaches to the uses of science to man's long-term survival. The object of basic and applied science should not be to increase man's creature comforts and to overcome the natural environment, but to free man from unnecessary hazards and to enable him to live in harmony with his environment.
Can we implement such a concept of science and the future of man? I think the prospects are excellent. The goal of a healthy environment is an idea whose time is come.
As we look to the future, the so-called policy makers are confronted by two realities:
1. It is clearer than ever before that man's survivability depends upon what he himself does to and about his environment – that the continuation of his current behavior patterns means a daily reduction in his prospects for a healthy life on this planet – and that the deterioration may already be irreversible in same vital respects.
2. The threshold of public patience with our failure to come to grips effectively with this problem is lower than ever before, and the level of public demand that we do what needs to be done is rising rapidly.
To put it bluntly: The crisis is here. The people are ready. What will the leaders do?
When I say that the people are ready, I mean that they are aware of the danger and receptive to a call to action.
Many or most of them may be inclined to believe that someone else's behavior patterns are at fault, and that the problems can be licked if someone else makes the appropriate sacrifices.
Most can be persuaded to accept restraints upon their own activities and costs they must share.
An entire new generation, disturbed by what we are doing to their environment, is demanding that steps be taken now to protect and enhance the environment, to protect and improve man's health, to restore the balance in man's relationship to other species. They are pushing me, and they will be pushing you.
Let me quote to you the portion of some remarks made recently at the 13th National Conference of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. The speaker was Pennifield Jensen, a graduate student at San Francisco State College.
"We don't want merely to survive; we want to live. There is only one place in which to live and that is on this planet and we must live here together."
I welcome Mr. Jensen and all others of like mind in his generation and mine to continuing the struggle. It is a struggle we must win if science is to be worth advancing and man is to have a future.