April 30, 1970
Page 13685
NBC-TV PROGRAM "POLLUTION IS A MATTER OF CHOICE"
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, NBC-TV recently broadcast a program about the environment entitled "Pollution Is a Matter of Choice."
The program focused clearly on the nature of the dilemma that America faces as we try to organize ourselves and to make the decisions to enhance and protect our environment.
The decisions each of us will have to make are effectively portrayed in the NBC White Paper.
Reporter Frank McGee and writer-producer Fred Freed showed an intelligent and sensitive insight into the problems of environmental contamination.
I ask unanimous consent that the transcript of the program appear in the RECORD at this time.
There being no objection, the transcript was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
NBC WHITE PAPER: POLLUTION IS A MATTER OF CHOICE
McGEE. We know about our murderous machines. We know about the environment they are murdering. We have heard all the apocalyptic prophecies. We know all the terrible statistics. We believe them. There's no more room for argument. The danger is real.
But we also know we cannot turn back the clock. We live in an industrial society. We need what it produces.
This program is about the real options that are open to us. About the real choices before us.
McGEE. This is where we begin. This is Machiasport, Maine.
Seemingly a world away from the blighted cities our technology has built. But what is happening here, now, to these people? The decisions they are facing may tell us some important things about our hopes of reclaiming our polluted landscape.
We know about the beauties of Maine: The tourist eye view. But it's not quite the same if you live here, have to make a living here.
The people who came here 300 years ago to make this nation, saw nature as the enemy. Here it still is. It threatens man's survival. He has to fight it to survive. That's why he built his machines, to help him survive.
In America, we've always believed in "progress". Technology would make us free. That's deep in our culture: Western, Puritan, American.
It's how we created this nation.
We learned to control some of nature with our machines. And that control made some of us rich, and most of us comfortable. We have more "things" than anyone else ever had.
But we began to lose control of the machines.
We began to run short of those resources we thought were endless. The skies and the rivers and the land began to disappear under the smoke and litter of our industrial waste.
The cities technology built were scarred with poverty, crime, racial violence.
It's easy to see why we are nostalgic now for places like Machiasport. But now that nostalgia is threatened.
Change is coming! Industry. Technology. Why let it happen here? Why not preserve this place as it is now?
The answer, as we shall see in this next hour, is not easy, not uncomplicated. Begin with this seemingly unrelated fact: we need oil in this country to run our machines.
LOUIS REAM. Total petroleum product demand in the United States is in 1970, going to be something like 600 million gallons a day.
Now that's a terrible figure to try to understand. Perhaps some prospective can be put on it if we understand that there are about 200 million people in the United States.
And this means that every man, woman, and child in the United States is in effect, consuming something like 3 gallons of petroleum products every day.
Over the decade, up to 1980, this will grow to about 800 million gallons a day.
McGEE. What has all this got to do with Machiasport, Maine?
We can find one part of the answer half way around the world, in Japan..
Because we need more oil, we need bigger tankers to carry it. Super tankers, displacing up to 300,000 tons, are being built in Japan. Because of this, Machiasport is being dragged into the affluent, polluted world the rest of us live in.
The reason is this. The super tankers need deep water ports.
This bay, at Machiasport, is one of the deepest on the East coast of the United States. One of the few that can accommodate the super tankers.
This is also part of the answer: a continent away on the north slope of Alaska . . . a great oil strike has been made.
The first tanker has broken through the ice of the Northwest Passage.
It could carry oil from the Alaska fields to the East coast. From the Alaska fields to Machiasport.
The oil companies see Machiasport as a great oil port of the future.
With the super tankers would come refineries, pipelines, petrochemical plants. The affluence of the age of technology.
And the pollution. Pollution that could destroy Maine's beaches, summer boating. The lobster and shell fishing industries. Oil could pollute the land and air and water.
Why would anyone want to take a chance on that happening here?
ROY SPRAGUE. Well, because there's no work around here for nobody.
The little, the little lumber company up here, they keep going in the summertime but in the wintertime there’s no, there's nothing here to do. For the people that lives here. They have to struggle for a living. I know because I've struggled.
ALAN LOOK. Unless that oil refinery comes in, I don't look for any industry to come in because it costs so much to transport the stuff. And without a world port, we've got nothing.
NORMA WOOD. Do we, do we think enough of the scenery to give up a good living out of an oil refinery or another industry. Would we rather have the scenery or would we rather have food on the table.
McGEE. Why should anyone want oil in Machiasport, Maine? Because this is a fact! Life outside the technological society is not so idyllic as it seems if you are a tourist. Fourteen per cent of the people in this county receive food surplus packages from the government because their income is below the poverty level. Oil would bring jobs . . . perhaps 3,000 in ten years.
New industry. Money for schools and roads. And pollution.
SONG
"Everybody talks about a new world in the morning.
New world in the morning, so they say. I myself don't talk about,
A new world in the morning.
New world in the morning, that's today.
And I can feel a new tomorrow coming on.
And I don't know why,
I have to make a song.
"Everybody talks about a new world in the morning.
A new world in the morning, takes so long.
"I met a man who had a dream, he had since he was twenty.
I met that man when he was eighty one.
He said too many folks just
Stand and wait until the morning.
Don't they know tomorrow never comes.
And he would feel a new tomorrow coming on.
And when he'd smile,
His eyes would twinkle at them."
McGEE. In this county, there is no air pollution. But eleven per cent of the people are unemployed. The water is clean but two thirds of the farmers make less than $3,000 a year.
There is no race violence. No organized crime. No ugly slums. But there is poverty. There is isolation. And for many, not much hope.
The young are leaving to go to live in the cities. The polluted, decaying cities, where the jobs are.
This is the dilemma of Machiasport. And, in a larger sense, of all of us. We need what technology creates for us. But we're being destroyed by the waste it spews out wherever it comes. We are being oppressed by the ugliness and depersonalization it brings into our lives.
In the next part of this program, we're going to look at the ways people in other parts of the United States are facing this issue, and with what results.
The jet ... Visible and audible symbol of the age of technology.
Around every city airport, the struggle between progress and quality of life is joined. Here in Florida that struggle threatened this wilderness. The Everglades. A swamp larger than the state of Rhode Island.
Inhabited by no people. The Miami Port Authority wanted to build the world's largest airport on the edge of this swamp. Conservationists said the airport would destroy the Everglades. They were able to keep it from being built.
So they were able to preserve for one moment, at least, this wilderness. For one moment the progress we have believed in and lived by stopped. The birds won over the jets.
But if it was victory, it was only a symbolic one.
And perhaps only temporary. Nothing was finally solved.
For while the environment of the Everglades is being temporarily preserved, the environment of many people in Miami is being destroyed.
ARTHUR PATTEN. Now as a result of the heated controversy, the Federal government invoked a 5,000 minimum altitude criteria over the entire Everglades National Park region. People don't live there. There are no people.
It was evidently important to keep airplanes 5,000 feet from the ground over this vast wasteland. But yet, the same agencies are perfectly willing for commercial airliners to fly over any city of this nation at a thousand feet, but over the Everglades now, 5,000 feet.
McGEE. The Miami airport is the seventh busiest in the country. It is dangerously overcrowded. And that overcrowding is going to get worse.
ARTHUR PATTEN. Miami is one of the most rapidly growing urban areas in the country. We have doubled our population in the greater Miami area every ten years. The transportation projections for our aeronautical future indicate that in the year 1985, this community will be called upon to handle 65 million airplane passengers annually.
SONG
"Everybody's talkin' at me.
I don't hear a word they're saying.
Only the echoes of my mind.
People stop and starin'.
I can't see their faces.
Only the shadows of their eyes.
I'm going where the sun keeps shining,
Through the pouring rain.
Going where the weather suits my clothes.
Banking off of the northeast wind
Sailing on a summer breeze,
Skipping over the ocean like a stone."
McGEE. Nobody argues about the need for a new airport. But nobody wants to live near this. People want the convenience of air travel. The prosperity it creates. But not the damage it does to the quality of their lives.
WOMAN. This is a wonderful neighborhood here. Clean. The people are all very nice. And they all keep their properties as you can see, in order. Their grass is cut and everything kept nice and clean around here. And the neighbors are wonderful. Couldn't be a better neighborhood. But it's that noise up there, and you should hear that–
That dirt that comes from these airplanes. That soot on my patio. I gotta clean that everyday.
McGEE. It took two years to find a place for the new airport. Seventy-one sites were considered.
This was the site they chose. Fifty miles west of Miami. Eight miles north of the Big Cypress Swamp.
One of the last untouched wilderness areas. Here in depressed, lightly populated Collier county, they were going to build the largest airport in the world.
The Everglades is particularly vulnerable. Conservationists have lost battles here before.
For Florida's growing population is pressing against the borders of the swamp. With canals, with houseboat and trailer colonies. With roads. A drainage district. Only a few miles away they are drilling for oil.
What man is threatening here is this: A unique environment that nourishes twenty-two almost extinct species of wild life.
A sanctuary.
A rare place of solitude in a world of noise and crowds.
Its survival is threatened by a flood control system constructed by the Army Corps Of Engineers. The idea was to be able to control the water supply of South Florida by dumping excess water into the park during floods and holding water to use for irrigation during droughts.
The result, for the Everglades, was instant flooding, and instant drought destroying the slow, even flow of water needed to sustain the wild life.
FOREST RANGER. Well, it'll just about make you sick. You go on to a head and you see a fawn, a deer, in there and they look real bad and you come back three hours later and they're dead. You come back three hours later and the hogs have just about consumed them. You can't find anything but a skull and maybe a few pieces of hair.
McGEE. This is what happens when the delicate balance of nature is altered by man. The airport is only the latest threat by man. It was to expand around this training runway, already in operation. It would occupy forty square miles across the path of the already damaged waterways of the Everglades. It would endanger the water supply, conservationists said, of all south Florida.
Airline and port authority officials promised rigid pollution restrictions. But the airport would create 70,000 new jobs. In time, a community of a million people would grow up around it.
There would be industry, prosperity, "progress". No one knows how to control the kind of pollution that would bring.
Detergents, pesticides, sewage, industrial waste pouring into the water. The sound of jet engines ripping through millions of years of silence. Exhaust fallout polluting the air. Jet oil spills polluting the water. How long would the swamp survive with man as its neighbor?
SONG
"You got to change your evil ways, baby.
Before I start loving you.
You got to change, baby,
And every word that I say is true.
You got me runnin', and hidin',
All over town.
You got me sneakin' and peepin',
And runnin' you down.
This can't go on.
Lord knows you got to change, baby."
McGEE. This battle, for the moment, is over. There will be no airport on the edge of the Everglades.
But the problem is bigger than an airport and a swamp.
Nothing is finished. Nothing is really solved.
There is still no airport. One has to be built. It will interfere with the environment wherever it is built.
Florida is growing. It needs room. For industry, for housing, for recreation.
The demands of technology are as greedy as ever. No one seems to want to give up the affluence technology creates. No one has yet worked out how to keep producing more babies, more goods and services, and still protect the environment.
But here, in the Everglades, time has been gained. And, at least, a symbolic victory. Here, we chose beauty over progress. We decided there is a quality to life beyond affluence.
In the next part of this program we may see more clearly why such a victory is not to be underestimated.
PART III
MCGEE. This is Gary, Indiana. Its business is to make steel.
SONG
I'm not scared of dyin and I don't really care
If it's peace you find in dyin’
Well then let the time be near
If it's peace you find in dyin’
And if dyin’time is near
Just bundle up my coat
Cause it's cold way down there
I hear that it's cold way down there
Yea, crazy cold way down there
And when I die And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world to carry on
Carry on
Now troubles are many They're as deep as ...
McGEE. At the turn of the century this was a beach. There were sand dunes here, and beach grass.
Now there are 2500 acres of blast furnaces, and slag heaps.
This mill makes more than 7 millions of tons of steel a year, for cars and so forth. It pays salaries that support 30,000 families.
It dumps 36,000 tons of soot a year on the people who live here.
Mrs. RENE RISBASIN. Oh the dirt's terrific. You send the kids outside to play and you have to wipe all the toys off before they can play. And cleaning in the house is miserable. You can't even pick up that black goop. It just, you just move it from one place to another.
JIM BALANOFF. A lot of people working are walkin’ around the mill who are sick. They know there's something wrong. They know that breathing this dirt and dust, washin’ with that dirty, filthy water is not doin' them any good. But what the hell can they do about it?
STEEL WORKER. You live around so long like I've lived here all my life and you don't pay much attention to it really. You get accustomed to it. But I know when my mother-in-law comes up to visit me she, she's just amazed. She doesn't know how you can live here, and breathe this, and smell this for all day long.
McGEE. Gary ... East Chicago ... Hammond – these are the towns technology built. They were created for producing, not living. For machines, not people. To fill the demands of an endlessly hungry consumer society. This is the price we've been willing, up to now, to pay for first survival, then affluence.
ANOTHER STEEL WORKER. Well, the place I left was a small farm town. Basically there was no cash. You harvest. If you had a good harvest you made good that year. You just about cleared expenses, and what not. And this wasn't enough I figured for my family.
Mr. ALEX BAILEY. When you've been down at the bottom of the economy scale, and you've come out of the ghetto and you're extremely low in earnings and practically nothing that you've worked your way up to a certain standard of living. Well, no one wants to go back down to the ghetto again and nobody wants to go back to earnin’ nothin’.
Mr. BALANOFF. Nobody comes out here because they like it out here. They come out here because they make a living, they can make some money. That's the only reason they come out here.
Mr. BAILEY. I went to the steel mill because my family worked there. My fathers, my brothers, all of my friends. It's a sort of romantic existence, a manly existence. You know you feel like this is the thing to do.
Like in my family, it seemed that if you worked in anywhere other than the steel mill it, you were sort of like a sissy. You know, ah you could barely wait to get into the steel mills because Dad was there, he worked there until he died. My brothers worked there and so ... you sorta got kidded a little bit. They made fun of you. Why don't you get a man's job. Why, so eventually you wind up in the steel mills.
McGEE. But even here these traditional answers to the questioning, how can you live like this? – no longer seem enough. We are caught in a dilemma of our own making. We consume in this country two and a half billion tons a year. Thirteen tons of things consumed by every man, woman and child in the United States.
We demand more and more every year. To produce them has a price. The destruction of our environment is the price we're now paying. Consider this: to provide the electric power we need to run our refrigerators, air conditioners, television sets ... we strip mine and destroy a hillside in Kentucky. We pour tons of dirt and slate into a river and pollute it. We burn carloads of coal in power generators and contaminate the skies over a city.
We demand more and more electric power. We sometimes demand more than we have. No one wants a power plant near where he lives. Conventional power plants pollute the skies. Nuclear power plants overheat the water and kill the fish. Still, nobody is willing to give up his air conditioner either.
CHARLES LUCE. Now, are people prepared to have less of what we thought of as the comforts of life? Are they prepared to have a somewhat less high standard of living as we thought of standard of living ... in terms of economic goods. I think that until people are willing to ride in small cars in New York – thirty five horsepower is enough to get you around.
CONGRESSMAN. Can you really expect the individual though to make that choice?
CHARLES LUCE. I'm not suggesting that laws aren't necessary and that more laws are not necessary. What I'm saying is that the basis for laws has to be an individual commitment and a willingness to accept less of the luxuries of life or what we thought of as the luxuries of life.
McGEE. We produce. We consume. Our resources grow scarce. Our demands increase. The only thing that's free is air, and water. So this is where industry saves money.
And this is the price. This is the hard reality of the crisis of our environment here. There will be more publicized issues. More dramatic issues. Somewhere another wilderness threatened.
But for most of us in the 70's, in this urban society, this will be our personal crisis. For this is how more and more of us are likely to have to live in the 70's.
SONG (UNDER NARRATION)
"Thrill is gone
The thrill is gone away
The thrill is gone, baby
The thrill is gone away
You know you done me wrong, baby
And you'll be sorry some day
The thrill is gone away
Is gone away from me
The thrill is gone away
Is gone away from me
The thrill is gone, baby
The thrill is gone away
Although I'll still live on
But so lonely around me."
McGEE. Caught in a landscape of our own making. Air we cannot breathe. Water we cannot drink ... A landscape of noise and dirt and tension.
The technology that makes us prosperous has become so uncontrolled that it threatens to destroy us.
We will either find a way to control our technological waste or we make this whole nation unlivable from sea to shining sea.
SONG
"The thrill is gone
The thrill is gone away for good
Oh, the thrill is gone
Baby, gone away for good."
McGEE. In this century, We've consumed more of our resources than in all man's previous time on earth:
Before the end of this century, our population will increase by a hundred million.
A hundred million more consumers.
More factories, airports, roads, houses, power plants.
We cannot go back to what we were a century ago. This is one of the facts that is going to change forever the terrain and quality of life of places like Machiasport, Maine.
We cannot go back to that simpler, pre-technological time. We cannot keep the landscape exactly as it is.
We cannot conserve all our resources. What is inescapably clear is that Machiasport and places like it are going to change in the next few years, unless we stop having babies, or give up our machines. It does not seem likely that we will do either.
What is also clear is that we do not have to do this. That there is a point where technology no longer serves us. Where it may in fact destroy us . . . May destroy . . . our health, the quality of our lives, our sanity . . . our existence as a species.
In the future we're going to have to decide what we really mean by "progress". We are learning that it is not necessarily more. It is not necessarily what is new or big. We're going to have to select that technology that serves us, reject that, that does not. This is what we're really talking about.
This is a decision the people of Machiasport have begun to try to make. The details of how and why Machiasport may become an oil port are complicated. Nothing is completely settled.
What is important is why some of the people of Machiasport want oil to come here. And why others don't.
OSSIE BEALS. I'd like to go on record for the M.L.A. Incorporated in the town of Beals, that we would oppose an oil refinery in the town of Machiasport.
McGEE. For we may be able to see here, in this small, isolated New England community, what the real issues of our environmental crisis are, how they relate to the other unresolved crises of our society.
BEALS. About a month ago, We had a Greek tanker here, go ashore down in Canada. In Nova Scotia and they had 1000 tons of crude oil. It's ruined our beaches and it's been a major threat to their fishing industry.
AUDUBON SOCIETY SPOKESMAN. The coming of oil to Machiasport does not mean prosperity for any of us. But instead will bring a disaster more terrible than I wish to contemplate.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN. I am concerned about the crime and the way of life that will be thrust upon us here. Well, we're very simple people and we live very close to nature. We're not used to violent crime and that sort of thing.
REGGIE SAWTELLE. I am a laborer, jobber, snow shoveler, whatever you want to call it. I just don't know what our trouble is but I think it's chronic unemployment. I wonder how much longer the other people that is paying you in unemployment the year round is going to keep carrying the load. Someday they're going to wise up and just decide that they don't want the unemployment any more.
McGEE. When we talk about environment we must understand this: For the poor, a better environment may be a job. To them a job is more important than an unspoiled view. An unspoiled view can not feed, clothe, and house a family. The middle class have jobs. For them a better environment is a better setting in which to enjoy their affluence.
Thus, the question of how to preserve and improve our physical environment is becoming in some places, a class issue.
NORMA WOOD. The poor people didn't dare to get together and say anything like they do now.
MAN. I think we were poorly represented last night.
NORMA WOOD. I think we was definitely.
MAN. Because the people with money done the talking ... I sat there and listened to them.
NORMA WOOD. Right.
ANOTHER MAN. We was licked before we ever went in.
MAN. But . . . he said that these poor people, our poor people can't work in that place. I got news for em. We got boys sittin' in this room right here tonight that's gone and melted metal. They set dye setting . . . great accuracy. We can run them mills.
NORMA WOOD. Yes, but the ones that come in are going to mean more, it's going to bring more in to the county anyway. They're going to have to have more of everything more stores, more stations. More everything.
MAN. The rich people can't see this. I say the rich . . .
NORMA WOOD. The rich can see it but they're scared of it.
MAN. They're going to be more homes. These people ain't going to live in homes like we live in.
NORMA WOOD. That's right. They wouldn't live the way we have to live.
MAN. ... for people like them that just. .. [People laugh]
Them that have the money are more or less trying to run the community themselves.
ANOTHER MAN. They're afraid of getting something in here so that these starvation salaries they're paying downtown... They'll have to raise them. That's what they're afraid of. Paying the workers some money.
WOMAN. I'd like to see some of these that oppose getting industry in here and getting some of these people in here, to come and live with some of these families for one week and see the children go without shoes and without clothes and without food and without medicine. And just live a life for one week and they'd vote industry in here. They'd get something in here for the people to do.
NORMA WOOD. That's right.
REGGIE SAWTELLE. Where's the income. There is no income. When we're standing in a bread line and they say you're going to slip downhill in oil I believe we're pretty near the bottom.
McGEE. John Cole is editor of the Maine Times. John, clearly there is a basic conflict here.
JOHN COLE. Here the conflict is between how to make a living and how to avoid destroying the place where you live. The two big words of course in the Machiasport situation are oil and poor and the oil people want in because the deep water harbor is here. Some people want the oil people to come because they're poor people here who need the work. On the other hand you have a whole group of people both in Maine and now in the Nation who say oil on the coast Of Maine is like a fire in an oil barn. By bringing in an oil industry you may give the people who are starving here the kind of jobs they need to make a living, but you run a very high risk of destroying the place where they live.
McGEE. But the Maine legislature, or so it's claimed, has passed some of the toughest anti-pollution laws of any State in the Union.
JOHN COLE. Well, they are tough laws but they're really only as good as the men who made them. And the men who will have to live by them. In other words, if the oil people want to disregard these laws, they can spill oil out here and nobody is really going to do anything about it.
The only thing that the law says is that the oil companies will have to pay for it. But that doesn't prevent the spill, and goodness knows, America and Maine should know what oil spillls do.
McGEE. The decision has not yet been made in Machiasport to accept what we have always called progress, or to reject it because the price is too high. It is a decision we are all going to have to make, one way or the other.
Some of what we've done to our environment is irreversible. What is left to us is to try to find a sane balance between technology and a livable environment in the world as it now exists.
We cannot escape to the past. We cannot solve our problems by breaking the machines.
We cannot allow environment to become a hobby of an elite. We cannot solve this expensive complex problem by taking it up as a fad this year and dropping it next year. The threat of destruction by pollution has united us as nothing else has for a long time. The danger is real. But we cannot use it to avoid the divisive, unresolved problems of the 60's.
These too are problems of environment. Problems growing out of our technological society.
What happens here in Maine, is a test case to see if we can use our technology to fill our needs while we control what it does to the quality of our lives. A nobel laureate, George Wald, has said: "Life on this planet is a tender thing". That tender thing is now threatened.
We have only begun to think about how to preserve it, and have yet to ask ourselves some difficult questions.
What quality of life is possible in an industrialized society? Do our institutions, created for simple times, have the vision, the power to control technology?
What are we willing to give up to clean up our environment? Are we willing to drive fewer or smaller cars? Have fewer television sets, fewer air conditioners? Have fewer comforts?
Are we willing to pay for the cost of cleaning up our air and water? Are we consumers willing to pay higher prices for cleaner engines and those who produce them, to take lower profits? Are we willing to have fewer babies, accept more rigid government controls? Would we dare set limits on our scientific and technological development?
We know that a species survives only as it adapts to its environment.
We know that unless we adapt, we may disappear from this earth like the dinosaurs before us.
"Everybody talks about a new world in the morning
New world in the morning, so they say
I myself don't talk about
A new world in the morning
New world in the morning, that's today
And I can feel a new tomorrow coming on
And I don't know why
I have to make a song.
"Everybody talks about a new world in the morning
A new world in the morning takes so long."