October 12, 1970
Page 36144
TENTH ANNUAL WEST SIDE COMMUNITY CONFERENCE – LIFE, POWER, AND POLLUTION
(Mr. RYAN asked and was given permission to extend his remarks at this point in the RECORD and to include extraneous matter.)
Mr. RYAN. Mr. Speaker, one of the critical problems facing our Nation and all mankind is the complex problem of life, power, and pollution.
Early this year, leading world experts and scientists joined with citizens of the West Side of Manhattan and of New York City to discuss the problem and to consider possible approaches and solutions.
Some 30 national and international experts joined with us in the 10th annual West Side Community Conference sponsored by me and by the Democratic and Liberal Clubs of the West Side.
I believe that elected officials, and particularly Members of Congress, have a special responsibility to increase citizen participation in public affairs. I believe that the public and those who mold policy are obligated to one another for understanding and direction.
Thus every year of my tenure in Congress I have sponsored an annual daylong community conference in New York City. The conferences are free of charge and free of partisan orientation. They bring together leaders in the Government and the academic world with the citizens to whom they are responsible for an exchange and an interchange of views.
On Saturday, April 18, 1970, we held our 10th annual West Side Community Conference on "Life, Power, and Pollution." More than 1,500 individuals attended and took part in the five panels and the plenary session at Riverside Church, New York City.
Speakers at the plenary session were Senator EDMUND S. MUSKIE, the Honorable T. T. B. Koh, member, U.N. Human Environment Preparatory Committee, permanent U.N. representative of the Republic of Singapore, and myself.
Other panelists included:
[LIST OF LOCAL NAMES OMITTED]
I am also deeply grateful to the large number of community sponsors whose generous contributions enabled the conference to be held.
The conference committee outlined the general theme of the conference in the following statement which raises some of the basic questions which must be resolved if the implications of the ecological crisis are truly to be faced:
In a modern society, each of us is a polluter. It would be more comfortable to place all the blame on impersonal entities – "the system," "the establishment," or "big business." While individual and corporate action and government inaction has played the major role in bringing us to our present disastrous condition, they have been ably assisted and abetted by each individual, ready to reap the personal benefits of convenience and ease. Every enzyme pre-soaking, every aluminum can, every weekend car rental, every pre-packaged cook-and-serve dinner contributes to a polluted environment.
We did not arrive at our calamitous state simply because of greed or indifference.We will not change it through moralizing. There are very real conflicts in legitimate social goals. We may now understand the effects of insecticides on the ecological balance, but who will argue that the under-developed nations must continue to live with plague and widespread disease? We may recognize that massive urban construction poses massive disposal problems, but who will tell the poor that they must continue to live in substandard housing? We will not resolve our conflicts by arguing for a return to a pre-technological society.
Many argue that it is now survival itself which is in question, that the answer is not in the vague future awaiting conferences and studies, and that action delayed may well ensure the most radical answer of all...the end of life on earth.
It is our hope that today's conference will face in some depths the implications of the ecological crisis for each of us – the questions beyond the current flurry of interest.
Can the scientists and technicians agree at this point on what the solutions are? What changes must each of us accept in our "life style?" What is the nature of the sacrifices involved if we are to restore our environment? What are the costs in money, in convenience? What are the possible effects on our economic system? What will it mean in jobs, in food, in public expenditures?
What role must be played by government, by industry, by the consumer in reordering our goals and achieving a new approach? What specific actions can we as individuals take to bring about the needed solutions?
Finally we must ask, are these questions themselves relevant? Can a democratic society which balances competing needs and interests resolve these conflicts? Can each of us, members of some pressure group – a union, a consumer organization, a professional association – individuals with personal concerns and demands, can we understand, recognize and work for solutions vital to the salvation of all?
At the plenary session, Senator MUSKIE, Ambassador Koh, and I touched on different aspects of the pollution problem facing our Nation and the world.
I include at this point in the RECORD the remarks of Senator MUSKIE, Ambassador Koh, and myself at the plenary session.
REMARKS BY SENATOR EDMUND S. MUSKIE BEFORE THE 10TH ANNUAL WEST SIDE COMMUNITY CONFERENCE, APRIL 18, 1970
I am very privileged to be invited to participate in this conference.
In this vast and beautiful center of worship there is a special drama as people of all ages and conditions of life have gathered to concern themselves about the health and welfare of their city.
We are searching together for a national policy of environmental protection affecting all communities of the country.
Providing for this forum of understanding and dialogue, the West Side Community Conference has performed a remarkable public service over a period of ten years. It is good to be here among friends.
Until the 20th Century, the world view of Western man was based on notions of fixed values and absolute laws.
We believed that the past infinitely repeated itself in cycles, and that the future was logically and predictably determined by the past.
Life was thought of as a state, rather than as a process, and the expressed goal of society was to achieve and maintain "normalcy."
But then in the early part of this century, the modern age burst into being. In an extraordinary flash of discovery and imagination, the sciences – physical and social – began to discover that their classical laws, so lucid and permanent, were merely fictions – invented by the human mind and imposed upon a reality that refused to conform.
We discovered that we were living in a dynamic, unpredictable world of process and flux.
But despite the vast gains we have made in theory and knowledge on all fronts, in large part we still live by the inherited assumptions of a previous age. We still live by the social equivalent of Newtonian physics.
We act as though a luxurious future and a fertile land will continue to forgive us all the mistaken traditions by which we still abuse our physical and social environment.
The fact is that our shrinking margins of natural resources are the bottom level in the barrel.
There are no replacements, no spare stocks with which we can replenish our supplies.
Our nation hangs together by tenuous bonds that are now strained as they have never been strained before. We now know that we live in a country of limited natural resources and fragile human resources, and that we cannot survive an undeclared war on our future.
An environmental conscience has of late been awakened in our nation, and it holds great promise for reclaiming our air, our water and our land.
But man's environment includes more than these natural resources. It includes the shape of the communities in which he lives, his home, his schools, his places of work and his society.
And it is essential to the quality of our national future that we recognize the present overall crisis of life in America. The environmental conscience may be the instrument needed to turn the nation around.
Through an awareness that the total environment determines the quality of life, we can begin to make those decisions that will salvage our nation from becoming a class-ridden physical wasteland.
We must forge a wholesale change in our priorities and our values. We must redefine our standard of living, reflecting the knowledge that both our human and natural resources are at stake.
The roots of the environmental crisis stretch as far back as the nation itself. Life in America was cheap in the beginning. Natural resources were plentiful, and the idea that there had to be limits on our material growth never entered our minds.
Early farming paid scant attention to conserving the land that produced the crops. We took trees from the forests without thinking of the possibility that our timber supply was not endless. Soon after industry first came to America, some of our rivers were seriously polluted and the air in some cities and towns was fouled.
But, as our cities grew and became more crowded, enough Americans could escape from the confines of soot and clutter so that the voices of those who were trapped were never really heard.
So pollution was isolated by the very size and openness of America. A river here, a forest there, a few of our larger, more industrialized cities – these early examples of environmental destruction seemed a small price to pay for our prosperity.
This was the frontier ethic: America pushing ahead and getting ahead, with an unlimited future – with a manifest destiny ahead of us.
The frontier ethic helped us build the strongest nation in the world. But it also led us to believe that our natural and human resources were endless, that our rivers could absorb as much sewage as we could pour in them, that there was automatic equal opportunity for everyone, that our air would always be clean, and that hunger and poverty didn't really exist in America.
The physical harnessing of the land absorbed us almost completely, and, in the process we did much more than domesticate it: we conquered it and are on the verge of killing it.
The luxury of space once absorbed our mistakes. If we irretrievably fouled our home areas, we could always pull up and make a fresh start farther west.
But the Western frontier is now gone. We have reached the shores of the Pacific, and the tide of our civilization has washed back into our cities.
We have become an industrialized, technically sophisticated society – and yet we still live by the old ethic of infinite horizontal expansions.
A frontier still exists, though, and we now confront it nationally. The frontier is no longer our West, or even "out there" anywhere.
It is now an internal and personal frontier. We now face – collectively and individually – a moral frontier.
And it is defined by the point at which we are willing to cut back our hungry selfishness in favor of selflessness.
It is marked daily by the extent of our concern for future generations. They deserve to inherit their natural shares of the American garden – as we have – but conceivably they could inherit a physical and moral wasteland.
We have reached a point where man, his environment, and his industrial technology intersect.
We confront a deteriorated environment, a devouring technology and our fellow men. Relative harmony has become a three-cornered war – a war where everyone loses.
No society has ever reached this point,before, no society has ever solved this problem. We have no past experience to guide us.
We have no choice but to turn away from uncontrolled economic and technological growth that ignores the increasing strain on the environment.
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 live with.
We have to learn to choose, to say no, and to give up the luxury of absolute and unlimited free choice. These kinds of decisions are the acid test of our commitment to a healthy environment.
Let us look at the national budget for 1971. That "balanced budget" represents shamefully unbalanced priorities. That budget "balances" $275 million for the SST against $106 million for air pollution control. It "balances" $3.4 billion for the space program against $1.4 billion for housing. And it "balances" $7.3 billion for arms research and development against $1.4 billion for higher education.
It is a sham to say that we cannot afford the protection of our environment – just yet; or the fight against hunger and poverty – at this time; or homes and medical care for our people – for a few years. We can afford these programs now, if we admit that there are less important programs that we cannot afford.
These are the kinds of choices that have to be reversed.
We have forgotten that our primary goal as a nation is to create a society where each individual has an equal chance to fulfill his own potential. Our goal has never been to create a society where human greatness or environmental quality take a back seat to technological change.
The study of ecology – man's relationship with his environment – should finally teach us that our relationships with each other are just as intricate and just as delicate as those with our natural environment. We cannot afford to correct our history of abusing nature and neglect the continuing abuse of our fellow man.
We should have learned by this time that in our development as a nation, we must find ways to live together in peace. And we should have learned that the only way to achieve peace among ourselves is to insure that all Americans have equal access to a healthy environment – to a healthy total environment.
That can mean nothing less than equal access to good schools for our children, to meaningful job opportunities, to adequate medical care and to decent housing.
For the last ten years we have been groping toward the realization that the total environment is at stake.
We have seen the destruction of poverty, and declared a war on it.
We have seen the ravages of hunger, and declared a war on it.
We have seen the costs of crime, and declared a war on it.
And now we have awakened to the pollution of our environment, and we have declared another war.
We have fought too many losing battles in those wars to continue this piecemeal approach to self-preservation.
The only strategy that makes sense is a total strategy to protect the total environment.
Environmental issues are not substitutes for the issues of poverty or race relations or urban decay.
They are not substitutes for the issues of arms control or peacemaking or economic development.
We cannot take refuge in concern for environmental quality as an excuse to ignore the specific ills that bedevil our society and our world – and will continue to do so whatever we do about cleansing the air and water and controlling solid waste.
An environmental point of view is however, something new – an integrative, comprehensive way of looking at human affairs.
It means that we have to outgrow the traditional way of approaching problems one at a time – each in its own limited context – and then acting, oblivious to the side effects.
It means that we must come off a long binge of specialization and learn to subordinate specialized knowledge to an encompassing view.
It means a brand new look at what we mean by "cost" what is economical or not economical, what we can afford and what we cannot afford.
One can sense today the emergence of a new morality concerned with the whole panoply of human concerns.
One can sense that we are approaching a sea-change in a human history dominated for so long by a spirit of competitiveness that – so easily – turns to rancor, hostility and violence.
Our competitiveness now has to be turned inward. We must begin competing with ourselves, and our selfishness – individually nationally and internationally.
The essential line along which our society is divided today is not that between leftist and rightist – it is the line between tolerance and intolerance.
The person who chants a litany of universal love and punctuates it with refrains of "kill the Fascist pigs" is linked in a selfish tribe of hostility with the person who preaches traditional religious values and raises his children to believe that one race has natural rights another does not have.
We must work for the day when political campaigns are no longer based on appeals to the lowest animal instincts of greed, selfishness, hostility and fear.
In the cold and infinite expanses of space, only one small planet is known to sustain life in any form.
This tiny ball teems with beings that all alike share brief allotments of conscious existence.
An intelligent observer would expect to find these beings locked together in a close-knit brotherhood devoted to improving the general quality of their lives and preserving the harmony of their tiny planet.
Who would believe that in their situation, they would devote a substantial amount of their lives and energies in efforts to destroy or control one another. Or even in neurotic efforts to demonstrate their individual superiority by piling up surfeits of wealth within actual sight of other beings who are bound to desperate lives of bare animal survival.
We are all too capable of deluding ourselves into thinking that some of us are naturally more important or deserving than others – that some possess a greater degree of human dignity and rights than others.
A common environment, however, contains them all, and finally is the great leveler. Our destinies are commonly linked – whether recognized or not.
Our national future hangs in great part from a fragile chain of natural and human resources, and the chain is corroded daily by selfishness and moral blindness.
The reform of our environment involves first the reform of ourselves.
We are all immeasurably more alike than different, and the continued insults to our social and natural environments are capable of shattering the delicate balance of the only world and home we have.
We have a right and duty to hope that the evolution of an environmental point of view might radically alter the fossil traditions about national interests, national sovereignty and national defense that pollute the world's intellectual environment.
It is a very long way from here to there. The old traditions have an incredible power of survival.
Reactionary regimes still rule in important centers of world power.
Hostility is still a way of life in large societies.
International cooperation so far is hesitant, tentative and fragile.
Yet the first step toward an environmental point of view surely is to see the human predicament in its universal dimension.
The global environment is universal by definition. It is unrelated to artificial political boundaries.
It is neutral ideologically. In its full dimension it can only be dealt with globally. And pervasive concern for the preservation, protection and management of the human environment is the best candidate yet for "a moral equivalent to war."
For this we do not need a miraculous reform of the human character. We only need a hard-headed human decision to save our own skins.