January 31, 1979
Page 1483
CBS NEWS ENVIRONMENTAL SERIES
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, for 5 nights during the first week of this year, CBS News presented a series entitled, "The Earth Revisited." The series was an update of a series that the network aired in 1970 — when environmental consciousness originally emerged.
The theme of the series was that the earth remains extremely fragile and sensitive to man's activities. The possibility of substantial manmade destruction, CBS concluded, is not merely science fiction to be tossed off lightly. The environmental laws enacted in this decade are attempts to prevent such ecological damage.
The five segments, narrated by Walter Cronkite, center around four crises which drew our attention in 1970 and still do so today: Population growth, pollution, the depletion of our natural resources, and the threat of nuclear war.
Mr. President, I ask that the transcript of this fine series be printed in the RECORD for the benefit of those who may have missed it.
The transcript follows:
CBS EVENING NEWS WITH WALTER CRONKITE
CRONKITE. There are places out here that look like doomsday has come and gone. This is the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico, 6,000 square miles of grease-wood and range grass. A few herds of wild horses live on this land, but mostly this land is empty. So it was here we came to test the weapons of modern war, and it was here we learned that there could be a manmade doomsday.
We're not, of course, the first people to think about the end of the world. Christians eighteen centuries ago watched for the "Four Horsemen", who would signal the coming of Apocalypse. And it seemed in 1970 four great crises were riding down on us like the horses we saw in the New Mexico desert, or like the "Four Horsemen" of the Book of Revelations. The experts we interviewed told us population was the fundamental crisis. And indeed, since the start of this decade we've added 700 million people to the world; in nine years the equivalent of 93 New York Cities.
The second crisis was pollution. And today you can find great clouds of poison hanging over our great cities. Not even the past is safe. In Rome, Venice and Athens a heritage is being eaten away by polluted air.
If we were to pick a third Horseman today it would be depletion of our natural resources, and this desert would be a perfect example. Barely a hundred years ago this was grassland, until the cattle barons of the last century destroyed the ecosystem here. Overgrazing turned this into a desert and a symbol of ignorance and greed.
A fourth great danger of biblical times was war, and so it is today. But even doomsday isn't what it used to be. On this wind-swept desert in New Mexico, July 16th, 1945 — a Monday — was a day with two dawns.First light was a sun that man had built. This is the same spot 34 years later. A simple rock monument marks "ground zero", and a cement stump all that is left of the concrete and steel structure that held the first atomic bomb.
We've built and tested bigger bombs since then, but somehow doomsday has stayed away. Yet even when we got used to living with the bomb, there was the thought, the nagging thought, that we could end our world.
[Feb. 23, 1970]
We're going to report regularly here the greatest battle man has ever waged, a true battle for survival — the battle, to put it crudely but accurately, to keep our heads above the rising tide of our own garbage. The stakes in this battle are far greater than any other we have ever fought. To lose this one is to lose the planet earth.
Many of the specialists we interviewed in our environment series nine years ago thought mankind's prospects were bleak. We asked some of them if they had changed their mind.
PAUL EHRLICH [biologist; 1970]. Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come. And by the end, I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.
[1978]. The world is older and going downhill fast. The only thing that's healthier is a lot more people are aware of the essential problems in the world. In other words, there is — we do have a – an Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental problems are considered at least newsworthy enough to go onto the Cronkite show.
BARRY COMMONER [biologist; 1969]. In 1970,this country and a large part of the world faces the crisis of survival. [1978]. Since then we've done a great deal to incorporate that ccncern into the ordinary operations of our political life. And I think that in that sense the movement — if you want to call it that — is a smashing success.
DENIS HAYES [activist; 1970]. And if this does prove to be a fad, it's going to be a very costly one, definitely costing hundreds of millions of deaths, very possibly costing the death of the species. [1978]. Since then I think we've bought ourselves some time. We've solved some of the really easily solved issues. We're still facing a variety of very-difficult-to-solve ones. And if we don't resolve them expeditiously in the next decade or two. then I think that that prophecy might well still hold — hold true.
CRONKITE. It is difficult to say whether we're any closer to saving the world than we were in 1970. Our intention is to use some of the resources of CBS News over this next year to examine our progress and explore our prospects. But one thing is worth noting: I'm standing on the spot where an atomic bomb was exploded. The very grains of sandon this desert floor were fused into something like green glass by that awesome heat. You can find shards of it in the weeds here. But there are weeds here. The birds have come back, and the spiders and the tough range grass; "ground zero" is coming back to life. And maybe that's the lesson we're learning. The earth will save itself if we just give it a chance.
When we offered a series of reports on the environment back in 1970, it seemed one crisis was fundamental, and in the second installment in our update of those reports we looked at the response to the challenge of that crisis in the decade of the environment. There are 4,300,000,000 human beings on thisplanet, but you can't tell that from this view. To see the works of man, you have to move around to the night side of the Earth. There in the dark satellites can see constellations of sparks. The East Coast of the United States is rimmed with foxfire. Those lights are our cities and our homes. At the beginning of this decade, it seemed that lights were going on all over the world. The experts we interviewed offered the prospect of an urban, overcrowded world, a world just too small for our numbers.
[February 24, 1970.]
In preparing this report, we asked a number of those population experts in and out of government where in all the world we could take our cameras to study an effective, broad-scale program of population control. The answer — there is no such place. And that's the way it is Tuesday, February 24th, 1970. This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.
That's the way it was, not the way it is. We have found an effective, broad-scale program of population control here on the other side of the world. This is the city and the nation of Singapore. And this is the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew.
Prime Minister LEE KUAN YEW. Well, we decided that unless we could check the population explosion, then all our efforts — health, education, economic development — would all come to naught, because you are — each time you are climbing up the tree, you reach a greasy patch, and you slip down again.
CRONKITE. Slipping down again is what was happening in 1966 in Singapore. A mother could expect to have four or five children. Today, the two-child family is the average. Of Singapore's married women, one in seven has had an abortion; one in five has been sterilized. In just ten years Singapore achieved one of the lowest population growth rates in Asia. It was done through
disincentives — a package of laws urged onto the books by Prime Minister Lee.
Prime Minister LEE. If you decide to have seven in the family or ten in the family, nobody can stop you. It's just that you will carry — beyond the third child you carry the full social and medical costs.
CRONKITE. The law says that hospital delivery fees go up with the number of children.The birth of a third child can cost twice as much as the first. The law says no income tax deductions for a fourth child. The law says no paid maternity leave after the second child. The law says that only the first two children will have priority at nearby schools; the third child may be bused. The law says abortion must be available on demand for five Singapore dollars. And they backed up their disincentives with a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people of this small land. While it may not be up to the state of Madison Avenue art, the campaign was straightforward, direct to the point.
And the message is everywhere — on posters, on key chains, on tea coasters, on school supplies. The message shows up in movie theaters, and is projected on buildings at night. The message is on Singapore television.
[Excerpt from TV commercial on family planning.]
A recent survey of the women of Singapore showed that 93% knew the message of the government family planning and population board.
TEACHER [in classroom]. What is the message?
CRONKITE. The word waits for the children in school.
TEACHER [in classroom]. Two is enough. Good!
CRONKITE. This is a sixth-grade class.
NURSE. Are you interested in family planning?
MOTHER. Yes.
NURSE. This was your second child, isn't this one?
MOTHER. Yes.
CRONKITE. And the word is waiting for the parents at the child health clinics.
Criticism of the measures has been muted, perhaps because the Chinese, who make up 75 percent of the population here, are pragmatic, shrewd, and fairly adaptable to new ideas. Church leaders of the 75,000 Catholics here refuse to comment on the laws, but some expressed the feeling that eventually the Church will have to take a stand.
Singapore is small — an island 15 miles across. The population, which 200 years ago was about 150 fishermen, is now 2,300,000. Almost nothing is left of the original plant and animal life on the island. Instead, there are flocks of people, rivers of cars, forests of apartment buildings. And in that, the story of Singapore could well be a parable for the rest of the world.
Population growth had to be brought under control here. There was simply nowhere to go. The methods might be called repressive, Orwellian. It might be said that 1984came early to Singapore. But it also can be said that in Singapore can be seen the future, and it can be made to work.
This is Walter Cronkite, CBS News. Good night.
ANNOUNCER. This has been the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
CRONKITE. This is Old Stockholm nine o'clock of a Sunday morning. The sun rises late here in the winter and can't do much to warm up the cold gray days. The weatherman tells us in degree days, Sweden has about the same weather as North Dakota. The economist tells us the standard of living in the United States and Sweden is about the same. Swedes have more second homes, Americans more second cars. Americans have more television sets, Swedes have more vacuum cleaners. But it's engineers who tell us the principal difference between the two nations. The Swedes in this cold climate maintaln their standard of living by using just two-thirds of the energy of the Americans.
It may seem strange for us in a land where even toothbrushes are electric that the good life is not strictly dependent on using energy, but that seems to be the lesson of Sweden. If you could convert all the different kinds of energy each country uses into coal, you would find that the average Swede at mid-decade was consuming seven tons of coal a year, while each American was using up the equivalent of twelve tons.
Transportation makes up a good part of the difference. Cars in Sweden and the United States are driven about the same number of miles a year — about 10.000. But the Swede's car is smaller and lighter and gets more miles per gallon. In the United States, smaller cars now make up about half of all new cars sold, but sales of gas-guzzling motor homes also are way up. The second car in Sweden is more likely to be a bus or a train. Almost half of a Swede's travels are on some form of public transportation. Just ten percent of an American's travels are on mass transit.
Another major difference in energy use is space heating. Buildings in Sweden are planned with the high cost of energy in mind. Windows are smaller, and may have two or three panes of glass.
Homes in Sweden are likely to leak half as much heat as an American home. While new homes in the United States contain twice as much insulation as they used to contain, experts estimate there are 15 million homes without adequate, easily installed attic floor insulation.
The difference is regulation. Here a law says that you must have an exhaust fan for your stove. It says how much heat can leak through your roof. Another law says how large your windows can be. Building a new home? The government tells you what sort of heat you may have. A new housing development is built around a mass transit stop. Everything here according to plan — a government plan.
And the plan calls for recycling in Sweden. Paper is separated from the other garbage, and ends up back at the paper mill. Heat left over from making electricity is sold to apartment buildings as steam. A deposit paid to the government when a car is purchased is returned when the car goes to the junk yard. Almost five percent of all steel used in Swedish industry is recycled steel. Swedish industry, experts conclude, is ten to fifteen years ahead of U.S. industry in energy efficiency.
Sweden's energy use is growing. but only eight-tenths of one percent a year. U.S. energy use is growing three times as fast.
What Sweden can do with a national plan and regulation, we try to. do through individual initiative and the marketplace. The process is slower; the scale is smaller. Consider the '"Golden Goat" of Scottsdale, Arizona. It's the brainchild of Tike Miller, a former toy manufacturer. His "Goat" eats aluminum cans, crushes them, weighs them, and pays twelve cents a pound for them. Miller says this machine takes in two tons of cans a week, which he resells to manufacturers.
TIKE MILLER. Oh, this is a profitable operation for the public and for the country and for the operator of the machine. It requires only five percent of the energy to recycle this aluminum in the cans again, as opposed to doing it with bauxite ore.
CRONKITE. The "Goat's" innards are complex, and its durability is still to be proved in service. For examples, vandals might be attracted by the silver in the "Golden Goat". But it does seem to be a way to put capitalism in service to the environment.
Compared to the energy conservatlon and recycling efforts we saw in Sweden, the "Golden Goat" at Smitty's Big Town shopping center in Scottsdale, Arizona, may not look like much. But compared with conservation efforts experts say will be needed, our efforts so far are pretty small change.
MAN. Twenty-four cents.
WOMAN. Well, that's not bad. [Laughter]
CRONKITE. This is Walter Cronkite, CBS News. Good night.
ANNOUNCER. This has been the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
CRONKITE. Even if you've never been here, this in a sense is your home town. This is the Acropolis in the center of Athens in the Republic of Greece. Twenty-three centuries ago it was the center of a government, of a faith, of a great civilization, a civilization that gave us Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, a civilization that gave us the very words democracy and politics, ethics and ecology, a civilization that gave us an architecture that has been duplicated in thousands of government buildings.
The man in charge of building this place was a statesman named Pericles. He said it would bring glory to Athens for all time. But the glory of Athens is being threatened by the city of Athens. The architecture may be timeless; it turns out the stone is not.
Athenians live in the shadow of the Acropolis. It rises from the center of town on a huge flat-topped rock. Fifty years ago, 500,000 people lived among the relics of Greece's golden age, but Athens has grown and grown. Athens has added apartment blocks, office buildings, industries, three million people and their cars. The famous crystal clear air of Attica has become the now familiar alphabet soup of pollution: CO, CO2, SO2, NOx. The gases mix with fog and make an acid mist. The smog turns the hard, translucent marble into gypsum, a soft, crumbly, plaster-like substance. The work of artisans 23 centuries ago washes away with the rain or disappears beneath a layer of gypsum and soot. This maiden has escaped the ravages of the acid bath because she's a concrete copy made in the last century. Her five sisters on the Acropolis are marble. They show what modern civilization has done to the wellsprings of modern civilization.
Government officials in Greece say frankly that industrial development is more important to them than the pollution that comes with industrial development. They say Greece cannot yet afford stringent environmental laws, so sewers reach only 60 percent of Athens' population, so there are no enforced auto emission laws, so a thousand industries discharge smoke into the air and liquid waste into Homer's wine-dark seas.
ALEXANDER GILAD [Athens Pollution Project]. Our primary concern was human life, and it also happened to be very good for the Acropolis.
CRONKITE. Gilad heads a five-year, six-million-dollar study of sources of pollution in Athens. His report, a cooperative effort between the Greek government and the U.N., led to a ban on high-sulphur fuel oil in the Acropolis area. The air is now easier on the marble, easier on human beings.
GILAD I always think that more should be done and quicker, but one has to be realistic. These things do not happen overnight. It takes time, and it takes work, and it takes a lot of money. Therefore, one must have patience.
CRONKITE. Is there anything more pragmatic or realistic than saving human life, or preserving civilization, for that matter?
GILAD No, I think this is [indistinct] one of the most important goals that we have, and we're trying to do it in a way which is feasible, in a pragmatic way. Because if we demand too much, we will get nothing perhaps.
CRONKITE. The director of antiquities on the Acropolis says he is encouraged by the progress that has been made and the attention that is being paid, but he would like to see more done.
GEORGE DONTAS [Acropolis director]. There are other measures to be taken which would be of a more drastic language. One of them would be perhaps — perhaps to have — to change altogether the heating system in the neighborhood of the Acropolis. For instance, a change from gasoline to gas.
CRONKITE. On that subject too a study is under way. The machinery of pragmatic politics turns, and the marble decays. The experts now think the best hope here will be a kind of transparent plastic coating painted on the marble. And the maidens who have patiently supported the temple roof for all those centuries will finally get a rest. They'll be moved to an air conditioned museum, replaced by skillful, pollution-proof copies.
Thucydides left us the words of the man who built this Acropolis 2300 years ago, and they're well worth re-reading:
"Fix your eyes on the greatness of Athens as you have it before you day by day. Fall in love with her, and when you feel that she is great, remember that this greatness was won by men with courage, with knowledge of their duty, and with a sense of honor in the things they do. Their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men's lives."
Whether the harmony and grace of the Acropolis will be woven into the stuff of our children's lives is an unanswered question of the decade of the environment.
This is Walter Cronkite, CBS News. Good night.
ANNOUNCER. This has been the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
CRONKITE. Nuclear proliferation, one of the modern Four Horsemen threatening our environment, indeed our lives and our civilization. It's the subject of today's update on the decade of the environment.
They come here from all over the world — to see some shreds of clothing, a scorched toy horse, a watch stopped at 8:18. They come here to see shadows that never go away. They come here to stand before this unlikely shrine to peace: a burned-out industrial exhibit hall. They come here to pause a moment, and to ring the bell.
[Man ringing bell.]
On August 8th, 1945, two thousand feet above this very spot, the atomic bomb exploded. For a brief moment the Japanese city of Hiroshima was bathed in light, and then it was blown away. Thus began the modern age, a third of a century ago. And then there was just one nuclear power.
Now there are six nuclear powers in the world. The United States, Russia, Great Britain, France and China have both atomic and hydrogen bombs. India has the A-bomb. Experts say Israel either has the bomb or could have it within hours. South Africa was reported ready to test a weapon in 1977, until diplomatic pressure was brought to bear. Some Carter Administration officials think Pakistan may be next to get the bomb. And as nuclear knowledge spread around the world in this past decade, the number of weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear powers has grown.
Theoretically, the United States alone could deliver the nuclear explosive power of six and a half billion tons of dynamite.
Sweden has some war memorials — not many, because the country hasn't been officially at war in 186 years. And it has a peace memorial. In this office building is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.It was set up by the Swedish parliament to keep tabs on the arms race. Frank Barnaby is the director of the Institute, and he is worried.
FRANK BARNABY [SIPRI]. The — the major thing that's happened in the last ten years is a move from strategies and policies based on counter-city, mutual assured destruction, or whatever you call it — nuclear deterrence.
CRONKITE. Balance of terror.
BARNABY. Balance of terror, nuclear deterrence. We're moving away from that now into a counter-force strategy which is based on the philosophy that you can fight a nuclear war and win it. I just can't believe that one side or the other would surrender while they have within their arsenals a significant amount of weapons that they regard to be usable. So, I believe that one — the use of one nuclear weapon will escalate to the use of the nearly 100,000 we have in the arsenals, which — which have an explosive power equivalent to a million and a quarter Hiroshima bombs. So I think that one nuclear weapon will lead to a million and a quarter Hiroshimas.
CRONKITE. It's hard to imagine even one Hiroshima. There are hints of the horror in the museum on the site. But we have to rely on government training films made during test explosions to tell us how much like hell is war.
[Excerpts from U.S. Atomic Energy Commission film "Operation Greenhouse"showing buildings blowing away during A-bomb tests].
There is something fascinating about the red tornado at the heart of the blast, and something beautiful about the cloud that has become the symbol of our age. It's easy to forget that these weapons are designed to kill.
It's not forgotten here. In that stone is a scroll with 94,000 names — the names of those who were killed here. And the Japanese inscription on the front says: "The evil shall not be repeated."
Still, we have stockpiled the explosive power of three tons of dynamite for every man, woman and child on this planet. Still we are spending a million dollars a minute on weapons of war. In the years since the Hiroshima bomb, we've invented apparently unstoppable means of delivering bombs to their targets. What we haven't invented is a way to deliver on the promise on that stone: "Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil."
This is Walter Cronkite, CBS News. Good night.
ANNOUNCER. This has been the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite..