TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032690/03261010.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.1 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 21

THE PRESIDENCY

The Issue That Won't Wash Away


By Hugh Sidey


    George Bush's helicopter lifted high in Washington's 86
degrees winter heat last Wednesday and churned down the Potomac
River valley as the President studied the water for signs of
bass running in the shallows. Within minutes he was at his
destination, the Potomac Electric Power Co.'s Chalk Point
generating station, a plant that produces electricity for the
White House. Under Bush's proposed clean-air program, the
facility would have to cut half its sulfur dioxide emissions
within ten years, a $400 million undertaking. "Megabucks,"
acknowledged Bush. "But I am determined to clean up the air."

    Storm rising -- political and natural. Bush can smell it and
view it on every horizon. The old planet is sagging more than
ever from its burdens of people and pollution, and it no longer
takes a hydrologist or climatologist to detect it. Every
American can see it in the air. You can stand with Nancy Reagan
on the lawn of her sun-drenched Bel Air home above Beverly
Hills and see a sinister tongue of smog lick out and engulf the
office where her husband works just three miles below. Or you
can walk along the low hills of North Dakota and scuff through
the shifting soil that still blows against the stubble in the
dry fields. Same message.

    Les Brown, head of Worldwatch Institute, warns again this
year of the globe's diminishing ability to produce enough food
to keep up with population growth because of erosion,
deforestation and air pollution. His annual State of the World
report has sold out -- 100,000 copies -- and the presses are
being readied for a new run. There are scoffers, principally
in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who say we can release
millions of acres of cropland from the soil banks, pour on the
fertilizer and meet any food demand. But Brown, with his soft
voice and his inevitable bow tie, holds firm. Grain stocks are
low; air pollution has reduced U.S. crop production 5% or 10%.
Major weather aberrations around the globe could easily produce
food scarcities and political unrest.

    Statistical arguments aside, the U.S. tells its own story
of concern on the front pages of papers and on local newscasts.
Solid wastes, pesticides, oil spills, chemical fertilizers. Ask
editors from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Boulder, and they will tell
you no story plays so steadily as the devastations of the
natural world. And almost anyone who wanders through the
country hears it, from coffee shop to filling station.

    Bill Kastner of the U.S. Geological Survey office in Denver
monitors the monstrous Ogallala Aquifer, that famous
underground sponge that reaches from South Dakota to the high
plains of Texas, touches eight states and embraces 174,000 sq.
mi. In some places the water level has fallen 200 ft., leaving
the balance between use and recharge from rainfall in
precarious condition. Given a little hot dry weather and good
farm prices that encourage increased grain planting, the
irrigation pumps will begin to whir, in all likelihood sucking
up more water than will be replaced.

    In southern Iowa, where they don't need irrigation water and
where the black loam used to stretch like a carpet from horizon
to horizon, you top a hill and find the brown claw marks of a
monster that has scoured off the land's precious mantle,
leaving the gummy, less productive clay showing in streaks. The
monster is erosion, brought on by poor farming.

    Five hundred miles south, you can stand on the banks of the
Mississippi and watch that topsoil roll by, going down to the
Gulf of Mexico. The 34 million acres of fragile cropland taken
out of production over the past few years have helped stem this
wash, but farmers are still losing to erosion four tons of
topsoil for every ton of grain produced.

    In Florida, just 200 miles below man's imaginative creation,
Disney World, nature's great act, the Everglades, is on the
edge of collapse because of dry weather and the demands for
water. The National Park Service is seeking money so that the
Army Corps of Engineers can uproot some of their canals and
dams that have routed water to commercial use. It is a new
experience for the Army engineers, who rarely undo their
majestic alterations of Mother Nature. But suddenly the thirsty
residents of Miami realize that if the Everglades aquifers
languish, so does the city. Here again, some good wet weather
would help. With more than half the U.S. population jammed into
strips 50 miles wide on the coasts and around the Great Lakes,
even small changes in weather produce noticeable stress.

    With the Berlin Wall down, the cold war over, the drug
battle stuck in stalemate, almost everybody in the political
world is waking up to the fact that the preservation and care
of the land, air and water may rise and dominate all other
issues. It links hearts and minds across continents,
obliterates old barriers that kept people apart, banishes
ideology. Eighty-seven-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond of South
Carolina turned a deaf ear for years, but now he has listed the
improvement of the environment as one of his top goals before
he is called up yonder. The environmental political flood is
about to break over us all.

    On April 22, Earth Day 1990 may produce a demonstration of
100 million people in 133 countries, united in a plea to the
globe's leaders to get on with the great cleanup. Already there
are 1,500 separate programs and demonstrations planned in the
U.S., and the harried staff of Earth Day, encamped in a small
office in Palo Alto, Calif., receives notification of at least
100 new events each day. They expect crowds of hundreds of
thousands of people in New York City and Washington, and out
in Tennessee the good green thumbs are expecting to plant 4
million tulip poplar seedlings. The quiet celebrations of kids
and oldsters in backyards and nursing homes will be as dense
as the stars in the heavens -- the ones we used to see.