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<text> <title> (1970s) Environment </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1970s Highlights </history> <link 07749> <link 07507> <link 07402> <link 06377> <link 05775> <link 00011> <link 00200><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Environment </hdr> <body> [It was the decade when many Americans, and other throughout the world, awoke to the fragility of the world around them and the specter of its despoliation, even destruction, at their own hands or those of their neighbors. From foul air to polluted water, from Agent Orange to nuclear accidents, from off-road vehicles to discarded bottletops, people learned the consequences of neglect, ignorance and greed for ecology, the interrelated science of the earth, for public health and for the ultimate survival of the human and all other species. Finally, politicians became aware that their constituents were willing to pay for a cleaner, healthier environment and began passing legislation that, by decade's end, was making the difference for a more livable world. Following are just a few of the stories that appeared in TIME's Environment section, which was created during the 1970s to report on the advances and failures in the ecological struggle.] Ecology ["The great question of the '70s is: Shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?"--State of the Union Message] (February 2, 1970) Nixon's words came none too early. The U.S. environment is seriously threatened by the prodigal garbage of the world's riches economy. The Apollo 10 astronauts could see Los Angeles as a cancerous smudge from 25,000 miles in outer space. Airline pilots say that whisky-brown miasmas, visible from 70 miles, shroud almost every U.S. city, including remote towns like Missoula in Montana's "big sky" country. What Americans now breathe is closer to ambient filth than to air. The environment may well be the gut issue that can unify a polarized nation in the 1970s. It may also divide people who are appalled by the mess from those who have adapted to it. No one knows how many Americans have lost all felling for nature and the quality of life. Even so, the issue now attracts young and old, farmers, city dwellers and suburban housewives, scientists, industrialists and blue-collar workers. They know pollution well. It is as close as the water tap, the car-clogged streets and junk-filled landscape--their country's visible decay, America the Ugly. Ecology is often called the "subversive science." Only 70 years old, it avoids the narrow specialization of other sciences--and thus appeals to generalists, including people with a religious sense. Ecology is the systems approach to nature, the study of how living organisms and the nonliving environment function together as a whole or ecosystem. The word ecology (derived from the Greek root oikos, meaning "house") is often used in ways that suggest an attitude rather than a discipline. Anthropologists and psychiatrists have adapted it to their work. Poet Allen Ginsberg declaims it like a revolutionary slogan. But few yet grasp its subtle meaning. What most worries ecologists, in fact, is man's blindness to his own utter dependency on all ecosystems, such as oceans, coastal estuaries, forests and grasslands. Those ecosystems constitute the biosphere, a vast web of interacting organisms and processes that form the rhythmic cycles and food chains in which ecosystems support one another. (May 25, 1970) Since 1962, the U.S. armed forces have sprayed (or dumped in haste) about 13.5 million gallons of potent chemicals (on South Vietnam) from low-flying planes. The peak of the program came in 1967-68, when 400 defoliation sorties were flown monthly. Now considerably reduced to a "classified" number of missions, the program continues under the ironic code name "Operation Ranch Hand." To date, the herbicides have affected an estimated 5 million acres, including 500,000 acres of rice and other crops. "The herbicides have saved many, many lives," says a Pentagon official. Defoliation removes the thick canopy of Vietnam's jungle and thus exposes enemy troop movements. Sprayed along roadsides and waterways, defoliants reduce the possibility of ambushes. Treatment of farm land denies the enemy food. Strongest and most heavily used is "orange," a mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, whose dangers were widely publicized last winter in a New Yorker article by Thomas Whiteside. Last month use of 2,4,5-T was suspended in Vietnam and strictly limited in the U.S. Reason: the herbicide, together with its contaminant, has caused birth defects in laboratory mice. Some investigators see an alarming if unproved correlation between the defoliant's use and a sudden rise in 1966 (over 1965) in the number of Vietnamese babies born with birth defects in Saigon's Tu Du hospital. [Those herbicides were later believed to have had dire effects on thousands of American servicemen--and their children--who experienced their effects while serving in Vietnam.] (August 10, 1970) The world will end with a cough, a wheeze, a mass gasp of emphysema. So it seemed last week, a bad week, as dirty air smothered cities around the earth. Millions of smog-choked city dwellers began to feel like canaries in coal mines--obliged to perish in order to warn others of potential disaster. Rarely before had man's dependence on the fragile biosphere been so dramatically illustrated on a global scale. In the U.S., polluted air hung like a filthy muslin curtain along the entire Atlantic Coast, from Boston south to Atlanta. Because of unusually stagnant winds and humid heat in the high 90s, Washington, D.C., was on the verge of the first smog alert in the capital's history. The hardest hit of all U.S. cities was New York, which declared a first-stage pollution alert and simultaneously reeled under a severe power shortage. The worst conditions of all were in Japan, where a vast economic expansion has outraced the country's feeble efforts to control industrial and automobile pollution. Unlike the cars it exports to the U.S., for example, Japan's domestic autos are not equipped with emission controls. In Tokyo, a long and dreary rainy season was broken by a surge of windless warm weather that suddenly worsened the poisoned air. Bright sunlight reacted with suspended auto exhaust to produce a photochemical miasma called "white smog." One day a group of children playing in a schoolyard had trouble breathing and began collasping; they were treated for smog poisoning. In five choking days, more than 8,000 people in Tokyo were treated in hospitals for smarting eyes and sore throats. Thousands more carefully stayed indoors or tried not to exert themselves when venturing outside. (October 5, 1970) In a remarkable reflection of public anger against dirty air, the Senate last week passed the most draconian bill in the new history of environmental politics. Sponsored by Maine's Edmund S. Muskie, the National Air Quality Standards Act of 1970 swept through the Senate without a single nay vote. The bill goes far beyond existing government and state laws on air-quality control. In its present form, it sets national standards for ten air contaminants like carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. Polluting industries would have to meet these standards in about five years. The bill also requires the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to prohibit hazardous emissions (asbestos, cadmium, mercury and beryllium) not covered by the air-quality standards. It orders new industrial plants to install antipollution devices, denies Government contracts to companies that violate air standards, and allows private citizens to sue polluting industries and individuals. To pay for research and administration, the bill allocates $1.19 billion spread over three years. The National Air Quality Standards Act has the legal clout to back up its stiff requirements. It calls for civil penalties of up to $10,000 a day in fines, plus criminal penalties of up to $25,000 a day and two years' imprisonment. While the strictures apply to all polluters, the biggest bit will be taken out of heavy industry. (May 17, 1971) The 1970 Clean Air Act was no mere piety. It ordered William Ruckelshaus, as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to propose a set of national air-quality standards, and within 90 days to determine the final ones. Now Ruckelshaus has done just that, despite protests from the Automobile Manufacturers Association, which calls his rules "disproportionate to any demonstrated health and safety need." According to the law, the states have until 1972 to present plans for compliance, and if accepted by the EPA, they have until 1975 to reduce 1970-level emissions by 90%. Last week they told Ruckelshaus that no matter how much Government pressure is exerted, Detroit will be unable to meet the 1975 deadline. [The auto industry succeeded in pushing the emissions deadline into the 1980s.] (March 22, 1971) The bleakest landscape in the U.S. can be found where miners have torn away the earth's surface to get at coal deposits. Huge piles of gray debris, aptly called "orphan soil banks," stand like gravestones over land so scarred and acidic that only rodents can live there. The sight is not rare. Using dynamite, bulldozers, great augers and earth movers, working on the surface rather than below ground, strip miners now produce 37% of the nation's annual coal output. They have already ripped up more than 1,800,000 acres. By 1980, if present trends continue, an area roughly the size of Connecticut will have been blasted, gouged, scraped and quarried for coal. After such mining, the land is usually abandoned. About 10,500 miles of once-clear Appalachian streams are contaminated by acids, sediments and metals draining from exposed coal beds. Even worse in the residents' eyes are the landslides of debris from "contour" strip mines, which encircle mountains. Dumped over deep cuts high in the mountains, the "overburden" piles up--until the rains come. Then the mud and boulders roar downhill, snapping big trees like toothpicks and tumbling onto farms, gardens and homes in the hollows below. The effects of strip mining are not confined to the hidden valleys of Appalachia. The flatter the land over coal deposits, the more easily surface miners can deploy their fantastic King Kong technology. Some new power shovels can scoop up 200 tons in a single bite, then take another gulp a minute later. Even with such ravenous machines working round the clock, all 52 motors screaming, the coal will not run out for centuries. Only 4.5 billion of the nation's 108 billion tons of strippable coal have been touched so far. [Congress passed a strong strip-mining bill in 1973.] [Famine stalked much of the globe in the 1970s.] (May 13, 1974) Girdling the world at its equatorial bulge is a belt of hunger. Above it live the 1.4 billion inhabitants of the northern developed nations whose advanced industry and agriculture permit them the luxury of worrying about reducing diets instead of diet deficiencies. Below It are the potentially prosperous lands of the Southern Hemisphere's temperate zone. Along the belt live many of the 2.5 billion citizens of the underdeveloped world, nearly all of them ill-fed: at least 60% are malnourished, and 20% more are starving. Today, famine is rampant in Ethiopia, the African nations of the Sahel (Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Upper Volta), Gambia and in areas of Tanzania and Kenya. Near famine also plagues Bolivia, Syria, Yemen and Nigeria. One poor harvest could bring massive hunger to India, the Sudan, Guyana, Somalia, Guinea and Zaire. In two dozen other nations, the populace faces chronic food shortages. Among them, Bangladesh, Iran, Indonesia, the Philippines and Haiti. The world's food reserves are at their lowest since World War II, amounting to a mere 27 days of consumption. "We're just keeping our heads above water," observes FAO Official John Mollett. "But the margin of safety is decreasing. One big crop failure anywhere and it could be every country for itself." For most countries in the hunger belt, that could mean mass starvation. In the Sahel, that time has already come. For the past six years, the 25 million farmers and nomads fatalistically accepted each dry season, expecting that rains would soon follow. They never did. Crops withered, grazing land turned barren, and lakes and wells dried up. Many Africans became so hungry that they ate their breeding cattle and seed grain, thus condemning themselves to total dependence on outside help. Unless they receive aid, they will be unable to plant new crops or raise new herds even if the rains do come. The Sahel's flat savannas, which once supported the blue-and-black-robed Tuareg and Fulani warriors, are now empty, save for the thousands of reddish brown mounds that mark the graves of those who starved. At least 100,000 have died. An emergency worldwide aid program was launched last year and has already saved more than 1 million Africans from starvation. Private and national agencies, coordinated by the FAO, delivered about 518,000 tons of grain to the Sahel and Ethiopia. This year 770,000 tons have been pledged, nearly half of it by the U.S. and significant amounts by the Common Market, Canada, the Soviet Union, Sweden and China. Even if this year's relief effort forestalls mass starvation, the long-term outlook for Africa' hunger belt is at best grim. A ministerial-level committee of the Sahelian nations is seeking foreign grants of $700 million to fund 126 long-range projects, such as dams, reforestation, transport networks and rebuilding of decimated herds. But the only certain means of guaranteeing that the present catastrophe will not repeat itself lies with population control rather than with food supplies. The "Green Revolution," which only a few years ago brought hope of agricultural self-sufficiency to India and other countries of Asia, has already lost much of its promise. The increase in oil prices has nearly trebled the cost of nitrogen fertilizers and of fuel for irrigation pumps upon which the crops of high-yield rice and wheat rely. (August 16, 1976) As soldiers stood guard in the northern Italian town of Seveso, hundreds of villagers last week loaded into their cars or hand-drawn carts the few belongings they were allowed to take, then fled southward. Behind them they left the bodies of scores of animals in a desolated area now sealed off by barbed wire. The cause of the exodus; a cloud of toxic gas caused by an explosion at a chemical plant in Meda, twelve miles north of Milan. Seveso's nightmare originated at Icmesa, a chemical plant that makes trichlorophenol, which is used in manufacturing disinfectant soaps and deodorants. The process can produce a highly toxic substance with the jawbreaking name of tetrachlorodibenzodioxine, or, as it is more commonly called, TCDD. On the morning of July 10, a stuck safety valve caused an autoclave to overheat and speed up the chemical reaction that produces TCDD. The result was an explosion that released two kilos (4.4 lbs.) of the poison. Already accustomed to some from the factories that have sprung up in the region in the last decade, nearby townspeople at first paid little attention to the white chemical cloud. But they could not ignore it for long. "The wind carried it here," recalls Vinicio Lazzaretti of the small town of San Pietro. "I couldn't breathe. It made my eyes water. The next day all the leaves and plants and flowers were riddled with small holes, as if they had been struck with tiny hailstones." Within a few days, household pets in the area started to bleed at the nose and mouth, then die. Farmyard chickens dropped dead, wild birds fell from trees, mice and rats crawled out of their holes and died. TCDD is so toxic, according to one scientist, that a single gram is capable of killing thousands of people. The gas can cause blistering, and damage to the liver, spleen, kidneys, respiratory tract and nervous system; it may also cause deformities in unborn children. [Seveso remained poisoned and abandoned through the end of the decade.] (May 9, 1977) Alaska's scenic grandeur almost defies description. Larger than Texas, Montana and California combined, the 49th state possesses more coastline than the rest of the nation. It boasts North America's tallest mountain, the nation's third longest river and, in addition to Alaskan brown bears, the world's largest land carnivores, a glacier the size of Rhode Island. Purchased from Russia in 1867 for a paltry $7.2 million, Alaska also contains some of the country's richest and most extensive mineral deposits. As a result, it has become the center of a classic clash between environmentalists, who want to preserve some of its spectacular and environmentally unique sections for posterity, and developers, who want to exploit the potential riches. The lines for this battle were drawn last week as advocates from both sides converged on Washington for hearings on legislation to turn 45.6 million hectares (114 million acres) of federally owned lands--some 30% of Alaska's total area--into protected parklands. The 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act awarded the natives $962 million in cash and some 17.6 million hectares (44 million acres) of their own. The act further directed the Interior Department to designate up to 32 million hectares (80 million acres) as potential national parks and monuments, wildlife refuges and wild and scenic rivers. Representative Morris Udall of Arizona has offered legislation that would add more than 12 million hectares (30 million acres) to the original Interior Department package. His bill, H.R. 39, would more than double the size of the country's national park system, and preserve for posterity some of the world's most extensive wilderness areas. Backers of the Udall bill insist that the enormous acreage they seek is essential if Alaska's fragile ecosystems are to be preserved. Tundra, for example, recovers so slowly that a tractor's tracks are visible years after they are made; many of Alaska's animals require substantial sections of terrain for forage. "While 114 million acres may sound like a lot, there's an awful lot to preserve up there," says the Sierra Club's Charles Clusen. "It takes 100 square miles to support a single arctic brown bear." Opponents of the Udall bill disagree--and strongly. Mining companies want to get at the minerals that may lie under the proposed parklands. J. Allen Overton Jr. of the American Mining Congress, warned last week: "We've got to find and produce 40,000 additional pounds of minerals for every man, woman and child in this country every year. How are we going to that by locking up a piece of America 2 1/2 times the size of California?" (April 10, 1978) Like a grotesque, hook-shaped inkblot, the oil spread menacingly across the water. Along a single stretch of Brittany beach, 25 species of dead fish were found. Vast beds of seaweed, which are harvested to make pharmaceuticals and fertilizer, were destroyed. Thousands of oil-tarred birds lay dead or dying. The Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey were threatened, as were the sands around the spectacular monastery at Mont-St.-Michel. Driven by gale winds, the oil may despoil more than 160 kilometers (100 miles) of France's ruggedly beautiful Brittany coast, and imperil the Normandy beaches farther to the east as well. By any measure, the spill was the biggest of all time and perhaps the most devastating. At week's end it appeared that most of the Amoco Cadiz's 220,000 tons of crude oil--twice the amount released by the infamous Torrey Canyon eleven years ago--would ooze from the American-owned supertanker, which lies broken in two after going aground off the storm-tossed Brittany peninsula. In the face of this major ecological disaster, French officials were helpless. Winds howled so furiously for most of the week that plastic barricades failed to contain the drifting slicks. Emergency crews were reluctant to use detergents to break up the oil because they fear long-term toxic effects on marine life. Instead, fishermen worked day and night to move valuable oysters and scallops to other waters or to market. (May 1, 1978) The idea of using the sun's energy is far from new. Archimedes is said to have focused the sun's rays with mirrors to set on fire an invading Roman fleet in 212 B.C. Over the past century, experimental solar units have been used to power everything from a printing press in France to a water-distilling plant in Chile. With today's advanced technology, the potential is enormous. The sunlight falling on earth could theoretically provide 100,000 times the total energy output of all existing power stations. At present there are three forms of active solar units: Rooftop panels or collectors made of glass and copper pipe. Liquids in the pipes absorb the sun's heat, and are then circulated to a storage tank that feeds heat to household living areas and water supplies. Photovoltaic cells made of silicon or cadmium sulfide, which can convert sunlight directly into electricity. Costs are very high, and existing installations are still only experimental. Power towers or solar furnaces, which use huge expensive banks of computer-controlled mirrors to track the sun and focus its rays on large electricity-producing steam boilers. In houses as far apart as Maine and Hawaii, rooftop solar panels are sprouting as the ultimate in status symbols. The units are often unattractive (one California city now insists that they somehow be screened), and can cost from $7,000 to $12,000 to heat an eight-room house. Solar is also being used by industry. Anheuser-Busch employs sun heat for some beer pasteurization, Campbell's Soup to heat water to wash its cans, Tropicana to steam-process its orange juice. Solar energy provides heat or hot water or both in a visitors' center at Mount Rushmore, S. Dak., Disney World's office block in Orlando, an Atlanta public school, and urban cooperatives in Lower Manhattan. Many householders simply doubt that expensive solar units will cut fuel bills enough to pay back costs quickly. If they now use oil or gas, their worries are probably justified, although solar will become increasingly attractive as the price of fossil fuels continues to rise. (August 14, 1978) For the past two years, several hundred residents of Niagara Falls, N.Y., have watched and worried as chemicals, some buried more than 35 years ago, have bubbled to the surface in backyards and cellars. Last week their worst fears proved well founded. After a long investigation New York Health Commissioner Robert Whalen described the waste disposal site as "an extremely serious threat and danger to the health and safety of those living near it." He also recommended that all pregnant women and children under two leave the area at once. Niagara Falls' nightmare goes back to 1942, when the Hooker Chemicals & Plastics Corp. began dumping wastes in Love Canal. Thousands of chemical-filled drums were dumped directly into the receding waters of the unused canal or buried in the mud along its banks. In 1953 Hooker sold the site, which covered 16 acres, to the Niagara Falls board of education for $1. For at least a decade, the buried chemicals were no problem. But by 1976, after years of abnormally heavy rain, the chemicals, leaking from corroded containers, began to rise. Pools, some bubbling like witches' cauldrons, appeared in low-lying backyards; fumes seeped into cellars. So far, more than 80 chemicals have been found in the dump site itself. At least ten have been identified in homes bordering the old canal, seven of them known to cause cancer in animals. One, benzene, has been linked to leukemia in humans. Women living in the area have suffered 50% more miscarriages than would be expected. There is also a high incidence of birth defects among children; of 24 youngsters in the southernmost section of the neighborhood, health officials report four are mentally retarded. Local residents are doubly upset by the suggestion that they leave the area because their houses are now virtually unmarketable, and without money to rent elsewhere, most of them simply have no place to go. (April 9, 1979) In the dead of night, the hulks of four 372-ft. cooling towers and two high-domed nuclear reactor container buildings were scarcely discernible above the gentle waters of the Susquehanna River, eleven miles southeast of Harrisburg, Pa. Inside the Edison's Unit 2, technicians on the lobster shift one night last week faced a tranquil, even boring watch. Suddenly, at 4 a.m., alarm lights blinked red on their instrument panels. A siren whooped a warning. In the understated jargon of the nuclear power industry, an "event" had occurred. In plain English, it was the beginning of the worst accident in the history of U.S. nuclear power production, and of a long, confused nightmare that threw the future of the nuclear industry into question. For the next several days, radioactive steam and gas seeped sporadically into the atmosphere from the plant. Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburg advised the evacuation of all pregnant women and pre-school children living within five miles of Three Mile Island, and thousands of people fled the area. As tension mounted, engineers struggled to cool the reactor's core. There was a genuine danger of a "meltdown," in which the core could drop into the water coolant at the bottom of its chamber, causing a steam explosion that could rupture the 4-ft.-thick concrete walls of the containment building; or the molten core could burn through the even thicker concrete base and deep into the earth. In either case, lethally radioactive gases would be released, causing a nuclear catastrophe. Whatever the final report, months from now, on what went wrong and how at Three Mile Island, the way in which federal and plant officials seemed to handle the breakdown will not help the industry's image. The trouble was dismissed at first by Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison's vice president for power generation, in a memorable engineer's euphemism, as merely " a normal aberration." Reassuring statements spewed from the plant's press spokesmen, sounding as if they were taken right out of the script for the film The China Syndrome, a thriller that depicts nuclear plant officials as placing greed for profits far above their concern for public safety. But if the movie is unfair in its villainous caricature of power- and construction-industry officials, its basic premise will no longer seem so far-fetched to those moviegoers until now unattuned to the nation's debate over nuclear power. The premise: that a nuclear power plant is not nearly as accident-proof as its builders proclaim and that "the China Syndrome," a total meltdown that causes the core to sink lethally into the earth (hence, fancifully, toward China), is not a totally outlandish possibility. [An exhaustive investigation subsequently attributed the accident to human error: in their attempts to correct the accident, operating personnel overrrode the plant's automatic safety systems, turning a relatively minor glitch into a potential disaster.] </body> </article> </text>