THE astonishing achievement of the year,” says Ecologist Lamont Cole of
Cornell, “is that people are finally aware of the size of the problem.”
They can hardly avoid it. In 1970, the cause that once concerned lonely
crusaders like Rachel Carson became a national issue that at times
verged on a national obsession; it appealed even to people normally
enraged by attacks on the status quo. With remarkable rapidity it
became a tenet in the American credo, at least partially uniting
disparate public figures ranging from Cesar Chavez to Barry Goldwater
and New York’s conservative Senator-elect James Buckley. At the root of this phenomenon were the dire warnings of ecologists that
man’s heedless outpouring of noxious wastes is overwhelming the
biosphere’s ability to cleanse itself. As the year began, the public’s
foreboding was bolstered by the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, which devoted 40 symposia at its annual meeting
to environmental dangers. Later in January, President Nixon stressed
the subject in his State of the Union address, which he followed up
with a February special message. Soon the press issued almost daily
reports on assorted ecological disasters—oil spills, fish kills,
nuclear radiation. By April 15, fears about herbicides had forced the Pentagon to suspend
the use of Agent Orange as a chemical defoliant in Viet Nam.
Ecological idealism inspired the young and pleased the old as evidence
that youth was finally doing something constructive. By the time Earth
Day dawned on April 22, ecoactivists of all ages were suffused with a
quasi-religious fervor. Many were also armed with petitions and pickets
against a growing list of alleged villains of pollution, including Dow
Chemical, General Motors and Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison Co. For a time, a backlash developed among Americans who viewed the
environment as a digression from pressing concerns like poverty, racism
and the war. They noted that ecologists, with their holistic view of
nature, proclaimed dangers on every front but failed to set clear
priorities for action. Ghetto blacks were incensed when white
collegians buried perfectly good cars as a protest against smog. Others
wearied of the apocalyptic warnings of the “New Jeremiahs” —ecologists
with an almost masochistic appetite for doom, and demographers with
passion for slogans . Even ecologists scoffed at
faddists who denounced colored toilet paper on the theory that the dyes
polluted rivers. “Poppycock!” said Du Pont’s chemists, and no other
experts disagreed. UNIVERSAL YEARNING. Yet the backlash soon waned.
Whatever exaggerations may have been committed by the environmental
evangelists, no one could really scoff at the new American concern with
“the quality of life,” the universal yearning for clean air and water,
quiet cities and communion with nature. That yearning gave rise to
scores of new environmental books, from The Tyranny of Noise to The
Politics of Ecology. It spurred myriad official responses, from the
advent of car-free streets in New York City to a mammoth suit filed by
15 states, accusing Detroit automakers of willfully delaying emission
devices.
