The Rise of Anti-Ecology

"Ecology?" scoffs a black militant in Chicago. "I don't give a good goddam about ecology!" In Georgia, Union Camp Corporation's director of air and water resources, Glenn Kimble, wonders whether mankind will suffer "a whole hell of a lot if the whooping crane doesn't quite make it." Flowery-hatted ladies from the D.A.R. have served notice that concern over pollution "is being distorted and exaggerated by emotional declarations and by intensive propaganda." Such backlash views are now being voiced in many parts of the country, although the protesters often have little more in common than the smoggy air they breathe.

Fancy or Fad. To some critics, the environmental movement resembles a children's crusade of opportunistic politicians, zealous Ivy Leaguers, longhaired ecoactivists and scientists who speak too sweepingly and too gloomily. The D.A.R. labels the movement "one of the subversive element's last steps." Members of that element, the ladies add, have "gone after the military and the police, and now they're going after our parks and playgrounds." In the same vein, several newspapers from Alabama to Alaska solemnly stressed the happenstance that Earth Day (April 22) fell on Lenin's birthday.

The Red-plot notion hardly impresses serious critics like University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman. Instead, they view the environmental movement as a mere fad that will soon vanish, like the War on Poverty. Friedman also decries the tendency of some crusaders to cast big industrial corporations* as "evil devils who are deliberately polluting the air." He argues that the real source of most pollution is the consumer.

Both the leftist Progressive Labor Party and Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. see the movement as a diversion from more important national priorities. Joining them in this view are many antiwar students who feel that peace far outranks pollution as a protest goal. S.D.S. chapters on many campuses have also publicly embraced anti-ecology because President Nixon is publicly pro-ecology.

Blacks generally are the most vocal opponents of all. Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes has said that providing housing, clothing and food for the poor should take precedence over finding ways to combat air and water pollution. Says Richard Hatcher, black mayor of Gary, Ind.: "The nation's concern with environment has done what George Wallace was unable to do: distract the nation from the human problems of black and brown Americans."

Other protests are bound to come as industries start to fight pollution. In many cases, marginal operations might indeed be forced out of business when they have to take on the added burden of pollution safeguards. Armco Steel Corp., for example, closed eight old open-hearth furnaces in Houston rather than equip them with costly antipollution devices. This kind of shutdown can cause economic havoc. Some cases:

> U.S. Steel Corp. has threatened to close all its plants in Duluth rather than spend $8,000,000 for pollution controls required by the state. A shutdown, city fathers fear, would throw 2,500 people out of work and severely damage the city's economy.

> B.A.S.F., an American subsidiary of a large German chemical company, has suspended plans to build a $200 million plastics and dye complex in poverty-stricken Beaufort County, S.C., until it determines just how expensive Government-ordered pollution controls will be.

> A recent Federal Water Quality Administration edict against thermal pollution, if strictly enforced, could reduce power production by plants using fossil fuel (oil, coal) and force utility companies to start costly redesign of water-cooling systems.

New Challenge. Most environmentalists agree that ways must be found to help industries and cities pay for pollution control. Says Stanford University Population Biologist Paul Ehrlich: "It should be made perfectly clear that when the Government sets out to ban the use of DDT, society ought to do something to ease the transition for people who previously engaged in the manufacture of DDT." Ecologist Barry Commoner, who heads the botany department at Washington University, goes a step further. "Every one of the ecological changes needed for the sake of preserving our environment is going to place added stress within the social structure," he says. "We really can't solve the environmental crisis without solving the resulting social crisis." Commoner argues that once Americans recognize the problems, they will find proper answers through the democratic process. But those answers require hard economic choices: Who should pay for improving the environment? How can a recession-hit town eject polluting plants at the expense of vitally needed jobs?

The key problem seems to be that the rhetoric of ecology too often makes the subject look like a confused mix of unrelated alarms and issues. In fact, most of the issues are interrelated. The DDT that kills birds and fish may seem remote in importance when compared with the rats and garbage that infest ghetto slums. Yet both DDT and rats directly degrade the quality of U.S. life. Nevertheless, some aspects of the environmental problem are clearly more pressing than others. For example, public-health and land-use planning should rank higher than campaigns against litter and noise. Curbing carbon monoxide in cities is more important than saving caribou in Alaska. For environmentalists, the new challenge is how to retain ecology's holistic view of man and nature while yet recognizing that the movement will soon fade unless it sets priorities that millions of Americans can understand and support.

* Last week Attorney General John Mitchell ordered the Justice Department to file suits to bar eight large corporations--including Allied Chemical, Olin, Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific--from poisoning public waters with mercury.

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