Week's Watch

From the Western White House in San Clemente, Calif., President Nixon in 1969 gazed down the 6 1/2 miles of adjacent beach held by the U.S. Marine Corps, Camp Pendleton and mused that the public should have use of it. Last week he followed through, asking the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to approve giving the beach to California. It was, he said, the first of several planned transfers of $6.8 billion worth of "excess" federal property to state and local governments for recreational and other uses. Others now under consideration are in Long Island, N.Y., San Francisco and Seattle.

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To the consternation of Hawaii's Visitors Bureau, chambers of commerce and hoteliers, travel agents throughout the U.S. last week began receiving a brochure entitled Facts You Should Know to Appreciate Fully the ALOHA STATE! The purported facts: Hawaii's air, water and land are being seriously contaminated by auto exhaust, raw sewage and overuse of pesticides, and "the cost of living in Hawaii is at least 20% higher than on the mainland."

The brochure was traced to students in a course in consumerism and environmental activism at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Their teacher: one of Ralph Nader's Raiders, Lawyer J. Davitt McAteer, 26. The critics, who quickly zeroed in, could not deny the brochure's accuracy on cost of living. But, as a Honolulu paper pointed out, the state does seem ready to enforce strong water-quality laws and establish new standards governing air pollution and noise. McAteer admitted the brochure violated Nader's principle of presenting both sides of an issue.

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"First it was the flower children, invading the Haight-Ashbury district during the mid-1960s," says San Francisco Police Lawyer David P. Roche. "Now we've got the garbage children, scattered all over the city."

Despite their avowed reverence for the environment, growing numbers of San Francisco's street people have apparently turned polluters. Roche, who is head of his department's legal-affairs office, contends that hundreds of youths, squatting in buses, trucks, campers and cars, are littering city streets with garbage and human wastes. Worried about the growing health hazard, the San Francisco board of supervisors has voted to ban such motorized camp-ins from city streets between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. If the mayor signs the ban into law, as is expected, anyone caught living in vehicles parked on city streets between those hours may be fined up to $1,000 and sentenced to up to six months in jail.

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DDT has been outlawed in Canada, Cyprus, Sweden, Hungary and Norway. Last week Japan followed suit. The Japanese ban includes not only DDT, which Japanese farmers use mainly on fruit trees, but also BHC, a pesticide that is widely credited with making Japan a self-sufficient rice producer. "We're still in the dark on what residual BHC and DDT will do to the human system," says Dr. Hideo Fukuda of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. "But we've decided that it is wise to ban them sooner rather than later."

Not so in the U.S. Last month William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced that five economic poisons are not "imminent" hazards to humans, and therefore may be used pending further studies. The poisons are the insecticides DDT, aldrin, dieldrin and Mirex, plus 2, 4, 5-T, once widely used as a defoliant by U.S. forces in Viet Nam.

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