Week's Watch

Now that the holiday season is over, what should be done with old Christmas trees? Henry L. Diamond, New York State's commissioner of environmental conservation, last week warned that burning them causes air pollution and burying them whole wastes scarce landfill areas. As a better ecological idea, Diamond singled out the system used in Greenburgh, N.Y. The town is picking up the trees at curbside and running them through chipping machines, used the rest of the year to clean up after tree prunings on the town's property. The tiny chips can then be used as a compact landfill or as a mulch to prevent the spread of weeds in gardens.

One of the great changes in the American consciousness, in Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 thesis, came when the frontier closed. A shift of equal importance, believes Professor James J. Flink of the University of California at Irvine, involves the automobile. Said he at last week's meeting of the American Historical Association in Manhattan: "The era of uncritical mass accommodation to the motorcar has ended; for most Americans, automobility has become simply utilitarian and lost its quasi-religious connotations; most important, the automobile and the automobile industry no longer call the tune and set the tempo of American life." One major reason for this shift in attitudes, Flink thinks, is young Americans' sweeping indictment of the car for contributing to "environmental pollution, urban sprawl, the decay of the center city, the decimation of our remaining wilderness areas." He did not predict what will take the auto's place as a predominant American force.

Under the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act, no industry or city can dump pollutants into navigable waterways unless it gets a "discharge permit" from the Federal Government. In late 1970 this old law became the keystone of President Nixon's program to clean up U.S. waterways. Last summer some 20,000 applications for permits were sent to Washington for approval.

Last week a federal court in Washington threw the whole permit program into confusion by ruling that discharges into non-navigable waterways were also illegal. Furthermore, the court continued, in view of the 1969 Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Government could not issue a permit to any polluter without first studying the environmental impact of each decision.

If the ruling is upheld on appeal, the paperwork ahead presents a herculean task. Likely result: fast action by Congress on either Senator Edmund Muskie's or President Nixon's bill, both of which would aim at stopping pollution from cities and factories at its source (before it ever reaches any waterways) and give them a ten-to-15 year deadline to comply. Anyway, something must be done. The requirement just set by the federal court has made the present laws virtually unworkable, since no federal agency can possibly provide a complete environmental report on the effects of discharges from every factory everywhere that asks for a permit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.