Doomsday--for Whom?

A television ad broadcast in California last week could have been mistaken for a scene from some late-night end-of-the-world movie. The camera panned across a clear blue sky, then suddenly shifted to a breadline, then to empty shelves in a supermarket, a blacked-out city, and finally to a swarm of buzzing mosquitoes. Throughout these scenes of desolation, a voice intoned: "Everybody is in favor of clean air--but losing your job won't solve the pollution problem. Banning pesticides that protect your home from termites and protect you from epidemic disease such as malaria won't solve the problem either. Vote no on Nine."

The commercial is part of a near $1,000,000 campaign mounted by California businessmen to warn of an economic apocalypse if Proposition Nine, a "Clean Environment" initiative, is approved by the state's voters in next week's primary. The initiative is the brainchild of a former Sacramento car dealer named Edwin Koupal and his wife Joyce. Originally, back in 1969, they set out only to fight Los Angeles smog. "I couldn't believe people could really live in that air," says Joyce Koupal. "My first reaction was, 'Why don't they outlaw it?' " The Koupals began collecting signatures for an unsuccessful antismog petition, but when the Federal Government announced its own rules against air pollution, they decided to broaden their campaign. Says Koupal: "We began asking ourselves, 'Why should we go out and collect signatures for just one issue? You might as well go after them all with that same dollar.' "

Joining forces with other environmentalist groups, the pair put together the most sweeping antipollution law ever submitted to a statewide vote. If put into effect, the 23-part measure would ban new coastal oil drilling, impose a five-year moratorium on the construction of nuclear power plants, outlaw DDT and other "hard" pesticides, sharply reduce the sulfur content in diesel fuel and phase out all lead additives in gasoline. It would impose harsh fines on air polluters--.4% of their gross annual incomes daily. It would also bar from environmental-control boards anyone with a financial interest in any automotive or petroleum companies or in any firm that pollutes the air or water --anyone, according to the California Manufacturers Association, except "an orphan hermit living in the wild by his own efforts."

At first this all seemed rather quixotic, especially since the Koupals' group, which calls itself the People's Lobby, operated out of the Koupals' own ramshackle frame house. There, with the help of half a dozen long-haired live-in volunteers, they began cranking out 100,000 leaflets a day, which other youths distributed from door to door. They have operated on a budget of only $172,000, but by May of 1971, they managed to get the 325,000 signatures needed to put Proposition Nine on the ballot. And when a Harris poll sampled voter opinion on the issue last February, California's political and business leaders (and union leaders as well) learned to their horror that the voters favored the measure by a margin of 3 to 1.

At that, the political public relations firm of Whitaker and Baxter, which had undertaken the poll for a group of industrialists and labor leaders, launched the massive campaign to defeat Proposition Nine. The firm has inundated the state with TV spots, bus ads and booklets attacking the initiative. One booklet declares that "epidemic diseases now remembered only by the older generation will no longer be subject to effective controls." Another booklet, distributed by the California Manufacturers Association, describes the Koupals as "fanatics" and refers to the People's Lobby as "ecofreaks." According to yet another ad: "If Proposition Nine is adopted, you will not be able to provide yourself and your family with the basic necessities of life. You can lose your job. You may have to go back to the scrub board and laundry tub for washing clothes."

Many environmentalists themselves are split on the extreme restrictions of Proposition Nine. The 30,000-member San Francisco-based Friends of the Earth have endorsed it, because, says President David Brower, "the pro-pollution lobby has been guilty of overkill in its attempt to protect its own investment at public expense." But the western region of the National Audubon Society has publicly opposed the proposition's "sweeping attempt to be all-inclusive." After months of deliberation, the 86,000-member Sierra Club has voted to remain neutral.

Despite the exaggerations of the lobbyists involved, some moderates have also sounded alarms. Former Democratic Governor Pat Brown, for one, has warned that the measure would "put 50,000 men out of work in the transportation industry alone," and the California AFL-CIO has declared that "it would make impossible the kind of growth that is essential to full employment and a prosperous economy." Proposition Nine offers Californians a clear chance to register a protest vote against their present conditions. But if enough of them decide to protest, the consequences could be grave.

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