Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004220283
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MAURA DOLAN and LARRY B. STAMMER LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Yet the progress the world celebrates today on Earth Day 1990 has brought little respite. New, potentially more devastating threats to the environment have emerged, environmental activists say, forcing the world to recast its agenda for the remainder of the 20th century.
Whereas the environmental movement 20 years ago worried about an individual dam or a single highway, many scientists and environmentalists believe the world today is facing the loss of its tropical forests and the extinction of half of its species within the next few decades as well as a potential warming trend that could forever change the climate of the planet.
"In 1970, we were accelerating as we headed toward the cliff," said Carl Pope, conservation director of the Sierra Club. "We applied the brakes during those 20 years and now we're maybe halfway there."
New controls on vehicle emissions have improved air quality over many cities, but the very fabric of the atmosphere is shredding because of an ozone-destroying pollutant not even recognized two decades ago.
Lake Erie, which was so polluted by sewage in 1970 that many conservationists considered it "dead," has been cleaned up and now has a $600 million fishery. But not far away, Lake Michigan is believed to be so contaminated by airborne pollutants and industrial chemicals that some conservationists say women of child-bearing age should not eat its fish.
Even though the nation today has far more legally designated wilderness areas than it had two decades ago, there is far less actual wilderness. Lands that were spared the rush of development by government protections instead are in danger of being ravaged by acid rain produced by burning coal.
"By every major environmental indicator, the Earth is worse off today than it was in 1970," said Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental organization.
Just as many of today's environmental problems differ from those of 1970, so do the recipes for resolving them. There is more emphasis on preventive measures. Instead of focusing on saving a single bird or plant species, the conservation movement has turned toward saving lands that contain a diversity of wildlife.
Instead of just asking for more smog-control equipment, conservationists are pushing for alternative-fuel vehicles, new strategies for getting people out of their cars as well as energy-efficient buildings and industry.
Instead of requiring that contaminants be cleaned up after industry has disposed of them, the push now is to find alternatives in the industrial process. Instead of just urging people to recycle, the nation's conservationists want less waste to be generated in the first place.
The fight against global environmental threats also has spawned a flood of proposed remedies but they require a will to act not yet demonstrated by much of the world.
If the planet is to save its tropical forests, repair the ozone layer and head off global warming, environmental leaders say, industrialization may have to be slowed in developing countries and their economies altered. Industrialized nations will have to find substitutes for fossil fuels and ozone-depleting chemicals and improve their energy efficiency.
The challenge is mind-boggling.
"We're looking at putting on the brakes on population growth . . . phasing out fossil fuels, reversing the deforestation of the Earth," said Brown. "Any one of these things would thoroughly challenge any generation in history. We've got a half dozen of them. We've got to do all at once."
Many of these perceived global threats went unrecognized on April 22, 1970, when the environment first was celebrated in a kind of national holiday called Earth Day and the nation awoke like a latter-day Rip van Winkle to discover that pollution was rampant and getting worse. For the rest of that decade, America saw unrivaled environmental action.
In short order, President Nixon opened the doors of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which regulates the disposal of hazardous wastes.
Much of this occurred in a presidency not sympathetic to environmental concerns. William Ruckleshaus, whom Nixon appointed to head the new EPA, said in a recent interview that his former boss considered the environment unimportant, never seemed curious about it and traced environmental activism to a "softness" in Americans.
"I had several conversations with him," said Ruckleshaus, now an executive with a waste management company. "He never once asked me, `Is anything wrong here' (with the environment?)"
But public pressure to take action was strong and many of the reforms launched under Nixon produced results. Dramatic progress was made in the cleaning of surface water. San Francisco Bay, for example, is far cleaner today than it was 20 years ago.
So is the Potomac River. "The Potomac stunk to high heavens in the summertime," recalled Brent Blackwelder, chairman of the board of the League of Conservation Voters, who grew up in Washington. "It was so foul you wouldn't want to get near it. Now it's a beautiful river."
Air quality also improved in the densest urban settings. Although the pace of growth in some cities overcame the benefits rendered by smog-control technology, "air quality in this country would be a disaster" today without the Clean Air Act, said Rafe Pomerance, senior associate of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington.
Perhaps the two most successful single strokes by policy-makers and conservationists were the banning of DDT and the phasing out of lead in gasoline in the early 1970s. DDT causes birds to lay eggs with shells so thin they break before hatching. Lead exposure in children can permanently impair their intellectual abilities. With the phasing out of those contaminants, endangered birds began to reproduce and lead levels in the blood of average Americans dropped substantially.
"One thing we discovered was that when we did something bold, nature bounded back better than we had anticipated," Pope said. "When we have taken half-measures, the system hasn't responded."
One of the "half-measures" cited by Pope was the Endangered Species Act, which protects wildlife only after it is already dangerously close to extinction. The bald eagle is multiplying and the once imperiled American alligator has been taken off the endangered list.
But, many species on the federal list continue to decline in number, and others, such as the dusky seaside sparrow, already have become extinct.
Whatever their individual failings, the environmental laws of the 1970s represented the traditional American impulse to preserve, to leave the land better than it was found.
The 1980s showed yet another side of the American character, the fervor to push back the frontiers, to exploit seemingly inexhaustible resources. Some environmental activists now dismiss the 1980s as "the lost decade," a time of missed opportunity. Environmental research, from the testing of pesticides to the development of non-polluting energy sources, significantly slowed.
Former President Reagan, who was not an advocate of environmental regulation, is largely blamed for attempts to unravel, or at least ignore, laws put on the books in the previous decade. Early in his first administration, Reagan tended to pay scant attention to the EPA and other agencies "he didn't care that much about," noted Ruckleshaus, whom Reagan brought in to reform the EPA after the president's first choice resigned in scandal.
Even so, Reagan had a curiosity about the environment. "(Reagan actually) was more interested in the environment than Nixon," the former administrator said. "He often would ask me . . . about the science of it. He wanted to know if there was any substance to it."
Despite Reagan's poor environmental record, some progress was made during his years. The Food Security Act of 1985 allowed for the recycling of land, the conversion of as many as 40 million acres of crop land - about 11 percent of the nation's total - into grasslands or woods. Conservationists say much of this land should never have been plowed at all and, without the law, it might have turned to wasteland. The law already is credited with reducing erosion by one-third.
In areas where government failed to act, consumers did. After a report last year about the possible health hazards of Alar, a chemical used to improve the appearance and prolong the shelf life of apples, the nation's consumers began demanding pesticide-free produce at their markets.
Public anxiety about the thinning ozone layer also prompted many corporations to phase out voluntarily their use of some ozone-destroying chemicals. Other companies are starting to promote their products based on their conservation merits. The H.J. Heinz Co., for instance, recently publicized the production of a new plastic ketchup bottle that can be more easily recycled than most plastics.
Market forces may even make recycling a permanent fixture of the American lifestyle. With communities running out of places for dumping rapidly proliferating waste and with disposal costs escalating, more and more cities are launching curbside recycling programs.
Legislatures have passed laws requiring deposits on bottle purchases and other recyclable goods. California, for one, will require communities to reduce garbage by 25 percent by 1995 and 50 percent by 2000, primarily through recycling, composting and reducing the sources of waste.
Corporations may be prodded into further environmental action under a proposal by environmental activists to award "green seals" of approval to products that meet certain conservation criteria. The seals could be given for anything from an energy-efficient manufacturing process to packaging that can be recycled.
While the nation has come up with answers to some of its environmental ills, there are no such easy fixes for combatting such global threats as overpopulation and deforestation.
When Paul Ehrlich warned of an overpopulation disaster in his 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," there were 3.5 billion people on Earth. Today, there are 5.2 billion and the number is growing.
Efforts to reverse the upward trend have succeeded in some countries. Fourteen European countries, with about 5 percent of the world's population, have reached zero-population growth and Japan, France and Finland are among others headed in that direction. Population growth fell by half in Japan from 1948 to 1955 and in China from 1970 to 1976.
But if death rates do not rise worldwide, birth rates will have to be reduced 62 percent to stabilize the planet's population, according to Brown of Worldwatch. The populations of India, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Mexico are expected to double or even triple before they flatten out late in the next century, he said.
"The real question is whether we check population growth or nature checks population growth," Brown said. "If we don't, nature will."
Population pressures have contributed to the loss of the world's forests and the rise in gases blamed for the greenhouse effect. Forests shield a diversity of wildlife and absorb gases that otherwise trap heat in the atmosphere much like the panes of a greenhouse. If the greenhouse effect is not checked, sea levels could rise, droughts and hurricanes could multiply and more forests could vanish.
Progress in persuading Third World countries to conserve their forests has been scant, although Brazil recently responded to international pressure by removing tax subsidies for forest clearing.
Attempts are being made to reforest, but South Korea remains the only Third World country to do it successfully. Some industrialized countries, including Australia and the United States, have launched tree-planting programs.
by CNB