editorial
Hurrah for the end of an era Confrontation on environmental issues won’t disappear, but the raw antagonisms of the past are fast fading
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ur next issue will mark the beginning of the sixth year of ES&T’S existence. As 1971 draws to a close, it is instructive as well as enjoyably nostalgic t o look back over our first five years and to see whether, on balance, the nation and the world have made any progress in solving environmental problems. Despite much of the cynicism and frustration that we, among others, have felt from time to time and in fact have expressed on this page, there seems now to be little doubt that real, tangible progress has, in fact, been made. Painfully slow progress, to be sure, but progress for all that. One of the reasons why we can express what diplomats always seem to call “cautious optimism” is that the protagonists in environmental battles are moving closer together philosophically-something that they themselves may not yet realize. On the one hand we have the “environmentalists”-the term coined by the media for the loosely coordinated group of conservationists, university professors, and concerned citizens and allied thorns in the corporate side. On the other, we have “industry,” that supposedly monolithic collection of cigar-chomping boors bent solely on profit and environmental destruction. A remarkable development that has occurred during the short life of ES&T is the shift in attitudes of these two groups. Environmentalists are no longer naive birdwatchers and little old ladies. They have become better organized, better informed (although still prone t o making unsubstantiated charges). Most important of all, they have learned how t o use legal and political machinery as well, if not better, than their corporate opponents. And industry has changed its attitude toward environmental concerns so radically and in so short a time that environmentalists’ distrust of the change is both apparent and understandable. In our opinion, industry’s remarkable metamorphosis from inward looking chrysalis to socially responsible butter-
fly is both real and encouraging. It is, in fact, a major factor that is surely going t o enable us to win the shortterm war against pollution. (The long-term war is another matter.) The plain fact is that the country has changed, and it is highly unlikely to change back. Quite simply stated, people want a cleaner environment, their political representatives want to get it for their constituents, and a growing number of businesses are staking their financial future on making the hardware and providing the services that will eventually ensure that the environment truly will be cleaner. The number of people who will benefit-socially and financiallyfrom control of pollution is rapidly exceeding the number of those who benefit from its continuance. Given the American political system of compromise between adversary positions of relative strength, it is not difficult t o see who will ultimately win and who, in fact, is winning right now. The tangible signs of progress, true, are not so numerous to justify complacency. But they are there: lower sulfur dioxide levels in cities, many rivers are cleaner than they were 10 years ago, and new plants are replacing old ones that were gross polluters. Current progress allied with that which will undoubtedly be made under the whip of a fired-up, strongly mandated federal bureaucracy make it look to us as if 1984 will be a much brighter day than painted either in Orwell’s novel or the books of the doomsday folk. The dangers lurking in the background that we have barely begun to tackle, however, are those connected with undisciplined growth of populations, and industrialization. Getting rid of gross air and water pollution in the seventies will be child’s play compared to arranging the social and political changes needed to consolidate our gains in the years after 1980.
Volume 5, Number 12, December 1971 1159
