viewpoint Kenneth M. Curtis Governor of Maine
Toward a new environmental attitude For some years now, it has been evident that Americans are slowly creating a national attitude toward the natural environment of our country. This new attitude may have been a long time in coming and its development still may be slow, but it must be measured against the time span of the three and a half centuries from the arrival of the Pilgrims upon the wilderness shores of North America. The earliest American attitudes toward our environment were incubated in an atmosphere of unbounded available land, merely waiting to be tamed by axe and plow. The wilderness was the enemy to the early settlers. It was there to be conquered and subdued. So, bred into the American consciousness right at the start was the idea of “development.” This was soon abetted by the many groups of speculators who formed companies for the establishment of towns and communities. Another part of the American attitude toward the environment was formed by the very abundance of the environment, the seemingly inexhaustible supplies of wildlife, of natural resources, and of public land that an undeveloped country was eager to have exploited for private use. It was perhaps only at the beginning of this 20th century that we Americans felt our frontiers close in upon us. Gradually, the realization has come upon us that we are no longer the great wilderness and that nothing in nature is inexhaustible. Old attitudes die hard and, every day, we see vestiges of the old modes of thinking that still prevail, whether it is the industry head who cannot understand why he should not go on using a public river or the public air as his private waste ground, or the motorist flipping a cigarette out his window who does not consider that he is using the public roadway as his private ashtray. Conservation has taken hold as an American ideal. The National Park is an American invention (along with the National Seashore and our system of State Parks), created in response to the need for setting aside areas of the wilderness we once thought would be endless. Now, at long last, we are waking up to the
menace of pollution and litter and the entire complicated process of befouling our own nest. Yet, to a considerable degree, the concern about our environment has not produced, nationwide, the sense of a national obligation as great, say, as our devotion was to becoming the first nation to reach the moon. Our national attention and our national imagination still has not been focused effectively on the problems of our environment. Sufficient funding has not been forthcoming from Washington. And money, alone, is not the entire answer, although without sufficient funding, our environment can neither be cleansed nor protected. The extension of the new attitude toward our environment must continue on all fronts. Industry has at last begun to see that rescarch into the potential use of wastes has a profit potential, but basic research into pollution has only scratched the surface. Whole new ways of looking at the problem must be considered. One recommendation of niy Committee on Pollution Abatement in Maine was for a dedicated anti-pollution fund, similar to the Highway Fund that was responsible for our Interstate Highway System, and this approach has merit. Another thing we have started is a coastal development plan, a comprehensive plan to map the future of our incomparable Maine coast. On all environmental fronts, there must be this continual seeking of new thoughts and new solutions for both remedying and avoiding the desecration that we Americans have caused to our homeland and are still continuing to cause, even as I write, for the assaults on the American environment have grown worse, not better. The hopeful sign is that we now recognize that there is a problem. With this recognition, therefore, has come the obligation to act.
Kenneth M . Curtis was elected Governor of Maine in 1966, after serving as Secretary of State of Maine (1965-66)
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