editorial On running just t h a t little bit faster Unless action quickly replaces discussion, environmental improvement may never be any more than an empty clichk “ A slow sort o f a country!“ said the Queen. “Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. I f you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” LEWISCARROLL Alice Through the Looking Glass
T 1he Red Queen might well have been talking about pollution control in the U.S. While everyone with the remotest claim to being civilized and articulate has added his voice to the chorus of platitudes and “told-you-so’s,’’ while cumbersome machinery at every level of government and industry has been painfully assembled to counter “the destruction of our environment,” while ordinary citizen and president alike have indulged in an unprecedented orgy of pontificating and finger-wagging, pollution has continued largely unabated and, indeed, may well have increased. Why has so much activity led to so little progress? Maybe because most of it consisted of airing problems rather than solving them. It is, after all, not too long ago that a smoke-billowing chimney was regarded as a sign of prosperity, not a potential harbinger of lung diseases or worse. Many people genuinely did not realize the extent of pollution. NOW that the problem has been given a very thorough airing, everyone, save the totally illiterate and completely cynical, can have few illusions about its seriousness, and perhaps we can stop talking and start doing something. Unfortunately, much of what we have done so far has succeeded merely in institutionalizing ways to talk about the problem. Water pollution enforcement conferences, for instance, are almost universally regarded as a waste of time and money, but they are still being held because that is the way federal legislation now on the books sought to get something done. Court actions, in which both alleged polluters and alleged conservationists may at various times be
the plaintiffs, have as yet accomplished little besides delaying important decisions for several years. Technical meetings with environment as a theme have been, in the main, planned more as crowd-pullers than as opportunities for constructive action. Federal laws, in which we put (in retrospect) such pathetic faith just a couple of years ago, have proved insufficient to do much more than increase the level of spending and to pay for the establishment of the E P A and cEQ-organizations that show every sign of adeptness at the sort of sincere papershuffling which is so beloved in the rest of the federal government. (When EPA was assembled from existing agencies in 1970, we editorialized, “it is perhaps asking too much to expect a newly created government superagency to avoid the bureaucracy that has plagued its component parts . . . .” Unhappily we were right: it is asking too much.) Well, it’s not too late to make a start right now. We have the national will-the public has shown that time and time again. We have the expertise-a glance at the Pollution Control Directory in this issue shows that. We have the money, although we certainly agree with EPA Administrator Ruckelshaus that the job cannot be done overnight. What we do not appear to have is the commitment. As long as federal, state, and local officials hang back from the admittedly nasty job of enforcement, as long as industry waits for the other fellow to make the first move to clean up, and as long as environmental professionals-the readers of this publicationcontinue to talk without really doing anything, we will get nowhere. Without commitment to the simple cause that everyone has mouthed a million times or morea cleaner environment for America-all the federal laws in the world will not make one iota of difference, no matter how fast we seem to be running.
Volume 5, Number 9, September 1971 739
