edito riaI
Pollution is a two-edged sword Man inevitably affects the environment, but the results need not be all bad if he just learns how to manage it l h e Sport Fishing Institute (SFI) reported an unusual fish kill the other day. A power station in Pennsylvania was forced to shut down because of a water leak, and one of the things stopped was the discharge of heated condenser cooling water. Over 20,000 fish, most of them valuable species such as smallmouth bass and catfish, died when the water temperature dropped quickly from 80 to 36°F. It is common at this power plant, as at many others, for fish to congregate at the cooling water discharge point during the winter months. SFI categorizes the kill as being caused by thermal pollution because, it says, were it not for the power station and its heated ’water discharges, the fish would never have been in the area at that time of the year. Fair comment. Nevertheless, the incident points up an important fact: pollution is a two-edged sword. While the greater majority of its effects is, almost by definition, insidious, there are cases where pollution-in the sense of man-made alterations in an ecological balance-can be turned to man’s benefit. Algal and fish culture in ponds fed with treated sewage that is rich in nutrients is a case in point (see Es&T, February 1971, page 112). And people are just getting around to thinking that heated water discharges might well be put to good use. Whether attracting fish to stretches of water from which they would normally be absent in winter is, on balance, a good thing is perhaps debatable, but the advantages of extending the shipping season on navigable bodies of water that freeze over in the winter surely is not. The simple fact is that man is managing the environment whether he realizes it or not. He may not be doing it very well-and that may be the understatement of the year-but by the very nature of his extensive activities he is doing it. In the U.S., environmental management is seen at its most overt in the flood
control programs that involve the building of dams, and in the management of migratory game birds by establishing chains of wildlife refuges along the major flyways. (Let no one suppose that goose populations have increased in spite of human pressure-they have increased because of human management.) In countries such as the Netherlands, the whole of life is essentially devoted to environmental management: there’s an old saying, “God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland!” Population pressures have forced the Dutch to extend their land area by 50% through diking and draining arms of the North Sea. Now there is a very real and probably justified contempt in this country for the frontier-taming spirit of old. Undoubtedly, much dam-building is done because of pork barrel pressures rather than to protect humans from destructive natural forces. Undoubtedly, also, much industrialization and other human activities are careless, destructive, and irresponsible. But all this suggests the need for more environmental management, not less. Everything man does affects the environment, a fact that is explicitly recognized in the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. So the only way not to affect it is to do nothing at all, surely a proposition with which few would agree. The U S . land surface is vastly different today than it was 300 years ago: very little original forest remains and the land everywhere shows the evidence of man’s hand. So by all means we should preserve what is irreplaceable (the Grand Canyon, the few virgin forests) but let us also recognize that we have already altered the American environment in a major way. What we need to do now is to manage it knowledgeably and responsibly.
Volume 5, Number 5, May 1971 383
