More to Come
Take water, for example. Over 90 million Americans today drink water that is either below Federal standards or is of unknown quality. Yet water demands throughout the U.S. are predicted to double by 1980.
More significant than this is the fact that the amount and variety of waste materials dumped into our waters are destined to increase at an even faster rate than the water demand. By 1980 the nation will be producing enough sewage and industrial water-borne wastes to deplete the oxygen supply in all 22 river basins in the dry season!
Air pollution is also increasingly a menace.
Smog blankets are appearing over cities that once boasted of their clean air and healthful climates. Additional cities are destined to fall under the putrid cloud of pollution.
Auto industry statisticians in Detroit, for example, calculate that city streets will contain twice as many cars by the year 2000 as now! Such greatly increased auto usage means more carbon monoxide, more photo-chemical smog, higher concentrations of poisonous lead in the atmosphere.
Dr. John T. Middleton, Director of the National Center for Air Pollution Control of the U.S. Public Health Service warned those of us at the Houston Conference that the "true dimensions of the threat which air pollution poses to our civilization are just beginning to be understood."
The lung cancer rate in large metropolitan areas, revealed Dr. Middleton, is twice as great as the rate in rural areas, even after full allowance is made for differences in cigarette smoking habits. The serious pulmonary disease, emphysema, has shot up eightfold in the last ten years.
As President Johnson said in a 1967 speech: "Either we stop poisoning our air, or we become a nation in gas masks, groping our way through dying cities."
Heat Pollution
Other experts in Houston were concerned over a relatively new source of pollution — excess heat. Specifically, this concerns water used by electricity generating plants. When the heated water — which has been used for cooling purposes — is returned to streams, it raises the water temperature markedly. This stimulates the growth of algae and undesirable plants, prevents fish from mating and eggs from hatching.
Heat pollution is expected to increase greatly in the next few years, due to the tremendous thirst for electric power. It has been calculated that power production — and therefore waste heat — will double by 1980.
Nuclear-powered plants, move over, offer no solution. One of their most serious drawbacks is the fact that they release as waste even more heat than do conventionally powered plants.
Assistant Surgeon General Richard A. Prindle, commenting in jest about this phase of the pollution crisis, said that if excess heat should ever melt the polar ice-caps considerably, resulting in a rise in the level of the oceans, mankind might at least be saved atop his growing coastal garbage heaps.
Which brings us to the next point.
The "User" Society
The disposing of solid wastes — plain old garbage, if you please — has become an enormous headache to sanitation engineers. The third largest municipal budgetary expenditure in America now goes for waste disposal. The "garbage bill" for all of America last year came to three billion dollars!
There has been a constant and spiraling increase in the per capita production of wastes. Recent studies in the San Francisco Bay area indicated that if all solid wastes were considered, the rate of production now approximates 8 pounds per day per person.
What do today's overburdened sanitation men have to deal with (when they are not on strike)? Listen to these staggering statistics:
Every year, we affluent (or rather, effluent) Americans throw away over 30 million tons of paper, 4 million tons of plastics, 48 billion cans, and 26 billion bottles!
Greatly compounding the miseries of our solid waste engineers are these facts. (1) Americans are no longer consumers. They are mere users of products. They buy, they use, they dispose — in greater and greater quantities (4% more each year). (2) The objects we use and subsequently throw away are increasingly of an incorruptible nature. That handy plastic bottle that won't shatter when you drop it on the bathroom tile won't break down via natural decay processes at the city dump either. And the beer or soda pop aluminum can "just sits there" unperturbed, a virtual King of the Dump. The old tin (mostly steel) cans at least rusted away. Yet industry, seemingly oblivious to the overall problems and needs of our environment, continues to produce and sell non-degradable items.
Someone has suggested man's eras should be summarized as the Stone Age, then the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Space Age . . . and now the Garbage.
Will Science Save Us?
Over and over again at the conference we heard the hackneyed expression "Technology created pollution. It can also solve it."
But will the hoped-for new advances in science and technology clean up our polluted world to the extent that we can once again breathe clean air, drink pure water, eat wholesome, nourishing, uncontaminated food?
Afraid not. Scientists do not intend to go that far.
The committee on pollution of the National Academy of Sciences stated recently in its report on waste management and control:
"The right amount of pollution must be planned with criteria set somewhere between the ideal of complete cleanliness and the havoc of uncontrolled filth."
The so-called "right amount" of pollution, this report continued, "involves a calculable risk of society. It depends on where we are, what use we want to make of the environment and quality of cleanliness for which we are prepared to pay."
Are you willing to accept this decision on the part of the scientific community? Are you willing to accept the opinion of a news magazine which in a recent issue claimed that in the search for solutions "there is no point in attempting to take nature back to its pristine purity."
Why not? Why shouldn't our environment be clean — TOTALLY? Why should we have to tolerate a "little bit of filth"?
Pollution is NOT necessary!
Drastically Needed: A Fresh Perspective
In his frantic effort to curb pollution, man is passing more laws, spending more money and conducting more research than ever before. And we can be thankful that he is!
As one manufacturer told us, "If all the pollution control equipment in the U.S. were shut down for just one day while industry continued to operate, you would really appreciate how much is presently being done to control pollution." He predicted that any such shutdown would create a national pollution emergency almost immediately.
But in spite of man's best efforts — with all the control machinery working — the fact still remains that we are losing the battle against pollution.
Something new and greater must be done — and soon — if mankind is to survive!
To use Dr. Middleton's words, "We have no alternative, then, but to seek a fresh perspective and to think and plan along new lines."
But what "fresh perspective" — and along what "new lines"?
Is there a solution to pollution?
There is! And we bring you the good news that this solution will be in full effect well before the end of this century.
The CAUSE of Pollution
The cause of pollution is no secret. Many speakers at this conference clearly identified the culprit.
"In its broadest dimensions, we all know that pollution is a by-product of industrial civilization, whether the system is capitalism or communism," said Dr. Lehner of Du Pont.
John S. Lagarias of the Air Pollution Control Association added that air pollution problems "follow closely the rate of urbanization and the development of megalopolises . . . [and] the crowding together of people in closer and closer proximity."
Addressing the entire group at the April 3 evening banquet, Senator Jennings Randolph of West Virginia stated: "Nearly all of the important and critical environmental health problems — air pollution, water pollution and the growing pervasiveness of pesticides . . . have been an undesired and unforeseen by-product of goods or services which society has wanted."
These brief quotes lay bare the cause of pollution. Did you catch it?
Pollution is caused by MAN, by man's lusts, his misdirected urban-industrial WAY of LIFE.