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Environmental Action
By Denis Hayes

"Most of the politicians and businessmen who are jumping on the environmental bandwagon clearly do not have the slightest idea what they are getting into. They do not yet understand that we see this as a long and serious fight for a profound change in what this country is all about. They are talking about emission control devices on automobiles; we are talking about bans on automobiles. They are bursting with pride over plans for inadequate municipal waste treatment plants; we are challenging the ethics of a society that, with only seven per cent of the world's population, accounts for more than half of the world's annual consumption of raw materials."

I AM NOT going to waste time today reciting a list of disasters. We all know about them. We already know how we are raping this frail planet. The shock effect of disasters is gone. Today such lists of catastrophes may even be counter-productive. They suggest we have a discrete number of specific problems we must address. We don't. We have THE PROBLEM. All ecological concerns are interrelated parts of the delicate problem of perpetuating life on our planet, and our approach to this problem must be holistic. It is absolute folly to continue to pursue piecemeal solutions: We scrub our air by fouling our water; we reduce our solid waste by vomiting smoke into our skies. The time has come to search beneath the symptoms for the cause.

This is not to say that the new ecologists oppose patchwork improvements-only that we are fairly indifferent to them. If bandages

Denis Hayes is the National Coordinator of Environmental Action, an environmental organization based in Washington, D. C. Mr. Hayes, on leave from his studies at Harvard Law School, was national coordinator for "Earth Day" in April. This article is taken from all address delivered before the National Wildlife Federation's 34th Annual Meeting in Chicago, March 21, 1970, and is printed here by permission.

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and bailing wire make life a little better, that's fine. But the cosmetic alterations being offered by our politicians and our industrialists do not really speak to THE PROBLEM at all. They are the kinds of marginal compromises that a skillful player makes to keep control of the game. The precedents are clear. Other social movements have tramped across the dusty American stage. Many began in search of fundamental change; all failed. Our movement must be different; we no longer have enough time to tolerate failure. Until recently, American movements tended to have a vulnerability. Relying heavily upon an economic analysis, they tended to focus at least in part upon material goals. And this made them vulnerable. The American economy can manufacture wondrous quantities of goods. So if a militant group wanted a piece of the pie, and was willing to fight for it, the economy would simply produce a little more pie and give the militants some. And with some of its material goals addressed, the movement invariably lost its teeth.

The contemporary revolution, however, does not rely upon an exclusively economic analysis, and its goals are not acquisitive. It will be impossible to "buy off" the peace people, to "buy off" the hippies, to "buy off " the young Black militants, to "buy off " the ecology freaks. We cannot be bought, because we demand something the existing order cannot produce. We demand a lower productivity and a greater distribution. We demand things which last, which can be used and reused. We demand less arbitrary authority and more decentralization of power. We demand a fundamental respect for nature, including man, even though this may sometimes result in "inefficiency."

Dissident groups accentuate different concerns, but our fundamental goals tend to be shared: ending exploitation, imperialism, and the war-based economy; guaranteeing justice, education, and health to all men. A focus on one concern does not mean a neglect of the others: We are able to seek more than one goal at a time. Those of us who have fought the war will continue to do so until the war is ended; those of us who have sought racial justice will not be satisfied until it is realized. All these goals fall under a single unified value structure. This value is difficult to articulate, but posited most simply it might read: "the affirmation of life." This is a clear contradiction of most things for which America stands.

Most of the politicians and businessmen who are jumping on

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the environmental bandwagon clearly do not have the slightest idea what they are getting into. They do not yet understand that we see this as a long and serious fight for a profound change in what this country is all about. They are talking about emission control devices on automobiles; we are talking about bans on automobiles. They are bursting with pride over plans for inadequate municipal waste treatment plants; we are challenging the ethics of a society that, with only seven per cent of the world's population, accounts for more than half of the world's annual consumption of raw materials.

We are stealing from the poor countries of the world and from generations yet unborn to satiate our own gluttonous need for consumption. We waste our riches in planned obsolescence, and invest the overwhelming bulk of our national budget in ABM's and MIRV's and other means of death. Our biggest bombs today are the equivalents of TNT sticks, each covering six city blocks and as tall as the Empire State Building. The only reason we do not have bigger bombs is that we do not have a reliable means of delivering bigger bombs. Yet. We are spending insanely large sums on military hardware instead of eliminating hunger and poverty. We squander resources on moondust while people live in wretched housing. And we still waste money and lives in a war we should never have entered and should get out of immediately. These are all a part of our basic disregard for how people live.

We have made Vietnam an ecological catastrophe. Vietnam was once capable of producing a marketable surplus of grains and rice. Now America must feed her. We have left more than 500,000 acres barren. Last year alone American bombs pock-marked the country with more than one-half million craters, some of which are thirty feet deep. We have destroyed more than a quarter of the country's fertile mangrove forests. The destruction of the environment of Vietnam is not simply a by-product of the war. We are guilty of a direct, devastating, and inexcusable assault on that nation's ecosystem. The United States spent $73 million on defoliation in Vietnam in the last fiscal year alone. Much of the money went for the purchase and distribution of Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide containing 2,4,5-T which has been shown to produce birth defects in laboratory animals. We have dumped defoliants on Vietnam at the rate of 10,000 pounds a month, blackening in a single year 6,600

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square miles. We cannot pretend to be concerned with the environment of this or any other nation as long as we continue the war in Vietnam or wage a similar war in Laos, Cambodia, or elsewhere.

But even if the war were over tomorrow, America would still be killing this planet. We are systematically destroying our land, our streams, and our seas. We foul our air, deaden our senses, and pollute our bodies. And it's getting worse. Our population and our rate of "progress" are both expanding geometrically. Many are doomed to die in Los Angeles in thermal inversions and not one element of the existing system can do a thing to reduce the flow of poisonous traffic into that city. That is what America has become, and that is what we are challenging.

America has become indifferent to life, reducing that vibrant miracle to a dead statistic. This callousness has allowed us to overlook the modest, intermediate consequences of our crimes. If fifty thousand people are killed, if twelve million people starve, if an entire country is laid waste, we have learned to tuck the information into the proper file and write the affair off as a mistake.

We have to "unlearn" that. These are not mistakes at all; they are the natural outgrowths of the "growth generation," of the neoKeynesian mentality that still expects to find salvation in the continued growth of population and production. Nurtured in our frontier heritage, as the short-sighted inhabitants of a bountiful, underpopulated country, this mental set (found in every economic text in our schools) has yet to grapple with the elementary fact that infinite expansion is impossible on a finite planet.

Let us remove ourselves from the global perspective for a moment. Instead of focusing upon the biosphere, let us address a very modest concern: smog and the automobile. There are few better examples of the shortcomings of the piecemeal approach. Smog is a complex mixture of air pollutants, varying from area to area. A major contributor everywhere is the automobile, and nitrogen dioxide is one of the more dangerous emissions from automobiles. We have now developed an anti-smog device which will last about eight thousand miles and which will significantly decrease the amounts of some pollutants discharged on the road. The flow of nitrogen dioxide, however, is actually increased by about fifty per cent as a result of hydrocarbon combustion.

There are other tricks to gain other small goals; we can remove the

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heavy metals from gasoline, and we can redesign our engines. But most knowledgeable people agree that there is no real answer short of banning the internal combustion engine.

So the question is: How do you eliminate the automobile from a society which posits the pretentious coat-of-arms of the Cadillac as its highest form of grandeur? How do you combat the vested billions of dollars in Detroit? How do you challenge the vested billions of dollars of the petroleum complex (especially after the opening of the Alaskan North Slope)? How do you fight something in which nearly every American family has a couple thousand dollars in vested interests, and whose advertising is a mainstay of American communications? It's all pretty bleak.

The first things we can do are mere nibbles. We require every car to wear a large warning: "This vehicle killed fifty thousand Americans last year, and its by-products are an extreme hazard to your health." We set up a network of Automobiles Anonymous to talk to people who have a desire to drive needlessly. Then we ban all advertising for new cars. Then we pass a law permitting each American family to buy only one more new car. Ever. We insist that all new cars have the capacity to carry a minimum of five passengers. We make all toll rates prohibitively expensive, and we relate the rates inversely to the number of people in the car. We prohibit parking anywhere in our urban areas; we pass massive allocations for public transportation; and we launch enormous campaigns to put people on trains.

The above scenario is not likely. Can we really expect such public spirited action from our government, aptly described as "a system of dollars, represented in Washington by men"? Yet the automobile is not really the problem; indeed, it is but a miniscule part of THE PROBLEM, scarcely more than a symptom. Similar scenarios can be drawn for the chemical industries, the war industries, and for this city of Chicago. They are all part of the problem.

Let's look at Chicago. Its public housing is abominable, its south and west sides are unliveable, and its major industries seem intent on destroying its air and water. Citizens here in Chicago have begun to question officials whose loftiest vision of a Great Lake is one with an airport in it. People in Chicago, like people all over the country, want to be able to breathe without poisoning themselves, but people in Chicago must depend on an air pollution control appeal board

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chaired by the husband of the mayor's niece. It has the second worst air pollution problem in the country, and an air quality control board dominated by relatives and friends of the mayor and representatives of offending industries. How does one bring about change "through the system" in an area ruthlessly dominated by arrogant corporations and machine politicians? America's political and business institutions do not seem to have realized that some of us have a serious desire to live in this country thirty years from now. They had better recognize that fact soon. We do not have much time; we cannot afford to give them much time.

When it comes to salvaging the environment, the individual is almost powerless. He can pick up litter, and with diligence he may still be able to find returnable bottles. But he is forced to breathe the lung-corroding garbage which Commonwealth Edison vomits into the air; he cannot buy his electricity from a company which does not pollute. He cannot find products in biodegradable packages. He cannot even look to the manufacturer for reliable information on the ecological effects of its products. There is simply no way that the average citizen can choose to lead an ecologically sound life in contemporary America. That is not one of the choices open to him. This is a problem which characterizes far too many of our opportunities to make decisions: We must choose between a Humphrey and a Nixon, between a Ford and a Chevy. And our choices are often made in ignorance.

Picture the housewife, for instance, stopping in the supermarket in front of the detergent race. She is concerned with the environment. Which brand should she buy? Action, Vel, Cold Power, Punch, Palmolive, Surf, Biz, Bonus, Sure, Dreft, Drive, Amaze, Duz, American Family, Joy, Ivory, Dove, Purex, Fels, Clorox, Cascade, Silver Dust, Breeze, Oxydol, Ajax, Rinso, Lux, Salvo, Fab, Wisk, Cheer, Tide, Tide-XK, Bold, Dash, or All?

Mirror the experience of that housewife across the whole population addressing the full range of issues confronting man, and you will have begun to gauge the depth of frustration pervading our decision-making apparatus. Out of that frustration is emerging a movement. In recent months at least two thousand local, state or regional action groups have sprung up on campuses and in communities across the nation. They participated in Earth Day on April 22nd. But that is only a start. They will continue to educate

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people in their areas and organize them to save the environment. It is quite possible that we are seeing the beginnings not just of a new political organization, but of a new kind of political organization--one that does not go into hibernation after every election. Too many environmental disasters have been brought about by agencies and industries that never answer to the electorate and are rarely even accountable to elected officials.

A movement is building to change that. In company after company, people are using meetings of stockholders to force corporate executives to make decisions that protect the public interest. The few proxy fights that have been organized so far are just the beginning. Industrial decisions have as much effect on us as governmental ones. Some of them may be killing us. Why should not citizens have the power to stop that? The new movement will be seeking a way. Polluting companies might be declared in ecological bankruptcy and turned over to trustees to administer them in the public interest. A couple of years ago that idea would have seemed outlandish. In the face of what we now know about the destruction of our environment and the future of the planet, it seems more like common sense.

We are going to have to come to some simple understandings. Our institutions are here to serve people, not vice versa. We are all interdependent, and we must stop acting without regard to our effects upon others. And we must modestly seek to regain a state in harmony with nature, and nature's laws. That's what the New Ecology is all about.