EuroVista

...I was forgetting politics...

...Israel is irrigating reclaimed semidesert with recycled sewage water, and its scientists have developed a fast-multiplying strain of bacteria that devours the paraffin content of petroleum, leaving dewaxed oil that decomposes into carbon dioxide and water...

...Pesticides used in the Ebro delta and orange groves of the Spanish Levante are finding their way into the sea, to the detriment of local crustaceans...

...Eels caught in the refinery-polluted Etang de Berre, frowned on by French health inspectors, have to be exported to Germany and Italy to find a market...

...Comparable developments are under way in Italy...

...But except in three or four areas like the Bay of Naples, its ecological balance does not seem to have been seriously disturbed until the 1960s...

...Recently La Vanguardia, Barcelona's leading daily, published an aerial photo showing the discoloration of some 10 square miles of sea off Vandellos, on the Costa Dorada, where an atomic generating plant was recently put into commission...

...Most of it comes from tankers that fill up at terminals in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Libya, and Algeria, and unload in the main industrial ports...

...Those beaches that remain relatively hygienic more often than not open onto a sea littered with plastic blobs of tar today, too...

...A vast petrochemical complex, including a big oil refinery, is under construction southwest of Tarragona...

...Big power stations, some of them nuclear, are raising the temperature of the sea in many places...

...While visiting a Yugoslav port once famed for its seafood, I was told of a local fish shortage caused by the proliferation of oxygen-consuming algae stimulated by pollution...

...Local villagers have held protest meetings and the government has responded by arresting a few of them and banning a conference on the subject called by the Spanish ecological association...

...French officials have adopted an economically sound but ecologically lunatic scheme to create a huge industrial complex-with new towns to house a million people?around the Etang de Berre, just west of Marseilles...

...so, as a temporary expedient, refuse may have to be tipped into the sea...

...According to the mayor of Cannes, a film of oil less than half a milimeter thick would be sufficient to block photosynthesis and oxygenation, and would produce a marine desert in Mediterranean conditions...

...Now Italian biologists report the total destruction of plankton in big patches of sea south of Genoa and west of Naples polluted by industrial and other effluents...

...French health officials are usually scrupulous about warning the public against bathing in-And eating fish from-polluted waters...

...They estimate that more than 250,-000 metric tons of petroleum are dumped into this landlocked sea annually by ships...

...Red tuna and other species that were plentiful 15 years ago are scarce today-And, when caught, "stink of oil or sewage...

...Market-gardeners protect their crops with huge polyethylene sheets that invariably end in the sea...

...Getting entangled in one, while swimming alone in deep water, is as scary as encountering a big octopus...

...French Languedoc and Corsica, as well as 20-30 miles south of Toulon, Cannes and Nice...

...Israel was excluded...

...An undersea oilfield is now being exploited off southern Catalonia, and exploration has begun along the coasts of the Spanish Levante...

...and the Ford company is planning to build a car plant in the same region...

...The Industrial Villains What overpopulation and tourism began, industry seems to be completing...

...Overpopulation, tourism, industrialization...

...According to the Spanish press, Palma de Mallorca, a small city in the Balearic islands that annually receives over 2 million tourists, has run out of garbage dumps...

...French Mediterranean fishermen have gone on strike and blocked port entrances in protest against the rising tide of pollution, but officialdom is more impressed by shining new refineries and industrial plants than by stinking fish...

...The Mediterranean has, of course, been a sewer and garbage dump for centuries...

...Israel would therefore, you might think, be a welcome participant in any international get-together concerned with marine pollution...

...The Marine Victims Tideless and overfished, the waters of the Mediterranean have always been poorer than those of the Atlantic in oxygen and plankton?the reason why Atlantic fish taste better than their Mediterranean cousins...

...Overpopulation and the tourist boom started the rot...

...A decade ago, for the price of a snorkel, you could explore another world: fantastic undersea canyons and jungles where thousands of bright fish frisked through prism-clear water...

...Some French beaches have actually been sprayed with perfume to make their air less noisome...

...Yet France has a better hygienic record than most Mediterranean countries, many of which cannot even furnish credible statistics on coastal pollution...

...Now, suddenly, it is in danger of becoming a dead sea...

...Spain, in the past an exporter of anchovies, now has to import them, and fishermen say anchovies and tuna will vanish from the Mediterranean within the next 10 years...

...The consequences of a leak like the one that occurred off Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 might be catastrophic in the Mediterranean...

...Much of it is brought by currents and a lot is dumped from passing ships, but a surprising amount is of local origin...

...The worst offender is Marseilles, a callous old delinquent that collects the "used waters" of its million inhabitants in a gigantic sewer-tunnel and dumps them a mile outside the city, polluting three miles of shoreline on calm days and a wider area when wind and currents disperse the mess...

...Such a conference was organized by a Leftward-leaning French organization last summer in Beirut...

...There have been many days during recent summers when stretches of the sea off France's overcrowded Cote d'Azur, Spain's congested Costa del Sol, several Italian ports and beaches, Beirut, and a few Greek ports smelled like old-fashioned sewage beds...

...Since then, the water has become oily and foggy, and the canyons are filling up with gooey treacherous swamps of plastic bags and containers clinging together in a tarry mass...

...An Anglo-Italian scientific team appointed by the Naples administration says marine life has become virtually extinct along considerable stretches of the coast of southwest Italy...

...Already the statues and facades of Venice are being corroded by sulphurous industrial fumes, while the whole city is sinking into its lagoon because factories and housing projects at nearby Marghera and Mestre are lowering the underground water table...

...its owners have closed the plant temporarily, following legal action by French and Italian tourist authorities, but similar wastes are still being dumped elsewhere in the Mediterranean...

...The best Mediterranean restaurants buy seafood from Atlantic ports, and even the general public is becoming doubtful about Mediterranean fish: What the French call loups de mer (sea bass in English) are currently worth $2.30 a pound if caught in the Atlantic as opposed to 800 if landed at a Mediterranean port...

...Even usually deserted stretches of the North-African and Greek coasts are blackened with oil and littered with indestructible plastic...

...In another grim report, Professor Ton-giorgi of the University of Pisa declares that some species of fish caught in the Gulf of Genoa and the Tyrrhenian Sea (east of Sardinia) show abnormally high concentrations of chromium, titanium and compounds considered can-cerogenous...

...The Italian authorities, too, are making an effort, though desperately needed projects to improve sewage control at Naples and to give Venice its first sewage system are apparentiy being delayed by the nation's economic crisis...

...Spanish electric companies plan to install six more nuclear reactors in this relatively unspoiled region...

...Housing developments, hotels and camping sites have been constructed along the Mediterranean coast faster than reliable sewage- and refuse-disposal facilities...

...The Italian press warns that bathing could be dangerous, because of pollution, at La Spezia, Pescara and the beaches near Rome...

...It is oil, however, that Mediterranean environmentalists fear most...

...French fishermen and mussel growers of the Marseilles-Fos region say pollution is destroying their livelihood...

...In France alone about 40 towns and 200 villages discharge sewage into the Mediterranean...

...A new titanium-bioxide plant at Scarlino, in Tuscany, has discharged more than a million tons of waste-said to contain sulphuric acid and poisonous oxides-into the sea near Elba, causing a sinister red mud to ooze toward Corsica and Sardinia...

...Some 700 miles to the west, I heard Catalan fishermen complaining that the delicious langostino, formerly plentiful along the coast south of Tarragona, has been decimated by oil slicks and will probably be destroyed by oil drilling and tanker activity in the area...

...A large industrial zone centered on a steelworks is taking shape beside the ruins of Saguntum, north of Valencia...