Salvation: It's Possible

...Moreover, intensive use of fertilizer, especially of nitrogen, provides a quick return on the farmer's investment...

...All of these cycles are driven by the action of living things: Green plants convert carbon dioxide into food, fiber, and fuel...

...This accounts for much of the mass of rotting algae which fouls the water and beaches of Lake Erie...

...Many other European lakes face the same fate, he says...

...Moreover, these technologies are now so massively embedded in our system of industrial and agricultural production that any effort to make them conform to the demands of the environment will involve serious economic dislocations...

...Modern, highly concentrated, nitrogen fertilizers result in the drainage of nitrate pollutants into streams and lakes just because they succeed in the aim of raising the nutrient level of the soil...

...Four—He can, in the name of ecological sanity, halt the development of the supersonic transport (SST) — an environmental horror which, if it is ever flown in the nation's airlanes, will expose a fourth of the nation to noise equivalent to that which surrounds our airports...

...Animals, basically, live on plant-produced food...

...I believe that we have, as of now, a single decade in which to design the fundamental changes in technology that we must put into effect in the 1980s—if we are to survive...

...We have unwittingly killed thousands of sheep in testing our chemical weapons and have triggered unanticipated earthquakes with our nuclear tests...

...The present smog control technique—reduction of waste fuel emission—by diminishing the interaction of nitrogen oxides with hydrocarbon wastes, enhances the level of airborne nitrogen oxides, which are themselves toxic...

...Our technology is enormously successful in producing material goods, but too often is disastrously incompatible with the natural environmental systems that support not only human life, but technology itself...

...At the Same time, the Holstein cow helped considerably to maintain the capital investment represented by the farmer's pasture land, for its wastes contributed to the organic content of the pasture soil, maintaining its fertility in a natural manner...

...And in each case, the new technology has not, in fact, yielded an unequivocal improvement in the ratio of productivity to cost of production because of the pervasive social cost of the resultant environmental disruption: pollution and, perhaps ultimately, our very survival...

...our cars throb with the noise of automobiles, aircraft, and construction tools...

...For, once the automobile is allowed out of the factory, and into the environment, it is transformed...

...Europe has its Lake Eries, too...

...Much of the modern pollution problems derives from the effects of phosphates on algal overgrowths, and nearly all of the phosphate enters surface waters from municipal sewage treatment plants because of the widespread use of phosphate-rich detergents...

...This says nothing of the toxic chemicals it carries or of the occasional chemical spills that can kill millions of river fish...

...Less apparent than the fact of pollution is what can be done about it...

...We may yet discover how to devote the wisdom of science and the power of technology to the welfare, the very survival, of man...

...This has taken the form of scientific efforts to breed a new strain of Holstein, capable of increased yields of milk per unit of feed...

...Vegetation will need to be massively reintroduced into urban areas...

...These efforts have met with success, and New York dairies now have available to them such high-yield Holstein breeds...

...Altogether, this vast web of biological interactions generates the very physical system in which we live: the soil and the air...

...we must determine, now, to develop, in the next decade, the new means of our salvation...

...I have emphasized these agricultural problems because they most directly reveal our dependence on the natural systems which constitute the environment...

...Each of these is a non-good and costs someone something...

...Another example of new problems created by what seem to be technological achievements is provided by modern agricultural technology, which is largely based on replacing the dwindling natural supply of plant nutrients in the soil by the massive use of inorganic fertilizers, especially nitrogen...

...What is surprising is the amount of nitrogen oxides that are generated by our automotive traffic: They account for more than one-third of the nitrogen contained in the fertilizer currently employed on U.S...

...This is some of the tragic destruction that lies hidden in the changing environment—costs that do not appear as entries in the balance sheets of industry and agriculture...

...But this machine, like other forms of technology, breaks the natural cycle of environmental processes...

...These fertilizers greatly increase the immediate crop yields...

...I was proud, and moved, recently to be termed "The Paul Revere of Ecology...

...Our success is in the construction of these machines...

...How, then, can we account for this pervasive relationship between technology and pollution...

...The total cost of bringing water pollution control up to present standards has been calculated at $100 billion over the next ten to twenty years...

...This vast change has occurred for sound economic reasons...

...To make present sewage treatment technology ecologically sound will require, at the least, the introduction of tertiary treatment stages to protect the ecosystem of surface waters (almost no plants of this type are now in operation), and ultimately, a wholly new type of system that returns organic waste to the soil so as to protect the declining quality of our soils...

...The problems are enormous in size: Cities are running out of places to dump garbage, and a lake as large as Erie has been nearly totally polluted...

...At its source, its water is pure...

...Consider this thesis, which, I believe, may provide some useful insights into these problems: Environmental pollution is not to be regarded as an unfortunate, but incidental, by-product of the growth of population, the intensification of production, or of technological progress...

...Now, suddenly, things are different: Environmental pollution is a major public concern...

...However, the rate of economic return from this system of dairying is low, relative to competitive forms of investment of the land and capital involved...

...Naturally the farmers were interested in ways of increasing the direct financial return from their dairy operations...

...From it we may yet learn that the proper use of science is not to conquer nature, but to live in it...

...Professor Passino also cited cases along the coasts of Versilia, southern Tuscany, and Latium, where marine pollution is killing coastal pines...

...He wrote Science and Survival, available in Viking Compass paperback...

...But, as already indicated, while this expedient is an effective way to maintain the immediate productivity of the land, it does so at the expense of a major social cost—added pollution of surface waters...

...Carbon monoxide in their blood rose thirty per cent...

...What can we do to avert the environmental crisis...

...At the same time, the pasture lands, now deprived of the organic matter of the cows' wastes, begin to decline in their fertility...

...He can also hold in abeyance the further exploitation of offshore oil in California and elsewhere until the ecological risks are effectively mastered...

...It is a place created by living things, maintained by living things, and through the marvelous reciprocities of biological evolution is essential to the support of living things...

...I should like to suggest, however, that these calculations are not complete—that certain costs have not yet been taken into account...

...like a drug addict, we would be "hooked" on a continued self-destructive course...

...In the Midwest and California, fertilizer drainage has raised the nitrate level of drinking water supplies above the safe limit recommended by public health authorities...

...For many years, dairy farming in the state of New York has been based on a particular breed, the Holstein cow...

...Public Health Service estimates the overall cost of air pollution at about $60 per person per year...

...For example, one consequence of our increasing dependence on the massive use of inorganic nitrogen fertilizer may be the loss, perhaps irretrievably, of certain species of soil microorganisms which in nature sustain the fertility of the soil by converting the nitrogen of the air to soil-organic nitrogen...

...Modern synthetic insecticides kill birds, fish, and useful insects just because they are successful in being absorbed by insects, and killing them, as they are intended to do...

...To extend the metaphor a bit, what should we expect of President Nixon if he hopes to become the nation's first eco-President, or, if you like, "The George Washington of Ecology...

...However, these agricultural problems also illustrate a much graver consequence of technological intrusions on the environment—a threat to the very survival of the biological systems which sustain us...

...If this should happen, any effort to restore the dwindling organic content of the soil and return to a balanced soil-water' system will become difficult, and in some areas, impossible...

...We have, in sum, blindly assaulted the integrity of the environmental systems that support us, and unwittingly risked our very survival...

...In one experiment, thirty-six volunteers stayed for three hours at the most polluted points in Paris...

...Because of such hazards, and the still poorly understood danger to man, DDT is being withdrawn from most of its uses...

...a fertilizer investment made in the spring is quickly reflected in the return from the crop in the fall...

...The problems are bewildering in their complexity: If we expand sewage treatment facilities, the effluent nourishes aquatic plants and we only intensify the pollution caused by rotting masses of algae...

...As a necessary concomitant to this development, the United States has been forced to adopt, on an equally massive scale, chemical fertilization of the land, which is now deprived of the natural organic fertility of the animal wastes produced by cattle that once browsed on farmlands...

...we are assailed by the odors of polluted waters and the sight of mounting heaps of rubbish...

...farmers rapidly adopt new insecticides, fertilizers, and machines...

...for organic pollutants we pay the price—not only in dollars, but in human anguish—of some number of cases of lung cancer...

...If we destroy it, our most advanced technology will come to naught, and any economic and political system which depends on it will founder...

...Agricultural technology will need to find ways of sustaining productivity without breaking down the natural soil cycle, or disrupting the natural control of destructive insects...

...These costs are a serious challenge to the social value of our new technology and the economic system which is based upon it...

...A third example which is—surprisingly—closely related to the previous ones is the matter of air pollution caused by automotive exhaust fumes...

...In each of these examples it is evident that we have been driven to disrupt the integrity of the natural environment under the impetus of demands for competitive economic returns from a given productive process...

...However, once it begins to operate, it threatens rivers and lakes with its heated waters and human bodies with radiation...

...We would then be forced into increasing dependence on inorganic fertilizer, with its attendant water pollution...

...The system is failing, however, because its inorganic products are themselves reconverted to organic materials by the green plants that participate in the aquatic biological system, thereby frustrating the initial aim of the treatment process...

...The total profit in the paper industry is $300 million per year, so that, as a minimum, the bill represented by the pollution caused by the paper industry, if paid, would reduce the industry's profit by one-third for ten years...

...Some of these costs can be converted to dollar values...

...These immediate actions, and the long-term massive effort to roll back pollution at its roots, amount to a wholesale reorganization of our national priorities...

...One answer to this question is that at least some of the environmental failures which are so characteristic of modern technologies are the end result of a response to economic pressure...

...Also involved are myriads of microorganisms in the soil and water...

...In brief, we are in a crisis of survival...

...This problem originates with the production of nitrogen oxides by gasoline engines...

...Five—He can avert the impending $250 million appropriation for the construction of the Florida Barge Canal, a project which in the considered opinion of ecologists will do more harm to the welfare of the state than any possible commercial value that it might yield...

...These examples reflect a faith, now common in our society, that a technological advance which results in an improvement in the yield of a particular desired product is an undiluted social good...

...The degradation of the environment in which we live has become a pervasive, intractable, discouraging problem...

...Here, the waste constituents, such as nitrogen, can no longer become naturally incorporated into the soil...

...As a final example of the intrinsic failure of a technology which bears a considerable responsibility for the present pollution of the environment, look at the current status of the insecticide problem...

...For, sooner or later, every human endeavor—if it is to continue—must pass this simple test: Is it worth what it costs...

...Why has a society which is so enriched by the progress of technology now become so impoverished in the quality of the life which that technology supports...

...In such soil, soluble soil nutrients, such as nitrates, retain their naturally low levels and drainage of excess nitrate does not sufficiently stress the biological cycle of surface waters to cause water pollution...

...However, as the massive use of persistent insecticides—such as DDT—continues, some species of these useful insects may face extinction, so that biological control may be difficult, and perhaps impossible, to reestablish...

...The city has a daily fallout of ten tons of sulfuric acid, formed by sulfur products spewed into the atmosphere...

...For example, what are the true costs of operating a coal-fired power plant in an urban area...

...In each is embodied the enormous insights of modern physics and chemistry, and the exquisite skills of metallurgy, electronics, and engineering...

...But if we are staggered by the magnitude and gravity of these undertakings, let us remember that we have indeed "incurred a debt to nature," a debt which must be paid if we are to survive...

...Without the biological processes that have gone on in the soil for thousands of years, we would have neither food crops, oil, nor coal...

...let us find the means to remove the abandoned buildings and junk piles from blighted city streets and restore the latter to nature's green...

...When we discover these hidden costs, we find that they degrade the biological capital—pure air—on which the lives and livelihood of the people depend...

...This, I believe, is the urgency of the environmental crisis—we must determine, now, to develop, in the next decade, the new means of our salvation...

...The environmental crisis is a grim challenge...

...Without the photosynthetic activity of green plants there would be no oxygen for our smelters and furnaces, let alone to support human and animal life...

...Seven—He can stop the war in Vietnam and halt the barbaric destruction of the ecological resources of that unfortunate land, not only by unprecedented destruction of its vegetation with weed killers, but the destruction of the land itself and of its people by the needless horror of war...

...It might appear that this question has already been answered...

...We may yet learn that to save ourselves we must save the world that is our habitat...

...We now know that a coal-burning power plant produces not only electricity, but also a number of less desirable things: smoke and soot, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, a variety of organic compounds, and dissipated heat...

...Recent reports from Asia, Africa, and Latin America show that, with awesome regularity, major outbreaks of insect pests have been induced by the use of modern contact-killing insecticides, because such insecticides kill the natural predator and parasitic insects which ordinarily keep the spread of insect pests under control...

...These sums loom large in the national budget...

...Because of our illusions we have become unwitting victims of environmental pollution...

...This is an ecologically balanced system capable of maintaining, indefinitely, a given level of productivity in the form of milk, and exacting little or no social cost in the form of pollution...

...More important, for certain industries they may represent amounts which are so large relative to their profits as to constitute a serious threat to an industry's stability—if it were required to pay the full bill for the hidden costs of operation...

...We face a similar crisis in the control of insects...

...We cannot escape from a profound truth of modern technology—for all its goods, we pay some price in hidden costs...

...For a number of years we spread radioactive fallout across the globe—before we learned that the resulting biological risks made it too dangerous to continue...

...Apparently their cost accounting tells them that the new technologies yield the best available margin between income and costs...

...Present sewage treatment procedures were designed to relieve the burden of organic wastes on the self-purifying biological system of surface waters, by converting these wastes to supposedly innocuous inorganic products, such as nitrate and phosphate...

...These are some of the great debts which must be paid if the environment is to be saved from ultimate destruction...

...for the powerful effects of new insecticides, we pay a price in dwindling wildlife and unstable ecological systems...

...We may yet learn that to save ourselves we must save the world that is our habitat...

...This animal was well suited to the small-scale irregular terrain of the local pastures...

...oxides of sulfur increase the cost of building maintenance...

...This raises an important question about new technology: Does it pay...

...A short time ago the condition of the environment was largely a subject for discussion among scientists...

...The nation has been told by President Nixon that: "Through years of carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called...

...For evident reasons, a large, heavy cow is not as agile as a smaller one, and farmers find that the new Holstein cows, unlike the original breed, are not as good at negotiating their hilly pastures—and are therefore unable, in that environment, to obtain sufficient nutrition by their own efforts...

...The modern automobile, or the nuclear reactor, is indeed a technological triumph...

...They maintain the purity of surface waters and by governing the movement of water in the soil and its evaporation into the air regulate the weather...

...For the economic consequences of the hidden costs of environmental pollution attributable to modern technology are not trivial...

...These examples also show explicitly that environmental pollution is caused by the violation of the integrity of natural environmental systems and illustrate the seriousness of the immediate social costs of the resultant pollution...

...for nuclear power, we risk the biological hazards of radiation...

...ROBERT C. COWEN The Christian Science Monitor February 25, 1970 Barry Commoner is director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University...

...This is the environment...

...But, as in America, automobiles are the chief culprit...

...Eight—He can declare to the world what we in the scientific community have long known—that modern warfare, with its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons—is totally incompatible with the continued life of mankind and take steps toward the permanent dismantling of the war machine that holds the whole world in terror...

...My own estimate is that if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe by the 1980s we will need to begin the vast process of correcting the fundamental incompatibilities of major technologies with the demands of the ecosystem...

...As a result, the new Holstein breeds are not only more productive, they are also considerably larger and heavier than their forebears...

...in turn they regenerate the inorganic materials—carbon dioxide, nitrates, and phosphates—which must support plant life...

...The drainage of nitrogen from fertilizer has already destroyed the self-purifying capability of nearly every river in Illinois, and the same process is at work in many other parts of the nation...

...We produced the automobile that envelops our cities in smog—long before anyone understood its harmful effects on health...

...We synthesized and disseminated new insecticides—before anyone learned that they also kill birds and might be harmful to people...

...Pollution is showing up along Europe's coasts...

...The point of this calculation is obvious: The hidden costs of power production, such as air pollution, are social costs...

...Without the action of plants and animals in aquatic systems, we can have no pure water to supply agriculture, industry, and the cities...

...Such engines operate at higher temperatures than older ones...

...A modern sewage treatment plant causes algal overgrowths and resultant pollution because it produces, as it is designed to do, so much plant nutrient in its effluent...

...Most of the technological affronts to the environment were made not out of greed but ignorance...

...at the same time they produce oxygen, so that the total oxygen supply in our atmosphere is the product of plant activity...

...Sewage and garbage treatment plants will need to be designed to return organic waste to the soil, where, in nature, it belongs...

...In the period 1945-1968, the use of nitrogen fertilizer in the United States increased about fourteenfold...

...For the advantages of automotive transportation, we pay a price in smog-induced deterioration and disease...

...Here are some of the ecologically urgent actions that are within his power, as President, to take: One—He can announce to the nation that we are, now, in a fight for environmental survival and declare a state of national ecological emergency...

...At the same time there is now increasing evidence that synthetic insecticides are responsible for declining populations of birds and fish...

...The result is predictable —massive, still unresolved, pollution problems exist, especially in the surface waters of the Midwest...

...After all, power companies are eager to build plants for nuclear fuels rather than fossil ones...

...Europe Has Its Lake Eries The Rhine, like many great American rivers, degenerates into a polluted sewer as it flows to the sea...

...they are met, not by a single producer, but by many consumers...

...This means that we will need to put into operation essentially emissionless versions of automotive vehicles, power plants, refineries, steel mills, and chemical plants...

...The immediate reasons for this concern are not difficult to detect, for they assail our senses every day: Our eyes smart with smog...

...In a sense, this faith is justified...

...It has been calculated that if the U.S...

...This represents about one-half of the total U.S...

...if we attempt to control smog by means of exhaust devices which reduce waste fuel emission, we worsen the pollution caused by nitrogen oxides...

...This example, though small in its scale, clearly shows how a technological change motivated by the demand for competitive financial return may succeed in this aim —but at the expense of the integrity of the natural environmental system—with the resultant generation of new social costs, in the form of pollution...

...Because of the development of feedlot techniques—much of it in the Midwest —the United States is confronted with a huge waste disposal problem, one considerably greater than the human sewage which we are attempting to handle with grossly inadequate treatment...

...All living things, including man, and all human activities on the surface of the earth, including all of our technology, industry, and agriculture, are dependent on the great interwoven cyclical processes followed by the four elements that make up the major portion of living things and the environment: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen...

...but at the same time, the impoverishment of soil organic matter, by altering the physical character of the soil (especially its porosity to oxygen), sharply reduces the efficiency with which the added fertilizer is taken up by the crop...

...Plants also convert inorganic nitrogen into protein, a critical foodstuff...

...It efficiently grazed these fields, producing a direct economic return in the form of milk...

...The obvious costs—capital outlay, maintenance, operating costs, taxes —are well known...

...It clashes noisomely with the magnificent progress of the age, with the marvelous competence of our new machines, with the rising productivity of our factories and our farms, with the new inventions that have revolutionized communications and management...

...Much could be done by cleaning up industry...

...To discover the true cost of electrie power we need to look for, and evaluate, all the hidden, social costs represented by environmental pollution—the dirty linen, so to speak...

...In the air nitrogen oxides are readily converted to nitrates, which are then brought down by rain and snow to the land and surface waters...

...The U.S...

...We have already paid a large price for such illusions...

...There they add to the growing burden of nitrogen fertilizer...

...farms...

...As it happens, however, genetic selection for milk yield appears to be closely linked to the size of the animal...

...A livestock animal produces much more waste than human beings, and the waste produced by domestic animals in the United States is about ten times that produced by the human population...

...Smoke and soot increase the householder's laundry and cleaning bills...

...The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine—the ecosphere—and on the integrity and proper functioning of that machine depends every human activity, including technology...

...Instead, they overburden the soil's assimilatory capacity and nearly all of the nitrogenous material leaches through the soil into surface waters—where it becomes a pollutant...

...Yet, the major threat to the integrity of this biological capital is technology itself...

...Much of this waste production is confined to feedlots—in 1966 more than ten million cattle were maintained in feedlots before slaughter, an increase of sixty-six per cent over the preceding eight years...

...For that reason, we must add to the cost of rolling back water pollution the economic consequences of remaking the detergent industry, so that phosphate can be eliminated from its products...

...Housing and urban sanitary facilities will need to be drastically improved...

...Thus, the Holstein has become, in effect, a kind of highly productive milk machine...

...Long adapted to saltwater spray, the pines there now are dying where the spray hits them...

...Let me illustrate this point by a fairly simple, but enlightening, example...

...Three—He can find the immediate means to devote Federal resources to a simple, yet enormously meaningful, program: Let us declare that every piece of land not in actual use by its owners must be returned, until otherwise needed, to grass and trees...

...Two—He can act to enable the scientific community to take the first steps toward environmental survival by releasing it from the paralyzing effects of the most severe cutbacks in research support in twenty-five years...

...If, as I believe, pollution is a sign of major incompatabilities between our system of productivity and the environmental system that supports it, then, if we are to survive, it is the productivity system that must yield first place to environmental preservation, however severe and challenging to our social concepts that revised priority may be...

...A reasonable assessment of the portion of the $60 cost caused by power production from fossil fuels is about $20...

...The total economic loss from air pollution has been estimated at $11 billion annually...

...This means that we must add to the cost of such power production, for each urban family of four, about $80 per year—an appreciable sum relative to the annual bill for electricity...

...We would then be forced to rely on synthetic insecticides—and be "hooked" on them...

...I have tried to describe the nature of the environmental crisis, and to illuminate, from what we now know, its fundamental causes...

...by increasing agricultural production with feedlot operations and fertilizers, we worsen water pollution...

...I have cited these examples to illustrate the point that major problems of environmental pollution arise, not out of some minor inadequacies in our new technologies—but because of the very success of these technologies in accomplishing their designed aims...

...Their productivity can be maintained by using inorganic fertilizer, which is now so cheap and easily spread as to compete favorably with manure...

...For now the cow no longer deposits its waste usefully over the pastures, but drops it instead in a restricted feedlot...

...Six—He can call a halt to the exploitation of oil deposits in Alaska, until the project devises—if it can —methods of drilling and transport that do not risk the future of the delicately balanced ecosystem of our— and Canadian—arctic territories...

...It then reveals itself as an agent which has rendered urban air carcinogenic, burdened human bodies with nearly toxic levels of carbon monoxide and lead, embedded pathogenic particles of asbestos in human lungs, and contributed significantly to the nitrate pollution of surface waters...

...But by the time it has run its course, the microbe population has jumped to two million per cc...

...Released to the air, these oxides, upon absorption of sunlight, react with waste hydrocarbon fuel to produce the noxious constituents of smog...

...As a result, unused nitrogen fertilizer drains out of the soil into rivers and lakes, where it joins with the nitrate imposed on the water by the effluent of sewage treatment plants, causing overgrowths of green plants and the resultant organic pollution...

...cattle population...

...We produced synthetic detergents and put billions of pounds into our surface waters—before we realized that they would not be degraded in disposal systems and would pollute our water supplies...

...Similar conditions prevail in many other European cities...

...This biological difficulty can be solved—by an economically acceptable solution —by bringing the feed to the cow, which is then confined to a feedlot where its clumsy weight is no longer a handicap...

...This machine is our biological capital, the basic apparatus on which our total productivity depends...

...In air pollution Paris rivals New York or Los Angeles...

...What lessons can be learned from the environmental crisis that might help us survive it...

...All of these will demand serious economic adjustments, and our economic and social system will need to be prepared to make them...

...This sewage treatment system is quite successful in achieving its aim...

...Some fish species have disappeared from accustomed grounds along the French Riviera...

...for environmental pollution is a signal that the ecological systems on which we depend for our life and our livelihood have begun to break down and are approaching the point of no return...

...Some sixty per cent of Europe's air pollution is laid to them...

...The modern high-compression gasoline engine contributes to smog and nitrate pollution because it successfully meets its design criterion—the development of a high level of power...

...Whether we ask this question in the direct language of profit and loss, or in the more abstract language of social welfare, the question is crucial...

...The lake at Zurich, once clean and productive, "is now an evil-smelling muddy sewer," according to Professor R. Passino, director of the Water Research Institute at Rome...

...This problem is the direct outcome of the technological improvement of gasoline engines: the development of the modern high-compression engine...

...Environmental pollution represents a major social cost incident to the operation of our productive enterprises, a cost arising from the nature of the technology on which these enterprises are based...

...It also is a great opportunity...

...although some of us did venture from our laboratories to alert the public and legislators to the problem, until recently the response was one of polite attention, but little demand for remedial action...

...if we incinerate garbage, we intensify air pollution...

...It has become increasingly clear that we will soon need to abandon our reliance on synthetic insecticides and restore the natural control of insect pests by their insect enemies...

...One example is the fact that much of our present water pollution problem is not caused by inadequate utilization of the present technology of sewage disposal, but rather the very success of that technology...

...The debts are so embedded in every feature of the economy that it is almost impossible to calculate them...

...our failure is in their operation...

...Halfway to the sea it has picked up 24,000 undesirable organisms per cubic centimeter...

...paper industry were required to meet present water-pollution standards, the industry would need to spend $100 million for each of ten years...

...at these elevated temperatures the oxygen and nitrogen of the air taken into the engine tend to combine rapidly, with the resultant production of nitrogen oxides...

...Similarly, the design and construction of a nuclear reactor epitomize all the skills of modern science and technology...

...but in that time the cost of fertilizer has declined about twenty-five per cent...

...We will need to seize on the decade of the 1970s as a period of grace—a decade which must be used for a vast pilot program to guide the coming reconstruction of the nation's system of productivity...

...we have indeed 'incurred a debt to nature/ a debt which must be paid if we are to survive...

...These costs are always less than the income derived from selling the power, given the requirements of our system of investment...

...It is, rather, an intrinsic feature of the very technology which we have developed to enhance productivity...

...What are the causes of this dismaying phenomenon...

...But we have recently discovered that there are other costs and have even begun to put a dollar value upon them...

...Since 1945 the cost of farm labor, land, and machinery has risen about fifty to sixty per cent...

...On the answer to this question depends the continued success of our economic system and the stability of the political framework which supports it...