Action for Survival
The PROGRESSIVE "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Action for Survival A Prologue by The Editors Less than a year ago, The Progressive published a special issue...
...A Sea of Swill Lake Erie is dead...
...They also emphasized the critical need for more hopeful and creative policies and programs for our country...
...These are understandable apprehensions...
...This objective is poison to right wing forces now contributing to the verbal overkill on the issue of environment while they oppose action programs of basic reform...
...Environmental reform calls imperatively for water and air pollution control, but even more importantly for enhancing educational and job opportunities...
...Ecology," says California's consummate politician Jess Unruh, "has become the political substitute for the word 'mother.' " The politics of the environmental movement can be discerned only dimly at the moment...
...But the politics of survival, as The Progressive envisions it, will have enemies—powerful enemies...
...I know of no more sobering statistic in this regard than that between now and 1980 the number of women in the most fertile age brackets, eighteen to thirty-two, will double...
...This makes great sense to us...
...A good sign of the progress achieved thus far by the ecological movement turned up recently in National Review, William Buckley's journal for the literates of the Far Right...
...And the crisis is compounded by a steadily rising population in defiance of all sense and science...
...The true ecological crusaders and the peace crusaders have a common objective—a world to save from war, poverty, racism—and pollution...
...The process of ravaging our planet has been going on for a long time...
...The air in New York is dangerous to breathe...
...It could also become the birthday of a new and more hopeful movement affecting all our lives in all ways...
...Mr...
...Goldberg is concerned to have the concept of environmental crisis broadened to include long neglected social and economic problems...
...In it a dozen or more distinguished authorities examine the challenge to our physical environment...
...The sudden and spectacular emergence of the environmental issue poses a host of problems...
...Joseph Wood Krutch, the noted essayist in the environmental field, has told us, for example, about an air pollution ordinance passed in Pima County, Arizona...
...Not surprisingly, many of them will be familiar faces and familiar forces...
...The score cards will be misleading, but you will be able to tell the players by how willing they are to expand public controls designed to combat pollution and other environmental perils, spend the money needed to achieve desperately needed reforms, advocate urgently needed legislation to speed population control, insist on the strictest possible enforcement of anti-pollution laws, impose massive penalties on corporate and individual violators, and propose even stronger measures to stop the wholesale pollution by industry, government, and individuals...
...Crusaders for a genuinely fundamental program to clean up the environment will know they are on the right track when the spokesmen for the corporate establishment switch from their present purring approval of something they call conservation to roars of recrimination against those who, in the process of combatting pollution, would disturb their corporate profits and power...
...in a normal year the United States "produces" 142 million tons of smoke and fumes, seven million junked cars, twenty million tons of waste paper, forty-eight billion used cans, and fifty trillion gallons of industrial sewage...
...The PROGRESSIVE "you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" Action for Survival A Prologue by The Editors Less than a year ago, The Progressive published a special issue entitled "The Power of the Pentagon...
...A polluted political system which enables a handful of senile Southerners to dominate, through the seniority system, the law making body of a supposedly free people is a political system which finds racism, poverty, and poisoned rivers equally congenial in its scheme of things...
...They beckon us to alternative paths that carry the prospect of hope, not despair...
...Readers of this special issue will note the strong emphasis of our contributors on the links between the challenge on the environmental front and these other problems...
...But the harsh reality, as emphasized by many of our hard-headed experts, is that a new Four Horsemen— Overpopulation, Pollution, the Famine of Resources, and Nuclear War—are riding relentlessly on their mission of destruction...
...military budget...
...ROBERT HEILBRONER in Saturday Review January, 1970...
...Time, Life, and Fortune, Newsweek, Esquire, and McCall's are only some of the slicks among the Establishment media which have given splash treatment to the threat to the environment in the past few months...
...In it more than a score of the nation's leading scientists, scholars, and public officials examined the social, political, and moral challenge confronting America...
...Now we publish a companion special issue entitled "The Crisis of Survival...
...To think of cleaning up the environment without emphasizing the social structure at least as ntuch as the physical strikes us as an exercise in self deception...
...life, not death...
...But there can be no doubt that the nature of the crisis and the urgency of the challenge are rendering that judgment less accurate -very day...
...If such a new and forward-looking political instrument is forged, it will be the enlightened vanguard of the nation's youth—those who have mastered the methods of democratic action—who will provide much of its dynamism...
...And the television networks have been competing with a spate of "specials" to announce their arrival at the scene of crisis...
...The obsessive American hunger for growth, more creature comforts, and an ever fatter Gross National Product—no matter how great the price for polluting and pillaging our national heritage—has contributed significantly to the mounting crisis in our segment of the earth...
...From President Nixon to the local alderman, they have pounced on the issue and commandeered it as the new vehicle of consensus politics...
...But, for all their deep concerns, they are not ecological doomsayers...
...Columnist Joseph Kraft may have been partly right in observing recently: "So far, at least, the politics of environment is very largely the politics of eyewash...
...The polluters, too, want their share of the action...
...The choice, both within and between parties, will be between those who make speeches and pass resolutions and those who recognize and act upon the fact that time is running out, that only the resolute rejection of war, profits-as-usual, procreation-as-usual, comforts-as-usual, and politics-as-usual will prevent our planet from sliding into disaster...
...The politicians, not sure whether concern over deterioration of the environment is a craze or a crusade, have elected, predictably, to play it safe...
...Some of them are buying four-color advertisements in the slicks to assure us that they too love the land and water and woods they go on polluting for profit...
...Perhaps the most important is that involvement in ecological concerns could readily serve—and to some extent may have already served—to divert public attention and the crusading zeal of progressive forces from the continuing tragedy in Vietnam, from an imperialistic foreign policy that invites more Vietnams, from a catastrophic arms race that could gut our planet more rapidly than the many-sided process of pollution, from a callous neglect of persistent poverty and racism in the United States...
...Since his ecological spree earlier this year, he has resumed his emphasis on a greater buildup of military hardware, especially ABM and MIRV nuclear missiles...
...now they are massing against the polluted physical environment as well...
...The worsening crisis commanded little concern until recently...
...The young have been rebelling against an immoral war and unjust social system and a tawdry culture...
...They underscore their anxiety that man and his planet face extinction as a consequence of our mindless abuse and greedy exploitation of nature...
...For the struggle for survival will demand a degree of public spending and public management and control that will constitute a political and social revolution...
...They have designated the day of their national teach-in on the environment as Earth Day...
...The result is an environment assailed by noxious doses of fumes, sewage, smoke, noise, filth, chemicals, ugliness, and urban decay...
...Both special issues of The Progressive, each in its own way, are committed to the same goal: the survival of man, but not that alone—the enrichment of life as well...
...The result could be the long talked-about political realignment in America which would enable those who want to clean up our social and economic pollution, as well as the physical environment, to build a great new movement dedicated to striking at the status quo through the instruments of democracy...
...Whatever it may have meant in previous times, conservation today is a grim synonym for survival...
...It is significant that such men of science as , George Wald, Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and David Ingu% and men of politics such as Mayor John Lindsay and Senator Gaylord Nelson—all contributors to this issue —are among the country's most outspoken critics of the Vietnam war and of the enormously swollen U.S...
...For example, they cite the war in Vietnam as a major obstacle to meeting the environmental crisis...
...They view the current environmental movement with good-natured tolerance so long as it languishes in the realm of rhetoric, so long as it goes no farther than it did in the halcyon days when the conservation movement was thought to be in the hands of nature nuts passing out packets of seedlings to Boy Scouts and little old men in overshoes flitting through the forests with their nets hunting for butterflies...
...They discussed, documented, and denounced the militarization of our foreign policy and the distortion of our national priorities...
...We are drowning in a sea of swill...
...It is one of the more curious phenomena of our time that the subject of our environment is now capturing such extraordinary public interest and concern after these many years of indifference and neglect...
...So high is the humbug piled on this "safest of all issues" that it is only with the greatest difficulty that even the usually well-informed citizen will be able to find his way in the next few election campaigns...
...The beaches at Santa Barbara are deserted...
...To all the other hazards that peril the environment we must add the danger that it will be talked to death...
...To question the sacred assumption that economic growth is always an unmixed' blessing is, as The Wall Street Journal noted recently, "to threaten the American dream itself...
...It may be that neither major party will move quickly or boldly enough...
...Their enthusiasm for the rhetoric of the great environmental crusade does not prevent theni from exercising their political clout to soften the penalties for pollution and to dilute enforcement of the many laws, largely unenforced, now on the books...
...The ordinance contained an exemption: It does not apply to the copper smelting plants, which are responsible for ninety per cent of the local air pollution...
...Unemployment and the alienation of the disadvantaged and the young make for a bad environment," he rightly pointed out...
...It may sound apocalyptic to suggest that man and the nature he corrupts are speeding toward extinction...
...It is with this hope that we of The Progressive dedicate this special issue to these, the young, who understand and are prepared to act on The Crisis of Survival...
...Everyone, it seems, is getting into the act...
...But the dream has become a nightmare...
...A runaway technology, whose only law is profit, has for decades corrupted our air, ravished our soil, denuded our forests, and polluted our water resources...
...Neither means much without the other...
...Fortune magazine, in its own special issue on ecology, expressed a view shared by a sizable number of careless observers when it wrote: "For a politician it is the safest of all issues, since conservation has no admitted enemies...
...Even now he seems more given to rhetoric than action, and appears none too eager to use the funds and powers he already commands to fight pollution...
...The daily press has poured out a multitude of news stories and editorials to mark its own concern...
...And presiding over this rampant process of environmental overloading is the most fearsome reality of all—a population that is still increasing like an uncontrollable cancer on the surface of the globe...
...The confrontation will be between those who are committed to making our presently inadequate social, economic, and political institutions equal to the task of repairing our ravaged environment as against those whose first and enduring allegiance is to private profit and corporate power and the political institutions which stand guard to protect and preserve that profit and power...
...The magazine hoisted storm signals for its arch conservative readership, warning of the "climate of hysteria that clouds the pollution question," express-April, 1970 ing fear that enthusiasm for conservation "can be fashioned into a nasty weapon for those who dislike business on general principles," and snorting at talk that there is "an unavoidable conflict between the 'economy' and the 'environment.' " We would be lacking in candor if we did not agree that there are discouraging symptoms of faddism—and political opportunism—in the newly regenerated ecological movement...
...Nixon, especially, has come rushing forward with a loud "me too" although he never before displayed much concern for the problem...
...Former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg expressed his misgivings when he told the American Association of School Administrators that racial discrimination, poverty amid affluence, urban squalor and decay, and alienation of young people pollute the environment as much as garbage and industrial smoke...
...Garbage and smog pollute our neighborhoods, but hate and prejudice do so in even greater degree...
Vol. 34 • April 1970 • No. 4
