402 HISTORY OF THF. COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



City to address the American Club of Rome concerning one of his 

 favorite subjects: The dialogue between scientists and politicians. 



Scarcely had he stepped off the plane at Andrews Air Force Base 

 upon his return from Italy, when Miller became busily engaged in 

 arranging for a Joint Colloquium on International Environmental 

 Science, which was sponsored by the House Committee on Science and 

 Astronautics and Senator Warren G. Magnuson's Commerce Com- 

 mittee. Well over 200 environmental experts from throughout the 

 world assembled in the historic Old Supreme Court Chamber in the 

 Capitol for the two-day colloquium, May 25-26, 1971, to assess the 

 proper relationship of man to his natural surroundings. The meeting 

 was a naturally expanded outgrowth of the 1967 one-day House-Senate 

 symposium on a national policy for the environment. 



In preparation for the great event, the Environmental Policy 

 Division of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service 

 produced a comprehensive "Reader in International Environmental 

 Science," a 160-page compendium, including not only an analysis of 

 the problem but also a dozen or so searching articles such as George 

 F. Kennan's proposal: "To Prevent a World Wasteland," raising the 

 challenge: 



Could there, one wonders, be any undertaking better designed to meet these 

 needs, to relieve the great convulsions of anxiety and ingrained hostility that now 

 rack international society, than a major international effort to restore the hope, the 

 beauty and the salubriousness of the natural environment in which man has his 

 being? 



Dr. Thomas F. Malone, vice president of the International Council of 

 Scientific Unions, acted as rapporteur for the colloquium, which went 

 a long way toward achieving its stated purpose: 



To apprise Members of Congress and other leaders about the status of scientific 

 information as the basis for important environmental decisions that have international 

 and global impact. 



HIGH NOON FOR THE ENVIRONMENT 



The colloquium served as a worthy prelude to the International 

 Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. 

 Russell E. Train, Chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental 

 Quality perceptively noted: 



Those of us here on this side of the railing, Mr. Chairman, might notice that the 

 clock over your head stopped at 12 o'clock. How many years ago? One might wonder. 

 But it gives me the opportunity to say that maybe it is trying to tell us something, 

 and that is, it is high noon for the environment. 



Peter Walker, the young British Secretary of State for the Environ- 

 ment, with broad and centralized powers, was optimistic: 



There is a demand of the younger generation who want to have clean air and 

 clean rivers and clean seas and don't want to lose the inheritance of decades past. 



