160 
This is a different kind of pollution and a safety hazard, resulting 
from an honest effort to ameliorate another condition. 
The above example was provided by my colleague, Dr. Donald 
Pritchard of Johns Hopkins University, the leading authority on the 
physical oceanography of Chesapeake Bay, in an open forum at the 
Smithsonian several months ago. At this same session Dr. Pritchard 
provides another example of complexity of environmental problems 
and their solution. 
Dr. Pritchard commented about the sewage treatment plant on 
Back Creek which processes over 200 million gallons of sewage per 
day for the metropolitan region of Baltimore. One would normally 
expect that the nutrients released into the bay from this operation 
would stimulate the growth of aquatic plants and the area would 
become an undesirable jungle from the resulting high productivity— 
the condition of eutrophication which you are familiar with in Lake 
Erie, for example. This did not occur, however. Dr. Pritchard pro- 
vided two reasons: 
1. About a third of the water from the sewage treatment plant 
is released into Back River—and this happens to be a very poor 
flushing area and thus acts like a treatment pond assimilating enter- 
ing nutrients without allowing them to enter the bay. 
2. The other two-thirds of the effluent is sold to an industry in 
Baltimore where it is used as cooling water and in the process is 
combined with other wastes that are rich in sulphuric acid and fer- 
rous sulfate—both being somewhat undesirable wastes in themselves, 
but it so happens that they combine with the phosphates from the 
effluents and settle to the bottom, preventing the expected eutrophica- 
tion from occurring. A lady in the audience commented that this 
process was like having criminals kill one another. 
A third and highly publicized illustration is the negative environ- 
mental consequences of persistent pesticides such as DDT. The solu- 
tion of an agricultural problem resulted in some new problems, whose 
full impact is only partially understood at best. We have, however, 
seen the failure of this year’s hatch of the California brown pelican, 
a failure definitely attributable to DDT. Likewise, the condemnation 
of a number of cases of California jack mackerel, because they con- 
tained concentrations of DDT exceeding the amounts allowed by 
FDA, dealt a severe blow to the regional fishermen. 
The importance of the above illustrations, however, is that they 
reveal something of the complexity of the overall problem and the 
fact that we cannot treat one part of the environmental system with- 
out examining all of the parts. 
Because of the above complexity, I would like to point out my 
approval of a study period of the kind suggested in H.R. 17603 
prior to enforcement of regulations. 
A delay, albeit perhaps implying a lack of seriousness of the 
pollution problem, could prevent precipitous action which could re- 
sult in more harmful consequences to the environment than the con- 
dition which is to be corrected. Although I agree with the general 
objectives of H.R. 15827, the possibility of causing serious damage 
by dumping farther out to sea, prior to careful study of the possible 
consequences, is of grave concern. 
