Chapter 4 The Pollution Menace 



Man easily surpasses nature in his energy and 

 inventiveness in polluting his environment. A river 

 abrades its banks and muddies the downstream 

 waters. A hurricane tears at a shoreline and buries 

 a few acres of shellfish under the debris. An 

 underwater volcano erupts and parboils nearby 

 fish. But nature had to create man to create, in 

 turn, the devil's potion of pollution: oil spreading 

 into the ocean from a stricken tanker; phosphates 

 from washday detergents leaching into the estu- 

 aries; phenol and cyanide escaping from industrial 

 processing plants; waste-laden effluents pouring 

 from some sewage treatment plants poorly de- 

 signed or badly operated. 



Pollutants are resources where they do not 

 belong. Pollution is an undesirable change in the 

 characteristics of the air, land, or water that is 

 harmful to human life and living conditions, or to 

 the life of other desirable species. It occurs when 

 we dump the residues of things we make or use, 

 the pollutants, into the envirormient. 



In this chapter, we concentrate on the pollution 

 of our coastal zones. We recognize that this is only 

 one aspect of the problem, which is remindful of 

 the thermodynamic equation that states that the 

 energy going into a system equals the energy 

 leaving a system. So, too, the products of industry 

 and agriculture, and the energies entering, say, an 

 urban area are equal to the wastes leaving that 

 area. To get rid of these wastes, we pour them into 

 the passing estuaries; or burn them so that the 

 winds carry them away, or perhaps let them hang 

 as smog over the city; or bury them or lay them on 

 the land. We do not consume these products and 

 energies, only use them. 



Because we emphasize here the problems of 

 disposing of the wastes through the Nation's 

 waterways, we are not in any way suggesting that 

 it is preferable to dispose of them into the air or 

 on the land. If choices must be made, then we 

 suggest that they be studied carefully and related 

 to the short-term and long-term anticipated uses of 

 the environment and the effects of the pollutants 

 on these uses. The ideal solution would be to have 

 a self-contained system within an urban area 

 wherein the wastes are recycled to yield usable 

 products. 



Figure 1. Where they are needed most, many 

 beaches in urban areas are closed or restricted 

 because of pollution. (Federal Water Pollution 

 Control Administration photo) 



I. BACKGROUND FOR CRISIS 



Pollution gains strength from increasing popula- 

 tion and increasing industrialization, and flourishes 

 under inadequate management of the natural 

 envirormient. 



The Nation would be playing a fool's game if it 

 expected that acts of Congress or improvements in 

 technology, no matter how imaginative, would be 

 able to clean up the pollution left by a population 

 that increases without end. We agree with Stewart 

 L. Udall when he says, "No comprehensive policy 

 of our environment can fail to include recognition 

 of the hazards of irresponsible population growth. 

 The Federal Government has for too long resisted 

 involvement in this central issue."' 



If this issue is not addressed in time, then the 

 people of the Nation, Uke bacteria in a petri dish, 

 will continue to multiply until they are poisoned 

 by their own wastes. However, the dominant 

 factor is not the expanding population but the 

 expanding economy. Industrial pollution is in- 

 creasing at 4.5 per cent a year, or three times as 

 fast as the population.^ 



Remarks of Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the 

 Interior, before the Joint House-Senate Colloquium on 

 National Policy for the Environment, July 17, 1968. 



Federal Water Pollution Control Administration, U.S. 

 Department of the Interior, The Cost of Clean Water, 

 1968, Vol. l,p. 20. 



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