Issue Of The Year: Issue of the Year: The Environment

THE astonishing achievement of the year," says Ecologist Lamont Cole of Cornell, "is that people are finally aware of the size of the problem." They can hardly avoid it. In 1970, the cause that once concerned lonely crusaders like Rachel Carson became a national issue that at times verged on a national obsession; it appealed even to people normally enraged by attacks on the status quo. With remarkable rapidity it became a tenet in the American credo, at least partially uniting disparate public figures ranging from Cesar Chavez to Barry Goldwater and New York's conservative Senator-elect James Buckley.

At the root of this phenomenon were the dire warnings of ecologists that man's heedless outpouring of noxious wastes is overwhelming the biosphere's ability to cleanse itself. As the year began, the public's foreboding was bolstered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which devoted 40 symposia at its annual meeting to environmental dangers. Later in January, President Nixon stressed the subject in his State of the Union address, which he followed up with a February special message. Soon the press issued almost daily reports on assorted ecological disasters—oil spills, fish kills, nuclear radiation.

By April 15, fears about herbicides had forced the Pentagon to suspend the use of Agent Orange (2,4,5-T) as a chemical defoliant in Viet Nam. Ecological idealism inspired the young and pleased the old as evidence that youth was finally doing something constructive. By the time Earth Day dawned on April 22, ecoactivists of all ages were suffused with a quasi-religious fervor. Many were also armed with petitions and pickets against a growing list of alleged villains of pollution, including Dow Chemical, General Motors and Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co.

For a time, a backlash developed among Americans who viewed the environment as a digression from pressing concerns like poverty, racism and the war. They noted that ecologists, with their holistic view of nature, proclaimed dangers on every front but failed to set clear priorities for action. Ghetto blacks were incensed when white collegians buried perfectly good cars as a protest against smog. Others wearied of the apocalyptic warnings of the "New Jeremiahs" —ecologists with an almost masochistic appetite for doom, and demographers with passion for slogans ("Stop at two"). Even ecologists scoffed at faddists who denounced colored toilet paper on the theory that the dyes polluted rivers. "Poppycock!" said Du Pont's chemists, and no other experts disagreed. UNIVERSAL YEARNING. Yet the backlash soon waned. Whatever exaggerations may have been committed by the environmental evangelists, no one could really scoff at the new American concern with "the quality of life," the universal yearning for clean air and water, quiet cities and communion with nature. That yearning gave rise to scores of new environmental books, from The Tyranny of Noise to The Politics of Ecology. It spurred myriad official responses, from the advent of car-free streets in New York City to a mammoth suit filed by 15 states, accusing Detroit automakers of willfully delaying emission devices.