The Presidency: The Issue That Won't Wash Away

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George Bush's helicopter lifted high in Washington's 86 degrees winter heat last Wednesday and churned down the Potomac River valley as the President studied the water for signs of bass running in the shallows. Within minutes he was at his destination, the Potomac Electric Power Co.'s Chalk Point generating station, a plant that produces electricity for the White House. Under Bush's proposed clean-air program, the facility would have to cut half its sulfur dioxide emissions within ten years, a $400 million undertaking. "Megabucks," acknowledged Bush. "But I am determined to clean up the air."

Storm rising -- political and natural. Bush can smell it and view it on every horizon. The old planet is sagging more than ever from its burdens of people and pollution, and it no longer takes a hydrologist or climatologist to detect it. Every American can see it in the air. You can stand with Nancy Reagan on the lawn of her sun-drenched Bel Air home above Beverly Hills and see a sinister tongue of smog lick out and engulf the office where her husband works just three miles below. Or you can walk along the low hills of North Dakota and scuff through the shifting soil that still blows against the stubble in the dry fields. Same message.

Les Brown, head of Worldwatch Institute, warns again this year of the globe's diminishing ability to produce enough food to keep up with population growth because of erosion, deforestation and air pollution. His annual State of the World report has sold out -- 100,000 copies -- and the presses are being readied for a new run. There are scoffers, principally in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who say we can release millions of acres of cropland from the soil banks, pour on the fertilizer and meet any food demand. But Brown, with his soft voice and his inevitable bow tie, holds firm. Grain stocks are low; air pollution has reduced U.S. crop production 5% or 10%. Major weather aberrations around the globe could easily produce food scarcities and political unrest.

Statistical arguments aside, the U.S. tells its own story of concern on the front pages of papers and on local newscasts. Solid wastes, pesticides, oil spills, chemical fertilizers. Ask editors from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Boulder, and they will tell you no story plays so steadily as the devastations of the natural world. And almost anyone who wanders through the country hears it, from coffee shop to filling station.

Bill Kastner of the U.S. Geological Survey office in Denver monitors the monstrous Ogallala Aquifer, that famous underground sponge that reaches from South Dakota to the high plains of Texas, touches eight states and embraces 174,000 sq. mi. In some places the water level has fallen 200 ft., leaving the balance between use and recharge from rainfall in precarious condition. Given a little hot dry weather and good farm prices that encourage increased grain planting, the irrigation pumps will begin to whir, in all likelihood sucking up more water than will be replaced.

In southern Iowa, where they don't need irrigation water and where the black loam used to stretch like a carpet from horizon to horizon, you top a hill and find the brown claw marks of a monster that has scoured off the land's precious mantle, leaving the gummy, less productive clay showing in streaks. The monster is erosion, brought on by poor farming.