for adjustment to unexpected expenses and regulations, is disconcerting and hardly helpful.

A national policy for the environment could provide the conceptual basis and legal sanction for applying to environmental management the methods of systems analysis and cost accounting that have demonstrated their value in industry and in some areas of government. It has been poor business, indeed, to be faced with the billions of dollars in expense for salvaging our lakes and waterways when timely expenditures of millions or timely establishment of appropriate policies would have largely preserved the amenities that we have lost and would have made unnecessary the cost of attempted restoration. A national system of environmental cost accounting expressed not only in economic terms but also reflecting life-sustaining and amenity values in the form of environmental quality indicators could provide the Nation with a much clearer picture than it now has of its environmental condition. It would help all sectors of American society to cooperate in avoiding the overdrafts on the environment and the threat of ecological insolvency that are impairing the national economy today.

It is not only industrial managers and public officials who need to recognize the unavoidable costs of using the environment. It is, above all, the individual citizen because he must ultimately pay in money or in amenities for the way in which the environment is used. If, for example, he likes to eat lobster, shrimp or shellfish, the citizen must reconcile himself to either paying dearly for these products or indeed finding them unobtainable at any price, unless we find ways to preserve America's coastline and coastal waters. The individual citizen may also have to pay in the cost of illness and in general physical and psychological discomfort. And these costs, of course, are not incurred voluntarily.

In the interest of his welfare and of his effectiveness as a citizen the individual American needs to understand that environmental quality can no longer be had "for free." Recognition of the inevitability of costs for using the environment and of the forms which these costs may take is essential to knowledgeable and responsible citizenship on environmental policy issues.

In summary, the American people have reached a point in history where they can no longer pass on to nature the costs of using the environment. The deferral of charges by letting them accumulate in slow attrition of the environment, or debiting them as loss of amenities will soon be no longer possible. It is no longer feasible for the American people to permit it. The environmental impact of our powerful, new, and imperfectly understood technology has often been unbelievably swift and pervasive. Specific effects may prove to be irreversible. To enjoy the benefits of technological advance, the price of preventing accidents and errors must be paid on time. From now on "pay-as-yougo" will increasingly be required for insuring against the risks of manipulating nature. This means merely that provision must be made for the protection, restoration, replacement, or rehabilitation of elements in the environment before, or at the time, these resources are used. Later may be too late.

3. MARSHALING RELEVANT KNOWLEDGE

For many years scientists have been warning against the ultimate consequences of quiet, creeping, environmental decline. Now the decline is no longer quiet and its speed is accelerating. The degradation is destroying the works of man as well as of nature. We are confronted simultaneously with environmental crisis in our cities and across our open lands and waters. The crisis of the cities and the crisis of the natural and rural environments have many roots in common, although they may erroneously be viewed as extraneous to one another, or even as competitive for public attention and taxation. In fact, both crises stem from an ignorance of and a disregard for man's relationship to his environment.

An effective environmental policy in the past might have prevented and would certainly have focused attention upon the wretched conditions of urban and rural slums. It would surely have stimulated a search for knowledge that could have helped to correct and prevent degraded conditions of living. It is now evident that the fabric of American society can no longer contain the growing social pressure against slum environments. Today, remedial measures are being forced by social violence and by the social and economic costs of environmental decay; but it is not certain that the remedies take full account of the nature of the ailment. The pressure upon the urban environment is acute and overt; it is dramatized, it has obvious political implications, and it hurts. Conversely, the degradation of natural and rural environments is more subtle. Stress may reach the point of irreparable damage before there is full awareness that a danger exists. What is needed therefore is a systematic and verifiable method for periodically assessing the state of the environment and the degree and effect of man's stress upon it, as well as the effect of the environment and environmental change on man.

One would expect to be able to look to the universities and to the great schools and institutes of agriculture, engineering, and public health as constituting an environmental intelligence system. Unfortunately however, no such system exists. Man-environment relationships per se have seldom been studied comprehensively. Various disciplines have concerned themselves with particular aspects of environmetal relationships. Geographers, physiologists, epidemiologists, evolutionists, ecologists, social and behavioral scientists, historians, and many others have in various ways contributed to our knowledge of the reciprocal influences of man and environment. But the knowledge that exists has not been marshaled in ways that are readily applicable to the formulation of a national policy for the environment. At present, there are many gaps in our knowledge of the environment to which no discipline has directed adequate attention.

It should not be surprising that there is a lack of organized knowledge relating to environmental relationships. Society has never asked for this knowledge, and has neither significantly encouraged nor paid for its production. By way of contrast, public opinion has supported the costs of high-energy physics as reasonable, even though direct and immediate applications to public problems are relatively few. But public opinion has been guided in part by the judgment of the scientific community and of the leaders of higher education. Only recently have the scientific community and the universities begun to interest themselves institutionally in man-environment relationships, perceived in the totality in which they occur in real life.

Environmental studies in the universities are as yet largely focused on separate phases of man-environment relationships. This, in itself, is not undesirable; it is in fact necessary to obtain the degree of specialization and intensive study that many environmental problems require. The inadequacy lies in the lack of means to bring together existing specialized knowledge that would be relevant to the establishment of sound policies for the environment. There is also need for greatly increased attention to the study of natural systems, to the behavior of organisms in relation to environmental change, and to the complex and relatively new science of ecology. There is need for synthesis as well as for analysis in the study of man-in-environment. A reciprocal relationship exists between the interests of public life and the activities of American universities. Public concern with a social problem when expressed in terms of public recognition or financial support, stimulates related research and teaching in the colleges and universities. Research findings and teaching influence the actions of government and the behavior of society, This relationship has been exceptionally fruitful in such fields as agriculture, medicine, and engineering. It has not, as yet, developed strength in the field of environmental policy and management. Nevertheless a beginning is being made in some colleges and universities, and in a number of independent research organizations and foundations, to provide a more adequate informational base for environmental policy. Recognition of the need for a more adequate informational base for environmental policy has not been confined to academic institutions or to government. Speaking to the 1967 plenary session of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Douglas L. Brooks, president of the Traveler's Research Center, declared that "* * * We need to recognize environmental quality control as a vital social objective and take steps to establish the field of environmental management as a new cross-disciplinary applied science professional activity of extraordinary challenge and importance."

To date, action by Government to assist the marshaling of relevant knowledge has been uncoordinated and inconstant. With the exception of defense and space-related technical investigations, the amount of money made available for environmental research has been relatively meager and has been allocated largely along conventional disciplinary lines. Specialized aspects of research on man-environment relationships have been well funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Defense, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. But much of this work is highly technical and is appropriately directed toward problems encountered in the missions of these agencies. More broadly based are the interests of the National Science Foundation, but the Foundation's resources for funding academic research relating to environmental policy are small. For a brief period the most promising source of support for the kind of knowledge needed for environmental policy effectiveness was the U.S. Public Health Service. In the mid-1960's, the Service began to assist the establishment of broadly based environmental health science centers in selected universities. But a shift of emphasis in the Public Health Service brought this effort to an untimely standstill. The National Institutes of Health fund a significant body of health-related environmental research, but little of it appears to be policy-related.

The Science Information Exchange of the Smithsonian Institution, surveying the general field of Government-funded research for the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, found (not unexpectedly) that there were heavy concentrations of research where Government funding was heaviest-notably in physical science and the biomedical aspects of the environment. Government-funded research of broadly cross-disciplinary or policy-oriented character appeared to be almost negligible in volume and in funding. It is probable that policy problems are investigated in the course of substantive research; but it is evident that we have not yet made a conscious decision to organize and fund the effort which students of environmental policy and management see as the necessary first step to an adequate environmental information system.

To provide facilities and financial support for new research on natural systems, environmental relationships and ecology on an independent, but publicly financed basis, a National Institute of Ecology has been proposed by a group of scientists associated with the Ecological Society of America and assisted by the National Science Foundation. The functions proposed for this institute are worth restating in brief, as indicative of the contribution that ecologists would like to make toward strengthening the Nation's capacity to cope with its environmental problems. Defining ecology to be "* * * the scientific study of life-in-environment," the proponents of a National Institute of Ecology state that it is needed (1) to conduct large-scale multidisciplinary field research beyond the capacities of individual researchers or research institutions, (2) to provide a central ecological data bank on which ecologists and public agencies can draw, (3) to coordinate and strengthen activities of ecologists in relation to ecological issues in public affairs, and to promote the infusion of ecology into general education at all levels, and (4) to perform advisory services for government and industry on action programs affecting the environment. The principal purpose of the proposed institute is not, however, to study public policy or education, but to do more and better ecology.

These efforts and proposals, and many others unreported here, are constructive contributions to the task of marshaling the knowledge needed for an effective national policy for the environment. They do not, however, add up to a national information system, nor do they necessarily present information and findings relative to the environment in forms suitable for review and decision by the Nation's policymakers. The ecological research and surveys bill introduced by Senator Gaylord Nelson in the 89th Congress would have established a national research and information system under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior. Similar proposals have been incorporated in a number of bills introduced in the 90th Congress, including S. 2805 by Senators Jackson and Kuchel. (See app. B.) An important difference between the proposals before the 90th Congress and the efforts and proposals described in the preceding paragraphs is that in pending legislation the knowledge assembled through survey and research would be systematically related to official reporting, appraisal, and review. The need for more knowledge has been established beyond doubt. But of equal and perhaps greater importance at this time is the establishment of a system to insure that existing knowledge and new findings will be organized in a manner suitable for review and decision as matters of public policy.

In summary, to make policy effective through action, a comprehensive system is required for the assembly and reporting of relevant knowledge; and for placing before the President, the Congress, and the people, for public decision, the alternative courses of action that this knowledge suggests. With all its great resources for research, data processing, and information transmittal, the United States has yet to provide the financial support and operational structure that would permit these resources to implement a public policy for the environment.

4. FACILITATING POLICY CHOICE

The problem of organizing information for purposes of policyoriented review leads directly to the need for a strategy of policy choice. Environmental policymaking presents certain organizational difficulties. It must draw heavily upon scientific information and yet it embraces important considerations and issues that are extraneous to science policy. Insofar as environmental policy is dependent upon scientific information, it is handicapped by the insufficiency of the research effort and the inadequacies of information handling described in the preceding paragraphs. In a review of U.S. science policy by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European examiners cited environmental problems as one of the areas of inquiry that American science was not well organized to attack. The criticism was directed not at the accomplishments of American science in support of major technical undertakings; it was instead concerned with the absence of a system and a strategy adequate to deal with the problems of the environment, and of social relationships and behavior, on a scale which their comprehensive and complex subject matters require.

Insofar as science is an element in environmental policymaking, the Office of Science and Technology affords a mechanism for enlisting the resources of the scientific community, for establishing study groups and advisory panels on specific issues, and for presenting their recommendations to the President. In the coordination of scientific aspects of environmental policy, the Federal Council of Science and Technology, in association with the Office of Science and Technology, is the more general of several coordinative or advisory bodies in the executive branch. (See app. C.) The establishment of special councils for marine resources and engineering development, for water resources, for recreation and natural beauty, among other purposes, complicates to some extent the function of policy advice. None of these bodies are constituted to look at man-environment relations as a whole; none provide an overview; none appear fully to answer the need for a system to enable the President, the Congress, and the electorate to consider alternative solutions to environmental problems.

Possible answers to the need for a system to assist national policy choice may be found in legislative proposals to create councils on environmental quality or councils of ecological advisers. These councils are conceived as bridges between the functions of environmental surveillance, research, and analysis, on the one hand, and the policymaking functions of the President and the Congress on the other. The