A NATIONAL POLICY FOR THE ENVIRONMENT Introduction This report is based upon the assumption that the threat of environmental mismanagement and deterioration to the security and welfare of the United States has been established. (See app. A.) There are differences of opinion as to the severity and relative urgency of various hazards to the environment. Some scientists believe that man's environmental relationships have reached a point of crisis; others do not see the condition of the environment generally as having yet reached a critical stage. But there is, nevertheless, general consensus throughout most walks of life that a serious state of affairs exists and that, at the least, it is approaching a crisis of national and international proportions. The focus of this report is therefore on national policy to cope with environmental crisis, present or impending, rather than with documenting the facts related to environmental deterioration. 195 PART I Requirements for Policy Effectiveness Effective policy is not merely a statement of things hoped for. It is a coherent, reasoned statement of goals and principles supported by evidence and formulated in language that enables those responsible for implementation to fulfill its intent. This section of the report describes some of the interrelating conditions that appear necessary to an effective national policy for the environment. The discussion will be developed under the following five headings: (1) Understanding Imminent Need. (2) Recognizing Costs. (3) Marshaling Relevant Knowledge. (4) Facilitating Policy Choice. (5) National Policy and International Cooperation. 1. UNDERSTANDING IMMINENT NEED An effective and enlightened environmental policy is a response to the needs of man in relation to his environment. The response may involve the control of man's behavior on behalf of the larger interests of mankind where those interests are clearly perceived and widely held. Man's relationships with his environment are, of course, multitudinous and complex. Control by governments, by international organizations, or by other institutions, cannot feasibly be extended to every aspect of the environment nor to more than a fraction of the actual points of impact of individual man upon his environment. Policy effectiveness consequently depends very largely upon the internalization, in the human individual, of those understandings, values, and attitudes that will guide his conduct in relation to his environment along generally beneficial lines. A major requisite of effective environmental policy is therefore intelligent and informed individual selfcontrol. There is substantial evidence to indicate that large numbers of Americans perceive the need for halting the spread of environmental decay. It is also evident, however, that few recognize the connection between the conditions which they deplore and the absence of any explicit and coherent national policy on behalf of environmental quality. Man is confronted by a circumstance that is totally new in human history. He has rapidly completed the occupancy of the easily inhabitable areas of the earth while his numbers have increased at an exponential and accelerating rate. Simultaneously, unprecedented economic power and advances in science and technology have permitted man to make enormously increased demands upon his environment. In no nation are these coincidental developments more dramatically evident than in the United States. And yet many Americans find it difficult to understand why sound environmental management should now suddenly become "everybody's business." Long-accepted ways of thinking and acting in relation to one's surroundings are now being called into question. Understanding of what has happened can be helped by a simple exercise in arithmetic. At the time of the American Revolution the total human population of the present-day continental United States could hardly have exceeded 3 million individuals. The demands of the American Indian and European colonists on the Atlantic seaboard were very light when contrasted with current exactions. By the close of the 20th century, if the population of this same area approximates 300 million, the daily stress man places on the environment will, on the basis of mere numbers, have increased 100 times over. Technology has alleviated some forms of stress (as on forests for fuel or on wildlife for food), but it has greatly increased environmental stress in general. The net result has been enormously increased demands upon the environment in addition to the increase in population. Calculation of an average per man-year stress upon the environment, estimated from A.D. 1700 to 2000, and adjusted for technological factors at particular historical periods, would be a powerful persuader of the need for a sensitive and forward-looking national environmental policy. The exponential increase in the pressure of man and his technology upon the environment, particularly since World War II, is the major cause of the need for a national environmental quality effort. The rate at which the Nation has changed since 1890 when the frontier officially ceased to exist has been unexceeded by any other social transformation in history. Scarcely one long generation removed from the last days of the frontier, America has become an urbanized and automated society with publicly institutionalized values in social security, labor relations, civil rights, public education, and public health that would have been utopian less than a century ago. In the absence of a system for adequately assessing the consequences of technological change, who could have predicted the many ways in which applied science would transform the conditions of American life? Powerful new tools applying the discoveries in chemistry, physics, biology, and the behavioral sciences were put to work for improving the health, wealth, comfort, convenience, and security of Americans. Utilizing the vast natural resources of the American environment, the world's highest standard of living was achieved in an amazingly short period of time. Unfortunately, our productive technology has been accompanied by side effects which we did not foresee. Experience has shown us that there are dangers as well as benefits in our sciencebased technology. It is now becoming apparent that we cannot continue to enjoy the benefits of our productive economy unless we bring its harmful side effects under control. To obtain this control and to protect our investment in all that we have accomplished, a national policy for the environment is needed. Although Americans have enjoyed prodigious success in the management of their economy they have been much less successful in the management of natural resources. As a people we have been overly optimistic, careless, and at times callous in our exactions from the natural environment. The history of soil exhaustion and erosion, of cut-over forest lands, of slaughtered wildlife document a few of our early failures to maintain the restorative capacities of our natural resources. Fortunately many of these early failures have been corrected or are now being remedied. But our exploding population and technology have created more subtle dangers, less easily detected and more difficult to overcome. These more recent dangers have been documented in testimony before the Congress and in the reports of scientific committees (app. A). They confront us with the possibility that the continuation of present trends affecting, for example, (a) the chemistry of the air, (b) the contamination of food and water, (c) the use of open land and living space, and (d) the psychophysical stress of crowding, noise and interpersonal tension on urban populations, may infinitely degrade the existence of civilized man before the end of this century. These are not the exaggerated alarms or unsubstantiated predictions of extremists; they are sober warnings of competent scientists supported by substantial demonstrable evidence. The practical course is, therefore, to forestall these threats before they have outgrown our technical, economic, legal, and political means to overcome them. Fortunately, we still have a choice in this matter. We still have a relatively wide range of alternatives available in managing the environment. It may be contended that the problems of the environment must wait until more urgent political issues are resolved. Problems of national security, poverty, health, education, urban decay, and underdeveloped nations have just and appropriate claims for priority in national attention and public expenditure. Yet many aspects of these problems involve environmental policy. Three of the most urgentthe slums and ghettos of the great cities; increasing disability and death from diseases induced by environmental factors (for example, cancer, emphysema, mental disorders); and the decline and decay of rural areas (for example, in Appalachia) furnish persuasive reasons for a national environmental policy. Before billions of dollars are spent in attempts to alleviate these social ills, it would be wise to be sure that environmental factors causing or accompanying these conditions are properly identified and remedied. We may otherwise worsen the state of our economy and environment without solving the underlying social problems. In summary, within the present generation the pressures of man and technology have exploded into the environment with unprecedented speed and unforeseen destructiveness. Preoccupied with the benefits of an expanding economy the American people have not readily adopted policies to cope with the attendant liabilities. Popular understanding of the need to forestall the liabilities in order to preserve the benefits is now becoming widespread, and provides the political rationale for the development of a national policy for the environment, and for a level of funding adequate to implement it. 2. RECOGNIZING COSTS The nation long ago would probably have adopted a coherent policy for the management of its environment, had its people recognized that the costs of overstressing or misusing the environment were ultimately unavoidable. This recognition was arrived at belatedly for several reasons: First, environmental deterioration in the past tended to be gradual and accumulative, so that it was not apparent that any cost or penalty was being exacted; second, it seemed possible to defer or to evade payment either in money or in obvious loss of environmental assets; third, the right to pollute or degrade the environment (unless specific illegal damage could be proved) was widely accepted. Exaggerated doctrines of private ownership and an uncritical popular tolerance of the side effects of economic production encouraged the belief that costs projected onto the environment were costs that no one had to pay. This optimistic philosophy proved false as many regions of the Nation began to run out of unpolluted air and water, as the devastation of strip mining impoverished mining communities, as the refuse of the machine age piled up in manmade mountains of junk, as the demand for electricity and telecommunications arose to festoon the Nation with skeins of cables strung from forests of poles, and as the tools of technology increasingly produced results incompatible with human well-being. Under the traditional "ground rules" of production, neither enterprise nor citizen was called upon to find alternatives or to pay for measures that would have prevented or lessened ensuing loss of environmental quality. Payment continued to be exacted in the loss of amenities the public once enjoyed, and in the costs required to restore resources to usefulness and to support the public administration that environmental deterioration entailed. When the public began to demand legislation to control pollution and to prevent environmental decay, the reaction of those involved in environment degrading activities was often one of counter-indignation. Businessmen, municipalities, corporations and property owners were confronted with costs in the form of taxes or the abatement of nuisances that they had never before been called upon to pay. They were now about to be penalized for behavior which America had long accepted as normal. What is now becoming evident is that there is no way in the long run of avoiding the costs of using the environment. The policy question is not whether payment shall be made; it is when payment shall be made, in what form, and how the costs are to be distributed. Hard necessity has made evident the need for payment to obtain air and water of quality adequate to meet at least minimum standards of health and comfort. Scientific knowledge and rising levels of amenity standards have added to public expectation that protection against environmental damage will be be built built into the products and production costs of manufacturers. Lack of a national policy for the environment has now become as expensive to the business community as to the Nation at large. In most enterprises a social cost can be carried without undue burden if all competitors carry it alike. For example, industrial waste disposal costs can, like other costs of production, be reflected in prices to consumers. But this becomes feasible only when public law and administration put all comparable forms of waste-producing enterprises under the same requirements. Moreover it has always been an advantage to enterprise to have as clear a view as possible of future costs and requirements. When public expectations and "ground rules" change, however, as they have been changing recently on environmental quality issues, the uncertainty of resulting effects upon business costs, and the necessity |