walk waters and wetlands that they formed a PYE-Protect Your Environment-club affiliated to the founding organization at Thomas School. We investigated the marsh at Farm Creek and found how it served as a nursery for game fish, such as the striped bass, shad, flounder, and bluefish; for shellfish, such as crabs and lobsters, oysters, clams, mussels, scallops; for the water fowl, such as mallards, Canadian geese, egrets, herons. We discovered that healthy salt marshes produce twice as much food as a cornfield. We learned that 80 percent of our oxygen comes from the photosynthesis process of green marine plants. Yes, and then we discovered that Fairfield County has lost half of these precious marshlands in a short 10 years, salt marshes that can never be replaced. We saw the marsh being filled in Farm Creek. Sherwood Island and Norwalk's Veterans' Memorial Park were already a fait accompli. Today we see dredging and hear our city fathers propose the removal of hundred of millions of tons of fill from (a) the mud flats off of Veterans' Memorial Park to make way for expanded marina facilities, and (b) in the inner passage between Chimon and Ram Islands to provide fill for Route 7-just as Sherwood Island gave up its marshland for the Connecticut Turnpike. Five nuclear powerplants are scheduled to be built in our area during the seventies. We wonder where? Will our precious islands be chosen? What will happen to our American egret, the snowy egret, the black-crowned night heron, the yellow-crowned heron, the graceful terns, sandpipers. Canadian geese, et cetera, who nest on our islands? What effect will thermal pollution have upon our fish and other forms of marine life? How can we protect our beaches and marshes from the ever-growing menace of oil spills from passing tankers, or even accidental spills by industrial and residential tanks? A year ago the C.L. & P. spilled several hundred gallons of oil into the Village Creek-Wilson Point area. To compound the tragedy, several hundred gallons of a detergent called Jan Solo was used to settle the oil to the mud bottom. Within a matter of days, a luscious, green marsh turned into a sickly, foul-smelling grave for all marine life. Today, a year later, there is some evidence of algae growth and a few brave fiddler crabs darting among mounds of empty mussel shells. The waterfowl and fish have not returned. Last spring my students tried to stop a tree-spraying truck from washing out its tanks of residue pesticide in the Rowayton Pond, which empties into the marsh at Farm Creek. In March of this year they joined with hundreds of young people in our city to clean up the Woodward Avenue Marsh and Ram Island. Obviously, the task of saving our environment and particularly the sound is gigantic. No single organization or even municipal agency can provide the vast sums of money needed nor the technical knowhow to accomplish a task that engulfs an entire region-an entire Nation. Therefore, we are gratified to know that the Federal Government through your committee is seeking more effective legislation. We need strong laws and regulations to stop air and water pollution, with strong enforcement provisions. We need protection from oil spills. We need laws to prevent private and corporate bodies, including municipalities, from dredging and filling our depleted salt marshes. We need Federal funding to help purchase our islands and shore marshes for future protection. We need a nationally sponsored education program on the subject of ecology so that future generations will grow up to value and protect our irreplaceable natural resources. I just want to make a very brief comment as a teacher. The success of your bill and your commission, I think, in large measure will depend on public education, and it seems to me one important area in educating our people is to our young people in the schools, and to the extent we can get a national education program which deals more with problems of ecology and problems of pollution, we will perhaps educate some of our citizens a little more rapidly. I found my own youngsters and students in Norwalk, in general, are very enthusiastic about these problems. They want to dig in and they want to learn about the problems. Thank you very much. Senator RIBICOFF. Mrs. Bubar. STATEMENT OF MRS. HARLEY M. BUBAR, DARIEN AUDUBON SOCIETY Mrs. BUBAR. Mr. Chairman, I am Peg Bubar, Mrs. Harley M. Bubar, president of the Darien Audubon Society. I wish to support the thorough study of Long Island Sound and the development of a comprehensive master plan for its use and preservation, suggested in legislation S. 2472 proposed by Senator Ribicoff. It is my sincere hope, however, that every possible effort will be made to assure that the pursuance of this study will not defer efforts that must be made without delay to alleviate pollution and prevent further destruction "our vanishing wetlands. Our Darien Audubon Society is a chapter of the National Audubon Society. It is only 15 months old: yet it already has more than 200 members. I believe this rapid growth reflects the awareness in our community of the earth's environmental problems, our concern and our desire to do what we can to improve the situation. Long Island Sound is of great concern to us all ecologically, esthetically, financially. Its salty, once-clear waters and its estuarine reaches are the natural habitat, the feeding, breeding, and migration-time resting areas of countless marine creatures and waterfowl. Unless the sound remains viable, they may all perish. The millions of people who live along the sound or near it need it far more as a lifegiving artery than as a sewer. Here is a channel of relief from urban pressures. Here nature still resists encrustment by asphalt and concrete. Here there is still an open place where the sun can clear the mind, the salt wind lift the spirit. Here is a place, hopefully, to teach a child to swim, to sail, to catch a fish, to know a bird, to build a castle in the sand, to pick un a shell the echoes the sea. Unless the sound remains viable, tomorrow's children may not know these things. Some population growth is inevitable. Certain industrial expansion may be essential. Shipping is important. But unless clean waters, not filth and poison, flow through this artery, this whole region will sicken. Only by immediate action on obvious problems, and careful planning of multiple uses and thorough understanding of all the values involved can we preserve Long Island Sound so that it may continue to serve all of us. I support the proposed study in the belief that it will be of real benefit. STATEMENT OF WILLIAM COLLINS, NORWALK, CONN. Mr. COLLINS. Senator, my name is Bill Collins. I am a city councilman here in Norwalk. Obviously, I support your bill, S. 2472. I doubt that there is anyone in the room who fails to support it. Any attempt at finding regional solutions to the problems we have here locally all along the sound I think is very laudable, and I certainly hope that your bill passes. One thing I think we have to be careful of is not to fall into the false hope that a commission which is dealing with regional problems over so small an area as Long Island Sound can come up with any large portion of the answers to our problems. Many of the dredging and filling problems that have been mentioned here today I suspect are susceptible to a solution on a region of this size; however, a commission is not a substitute for action as far as our grander national policies problems are concerned. I would like to take just a minute to keep some of these national policy problems in view so that we do not go away forgetting them and forgetting that there are things that the Congress of the United States can be doing today to help us answer these problems. I feel probably that the commission will come up in its report with some suggestions as to what ought to be done, but that is 3 years from now, and there are certain things which I think should be undertaken today. I would list a couple of them. One, for instance, is the problem of powerplants. We have no national power policy, as far as I have been able to determine, in this country. We are all pretty much ready to accept the fact that Connecticut and the whole Long Island Sound area will, over the years, need more and more power, and probably one of the things that this commission will be asked to do is to pick the least worst sites to build a few powerplants. We already have the commission in Connecticut which some of us suspect has been delegated that job, to pick some point where you will hurt the ecology the least and make the fewest enemies, but Connecticut needs the power so we have got to do it. I think that what we really need is a national policy on how we are going to provide power to this country. Many other nations of the world do not take small units of territory, such as the Long Island Sound area, Connecticut or New England, for generation of their power. They look over the whole country. In Sweden, in the Soviet Union, for instance, they transport power thousands of miles. We have had over many, many years the suggestion of the Passa maquoddy project in Maine. Perhaps this is one chance to getting power down here without having to have powerplants spaced on our islands or estuaries along Long Island Sound. This is certainly the kind of problem that your commission cannot come to grips with. I think only the Federal Government as a whole can come to grips with that problem. Another example of problems far beyond the scope of this commission is the increasing content of phosphates in the rivers that run into our Long Island Sound and all our other salt water bodies. The Congress has set levels of biograde detergents which the producers have now had to meet. I think that was very laudable legislation. Now we find that the phosphate content of these same detergents and other materials that come out of our sewage disposal plants is just as large a problem, by changing the amount of food in the water for microscopic plants and changing the whole ecology of our water resources. This is the kind of problem, again, that has to be taken up by the Congress of the United States. The State of Connecticut can't do it, the States of Connecticut and New York together can't do it, and no compact of States can do it. It takes Federal action, and this commission will never be able to come up with a solution to that problem. Along the same line, we have the very question of gravel mining. Somebody has to come up with a policy of where our society's going to get its gravel. Nobody wants a gravel mine, any more than they want a jetport or bridge across the sound, coming into their sound. Perhaps this can be solved on a multistate compact basis. But our society has to decide whether we are going to accept the extra cost of going to some less public place to get our gravel or whether we are going to continue to dig up places like Long Island Sound so we can get it a few cents cheaper. I doubt that the commission can come up with an answer to that problem. I think we will probably need at least State and possibly national policies on that. I don't think the city of Norwalk can do it, at any rate, as far as myself, but this is one of those larger issues that the commission can make recommendations on. But everybody knows the problem now, and I think we ought to be attacking that question right now. The four problems that I wanted to bring up was, again, the boats and ships that ply Long Island Sound. We have the problems with spills. This isn't a problem for the commission; this is a problem for national legislation. We have discharges, sanitary discharges, from every manner of pleasure boat and commercial boat that floats our waters. We already have some laws on this. They need enforcement. The question of enforcing our Federal or State laws is not a matter for this commission. It is not a matter to be studied, at any rate; it is something that can be done now. Encouragement from the U.S. Senate, I think, would be very helpful in that matter. There are a lot of problems of this nature that the commission is going to have to throw up its hands and say we can't do anything about even when its 3 years are up. It will propose solutions to some other body, presumably the one of which you are a member. The commission on a regional basis just covering Long Island Sound will find itself in the same dilemma that we in the individual towns find our selves. We need to cover a larger region before we can answer these problems. I am happy that a regional commission is in the works, and, you know, every little bit helps, but I don't think we can come to grips with these basic policy problems at this level. I think we are maybe halfway to the goal with the founding of this commission, but I hope that the U.S. Senate, as part of the Congress, will also come to grips with these larger questions which I have raised which will prevent any final solution to our problems with Long Island Sound until we have solved them, also. Senator RIBICOFF. Thank you. STATEMENT OF MRS. SALLY BOLSTER, NORWALK, CONN. Mrs. BOLSTER. Senator Ribicoff, my name is Sally Bolster. I am a member of the common council of the city of Norwalk, and I represent the 146th district, which encompasses the territory from the Five Mile River to the Norwalk Harbor, Rowayton, Wilson Point, and Harbor View. So, obviously, most of my constituents, as 1, are very much interested in what happens to our water. Although I do not wish to contradict or take issue with the statements made by Senator Jack Rudolf, I personally feel that one of the largest problems that we have had in our community regarding pollution and solving our problems has not been so much with the Army Corps of Engineers as it has been with the State Water Resources Commission, and I know that the people in my area would prefer to fire them. [Applause.] The problems here I think have been tremendous. Everybody has reiterated that we know that our water in Long Island Sound is polluted. We have been faced this season with no baby ducks in Wilson Cove at all, period. We are not sure why. They just aren't there this year. For the first time there are no small ducks. There are no new baby fish. We don't know why. Whether this is in the gelucil that was used to combat the oil spill last year, this is a very good question. We have also been faced with a brown scum which is almost like a brown tide. They talked about the red tide once upon a time, but we have got a brown tide, and all our water, instead of having white foam, has brown foam. This is something that is new this year, too. Obviously, this is some sort of accumulation that has built up throughout the years, and it is upon us and it has made itself more and more evident. People in my area are very concerned about using this water. We don't have, really, 3 years in order to just study. This is a tremendous problem, and, unfortunately, we are always faced with it. It does take time. But I think that in the meantime we must implement the laws that we have. We must crack down on our major polluters, we must clean up our sanitary sewerage facilities in our municipalities. Many of these municipalities need perhaps Federal funding and Federal help. This way is the way we can overcome this problem. But this is where |