AMERICA
Conservation in the shade
STANLEY JOHNSON
A little time ago, Earth Day was celebrated in the United States on 800 college cam- puses and by 3,500 high schools; but—in that short space of time—the prospects of some new national consensus being forged out of the 'environment movement' have been severely jolted. Back in April, everything looked rosy. When I visited the headquarters of Environmental Teach-In, Inc. (the co-ordinating body for the 22 April demonstrations) the atmosphere was brisk and optimistic. Telephones rang constantly and big names from industry and govern- ment dropped by to show that they knew a good thing when they saw one. One might say, in short, that the environment had ar- rived.
The proceedings on Earth Day varied ac- cording to the whims and predilections of the participating groups. In some parts of the States special 'awards' were presented to polluters; large spotlights were shone at night on belching smokestacks; dead fish were exhibited on the sidewalk; Mayor Lindsay walked down a Fifth Avenue emptied of noontime traffic.
For a while it seemed that this unlikely issue—the 'quality of life'—was proving to be a great unifier in a land of divisions. Cor- porations rushed to advertise their intentions as good environmentalists in campus magazines. Parents at last found something which they and their children could talk, even agree, about.
The Administration for its part helped the process. There are those who argue that President Nixon's concern with the quality of the environment is a deep and genuine one. He was, they say, raised on a farm and has houses in both California and Florida, states where the environment pro- blem is acute; whereas President Johnson's idea (so the argument runs) was to 'have Lady Bird go out plant some tulips in her "beautification" programme', Mr Nixon is at heart a full-blooded conservationist. There are also those who argue that all this was merely a cunning political ploy. The Ad- ministration realised that the new concern with pollution and so forth could be used to deflect public attention (and especially the attention of youth) away from other tricky areas like poverty, civil rights and—of course—Vietnam.
We have no way of knowing whether the Administration's strategy on the en- vironment is as Machiavellian as some sup- pose. In any event, it is now clear that the strategy hasn't worked. The environment, as a tool of consensus politics, is dead.
In the most immediate sense, it was killed by Cambodia and Kent State. Any idea that dissent had been stilled in the us, that the protest movement had been defused by the Vietnamisation programme, was—with the shooting of William Schroeder, Jeffrey Miller, Sandy Scheuer and Allison Krause—made entirely laughable. But Cam- bodia and the Kent State tragedy merely triggered a reaction which, sooner or later, would have come anyway. The en- vironmental problem is certainly a major problem: the transformation of once-
beautiful America into a desert of used-car lots and junked automobiles, of foul air and polluted streams is not a pretty sight: but the environment is not the major problem and it is foolish, even dishonest, to pretend that it is.
I took part, when I was in New York a few weeks ago, in an anti-pollution march. We gathered in front of the Gm building, then wound round Columbus Circle into Central Park. The leaders of the march, wearing black capes and gas-masks, pushed invalid chairs bearing what were supposed to be representative victims of pollution. The main event was to be a concert, combining speeches and songs about pollution—the modern equivalent of the Christmas festival of lessons and carols.
The crowd, which I estimated as several thousands strong, clustered before the bandstand in the park. There were some warming-up speeches, full of words like `biospheric' and 'non-biodegradable'. Then the Panthers invaded the stage. There were thirty or forty of them. They had khaki- green paramilitary uniforms and black berets. They shouldered aside the marshals of the environment march, raised their clenched fists in the Panther salute and, for an hour, took over the meeting.
The harangue the leader of the Panther _ group gave the crowd began in the tradi- tional way. Had we heard of Bobby Seale, bound and manacled in a Chicago courtroom? of Hampton gunned to death in his bed? of Huey Newton and a thou- sand other victims of a society bent on genocide?
Then, as he warmed to the task, his invec- tive became more direct. What were we doing here anyway, with our effete, irrelevant con- cern about pollution? Rich white students, he sneered, driving in fat polluting autom- biles, tossing beer-cans and cigarette stubs out of the window in the time-honoured American way; coming to New York to at- tend a protest rally about—yes, man, can you believe it?—the quality of the en- vironment. 'Man, you talk about polluted air while we are denied even the right to breathe!'
All this doesn't mean that the en- vironment, having been top of the pops, is now going to sink out of sight completely. What it means is that the environment pro- blem is going to be seen in perspective as the realisation dawns that clean air, clean land and clean water cannot be the overriding preoccupation of the seventies; that other older claims, like those of social and racial justice, will need still to be heard. In the long run this is healthy, for rhetoric, politically motivated, will not solve the environment problem. What is needed is some hard think- ing about priorities for public expenditure; about the detailed legislation that will be re- quired and about the specific machinery of government necessary to handle the diffuse rag-bag of environmental issues in a systematic way.
The Americans have, in fact, already done some of this hard thinking. The, fruits of it are to be seen in the establishment earlier this year, as an operational body, of the Council on Environmental Quality. This is headed by Russell Train, former Under- Secretary of the Interior and an ex-President of the Conservation Foundation. Mr Train is interested in much more than winning isolated battles; he believes that, in much the same way as the Bureau of the Budget scrutinises the economic aspects of pro- grammes and proposals for action, so the council will (or should) scrutinise their en- vironmental implications. This, if it can be made to work, is probably a far more significant development than a solid month of Earth Day demonstrations.
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