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disposed of in sorne manner. Along with
those cars you'll have to get rid of
one
htmdred mil/ion
old tires that don't have
a mile left in them, but are still good
for a thousand years with little decay.
With all of this great garbage we
have just begun to pick at the surface.
Industrial wastes, agricultura! wastcs,
household, commerdal and municipal
wastes must be added. Throw
in
the
daily paper and the odds-and-ends
waste and you come up with the
astounding figure of over
ONE HUN–
DRED POUNDS OF GARBAGE PER PERSON
PER DAY
that has to be disposed of
in sorne manner in today's Anglo–
American society! That's over
18
tom
per person per year!
The trash you put
in
your garbage
can for the local sanitation crew to
remove is the small - about
5% -
visible (but not for long) representa–
tion of the total amount of refuse neces–
sary to maintain you in the life to which
you have become accustomed.
Sorne of the Consequences
At the beginning of this decade a
wave of popular interest has been
sparked by the sudden recognition of
the fact that mankind is rapidly turning
bis small planet into an uninhabitable
garbage dump! In all too many areas
this knowledge has been quickly trans–
formed into a political football. But
serious scientific studies from neady
every field are pouring data into man's
total fund of knowledge which indicates
that nothing can really be thrown
"away."
For many decades we threw our gar–
bage "away" into swamplands and mar–
shes. This caused us to realize, a little
late, that a delicate balance in nature
has been upset. Entire species of ani–
mals disappeared. Entire industries
based on harvesting the animals and
fish life that the marshes produced went
out of business.
We dumped industrial, human and
agricultura! waste into our massive river
systems
beautiful rivers which
seemed so powerful, untouchable, inde–
structable. Then we discovered the awe–
some destructive power of collective
human beings! Multiple thousands of
miles of waterways became too polluted
to drink without massive doses of
expensive deansing chemicals - too
lacking in oxygen and other life-giving
elements to support the life of com–
mercial or sports fish - and finally so
loaded with too many salts and other
harmful chemicals that they become un–
fit even for irrigating agricultura! fields.
Those streams sluggishly make their way
to sea to contribute their deadly "fall–
out" to the ocean.
We dumped untold tons of evil–
smelliog particulate matter, that cor–
roded and besmirched everything it
touched, into our air until each great
accumulation of human beings - called
cities - has its own pall of smog that
J.mbotsodor Co/loge PholoJ
signals its presence even to astronauts
in deep space!
The mighty ocean seemed able to
cleanse itself of any refuse we wanted
to throw "away" - from the accumu–
lated waste of human sewage to the
multiple millions of barreis .of oil spil–
lage, both deliberate and accidental. But
now we begin to see that even the ocean
has its limit. Entire coastal areas have
been denuded of all animal and vege–
table life by indiscriminate dumping of
human trash, dregs and rubbish. Entire
industries pnce supported by the sea,
from commercial fishing to tourism,
have in all too many arcas gone bank–
rupt - a tragic return on the deposit
man didn't think he was making.
So the consequences are beginning to
be
noticed. We notice we don't have
clean air. We notice we don't have pure
water. We notice we have less and less
productive land.
w~
notice that the
entire ecological web of life has been
brutally ruptured!
In short, we notice that we
4o not
Jike the prodttct of
o11r
way of life/
What Can Be Done?
Noisy efforts on every hand are being
made to fight the
comequences
of our
life style - our polluted environment.
Politicians of every ideological back–
ground imaginable all seem vociferously
i~
agreement with the fact that
some–
thi11g
must be done, and done soon, to
correct this pollution trend before we