The Brakes and the Indian

100   pesticide in human breast milk: Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images,. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 31, 54, 56, 60.

Dunaway writes very sharply about the proto-green era; the container and Keep America Beautiful section is similarly indebted to Robin Andersen, “The ‘Crying Indian,’ Corporations, and Environmentalism: A Half-Century of Struggle Over Environmental Messaging,” in Matthew P. McAllister, Emily West (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, Routledge 2013.

The President’s staff wouldn’t have missed it; green groups took the canny step of running ads in the New York Times. “In particular, the Environmental Defense Fund produced advertisements that represented DDT as posing a serious and escalating risk to humans, nature, and their conjoined futurity. Published in the New York Times, one ad provocatively asked: “is mother’s milk fit for human consumption?” Dunaway, Seeing Green, 29.

 

100   “It is particularly fitting”: Richard Nixon, “Statement About the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969,” The American Presidency Project, University of California at Santa Barbara, January 1, 1970.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-about-the-national-environmental-policy-act-1969
Accessed 10-12-22.

 

100   “the year of the beginning”: James M. Naughton, “President Signs Bill to Cut Auto Fumes 90% by 1977,” The New York Times.

 

100   “Seen one redwood”: Steven V. Roberts, “Pollution 2: Next to Motherhood For Votes in California,” The New York Times, Jan 25, 1970.

 

100   “against the debauching of the environment”: Wayne King, “Pollution Fight Pressed Across Nation,” The New York Times, February 24, 1970.

 

101   most influential people: Michael Lemonick, Michael Novacek, “America’s Best: Lifetime Achievement Award: E. O. Wilson,” Time Magazine, August 20, 2001.

 

101      “the brake on the wheel”: Jonathan Weiner, The Next One Hundred Years: Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth, Bantam 1990. Chapter 11, “The New Question,” 231-2.

 

101      “I think interest in this will recede”: Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, Simon & Schuster 2001, 173.

The President was not the only American—and wouldn’t be the last gimlet eye to see the word environmentalism and reach for the calendar—wondering if green were a fad.

Paul Shepard, “The Environment,” The New York Times, August 30, 1970: “The question on the dozen college campuses I visited last April was: ‘Is the environmental crisis merely a fad?’ Not only students were asking: academia reflected the national uncertainty and exacerbation, Congress was swamped with antipollution bills.”

And, as would become our media pattern, other issues (war, domestic tragedy) obtruded: these, per Shepard, “cooled the issue overnight.”

 

101      “Spell it out”: Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, 483.

It was all, Nixon explained to his Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, “just a holding action.” 297.

 

101      “In a flat choice”: Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, 163. Nixon continues, “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.”

 

101      “uniquely dismal”: Editorial, “ . . . And Looking Up,” The New York Times, January 1, 1971.

 

101      “go back and live”: Rick Pearlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Scribner 2008, Chapter 26, “How to Survive the Debacle,” 544.

 

101      dress shoes to the beach: Katelyn Fossett, “Richard Nixon, Awkward American Icon,” Politico, April 21, 2014.

I thought you might enjoy the photo.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/gallery/2014/04/richard-nixon-awkward-american-icon-000036/?slide=0
Accessed 10-12-22.

 

101      “No other chief executive”: Thomas R Wellock, “Nixon and the Environment,” Environmental History, April 2001.

 

102      “I kicked at the sand”: Walter Munk, Naomi Oreskes, Richard Muller, “Gordon James Fraser MacDonald: 30 July 1929–14 May 2002,” Biographical Memoirs Volume 84, National Academy of Sciences, National Academies Press 2004.

 

102      “Can the Planet Be Saved?”: Editorial, “Snowmen, Unlimited,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 1970.

 

102      “The scientists I spoke with”: Editorial, “Earth’s Fate May Be Sealed Already,” The Hartford Courant, March 15, 1970.

 

102      “the famous greenhouse effect”: William R. Graham, “Mystery of Climate: Man Tinkers With Survival,” The Los Angeles Times.

 

102      “Then there is the Greenhouse Effect Theory”: Eugene Guccione, “No, Breathe Easier,” The New York Times, August 28, 1971.

We’re going to watch denial hatch and mature. And it’s fun to spend more time with the op-ed here down in the more leisurely region of the endnotes.

What the Engineering and Mining guy—who just wanted to be left alone by politicians and regulations to mine and engineer in peace—did was use the two factors counteracting each other to cancel the validity of either one. This was a trick that would become quite popular in our time—list enough facts so drawing any one conclusion becomes impossible.

Watch the start: something bombastically positive and counter-factual.

 

We are winning the war against pollution. And this is the biggest untold story in America today.

 

Then confuse the issue—the best of ways, with accurate statements. Because the season-pass reader says “That’s true but also not true”—and the part-time reader checks out. That part-timer can then decide to believe whatever reading feels most convenient.

 

Then there is the case of those poisonous gases released to the atmosphere. The worst of these gases is sulphur dioxide, according to “environmentalists” who have launched an all‐out war against such industries as copper‐smelting and power‐generating companies. . . .

Unaware that particulate concentration is decreasing, “environmentalists” talk about the New Ice Age Theory. The build‐up of dust in the air, so goes the argument, will screen out the sun and we’ll all be turned into ice.

Then there is the Greenhouse Effect Theory. The build‐up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so goes this particular idiocy, will cause a temperature increase throughout the planet [and] we’ll drown in the tidal wave resulting from the melting of the polar ice caps, or roast to death.

These so‐called theories contradict each other. We cannot both freeze and roast at the same time. It’s either or. But relax. It’s neither.

 

And now get out while the getting is good.

 

We are winning the war against pollution. Are the so‐called environmentalists happy?

 

103      “deeply worried”: Richard Earle, The Art of Cause Marketing: How To Use Advertising To Change Personal Behavior and Public Policy, McGraw-Hill 2002. (Google the title: The Indian is crying right there on the cover.) 69. “The tear was exclusively visual.”

 

103      fifteen billion times: Shepherd Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Norton 1999. 15.

 

103      “perhaps the most famous visibly shed tear”: Shepherd Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Norton 1999. 15.

Cultural historian Finis Dunaway calls it perhaps “the most famous tear in America history.” Finis Dunaway, Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images, University of Chicago Press 2015. Chapter Five, “The Crying Indian,” 79.

Finis Dunaway, “The ‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 2017.

 

103      one of history’s top campaigns: John McDonough, “The Ad Council At Sixty—Facing A Crossroads; Motivation And Competition Alter Big Picture,” Advertising Age, April 29, 2002.

 

103      by Entertainment Weekly: Stuart Elliott. “The Media Business: Advertising; An Environmental Campaign Is ‘Back By Popular Neglect,’” The New York Times, April 22, 1998.

 

104      they’d rebroadcast so often: Finis Dunaway, “The ‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 2017.

Fordham University Professor of Communication and Media Studies Robin Anderson notes, “At the height of the campaign, 2,000 people a month wrote letters wanting to join their local anti-littering teams.”

Robin Andersen, “The ‘Crying Indian,’ Corporations, and Environmentalism: A Half-Century of Struggle Over Environmental Messaging,” in Matthew P. McAllister, Emily West (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, Routledge 2013, 405.

 

104      Iron Eyes Cody: Amy Waldman, “Iron Eyes Cody, 94, an Actor And Tearful Anti-Littering Icon,” The New York Times, January 5, 1999.

“Mr. Cody said he was born in Oklahoma territory to a father, Thomas Long Plume, who was a Cherokee Indian, and a mother, Frances Salpet, who was Cree. His father performed in Wild West shows and circuses.”

 

104      “What we found”: Tom Vallance, “Iron Eyes Cody,” The Independent (U.K.), January 7, 1999.

Ted Williams (no relation) of Audubon Magazine, on the other hand, called it “the single most obnoxious, commercial ever produced.” Quoted in Andersen, “The ‘Crying Indian,’ Corporations, and Environmentalism,” in McAllister, West (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, Routledge 2013. 404.

Williams expounds in “The Metamorphosis of Keep America Beautiful” (Audubon Magazine, March 1990). The Keep America Beautiful spot represented “the ultimate exploitation of Native Americans: First we kicked them off their land, then we trashed it, and now we’ve got them whoring for the trashmakers.” Also in Andersen, Routledge Companion, 407.

 

104      “I chanted it once”: Earle, The Art of Cause Marketing, 70.

 

104      “Indians,” he said, “don’t cry”: Amy Waldman, “Iron Eyes Cody, 94, an Actor And Tearful Anti-Littering Icon,” The New York Times, January 5, 1999.

 

104      So the actual tear was glycerin: Waldman, “Iron Eyes Cody, 94, an Actor And Tearful Anti-Littering Icon,” The New York Times, January 5, 1999.

 

104      “quite likely the best-known American Indian”: Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate, “Iron Eyes Cody Parade Marshall,” August 31, 1980.

Anderson calls Cody “America’s most famous Native American.” Andersen, “The ‘Crying Indian,’ Corporations, and Environmentalism,” in McAllister, West (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, 403.

 

104      on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: Dalton Ross, “The Glutton: Star Treatment,” Entertainment Weekly, November 9, 2007.

 

104      “the embodiment of our entire organization”: Keep America Beautiful, “The Adventures of KAB Man—Episode 3: Cry Now, Litter Later,” April 23, 2007. Creepily enough, Shakespeare’s Birthday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwXUe7DLNQ&t=205s

Accessed 10-15-22.

 

104      “he had his mind all the time on the movies”: Angela Aleiss, “Native Son,” The New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 26, 1996.

 

104      “I fell asleep instantly”: Iron Eyes Cody, Iron Eyes: My Life As A Hollywood Indian, Everest House 1982. 90.

 

105      “You can’t prove it”: Angela Aleiss, “Native Son,” The New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 26, 1996.

 

105      Keep America Beautiful was founded: The New York Herald Tribune, “For A Cleaner America,” May 28, 1954. “A non-profit organization established last December, called ‘Keep America Beautiful,’ is embarking on a nation-wide campaign to bring the problem to public notice.”

 

105      representatives of the beverage and packaging industries: Peter Harnik, “The Junking of an Anti-Litter Lobby,” Business and Society Review, Spring 1977.

John G. Mitchell, “Keeping America Bottled (and Canned)—Or, Why You See Only Paper Products In Those Anti-Litter Ads,” Audubon Magazine, March 1976.

 

105      litter regulation: John C. Stauber, Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry, Common Courage Press | Center for Media & Democracy 1995. Chapter Nine, “Silencing Spring,” 133.

Anderson, Routledge, 406. “The Vermont state legislature passed a law in 1953 banning the sale of disposable containers, requiring that beer be sold in reusable bottles (Williams 1990). The American Can Company led the charge to stop such legislation [and] Keep America Beautiful was born in 1954, supported by a variety of industries, most notably the manufacturers of beer and soft drinks, and the bottles and cans that deliver them.”

 

105      the whole industry went nonreturnable: The post-war production increase is startling. Across a quarter-century, a rise of more than 50,000 per cent. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that number before.

Biologist Barry Commoner, writing in The New Yorker, used a computer to produce a list of economic sectors that had seen the most spectacular recent growth.

“This list,” Commoner writes, “presents a striking picture of the how the American economy has grown since the Second World War.” The scientist continues:

 

The winner of this economic sweepstakes, with the highest postwar growth rate, is the production of non-returnable soda bottles, which has increased about 53,000 percent in the past twenty-five years.

 

Barry Commoner, “A Reporter At Large: The Closing Circle II,” The New Yorker, October 2, 1971. If you’re curious about the other items on Commoner’s fascinating list, it can be found at the end of this chapter’s notes.

 

105      use it once: Robin Andersen, “The ‘Crying Indian,’ Corporations, and Environmentalism: A Half-Century of Struggle Over Environmental Messaging,” in Matthew P. McAllister, Emily West (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, Routledge 2013. “The corporate push toward disposable consumption,” Andersen writes, began “after World War II . . . Part of the massive expansion of consumer culture during the 1950s involved the movement away from reusable containers and toward throwaways.” 405–6.

Another aspect was the ramp-up for the war. There was now a surplus of can-making aluminum. “The convergence of cheap energy and the technology to process aluminum met the needs of World War II, and left manufacturers poised for a disposable economy,” Andersen explains. “The wildly successful increase in production left a glut of the metal when the war ended, and using aluminum sheets for cans became more profitable than the sale of all other aluminum products combined.”

 

105      a tower five million miles high: Peter Harnik, “The Junking of an Anti-Litter Lobby,” Business and Society Review, Spring 1977.

For the more terrestrially minded, Harnik points out this is also “over 200 times around the earth at the equator.”

John Mitchell at Audubon (“Keeping America Bottled,” March 1976) pointed out that as of 1976, the average American generated 300 disposable cans per year.

 

105      Keep America Beautiful’s objective: The Journalist Ginger Strand boils Keep America Beautiful’s purpose down to three words: “Rejecters of reusability.”

Strand gives the manufacturer’s why. “Something you use once and throw away: that’s the perfect product.”

Ginger Strand, “The Crying Indian,” Orion Magazine, December 2008.

Andersen, Routledge, 406.

Dunaway, Seeing Green, Chapter Five, “The Crying Indian,” 83. “Yet rather than critique the proliferation of disposables, rather than question the corporate decisions that led to the widespread use of these materials,” Dunaway writes, Keep America Beautiful “singled out ‘individual thoughtlessness’ as ‘the outstanding factor in the litter nuisance.’”

 

105      “This whole environmental movement”: Victor Chen, “Equal Time,” The New Yorker, January 7, 1974.

 

105      For the beverage and packaging industry: John G. Mitchell, “Keeping America Bottled (and Canned)—Or, Why You See Only Paper Products In Those Anti-Litter Ads,” Audubon Magazine, March 1976.

Victor Chen is funny about this in The New Yorker.

 

Mr. Powers told us he had been with K.A.B. for four years and that previously he had been a representative of “a group of industries in the government-relations area.”

“What industries were those?” we asked.

“The beverage and packaging industries,” he said.

 

105      “a sense of individual responsibility”: Victor Chen, “Equal Time,” The New Yorker, January 7, 1974.

See also Dunaway, Seeing Green, 83-4.

 

105      That is, not industry: The New Yorker’s Victor Chen quotes Patricia Taylor, an advocate from the group Environmental Action. “Anti-litter campaigns are at their heart a matter of blaming the victim—and glorifying the victimizer for its ‘public-spirited sentiments.’” Taylor continues, “K.A.B. has attempted to blame the consumer for the problems created by the proliferation of ‘convenience’—no-deposit, no-return—packaging, which its supporters manufacture.”

Chen expresses this very neatly: “These industries [would] very much like the public to believe the K.A.B. slogan. ‘People Start Pollution. People Can Stop It.’ People, that is, and not corporations.”

Victor Chen, “Equal Time,” The New Yorker, January 7, 1974.

Ginger Strand, in her Orion piece, is faster and funnier. “The message was the same: quit tossing coffee cups out of the window of your Chevy Chevelle, you pig, and America’s environmental problems will end.”

Strand also noted this sly lexical shift. “The language had shifted from ‘littering’ to ‘pollution.’” Strand, “The Crying Indian,” Orion, 2008.

 

105      the gentlest way of saying: Historian Finis Dunaway puts this very crisply in an essay for the Chicago Tribune.

 

“People start pollution. People can stop it.” By making individual viewers feel guilty and responsible for the polluted environment, the ad deflected the question of responsibility away form corporations and placed it entirely in the realm of individual action, concealing the role of industry in polluting the landscape.

 

Finis Dunaway, “The ‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 2017.

 

105      the National Soft Drink Association: Peter Harnik, “The Junking of an Anti-Litter Lobby,” Business and Society Review, Spring 1977.

 

105      American Can had advanced the money: John McDonough, “The Ad Council At Sixty—Facing A Crossroads; Motivation And Competition Alter Big Picture,” Advertising Age, April 29, 2002. “American Can funded the initial campaign.”

Then the journalist pauses for the joke. “American Can may have loved the pre-Columbian landscape as much as the next guy—and delighted in having Iron Eyes let people know it,” he writes. On the other hand, the company “consistently opposed state legislation designed to curb litter through container refund-deposit programs.”

Per Anderson in Routledge, American Can had been leading the charge since 1954. Anderson, Routledge, 406.

 

106      Oregon and Vermont: Earl and Miriam Selby, “Can This Law Stop the Trashing of America?”, Readers Digest, March 1976.

When you’ve lost Readers Digest, you should at least consider the white flag.

The Digest piece contained a wild stat from good old pollution-fighting California. “A 1975 California study put that state’s current litter injuries at 300,000 per year. The predominant causes: broken beer and pop bottles and pull tab openers from cans.”

Oregon went first: enacted July 2, 1971, implemented October 1, 1972; Vermont enacted its bill in April 1972, and implemented the following July.

 

106      Then the squares between: The Oregon results were inspiring. Beverage litter, six months after implementation, had dropped (a fun verb in context) 80 percent. It seemed to affect littering overall—giving those inclined a touch of stage fright. Prior to the bottle bill, you’d get 1,031 improperly disposed items per highway mile, with 144 of these beverage containers. Half a year later? Only 19 containers, with 141 litter items per mile.

John G. Mitchell, “Keeping America Bottled (and Canned)—Or, Why You See Only Paper Products In Those Anti-Litter Ads,” Audubon Magazine, March 1976.

 

106      Roger Powers testified: John G. Mitchell, “Keeping America Bottled (and Canned)—Or, Why You See Only Paper Products In Those Anti-Litter Ads,”

Audubon Magazine, March 1976.

 

106      The Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society: Peter Harnik, “The Junking of an Anti-Litter Lobby,” Business and Society Review, Spring 1977.

 

106      “a powerful political decoy”: McDonough, “The Ad Council At Sixty,” Advertising Age.

“While different versions of the ‘70s campaign spots showed smokestacks as well as garbage, critics argued that by placing responsibility for pollution on individuals rather than institutions, the campaign was a powerful political decoy devised by corporate interests.”

 

106      described advocates of recycling as “communists”: Peter Harnik, “The Junking of an Anti-Litter Lobby,” Business and Society Review, Spring 1977

Finis Dunaway, “The ‘Crying Indian’ Ad That Fooled the Environmental Movement,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 2017.

 

106      The Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy: Peter Harnik, “The Junking of an Anti-Litter Lobby,” Business and Society Review, Spring 1977.

 

106      “You’re not going to solve it”: Robert A. Hamilton, “Connecticut Q&A: Roger W. Powers | ‘Litter Is a Behavioral Problem,’” The New York Times, March 27, 1988.

 

Q. Do you have any statistics on the source of litter?

A. We really don’t dwell on composition because that’s finger pointing. We’re saying litter is a behavioral problem; we all contribute to it.

 

106      “the spirit of the tear”: Stuart Elliott, “The Media Business: Advertising: An Environmental Campaign Is ‘Back By Popular Neglect,’” The New York Times, April 22, 1998.

 

106      everything but a: It was always their way: right there even in the Audubon headline from 1976.

“Keeping America Bottled (and Canned)—Or, Why You See Only Paper Products In Those Anti-Litter Ads,” John G. Mitchell, Audubon Magazine, March 1976.

 

106      Greenwash: “‘KAB is the granddaddy of greenwashing,’ says John Stauber, executive director of the watchdog Center for Media and Democracy. ‘By funding Keep America Beautiful, these companies, which are responsible for so much waste and which are the worst players in defeating environmental bills, reframe the issue to be an individual problem.’”

Kevin LeShane, “Keeping America Cluttered: The Big Fight Over Bottled Water Litter,” E: The Environmental Magazine, September 1, 2007.

Media studies professor Robin Andersen calls the K.A.B. “the most successful ‘Greenwashing’ campaign”: as well as, potentially, “the first instance of greenwashing.”

Robin Andersen, “The ‘Crying Indian,’ Corporations, and Environmentalism: A Half-Century of Struggle Over Environmental Messaging,” in Matthew P. McAllister, Emily West (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, Routledge 2013. 407.

 

106      large companies should not be on the hook: Ibid, 407. “The conflation of pollution with litter also presented a simple solution to environmental destruction,” Andersen writes. “One that could easily be addressed by an ‘information’ campaign, making it safe from actual conservation policies. A message designed to obscure, hide, and redefine the environmental consequences of commodity production is the very definition of greenwashing.”

 

[The ad’s] legacy may be measured by the huge mountain of garbage Americans throw away each year, and today non-returnable beverage cans and plastic bottles remain at the top of the pile. As the Container Recycling Institute reports, “beverage containers are variously reported at 30 to 50 percent of the litter stream” (2011). In addition, the recycling rate of plastic bottles has declined to just 23 percent annually. A recent report by Ocean Conservancy (2009) lists beverage containers in the top ten most common items found in marine debris.

 

It was general. The New Yorker towards the end of the Year of the Beginning ran a “Notes and Comment”: quoting a New York Times Greenwash story before the word came into existence. (The “we” here voiced by staff writer Jonathan Schell, later to write the unsettling series on nuclear war “The Fate of the Earth.”)

 

Headed “Polluters Sit on Antipollution Boards,” [the Times] revealed that “the membership of air and water pollution boards in thirty-five states is dotted with industrial, agricultural, municipal, and county representatives whose own organizations or spheres of activity are in many cases in the forefront of pollution,” and that “the roster of big corporations with employees on such boards reads like an abbreviated blue book of American industry.” The story went on to say that the conflicts of interest in this state of affairs naturally impeded the control of pollution. That being so, we began to wonder again how America’s economic system helped contribute to pollution control. It appeared that this powerful economy “makes possible” a “wide range of efforts” to control pollution only in the sense that if it weren’t for this economy we wouldn’t have the problem of pollution to cope with in the first place.

 

“Here is a system,” President Nixon had boasted of the American economy, “that makes possible . . . a wide range of efforts to protect and restore our environment.”

The New Yorker notes that it was as though “the President were offering his congratulations to the very people who were at the root of the problem, much as if he were to congratulate a criminal for having given a policeman the opportunity to make a heroic arrest.”

Jonathan Schell, “Notes and Comment,” The New Yorker, December 19, 1970. Quoting Gladwin Hill, “Polluters Sit on Antipollution Board,” The New York Times, December 7, 1970.

 

Barry Commoner’s list. From Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology, Alfred A. Knopf 1971. Chapter Nine, “The Technological Flaw,” 142–4.

It’s a picture, in freight containers and customer receipts, of the quarter-century’s flux that followed World War II.

 

We computed the overall change for the entire twenty-five-year period—a twenty-five-year growth rate. When this list is rearranged in decreasing order of growth rate, a picture of how the United States economy has grown since World War II begins to emerge.

The winner of this economic sweepstakes, with the highest postwar growth rate, is the production of nonreturnable soda bottles, which has increased about 53,000 per cent in that time. . . The runners-up are an interesting but seemingly mixed bag. In second place is production of synthetic fibers, up 5,980 per cent; third is mercury used for chlorine production, up 3,930 per cent; succeeding places are held as follows: mercury used in mildew-resistant paint, up 3,120 per cent; air conditioner compressor units, up 2,850 per cent; plastics, up 1,960 per cent; fertilizer nitrogen, up 1,050 per cent; electric housewares (such as can-openers and corn-poppers), up 1,040 per cent; synthetic organic chemicals, up 950 per cent; aluminum, up 680 per cent; chlorine gas, up 600 per cent; electric power, up 530 per cent; pesticides, up 390 per cent; wood pulp, up 313 per cent; truck freight, up 222 per cent; consumer electronics (TV sets, tape recorders), up 217 per cent; motor fuel consumption, up 190 per cent; cement, up 150 per cent.

Then there is a group of productive activities [that] have grown at about the pace of the population (i.e., up about 42 per cent): food production and consumption, total production of textiles and clothes, household utilities, and steel, copper, and other basic metals.

Finally there are the losers, which increase more slowly than the population or actually shrink in total production: railroad freight, up 17 per cent; lumber, down 1 per cent; cotton fiber, down 7 per cent; returnable beer bottles, down 36 per cent; wool, down 42 per cent; soap, down 76 per cent; and, at the end of the line, work animal horsepower, down 87 per cent.

What emerges from all these data is striking evidence that while production for most basic needs—food, clothing, housing—has just about kept up with the 40 to 50 per cent or so increase in population (that is, production per capita has been essentially constant), the kinds of goods produced to meet these needs have changed drastically. New production technologies have displaced old ones. Soap powder has been displaced by synthetic detergents; natural fibers (cotton and wool) have been displaced by synthetic ones; steel and lumber have been displaced by aluminum, plastics, and concrete; railroad freight has been displaced by truck freight; returnable bottles have been displaced by nonreturnable ones. On the road, the low-powered automobile engines of the 1920’s and 1930’s have been displaced by high-powered ones. On the farm, while per capita production has remained about constant, the amount of harvested acreage has decreased; in effect, fertilizer has displaced land. Older methods of insect control have been displaced by synthetic insecticides, such as DDT, and for controlling weeds the cultivator has been displaced by the herbicide spray. Range-feeding of livestock has been displaced by feedlots.

 

Leading to one of those startling, clouds-part moments a page later.

 

All this reminds us of what we have already been told by advertising—which incidentally has also grown; for example, the use of newsprint for advertising has grown faster than its use for news—that we are blessed with an economy based on very modern technologies. What the advertisements do not tell us—as we are urged to buy synthetic shirts and detergents, aluminum furniture, beer in no-return bottles, and Detroit’s latest creation—is that all this “progress” has greatly increased the impact on the environment.

This pattern of economic growth is the major reason for the environmental crisis. A good deal of the mystery and confusion about the sudden emergence of the environmental crisis can be removed by pinpointing, pollutant by pollutant, how the postwar technological transformation of the United States economy has produced not only the much-heralded 126 per cent rise in GNP, but also, at a rate about ten times faster than the growth of GNP, the rising levels of environmental pollution.