End of the Dream Read online

  TRANSPOSE LETTER, EARLY PORTION OF “END OF DREAM” AND LAST SECTION. TO GO AS SCHEDULED. OPERATOR TO REPORT DELAY, IF ANY.

  WILLARD P. GULLIVER, Acting Director

  District Two, Central City 6/17/23

  I

  Selections from 1975: Date of No Return

  NOTE: Part I consists of excerpts from a book published in 1995 by Doubleday and Company, in New York. Its author, George Washington Packett, a scholar with degrees in history and creative journalism, contributed many technical papers to appropriate periodicals but also wrote seventeen “mass audience” books about the “current” state of civilization in the years between 1964 and 1997.

  The following excerpts from his most famous (or, to many scholars, most infamous) work are not always in the order in which they appeared. Some are reprinted here only in part. But Packett does convey, in the editor’s opinion, something of the attitudes of individuals, groups, governments and the public, in the years he discusses.

  What is important to bear in mind, here, is not so much that Packett’s attitudes and evaluations are his own, but that his facts and his factual descriptions, his quotes and attributions are absolutely correct.

  WILLARD P. GULLIVER, Editor

  In 1970 the American public was exposed for the first time to an all-media warning of its environmental condition. Television, not then three-dimensional, the press, the mass magazines and the radio almost overnight began to discuss “pollution,” “conservation” and a “clean environment as a right.” These subjects had been more or less in the news and in hazy national consciousness for some years. But, almost with the first day of this special year, public concern was focused on the matter.

  Within weeks an anti-pollution crusade became the major emotion of students and diverted their often mutinous attention and activities from such recently leading “causes” as the war in Vietnam, the draft, poverty, the low status of “blacks,” the proper term at that time for Negroes, education and its administration, along with such broader matters as the “system” and “establishment” which many activist young people in numerous unruly organizations were then proposing to destroy.

  The new and exploding concern soon became a political matter. It was said that all the members of Congress had become “instant ecologists,” a remarkable—rather, a miraculous—achievement. The President Richard Milhous Nixon, was among the early converts. Previously, he had not been interested in conservation or pollution save as throwaways in campaign speeches—promises of improvements in the American environment which, however, were non-specific and tendered offhandedly.

  In early 1970, however, the President changed his mind and suggested five billions be budgeted in 1971 for federal aid in reducing air and water pollution, and similar sums in the years to follow. However, with that abrupt shift of view, he did not show any sign of understanding the actual problem. Congress was as uncomprehending, with a few exceptions.

  Not more than one American in ten thousand had, in 1970, or later, for that matter, any true sense of the nature or the certainty of the coming calamities. Not that many, in early 1970, perceived that a tremendous and absolute shift in all dominating cultural concepts would be necessary for the mere hopeful beginning of environmental restoration and salvage. Those who remember the era now find it impossible, or nearly so, to understand why there was so little effective public response to a situation which already seemed crystal clear.

  In years just past there had been many, many calamities that were pregnant of ill omen. One London “smog” had caused, in four days, deaths at the rate of more than a thousand a day. Los Angeles had been conducting a long battle against its still often contaminated air after the citizens had reluctantly, and following only unarguable tests, admitted their cars were the agents of their misery. Oil spills at sea and in harbors had occurred and the grounding and breakup of one oil tanker, the Torrey Canyon, had greased long stretches of shore in the English Channel. There had been a very serious spill or, more accurately, leak from at-sea petroleum wells off California with subsequent turgid incursions at and near Santa Barbara.

  Every major river in America was grossly polluted, an “open sewer” even in current terms, and the overwhelming contaminants consisted not only of countless industrial wastes and effluents but urban sewage which often reached rivers and lakes untreated, as the same lines that carried human sewage served for “storm” or street waste. The latter frequently overtaxed such treatment plants as existed, and so emptied human wastes, fecal and all others, into waters, without prior chlorination or other processing.

  That Lake Erie was “dead” had been known for years. That its sister lakes, Michigan, Ontario and Huron, were “dying” was also known. Superior was endangered though in a relatively viable state in 1970.

  . . .

  Americans were producing a daily volume of solid wastes at the per capita rate of between four and five pounds. “Garbage strikes” had already revealed to the citizens of several cities what the scope of that single disposal problem was, when collection stopped for days or a few weeks.

  The rat population of the nation was estimated as greater than the human, some two hundred million rats, give or take a million or two.

  Many other dangerous contaminants were known to abound in the dust and fumes of cities and in manufacturing areas. The asbestos used in numerous major products was thought to be at least partially responsible for the rise of respiratory ills, especially those resembling the chronic and finally fatal lung ailments of asbestos miners. Lead levels were rising in human beings constantly exposed to automotive traffic and the tetraethyl lead then used to raise the “octane rating” of gasoline, or to reduce the knock characteristic of gasoline-using engines.

  People by 1970 were fairly aware of many other and different toxins in local but often extensive regions. Nitrogen oxides, sulphuric acid, other acids, carbon monoxide and sundry gases abounded in urban air and manufacturing locales. In some cities and areas, moisture combined with sulphuric stack effluents became an acid strong enough to “dissolve” such fabrics as were made from certain plastics. Nylon stockings, a synthetic material closely resembling silk and more durable, at times literally “melted” on the legs of women on the street.

  . . .

  Perhaps the most startling, and certainly the longest-publicized, contaminants were the chlorinated hydrocarbons and, particularly, DDT. A scientist-author, Rachel Carson, had dramatized the perils these involved in a book called Silent Spring almost ten years earlier. The book had been ridiculed by innumerable colleagues, by pesticide chemists, manufacturers and persons with interests in agriculture.

  By 1970 it was known that DDT and its relatives had entered the seven seas, via rivers and rain, and now were found in measurable amounts in the fatty tissues of birds, mammals and other orders of life, the world over. In addition, a plastic widely used as material for liquid containers of household and other substances produced, when burned, a toxin resembling DDT and having the same effect. Since such “disposable” material was usually burned, in backyard trash piles or municipal dumps and incinerators, it added a bizarre quantum to the DDT peril. Several species of birds on the Atlantic coastal areas north of Florida had become extinct, or doomed, as these DDT and allied chemicals affected their enzyme systems and prevented the formation of shells for their eggs.

  DDT was concentrated in human fatty tissues, too. By 1970, mother’s milk contained from twelve to thirty times the amount of these toxins that the federal bureaus allowed as the limit for interstate commerce in cows’ milk. Observers had grimly predicted that in twenty more years, at the current rate, Americans who were grossly overweight would have, in their fat, such an amount of the material that reducing would be impossible. In other words, any effort to shed excess fat would pour the poisons, DDT mainly, into their systems and in fatal amounts.

  Even so, it was argued that the massive production and world-wide distribution of DDT must not stop. This pesticide was the
cheapest for mosquito control and the control of other bearers of disease. Without DDT tens or hundreds of millions would be stricken with malaria and other ills, including dengue or breakbone fever, yellow fever, certain forms of encephalitis, and so on. This mercy-need took no cognizance of the fact that where DDT had been used for some years the insects it was expected to eliminate had become or were becoming resistant to the poison.

  President Nixon had in 1969, by executive order, decreed that the DDT group of pesticides was to be phased out and, meantime, used only where “necessary.” The public thus assumed that proper measures were being taken in the matter. Actually, the use of DDT and its deadly associates was nowhere prevented for any individual or company.

  As one looks back at countless examples of that common act of seeming validity but no actual force, it is impossible to judge whether or not the administrators and executives who employed it were aware of its perfidy. Checking to find the truth in the environment was possible only for specialists, or teams of specialists. Checking for nationwide response, if any, was even less feasible, owing to the scope and cost of such a project as well as the need of know-how.

  . . .

  The land of the United States was being skinned and gutted by thousands of business and engineering endeavors. Roads, railroads, power lines and rights of way along these had been and were being kept free of brush by the use of various chemicals, some of them enormously toxic, as cyanide, and others, complex hormones that had a deadly effect on the green plant spectrum. These, of course, drained in rainstorms from their place of application into the surrounding ecosystems. The extent of that menace can be imagined when it is known that, by 1970, these mere sides of roads and rail beds, power-line paths and the like had a total area greater than that of the New England States.

  A newscaster, Walter Cronkite, for Columbia Broadcasting System, a major TV network, disclosed in February of that year that the total amount of annual pollutants in the United States was 25,000,000,000 tons.

  Even so, up until 1970, there had been less total concern and protest of the general public over that immense amount of contamination than over the allegedly controversial fluoridation of water supplies to reduce dental caries in children.

  Again, there was far more anxiety, nationally, over the carcinogenic and other ill effects of cigarette smoking than over the sum of water and air pollution.

  It will seem difficult to understand the public’s lack of balanced reason about the massive threats it faced. A nation, stinking from border to border, its lakes dying, its rivers the national slop jar, garbage pail and factory dump, would be convulsed by the finding that sugar substitutes, cyclamates and saccharine, were “carcinogenic” and, then, federally banned. Few citizens would trouble to note, even if they had the competence, that the attribution of cancer-causing properties in these diet sweeteners and sugar alternatives for diabetics was based on mouse research, or that the amount required to cause some mouse malignancies was, by weight and cost and for the equivalent of a normal adult, about three hundred dollars’ worth a day.

  . . .

  Strip mining was denuding and destroying enormous areas. Open-pit mines and quarries gutted ever more and more extensive regions. New roads, airports and car parking spaces removed a million acres or more from use as plant cover, annually.

  Estuaries and river mouths along seacoasts, including immense stretches of marsh and swamp, were being filled at a tremendous rate though these were known to be the mating and/or breeding and rearing grounds for scores of valuable crustacea, bivalves and fishes.

  . . .

  Of course, in 1970, the public had not grasped the simple fact that its sudden interest in environmental cleanup was on a collision course with the goods and services or Gross National Product which it bought or used at an ever rising rate, one it had not the slightest intention of curtailing.

  There was talk about “sacrifices” necessary and “passing the costs of cleanup on to the consumer.” There was, however, far more talk about inflation and recession, the seemingly paradoxical condition in the nation at that time. Economists were sure the Gross National Product would soon hit the trillion-dollar figure it had approached in earlier years. It did so. The census would be taken, as usual, in 1970. At the year’s start it was estimated that the population would number two hundred and four millions. Welfare programs on every level, medical care for the aged, schemes for a guaranteed income and other such paternalistic, sometimes decent, often expensive and wasteful endeavors and plans were constantly launched, or in long-term being, or contemplated, all with one aim:

  America and its affluent society felt it must and would assure every citizen of an education to any level desired, or its semblance, a sufficient income to purchase those goods and services that represented “un-poverty,” every modern medical and health advantage, in effect a “packaged” life, birth to death, and more than seventy years between the two, then a national average.

  None of the major corporations providing the basic goods and services of the nation had any thought of reducing its production in the decade ahead, or ever. Instead, various underestimates of demand had caused countless minor and many serious dilemmas and mass discomforts owing to corporate blunder and underpreparation. Strikes, the delays inevitable in manufacturing processes, the managerial errors noted, and other factors resulted in telephonic foul-ups and inadequate electrical supply for growing numbers of communities and cities.

  There was not enough electric power to keep New York City air-conditioned in the summer of 1970 and not enough to keep its refrigerators going. Brownouts were common in dozens of areas owing to power shortage. The New York telephone system was similarly inadequate and for the same cause, underestimate of demand. Postal service, nationwide, was close to collapse owing to obsolete equipment and procedure.

  So a public that was at least nervously informed of certain of its more visible pollutants was also one that raged for and expected quick and great increments of needed services and goods. The corporations supplying them were more than eager to expand.

  Electric power was produced in three ways, by burning fossil fuel, by hydroelectric generation and from nuclear reactors. Coal, gas and oil, the main energy sources, were, of course, contaminating. Nuclear reactors were proliferating, although not as rapidly as had first been expected.

  All such plants produced fantastic amounts of heated effluent, the coolant for the “boiling water” systems that powered turbines and generators. Two to three million gallons a minute were raised by ten or more degrees when returned to their sources, lakes or rivers or bays on the seaboard. Other problems with these power sources were subtler, not yet understood, or, if understood by experts, still unheard of by the average citizen.

  He—and she—would come to know them the hard way. Whether a general effort at educating the public in reactor liabilities would have led to political pressure and foresighted alterations of reactor planning is undeterminable. That sort of “pressure” would have been necessary. It never was encouraged by the corporations, of course, or by the Atomic Energy Commission, and not by any other federal or state body. In 1970 it was predicted that within a decade, or at most two to three, uses of water would exceed the total available rainfall on the nation. The demand for reactor-cooling water, alone, would soon amount to more than half the flow of all rivers within the bounds of the country. The resulting heat rise would, of course, do vast ecological damage, but of sorts not really known or much discussed. That such torrents of effluent were also slightly radioactive, and that the hot isotopes would in some part be precipitated on riparian, esturial and lake bottoms, was not even noted publicly. The high-level radiation of stack gases—again, a matter not yet of general concern—was an unknown.

  What was known, though not with any public anxiety in scale, was that the need to change fuel rods in reactors, and to replace radioactive parts of the assemblies, involved transport of “hot” material to sites where fuel-recovery plants ret
rieved the unexpended uranium or plutonium for reuse, and that the hot junk was also shipped to remote places where it was retained in boiling-hot “tank farms” till its isotopes should lose energy enough for less costly storage. Fuel rods and other metal machine parts were moving across US by truck and rail in special containers with individual cooling systems and lead casing to keep their thermal and radioactive violence under wraps till their destinations were reached.

  Few people knew that the overradiated junk required centuries of boiling, of decanting and other careful control before being safe to package and move elsewhere, underground in some presumably safe geological region. That every rail line was measurably “hot” from such haulage was not widely appreciated as significant. That this extensive and costly series of processes and of transport would rise exponentially as reactors proliferated, again, was knowable but not even dimly grasped by the vast majority. Problems of that complexity and sophistication were far beyond the public grasp—and of the grasp of Congress or state or county governing bodies. It was assumed that people who did have the knowledge were managing the situation well.

  Nothing could have been more mistaken.

  Nobody, or almost nobody, had enough knowledge to contemplate usefully the present situation, not to mention the future. In 1970 there had as yet been no transportation or other known disaster of a sort even to start the public worrying about the growing risk from this single source. Reactors were believed to be the best possible energy suppliers of the future, the least polluting and, in fact, the only visible new sources in a nation using up finite fossil fuels.