Confronting Future Environmental Challenges

The early 1970s saw the great­est outpouring of legislative initiatives ever on a single is­sue—the environment. Just a few months after the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, President Nixon proposed the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, which would consolidate federal environmental programs. Earlier that year, he signed legislation that established the Council on Environmental Quality and required environmental impact statements for large federal projects. In 1970, Congress also passed the Clean Air amendments, which called for the establishment of national air quality standards, and the Water Quality Improve­ment Act, which established liability for oil spill clean-up costs. Over the next 20 years, Congress would enact over 20 other major environmental laws, including the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 and amendments to the Clean Air, Water Quality Improve­ment, and Federal Water Pollution Con­trol acts in 1977.

Perhaps more important than these legislative actions, however, has been a fundamental change in the attitude of the American public toward the environment. The environmental concern that began emerging in 1970 has now so thoroughly penetrated American society that even industry has seen the need to cooperate in preserving environmental quality. This was not always the case, as an incident during the 1970 Earth Day ceremonies at Colorado College illustrates.

Before the early 1970s, it was com­mon to think of the sources and manifestations of environmental problems as mostly local or regional in scope. More recently, scientists have observed that pollutants, particularly those emitted into the air, can be transported and can accumulate far from the place of origin, causing widespread environmental deg­radation. Two phenomena associated with the long-range transport and accumula­tion of pollutants in environmental media are acid rain and global warming.

Acid rain occurs when sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), which are emitted in industrial operations such as electricity generation, chemically react in the atmosphere to form sulfuric and nitric acids. These acids can accumulate in soil and bodies of water, retarding plant growth and killing fish. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide emissions in the United States are blamed for acid rains that may damage forests as far away as Canada.

This year, Congress is considering a major reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, as part of which it is investigating the trading of emissions allowance per­mits among electricity generating plants—a major source of SO₂ emissions. Under this approach, a plant that would be re­quired to reduce its SO₂ emissions would have the option of making the reduction itself or paying other plants to reduce their emissions in excess of their required amounts. Such a purchase would be al­lowed as long as the total emissions re­duction target was met. Emissions per­mit trading would be pursued by those plants that find it cheaper to buy emis­sions reductions than to improve their own emissions control. Economists say that such trading would probably prove a more efficient way of meeting national SO₂ emissions standards than the tradi­tional regulatory approach, perhaps sav­ing billions of dollars.

A more difficult problem, since it will require more than domestic initiatives, is global warming, a phenomenon many scientists believe will result from the accumulation in the atmosphere of car­bon dioxide emissions and other so-called greenhouse gases. These gas emissions, some say, will create a blanket around the earth, causing the earth to retain heat. The potential effects of this rise in tem­peratures worldwide include coastal in­undation and erosion, resulting from a rise in sea levels, and ecological and agricultural changes.

The impact of agricultural activities on the environment was not a major con­cern of the environmental legislation of the 1970s. For example, in focusing on “point,” or direct, sources of water pollu­tion, which are mainly industrial and municipal, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 gave little consid­eration to “non-point,” or diffuse, sources of pollution, which are often agricultural. Yet today, the major pollutant load on US water courses is from non-point sources, primarily agriculture. Runoff from cultivated land can contaminate water with agricultural chemicals, as well as deplete oxygen in water and add ex­cess nutrients and salt to it. In addition, soil eroded from farmland can silt up reservoirs, destroy fish habitat, and con­strict river channels (which leads to in­creased flooding). It is likely that future water quality improvement will be possible only through further control of non-point sources of pollution. How­ever, controlling these sources presents far more complex regulatory problems than does controlling point sources.

Scientists now recognize that agricul­tural activities have far-reaching impacts on the environment. They even affect the earth’s carbon cycle, which in turn af­fects weather and climate. For instance, the burning of trees to clear land for crop cultivation releases carbon dioxide. This contributes to global warming and may reduce the earth’s ability to absorb carbon through the process of photosynthesis. As the effects of agricultural activities on the environment become more clear, the United States and other countries must determine which circumstances are likely to permit both indefinite development of profitable agriculture and environmental protection. The United States has already begun to examine policies that might bet­ter integrate the different objectives of agricultural and environmental programs. For the first time, broad environmental concerns will be a major factor in formu­lating agricultural policies, as Congress debates the 1990 farm bill.

Thus far, efforts to deal with both ci­vilian and military nuclear wastes in a decisive way have come to nought. For some years, the Department of Energy (DOE), which is responsible for nuclear waste disposal in the United States, has been trying to find a place to store the most dangerous of nuclear wastes—those that must be isolated from ecological systems for at least 10,000 years. The search for a geological formation suitable for long-term storage of high-­level nuclear waste has come to focus on Yucca Mountain in Nevada. However, political resistance from Nevada plus doubts about the geological integrity of the site have led to a standoff between the state of Nevada and the DOE. Although the federal government has spent more than half-a-billion dollars studying the mountain’s suitability as a nuclear waste storage site, DOE Secretary James D. Watkins recently reported that the site assessment work performed thus far was not of sufficient quality to allow the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to grant the necessary licenses for nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain.

Discussion of the new generation of concerns often proceeds under the terminological umbrella of “sustainable development,” a concept that spans a range of moral and economic considerations. The general concerns it envelops are continued improvements in the well-­being of people in developed countries and protection and maintenance of a safe and attractive environment.

These goals cannot be achieved with­out a better understanding of the natural world than we now possess and a much greater ability to put that understanding into practical use through technology. Thus, we have no choice but to make technology serve human interest better than ever before. In this context, the conventional distinctions among natu­ral resources, the environment, and hu­man resources blur. Indeed, the central focus becomes human knowledge, skills, and innovative and adventurous behav­ior, all of which are beyond our present ability to measure and assess, despite their clear importance. What we do know is that education is a prerequisite for most of them. In that connection, on every test of scientific and intellectual attainment, our young people rank behind every other industrialized country. That may be our greatest challenge for Earth Day 1990.