Nature Operates in Precarious Balance
Air, water, and landthose are the systems. How do they work?
Look into a pond. A fish feeds there on tiny plants and animals called plankton. In time, the fish dies. Micro-organisms in the water break the creature down into basic chemicals, consuming oxygen from the water in the process. Plant plankton, nourished by those chemicals, produce oxygen to replace it. Animal plankton feed on the plants, fish eat the tiny animals, and the cycle begins anew.
On land, too, nature moves full circle. Living things are nourished there, grow old and die, then decompose to enrich the land again.
A thin envelope of air surrounds the planet. We use its oxygen, exhaling carbon dioxide, which vegetation absorbs. Plants use the carbon for growth by the marvelous process called photosynthesis, and return oxygen to the atmosphere. Thus nature's delicate balance is maintained.
Consider First Our Overloaded Air
For some "air pollution," let us give thanks. Dust and other particles in the atmosphere serve as nuclei about which raindrops form. But man has overloaded the sky. For centuries he has pumped particulate matter and gases into the atmosphere. As far back as 1661, a tract on air pollution was published in England: Fumifugium: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated.
Today much of the world suffers from the eye-smarting, lung-scarring curse we call smog. In Los Angeles and other great cities it comes in large part from automobile engines.
Last March I braved the streets of Tokyo, in that careening, cacophonous time of day the Japanese call rushawa. I was there for the first International Symposium on Environmental Disruption, where scientists from 13 countries had gathered to exchange views.
"Environmental disruption" was easy enough to see from the window of my taxi. Where else in the world, I wondered, must traffic policemen pause regularly to breathe oxygen. Conditions became so bad last summer that all cars were banned from 122 Tokyo streets on Sundaysthe busiest of Japan's shopping days.
In Essen, Germany, I saw disruption in another formsmog caused mainly by industries. The chief of air-pollution control and land protection for North Rhine Westphalia, Dr. Heinrich Stratmann, showed me two small steel squares. The first was bright and new. The second, exposed to the Ruhr's smog for only two months, was chocolate brown and deeply corroded.
Polluted Air Circles the Earth
We can clean up land before we use it, and purify water before we drink it, butexcept in air-conditioned roomswe must breathe air as it comes to us. Scientists have tracked one type of air pollutionradioactive fallouttwice around the globe. The hazy air I am breathing now in Washington, D. C., may contain sulphur from a Pittsburgh steel mill and carbon monoxide from a Chicago taxi, for this continent's weather patterns often send a river of polluted air flowing southeastward. Someone in Norfolk, Virginia, will be using this air again when I am finished with it.
Automobiles, factories, heating furnaces, power plants, trash incineratorseach adds to the problem, so control is difficult. Compounding that difficulty has been the diversity of agencies responsible for control. Until the President this year established a new Environmental Protection Agency, air-pollution control came chiefly under the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, water pollution under the Department of the Interior, and land pollution under the Departments of Agriculture, HEW, and Interior.
Now virtually all pollution control is to be directed by one federal agency. But it will still be a complex problem, with much responsibility devolving upon state, county, and municipal governments.
