"Ecology?" scoffs a black militant in Chicago. "I don't give a good goddam about ecology!" In Georgia, Union Camp Corporation's director of air and water resources, Glenn Kimble, wonders whether mankind will suffer "a whole hell of a lot if the whooping crane doesn't quite make it." Flowery-hatted ladies from the D.A.R. have served notice that concern over pollution "is being distorted and exaggerated by emotional declarations and by intensive propaganda." Such backlash views are now being voiced in many parts of the country, although the protesters often have little more in common than the smoggy air they breathe.
Fancy or Fad. To some critics, the environmental movement resembles a children's crusade of opportunistic politicians, zealous Ivy Leaguers, longhaired ecoactivists and scientists who speak too sweepingly and too gloomily. The D.A.R. labels the movement "one of the subversive element's last steps." Members of that element, the ladies add, have "gone after the military and the police, and now they're going after our parks and playgrounds." In the same vein, several newspapers from Alabama to Alaska solemnly stressed the happenstance that Earth Day (April 22) fell on Lenin's birthday.
The Red-plot notion hardly impresses serious critics like University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman. Instead, they view the environmental movement as a mere fad that will soon vanish, like the War on Poverty. Friedman also decries the tendency of some crusaders to cast big industrial corporations* as "evil devils who are deliberately polluting the air." He argues that the real source of most pollution is the consumer.
Both the leftist Progressive Labor Party and Conservative Columnist William F. Buckley Jr. see the movement as a diversion from more important national priorities. Joining them in this view are many antiwar students who feel that peace far outranks pollution as a protest goal. S.D.S. chapters on many campuses have also publicly embraced anti-ecology because President Nixon is publicly pro-ecology.
Blacks generally are the most vocal opponents of all. Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes has said that providing housing, clothing and food for the poor should take precedence over finding ways to combat air and water pollution. Says Richard Hatcher, black mayor of Gary, Ind.: "The nation's concern with environment has done what George Wallace was unable to do: distract the nation from the human problems of black and brown Americans."
Other protests are bound to come as industries start to fight pollution. In many cases, marginal operations might indeed be forced out of business when they have to take on the added burden of pollution safeguards. Armco Steel Corp., for example, closed eight old open-hearth furnaces in Houston rather than equip them with costly antipollution devices. This kind of shutdown can cause economic havoc. Some cases:
> U.S. Steel Corp. has threatened to close all its plants in Duluth rather than spend $8,000,000 for pollution controls required by the state. A shutdown, city fathers fear, would throw 2,500 people out of work and severely damage the city's economy.