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> B.A.S.F., an American subsidiary of a large German chemical company, has suspended plans to build a $200 million plastics and dye complex in poverty-stricken Beaufort County, S.C., until it determines just how expensive Government-ordered pollution controls will be.
> A recent Federal Water Quality Administration edict against thermal pollution, if strictly enforced, could reduce power production by plants using fossil fuel (oil, coal) and force utility companies to start costly redesign of water-cooling systems.
New Challenge. Most environmentalists agree that ways must be found to help industries and cities pay for pollution control. Says Stanford University Population Biologist Paul Ehrlich: "It should be made perfectly clear that when the Government sets out to ban the use of DDT, society ought to do something to ease the transition for people who previously engaged in the manufacture of DDT." Ecologist Barry Commoner, who heads the botany department at Washington University, goes a step further. "Every one of the ecological changes needed for the sake of preserving our environment is going to place added stress within the social structure," he says. "We really can't solve the environmental crisis without solving the resulting social crisis." Commoner argues that once Americans recognize the problems, they will find proper answers through the democratic process. But those answers require hard economic choices: Who should pay for improving the environment? How can a recession-hit town eject polluting plants at the expense of vitally needed jobs?
The key problem seems to be that the rhetoric of ecology too often makes the subject look like a confused mix of unrelated alarms and issues. In fact, most of the issues are interrelated. The DDT that kills birds and fish may seem remote in importance when compared with the rats and garbage that infest ghetto slums. Yet both DDT and rats directly degrade the quality of U.S. life. Nevertheless, some aspects of the environmental problem are clearly more pressing than others. For example, public-health and land-use planning should rank higher than campaigns against litter and noise. Curbing carbon monoxide in cities is more important than saving caribou in Alaska. For environmentalists, the new challenge is how to retain ecology's holistic view of man and nature while yet recognizing that the movement will soon fade unless it sets priorities that millions of Americans can understand and support.
* Last week Attorney General John Mitchell ordered the Justice Department to file suits to bar eight large corporations—including Allied Chemical, Olin, Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific—from poisoning public waters with mercury.