Fighting to Save the Earth from Man

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in an inefficient way; the term "slurb" was coined in California to describe sleazy, sprawling subdivisions. By planning ahead, much land can be preserved, with houses and services concentrated between green belts. But Californians, like all Americans, have a record of acting for their own benefit only after the damage is done.

SALINITY. The Imperial Valley has perhaps the richest farm land in the nation, producing five or six bumper crops a year. The valley's intense irrigation, however, is raising the level of the water table to the bottom of the irrigation trenches. Salts are pulled to the surface —and salts do not evaporate. In time, the soil becomes too saline to support normal crops.

FERTILIZERS. To boost crop production, nitrogen fertilizers are spread liberally on California's superb farm lands. Just as people get hooked on drugs, so the soil seems to become addicted to chemical additives and loses its ability to fix its own nitrogen. As a result, more and more fertilizer has to be used. What makes the problem doubly serious is that the nitrates eventually turn up in the water supply, where they endanger human health.

WASTES. Each of California's 18.5 million residents throws away 20 lbs. of solid wastes per day—an amount that in a year would make a wall 100 ft. wide by 30 ft. high stretching from Oregon to Mexico. Most of the garbage is buried in landfills, but space is running out, and there is no state or regional authority to coordinate solutions. San Francisco now plans to pay the town of Mountain View $2 per ton to accept 2,000 tons of solid wastes a day. The arrangement stops when Mountain View's marshes are filled, in about six years. After that, nobody is quite sure what to do.

When the Snow Fell Black

The U.S. is far from alone in these battles with pollution and waste. The smog in Tokyo is so dense that some residents are asking: Is it worth owning a car when there is no blue sky to drive it under? The tidy Swiss are horrified to discover that their three crystalline lakes — Geneva, Constance and Neuchatel—are turning murky with effluent from littoral cities and industries; the trout and perch in them are nearly gone. In Italy, trash is neatly collected in plastic bags and then thrown like confetti over the landscape. Norway's legendary fjords are awash with stinking cakes of solid wastes.

Pollution respects no political bound aries. The Rhine flows 821 miles past the potash mines of Alsace, through the industrial Ruhr Valley to the North Sea. Known as "Europe's sewer," the river is so toxic that even hardy eels have difficulty surviving. The Dutch, who live at the river's mouth, have a stoic slogan: "Holland is the rubbish bin of the world." In Sweden, when black snow fell on the province of Sma-land, authorities suspected that thick soot had wafted from across the sea.

Where do most of the pollutants end up? Probably in the oceans, which cover 70% of the globe. Yet even the oceans can absorb only so much filth; many ecologists are worried about the effects on phytoplankton. If the supertanker Torrey Canyon had leaked herbicides rather than oil, the spillage would have wiped out all plankton life in the North Sea. Other ecologists fear that the oceans will become so burdened with noxious wastes that they will lose their vast power of