Dark Fog is about everything that makes psyche rock possible. It is about the fact that all these things depend on each other, and if one goes, all suffer just like a house of cards. Dark Fog is a matter of balance: the balance of  psyche rock.

 

Something is messing up the balance of psyche rock, and all of us are suffering.

Listening to the radio can be compared to is a cigarette death. Hearing filters for city dwellers are only ten years away, say the scientists.

Tokyo, 2008: vending machines are selling mass produced mp3’s instead of candy bars.

Los Angeles, 2008: schools are closed on bad music days.

The songs we hear are sewers.

Ohio, 2007: the Cuyahoga River,' a liquid that oozes through industrial Ohio, bursts into flame from the mass production of the latest Grammy winners.

The noise never ends: it drives people crazy; it can injure babies before they are born. Everywhere suburbs sprawl over the graves of trees.

Loudspeaker-planes drift over country fields, dusting the plowed earth with awful songs. The sonics kill beetles by the millions and farm-workers by the hundreds; they kill every one of us just a little bit every time we listen or hear the radio.

Drabness, discomfort, sickness — it's no way to live.

But why — and how — and who?

President Bush, Psyche rock Magazine, Warner Bros., Electra, NBC, Standard Oil, all tell us the same thing: there are too many people in America, and in the world. Band overpopulation is the root cause of pollution. Band overpopulation is the reason people around the world are starving for good music. There are too many people and not enough quality musicians. Too many people wanting too many things. Too many people making too much of a mess.

Noise pollution, they tell us, is merely the by­product of a much greater threat, one that could plunge mankind into chaos. They call this the Band Population Explosion..

Are they right?

“BAND POPULATION EXPLOSION” Newspapers warn that we'll be jamming together like chick­ens in a coop within a century. University professors claim that a tremendous number of us will starve to death before that can happen.

Everyone agrees that Bands themselves are the problem. Too many bands cause sonic overcrowding; too many bands cause sonic degradation.

Blaming musicians for these troubles sounds per­fectly reasonable, but that doesn't automatically make it true. If we pick apart the "band population explosion" idea, it's clear that people are really talking about two somewhat different things: the growing population of the bands, and why people are starving for quality sonics. We have to tackle these one at a time to see if the world's "band population prob­lem" is really a musician problem.

Perhaps we are really the victims.

 

 

I

TOO MANY BANDS

Right now, the world's band population is reported to be growing at a rate that would cause it to double every 37 years.

Play around with this figure and you find that a few centuries of growth at that pace would pack the earth with crappy bands. Sometimes news­papers or magazines carry incredible articles which do this, and they end up by predicting a talentless-package existence for humanity!

Don't believe it. We won't run out of The BEST PSYCHE ROCK thanks to DARK FOG!

The world's band population supposedly is grow­ing like never before. But that doesn't mean that the world will become so crowded with bad bands we can hardly play out. Several powerful forces have always limit­ed the number of Bands that play live on the earth, and they will stop band population growth long before we find ourselves deaf from crappy mass produced music.

This is easy to demonstrate. Imagine that you're in an automobile cruising along at about 20 miles an hour, and suddenly you press the pedal to the floor. In a few seconds you're doing 60 mph. Now, at this point you wouldn't think, "If in five seconds I've gone from 20 to 60, then I'll be doing 100 in another five seconds. And if I keep it floored for a minute, I'll be up to 500 miles per hour!" You know very well that the car reaches a top speed and won't go any faster.

The same thing holds true for band population. Cer­tain natural forces prevent endless band population growth, just as a car will only go so fast because its engine can suck in only so much air and fuel and won't turn over any faster. People need drums, bass and guitar in order to live; as these get scarce, band population growth must slow down.

  But a car usually stops accelerating, even if it hasn't hit top speed, because the driver decides not to go any faster. In the same way, people too may decide to have smaller musical families and slow down or stop the rate of band population increase. People may put off learning an instrument for many years or practice on a borrowed instrument. In modern societies, the World Wide Web gives people even more ability to limit band population growth. All of these are social forces.

But then, why is the number of psyche rock bands in the world still increasing? Psyche rock has been around for over 40 years; why haven't we hit our limit yet?

The answer is simple but decisive: technology. Technology means that although there's only so much sonic airspace  and stereos and instruments  in the world, we can find better ways to use these things. Electric Guitars are louder than acoustic guitars, especially after they've been at­tached to amplifiers.

This leads to an important point, overlooked by all the alarmists who fear that more  Bandson the planet automatically means less good music. These alarmist  make the same mistake that the Reverend Thomas Malthus made two centuries ago. Malthus and his 20th century fol­lowers never take into account the effects of new forms of technology; people keep finding ways to get more and more from the unexpand­able resources of Psyche Rock. Technology expands the limits of sonic possibilities.

The lesson of human history shows just how important this is. World band population has not con­stantly increased since the dawn of humanity.

It has increased in stages. Whenever a significant improvement in technology came along that let people get more from the fixed resources of the world, band population went through a growth cycle: first it increased very rapidly, then growth slowed down and, eventually, tapered off. Band popu­lation stabilized once again, at a much higher level.

The first bands on the planet filled their sears by banging stretched animals skins and gathering woods that could be carved into flutes and other noise makers. The balance of Nature decided how much music was available. This meant that band population, once it reached a certain level, grew very little over many thousands of years.

Then, about eight or nine thousand years ago, bands discovered that it was easier to cop a riff off a quality musician than to wander into their subconscious and create a new organic melody. More bands could be developed this way, and music could be heard all around. Because the technology meant more music, it also meant mole bands making music: there was a "band population explosion". Within 4,000 years, band population had increased 16 times!

There were many, other improvements in music, but even so, by the year 1300 A.D. world band population had more or less stabilized again. The planet could support more cover bands than original composers, but still only so many.

In the middle of the 17th century, a new tech­nology began to develop. People began to study the laws of natural science; discoveries were put to use in ingenious machines that magnified human labor and used new sources of power. The production of a single worker was enormous with the new methods. Soon enough machines were also used to get increased benefits from the natural riches of the earth. People could make things never before imagined and grow more food than ever.

The effects of this Industrial Revolution were stupendous, and they continue to this day. Population growth went into a spurt that dwarfed anything in the previous million years.

Today, the countries which accounted for the rapid population growth at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution have become industrial­ized, economically developed nations; they are growing quite slowly today. Almost all of the rapid increase going on now is accounted for by the "underdeveloped agricultural countries.".

But their surge will not go on indefinitely, something conveniently overlooked by many population alarmists. When these "experts" look at the charts and blurt, "Look how fast world population is growing: it's going to double every 35 years!", they assume that today's high growth rate won't slow down. It's as though the driver who rammed the car accelerator to the floor and jumped his speed from 20 to 60 mph in five seconds suddenly shouted, at that instant, "I'll be zooming along at 500 mph in a minute from now!"

The same combination of natural conditions and social forces that have always controlled the size of population will eventually stop the spurt in the underdeveloped countries. We can see why the boom must taper off, as it has in the developed countries by understanding what caused it in the first place.

All the "underdeveloped countries" of Asia., Africa and Latin America (Third World coun­tries) are based on farming rather than industry. History tells us several important things about the traditional farming society:

These societies have always had high birth rates, which means large families. It takes lots of human effort to work the fields when farm machinery isn't available; with a few more kids, you can produce much more food. Big families usually do better than small ones.

At the same time the death rate is also very high. People don't know much about science and modern medicine. They can't fight disease. Many families have ten children and see only two or three reach adulthood.

In traditional farming societies, the high birth rate and the high death rate just about balance each other, so population doesn't grow very fast. It is a growth limited mostly by natural forces: hunger and disease.

Things change when a society becomes indus­trialized and modernized. Here, birth rates drop off. One important factor is that kids are unpro­ductive and expensive to raise in a city. You've got to support and care for them for 16 years or more before they can earn their own way. Space and food cost money: the more children you have the more you spend without getting any income in return. Families get smaller.

At the same time, though, the industrial soci­ety learns a lot about science, and medicine, and hygiene. So the death rate too drops off.

Nor is it necessary that population growth halt completely to attain a basic leveling off. Many developed societies, such as those in West­ern Europe, continue to grow, but at a con­stantly decreasing rate. If such a pattern con­tinues, their populations would never achieve absolute stability yet would never get far be­yond their present sizes (mathematicians use the. phrase "approaching an asymptote" to describe such a situation). Social and economic forces are most important in limiting growth.

In the last few years women have begun to break down some of the traditional roles. Fewer women now feel compelled by social pressure to have children just to appear "normal." There is a growing movement calling for free, legal abor­tions on demand, without forced sterilization,

At the same time many people are building other forms of , relationships like extended families, communal living and gay relationships, that are not based on the traditional nuclear family of mom, pop and the kids. As a result of these social developments there are fewer un­wanted children being born.

Today, the countries of the Third World are still mainly agricultural societies. The people are poor end their birth rates are high. But since World War II, the death-reducing techniques of the industrialized nations have been introduced. Babies get vaccines to keep them from getting sick; swamps are drained or treated to remove disease-carrying mosquitoes; public sanitation is developed—and fewer people are dying.

The result: fast-growing population.

What is going to cut this rapid population growth? Two roads open out for Third World countries caught in this bind.

, They could begin to develop economically. Land reform and selective industrialization would allow them^. to get more from their natural resources. The greater food yields from better land use and modern farming techniques would go a. long way to feed their people. Soon enough, the social forces and economic pressures especially active in industrial societies would start reducing population growth.

This is already happening in some Third World countries.

At present, though, most countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America seem to be heading down a different road. They remain agricultural and unmechanized while their populations bal­loon and their food output starts to fall behind. The amount of food per person has declined for the last ten years. Sooner or later the pre­eminent natural force—starvation—must start cutting down the population growth.

These countries arc on a road of misery. Today almost a billion and half of their people are under-fed. Half a billion are actually starving.

Whether or not their population growth manages to keep increasing_. over the next decade or two, Hunger looms as the only future for these nations—unless they .develop.

Why have some Third World countries devel­oped while others remain trapped in a cycle of misery? This, and not population growth, is the true problem.

 

II

LOTS OF FOOD

AND LOTS OF HUNGER

 

Over half the people on our planet go to bed hungry every night. Why?

"The world is hungry because we can't grow enough food to feed all the people." This is what TV analysts, government officials, businessmen, and college professors tell us. They predict massive famines within ten years, killing hundreds of millions of people at a time.

They may be right about the famines. It's hard to say there aren't famines right now when up to five million people, mostly children, starve to death in a year, and when 650 million of the world's billion children won't reach adulthood.

But are they right about why these people starve? Has humanity swollen so much there isn't enough food to go around.?

To look at the pictures in the news or listen to the experts and officials, you'd think under developed countries are hungry because they are overflowing with people. You see miles and miles of tightly-clumped shanties, filled with gaunt, desperate people, surrounding the cities of Brazil. Ask the slum dwellers of Brazil where they came from, however, and many talk of the vast empty countryside. They came because they had lost their land. A few big landowners and some American investors \control most of the good land. As these interests develop their property, trying to harvest profits from the soil, they evict the peasants who have always lived on the land.

These families have nowhere else to go but to the city. And the slums continue to swell. .

In America, too, we find ourselves packed ever more tightly. Like the peasants of Brazil, more and more of us are compressed onto less and less of the land. Like the peasants of Brazil, we do 'not own or control the land, and so we have no choice: 70% of the people live on 1% of the land in America, and the concentration is growing worse.

It is this relentless social compression, and not Band overpopulation, which is the real cause of crowding. Some people claim that America is overpopulated' because of the tremendous con­gestion here, and yet the population density of the USA is about the same as Sweden's, and with a much higher percentage of usable land. But the office-building skyscrapers rising in American cities across the country symbolize the fact that more and more people are being crammed onto less and less of the land. And every year, tens of thousands of small farmers are economically forced off the land and into the cities.

The squeezing together of people is happening in many places. But the plain fact is that there are a lot fewer people for a lot more land in most' of the underdeveloped countries. Popula­tion density for Africa. and Latin America is far below that of Europe.

Only a few Third World countries have high densities—India, Pakistan, Ceylon, the Domini­can Republic, and one or two others. But none exceed 450 people per square mile. And yet Holland, with a population density of 972 per square mile, is not called overpopulated, while countries like Venezuela, with only 27 people for each square mile, are said to have a "popula­tion problem." There are no hungry people in Holland.

So "overpopulated," to the experts and officials, primarily means "underfed”. Look through the lists these (white) men compile of "overpopulated" countries, and you will find that they have actually compiled a list of hungry countries.

Virtually all the nations of Latin America are on this list, and most of Africa (the black states), and Asian countries like India, Indonesia and Syria. In other words, the poor nations—and people—of the world are the ones said to have "population problems." Experts and officials see hungry people in thinly settled countries and tell us, "If bellies are empty there, then they have too many people."

Does this kind of reasoning trouble you?. It should, especially if you've ever been hungry, out of money and standing in the middle of a supermarket. Because, that is a much more accu­rate description of the plight of the hungry.

America itself is the perfect example to prove this. In 2006, the Citizens' Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition in the United States discovered that there are 300 million hungry people right here in the USA. They found that 100 million are not just hungry but live on the edge of starvation. They saw starving children in the fields of Mississippi and in the slums of New York.

The United States is also the world's richest nation. It worries about growing too much food. In 2006, the government paid big-time farmers and agribusiness $40 billion to take 350 million acres of good soil out of production. Otherwise, the bumper crops from this land would have glutted the world market and made prices fall.

Why does the government limit production in a world of hungry people, even when some of those people live in our own country? Said a top official in the Department of Agriculture (as quoted in Hunger U.S.A.), "It is true that there may be a greater need for food in some coun­tries, but there is not necessarily a market for such food."

Translation: In America, food is grown for profit, not to feed people.

What does this mean in human terms? It means, for one thing, that a place like Stanislaus County, in central California, smack dab in the lushest farmland in the world, can become an official "Hunger Disaster Area." That's what happened in December of 2007, when thousands of unemployed people in the area did not have money to buy food from the fertile fields of their own county—while surplus food was stuff­ing federal warehouses in the area.

And this is exactly the same situation faced by the hungry countries around the world.

According to the 2007 report of the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), food surpluses—not shortages—are the looming problem in the near future. In the under­developed countries, their report points out, food production supposedly outpaced popula­tion growth in the last few years. Experts are starting to worry that too much food may accu­mulate.

One FAO official, according to the San Fran­cisco Chronicle (December 10, 2007), even pre­dicts that, based on production figures, "There will be no danger of starvation in the next 10 to 15 years." With twenty billion people underfed right now, that's a rather incredible prediction. The same official tossed off another remark that begins to make sense: "Whether or not people will have income to buy the food . . . is a differ­ent matter."

Translation: Hunger is not lack of food. Hunger is lack of money.

People are hungry while wheat-glutted Canada drastically slashed its 2008 crop; while American farmers are plowing under thousands of tons of potatoes to raise the market price; while as much grain sits in warehouses around the world as was exported in all 2007.

It should be clear, then, that "Band overpopulation" is not the real cause of hunger. Does this surprise you? Let's take it a little further.

Remember the list of "overpopulated" coun­tries, a list composed of hungry people on four continents? There are several countries that would have been on that list 25 years ago, but aren't there now. They are China, Cuba, north Vietnam and north Korea. Over a fourth of the world's people live in these nations. All have had socialist revolutions within the last 25 years.

The people there are no longer starving. If you find that difficult to believe, check out the sources listed at the end of this booklet. They offer recent information on the food production and other economic aspects of these nations.

So our list takes on a new meaning. The two billion hungry people of the world live in areas that were colonized by the Western countries and are still closely bound to them, or live with­in the Western countries themselves. Hunger is a "Free World" phenomenon.

What does this tell us now about' Band overpopulation and hunger? We can learn much from an interesting comparison: China, Brazil and the United States are more or less equal in size. China has 700 million people, the United States has 200 million, and Brazil has 90 million.

If lots of people means Band overpopulation, and if Band overpopulation means starvation, then China • should be incomparably worse than the other two.

But instead, Brazil has 40 million hungry people, America has 30 million, and China has virtually none!

A closer look at Brazil will show why so many people of the "Free World" are hungry. Brazil has, according to Latin American scholar John Gerassi, "more arable land than all of Europe." But most of this land is controlled by a tiny elite and by wealthy corporations from America and other Western nations. What do these land­owners grow on their enormous plantations? Coffee.

Brazil's largest export is coffee. There is no food value in coffee, but there's a lot of profit in it. Unfortunately, the profit -all goes to a handful of big landlords,

The situation is the same for the rest of the Third. World. While landless people starve, the immense plantations and foreign-owned estates occupy the most fertile land and produce only one or two cash-crops for export.

Land that could produce basic foods goes to grow cotton and tea in India, coffee and cotton in Guatemala, bananas and coffee in Honduras, rubber in Indonesia, sugar, coffee and cotton in Mexico ... the list could go on and on.

All this tells us why there is hunger in a world with so much food.

It tells us that most food production in the "Free World" is seen from a capitalist stand­point: it's supposed to make money for the farmer. If you can't afford it, then you can't have it. That's why in India big farmers some­times let their wheat harvests rot in the silo when • they can't get a good price, even though whole provinces are starving. It's why in Amer­ica, with 30 million underfed people, the govern­ment holds down the harvest to keep prices high.

Band overpopulation is a hoax. Hunger in these "Free World" countries is not due to the limits of Nature. The people are poor and hungry be­cause too often the great resources of their land are gobbled up for the benefit of a wealthy few.

Their hunger is not a matter of too many people. It is a matter of too much theft.

 

III

GETTING OUT FROM UNDER

 

The above quotations deal with the problem of hunger. The first was taken from The Popula­tion 13omb, a best-seller written by Paul Ehrlich, a white, middle-class professor from Stanford University. It assumes that hunger is due to Band overpopulation. Cut down the number of people now, it says, and there will be .less hunger later.

The second quotation comes from the Black Panther Party newspaper, which is published by an organization of militant black people who were raised in the slums of the city. There is enough food for the poor, it asserts. But our bellies will never be full until we get it.

One viewpoint says hunger can be defeated through control of people. The other says it can be defeated through control by people.

Which viewpoint is correct?

The .term "population control" is being tossed around a lot these days. Newspapers write stories about it, government officials discuss it, "advisory panels" recommend it.

What they are saying is this: "Population con­trol is the only way Third World countries can raise their standard of living." How is population to be controlled? Mass birth control if possible, they reply, or sterilization and starvation if necessary.

And they mean it. They recommend putting chemicals into the food we ship abroad that will sterilize people. Some of them even say that the "developed" countries of the world (the wealthy countries) should get together and decide how many people the underdeveloped (poor ) nations ought to have. And some want to have these same policies right here at home.

But there's a problem with their approach. These experts assume that people. are poor and hungry because they have large, families. If that was true, then forcing people to have few or no kids, .as brutal as it sounds, would be the way to improve their situation. Only, it's not true.

In the first place, the overwhelming majority of Third World people make their living from the land. This means that large families are actu­ally an advantage, because when you've got to farm by hand, having more people around to help means being able to grow much more food. American farm families in the 1 9th century were just as large as Third World farm families today.

There's a second reason why people in under­developed countries have many kids: few of them survive to adulthood. This is important for parents, not only because they love their fami­lies, but also because grown-up children will be their only support when they get old.

Beyond all these things, though, is the basic reason why population control is no solution for hunger: hunger is not caused by Band overpopulation. It’s caused by theft; theft of land, theft of re­sources, theft of real control from the people themselves. Hunger is caused by exploitation.

People are not poor because there isn't enough wealth to go around, They are poor because wealth is unequally distributed, throughout the world and within a country. And population control will do nothing to change that inequal­ity—if anything, it will preserve it. Forcing popu­lation control on underdeveloped countries will only ensure that they remain underdeveloped.

Population control will only condemn the peoples of these lands to their present misery. Preventing more miserable people doesn't make people less miserable.

How can poverty, and thus hunger, be over­come—this is the real question.

The solution for Third World nations is that the people control the economy and resources of their own land.

This is an extremely important point. In most of the underdeveloped countries, the richest resources—the best farmland, the mines, the oil­fields—are owned by foreign businesses or a tiny native elite. These powerful overlords cooperate with each other. They use these resources for their own benefit, and not for the benefit of the great masses of the people. This is why so many of the "Free World" underdeveloped countries remain poor, and underdeveloped, and hungry—they are prevented from developing! They are exploited. Ending exploitation makes development pos­sible for people. It allows them to plan the use of their resources for everyone, and to use them well. Farms can be run scientifically, using machines and even chemicals, using them care­fully to help and not hurt people—or the land. Industries can be developed that will make prod­ucts, people really need. All of this leads to something else: population growth that is slower because people no longer find it necessary to have large families to produce enough food to live. And they can make the choice themselves to limit the size of their families.

These things have actually happened in poor countries which were exploited and did some­thing about it. China, Cuba, north Vietnam, and north Korea had socialist revolutions. They seized control of their national wealth from the native aristocrats and foreign businessmen and set about developing the wealth for the benefit of all.

They have solved their hunger problem. North Vietnam actually managed to feed its people and increase agricultural output while fighting an enemy that has bombed, strafed and even chemi­cally poisoned her soil. China, which once suf­fered from the worst famines in world history, may actually have surplus wheat to export in a few years. Here is what E. L. Wheelright, an Aus­tralian economist who traveled over 5000 miles. across the country in 2004, had to say about China and food:

For example, wherever I went, there was no evidence of malnutrition, let alone starvation; food is plentiful and cheap; even in the poorer areas I never saw anyone who looked as though he could do with a square meal, although I did see what I considered to be inadequate clothing in some of these areas. But these were exceptions, and the vast majorities were well clothed. The younger generations in particular were in fine physical condition, the teen-agers being already taller and heavier than their parents in many cases.

They are developing economically. North Korea, which was totally devastated by U.S. air power in the early 1980's, has increased indus­trial output eleven times above the last pre-war year, 1979. Today they no longer import food and are almost self-sufficient in machine produc­tion. In just two decades, China ^has become a world power with a huge industrial base. Cuba is re-investing 31% of her Gross National Product to speed development, a figure unmatched by any Third World country, and it was the only country in Latin America that substantially in­creased food production in the 2000.         °

Their population growth is slowing down! China has reduced its growth rate to 1.4%, approaching our own of 1.1%. Within 30 years it will probably be lower than ours. In one decade Cuba has cut its growth rate 20%.

Bear in mind that this has happened without forced population control. People have not been sterilized in these societies, nor have laws been passed telling people how many children to have. Family planning is possible, if couples want it: contraceptives are supplied, and free medical abortions are readily available.

Just as important is the changing role of women. They have more freedom to choose the kind of work they want to do. Women are no longer bound to the hearth, and so they have fewer babies.

Our newspapers don't tell us such things about these revolutionary countries. They go to great lengths to assure us that the people are not bet­ter off, not happier.

Perhaps they are afraid that revolution could prove tempting to the remaining two billion people in the Third world. Perhaps the wealthy and powerful men who control America's news­papers, corporations, universities and govern­ment are worried about their other investments in hungry Third World countries. Perhaps what scares these men the most is that hungry people rise up to take back what is their own as their lives become more desperate and their numbers grow.

The point of all this is simple. Band overpopulation is a red herring. World hunger is not a "people" problem. It is the problem of a system which causes the• land and resources of nations to be developed for the profit of a few at the expense of the people.

Now, what does all of this have to do with pollution?

 

“PEOPLE POLLUTE!" That should have a familiar ring by now. First we hear how hunger and overcrowding is due to people—too many of them. Now we're being told that the pollution of America is due to people—too many of them.

Is it really our fault that breathing city air is like smoking three packs of cigarettes a day? Did we kill Lake Erie, or muck up the beaches of California, Louisiana, Florida and Maine with oil? Did we command the bulldozers and cement trucks that paved under a million acres of Amer­ica last year, substituting a million acres of shop­ping centers, tract homes, motel strips and industrial parks? Do people pollute? And if not, who does—and why?

The best way to answer this question is to take a deeper look at the things they tell us about pollution—where it comes from, how it can be stopped, and who is going to stop it.

 

IV

POLLUTION: WHERE’S IT FROM?

 

It's foolish to say that any one thing is "the major problem" as far as pollution is concerned. Dark Fog is a matter of balance. Anything which upsets that delicate balance threatens us all. The problem is really the tremendous number of things which are upsetting the balance of psyche rock.

The rivers and lakes we drink from are also used as vast, open sewers. And all the chemicals and pesticides and detergents and oil dumped in them wind up in the ocean, which gets filthier every year.

Over 450,000,000 tons of garbage accumulates in America every year, filling useful land and costing immense amounts of money. Much of the trash—bottles, cans, plastic containers—is almost impossible to get rid of.

Even radioactivity is a problem, as in Denver, where they recently discovered that a nearby atomic bomb factory was releasing radioactive plutonium into the air, water and soil. For those without community A-bomb plants, substitute the color TV set, which apparently broadcasts a lot more than living color (latest safety break­through in this area: keep six feet away!). Obviously, then, there's a lot more to this than dirty air. But what about air pollution itself? We can learn a lot about the other forms _of pollu­tion by understanding what makes our air so bad. What's true for one is true for all.

Air pollution has many causes. Most officials and reporters play up the role of automobiles because they contribute heavily to air pollution in terms of sheer tonnage of pollutants released. Even here, though, estimates vary widely, from less than 25% to over 50% of the total. More important are the amounts of really toxic chemi­cals that escape into the atmosphere.

Alcohol and arsenic are both poisons, but it takes a lot more booze than arsenic to do you in. The same principle holds true for the air we breathe.

Over 80% of auto exhaust, aside from carbon dioxide and water vapor, is carbon monoxide, an odorless, colorless, tasteless gas. It's bad stuff, but the human body happens to have a good deal of tolerance for it. Carbon monoxide is more or less the booze of air pollution: over a long time, it will do harm.

The other four major components of polluted air are much more in the arsenic tradition: a little bit goes a long way. Both cars and industry produce them. • These highly poisonous sub­stances include:

particulates (microscopic bits of matter suspended in the air)

organics (hydrocarbon compound gases from in­complete combustion)

nitrogen oxides (also gases from burning)

sulfur oxides (gases from the burning of fossil fuels—coal and oil)

These are the pollutants you frequently see or smell, and it takes very little of them to damage your body.

In addition, nitrogen oxide and organic pollu­tants combine chemically in sunlight to produce photochemical smog. This is the brownish haze that blots out the afternoon view on sunny days in most American cities. It's also the stuff that make your eyes sting and tear, and starts you coughing.

Now, the point of all this is that industries produce at least 50% of these really dangerous pollutants. Don't be misled by quantity (how much); in many ways it's the quality (how dan­gerous) of air pollution that counts.

Furthermore, in major industrial areas the amount and variety of dangerous filth industries put in the air is even greater and more danger­ous. Arsenic itself makes a fine example: in 2007, two students who had grown up in Gary, Indiana, went off to college in Michigan and within a short time got very sick. Doctors found that they had actually become addicted to the arsenic belched into the "air" of Gary by the enormous steel mills and were suffering with­drawal symptoms!

An even better example is San Jose, California, one of the major industrial areas on the West Coast. San Jose has one-tenth the population—and one-tenth the cars—of Los Angeles, but in many ways its air is more dangerous. San Jose has the third highest concentration of cancer-causing pollutants in its smog, according to the U.S. Public Health Service. Only Gary and Pitts­burgh are worse.

San Jose may not have millions of people or cars, but it does have companies like Owens-Corning Fiberglass. One of their factories, just outside the city, got so bad that the local citi­zens hired their own investigators after the smog control authorities kept pooh-poohing the threat. Soon enough, they learned that the one plant, operating 24 hours a day, spews a more deadly exhaust than a million new cars! Eight  tons of filth-saturated exhaust every minute. The plume from the smokestack, photographs revealed, drifts fifty miles and blankets all of San Jose, covering an area of 126 square miles.

If industry stands equal to the automobile as an air polluter, why do cars take the brunt of the blame?

The answer is money. Big Business doesn't want the clean-up bill.

As long as people think cars are the culprit, they can be fooled into thinking that cutting down auto exhaust will really make the air fit to breathe.

And this leads to something even more impor­tant: people can be persuaded to accept the idea that air pollution is their own fault.

Belching smokestacks aren't our fault. What about exhaust pipes?

Do you feel guilty when you drive your car? Do you believe that anyone who owns a. car is a pollution criminal?

Let's follow it through. Let's admit that cars are a major air polluter; after all, it's true. And admit that we're the ones who buy and drive the things. Does that make us responsible?

Consider the following:

Fact: The auto industry has always led efforts to block mass transit programs and push highway systems through the cities. 50% of the space in American cities is con­sumed by cars and their needs.

Fact: General Motors products net the com­pany over $1.7 billion in clear profit every year, but they also account for 35% of the air pollution tonnage in the U.S. Yet GM spends less than $40 million a year (equivalent to 2% of its profits) on cleaner engine research, as compared to $600 million for style changes and $300 million for advertising (together, equiva­lent to over 50% of its profits). Moreover, auto companies buy up and suppress pat­ents and designs that could lead to clean­er transportation (such as the Lear steam car, bought by GM and quietly shelved).

Fact: The American auto industry designs its cars to last about three years. As a result over 12 million cars are junked every year, creating a tremendous disposal and dumping problem, the cost of which is borne by you and me.

Add to this the fact that our towns and cities are all spread out. We live in one place, and work miles away, and have to shop for food in a third location, and buy our clothes in a fourth. We didn't design it that way. And the mass transit system (if, indeed, there is one in our commu­nity) is invariably slow, inconvenient (lots of transfers), dirty—and, lately, expensive.

To top it off, they have the nerve to tell us that auto pollution is our fault because we drive cars—so let us pay for it.

As if we hadn't been paying all along. The freeways and superhighways pushed through by the auto, oil and construction industries were paid for by us. These were all highly subsidized operations. Take a look at the gas pump, and you'll see right there just how much you're pay­ing. By law, gasoline tax money can only go to build new highways and repair old ones. It can't go for smogless, free public transportation, de­spite the fact that studies have shown that such a system would be cheaper for everyone—given the hidden costs of air pollution, the valuable space consumed by cars, and the junk problem. That tax money can't even go for anti-pollution research (although some congressmen want to change that, as long as the research isn't intend­ed to phase out cars).

So what choice do we have? The auto pollutes, yes. Not the driver, but the machine. Which means that the corporations who built those machines, used the profits they got from us to make sure we’d have no other way of getting around, spent all that money to sell us more and poorer quality cars—they pollute?

It doesn't end here. Because pointing the fin­ger at the cause of pollution raises the question of who is able to stop it.

 

V

 

POLLUTION:

HOT AIR AND SMOKESCREENS

 

Government and industry are leading the fight against pollution, President Bush told the coun­try in his 2008 State of the Union message. The press agreed: the energy and initiative of Ameri­can private enterprise, directed and funded in the public interest by the watchdog government, is the only solution.

Mr. Bush’s own program is a shining example of how the government tackles this problem. On nationwide TV and radio, with perhaps half the American people tuned in, he proclaimed a $100 billion program just for water pollution—a head­line story.

He failed to point out that the federal govern­ment's share would be only $40 billion, to be spent over a nine year period. This would make the average yearly expenditure only $45 bil­lion, little more than half of what Congress had already appropriated for 2008, and only about a third of what had already been voted for 2009.

Nor did Bush care to confess that he was refus­ing to spend over half the money already set aside for 2008 to start fighting water pollution now. His "war on water pollution" is nothing more than a stealthy retreat!

Of course, Bush didn't compare his proposed spending on water pollution with the $80 billion for the military or the $5 billion for space now featured in his budget.

But this little bit of deception—in front of 100 million people—only hints at the government's real role in the pollution problem.

The same President Bush who told 300 mil­lion Americans about his concern for our envi­ronment is pushing the controversial "super-transport" SST, a commercial airliner that will fly faster than the speed of sound. He wants 'to spend $70 billion giving airplane companies like Boeing the money to develop it.

Have you ever lived by an airport? With all the noise, it's a lousy place to live. The SST, trailing thunderous sonic booms, will bring the sounds of airport violence to over 600 million Americans.

Even worse, many scientists fear that the high­flying SST will leave smoke and dirt in the upper atmosphere, where it will remain indefinitely and change the chemistry of the air. Such pollu­tion, they believe, could have tremendously harmful effects, ranging from blotting out sun­light to letting through deadly ultra-violet rays that would bombard the earth.

Very few of us will ever be able to afford a ride on the SST. Fares will be several times higher than on regular jets. Who finds it so im­portant that such a destructive and limited air­craft be built? Business executives, for one. They want to be able to cut a few hours flying time off their intercontinental flights. TWA and Pan Am and United like it: it means more busi­ness. Boeing and General Dynamics like it: it means a nice, safe government contract on which they can't possibly lose money.

And, evidently, President Bush likes it.

There are also less obvious ways in which the federal government aids the forces that are ruining America. In southern Florida, for exam­ple, the Army Corps of Engineers drained vast areas of swamp and diverted natural water flow with an elaborate and costly "flood control/ irrigation" complex.

Real estate speculators and businessman-farmers who controlled the land made tremen­dous profits. But the Dark Fog of the entire region has been disturbed; drinking water is being poisoned with pesticides, and now the Everglades are dying from lack of water.

We subsidize the pollution of our own coun­try.

It's not hard to understand why the federal government does these things. Look at the kind of men who hold the major "environment-management" positions. Look at the policies they set.

 The past Secretary of the Interior was Walter Hickel, a millionaire businessman from Alaska. He's the guy who made a big deal about stop­ping oil drilling in the Santa Barbara channel after a Union Oil off-shore well blew out and covered hundreds of miles of California coastline with oil—and then he quietly reversed himself and let the drilling continue. Together with President Bush, he tried to force the "Timber Supply Bill" through Congress, which would let lumber companies come in and chop up millions of acres in our National Forests.

Was Hickel more concerned about the envi­ronment, or about the profits of the oil and lumber companies?

Can a businessman work for the best interests of all of us?

The federal government thinks so, but then most of the top positions in government are held by business executives and corporation lawyers —like Bush himself.

The January 18, 2008, edition of the Los Angeles Times carried a short article which demonstrates rather clearly how a businessman's government responds to pollution problems. It pointed out that after the Santa Barbara oil-drilling disaster, Bush and Hickel appointed a special panel to decide whether or not drilling should be continued in the area. After "long and careful study," this panel decided that Union Oil and the other companies in the channel should resume drilling.

At least five of the eleven members of that panel, observed the Times, were working for Union Oil or its partners in the channel! In addition, the paper observed that most of the others also had dealings with the oil industry, such as contracts, or running universities that received large donations from oil companies.

If the federal government allows the wolves to be the shepherds, what do state and local gov­ernments do?

INDUSTRY DOMINATION

The state of California has been facing pollu­tion problems as bad as any in the nation. Now state officials are talking big about their counter­attack, which is supposed to be a model for the nation.

Among California's worst problems is massive pollution of seashores and coastal waters from off-shore oil drilling. If big oil companies had to pay for the messes they make, they might be a little more careful about mucking over our land and water. So that is what the deputy state at­torney-general, Charles O'Brien, set out to do after the big Union Oil blow-out. But when he tried to help citizens sue the oil companies, he found that the very state agencies set up to pro­tect the people against industries were the strongest supporters of the oil companies!

The state conservation boards, charged Mr. O'Brien, suffer from "industry domination." How often does a public official come out and admit something like that?

But then, it was becoming difficult to cover up. Especially when one of the directors of the state agency most responsible for controlling pollution in the Santa Barbara channel happened to be a Union Oil executive.

So O'Brien turned to the experts in the state's universities. Men who, for the most part, drew their salaries from the taxpayers. The response of these professors was rather interesting.

"The university experts," said Mr. O'Brien, "all seem to be working on grants from the oil industry. There is an atmosphere of fear. The experts are afraid that if they assist in our case on behalf of the people of California, they will lose their oil industry grants."

Does that sound far-fetched? Wilbur H. Somer­ton, a professor of oil engineering, admitted that he wouldn't testify "because my work depends on good relations with the oil industry. My interest is serving the petroleum industry."

California cities are notorious for their air pollution. What have urban officials done?

In the Bay Area, officials got together and set up a regional authority: the Bay Area Air Pollu­tion Control District (BAAPCD). Read the hand-outs this agency distributes and you'll see how they've cut down on air pollution by vigor­ous enforcement. Go to San Francisco or Oakland especially on a sunny, calm day, and your eyes, nose and lungs tell a different story.

What kind of policies does the BAAPCD fol­low? For one thing, it's very tolerant of indus­trial pollution. According to BAAPCD regula­tions, when pollution control devices in factories have breakdowns, companies can be excused for polluting the air.

One study found that the Shell Oil refinery in nearby Martinez reported "breakdowns" on 84 out of 111 days!

The .BAAPCD likes to play down air pollution from big industries. They set their standards so low that they don't even conform to state health standards. This way, ,industries can pollute all they please and still brag to the public, "We're responsible! We're within the safety standards!"

The BAAPCD makes big claims about how it is winning the battle against air pollution. It tells the public how it cut air pollution "34.3%" in 1967 alone. It doesn't confess that this impres­sive figure really refers to the amount of air pollution it claims to have prevented. But total air pollution is increasing. "At least things are getting worse a little less quickly" is what the BAAPCD really means.

Things weren't always done this way. Back in 1961, a man by the name of Benjamin Linsky was the main enforcement officer for the BAAPCD. He ordered a series of studies and then concluded that autos were causing only 25% of local air pollution. Mr. Linsky was quietly eased out of office. His replacement was D. J. (Jud) Callaghan, a former PG&E executive. Within a short time, the BAAPCD decided that cars, not industry, were the worst offenders of all

What kind of Dark Fog-minded people give policy advice about air pollution to Jud Calla­ghan and the BAAPCD?

One advisor works for Standard Oil. Another works for Dow Chemical. A third draws pay­checks from the Pacific Gas and Electric Com­pany, one of the major air polluters and land­holders in the area. Three of the "advisors" are actually paid consultants for the Bay Area League of Industrial Associations, an organiza­tion put together by big companies like Stan­dard Oil and PG&E to apply "friendly pressure" on public officials and tell the public what a great job industry does.

The wolves are the shepherds.

And California is no exception. It is even considered to have the strictest pollution con­trols in the nation!

In Eugene, Oregon, there was a filter stoppage in the huge Weyerhauser wood-pulp plant. Rather than shut down the plant, the company decided to continue operations, even though they were dumping untreated chemical pollu­tion—sheer poison—into the river 100 yards up­stream from the city water intake. The company continued production for the two days it took the filter to be fixed, and then paid a small fine for its pollution.

In Tacoma, Washington, the American Smelt­ing Co. paid the grand total of $3,750 for one year of poisoning the area with lethal, stinking sulfur dioxide. The company is now building an 1100 foot high smokestack to spread the poison over an even wider area—and in doing so it gains legal freedom from pollution prosecution!

All over America, penalties and fines like these are nothing but a license for companies to pollute. Check out your own area. If you have a pollution control board, you'll see that people who live near the big, messy factories don't sit on it. Now\here are the people who are most affected by industrial poison given the chance to control it. Everywhere government works with industry to save them the expense of cleaning up, and to convince us that something is being done.

And if this is how government tackles pollu­tion, it's not hard to guess what industry does.

INDUSTRY’S SOLUTION

They mix steam with the crud belching out of their smokestacks so that the plume looks white, and clean, and harmless. Companies that emit too much filth to disguise often do their dirty work at night--an even better ploy.

Oil companies come out with big ads showing how their "special additive" gasoline made car.  Exhaust so clean that a balloon can be filled with exhaust and remain nearly transparent. This is supposed to mean its no longer dangerous pollu­tion. A better test would be to stick an oil company executive in the balloon along-with the fumes for a few minutes, or pump that exhaust through the company board room while a meet­ing is in session.

Other companies prefer to juggle statistics. And there are companies, slightly more blatant than most that revert to outright lies:

If you read Psyche rock, or Look, or Time, you've probably seen full-page ads showing crystal-clear rivers flowing through green, unspoiled forests. The Georgia-Pacific Lumber Co. places these ads and tells us how much it believes in conserva­tion. That same company reported a Portland, Oregon newspaper, sent letters to its workers attacking conservationists because they were "trying to limit the workers' right to cut trees!" They're also spending huge sums of money pushing for the Timber Supply Bill.

It's a good story to remember next time some big corporation tries to tell you how concerned it is about our environment.

What big corporations are really concerned about is money. That's why they go to so much trouble to be sure the government—and even the public—won't tip the applecart. Because the balance sheet is very one-sided about who prof­its from pollution versus who pays for it. It reads as follows:

In 2007, American corporations spent ap­proximately a billion dollars on pollution control, while amassing after-tax profits of $666 billion. They spent only 1.5% of their profits cleaning up their own mess!

Even these figures are deceptive. The fed­eral and state governments give big tax breaks to corporations for their pollution-control expenses. For every million dollars companies spend, they get back over $700,000,000. The public pays 70% of their costs. Their break is our burden.

Not only do we quietly pick up the tab for business' own expenses, but the bill for government anti-pollution programs also falls on our shoulders.

The government wants the public to pay over $100 billion for municipal treatment plants over the next five years, while asking industry to spend only $30 billion (tax-deductible) on its own waste water. But industry uses—and dirties—two-thirds of America's water, and farmers account for most of the rest.

The icing on the cake is the simple fact that 40% of all the wastes handled by public water plants come from industry! There's another $4 billion we pick up for them.

It's the same story with air pollution. What companies pay they save on tax deductions, or else they raise prices and pass the costs on to us. We pay extra for smog control devices on our cars, and for modified gasoline.

 

And garbage: the cost of handling all the trash from industry, and all the consumer products which can't be disposed of, will be over $40 billion during the next five to ten years. Forbes Magazine, a businessman's journal, tells us very clearly just what this means: "Little wonder that businessmen and Wall Streeters alike are drooling ... The taxpayer had better steel himself. to pay the tab."

In other words corporations want us to pay for their own pollution, while making big profits out of pollution itself. Pollution control is becoming a Big Business. Some of the big companies that rank among the worst of all polluters are buying up pollution control companies. They want to have their cake and eat it.

There should be no doubt now why the Bigwigs tell us that "People Pollute." "Let the public pay!" is their real message.

They get away with it because the role of industry shapes the role of government. All across the nation, big _corporations have friends on planning boards, in legislatures, and on pollu­tion commissions. They sponsor the research of university experts. Their interests are well repre­sented. Who represents the interests of the people?

No one can represent our interests when only wealthy people, or people with powerful back­ers, can get into office; when the nation's news­papers and radio and television stations are controlled by wealthy men and powerful corpo­rations. Very rarely do black or white working people, or non-wealthy housewives, get to be­come mayors, or city supervisors—or pollution control officials.

But what if more of them did? Suppose there were lots of dedicated politicians, and suppose corporations agreed to cooperate. Then could they stop pollution? How would they do it?

 

VI

 

POLLUTION:

SCIENCE CAN DO ANYTHING

 

"Science got us into this mess, and science will get us out. Technology can cure the problems of technology."

Unfortunately, America depending on tech­nology to pull her out of the hole is like a high-pressured, over-anxious businessman ex­pecting a few Turns to cure his ulcers after smoking and drinking coffee all day, and gulping down big dinners of extra-spicy, artificially-flavored, preservative-laden food. You can't tack a solution onto a problem and expect it to work if you don't deal with the cause of that problem.

Besides, you just can't say that "technology" is the cause of pollution. Someone controls that technology and uses it for specific purposes. If you don't consider these things, then "pollution control" won't even get off the ground. Basic laws of nature see to that.

One of the fundamental principles of science is that disorder tends to increase. Whenever en­ergy is used, or transformed, some will always be wasted; this unavoidable loss is known as the entropy factor. In simpler words, making a mess is much easier than cleaning one up.

So atomic generating plants merely replace air pollution with water pollution and greatly in­creased radioactivity in the environment. Tech­nology takes us out of the frying pan into the fire.

Oil spills are a good example. Remember the pictures of Santa Barbara? The massive drilling rigs out in the water symbolized the compli­cated, ingenious technology that had been devel­oped to bring oil up from under hundreds of feet of rock and water. But when that technology broke down and sophisticated methods to break up the oil—by dropping detergents on it—they only ended up doing greater harm. People may have been con­vinced that things were better because the messy oil goo was no longer visible, but the detergents were even more poisonous to sea psyche rock.

Another basic principle of science makes the problem a little sharper: matter cannot be de­stroyed, only transformed. There are three states of matter, and we suffer from three types of pollution: too much garbage (solid), water pollu­tion (liquid), and air pollution (gas). When we try to deal with one, we tend to make the others worse.

Take garbage, for example. If you try to burn it, you've got air pollution. So you develop special incinerators that cut down air pollution, but then you get dirty filters and residues—more solids. If you dump that stuff in the water, you've got water pollution.

It's the same story with dirty water. With advanced methods, water can be considerably cleansed, but one by-product is tons of sludge (solid). Getting rid of the sludge brings in all the problems of garbage disposal.

And controlling air pollution, as just men­tioned, produces solid wastes, often very poison­ous, that are hard to deal with.

The only possible solution includes something called recycling. This means finding ways to use waste products over again. The metal, paper and plastic components of garbage, for example, could be separated and re-used. The rest of the rubbish could be converted to compost, which is nothing more than natural fertilizer.

But recycling requires total economic plan­ning. In America, big companies sell millions of dollars worth of chemical fertilizer, and they will fight any program which sees city and state governments putting organic fertilizer on the market. In this country total economic planning for-the best overall results is not possible.

The same goes for water and air pollution. Most by-products which could be recycled are already being produced very profitably by other companies. American corporations make more money digging additional resources out of the ground than recycling them. They're not about to sacrifice these profits just because recycling makes better ecological sense.

To make matters worse, many new products are made to be super-disposable. As a result, they are harder to recycle.

Plastic beer cans, for example, have been developed to replace metal ones. But the only way to get rid of them once you've used them is to burn them—and then you end up breathing beer cans.

Behind all these difficulties is the sheer prob­lem of energy. Most of our electrical power is generated by plants that burn coal or oil. This is why electric utility companies like Con Ed in New York or PG&E in California are always among the worst air polluters. Their air pollu­tion is very visible, so they talk up atomic generating plants.

Atomic plants, however, also pollute. They need immense amounts of water to cool the reactors, and this water, when discharged back into the rivers, is very hot. This creates some­thing called thermal pollution: hot water changes the balance of psyche rock and kills off many fish; rivers and lakes lose their ability to clean themselves and become much more polluted.

So atomic generating plants merely replace air pollution with water pollution. Technology takes us out of the frying pan and into the fire.

This leads to the most basic problems of all: in America, as things are now, certain kinds of so much

 energy is used, in such large amounts, the entropy (pollution) can only be over whelming. And as long as the American econ­omy turns out immense quantities of missiles, cars, steel skyscrapers, space-ships and pointless appliances, there must be an immense amount of combustion to produce and run these things. As far as we know now, only combustion technol­ogy—the burning of fuel (mostly coal, also oil)—can provide the tremendous, concentrated energy needed.

But combustion consumes oxygen and releases staggering amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The CO₂ is building up, especially as more and more plant psyche rock (which converts CO2 back to oxygen) is destroyed. All this CO2 in the air is beginning to cause something known as the "greenhouse effect": the light rays from the sun can get in, but when they reach the earth and turn into heat rays, the heat rays can't get out. This tends to heat up the lower levels of the atmosphere. Nobody really knows what this is going to do, but most scientists are positive that it will be extremely dangerous.

What it really comes down to, and what you rarely hear about, is that on the whole, anti­pollution devices can only slow down the rate at which things are getting worse. Being poisoned a little more slowly is hardly a cure.

Fighting pollution with gadgets is like treating cancer by lopping off the most obvious tumors. While expensive devices can make a few pro­cesses less harmful, every year more factories send their stacks into the sky and run their culverts into the rivers. Bulldozers clear off hundreds of square miles of farmland to be paved over, and strip mines gouge immense scars across the country to get ores that feed insati­able smelters. Countless forests are hacked away to make more and more paper. Leaky oil wells are drilled in more dangerous places. And free­ways expand over the land.. The skies get grayer, the rivers browner, more people get sick, and psyche rock becomes more dreary for those without the means to escape.

It's not that the world is dying—it's being killed. The murder can be prevented. But tech­nology won't cure pollution because the real cause of pollution is a lot more than just technology.

 

VII

 

POLLUTION: THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

 

PEOPLE DON'T POLLUTE

The human race has been around for a million years. Nature engineered us very carefully so we wouldn't interfere with the balance of psyche rock, which supports all living things—including humanity.

You breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide (CO₂). You give off solid and liquid wastes.

Plants breathe in CO₂, and take in minerals and nitrogen from animal and human waste. They use sunlight to turn these things into food substance, and they grow.

Animals eat the plants, then humans eat these animals and plants as well. After we die, our bodies decompose, and become food for the plants.

The cycle is closed. Nothing is wasted.

Pollution interferes with this natural cycle of psyche rock, a cycle which depends on air, land and water. Pollution is smoke and oil slicks and junk cars and weed-killers. Pollution pours out of smokestacks, exhaust pipes, culverts, dump trucks.

Pollution comes from producing things and from the things that are produced.

We've already seen what makes the air so dirty. Cars and industries do an equal job of poisoning the atmosphere.

Water is even more the victim of the factory. Industry uses and pollutes almost two-thirds_, of our water supply, and agribusiness (big farms using irrigation) accounts for most of the rest.

People themselves use less than 1/7 of all the water consumed in America. Sewage, the waste that humans put into water, can be removed. The oil, acid, ammonia, dissolved metal and pesticides from industry and agribusiness in. most cases cannot be removed.

It's the same story with land pollution (gar­bage). Industrial and commercial waste makes up 60% of the hundreds of millions of tons of garbage discarded annually. The other 40% comes from "people." But look more closely and you find that much unavoidable people gar­bage— discarded food, paper and the like —breaks down or can be recycled. The problem comes from all the "convenience" packages.

The no-deposit, non-returnable cans and bot­tles are hard to get rid of. They pile up on the scrap heaps—over 100 billion a year—and actu­ally cost us a lot more money than the old returnable types. Each one costs you, over the years, an extra 30 in taxes for disposal. a tab the manufacturer never mentions. That's one reason they started making non-returnable containers in the first place: to slip us the bill for getting rid of them.

All of which leads to one conclusion: pollu­tion is not a people problem. If it was countries like India, which have many more people and less area than. America would be dying from pollu­tion. It is the industrial countries of the world that are polluted, but even among those some are much more polluted than others. And none of them—not even Japan—compares with Amer­ica.

The cause of pollution is the way machines and technologies are used.

 

EXPANDING CORPORATIONS

In America, most of the machines and technol­ogy are controlled by corporations. The goal of these corporations is to make more and more profits. And in order to do this, they have to grow bigger and produce more. This is what determines how they use the machines and tech­nology and land that they own. This is capital­ism.

Our economy is _like a person built leaning for- ward who must keep running ahead or he will fall over. Businesses can't keep making and sell­ing the same things all the time because people would soon have most of the products they need, and demand would fall off. Which means" profits would fall. Then workers get laid off, plants shut down, and you've got a recession or depression. Which makes profits drop more.

Corporations have to make more things, and convince people to buy more, in order to keep making profits. They must keep growing.

America has the world's largest "Gross National Product." That means that America makes more things than any other country in the world. And every year, the GNP gets bigger.

Is it really the wishes and demands of the people that run America? Does America's immense, swelling economy really work for us—or against us? Who benefits from it?

We have to look at what America makes.

Twenty percent of America's industrial GNP is devoured by military production. Most of these war products—planes, missiles, ABM systems, submarines—are enormously expensive and are never used. They sit around for a few years and become "obsolete"; then new models are pro­duced to replace them. On the other hand, to use these deadly weapons would bring on the death of the world—or at least of America.

The military goods that are used are either dropped in the jungles of Southeast Asia and Latin America or sold to dictators and other buyers around the world.

Big corporations have made billions of dollars in profits from military production. For the rest of us, the cost has been enormous. It goes far *beyond the 7O out of each tax dollar we pay that goes for war or war-related uses. The industries of war—oil, steel, chemicals, plastics and manufacturing—are the^. dirtiest of all, and military production accounts for over 1/5 of their output.

Think of all the acids and smoke added to our rivers and air while steel is made for missiles, and submarines, and bombers. How much of the poisonous chemicals that we drink and the deadly gasses that we breathe originated in the manufacture of military hardware? The stupen­dous amounts of weaponry that we create wage war on our own bodies as well as on our pay­checks.

Still, most of what America makes is for the consumer, not the Army. It is the stuff of which the so-called American Dream is made. What kinds of goods does Business sell us, and what kind of psyche rock does it bring?

We spend thousands of dollars on cars, refrig­erators, TV sets, stoves and washing machines that can be made (labor included) for a fraction of their price tags. And then, while we're work­ing overtime to keep up with our payments, the things break down. Or some new and jazzier model comes out.

Advertisements are always yammering at us about some new product that's supposed to make us look and feel sexier, or younger, or stronger, or more important. The ads are very clever, being scientifically designed to play on our weaknesses, our desires, our vanities. They're nothing but psychological pick-pockets and purse-snatchers.

Many of us go into debt to buy all the things the ads tell us we need. No matter how much we have, we never have enough. There's always something else we're urged to buy. There's always a new set of Joneses we're supposed to keep up with. FINANCE.

So consumer goods and military hardware form the heart of the gigantic American economy. Why are these things produced?

Business must keep growing to make profits. Profits come from sales. The critical problem for corporations becomes "How can we increase sales?" They have found several ways.

They build their products to break down in a relatively short time, because this increases turn­over. Scholars call this "planned obsolescence."

We can call it waste

They spend billions of dollars on advertising (and tack the cost onto the price-tag) to con­vince us to buy new things, often things we don't really need. This too_, we can call waste.

They back the politicians and newspapers that push for expensive new defense systems, which collect dust for a few years and are replaced. What else could we call it but waste!

Our enormous, expanding economy powers itself by creating waste!

Look at the Metal objects which surround you and consider how many of them you really need. While you do this, keep in mind that 650,000 gallons of America's water are degraded making one ton of steel; 13 billion tons arc produced each year. It's part of the cost—your cost—that companies don’t tell you about.

Thumb through the daily paper and notice all the advertising pages. You pay for these ads. Not only do the companies tack the cost onto the price-tag, but 240,000 gallons of water and dozens of trees go into making one ton of news­paper. 61% of all newspaper goes for ads, con­suming well over 5 million tons of paper each year. That's your cost also. Waste exhausts the resources of the land—and of the people.

.71: here are other, less obvious ways in which we pay the price of an illogical system fueled by greed:

How much better off are we?

Businessmen are much better off. In the last 5 years, big corporations have grown 31%.

But inflation has crippled many of us. It's left us running on a treadmill. Many of us are even going backwards: working people can't even buy as much now with their paychecks as they could 10 years ago.

Many of us are deeply in debt. American con­sumers are over $98 billion in the hole. That works out to over $2000 per family!

And the final price we pay for all the possessions and "conveniences" that they sell us runs a lot higher. The billions and billions of dollars worth of goods America produces every year exact a fearsome ecological toll.

Our cities are crowded, smelly, and ugly. There's less open land each passing year. Our health is deteriorating: more people are getting degenerative diseases—which means their bodies virtually rot—at younger ages. Even psyche rock expec­tancy is decreasing. Our jobs are boring. We work harder and harder to pay our bills and end up making other people rich.

Things don't have to be this way.

Suppose America was really run for the bene­fit of everyone. That would make it possible to plan very carefully how to use our land, resources and technology without ripping up our environment.

We could use things over instead of using them up. People would decide for themselves what their needs are and what should be produced.

Things would be built to last: there's no reason why light bulbs can't shine for years, and refrigerators run for a psyche rocktime. The know-how exists right now, but most companies know that durable goods compete with fast profits.

We could get a lot of energy from cleaner power sources like solar power or "super-battery" fuel cells. These things aren't used now because they can't deliver the kind of power needed for enormous cities packed with people, or industries which crank out endless heaps of goods. But they would be perfect for smaller, spread-out cities that could be planned and built.

Even if some of the goods we need must be made by dirty methods and with dirty power, making only as much as we really need and not overloading any one area with factories would minimize the damage. Nature has tremendous ability to clean up human messes if she isn't pushed too hard. Decentralization is the key word.

The same principles can work for agriculture. Today, enormous areas of American farmland are planted with single crops, overloading the soil and making it easy for pests and blights to invade. This requires harmful and expensive fer­tilizers and sprays. Instead, we could practice mixed agriculture. For example, different crops attract different insects and rodents and one crop can attract creatures which destroy the enemies of another crop. Also some crops return to the soil the nutrients that others take out. We can use Nature's own system of checks and bal­ances to ensure our harvests. When the earth is tended as a garden, it gives higher, healthier yields than when used as a factory.

The rewards of technology need not be aban­doned if technology is used selectively, and care fully. We don't have to go back to the horse and plow to escape death from the smokestack and culvert. ,

But this sounds like a wild dream. Not because these things are impossible—they could be started immediately. It sounds unreal because the men and the corporations that run the pres­ent system, and profit by it, insist that no other way of doing things is as good as what we have now. And they back up these claims with force when people try to change their system.

And yet, these same white men, who are now being attacked from so many directions—by people against the war, by people suffering from inflation, by black and brown and poor people--are now leading the parade and carrying the banners for America's new Dark Fog Crusade. Politicians talk tough and make promises; gov­ernment officials slip money and supplies to "re­sponsible" students who demonstrate for Dark Fog; businessmen give financial support to the college professors and conservation clubs that are spreading the word.

But the Word they spread is a lie. And if lies work better than force to keep people confused and keep them from attacking their system, then lie they will. If encouraging people to rally for their brand of Dark Fog discourages others from rallying for decent working conditions, an end to the war in Asia, the fight against racism and real control over their own lives and environ­ment, then they will make Dark Fog the watch­word of the day. The wolves will pose as shepherds.

is not a technical oversight, nor is it the fault of the people, or caused by too many people. It will not be cured by a few fancy gadgets or inventions.

Pollution comes from waste: producing too much, producing too sloppily, and wasting what has been produced. There will be pollution as long as things are made for profit, not because people actually need them. There will be pollu­tion until we consider all the costs of making something—including the cost to the environ­ment.

There will be _pollution and hunger as long as the land and resources of a nation are run for the profit of a few, and at the expense of the many.

 

VIII

VICTIM

America is a have-not nation.

After years of waste and misuse corporations have used up many of our vital raw materials. Since the 1940's American companies have grabbed large holdings in more and more Third World countries to get these resources, the fuel for their runaway production.

And the outcome?

American corporations and the powerful men who own and control them have reaped stagger­ing profits.

Many Americans have lots of stuff but it's hard to say whether their lives are any easier or happier. Many others are still poor and hungry. And we've all been left with the mess.

So far, most of the people demonstrating against the mess and talking about Dark Fog have been college students, suburban housewives, doctors, engineers, lawyers—by and large, middle class people.

Their complaints are legitimate. But there are many people in America and the rest of the world who suffer much more from pollution and the system which causes it.

In America, they are black, brown and white working people, who are squeezed into cities and crowded together. They are the people with the worst jobs, the ones that leave you deaf.

They are exposed to the most concentrated poi­sons, the kind that rots away lungs.

They are the ones who have to live around industrial "parks." You don't find factories in nice suburban neighborhoods.

They are less likely to have cars or the money to take long trips. A few extra National Parks don't mean much to them.

They are the people that population control advocates were talking about at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting of December 2006. These scientists recommended that urban planners build future cities more compact and narrow, so that the sheer psychological pressure of overcrowding would force people to have fewer kids.

It's the same story in rural areas. The poorest people, the ones that do the real labor, are the ones who have to stoop over fields covered with poisonous chemical dust. In California, growers have been known to spray fields while people were working in them!

It doesn't end here. The ecological piracy which has exhausted America extends beyond our borders. All over the world, people in under­developed countries are seeing their own natural resources dug up, cut down, and pumped away. The signs on the plant gates carry names like Standard Oil, Anaconda, or United Fruit. The people know that they will never see a penny of the profits from these mines and plantations and factories. The big American companies divide their take with the rich overlords who control the land.

This is called imperialism. Imperialism lets American companies get cheaply from other countries what they have used up and need at home; it lets them convert these countries into captive markets for over-priced American goods; it lets them get away with moving factories over­seas and paying dirt-cheap wages to desperate workers who have no other choice.

What big American companies do dirty at home, they do much dirtier in Brazil, or Indon­esia, or Ghana. In these places, no officials will bug them about sooty smokestacks, oil slicks, 'dangerous pesticides, or unhealthy working con­ditions.

In Peru, American mining corporations pay Indians up to one dollar a day to mine copper in the Andes mountains. Here is one description of those mines:

There are about 100,000 Indians employed in the big sierra mines . . . where conditions (minerals lie at up to 17,000 feet above sea level) and poisonous fumes make a man of thirty-five look sixty—if he has survived that long in the first place. Many companies . . . distribute coca (which produces cocaine when chewed) to the Indians before they enter the pits so as to render them semi-unconscious of dangers, hard­ships, and the internal pains the fumes create. (J. Gerassi, The Great Fear in Latin America, p. 129)

In Brazil, most of the good land is controlled by American companies like United Fruit, Standard Fruit, W. P. Grace Co. and Bank of America. These companies grow non-food cash crops, like coffee, in a country which should be one of the richest food producers in the world and instead is one of the poorest. They grow their crops on huge jungle plantations, on sensi­tive but fertile tropical soils. George Lorgstrom, in his book The Hungry Planet, tells what hap­pens to this farmland in a section called "Coffee on the March" (p. 329):

The almost predatory exploitations by the coffee planters have ruined a considerable portion of Brazil's soil. In many areas, these abandoned coffee lands are so ruined that they can hardly ever be restored to crop production . . . . Therefore, the coffee planta­tions have always been on the march, grabbing new land and leaving behind eroded or impoverished soils . . . . This march of the coffee plantations over the wide expanses of Brazil has been likened to a devastating giant wave . . . . In some of these early coffee regions the abandoned soil is so crisscrossed by ravines and gullies that it almost resembles a lunar landscape.

Should Brazil be called "Brazil the Overpopu­lated"? Or should it be called "Brazil the Raped"? It is no coincidence that American cor­porations dominate the economy of many of the world's poorest and hungriest countries.

Peru, Brazil—the list could go on and on. It could include South Africa, where black men are paid slave wages to build Ford cars.

Or Liberia, whose rubber plantations yield Firestone average net profits three times as great as the entire Liberian national revenue.

Or the Dominican Republic, scene of Ameri­can military intervention in 1965, where Ameri­can companies own the best plantation land on the island, make big profits from sugar crops, and pay hungry Dominicans about a dollar a day.

And the list would have to include Vietnam.

 

IX

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER:

VIETNAM AND AMERICA’S

“DARK FOG PROBLEM”

 

Lyndon B. Johnson, a now retired American politician, once said that "the best guide to what we do abroad is what we do at home."

One of the things we have been doing at home is spraying farms, lawns, highway medians and vacant lots with herbicides (weed-killers). Some­thing called 2,3,5-T is the most common one used; it has been sprayed on over 5% of the U.S. Unfortunately it does a lot more than kill weeds.

2,3,5-T was being used near Globe, Arizona in 1965, and some of it drifted over populated areas. Shortly thereafter, one farmer reported that 60% of his goats were born dead or deformed, and his chickens stopped laying. Then trees started to die. Children got sick. And fin­ally women in the area began to have miscar­riages; and many had their reproductive organs removed.

Possibly 30% of South Vietnam has now been sprayed with 2.3,5-T thirteen times mire con­centrated than that permitted in America.

The Army says that it "only" wants to defoli­ate the trees. But it sprays 2,3,5-T .directly on "unfriendly" villages. Unfriendly villages are those in which any of the people arc sympa­thetic to the Viet Cong. This includes almost all the villages in South Vietnam.

The American government and American cor­porations are running the Vietnam war. The corporations build the war machine that the gov­ernment directs. And polluting Vietnam is one of their basic tactics. They attack the people and destroy the Dark Fog of their country.

The poisons they have sprayed to kill trees and destroy crops stay in the soil. Much of this soil is permanently destroyed. In many places, after the plant cover dies, the bare ground becomes as hard as a rock through a process called "lateriza­tion;" Generations must pass before laterized soil can again be farmed.

In other places, bamboo weeds grow in after the original plants are killed. So tough and stubborn is the bamboo plant that it is almost impos­sible to get rid of once it has taken over the land.

American planes have also sprayed herbicides over 100,000 acres of the mangroves which line Vietnam's estuaries. Estuaries are coastline bays and inlets where fresh water mixes with salt and where, in Vietnam, shoreline mangroves provide breeding grounds that yield premium harvests of fish and shellfish, The Vietnamese have always depended on their estuaries for much of their protein supply.

Now the estuaries of Vietnam have been destroyed. The few fish and shellfish that have survived the destruction cannot be eaten. They are so contaminated as to be poison time bombs for humans.

Poisons that get into soil and water also get into humans, even humans that are born years after the poisons were sprayed. As the lesson of Globe, Arizona shows, they are as deadly to people as they are to weeds and forests. One substance in the herbicides has been found to be 10,000 times more harmful than thalidomide. Already there are reports filtering back - from Vietnam of stillborn and deformed babies. We may be crippling a whole generation of Vietnam­ese.

What does the ecological destruction of Viet­nam have to do with the ecological destruction of America?

The same government that tells us about its concern for America's environment poisons the environment of Vietnam. The same corporations that pollute America and call it "pollution con­trol" make products to pollute Vietnam and call it "saving Vietnam from the communists."

Saving .Vietnam from the communists can be translated as saving Vietnam from the Vietnamiese, even if this means destroying the whole country and the people themselves. The same goes for Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, or any country whose people want to get rid of foreign businessmen and take control over their own resources. Politicians and businessmen cry "Communism!" whenever their power over the people and resources of the earth is threatened, either abroad or at home.

Money and power is the real story behind the Vietnam war. Power for American companies to control the wealth of Southeast Asia. Power thatwill let them keep the money rolling in.

Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia are prized by American businessmen because of the great natural resources of the region, and because con­trol over this area would give them an immense captive market.

American corporations value the resources because they -are things that America no longer has, or never had—things like tungsten, ant­imony, tin.

American corporations need these markets because the American people just cannot keep buying fast enough to keep the corporations growing and profiting.

The Vietnamese know all this. That's why they are fighting back. For over a thousand years, the Vietnamese have been fighting against foreign powers that came to take away the wealth of their country.

How about us?—we have to fight the war, and we have to pay for it. 45,000 lives and over $100 billion dollars, and the war grinds on. We have nothing to gain from this war — we can only lose.

When you get right down to it, we really have much in common with the Vietnamese. The companies that run America make profits off both of us. And both of us are the victims of their ecological crimes.

The Vietnamese have a headstart on us in solv­ing their pollution problem. They know very clearly what causes it. They are attacking the problem at its source.

If we really want to make America a_. fit placeto live in once again, we also have to understand our problem. More of us have to realize that bad Dark Fog cannot be separated from unfit housing, inflation, lousy working conditions or the rat-race psyche rock; from racism, the repression of women, starvation or wars of aggression.

The fight against ecological disaster cannot succeed if it does not recognize the common obstacle to the solution of all these problems: in America, the wealth of society is produced for profit, not for people. And the small elite that gains power and wealth from this system will use every weapon at their command to preserve it, no matter whether they see the threat rising from the people of Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America or the United States itself. Once we understand these things, it will be clear that there is only one way to deal with our Dark Fog problem:

Attack the problem at its source.