11
Protecting Nature
On January 28, 1969, an oil well failed in the Santa Barbara Channel, six miles off the California coast. “Uneventful Day,” read the Los Angeles Times headline, “Then Well No. 5 Blew Out.” The oil flowed freely for eleven days, and lesser leaks plagued the channel for the rest of the year. The Santa Barbara spill created the third-largest oil slick in US history, after the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico and the 1989 Exxon Valdez crash off Alaska.
Santa Barbara is a cupcake of a university town nestled between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Ynez Mountains. In 1969, it was home to an engaged citizenry of about 70,000 students, surfers, artists, and upper-middle-class liberals. At the time, no place was off-limits to resource extraction. The Santa Barbara Channel saw its first drilling rigs in 1958. A decade later, when the Lyndon B. Johnson administration was trying to finance the Vietnam War without raising taxes, more oil leases in the Santa Barbara Channel seemed like a good idea. Oil companies bid for leases on more than 450,000 acres under the Santa Barbara Channel, and the government received $624 million for seventy leases.
Disaster struck in less than a year.
An oil slick of about 800 square miles formed in the channel, and a storm finally pushed the oil ashore eight days after the accident. Oil containment booms were laid to keep the spill away from the harbors and beaches, but they failed. Sticky, black crude oil–covered birds, seals, sea lions, dolphins, kelp beds, and mile after mile of beaches. In the end, roughly 4 million gallons of oil were released and over thirty miles of California’s coastline were besmirched. On some beaches, the oil was six inches deep.
“A week after the blowout,” recalled one resident, “you’d go to the beach and you couldn’t hear the waves.… Just … slop, slop, slop, slop. And people just stood there and cried.”
Another person recalled that there were “miles of beach—as far as the eye could see—covered in black oil. Beaches that you walked on, swam off of, just gazed at countless times. And the smell of oil was just everywhere.”
Meanwhile, no one knew how to manage an oil slick. Straw was thrown down to soak up oil in the harbors and on beaches, and pitchforked into waste barrels that were dumped in a canyon; subsequent rainstorms swept the blackened hay back to the shoreline. Eventually more than 5,200 dump trucks of oily wastes were landfilled. Six months after the blowout, oil continued to wash ashore and some beaches were still closed.
The oil slick in the channel took more than a year to dissipate.
Many of the townspeople had objected to the government auction of oil-drilling rights off Santa Barbara, and they were furious. These Santa Barbara residents held protests, signed petitions, and demanded a ban on offshore drilling. They staged plays, sang protest songs, and wrote hundreds of letters to the editor. The nearby Los Angeles news community featured the Santa Barbara spill on nightly television news, and lawsuits filed by the city and county of Santa Barbara sought $1 billion in damages from oil companies and the federal government. This oil spill caught the nation’s attention.
Before the days of federal regulation, everyday environmental degradation was so profound that action had become imperative. The public was agitating for pollution control at the local, state, and federal levels. Local organizations sprang up in communities near polluted water bodies, particularly the Great Lakes, and citizen action groups were formed across the country. The Student Council on Pollution and the Environment, Buffalo’s Housewives to End Pollution, the Society Against Violence to the Environment, the Clean Air Coordinating Committee, Chicago’s Campaign Against Pollution, the Group Against Smog and Pollution, and Santa Barbara’s Get Oil Out all lobbied their local city councils, state legislatures, and national representatives. By 1970, there were thirty-six Chicago groups working for a cleaner environment, and thirty organizations in northern California alone.
At the time of the Santa Barbara spill, Republican president Richard Nixon had just been inaugurated. Nixon, caught in a historic moment, was our nation’s most effective environmentalist. Southeast Asia and China were more interesting to Nixon than the US environment, yet he signed a far-reaching pile of laws to prevent his Democratic rivals from claiming the issue as their own.
Nixon’s tapes reveal more than you’d want to know about what he really thought. In a meeting with automakers in the Oval Office, he explained that environmentalists wanted to “go back and live like a bunch of damned animals.” They weren’t even sincere, according to Nixon. They’re “a group of people that aren’t one really damn bit interested in safety or clean air. What they’re interested in is destroying the system. They’re enemies of the system.” Nixon clearly did not see himself as an environmentalist, but he presided over an astonishing amount of environmental legislation.
After the Santa Barbara spill, bills to protect the environment were introduced by both parties, and Nixon’s January 1970 State of the Union address was a call to action: “Clean air is not free, and neither is clean water.… Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.” The New York Times’ above-the-fold headline was “Nixon, Stressing Quality of Life, Asks in State of Union Message for Battle to Save Environment.”
Nixon set up the framework for US environmental policy because he had to. “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions,” he said. “It has become a common cause of all of the people of this country.” Laissez-faire capitalism had resulted in unbreathable air and unswimmable waterways, and the times were changing.
The new environmentalists were different from conservationists like Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, and Gifford Pinchot. Those men wanted to protect beauty and resources from people who would kill all the animals and cut all the trees for money. Saving nature, to them, meant regulating commercial hunters and reserving forestland from loggers. New environmentalism wanted to do a lot more than that: their intent was to readjust the relationship between humans and the Earth. By the 1960s, the air and water had been compromised, and protecting these commons would take a wholesale change in the way business was done. The new activists rejected the assumption that environmental degradation was a necessary corollary of affluence. Capitalism itself would have to be curbed to save the country.
Opinion polls from the late 1960s show a dramatic upswing in public concern about environmental issues, particularly water pollution. National organizations that pushed an environmental agenda were multiplying: 1969 saw the first meetings of the League of Conservation Voters and Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council was formed in 1970, and Greenpeace was launched in 1971.
Civil rights, the counterculture, the music, and mass demonstrations in the streets were signs of a fundamental shift in American culture. In the Age of Aquarius, happiness was no longer contingent on simply having enough money to purchase material goods. Instead, people were starting to believe that living without nature makes us poor.
When Stewart Brand wrote the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, his preface read, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Until now, he noted, power has been held by “government, big business, formal education, church.” But “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Long before the Internet and the personal computer, Stewart Brand promoted self-sufficiency through networks of like-minded people. The Last Whole Earth Catalogue won the National Book Award in 1972, in the category “Contemporary Affairs.”
“Stay Hungry,” wrote Brand. “Stay Foolish.”
Change the world.
People were rejecting established norms in favor of an individualistic nature-centered worldview. Communes and the back-to-the-land movement were based on a personal connection to nature, and Nixon guided Congress to embrace a new role in environmental protection. “Our current environmental situation calls for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air, and water use,” said Nixon, “for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs.”
Nixon’s environmental engagement was backdropped by the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, when over 20 million people—about one-tenth of the country—demonstrated across the United States for action on the environment. Nixon signed an executive order creating the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the end of the year, with the mission of protecting public health and the environment. The Clean Air Act and its tough automobile emission standards followed.
The foaming rivers and algae-clogged lakes—one of the most visible signs of nature gone askew—came next. Lake Erie had been declared dead in the late 1960s, thanks to the 1.5 billion daily gallons of sewage and industrial effluent pouring into the lake from Detroit, Cleveland, and 120 other cities.
Canada’s response to the Great Lakes’ distress was the 1970 Canada Water Act, which reduced phosphorus in detergents. The United States took longer. In classic American fashion, the soap manufacturers bound together to form the Soap and Detergent Association with the purpose of questioning whether phosphates really caused eutrophication, where excess nutrients in water leads to excessive growth of algae and plants. As with tobacco and lung cancer or fossil fuels and global warming, doubts over whether detergents caused lakes to be clogged with algae were funded by corporations with profits at stake.
In the face of federal inaction, cities in six different states outlawed detergents with phosphates in 1971. The result was a patchwork of laws until the federal government (and its friends, the soap manufacturers) caught up with the will of the people.
The Clean Water Act was like a miracle. When you stop dumping industrial and municipal wastes into the waterways, they become healthy. It worked every time: soon after a wastewater treatment plant was built, clean water and fish replaced the turds and algae that had clogged the local river, lake, or seashore. The trash that littered the waterways was cleared out, often by citizen groups, and over time many of the country’s rivers and lakes have became vibrantly alive. Boston, for example, was the last major US city to build adequate wastewater treatment facilities. Until the 1980s, Boston Harbor was a fetid mess, and the prevailing currents deposited human feces onto Winthrop Beach. Thanks to the EPA, dolphins and seals now swim in the harbor, and Winthrop Beach smells like the seashore.
Without federal regulations, cities and industries ruined our commons because costs incurred by damaging public health and the environment aren’t paid by the polluters, and it is always cheaper to dump wastes into the air and water. Pollution control is expensive, and federal environmental laws are the sole reason that our cities are no longer dark with smog, our waterways don’t burn, and many lakes and rivers are now swimmable. As Nixon said, clean air and clean water aren’t free.
We’ve been focusing on air and water pollution, but there was also an ongoing fight to save animals from extinction. We left species protection back in 1918, when overharvesting was the biggest problem, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed to increase waterfowl populations. It didn’t work, and a 1934 report listed migratory waterfowl as the most significant issue in wildlife conservation. Conservationist Jay Darling testified that migratory waterfowl populations were a quarter of what they had been in 1910, and his Duck Stamp Act of 1934 funded an expansion of the national wildlife refuge system before ducks disappeared. Mammals, however, were on their own. Director of the National Park Service Arno Cammerer warned Congress that unless “fur-bearers, notably the wolf, wolverine, badger, otter, and fisher” were protected, they would be gone. The government did nothing, and citizens formed national organizations to advocate for wildlife, including the Wilderness Society in 1935, the National Wildlife Federation in 1936, and Ducks Unlimited in 1937.
The first attempt to protect the bald eagle was the 1930 House Resolution 7994. The National Audubon Society presented evidence that the bald eagle was in danger of extinction, and many conservation groups supported the bill. But it took a decade for the law to pass because ranchers saw eagles as dangerous predators (in fairness, eagles can eat a lot of chickens, are notorious for eating lamb eyes as well as lambs, and can kill small calves). In 1940, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act finally safeguarded these apex predators from humans.
Sport hunters and ranchers had a mutual distaste for predators, and guided most wildlife management decisions in the 1950s and ’60s. Government agencies worked to increase the populations of certain species and eradicate others, and there was no room for wolves or grizzlies on public land.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) was created in 1961 as an arm of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to save the world’s most endangered species. They believed that $4.2 million (about $35 million in 2018) was enough to save the California condor, the whooping crane, the giant tortoise, the Ceylon elephant, the African lion, and more than a dozen other species from extinction. According to the New York Times, WWF scientists believed that about 200 species of mammals and birds had become extinct “since the time of Jesus,” and more than a third of these extinctions took place in the first half of the twentieth century. Their list of species that needed saving included several that were native to the United States.
A world list of endangered and threatened species—the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species—was first published in 1964. The US Fish and Wildlife Service created the Committee on Rare and Endangered Species that same year, and nine biologists determined that some thirty-five to forty species had gone extinct in North America since the American Revolution, and sixty-two US species were currently threatened with extinction. They faulted habitat destruction, overhunting, and pollution.
Most of the species that caught people’s imagination were charismatic megafauna. In particular, people loved whales and other cetaceans, and Dr. John C. Lilly was largely responsible for their popularity. Man and Dolphin, which a review in Science magazine described as “one of the frankest and most egotistical accounts of a research project ever placed before a sensation-loving public,” was his first bestseller.
Lilly first studied dolphin intelligence by implanting electrodes in their brains. Later research projects on dolphin communication included giving dolphins LSD and interspecies sex. (Both of these research projects are less shocking than they sound, since psychoactive drugs were new, and given to many species for research—a paper on drugged spiders is a classic of the genre—and dolphins are one of the few species that enjoy year-round recreational sex.)
Lilly was a fan of anecdotal evidence, and little of his research was peer reviewed. But he was very enthusiastic. According to Lilly, dolphins were peaceful, generous, and sexually liberated. Lilly waxed poetic about dolphins’ social compassion, intelligence, and complex phonations: dolphins use whistles and clicks to communicate. Other cetaceans, particularly whales, have elaborate songs constructed with individual variations on common forms, lasting from six to thirty minutes. Whales repeat their song very precisely, and their songs change slowly from year to year. As a child, my dad told me that blue whales would go extinct because there were so few left they couldn’t find each other in the oceans. Then we learned about whale songs, and our understanding of the oceans changed. Whales are the voice of the ocean, and their songs can be heard for hundreds of miles.
How smart are cetaceans? Really smart. One guess is that their intelligence is equivalent to a three-year-old human, or a smart dog. Which might sound insulting except that three-year-olds are really smart, as are dogs. Plus they echolocate, using sound to “see” objects.
Bottlenose dolphins have bigger brains than humans (1,600 grams versus 1,300–1,400 grams), and when body size is taken into account they have the largest brains of all animals but humans. Considering that dolphins swim in cold water and need a layer of blubber for insulation, their ratio of brain weight to body weight is very impressive. Their neocortex, the area of the brain used for language, cognition, sensory perception, and spatial reasoning, is more convoluted than ours. Complex social relationships are linked to large brains, and research has revealed that wild dolphins, like elephants, apes, and humans, have highly complex social lives.
The new discoveries about cetaceans led people to reconsider their beliefs about marine mammals and animal intelligence. To some people, cetaceans represented an alternate evolutionary path for an intelligent mammal. Cetaceans are like better human beings with a more enlightened relationship with nature.
Flipper, the television show that ran from 1964 to 1967, featured a dolphin who befriends a Florida park ranger and his sons. Flipper was marketed like Lassie, on lunch boxes, souvenir spoons, swim trunks, and a glow-in-the-dark watch, in comics, puzzles, songbooks, coloring books, and a children’s novel. Flipper did not have an ecological message. There was no attempt to show bottlenose dolphins as anything but a human sidekick. And no attempt to be accurate: his voice is reportedly a slowed-down version of the song of an Australian kingfisher, or kookaburra. But the television show presented these mammals as clever, worthy, and kind.
Naturalist Marlin Perkins hosted Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, an educational series centering on the lives of animals, which ran from 1963 to 1971. The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau was a documentary television series, which ran from 1966 to 1976, hosted by conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the crew of his ship, the Calypso. They went to different areas of the globe to film episodes like “Sharks” and “Octopus, Octopus,” teaching people about the oceans at a time when our understanding of these biomes was in its infancy. Both of these programs presented the intrinsic value of different species to people who may not have thought about nature in that way.
In 1966, the New York Times reported that only forty-four whooping cranes and thirty-eight condors remained, and that bald eagles and Florida’s Key deer were on the brink of disappearing forever. In the past, this news would have spurred collectors to harvest and stuff the last few individuals for museums and private collections. That’s how the auk went extinct. But this time, people were thinking about other species with more respect.
Congress passed the 1966 Endangered Species Preservation Act because the public was demanding that the federal government step in and save iconic American species. The act pulled together existing wildlife refuges and other federal lands to create the National Wildlife Refuge System, and hunters were barred from killing endangered species in the refuges (but not on private, state, or other federal lands).
Florida’s Key deer was the first species saved by the Endangered Species Preservation Act. These strange, fairy-like creatures weigh between sixty-five and eighty-five pounds, about the size of a Labrador retriever. There may have been just twenty-five deer left when the government intervened and created Key deer refuges that grew to 9,200 acres. These little deer are common now on some of the Keys, living testimony to the fact that we can save endangered species from extinction.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s list of endangered species now included seventy-eight species. The New York Times kept writing about the impending extinctions, and a September 9, 1967, editorial noted that the global list of species facing extinction included 250 species, including the “blue whale, the polar bear and the leopard, the fearsome tiger and the humble alligator.” A few weeks later, the newspaper was decrying the fur trade as preying on some of the rarest and most beautiful creatures alive. Jackie Kennedy’s leopard coat of 1962 had inspired a national craze that, at eight pelts per coat, was driving the big cat to extinction.
Hunters had become very efficient, as had whalers. Modern industrial whaling started soon after 1900, with large factory ships, fast catching boats, and specialized crews. The largest and fastest whales could now be caught and rendered, and soon the factory ships had rear slipways so whales could be winched directly onto the deck up a ramp.
“One modern factory ship can take more whales in one season than the entire American whaling fleet of 1846 which number over 700 vessels,” said US Coast Guard lieutenant junior grade Quentin R. Walsh in 1938 after a year on the whale factory ship Ulysses. (During his tour, the Ulysses crew killed 3,665 whales.)
Close to 3 million whales were processed during the twentieth century alone. Just looking at sperm whales, about 300,000 were killed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, another 300,000 were killed between 1900 and 1962, and 300,000 more were killed between 1962 and 1972. The problem with these numbers is that females do not physically mature until about the age of thirty, and males do not physically mature until they are about fifty. Populations of these slow-growing, long-lived mammals had no way to recover from ships that could process a hundred sperm whales a day.
Whales were common property and an open-access resource: no one owned them and anyone could take them. They were initially plentiful and when one species dwindled from overhunting, another species would become the favored prey. The cost of a factory ship was so high that, in practice, the world’s whales were divided between a handful of ships.
Blue whales had been too fast to catch and too big to process until factory ships started being built. Between 1910 and 1966, an impressive 330,000 blue whales were killed in the Antarctic alone. According to the IUCN, a female reaches sexual maturity when she is about thirty-one years old and seventy-eight feet long. The 1937 International Agreement for the Regulation of Whaling allowed whalers to take blue whales at seventy feet, so whalers harvested the adolescents as well as the adults. The average length of the blue whales caught in 1965 was seventy-three feet. They were catching the teenagers, and there was no hope for the next generation.
Old harpoons stuck in the blubber of recently harvested bowhead whales show that they can live to be over 200 years old. We don’t know how old sperm whales and blue whales can be, but a species that doesn’t reach sexual maturity for fifty years could be very long-lived indeed.
Whaling has been regulated since 1931, when twenty-two nations signed the Geneva Convention for the Regulation of Whaling and agreed to stop bowhead whaling; right and gray whales were protected in 1935. The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was signed in Washington, DC, in December 1946, and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) was set up “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry.”
In spite of the regulated harvest, species after species of whales were harvested to near extinction. In its first thirty years, the IWC authorized the harvest of 1.5 million whales, about half of the total killed in the twentieth century. Some populations were slaughtered completely, and others were reduced to a small fraction of their original abundance. The IWC banned humpback whaling in the North Atlantic in 1955, the hunting of blue whales in 1966, and fin whale hunting in the southern hemisphere and the northern Pacific in 1976.
And yet hunting continued. In The Blue Whale, which won the 1972 National Book Award, George Small described case after case of illegal whaling. The most gruesome account was of Aristotle Onassis’s factory ship Olympic Challenger, a notorious pirate whaler. In 1954, Onassis was charged in court with slaughtering 4,648 sperm whales, 285 blue whales, 169 fin whales, 105 humpbacks, and 21 sei whales during a year in which he had a modest declared catch of 2,348 sperm whales. After many protests, Onassis paid a fine of $3 million, and upholstered the barstools on his private yacht with leather made from sperm whale penises (which, according to the Amsterdam Zoo, is the only skin on a whale that can be tanned and used as leather). I can only hope that Jackie Kennedy Onassis never wore her leopard-skin coat while perched on a barstool on the Christina, lest the gates of hell yawn open.
Onassis liked his factory ship, and kept using it even when regulations limited his allowed catch. So did the Soviet Union, which owned seven factory ships, each with a fleet of catcher boats that numbered from three to over a dozen. In a single day, the largest factory ships could process up to 200 small sperm whales or 100 humpback whales, and they weren’t inclined to stop. Even with multiple international observers living on factory ships, whalers figured out how to cheat the rules. The USSR whaling fleet is estimated to have illegally killed about 180,000 whales worldwide after hunting was banned, and was responsible for a number of population crashes. By the time blue whale hunting stopped, there may have been as few as 200 left.
The most disturbing part of this story is that there was no need to harvest whales. In the twentieth century, whale oil, baleen, and ivory were products with viable substitutes. European margarine and soap makers started replacing whale oil with tastier seed and nut oils in the 1950s. The Soviets used whale oil for lubricants, and whale meat as food on fur farms; the Japanese and Norwegians eat whale meat. I ate whale meat in Norway in 1970, where it was sold in the market as hvalbiff (whale steak). My mother bought it thinking of halibut, but hvalbiff is nearly purple, like liver, because whales have more myoglobin in their muscles than cows (or humans). Myoglobin stores oxygen, allowing whales to stay underwater for up to ninety minutes at a time. The meat tasted like rich, lean beef.
A series of recordings of humpback songs was released in 1970 as the album Songs of the Humpback Whale. This became the bestselling environmental record in history, achieving multiplatinum status. In 1979, National Geographic magazine inserted a flexible sound page of Songs of the Humpback Whale inside the back cover of all of its editions, with 10 million copies sent around the world in a single month, perhaps the greatest single pressing of any album ever. Humpback whale songs are psychedelic and a little trippy, perfect for the era. The songs were recorded by whale biologist Roger Payne and his sidekick, Scott McVay, a former lab researcher for dolphin aficionado John C. Lilly. Their article in Science magazine introduced humpback songs to the world: “The humpback whale,” they wrote, “emits a surprisingly beautiful series of sounds.”
Whale music helped inspire the worldwide movement to save the whales. The songs ranged from heartfelt moans and deep growls to high wails and riffles of clicks, encompassing the full range of emotions. As an engineering student, I did years of problem sets with Songs of the Humpback Whale playing in the background. What better way to set up graphs than by listening to animals who can see sound?
At first, the United States tried to save the whales by itself. The US secretary of the interior put all the great whales on the endangered species list, whether or not they needed to be there. No US company had harvested whales since World War II, but hunting or selling whales became illegal in 1971 when the US secretary of the interior banned commercial whaling. Whaling fleets were owned by many other countries, though, and saving the whales was an international problem. Congress passed a resolution calling on the secretary of state to negotiate a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling with other nations.
The harsh truth about whaling is that factory fleets are too efficient. A single whaling factory fleet is capable of deconstructing 35,000 humpbacks a year, if they can find them. That means that a factory ship’s annual quota of 3,000 whales leaves the vessel woefully underused. There are plenty of minke whales—over half a million—but they’re much smaller than humpbacks and a single factory ship might be capable of processing 100,000 to 150,000 a year. Should only one country be allowed to harvest minke whales? Shall we allow three or four factory fleets to harvest them all? When a single ship is capable of eradicating an entire species in a single decade, it’s good to remember that when profits are balanced against regulations, profits often win.
Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, which protected every marine mammal from harassment or harvest. The United States would no longer attempt to harvest any of these animals because the factory ships were so enormous and the remaining populations of marine mammals so remote that, in practice, the harvest could not be regulated.
In 1972, Nixon ran against George McGovern. The protests against the Vietnam War were escalating, and the Republican Party’s adoption of environmental protection made Nixon a more attractive candidate. The Republican Party platform of 1972 included a promise of “vigorous environmental protection … [to] restore the water quality of the Great Lakes in cooperation with Canada … [and] protect and conserve marine mammals and other marine species.”
“We commit ourselves to comprehensive pollution control laws,” claimed the Republicans, and “vigorous implementation of those laws and rigorous research into the technological problems of pollution control.” They even liked public land: “We have proposed 36 new wilderness areas, adding another 3.6 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System.” And they liked whales most of all.
The Nixon White House tapped into the growing energy of the anti-whaling movement as part of a larger political strategy to maintain American environmental leadership internationally. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm was the first global meeting on the environment, and the United States pushed hard for a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling everywhere in the world. The ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling was adopted by nearly all nations, and the International Whaling Commission voted in favor of sustaining the moratorium in 1982. It is still in effect today. This was the first time all of the world’s nations worked together to solve an environmental problem.
The USSR was a rogue operator in the 1970s, and nearly pushed some species of cetaceans to extinction. But they stopped whaling in the 1980s, and the whales have in fact been saved. The blue whale population is now somewhere between 10,000 and 25,000 from a low of perhaps 200. They survived.
Published in 1972 by Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits to Growth became an international phenomenon, selling over 30 million copies in more than thirty languages. The thesis was that if current rates of economic growth, resource use, and pollution continued, then modern civilization would face environmental and economic collapse in the mid-twenty-first century. This tied in nicely with ecologist Garrett Hardin’s well-named 1968 Science article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” where he explains that rational individuals will exploit common property like forests and fields without considering the effects on other people because the individual reaps all of the benefits, and the costs to the community are evenly distributed: I win a lot, and everyone else loses a little. Individuals, acting independently and rationally, will behave against the community’s long-term interests by overusing the commons. The same year, biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote the bestselling book The Population Bomb, predicting that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation unless there was an international effort to slow population growth.
While the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA) was debated, the whole nation was thinking that there were too many people, too much pollution, and not enough room for wild animals. Eagle and condor populations had still not recovered, and a 1972 study showed that between 1968 and 1970, furriers in the United States imported 18,456 leopard skins, 31,105 jaguar skins, and 249,680 ocelot skins. The current laws weren’t working. Aldo Leopold’s line from A Sand County Almanac, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering,” was passed around like a mantra, along with the tautology “extinction is forever.”
The ESA passed unanimously in the Senate, and the House vote was 355–4. When Nixon signed it, his camera-ready quote was, “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.”
The ESA protected habitats as well as individual animals. This led to the practice of shoot, shovel, and shut up, where ranchers would kill and bury endangered species they found on their property, fearful that the government would tell them how to manage their land. But at the time, when our native species were fading away in front of our eyes, Republicans and Democrats both wholeheartedly supported the ESA.
Within the United States, a new kind of environmental consciousness was taking root. Before major projects were built, input from a variety of stakeholders was taken into account. Impacts and alternatives were considered, and decisions were made after public hearings and comments. New oil leases and drilling-rig proposals had to be evaluated for their environmental impacts, and could be prohibited on those grounds. Untreated sewage and industrial wastes could no longer be discharged into the waterways, cars could no longer belch smoke, and freeways could no longer be built through the middle of a neighborhood. People finally had a voice, which was often clamoring to decrease pollution, and before long environmental considerations even played a part in factory design and plant location. Protecting the environment became part of the way we do business.
We have cleaned up our air and water. The EPA, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act were largely successful, but in the 1970s a number of invisible international threats emerged. Ozone depletion came first, and then acid rain.
It is astonishing how quickly the world came together to solve the ozone problem. In 1974, Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina wrote a paper published in Nature that explained how human-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), used as refrigerants, in air conditioners, and as an aerosol propellant in cans, could damage the Earth’s protective ozone layer. They postulated that loss of ozone would allow more ultraviolet light to reach the Earth’s surface, and skin cancer and cataracts would become much more common. Although ozone loss had not been observed in the stratosphere—this was just a theory—these researchers recommended that CFCs be banned.
CFCs were an $8 billion business and DuPont, who made a quarter of the world’s CFCs, claimed there was no proof that CFCs were harming the ozone layer. DuPont’s chairman, quoted in Chemical Week, commented that the ozone depletion theory was “a science fiction tale … a load of rubbish … utter nonsense.” In the same July 16, 1975, issue, Sherwin-Williams Company announced that it was removing CFCs from its spray cans and adding a cheerful endorsement to their labels: “Use with confidence, contains no Freon® or other fluorocarbons claimed to harm the ozone layer.”
Before there was scientific consensus on ozone depletion and before anyone saw any ozone depletion in the atmosphere, the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark all banned the use of CFCs in aerosol cans. The terms ozone shield and hole in the ozone were easily understood, and Americans voluntarily stopped buying aerosol sprays even before CFCs were banned in spray cans in 1978. The US ban on CFCs as a propellant in aerosol cans made a big dent in global production of CFCs, but they were still used as a refrigerant and to clean circuit boards.
In the spring of 1981, the Japanese and British research stations in Antarctica both observed a 20 percent reduction in ozone. None of the scientists involved made their findings public because each research team assumed that their low measurements were due to faulty instruments. The following spring, the ozone depletion was noted again. In 1984, researchers from the Japanese station authored a paper on the ozone findings, and scientists at the British station published their findings in Nature. The ozone hole had first appeared in 1981 and had been observed every year since then, just like Rowland and Molina’s 1974 paper had predicted.
Under Ronald Reagan, the United States pushed for the international regulation of CFCs. A year after the ozone paper in Nature, the 1985 Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer was signed by twenty nations, including most of the CFC producers. A 1986 front-page article in the New York Times warned that “Americans could suffer 40 million cases of skin cancer and 800,000 cancer deaths in the next 88 years because of depletion of atmospheric ozone.” DuPont, possibly thinking of potential lawsuits from 40 million excess cancer sufferers, suddenly supported CFC limits, and the Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer, with forty-three signatory nations, followed in 1987. Decades later, the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic has finally started to mend.
Acid rain was also curbed by the federal government’s quick action. Until recently, the smoke from burning wood and coal went up the chimney in a cloud of alkaline soot and fly ash particles along with the acids produced during combustion, so the acids were neutralized by the soot. After World War II, tall smokestacks caused regional acid rain problems because the heavier ash and soot would fall to the ground while the lighter precursor chemicals for acid rain would stay high, un-neutralized by the soot. Acid rain is a complex mess, chemically, but direct measurements of rainwater have sometimes shown it to be as acidic as lemon juice or vinegar.
When huge coal plants with high smokestacks were built in the Midwest, the eastern states of the United States started to be affected by acid compounds carried on the jet stream. Mountain forests and ponds in the Northeast started dying of acid deposition in the 1960s. One problem with acid rain is that the low pH allows heavy metals, particularly aluminum, to become bioavailable. Fish and birds were killed by overdoses of aluminum in high-altitude ponds throughout New England, and soon ponds in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the Adirondacks of New York were completely devoid of life and ringed with small, pale skeletons. These dead ponds near the top of forested, seemingly wild mountains were surreal, and the soil was also affected: acid rain binds the calcium in soil, robbing plants of critical nutrients.
As fate would have it, a long-term forest monitoring project in central New Hampshire, the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, was the first place where the effects of acid rain were quantified. They found that throughout high-altitude New England, the acid rains stripped the buffers from the soil and released heavy metals, while the long-term biogeochemical measurements from Hubbard Brook show a decades-long decline in calcium levels in soil and plants. Thanks to New York Times reports on acid rain research, the Acid Precipitation Act was passed in 1980 to study the problem.
The northeastern mountains were acidified by a handful of power plants, and the problem was solved using a clever, low-cost model. The 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments demanded that overall sulfur emissions from these plants be cut in half to reduce acid rain, but it did not specify which type of air pollution–control equipment should be used, or limit the pollutants emitted by each plant. Instead a cap-and-trade approach was written into the legislation.
Cap-and-trade is based on two principles: there is an overall cap or limit on pollutant emissions within a certain boundary, and there are tradable allowances that permit allowance holders to release a specific quantity of the pollutant. This allows environmental goals to be met, and provides flexibility for individual polluters to figure out how to reduce emissions. Since pollution allowances can be bought and sold, cap-and-trade programs are often classified as market-based. Power companies could use the plants with the least emissions, retire plants that polluted the most, conserve their way to fewer emissions, substitute fuels to reduce emissions, clean their fuel before combustion, or actually sell or buy emission rights, so plants that reduced their emissions cheaply can sell their reductions to plants that pollute more.
Acid rain faded away. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, sulfur emissions went down more quickly than expected at a quarter of the anticipated cost. The US experience with cap-and-trade was a big success, and the rain in the northeastern mountains is much sweeter.
Since the 1960s, a number of global environmental issues have been solved by nations working together. The United States helped save the whales, heal the ozone hole, and halt acid rain, and was well positioned to lead the world in curbing climate change.