The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2017 41 May 1978: Decade of the Environment BY F I TZHUGH GREEN FROM THE FSJ ARCHIVES Carter wipes the packing grease off his new administrative machinery. The incumbents have smoothly grabbed the baton. They have made no major innovations so far, but they are busily building on the already registered gains in clean air and water and grappling bravely with the ever-increasing legions of carcinogens. Overseas the United States assumed an early leadership starting in 1971 as its fledgling EPA began to meet, plan, negoti- ate and swap information with dozens of other countries just waking up to the eco-peril. Only Sweden (in 1967) had already formed a national EPA. This country and Great Britain set theirs up in 1970. As of now there are approximately 50 federal pollution agencies to be found on the five continents. Also, a clutch of multinational organizations are busily establishing pollutant measurement criteria and control guidelines among their members. The magnificent results of the United Nations Conference on Human Environment at Stockholm in 1972 are still felt. That autumn the U.N. General Assembly formed another special- ized agency and named it the United National Environmental Program. Headquartered in Nairobi, UNEP is largely an envi- ronmental monitoring activity but it can and does focus world attention on major pollution problems. … The conviction that all nations are enmeshed in the planet’s deteriorating atmospheric and oceanic system has also evoked quite a response from other major multinational organizations— NATO, for one. It was Daniel Moynihan’s idea to reorient the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to the ecological concerns of its members. This new departure for NATO began slowly. ... There is just one fragile spaceship Earth, and … if we are to survive, we must all take a world view. –Sen. Harrison Schmitt (R-N.M., 1977-1983) Fitzhugh Green was with Life magazine in New York before coming to Washington to work for the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Information Agency. He then served on the Hill as adviser on foreign affairs and oceanography to Senator Claiborne Pell and ran for Congress in 1970. After serving as associate administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency for six years, Mr. Green authored A Change in the Weather (see the January 1978 FSJ ). He also served as a psywar consultant at American University and is now [May 1978] working on a book on propaganda and doing consulting work on the environment. Eight years ago, America’s virgin environmental movement will- ingly entered the embrace of big government. One offspring of this union was internationalization. Our president laid down a policy to encourage other nations to fight against pollution. …How has the movement fared since President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970 and entitled this the “Decade of the Environment”? At Home and Abroad Many battles have been waged domestically between the polluters and the new federal control agency set up on Dec. 2, 1970—the Environmental Protection Agency. Additional laws have been passed, and enforced or tested in the courts. The environ- mental war zone was widened by the Arab oil embargo and fuel shortage, and the resultant fight to seek relief from strict control measures. Nuclear energy has been considered and rejected as the perfect oil-gas substitute. Nearly 30 billion federal dollars have been earmarked for improving the quality of rivers, lakes and off- shore waters. Yet we now discover that our globally renowned safe drinking water is threatened by chlorine, the very substance that is supposed to purify it. The air we must breathe has improved somewhat with the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act, despite some relaxation of the automobile emission regulations. But both air and water and living creatures, including man, are menaced by the entry into the market of hundreds of freshly manufactured and inadequately examined toxic chemicals every month. So there are wins and losses on the home front as President FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENTAL DIPLOMACY