Life styles modified
By ROBIN STEWART Kansan Staff Writer
With the bomb, the arms race, Vietnam and the cold war getting colder every year, prospects for a peaceful society look slim to many members of the younger generation. As a result, youth has sanctioned ways of life formerly unacceptable to their parents and grandparents in an effort to live "now."
Life in today's world is polarized by tremendous affluence on one end and equally tremendous poverty on the other. Domestic and international problems have yet to be met. The rapid pace of scientific and technological advancement has created a need for new life styles. Youth of today seem to have an answer to the age old question of living, and that is "do what is natural."
SEPARATION OF SEXES has been called unnatural, and college students reacted by demanding that coeducational classrooms extend into their ways of living. Result: coeducational dormitories.
KU has three university dorms and one private dorm which are coeducational. A counselor at one of these dorms said discipline problems could be expected in coeducational dorm living, and at her dorm such problems were at a "medium" level. She said she thought some couples were probably having sexual relationships in the dorm.
A recent survey conducted by "Ladies Home Journal" magazine found that 200 of America's 3,000 colleges and universities have coed dorms, and the number is increasing rapidly. Parents were at first shocked; they felt coeducational living would further intensify what they call the "sexual revolution." Nationally, however, comparatively few sexual relationships developed.
"SOME ONE MIGHT set the spark off, and we will all be blown away" go the lyrics
of a popular song. And today's youth prefers to live now while there is still time. "Shacking" is being increasingly sanctioned. Couples live together because they question American institutions, notably marriage. They live together because they are afraid to marry, wish to prepare for marriage, or for personal reasons.
A way of life that outspokenly rejects American institutions is communal living. Communal living may range from a do-it-yourself community tucked back in the mountains to a commune in which people live together for the sake of economy. Mores differ widely from liberal to traditional views on life. Again the idea that it is unnatural to segregate the sexes turns up.
MARRIAGE IS BECOMING a private affair, not a public act, as some clergymen assert. Kinsey found that the divorce rate was steadily rising. In 1900 one divorce took place for every 13 marriages; in 1967 one divorce took place for every four marriages.
Statisticians claim the new sexual permissiveness is due to the impersonality of city life, technological innovations such as birth control pills and the decline of religious influences. The number of illegitimate births has tripled in the last 15 years. In moral standards, "anything goes," wrote J. Edgar Hoover in a crime report.
ANOTHER NOVELTY in life styles is "sex clubs" in which members share sexual partners. About 40 to 50 clubs are located on the West Coast.
A search for new values rather than a moral decline is taking place today. Young people are not satisfied with present morals and values, so they are beginning to create their own. They want something more personal than institutionalized living.
Kansas pollution growing
In some ways Kansans are lucky. We do not yet have the kind of air pollution problems which killed 4,000 Londoners around Christmas time in 1952. The population has not grown yet to the point that cement streets and asphalt parking lots cover everything, as in New Jersey or Southern California. And we have not yet been blessed with a nuclear power plant.
On the other hand, the relative lack of severe pollution problems may eventually work against us. We compare our abundance of open space, translucent air, and quiet back country with the horrors of the highly industrialized states and we feel safe.
We would do better to be careful. We are still showing bad judgment, or none at all, in using our resources. For example, septic tanks provide the only sewage treatment for many expensive homes in all parts of Lawrence although the soil
is not suited to their use. The tanks are often too close together, and the soil is not porous enough to properly dissipate the flow. A similar problem already threatens the purity of the water in Perry Reservoir, a few miles north of Lawrence.
ONE OF KANSAS' big industries rivals the notorious wood pulp mills of the Southeastern United States in its river-polluting ability. Some feed lots, which turn out beef cattle the same production-line way International Paper turns out milk cartons, dump incredible amounts of raw sewage into the Cottonwood, Solomon and other rivers. In 1968 more than 27,000 fish died as a result of this kind of pollution in Kansas rivers.
Methods of maximizing agricultural production have caused problems which threaten to reduce long run soil productivity. Barry Commoner, professor of botany at Washington University in St. Louis, and a prominent ecologist, thinks that by
using artificial nitrogen fertilizers, farmers are reducing the soil's natural nitrogen-forming ability. Thus we shall have to use more and more artificial fertilizer in the future. But the run-off from fields treated with them pollutes rivers.
Kansas shares many environmental problems with the rest of the world. Presidential adviser Daniel P. Moynihan said recently that the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content would increase by one-fourth in the next 30 years. Although Kansas has but a small share of the world's cars, which spew forth carbon dioxide, it will bear its full share of the consequences.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere creates a "greenhouse effect" by letting through the sun's short wave radiation, but preventing long-wave heat radiation from escaping. The President's Science Advisory Committee reports that the resulting increase in surface temperature might be enough to melt the Antarctic ice cap in 400 and 4,000 years, with a resulting rise of 400 feet in the sea level.
Also, such environmental pollutants as DDT and radioactive wastes from weapons tests and nuclear power stations spread throughout the world, effecting the remotest locations on the globe.
Students take action
A rising concern among students about the physical conditions in which they will spend their lives has resulted in a national movement for environmental awareness and action. Students across the country are taking action to reverse the downward trend in the livability of our environment.
Students at the University of Washington staged a plant-in this fall to restore natural vegetation to a marsh area which had been severely damaged by road and building construction on campus. At the University of California at Berkeley a "Smogless Transportation Day" featured a parade of non-automotive means of travel.
Of more significance is an increased interest in courses and curricula to train future technicians and leaders with an understanding of and concern for conservation in addition to pure economics and technology.
ONE MAJOR FOCUS of student activity is a nation-wide teach-in scheduled for April 22. The national headquarters for the event is in Washington, D.C.
A series of speakers and discussion groups is being planned for the KU campus during the week of April 22.