What-me worry?
Is public interest lacking in air pollution?
By JOHN KIELY
Now, as Americans are fighting that land war in Asia, as taxes are fluctuating, as interested parties are struggling to make LSD available on demand, as water is critically short, as housewives organize to lower retail food prices and as some struggle to save the whooping crane from extinction, why worry about air pollution?
The air over Lawrence isn't in too bad a shape, so it is the ideal time to worry about air pollution here.
THREE YEARS AGO, WHEN Tony Resnik, now Kansas City-Wyandotte county public health director arrived in Kansas City, he suggested the city investigate the problems and potential problems of air pollution there. At that time, the air over Kansas City
TONY RESNIK
didn't seem to be in too bad a shape either.
One community official told Resnik, "You go out and collect me some air pollution and I'll eat it." Resnik did. The official has been.
Thousands of samples of polluted air have been collected. And that official and each other townsmember has eaten and breathed the pollutants daily.
MIDWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE conducted the Kansas City investigation. Currently they tout their non-profit service in air pollution by saying, "Even if you do not believe that an air pollution problem exists in your community, now is the time to develop air quality standards to establish an air pollution authority to prevent the occurrence of air pollution in the future."
Once upon a time, Los Angeles residents didn't believe that an air pollution problem existed in their community. They learned. Now they're desperately trying to maintain what clean air they can.
"If we had not stopped smog from stationary sources," said a Los Angeles air pollution control officer, "Los Angeles today would be uninhabitable. If we are not able to stop smog from automobiles it will be uninhabitable in a few years."
AND SO, THEIR PARTICULAR fight goes on. Right now, L.A. industry must control emissions. Private incinerators are outlawed, one does not burn refuse. Vapor filters must be fitted for restaurant kitchens, printing presses, dry cleaning plants and many other places.
Angelenos have even tried out lawing dust. Contractors must
now water soak the ground before each earth-moving operation begins.
The problem in that smog-clogged city is particular and specific. Much of it is caused by their geographical and meteorological conditions. They can't help that. However, they can control much of what pollutes their air.
Any city or town can do this, if they will. With public health officials reporting that over ninety per cent of the city people breathe polluted air, one of the important considerations is time. Another is doing the job intelligently.
JOHN LINDSAY, WHO USED air pollution as a campaign issue when he raced for the New York mayor's post, was concerned about the problem when he was still a congressman.
"Air pollution is a problem which could have been solved, or, at least adequately controlled when it first began to grow. Inaction has allowed it to reach the order of crisis."
Resnik, who calls air pollution "one of the biggest departmental problems" doesn't like crisis motivated action. He says that for far too long, the professionals in the health field have had to wait until a crisis of disaster hit and motivated the average citizen to action.
BUT, LIKE IT OR NOT, it's a fact of life. "The missing ingredient," says George R. Williams, chief of the Respiratory Disease Program for the National Tuberculosis Association, "in most community air pollution programs has been public interest and participation."
A Midwest Research Institute chemical engineer, Thomas Bath, said that, ideally, the best time to act on air pollution is before the problem exists. However, he amends the ideal to the actual. "It costs money . . . so the best time to start work is when there's public support for it."
The amount of money it costs varies. Under existing federal laws the cost to the local community is greatly reduced.
For instance, a double jurisdiction, such as Kansas City and Wyandotte county or Lawrence and Douglas county, can receive a grant in a 3-to-1 ratio. The federal government gives three dollars for every dollar the local jurisdictions supply in cash or service.
IN KANSAS CITY-WYAN-dotte county, they got ninety-seven thousand federal dollars by supplying thirty-six thousand dollars.
If, as reported earlier, local industry is instituting self-control, why is any spending necessary? Maybe it isn't.
However, these industries aren't required to self-impose standards, and they have no set of standards deemed locally acceptable.
"All public policies of the sort involved in air conservation require the setting of standards," wrote James P. Dixon, president of Antioch College and director of the American National Council for Health Education of the Public.
Friday, Nov. 25th, 8:30 p.m.
Municipal Auditorium
Kansas City, Missouri
Tickets on sale at Auditorium Box
Office—$2-$3-$3.50-$4.
—Exclusively on Warner Brothers
THIS LACK OF STANDARD setting is the general condition throughout Kansas. There is no state wide air pollution control board. Last year when air pollution control laws were introduced in the state legislature they were defeated. This seems an almost ironical footnote to the 1958 statement of Dr. Dixon, then Philadelphia's Health Commissioner, who said that unless man's "somewhat submerged" desire for self-preservation surfaced, "Gas masks may be as common in a hundred years as shoes are today."
And the doctor's statement doesn't seem far-fetched when Public Health Surgeon General Luther L. Terry states, "A decade now brings changes demanding much greater adaptations in our habits of body and mind than a millennium did during the vastly greater portion of man's existence on earth."
"WE ARE LIMITED IN OUR knowledge of the health effects of air pollution by our knowledge of the substances in the air," said researcher Dr. Eric J. Cassell.
With this accelerated pace constantly accelerating, experts not only explain that legislation is necessary but that constantly changeable legislation is necessary.
He maintains that since new substances are continually being found, "Air pollution legislation directed solely at specific substances runs the hazard of becoming obsolete and falling to protect people from other toxic and irritating substances that have not yet been identified."
At least Kansas hasn't directed legislation at specific substances, but having no legislation seems a greater problem to people like Public Health Service Assistant Surgeon General Vernon G. MacKenzie.
Last 2 Days!
Shows 2:30 - 7:00 - 9:15
NEXT!
"Not With My Wife
You Don't"
"WE SHOULD NOT POSTpone action until emergency makes it compulsory. To wait for the flood and then try to plug the hole in the dike is not flood management. In air pollution, drastic action—undertaken at short notice in response to some new and larger-scale Donora (site of a fatal air pollution episode)—
Next — "The Swinger"
Last 2 Days!
Shows: 2:00 & 7:30
"LA DOLCE VITA"
Sunset DRIVE IN THEATRE - West on Highway 40 Now! Show at 7:00 "Bunny Lake Is Missing" & "Psycho"
"Not With My Wife You Don't"
THOMAS BATH
perhaps applied gradually. Above all, pre-planned action will save lives."
could be far more costly and far more disruptive of normal economic and social patterns, than control measures which could be carefully planned in advance and
And the lives aren't all taken in smog assaults. "We are . . . more concerned with the slow, insidious effects of long-continued exposure to much lower concentrations of air pollutants, concentrations such
Last of a three part series
as those which prevaliant constantly or recur frequently in most of our cities," said Dr. Robert J. Anderson, Public Health Service Assistant Surgeon General.
Of course the experts could be wrong. Perhaps there isn't an air pollution problem and perhaps the pollutants don't really kill. Perhaps it would be better to wait and see.
And, conceivably, there might even still be time after the experts' beliefs are again verified.
RAMSAY'S RECORD
PHILADELPHIA—(UPI) Jack Ramsay, general manager of the Philadelphia 76'ers of the NBA, had a 234-72 record and 10 post-season appearances in 11 years as head basketball coach at St. Joseph's (Pa).
10
Daily Kansan Monday, November 21, 1966
THE TOWN CRIER
912 Mass.
FEATURES SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTBOOKS
PAPERBACK BOOKS
MAGAZINES
NEWSPAPERS
GREETING CARDS & GIFTS
Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
Daily Including Sunday