Overall, legislative approaches to pollution control have been successful. For example, the air in many of the world's cities, although still pol­luted, is far cleaner than it was 15 years ago. Levels of sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants have been cut in several large industrial countries, including the United States, the former

West Germany and Japan. Lake Erie, which borders the United States and Canada, is no longer a dying ecosystem. The level of lead emissions in the United States is one-tenth

The 1975 level; this decline is primarily the result of a switch from leaded to unleaded gasoline. There is still plenty of room for progress—for example, in the United States, nitrogen dioxide pollution of city air from automobile exhaust is worse than it was 15 years ago. But the preceding examples dem­onstrate that it is possible to reduce pollution by setting legal limits.

    In countries where laws have not been passed to control pollution, the situation is far worse- Cities in developing countries {which typically do not regulate air emissions) have far filthier air than those in developed countries. Water and air pollu­tion in Eastern Europe, which never attempted to

control pollution while under Communist rule, are particularly bad. Approximately half of Poland's water is too polluted even for industrial use, 80 percent of its deep wells are polluted, and one fourth of its soil is too contaminated for safe farming. One fourth of Czechoslovakia’s rivers support no fish, and one third of Bulgaria’s forests are damaged or dying. Seeking lo limit pollution by legislation is only one of many ways in which governments act to protect the environment. In order to better understand key role governmental policy plays in environmental protection, let's look briefly at the history of environmental legislation in this country.

National Forests

From the establishment of the first permanent English colony at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the first two centuries of our country's history were a time of widespread environmental destruction. The great forests of the Northeast were leveled within a few generations, and soon after the Civil War in the 1860s, loggers began deforesting the Midwest at an appalling rate. Within 40 years they deforested an area the size of Europe, stripping Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin of virgin forest. By 1897 the sawmills of Michigan had processed 160 billion board feet of white pine, leaving less than 6 billion hoard feet standing in the whole state.

Economics and the Environment in Eastern Europe

The fall of Communist governments in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s revealed a grim legacy of environmental destruction. Water in Eastern Europe is so poisoned from raw sewage and chemicals that it cannot be used for industrial purposes, let alone for drinking. Unidentified chemicals leak out of dump sites into the surrounding soil and water, while nearby, fruits and vegetables are grown in chemically laced soil. Power plants pour soot and sulfur dioxide into the air, creating a persistent chemical haze. Buildings and statues ate eroded and entire forests are dead because of air pollution and acid rain. Crop yields are falling despite intensive use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

    How does this massive pollution affect human health? Many Eastern Europeans suf­fer from asthma, chronic bronchitis, and other respiratory diseases as a result of breathing the filthy, acrid air. By the time most Polish children are ten years old, for

Example, they suffer from chronic respiratory diseases or heart problems. The levels of can­cer, miscarriages, and birth defects are also extremely high. Life expectancies are lower than in other industrialized nations; the average Czech lives four to five years less than the average Western European, for example.

    The economic theory behind Communism was one of high production and economic self-sufficiency—regardless of costs or damages and so pollution in communist controlled Eastern Europe went unchecked. Meeting industrial production quotas always took precedence over environmental con­cerns, even though production was not car­ried out for profit. The Communist regimes supported heavy industry—power plants, chemicals, metallurgy, large machinery—at the expense of the more environmentally benign service industries. As a result, Eastern Europe is over industrialized, and because most of its plants were built during the post-World War II period, it lacks the pollution abatement equipment now required in factor­ies in most industrialized countries.

In addition, communism did little to encourage nature resource conservation, a very effective way to curb pollution. For ex­ample, high energy subsidies and lack of competition allowed power plants to provide energy at prices far below its actual cost. Thus, neither industries nor individuals had a strong incentive to conserve energy. On the other hand, the conversion of Eastern Euro­pean countries to a free market economy and the removal of government-sponsored energy subsidies have driven the price of energy up to more realistic costs, thereby encouraging energy conservation.

    Communism also took a toll on the en­vironment because a repressive government run by a single political party cannot be held accountable. Political opposition to any as­pect of government operations, including environmental damage, was unthinkable, and people who wanted to scrutinize pollution information found that it was unavailable, having been classified as top secret. Only the collapse of Communism allowed the citizens of Eastern Europe to begin to assess the full extent of damage to their environments.

    Clearly the new Eastern European government faces an intimidating task. While switching from Communism with a command economy to democracy with a free market economy, they also face the overwhelming responsibility of improving the environments.

They are trying to formulate environmental policies based on the experiences of the United States and Western Europe in the past several decades. What they need most urgently is information and technical assistance. Eastern Europe government wants to clean up their countries, but do not possess or even know about the latest pollution abatement technologies.

years later, the General Revision Act gave the pres­ident the authority to establish "forest reserves on the public domain." Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, and Theodore Roosevelt used tins law to put 43 million acres of forest, primarily in the West, out of the reach of loggers. In 1907 angry Northwest congressmen pushed through a hill re­scinding the president's powers to establish forest reserves, Theodore Roosevelt responded by desig­nating 21 new national forests that totaled 16 mil­lion acres, then signing the bill that would have stopped him into law. Today, national forests have multiple uses, from wildlife habitat to recreation to timber harvest

National Parks and Monuments

The world’s first national park was created in 1872 after a party of Montana explorers reported on the natural beauty of the canyon and falls of the Yellowstone River; Yellowstone National Park now includes parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. In 1890 the Yosemite and Sequoia parks in Califor­nia were created by the Yosemite National Park Bill, largely in response to the efforts of a single man, John Muir, and the organization he founded, the Sierra Club. In 1906 Congress passed the Antiquities Act, which authorized the president to set aside as national monuments sites (such as the Badlands in South Dakota) that had scientific, historic, or prehistoric importance. Many of the national parks and monuments that exist today were set aside over the following ten years. By 1916 there were 13 national parks and 20 na­tional monuments, under the loose management of the U.S. Army.

Some environmental battles were lost. John Muir's Sierra Club fought such a battle with the city of San Francisco over its efforts to dam a river and form a reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley I

tween environmentalists and Jam builders over the construction of a dam within Dinosaur National Monument. Nobody could deny that to drown the canyon under 400 feet of water would "impair" it. This victory for conservation established the "use

without impairment" clause as the firm backbone of the legal protection afforded our national parks and monuments.

The Power of Public Awareness

Until 1970 the voice of environmentalists in the United States was heard primarily through societies such as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation. There was no generally perceived mass "environmental movement" until the spring of 1970, when the first Earth Day trans­formed the specialized interests of a few societies into a pervasive popular movement. On the first Earth Day, an estimated 20 million people in the United States demonstrated to demand improve­ments in resource conservation and environmental quality. By the 20th Earth Day in 1990, the movement had spread to all seven continents; approxi­mately 200 million people in 141 nations demon­strated to increase public awareness of the importance of individual efforts in sustaining the Earth ("Think globally, act locally").

    Galvanized by ecological disasters such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and by overwhelming public support for the Earth Day movement, in 1970 the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law, A key provision stated that before beginning any development proj­ect involving federal lands or funds, public agencies and private individuals and corporations would have to examine the likely environmental conse­quences. The required environmental impact state­ments (EISs) would be monitored by a newly cre­ated federal board, the Council on Environmental Quality, which reports directly to the president.

    Because this council had no enforcement pow­ers, the NEPA was thought to be innocuous, gener­ally more a statement of good intentions than a regulatory policy. During the next few years, how­ever, environmental activists took people, corpora­tions, and the government to court to challenge their environmental impact statements or to use the statements to block proposed development. The courts decreed that EISs had to be substantial documents that thoroughly analyzed the environ­mental consequences of anticipated projects on soil, water, and wildlife and those EISs must be made available to the public for its scrutiny. These rul­ings put very sharp teeth into the law—particularly the provision for public scrutiny, which placed in­tense pressure on federal agencies to respect EIS findings.

    The National Environmental Policy Act revo­lutionized environmental protection in this coun­try. In addition to overseeing highway construc­tion, flood and erosion controls, military projects, and many other public works, federal agencies own nearly one third of the land in the United States, Their holdings include extensive fossil fuel and mineral reserves as well as millions of acres of pub­lic grazing land and public forests. Since 1970 very little has been done to any of them without some sort of environmental review.

    In the mid-1970s, following the passage of the NEPA, Congress passed a number of other substantial pieces of pro-environment legislation, notably the Endangered Species Act, the j Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. These laws greatly increased federal regulation of pollution, creating a tough interlocking mesh of laws to improve envi­ronmental quality.

However, the laws are not perfect. Economists and industries have argued that they make pollu­tion abatement unduly complex and expensive. Nor have the laws always worked as intended. The clean Air Act of 1977, for example, required coal-burning power planes to outfit their smokestacks with expensive "scrubbers" to remove sulfur diox­ide from their emissions, but made an exception for tall smokestacks. This loophole led directly to the proliferation of rail slacks that have since produced acid rain throughout the Northeast. The Clean Air Act of 1990 goes a long way toward closing such loopholes.

    On balance, despite its imperfections, environmental command and control legislation has had positive and substantial effects. Since 1970, eight national parks have been established and 80 million acres have been declared wilderness. Some 34 million acres of farmland that are particularly vul­nerable to erosion have been withdrawn from pro­duction. Many previously endangered species are "Liter off than they were in 1970, including alligators, antelope, badgers, bald eagles, bighorn sheep, pelicans, and wild turkeys. {However, dozens of other species have suffered further decline or extinction since 1970.)

    Although we still have a long way to go, pollu­tion control efforts have been particularly success­ful. Emissions of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and soot, totaling 181 million metric tons {200 mil­lion tons) in 1970, have been reduced by more than 30 percent. The number of secondary sewage treatment facilities (in which bacteria break down organic wastes before the water is discharged into rivers and streams) has increased by 72 percent in the last ten years. The release of certain toxic chemicals into the environment (notably DDT, asbestos, and dioxin) has been banned. The EPA estimates that public agencies and private firms are currently spending about $100 billion a year on pollution control; double the amount ten years ago and five times the amount in 1970. In the last ten years, the U.S. population has increased by some 40 million and the number of cars by more than 60 million. Had pollution control legislation not been in place, environmental quality would almost cer­tainly have declined dramatically.