Any such council will also need competence in chemistry, engineering, geology, meteorology, sociology, and economics. While a few rare individuals can be found who are competent in two or three of the areas mentioned, it seems to me certain that the three-man council envisioned by at least one of the bills is too small.

Somewhat later in the bill to establish this council on environmental quality, Representative John Dingell asked for my advice on this, and I wrote to him on August 1, 1969, and I will read one paragraph (reading):

Several things about the composition of the proposed council disturbed me. First, consider the size; whether three, five, seven, or some other number, it should have topnotch ecology represented possibly by two ecologists, because few can claim top competence in plant ecology, animal, marine ecology, limnology, soils, and so on.

Then I told him much the same things I told Mr. Daddario. I will mention here one thing I think that needs saying.

The President's Scientific Advisory Council has never had an ecologist on it. They have a 16-man part-time panel of advisers on the environment, and only one of those 16 men, to my knowledge, can be said to have any knowledge of ecology.

The President, of course, set up this Environmental Quality Council, a Cabinet body, and it, of course, includes no ecologists, but they have a council of advisers, Citizens Advisory Committee of 12 men, with no ecologist.

So this is the sort of thing that we can anticipate going on indefinitely. They just don't know who the ecologists are.

When Mr. Dingell's bill finally went through and became law, the result was that we now have a three-man Council on Environmental Quality, including no ecologist.

Now, I don't want this to be interpreted as in any way criticizing the three distinguished gentlemen appointed to that Council, but it impresses me as a little bit like setting up a council of economic advisers without including any economist.

I am afraid that large segments of both Government and industry still view the problems of environmental deterioration as in large part a public relations problem. The newspapers just recently announced that DuPont has set up an environmental quality committee chaired by a vice president and it consists of one man each from their engineering department, legal department, and their public relations depart

ment.

Now, I think, as far as formal statements go, that that is all I will try to say. I would be very happy to try to answer any questions.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Dr. Cole. I have a lot of questions for you. Let me begin by reiterating the question I put to you a moment ago with respect to which you did provide some response, but if you were asked to give a definition of "ecology," what would it be?

Mr. COLE. Well, "ecology" is formally defined as the study of the relationships or interrelationships among living things and their environments. So people that have had formal training in any part of this general broad area I would say might be considered as ecologists. It is very much a point of view.

Mr. BRADEMAS. So a man could be, like you, a physicist but, because of the particular perspective he takes to the subject matter in the relationship of living things, could be defined as an ecologist?

Mr. COLE. Yes. David Gates, who will testify later, was trained as a physicist initially, and certainly the ecologists accept him as one of their own now.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Why would you imagine there is no ecologist who is a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee to the President's Environmental Quality Council?

Mr. COLE. I have no idea whatsoever. It must be that they don't recognize the need for one.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I would hope that it would not be the same reason you have suggested a number of industries are now beginning to have their vice presidents for public relations take over that particular assignment.

Mr. COLE. I hope not, too; but I just don't know.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Cole, Time magazine a few weeks ago described you as a charter member of the doomsday school of ecologists and then went on to say that despite your old pessimism, you have been somewhat encouraged over the last several years. Could you tell us why they called you that, and, second, if that was not inaccurate, what has lightened the burden on your spirit at this point in time?

Mr. COLE. Well, the course we are on is going to destroy the ability of the earth to support life. We are on a collision course with disaster in many ways. But I have been screaming with agony about it for 21 years. My first disspirited publication on the population problem was written 21 years ago, so the thing that has me encouraged now is the tremendous upsurge of interest in the subject.

Even 5 or 6 years ago, when we started sending little delegations around from the ecological society to talk to Members of Congress individually, we found they were very friendly and everything but they mostly listened just politely. Now they are calling up to see if I won't testify at this or that hearing, they are asking for statements on this and that, and they are requesting my advice on bills, even help on the wording of some of them and so forth.

The few of us that the public does recognize are simply swamped; I can't even get my mail open a good share of the time, much less read and answer it.

Mr. BRADEMAS. You will appreciate that the principal thrust of the bill before us is to provide support for the establishment of environmental studies in our elementary and secondary schools in our universities and in community conferences, although the bill is not confined to those purposes.

But I wonder if you could, sir, give us a comment on those aspects of the bill that provide for grants to colleges and universities who develop curricular materials for teaching environmental studies in elementary and secondary schools and universities and, second, for the training of teachers to offer such courses in schools and, third, the question of direct support to elementary and secondary schools to offer environmental studies.

Mr. COLE. Well, I have felt for some time it is very necessary to get down at least into the secondary schools and it would probably be better if we could get into the elementary schools. They have to be informed

in some way, and I have been approached by, I don't know how many publishers, to see about writing books at this level. The publishers are becoming aware that they want books on ecology at these levels now, and I expect in a few years you will see a flood of them coming out.

I think, from what I know of the public schools and the troubles that they are in, I think it is a very good thing to provide direct support for programs of this sort, which I hope would reach all of the students.

The training of the teachers to teach these students is going to be a serious thing, and I certainly favor the aspects of the bill that would provide for producing these teachers.

What we should be doing even at university levels now is training the ecologist teachers for the next generation, because we are trying to set up a national instiute of ecology, and if it comes to pass, it is likely to hurt the universities. There are not enough top people and some of them are going to have to be recruited to staff that agency which I feel is so sorely needed we must do it, but it may be at the universities' expense.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Can you tell us what you have in mind? I believe you made the proposal in 1968 before the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the House. Can you tell us just what you contemplate with your proposed national institute of ecology and what the present status of that proposal is?

Mr. COLE. The Ecological Society of America, through its ecology study committee, which is the long-range planning arm of the society, has simply taken the initiative in pushing this thing, although we realize it has to involve a lot of people that won't find the proper home in the Ecological Society. It has to involve economists and geologists and a variety of other types of people.

So we carried our plans for it as far as we felt that we, as ecologists, could go. We visualize a coordinating body of big research projects, one that will undertake to do projects that are so big that no one institution can handle it, things comparable to some of the programs going on now under the international biological program. We contemplate a data storage and retrieval center.

You might be surprised to see the number of requests that we get. People call me up long distance, people I never heard of, and they say that the Department of Agriculture wants to spray their land for this or that, and the chemical they are going to use is this or that “Is that good or bad?" And I am geting this sort of thing all the time. There should be a place I can go and have a computer quickly give me information on past experience for a particular type of manipulation

like that.

Mr. BRADEMAS. It sounds like what we would call a bill for the relief of Dr. Cole; that is what we would call it around here.

Mr. COLE. In part.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Is this a privately operated institute you have in mind, then?

Mr. COLE. It is not to be a part of the Government. We all feel strongly on that. But in the Ecological Society, our real prototype, I think, was the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., which is an independent body run by a consortium of universities but funded as a line item in the National Science Foundation

budget, so these are the terms we were thinking in, and then we have been approached by spies from various foundations who usually identify themselves as spies from foundations, and there is enough interest in this so I feel that it may be possible also to get private endowment behind it, which would be highly desirable.

Now we have reached the point where we have to start talking about where to put it and how to organize it and how much it is going to cost. So we felt here completely out of our depth. So we went to National Science Foundation for funds to have a management consultant firm to do a feasibility study for us.

We received bids from five such firms and went over them and met and accepted the one from Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co. here in Washington. They proposed to do the study in two parts: first, the feasibility study to see what the needs are in various segments of society, what people want, what use they would make of it and so on; and if the results of that are positive, that it is feasible and needed and desirable, then they would go on to part 2.

The part 1 has been completed, and the conclusion is that it is feasible and desirable and that we should go ahead. The report on that has just been, within the week, taken into National Science Foundation, and we are going back to try to get funds to finance part 2, or phase 2, which will get down to the details of organization and location and staffing and size of computer that we would need and many things of that sort.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Cole, I have several other questions, but I think I will yield to the gentleman from New York, Mr. Scheuer, who has long had very deep interest in this whole field of environmental problems, as you may know, and who participated in the UNESCO Conference in San Francisco some weeks ago and is a cosponsor of this measure. Mr. Scheuer of New York.

Mr. SCHEUER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I certainly want to thank you for the strong support that you have given those of us who have been deeply interested in this problem. Dr. Cole, I share the fears of some that the current interest in ecology and environment may be a fad that is looked upon by many as a public relations gimmick and that we are applying bandaids and cosmetics where basic surgery and summary structuring of our basic institutions is much more relevant.

Let me read a quote from the New York Times of March 17: "Senator Muskie and two scholars agreed that Americans may have to hold down their standard of living to hold down pollution. They cited fast automobiles, supersonic transports, disposable bottles, and more electric powerplants as some of the things they may have to give up to help save the environment.

"Mr. Muskie said: 'In a consumer-oriented society, everything we produce leads to waste. Maybe we ought to set some limits on the standards of living."

Now, just to take electric power, people, who are far more expert in this area than I, feel there is no way that we can produce electric power either through fossil fuels or atomic energy that does not have some fallout in affecting the environment.

Probably as hopeful an answer as any to the problems of environmental pollution is deemphasizing additional use of electric powers for hair driers, electric carving knives, and so forth.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but do you feel that one of the benefits of an education program in our schools on environmental issues is that it may give the future citizens and the future voters of our community enough understanding of the dire effects of current practices in the production of both goods and services that cause pollution, may give them the understanding by legislation as well as by individual conduct that we have to change the basic ways of producing and consuming things?

Mr. COLE. I would agree entirely with that. This education is sorely needed. Now, I don't quite agree that it may be necessary to cut back the standard of living. It should again be looked at as a system. This country, this earth can support a population of people indefinitely at just about any standard of living that you want to set up, but it can't do it for this large a population. Well, this is the key to the whole thing. Instead of giving up all of these things that are considered to make a high standard of living, let us see how large a population we can support without the environment deteriorating and still maintaining the standard of living we want.

This is a very multidisciplinary question, because it is apt to involve not only ecologists and demographers but sociologists and a lot of other people. We can still have automobiles with internal combustion engines without using fossil fuels. We can run them on alcohol that is grown as a crop. I don't know that we can run as many automobiles as we are running. We don't have to have these automobile graveyards. I think if Congress would repeal the depletion allowance for mining, that those graveyards would start disappearing if it became as expensive to mine new metal as it is to reclaim the used metal.

So people do need to become aware and concerned about this and understand that it is this population explosion that is at the very heart of the thing, and when people say to me, "This population is, or the United States is, not overpopulated; we have lots of space," the answer is that perhaps our population explosion is the most serious one in the world because while other countries are growing much more rapidly, in terms of the resources it is going to consume and wastes it is going to produce, one American is equivalent to about 80 Indians, So this affluent society of ours with still a growing population is a terribly serious thing which I am trying to get across to the people, but I am sure a program in the secondary and elementary schools, if you started there, would make this go much more rapidly.

Mr. SCHEUER. How do you feel we ought to devise a national population policy or program? What is our maximum level of population or what is the maximum rate of population growth?

Mr. COLE. The population in this country now is estimated at 204 million, and it is growing at 1 percent per year at the present time. The number that could be supported I don't know, and I wish I did know, but we can't seem to inspire these people to get together from all of the various disciplines, and particularly the economists, who usually can't conceive of a steady state economy, and to try to see. Mr. SCHEUER. Can't conceive of what?

Mr. COLE. Steady state economy.
Mr. SCHEUER. High static economy?
Mr. COLE. Yes.