But for the most part, we will live in widespread areas that have urban facilities for transportation, education, and at the same time we will contain agricultural areas within them, and that the old notion of the compact city, ringed by suburbs, and then by exurbia, and then ringed by terribly prosperous agriculture, or terribly poor-maintenance agriculture, will disappear. And we will be able to include rural areas in a wider complex, so we won't have the dreadful contrasts between the very poor-subsistence rural life, which has no possibility except sheer escape on a bus to New York, San Francisco, or Chicago, and what we call urban life today.

Unless we can think of them all at once, think of the welfare program of this problem of this country as a national problem, so that we don't have the rush of people from debilitated rural areas into the cities and into cities which have no relationship to them regionally-unless we can do this, we will have the horrible deterioration of both the rural areas and the urban areas that have been outdated, because we don't need those crowds of people around the gates of a nonexistent factory anymore.

Mr. HANSEN. I assume from your comment that one of the first places to start is back in the rural areas.

Dr. MEAD. Back in the rural areas, exactly.

Mr. HANSEN. Let me ask one further question relative to the implementation of the grants anticipated by this bill. It is my understanding that you were involved in the development of a system of handling so-called minigrants, the acorn program in the Department of Justice. Do you think that format might fit this bill?

Dr. MEAD. I think it is very lively and very stimulating. I think that a minimal amount of structuring is in order. But the way we have got Government grants set up at present, you take 2 months off to write the proposal for the grant. We are using up more valuable research and innovative time in writing grants in this country instead of working on the grants. This is true the larger the grant gets, the more necessary it is to have these large proposals.

Also, they get concentrated in the hands of people who know how to write them. And so even for a minigrant sometimes you get a book by people who have enough money to pay people to write the books.

Now, if we could simplify this, and especially if you want to get different kinds and sizes of communities into this, and different community forces, I think minigrants where people could just take off on small experiments would be very useful.

With the environment, there are so many things you can do. You can start work right from your backyard or your block, test the air in your own street, or work on the lead in the paint on the walls in the old tenement right where you are. And it is not necessary to work on a world scale, especially for the children and the local citizen to find out what it is all about. In the end, you are working toward establishing a sound, informed citizen backing for the necessary steps that have to be taken by the Nation and the world community. And I think minigrants, with a minimum amount of redtape and professional expertise and jargon, are one way of approaching this.

Mr. HANSEN. If we considered amending this bill to limiting the grant application to one page, it would be a step in the right direction. Dr. MEAD. Yes, but I wouldn't want to interfere with an individual's right to write long reports like that.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I want to put one more question to you, because I am familiar with your work in the World Council of Churches. Do you have any comment to make on the role that churches might be playing with respect to the whole environmental crisis? I have raised this, obviously, because of your earlier comment on the importance of attitudes.

Dr. MEAD. Well, we are very hopeful that the churches will supply one of the principal ethical impetuses to what needs to be done. The World Council of Churches in the period before 1968 spent a great deal of time discussing such problems as man's economic organization for fairness and justice in the world. And for the next 7 years the group on church and society are working particularly with the place of man in a future oriented technology-based society, in which technology is a necessary component, and the relationship of that technological progress to man's spiritual and human welfare. That must be taken into account.

There are some quite serious problems involved, because in many of the orthodox positions, technology has simply been regarded as a simple enemy of spiritual life. Any tool invented before the birth of Christ was regarded as good and appropriate for a figure of speech in the sermon, the sail and the plough, and things like that. Anything invented since then has been regarded as the devil, with the computer now leading in this field. We have a dangerous break in society between those who feel man's spiritual life is permanently endangered either by technological advances as a whole or by the kind of thing Mr. Scheuer was talking about, where we spend our lives getting new kinds of hair dryers and electric toothbrushes and two fivepassenger cars.

What we are trying to do is bring the two things together, to bring together the churches concerned for human welfare, bring together the churches and the synagogues to involvement in man's relationship to man and man's relationship to nature, and responsible attitudes toward technology, so instead of having either a kind of humanistic or spiritual battle with, or avoidance of technology, we will take responsibility of what we do with technology. We will recognize that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath, and that we are letting technology take the lead in many cases instead of the value of human beings taking the lead.

One of the interesting developments here has been the reinterpretation of the phrase of man "being given dominion over the earth," as it has been recognized. That has too often been interpreted as the right to exploit it, and we need to include the older image of man as being responsible for the earth and all the living things thereon.

Also, in terms of ecumenical movements, this is one of the areas in which you can get cooperation, and it is in fact one of the active areas in which there is active cooperation going on now between the Vatican and the World Council of Churches. We will have no more purely Roman Catholic or purely Protestant commissions in this whole field. They are going to work together from now on. And, of course, with greater understanding with the Far East and with other countries, we need an enlarged spiritual evaluation on man in nature and man's responsibility for this earth on which he lives, and the relationship of man to man within this environment that surrounds us.

Now, the churches are one of our enormous resources. They, to begin with, have a certain degree of humanity in that they include young and old and both sexes within their bounds. And they are working hard to include all races and all classes. You have a great uproar going on in the churches today, where people want to be more relevant, want to find things to care for, and where there is a great deal of experimentation of man's relationship to the whole natural world.

So I think the churches should be one of the principal ethical energizing resources for what we want to do in this environmental field.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Mead, you have been, not to our surprise, informative, provocative, and indeed eloquent. And we are grateful to you for having come to be with us this morning.

Thank you very much.

Mr. SCHEUER. I want to add to that, Dr. Mead.

We have been troubled by the generation gap. But you as an articulate American have helped us to bridge that gap, and we thank you for your help.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Our final witness today is Dr. John Steinhart, director of the Marine Center at the University of Wisconsin. He is coauthor of the report "Universities and Environmental Quality" for the President's Environmental Quality Council.

STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN S. STEINHART, PROFESSOR, INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Steinhart, we are pleased to have you with us. here this morning, sir, and invite you to go ahead.

Dr. STEINHART. Mr. Chairman: On the week of April 22 the people of Madison, Wis., will stage an environmental week. Plans involve all segments of our local society-from chamber of commerce groups to high school students, and from rich to poor. Prominent figures from the national scene will speak and participate in panels. Demonstrations will doubtlessly take place, including not only the youths of the university, but children and middle-aged citizens of all political persuasions and from all economic strata.

Such scenes will be repeated across the country and remind us once again of the depth of feeling and imminence of concern about our environmental problems. Because this feeling has now become widespread and because it is shared by the members of Congress and particularly the members of this subcommittee considering H.R. 14753, I do not intend to give a catalogue listing of our environmental problems.

It will take serious and stringent efforts by all elements of societygovernment at all levels, citizens groups, industry and labor, educational institutions and individual citizens-if we are to halt and reverse the trends of environmental degradation and restore the search for human dignity, meaning, and satisfaction to the center of our lives. Of crucial importance to these efforts to solve our environmental problems are the educational efforts needed to inform all elements of society of the nature of these problems, their order of priority and such solutions to individual problems.

I will talk primarily about the role of higher education, not because it is the only important role, but because it is the one about which I know the most.

Conceptually there are three tasks in searching for solutions to our environmental problems:

First, we must seek a better understanding in detail and in the broad general sense so that we understand not only the technical details, but how various problems are interrelated and solutions therefore dependent one upon the other.

Second, we must search for particular and general solutionswhether technical ones, statutory ones, or social solutions are indicated. And, finally, we must encourage forward the discussion of our collective and individual goals for our society so that the search for environmental quality does not become a collection of prohibitions but includes in it such general goals for a better quality of life as are common to all Americans.

It is in the third task, however, where the colleges and universities of the Nation may play the most important and perhaps crucial role in dealing with our environmental problems. The environmental concerns go far beyond the mere wish to remove irritants from our surroundings. Feelings about the degradation of life and dehumanization of individual occupations will not disappear even if water pollution and air pollution are suddenly terminated or brought to an acceptable

minimum.

We must stop inquiring at some time where our blind devotion to a century-old attitude of unbridled growth and exploitation are leading us and inquire instead where it is we wish to go and what kind of lives we wish to lead.

The President almost a year ago appointed a commission on national goals. Such a commission is itself a recognition that we do not possess, at present, a clear idea of the common goals of all Americans nor do we possess any positive programs that will lead us there.

But I submit that national goals are not arrived at by Presidential commissions, but by widespread discussion openly held across the nation. Colleges and universities are so spread across the Nation in small towns and large cities and have a tradition of conducting just such discussions and, in the case of land-grant colleges like the University of Wisconsin, also a tradition of including citizens from all parts of society in these discussions through extension services and other direct participation.

I suggest that the bill currently under consideration could be an important piece of legislation in urging this discussion onward so that after a period of such free discussion of our common goals in society it may be easier for the Federal Government as well as government at other levels to select those common purposes which should become part of our political aims.

Unfortunately, this discussion does not proceed very rapidly at present. Our universities are badly in need of change and reorganization. I am told that Congress is similarly in need of reorganization and that such a reorganization, in the Congress, confronts considerable difficulty. If it is difficult to reorganize the Congress, it is at least as difficult to reorganize the purposes of the universities. They are bound by tradi

tion and devoted to the narrow technical expertise presently represented by—and I am afraid embalmed in the narrow disciplinary departments.

Warren Bennis remarked in a recent article that a university was "harder to reorganize than a cemetery." As a man who has tried for change from the position of vice president of a major university, Dr. Bennis was expressing just the frustration I have alluded to.

Those at universities who are anxious to get on with difficult multidisciplinary problems, like those related to the environment, need the help of Congress, and need bills like this one to make available to them funds that will help break through some of the traditional rigidity and enable those who wish to, to get on with solving our present-day problems.

Let me raise one or two questions which it seems to me are of crucial importance and yet find no place in the usual college or university

structures:

With rapidly expanding technology, we know that each new advance brings with it certain side effects, some desirable, some undesirable, and some unpredictable. Considering all these side effects and the rapid rate of change, are things getting better or getting worse?

The finite size of our resource base and our planetary environment have begun to concern us. Are these problems and challenges qualitatively different from what they have been in the past?

Most of the environmental questions confronting our society contain in them complex technical considerations-although not necessarily narrow specialist ones. Is it possible to have a free society or even a representative society when large portions of the citizenry do not understand the technical issues, and, considering the rate of change, are not very likely to in the future?

This list could be expanded endlessly, but I think the point is clear. New kinds of questions ought to be asked and cught to be at the central focus of educational programs. I assert that at present they are not.

I urge this committee to pass this bill and either in the bill or in the instructions to the granting agencies to look carefully at applicants for moneys appropriated to ascertain whether the applicants have a commitment to working on these problems or simply wish to acquire moneys to do what they have been doing all along.

Last year, at the request of the President's Environmental Quality Council, I participated in an investigation of environmental-quality programs at universities. My associate was an undergraduate from the University of California. Our report was published in September of 1969, entitled "The Universities and Environmental Quality." In that document we stated our findings that there were indeed a wide variety of college and university teachers prepared to move in new directions but hampered by the lack of Federal funds and by the conservatism and traditional resistance of their own institutions.

Speaking now in behalf of the group at the University of Wisconsin, I can say that with the help of administrators in our own university and the interested members of the faculty, we can solve the second problem if you can help us solve the first.