There tends to be a cyclic approach to education; you will recall the tremendous emphasis on "Conservation Education" in the thirties. A great many benefits were derived from this movement, but permanent change did not result. In my opinion these inadequacies were caused by superficial approaches to the problems. In our present society education is concerning itself with the process approach and inquiry thinking. Conceptual ideas rather than isolated information is the order of the day. These emphases reinforce the idea of interdisciplinary attacks on problems and, in my opinion, provision should be made for use of new technology and team teaching techniques for education for environmental quality. In current educational language it is imperative that attention be given to the affective domain in addition to the cognitive domain in terms of the material prepared and the teaching that occurs.

Turning from the substantive material involved, I should like to react briefly to the uses of funds. It seems to me that although there were many very fine results derived from the NDEA programs that a great deal of the money was not used efficiently. Unfortunately many public school and community agencies do not have the necessary expertise to develop sound teaching materials nor in many cases do they understand implementation of programs. Getting a grant, implementing a program, and massing teaching materials that remain on the stockroom shelves tend to be status symbols rather than educational innovation. Therefore I would recommend that any public school programs or grants to such schools take into consideration utilization of professional staff from state departments of education, universities and colleges, and appropriate federal government agencies. Emphasis should be placed on well spelled out plans of preparation, procedure, and evaluation. Materials should be field tested at each stage of development.

I trust that my brief series of opinions and suggestions will be of some value for your reactions to H.R. 14753. Thanks for the opportunity and if I can be of further service please let me know.

Sincerely,

WAYNE TAYLOR,

Professor and Acting Director, Science and Mathematics Teaching Center.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you, Dr. Cantlon. The first question I was going to ask you touches on the field of curriculum development. You remarked on an NSF curriculum improvement study. I am not familiar with that. Is that generally in the field of environmental studies?

Dr. CANTLON. That is one of the components, but that is not the only thing. An example I have here includes the concept of "eco systems" as part of the curriculum material. It has various additional concepts such as the idea of organisms, material objects, life cycles, populations, environments and communities. These materials are being designed for a wide area of curriculum but environment and ecosystems are not the sole direction of that study.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I take it you are in general agreement with one of the fundamental purposes of this bill, which would be to provide support for curriculum development clear across the range of environmental studies and, second, that you would agree that we need to encourage such studies in elementary and secondary schools?

Dr. CANTLON. Yes, absolutely. I think that, like instruction in mathematics, one needs to start at the lowest grade level.

Mr. BRADEMAS. What about the problem to which Dr. Steinhart, who testified yesterday, addressed himself in his report to the President's Environmental Quality Council, namely, the problem that in our university faculties in this country at this time, there is so much insistence on sovereignty within each faculty that there is lacking a multidisciplinary, problem-oriented approach to the whole environmental issue.

I am sure that is not the problem at Michigan State University. Dr. CANTLON. As provost, I do have to contend with it.

It is true, that problems of jurisdiction and feelings of priority do exist. However, partly in response to the disenchantment of students, and especially the bright young professors, faculties, as slow as they are to change, are in fact changing.

We have, if you reflect on it, a number of multidisciplinary activities that are long-established traditions in American universities. The schools of medicine represent a multidisciplinary approach to a set of problems, human health, and these are very old and well established. Colleges of agriculture are multidisciplinary operations. Chemistry, economics, biology, and engineering are brought to bear on food production. Concern for multidisciplinary problems isn't of itself new. What we lack is multidisciplinary, problem-oriented look at the totality of things. We look at agriculture in a multidisciplinary way, and have at Michigan State since 1855. We look at health this way also. The problem is that what we do in agriculture, industry, and government influences the health of individuals, of societies and the biosphere of the planet.

So my point would be, true, faculties are in narrower operations in parts of the university, but in every one of our land-grant institutions we have a tradition of using a multidisciplinary approach to problems. No one had posed this concern about the biosphere convincingly until recently and thus we don't have extensive coordinated expertise in it, but we are building.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Yesterday, we were talking to Dr. Margaret Mead about her suggestion that we needed for purposes of educating people in the whole environmental field to establish models. She suggested, for instance, the use of islands, but we asked her to comment, and I would invite you to comment, on the possibility of utilizing the computers to simulate a wide variety of variables and thereby enable us to know rather rapidly what the impact of diverse interventions in the ecosystems would be on population, employment-well, one can rattle off a whole litany of events.

Dr. CANTLON. Yes. I think two points need to be made here. Computer simulation is only as good as the information you put in the computer. We are dealing with systems that have so many components there is now no computer built, indeed no lash-up of existing computers, that would have the capacity to handle even a modest size ecosystem in its totality.

In other words, we are dealing with numbers of variables here of a very, very large size. We have not yet tackled a problem of this scope by simulation. As in that diagram I showed you, on pages 198-199 of the Brookhaven Symposium, what we do is to pick out some subset of a system and test it. We can do that.

Margaret Mead's suggestion that we use islands and simply stress the island and study the behavior of the total island as a unit has virtue; it is a real system. It has all of the components, and while we never have neither the man-hours nor the expertise to monitor every species population present, we can begin looking at the health of that system as a totality. The insular example represents a good empirical experimental approach.

I suspect that the research techniques we will be evolving will be many. Of these, the current U.S. portion of the international biological program dealing with biomes such as the grasslands studies in Colorado represent one major effort at looking at full-scale examples of large systems.

Some of the IBP biome study units are relatively pristine and untouched, some involve a great deal of man's influence in them, as for instance the grasslands beef production studies.

These are research approaches, but it seems to me for educational purposes, especially for public school and mass media purposes, these research studies will remain rather esoteric things, essential for acquiring new knowledge, but for effective education we need a way for each individual to visualize himself in one of these complex systems.

So, this idea of trying either, through simulation or through describing existing situations, to describe the individual's home as an input-output system coupled to diverse other systems would be one of the ways that I think might be more effective.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you.

Mr. Landgrebe?

Mr. LANDGREBE. I have appreciated your statement, and I feel that I have gotten some very good thinking and some good ideas from it. I am not sure that I have any real worthwhile questions.

You talk about a fad, and there is a lot of discussion at the present time. Have we not, as these technological acts came upon us, haven't we had a lot of study and work done, sewage treatment plants and so forth? There has been a lot of thought and a lot of money spent in the past on this, has there not?

Dr. CANTLON. Yes, that is correct. The way in which we have approach our environmental problems, though, has been a highly unitized approach. Currently we worry about phosphorous in the secondary effluent coming from our disposal plants. Earlier on, we didn't even have a secondary treatment process and we worried about the biological oxygen demand of primary effluents. The effluent leaving a secondary treatment plant still contains the phosphorous and the nitrogen and the potassium which now results in the rapid growth of algae in our lakes and streams. These are the same elements we buy to fertilize crop land. The point is that we have in most of our approaches taken a very unitized approach, solving one problem at a time, often thereby displacing it as a different problem occasionally some distance away.

Let me suggest that much larger problem arrays are going ultimately to provide more powerful approaches to the problems. Let's look, for instance, at what seems to be an unrelated pair of pollution problems.

Heat pollution from power generation is currently producing a lot of concern for aquatic biologists and conservationists. What do we do to dissipate this gigantic amount of heat, really a low-grade energy, that results when we cool reactors? The usual cooling technique is a water system, and the discharged warm water creates problems for temperature sensitive fish and other organisms.

The engineers have been drawn in locating and siting power generators-whether atomic reactors or the fossile fuel type-to places where there is abundantly cold, pure water, pure water reduces maintenance in the pipes and jackets of the cooling system.

Now, if you think about sites with cold, pure water, they turn out to be trout and other game fishing waters in most of the Northern climate. There is no quicker way to have the power generating industry run head-on into both the fishermen and the conservationists. It would make a lot more sense in cooling generators to look for waters of lowest public concern. Now, you can't get any lower in public concern for water than the discharge of a city's secondary effluent. There ought to be a lot more research in how to use this dirty water in generator cooling, and in the process use the low-grade energy to assist in cleaning up the water. The cooling contribution can be an economic incentive to clean up the water.

What I am saying is that our approaches have been so fractionalized that we often don't really solve problems. We displace them-occasionally creating worse ones.

Mr. LANDGREBE. I certainly can't argue with that. There are lots and lots of things that can be done, but are we moving along to face these problems? Of course, I know you are smiling, and I knew you would smile on that. In this world, there seems to be a constant battle for the dollar, and sometimes we put off until we need to do things those things which are necessary.

This matter of pollution, you talk about making this part of the home ec course. In my school days, we considered this to be a part of the health classes. Do you have some suggestion of how we can approach and get the cooperation of folks of all ages in becoming better housekeepers and being responsible?

In other words, we see just as an example, people who empty their ashtrays on the lot at the drive-in family stand and things of this kind. How in the world will we ever approach these matters with individual responsibilty, a term that you used yourself?

Dr. CANTLON. In the first place, like any kind of ethical or moral question we do a very poor job of this in public schools. Morals, I think, really have to begin in the home. I would say the first side of responsibility will have to be with parents, and there is every evidence that we have been pretty lax in this. This is not to say that we can't build a better ethical phrasing of men's stewardship and responsibility for the atmosphere in the way we present materials in public school curriculum. We have tended to err on the conservative side, we have been too loath to intrude the ideas of ethics and morality in our consideration of science and technology generally.

Mr. LANDGREBE. I am happy to hear you make that statement, and I hope it will go into the record underscored, because I have had one particular contact with a situation where people who actually had garbage service at their door in town would take their garbage out and scatter it along a country lane.

I think that ends my questions, thank you.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you, Dr. Cantlon, for being with us today. I hope you will give my best wishes to your new president out there.

Mr. BRADEMAS. We have five more witnesses this morning, and the Chair would like to suggest that they come forward and, to the extent possible, summarize their statements. All of them will be included in the record. If you feel you want to read your entire statement, that is all right also, but we want to put questions to you, and I think we might do it by inviting everyone remaining to come forward and we shall hear you as a panel, as it were, and we would like to hear first from Mrs. Donald Clusen, chairman of the water resources committee of the League of Women Voters. Then we will hear from Dr. Stahr, and Mr. Dustin, and Mr. Clapper, and Dr. Smith, in that order, if that is agreeable.

Gentlemen, won't you come forward and join Mrs. Clusen.

Mrs. Clusen, we are pleased to have you here. Why don't you go ahead.

STATEMENT OF MRS. DONALD CLUSEN, CHAIRMAN, ENVIRONMENTAL COMMITTEE, LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS

Mrs. CLUSEN. I think my remarks do not exceed a very few moments, but I will do some summarizing and will request that the full text be entered into the hearing record.

(The statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF MRS. DONALD E. CLUSEN, VICE PRESIDENT, LEAGUE OF WOMEN

VOTERS OF THE UNITED STATES

The League of Women Voters of the United States welcomes the Subcommittee's invitation to comment on H.R. 14753-an act to authorize the U.S. Commissioner of Education to establish educational programs to encourage understanding of policies and support of activities designed to enhance environmental quality and maintain ecological balance. Because the League is not an educational institution as such, I shall not comment on matters of school curriculum, but I do appreciate the opportunity to express League thinking on the need for more and better education of both adults and children on environmental problems. It is to these two points that I should like to address my comments today.

The League of Women Voters has had first hand experience in attempting to create public awareness of environmental problems. We have long recognized the urgent need for more attention to policies, programs, and funds that would serve as incentives to both layman and educator in building increased understanding and awareness of environmental problems.

If this kind of education had been a basic part of the curriculum in every school during the last generation, perhaps the environmental problems that face us now in crisis proportions would not be so pressing. If adequate attention had been given to making citizens aware and concerned about deteriorating air and water quality, perhaps the task of awakening people to the problems now before us would not have taken several decades.

In spite of the current rhetoric, a large segment of the public still does not fully understand the dimensions and urgency of our environmental crisis and the threat it represents to the quality of human life. What is even more alarming is that among those who do recognize the problem there seems to be a growing feeling of frustration and helplessness about whether current downward trends can be reversed.

League members have a great deal of faith in educational processes generally; we believe that most national problems are aided by intensive public information efforts. Indeed this is the basis of our existence as an organization-“let the people know, make the people care, help the people act." It seems to us that the Environmental Quality Education Act attempts to do just this-to arouse both students and their elders to an understanding of the physical world in which they live.