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I am sure that our professional staff could outline very quickly and I would be more than willing to provide the committee with such information, a list of the kinds of materials we have and, more important perhaps, the kind of material that we would need and the kinds of programs that would be needed and which could come about as a result of this act.

Mr. REID. Well, I am sure the chairman and I would be very appreciative if you could supply that list and also if you would take a look at the bill and see if there are any technical additions that might be relevant from the curriculum standpoint and, finally, just to add, agree with you on reverence for life and the wonder of being alive and the wonder of life, convincing children of this; George Wald has done something on this, and I was struck the other day in looking at the age of the earth and moon.

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We have lived here really for a very short span and it takes 500 years even to produce an inch of good top soil, yet we are in a matter of months destroying life, destroying something that has really taken billions of years to develop, and the wonder of life and the wonder of the child.

Thank you very much.

Mr. MONSERRAT. Thank you.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Mr. Monserrat.

(Prepared statement of Mr. Monserrat to be inserted at this point.)

STATEMENT OF JOSEPH MONSERRAT, PRESIDENT, BOARD OF EDUCATION

Thank you for this opportunity to speak out on the need for education about the preservation and improvement of our environment. I want to start by expressing my complete support for the proposed Environmental Quality Education Act.

I hope that the current concern for our surroundings, both man made and natural is not merely a passing fad. It would be tragic if it were so. The way we have treated our natural environment and the way we have created our manmade surroundings reflect the fundamental ills of our society. I cannot agree with those critics who denigrate the recent popular concern for "environment" by labelling it "political" or who regard it as an attempt to turn our focus away from other pressing economic and social issues. Pollution, inability to handle natural and man-made wastes, over-population, urban blight, and the desecration of our nation's spectacular natural beauty are all symptom of other moral, social and economics ills. Educating our young as to the nature and future of our total environment is a forceful way to increase a needed awareness and understanding about the fundamental problems which face us.

I would like to speak to the issue before us from two perspectives: As President of the New York City Board of Education and as a member of the Puerto Rican community.

As President of the Board of Education, I think the passage of the Quality Environmental Education Act will help fulfill the following aspirations: First, adults, and perhaps more important, our children must learn what "environment" means. Much of the popular discussion stresses pollution and the need to preserve and use our natural resources with safety. However, this should be only part of the total focus. Environment consists of all that man does with nature and all that man has created for himself from nature. I think that in an educational program we should look at the environment from the standpoint of ecology as a whole. We should take as a model that which scientists have learned from their study of other organisms and how they provide for themselves in their natural habitat and how they survive in the niches they have created.

We must teach adults and children that houses, streets, stores, highways and machines are part of the environment; that poverty and the slums in which many of our urban children grow up and play, are symptoms of a failure to use what nature has given us, in a humane way. We must demonstrate that the

means we now use to get from one place to another, the use of cars and the misuse and collapse of public transportation, are all signs that man, with all his creative powers, has failed dismally to use his gifts to help his fellow men. Too many children respond to the issue of "environment" with a mental picture of rich rolling hills, lovely streams and stunning mountains-all fantasies to the many children who have never seen and will never be able to see or live near such splendor.

I think that a program of environmental education should be introduced on all levels and geared toward a systematic understanding of man's relationship. both biological and social to his surroundings in terms of the total human condition. This means teaching, as you have proposed, in the mass media, in the community and in the classroom, the old and the young, to understand the relationship between mountains and cities, air and cars, water and the food we buy the connection between resources and our use of them, between potential and failure, between healthy livable space and poverty stricken slums.

Second, education about the environment should inspire the young to solve those important problems beyond the more theoretical and all-inclusive scope I have just outlined. These problems are most familiar to us all and are the probable cause for the gathering here today. New ideas must be found to end pollution of air and water, and to dispense with the avalanche of man-made waste in a way that will not harm us. Environmental education should bring the young to an awarenes which we, in our generation, never had about the population explosion. New ways to help regulate and distribute the human part of the environment must be found, ways which avoid the political connotations which have continually plagued concern over the demographic future of man. Third, the increase in awareness about our environment should lead to the better use of our surroundings in the near future. Through the programs and materials which can result from the proposed legislation, the progress of decay may be halted sooner than expected. This goal may be best realized through the mass media and community and adult education.

To conclude, as President of the Board of Education, I support the Environmental Quality Education Act because it will help broaden and deepen the understanding of the patterns of man's existence and because it may help us solve the ominous problems which are before us in 1970.

But there is a further reason why I support this Act. I support the Environmental Quality Education Act as a member of a "minority group" which has been "disadvantaged". I grew up with personal knowledge of how an environment can crush a people's spirit, dash their hopes and reduce them to an object of hate, fear and pity. Unfortunately, nationwide concern for the environment comes only when pollution and decay threatens a larger portion of our nation: those who have not been confined to the urban slums which have existed since cities themselves. But it is not too late or too soon. As a Puerto Rican, I hope that the program for education about the environment will ultimately turn the concern of our citizens to the condition of their fellow men.

The environmental crisis before us reflects the failure to use our surroundings to benefit each other. Concern and understanding about the environment must lead to the solution of the problems of our cities and the problems of the poor. Concern for the environment cannot be separated from concern for men. The solution to the problems of our environment must, by definition, include the elimination of slums and the elimination of poverty because these are the most painful tragedies which have resulted from a misuse of nature and man, and they continue to destory our environment. If our nation really solves the environmental problem, it will have helped to solve the basic moral problem beneath all the crises we face in our nation at this time. This moral problem is the on-going struggle of men among and with themselves; the translation of hate, envy and greed into reality. As a Puerto Rican, I see the national concern for the environment as part of a movement which will eventually better the economic and social position of our national minority communities and improve the physical and emotional conditions in which they live.

In closing. I want to express my complete support for your Bill as a crucial step. Quality environmental education will be part of the groundwork behind a better environment and part of the total role that education must effectively and powerfully play in the creation and preservation of a pluralistic democracy in a nation as large as ours and torn by so many different currents. Environmental education, however, has its own special purpose: to help insure the future survival of our planet and of man himself.

Thank you.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Our final witness today is Mr. Neil Fabricant, general counsel of the Environmental Protection Administration of the city of New York.

Thank you very much for being with us.

STATEMENT OF NEIL FABRICANT, GENERAL COUNSEL,
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ADMINISTRATION

Mr. FABRICANT. At the outset, Mr. Chairman, I would render some apologies for my lateness and the absence of Xerox copies.

Mr. Kretchner had intended to testify but his legislative duties kept him in Albany and I was pressed into service rather late.

With that, I will be very brief. My only professional background is that of a civil liberties lawyer, and I would like to speak to your bill through that perspective.

I think we are at the beginning of a civil rights movement in the environmental area in this country, and, unlike that movement I think we are all environmentally oppressed.

While there may be angels and devils with respect to this issue, I don't think nature is going to draw that distinction.

If we are unable to reverse ourselves, there is going to be no escape to the suburbs for any of us.

Let me press the civil rights analogy further. Like the Federal Government which dissipates our resources on military spending and corporate welfare, civil rights and civil liberties organizations have misallocated their own resources.

Enormous sums of money have been spent on litigation programs which in the final analysis have accomplished very little. Relatively small amounts of money have been allocated toward sustained educational programs.

As a result of that I don't think we would have the constituencies to support a civil rights and civil liberties movement in this country and that tragic lack has undermined all civil liberties and civil rights programs.

We have learned one thing, that a court that ventures too far beyond what the public has been prepared to accept educationally, that court will lose the broad base of support which will enable it to act and which underlies its very legitimacy.

That's why I think your bill and your approach is so very critical in this area.

Our environmental problems have only reached broad public concern within the last couple of years.

Until then I think we have operated under a mythology and that mythology is expressed in our history books, our philosophy, and in our art, and that is that man conquers nature rather than being an extension of nature.

And I think that is at the heart of some of our problems.

Just parenthetically, my wife pointed out to me one day that in oriental painting, for example, in Japanese painting, you see small men against a backdrop of huge mountains and churning seas, and it is quite the opposite with respect to our literature, our art, and our painting.

That kind of crystallizes the issue to me. It is the way we think about ourselves that is at the root of this problem.

I think if we survive we are not going to be able to do so while indulging in the luxury of that mythology.

The environmental issue has become very popular. Vast numbers of bills have been introduced to combat this or that form of pollution. I am concerned that it is just a fad. If it is a passing fad, another issue will take its place. Again, however, like the civil rights movement, the issue is not going to disappear. It is just going to become more difficult to resolve and the stakes a lot higher.

That's why I think your approach is critical. We have to begin a massive and sustained educational campaign right now which will build that constituency which will permit the courts and legislature to respond in the way it should be responding.

We have to begin in the public schools so judges can't be produced 20 years from now who are going to view pollution problems as some kind of minor white collar crime that doesn't deserve the kind of sanctions we feel should be imposed for that kind of pollution, that kind of serious crisis.

A concrete illustration is the asbestos spray area where we have known for some time that asbestos spray causes a serious health hazard.

The relationship between that and lung cancer is as serious and high, as clearly demonstrated, as that between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.

We just issued a set of regulations to take effect Monday, the most stringent I think in the country which are carefully going to restrict the way fireproofing material is applied in on-going construction jobs.

That should have been done a long time ago. I don't know how many lives were lost as a result of the failure to act.

Had the public been educated to the problems sooner, I think we would have gotten swifter action.

In the past 2 months I have listened to a lot of industry arguments which center around the cost of pollution abatement and perhaps my approach is too simplistic.

But those arguments just remain unpersuasive to me. I think a burglar would not be heard to argue that the cost of curtailing his activities would be just too high for him and that his activities could not be restricted.

While we don't see the causal relationship between pollution problems and public health and property damage as clearly as between burglary and loss of property, that causal relationship is there and, as the technology builds up, we are going to find through your bill and others like it that that causal relationship is very clear.

When the public becomes educated through your bill and the media and hearings such as this, I believe a very pristine approach to environmental problems is going to be vindicated, that approach that doesn't balance competing economic interests, but that which takes the pure public health view.

Because I am persuaded that the problem is just too urgent to leave to future generations to resolve, I am really heartened by the specific provisions in your bill that provide for industrial and adult

education. I think those are critical because I think the problem is that argument.

The tunneled vision which sees the short-run profit and doesn't see the long-run disaster I think is also at the heart of this problem and that can only be overcome through public education I think.

I have only one final observation. Your bill speaks in terms of ecology. When I think of pollution I think rats, blights, pollutiton, everything that pollutes the cities' atmosphere.

And I think we have our own peculiar ecological problems and balance and I think we have to strike that balance and live with man and man with nature and strike that very delicate ecological balance. So I hope the programs that are going to be implemented under your bill are going to focus on the cities' problems, as opposed-not opposed, because I think David Sive's problems are our problems as well-but concentrate on the cities' problems and those educational programs that you envision under this bill will concentrate on those problems, the environmental as opposed to the ecological problems.

Lastly, as one of the other speakers mentioned, something along the same lines, what I would propose is an environmental college. I think we would need a system of all of these problems under one roof, because that's the only way these problems can be resolved.

The results of one piece of technology can never be seen without the approach of all those disciplines involved and I think right now we have very few environmentalists, very few laywers like David says, very few scientists interested in the country, and I think an environmental college studying municipal ecology as well as the problems that David Sive raises would be a fundamentally important thing and I recommend it for your consideration.

With that I will end my remarks.

(Mr. Fabricant's statement follows:)

STATEMENT OF NEIL FABRICANT, GENERAL COUNSEL, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ADMINISTRATION

Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, my name is Neil Fabricant. I am the General Counsel to the Environmental Protection Administration, the agency charged with the responsibility of overseeing New York City's air, water and sanitation departments, and more generally of protecting the city's environment. My own professional background is mainly that of a civil liberties lawyer and I would like to speak to your bill, Mr. Chairman, from that perspective. We are at the beginning of an environmental civil rights movement in this country. Unlike the civil rights movement, however, we are all environmentally oppressed. While there may be angels and devils with respect to this issue, nature will not draw those distinctions. The cities are in the midst of an environmental crisis. If we are unable to reverse ourselves, there will be no escape to the suburbs for any of us.

Let me press the civil rights analogy a bit further. Like the federal government which dissipates our resources on military spending and corporate welfare, civil rights and civil liberties organizations have misallocated their own resources. Enormous sums of money have been spent on litigation programs which in the final analysis have accomplished very little. Relatively small amounts of money have been allocated towards sustained educational programs; with the result that if a popular referendum were to be held today, at least some portion of our Bill of Rights would vanish. This tragic oversight has seriously undermined the ambitious legislative and litigative programs undertaken by these organizations. While courts and legislatures can educate, this function must be the primary responsibility of education institutions.

The one stark lesson that we have learned in recent years is that a court which ventures too far beyond what the educational process has prepared the public to

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