their way. They are destroying the West and Midwest in this utility bargain.

You must hold to this nondeteriorating criteria and extend it. These people are minorities, just like women or Negroes or anybody else. They have got a minority right to keep that which they have chosen to live under. They rejected your urban environment. Yet you are coming in on top of them with this stuff and destroying their lives. It is the most immoral situation in the United States today.

The issue is really not whether we are going to have clean air or electricity or cars. The issue is solely, are we going to do it right? We are not doing that in this Nation today. We are heading for tragedy. That tragedy is not in the form of London. That tragedy is me sick from air pollution. It is an advanced indicator or sensitive indicator that maybe 5 or 10 percent of the population who are telling you that long-term exposure which affects different people different ways is today affecting hundreds of thousands of people, and they are simply your advanced indicators of what is going to happen to a very larger percent in the future years.

I make four specific points again. You must not give up the deterioration of the clean air farm country criteria. You must not pull out the protection that Mr. Muskie put in the original Clean Air Act that you must protect all of the people. I will not accept the fact that although I am particularly adversely affected by this, that you are going to ignore me because I am only from a 1 or 2 percent population. Your standards must cover every person in the United States.

Third, the ozone numbers have no margin of safety in them whatsoever today. Your problem is you are not doing anything when you see those ozone numbers being exceeded.

Finally, and to me it is the most important element, NO, is the biggest air pollution problem in the Los Angeles basin. And for me, I get ill at numbers far, far below generally accepted levels of that pollutant.

Thank you.

[Mr. Marth's prepared statement appears at p. 60.]
Senator HART. Thank you both.

Mr. Marth, I would love to have you in the Senate.
Mr. MARTH. Too smoggy back here.

Senator HART. You are right about Denver, too. That is where I am. from. I don't know, you mentioned the word you get out West, I don't know where the word comes from in your part of the West, but the word in my part of the West is that there are 535 Members of Congress. This committee spent 2 years trying to address the problems that you have cited in many respects in the way that you have suggested.

By an overwhelming vote, this committee passed out a bill, which was not a no growth bill, which would not have shut down the economy of this country, which would have permitted people to work, but would have taken substantial steps to improve the situation that you have described. Unfortunately well, I guess it is not unfortunate-but we do have a rule, at least in this body, that says that Members can talk as long as they wish. Because it took us so long to get that kind of legislation and so many hours we put in on it, that piece of legislation did not get on the floor of the Senate until the closing

days, even hours, and that rule was taken advantage of. So we are starting all over again in some respects. We appreciate your remarks. Dr. Bouhuys, I think Senator Muskie may have some questions. Senator MUSKIE. I would like to have Dr. Bouhuys respond. As I read your testimony, Doctor, you say:

In conclusion, we have found no evidence that outdoor air pollution with particulates, NO, and NO, at levels ranging from well below to slightly higher than current primary air quality standards bears a demonstrable relation to morbidity of chronic lung diseases in three communities.

You seem to be at odds.

Mr. BOUHUYS. Senator Muskie, I think it is good to have this contrast and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to what Mr. Marth has said. I am very concerned about the situation he has referred to. As a physician I am very concerned about people who are extremely sensitive, like Mr. Marth undoubtedly is. I do not think there is any basic contradiction between what he and I have said because the levels that he mentioned that make him sick are those upper limits of what we have measured in the towns where we studied people. The problem is that we have not been studying with the same methods as people in the Los Angeles area. It is a problem. Of course, it is long known where automobile emissions are compounded by a special geographic situation. I am very concerned about it. Nevertheless, I would want to draw your attention to a study that was done some years ago by Dr. Cohen and others of the Environmental Protection Agency where they studied nonsmoking people in I believe the Pasadena area compared with nonsmoking members of the same church.

In the San Diego area they documented the numbers of days with high oxidant levels in both levels, and such days are much more frequent in Pasadena than they were in the San Diego section where they studied these same nonsmoking people. They did not find differences in lung function. The thing that is bothersome on the health effect on the lung is that there is no question at all in principle these pollutants are toxic gases. The difficulty we have is to find a level that will not hurt people as far as we can detect, but that qualification as far as we can detect has to be there.

The study that I quoted that was done in the Los Angeles area gives no evidence that there were a large number of people who reacted like Mr. Marth does, but that does not mean there are among that group not again especially sensitive individuals who are affected. The problem is that is always hard to be documented in terms of numbers, even when you go out, as we have done, to these communities and study the people, talk with them directly and measure the air in their environment.

Senator MUSKIE. There are two problems here. When air pollution first came to my attention, it was not because of any conditions in my State. We have a few clean places there, Mr. Marth, although even in the 19 million acres of wilderness that we find in northern Maine on a Sunday morning, at 6 o'clock in the morning, when there is no human activity at all, I have seen visible signs of air pollution. But 25 years ago we all thought of air pollution as being a Los Angeles phenomenon that the rest of us would never have to worry about. Yet ever since that time we have seen it spread and it is continuing to spread. And in response to that and the best evidence.

we could get, we set standards, for two purposes: First, to determine whether or not things as they were imposed unacceptable risks upon our people; and second, at what level we ought to hold further deterioration of the air to prevent its spread.

That is what the 1970 act was. We continue to try to take measurements on both of these points in order to insure that public policy is wise policy, that we are protecting health and not overprotecting it, to the degree of inhibiting economic growth and the opportunities people need in order to enhance their lives. As we move along in this effort, we find people increasingly restive under the restraints of this air pollution legislation. They are beginning to argue that the standards are too tight, too restrictive. They argue that what we have already done represents a rollback or stabilization of the situation. So it is very important when we take these almost annual measurements of where we are and where we are going, that we be as sound as possible in our conclusions. The effect of your testimony, it seems to me, would be to encourage those who say we are doing too much. If that is its effect, we have to evaluate it very carefully. If we are wrong and we permit the momentum of increasing deterioration of the air to continue, we tend to put in place irreversible conditions. It is much more difficult to clean up dirty air after it is created than it is to prevent it, because after it is created we constantly face the arguments that we don't have the technology, that to try to impose new technology upon existing plants will exact unacceptable economic costs, resulting in the closing of industry, the loss of jobs, and

so on.

I have taken the position for a long time that we ought to be extra careful about permitting the growth of polluting activities because it is much more difficult to roll it back if you are wrong. We ought to lean over backwards to protect public health. I think you ought to lean over backwards to insure that you preserve air quality capacity in this country for the purpose of supporting the kind of economic activity future generations will require. I have seen too many instances in my lifetime in the case of pollution of waterways whose oxygen content has been exhausted. When that happens, it does not impact on public health because you do not have to drink it. There is nothing that forces you to drink it. But it does inhibit economic growth, because if you have used up the entire oxidant bank in a stream, there is no way of producing the processing waters that are essential. It seems to me that lesson ought not to be forgotten when we talk about air pollution; indeed, it ought to be underlined and emphasized. If you live in a great urban area or a rural area and there is air pollution and it is too costly to eliminate it, then you are forcing people to breathe it. People in air are like fish in water. They cannot escape what we have imposed on them. So I would hope that you and others who testify on this important question of the health impact of air pollution do so bearing in mind that this is not an exact science, that we have got to make judgments as to whether or not we have stabilized the situation. And I am sure we have not.

I think the momentum of dirty air is growing all the time. I don't care what the auto industry testifies on that score. They are wrong. We may have slowed down the growth of dirty air masses in this country

by the controls we have imposed but we certainly have not stabilized it and we certainly have not rolled it back.

What you seem to say is that the health basis for the primary air standards is pretty tenuous and that we had better go to another basis, the welfare standards, instead. Our public health scientists and doctors have told us that there is no threshold, that any air pollution is harmful. The Clean Air Act is based on the assumption, although we knew at the time it was inaccurate, that there is a threshold. When we set the standards, we understood that below the standards that we set there would still be health effects. The standard we picked was simply the best judgment we had on the basis of the available evidence as to what the unacceptable health effects in terms of the country as a whole would be. The National Academy of Sciences said in its 1974 report:

In general, the evidence that has accumulated since the promulgation of the ambient air quality standards supports those standards. Hence, on balance, the panel has found no substantial basis for changing the standards.

Do you disagree with that conclusion?

Dr. BOUHUYS. I think on the basis of the evidence in that report, that is a reasonable conclusion.

Senator MUSKIE. Is there new evidence that undermines the reasonableness of the conclusion?

Mr. BOUHUYS. I find that the matter of setting numerical standards a matter in which I have not the expertise. But I have observed that in the towns where we studied people we are not able to detect health effects on the lungs, which is one part of the health effects. I want to make that very clear. It is asthma, chronic bronchitis, emphysema.

The data we have obtained can be used to say the standards are approximately right. One may be in conjunction with other results but could use the same data that might suggest they might be set at somewhat higher levels. It is a matter of interpretation.

If you allow me, Senator Muskie, I would like to read a conclusion I found in a report of an expert committee of the World Health Organization that we published in 1972:

Serious attempts have been made with limited information to reach a consensus of opinion as to the action that should be taken to protect people from pollution. Unfortunately, it must be recognized that this approach to the problem in no way guarantees that such action will necessarily confer the protection sought.

It is mainly that conclusion that I wanted to express, that even if we were able, and I would hope we were able to implement clean air all over the Nation, but that it would be extremely difficult to document in objective terms the improvement in the respiratory health of the people concerned.

Senator HART. One classifying question about your study. You contrast rural residents in Ansonia, Conn., with those in Lebanon, both groups being nonsmokers. The suggestion I think of your study is that Ansonia, Conn., is urban and therefore dirty. But isn't it the case that the particulate levels and NO, levels in Ansonia are both below the national standard?

Dr. BOUHUYS. The total particulate level was close to the annual primary standard. The NO2 level was sometimes above it, but not much. Ansonia is no longer, at least it was not in 1973, a highly polluted town. But from the data, the very limited data that were avail

able in previous years, it used to be much dirtier. Those data were obtained by my laboratory and they are rather limited. But whatever they showed, it is clear the air there was more clean and cleaner in 1973 than it used to be before.

The kind of symptoms and lung function loss that we studied is a relatively long-term development so that in part it would reflect past exposures. But, again, one has to be very careful in the interpretation. Senator HART. Senator Stafford?

Senator STAFFORD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Marth, I have a few questions for you. I noticed in your statement that you said "we"-I presume you meant Congress and the committee-authorizing the construction of freeways and houses and so on in the Los Angeles area. Do you really believe the Congress controls where highways are built, what kinds are built, and where and what housing is built?

Mr. Marth. No, sir, not directly. What I am really saying is you know there are 200 days a year or 150 days a year where you are exceeding the ozone standard in the Los Angeles basin. The EPA says you are supposed to have a rule to do something about that, to get that down in the standard. Nothing is happening out there.

I will tell you why it isn't happening. There is too much money involved in shutting down. The freeways are pushed by the developer. The development of housing bringing more people into an area that shouldn't have any more people is all pushed by these things, all pushed by money. They are ignoring your laws. You have got this thing that says you are supposed to come up with a plan to diminish it. Nothing ever happens.

How can I think any otherwise than Congress and EPA is foregoing their responsibility to give us clean air? I am sick from it.

Senator MUSKIE. Do you consider that maybe the State of California, if it hasn't done so, should have some sort of land use controls? Mr. MARTH. Absolutely. I would make the point that California isn't quite as bad as most of them, but almost all air pollution control districts and State control agencies are simply propaganda agencies in the hands of those polluters who are responding to those polluters and not the individuals who are sick from it.

There has been a lot of talk about land use. Basically I am against that, like other people. Why can't people use their land as they choose to? But if something is this critical, maybe we are going to have to do something about it.

What always bothers me about land use controls is it is just another way to sell out. Money is passed under the table and the land use is passed. That is the weakness of local zoning. No matter what you say, you say this is going to be our land control policy. But then somebody comes up with an exception. That exception is based on a political contribution and local reaction there.

So land use in my mind is a failure. I think we have to do something in Los Angeles, like you don't build on any more open land, don't destroy any more open land. If that means buying land, setting it aside, and letting land exist on its own merits, maybe that is what it is. I frankly don't trust governments, local governments or national governments, with things like land zoning because they go around them. Senator STAFFORD. What business are you in, Mr. Marth?