Nature in the Nixon era

As The Times prepares to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in more than 35 years, the editorial board will examine the candidates' stances on issues through our own sense of the meaning of some essential American values. How much have The Times' values changed since its 1972 endorsement of Richard Nixon? We'll find out by looking through editorials from that year. Earlier, we went through The Times' positions on life, liberty and justice and the pursuit of happiness.

Today, The Times considers "the powers of the earth" — or the key environmental issues of our time. In 1972, Nixon was on his way to establishing a fairly solid environmental legacy, signing the basis of the Clean Water Act that year. The Environmental Protection Agency had been around only two years, and California was already fighting to enact its own stronger environmental standards. The Times of old advocated pollution control and exploration of new energy sources — only by control, the board meant control; pollution included the noisy kind; and new energy sources meant not renewables, but nuclear.

The Times started the year strongly on Jan. 6 with an expose on air pollution and a long, harsh list of policy measures for "pure air" by the end of that decade:

Reporters of The Times throughout the nation and around the world have set forth in today's edition the story of air pollution, the corruption of the earth's atmosphere by the effluents of a global industrial revolution. The industrial revolution has brought man a longer and easier life. But man has paid a terrible price, rapidly exhausting irreplaceable resources, littering the landscape, and now obscuring it with clouds of gaseous and particulate filth that erode the mucous membranes, facilitate the assault of bacteria and viruses on the respiratory system, divert the mind, strangle the population with irritations and infections. It is astonishing to learn that air pollution has become almost universal in a single generation. Smog may even be worse in Mexico City than in Los Angeles….London wiped away the smoke and sulfur. So did Pittsburgh, and so did Los Angeles. Those were great victories. But they made all the more conspicuous the problem of photochemical smog…. The search for solutions has been frustrated step by step, by political malingering, by a petroleum industry which was slow to see its responsibility, by a motor industry that preferred postponement to commitment…. [T]here is a word of hope…of relatively pure air by 1980…. [I]t will be possible only with a shift to nuclear energy for power generation, improvement of bus transportation, conversion of fleet vehicles to natural gas, restrictions on traffic in some urban areas, and stricter auto emission controls.

The board banged the drum for clean air again on Jan. 18, this time throwing around talk of "police power" that wouldn't pass today:

State and federal officials are currently cooperating in a farce involving clean air in California. It cloaks a deadly serious problem. Clean air, under federal law, is air that is not harmful to health, and the national deadline for getting air of this quality is 1975…. It is up to the states to devise ways to meet the federal standards…. We understand the practical difficulties in the way of the state's plan. But we understand too that the quality of our air isn't going to be improved without effective and vigorously enforced measures to reduce the pollutants we are putting into it. The time may indeed come when the state will have to use its police powers to restrict auto use, to protect the health of the community. The time is here now, however, when the state can take feasible steps to assure us at least cleaner air in the years ahead.

And nine days later, the pre-Three Mile Island-era Times applauded efforts to build a better, faster nuke plant, a position with which the current board would disagree:

By 1980, the Atomic Energy Commission, working with industry, hopes to have in operation in Tennessee the nation's first large fast breeder reactor, a new type of nuclear power plant that could point the way to providing cheap and abundant electrical energy to meet the expanding needs of coming decades…. With the nation's electric power demands doubling every 10 years, the need for developing economical new power sources has become acute…. The safety record of commercial American nuclear reactors has been generally excellent, but the possibility of accident, and perhaps of widespread radiation, can never be entirely ruled out.

At the end of January, the board decried noise pollution — and lest they seem old fogeyish, they made sure to note they were hip to rock music:

Noise is more than an annoyance, it is a health problem…. Excessive noise not only harms hearing and interferes with sleep. It may have effects on the heart, the circulatory and respiratory systems. Too much noise is indisputably bad for people, and most of us are exposed for varying parts of the day to too much noise. Hearing tests were given recently to more than 40 rock musicians; half were found to have some impairment. The doctors who conducted the examinations noted, however, that audiences at rock concerts actually are exposed to higher noise levels than the performers, because of amplifying equipment. Hearing impairment is becoming not only an occupational risk, it would appear, but a cultural one as well.

On Feb. 24, The Times wanted to control urban blight and air pollution by regulating gas stations (who knows how the old board would have reacted to Olympic and Robertson today):

There is a justifiable clamor for controls to eliminate air pollution caused by the gas-burning automobile engine. Also needing control is the visual pollution produced by those ubiquitous gas stations — especially the abandoned ones that become such eyesores…. [r]egulating business locations always has been an integral part of sound planning and zoning. Most ordinances allow gas stations in industrial and commercial zones. More specific statues are now needed.

It may seem surprising these days that a Republican administration was being praised for its environmental achievements, but things were different during the earth-happy Nixon era. The board wrote on March 17:

Alaska, one-fourth the size of the continental United States, is the last great American frontier. Its timber, oil, coal and other resources are immense. The disposition of these resources between the federal government and the state, and the release of land for private development involve decisions of the greatest importance to the entire nation The action taken Wednesday by Secretary of the Interior Rogers C. B. Morton was in the tradition of great conservationists of the past like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. Morton set aside 274 million acres of federal land in Alaska.

But maybe that was too hasty. The Times reconsidered somewhat on March 22, alluding to the instability of oil sources in '72 (which would get a lot worse the next year):

It now appears that the controversial trans-Alaska oil pipeline will be approved…. The issue is not whether the vast oil reserves of Alaska's North Slope should be tapped — moving the oil to domestic markets will be a welcome means to reduce dependency on foreign sources and to help the balance of payments. The issue has been whether the pipeline is the best way to do it.

And on April 13, the board listed the pros of natural gas in a more optimistic way than the present-day board:

Southern California faces a serious and potentially severe shortage of natural gas used to fuel its electric power plants, and that shortage could lead to a major increase in air pollution as early as next year…. A reduction in the supply of natural gas would require California electric utilities to shift more and more to fuel oil…. This is where the air pollution problem comes in. Natural gas is virtually pollution-free. Most oil, on the other hand, has a high sulfur content. When this oil is burned, sulfur oxides are created. These oxides reduce visibility. They can damage buildings and plant life. And they can affect health.

The board cheered the House of Representatives for letting a nuclear power plant operate temporarily without an environmental impact report. Heat pollution was the only worry the board had on April 24:

Nuclear power is an alternative to fossil fuels that poses no air pollution problem. Nuclear plants do give off heat pollution, but that can be controlled. It is clear the nation will have to rely increasingly on nuclear power to meet its electricity needs. California particularly, with its tough clean air standards, needs nuclear power.