For ecology is currently conceived in a narrow sense. To most anti-pollution campaigners, ecology means pretty lakes, green grass, blooming trees, and ugly factories whose smoke does not pollute the air. Even more people, these reformers thinks, will want to buy a GM car every two years if the folks at General Motors install an anti-pollution device on their products.

MAY BE, however, the killing of Vietnamese peasants will someday appear unecological. So will the starvation of most of the world's population, condemned to hunger as their nations' resources are fed to a burgeoning American economy. Americans combrising only six per cent of the world's population, gobble up thirty per cent of the world's available resources every year. More important than improving our ways of gobbling these resources up is to allow other peoples to share in their use.

Fur Coats and Oilmen

Concern for the sea otter and the bald cagle is not misplaced. Traditional conversationists, deeply protective of a vanishing magnificent natural environment, serve a valuable purpose in the struggle to improve the quality of life. Concern for the air, the water, the land-the preservation and protection of beautiful scenery-adds valuable opposition to the campaigns of business to carve up the American wilderness into profitable industrial squalor.

The oil industry, for example, is attempting to take over Alaska. Conservation groups, fighting the wishes of Interior Secretary Hickel, have obtained an injunction preventing construction of an 800-mile. $1 billion pipeline stretching from Valdez in southern Alaska to oil-rich Prudhoe Bay on the northern coast.

In a joint suit, the Wilderness Society. Friends of the Earth and the Environmental Defese Fund have managed to delay the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, a key ingredient in the efforts of oilmen to claim the profitable resources of Alaska.

Ecologists are waging valuable campaigns across the nation against the fur coats popular so long as an expensive status symbol, especially those of the young sea otter, who is clubbed to death by entrepreneurs seeking to obtain their valuable white furs. Despite a public outery which forced Canada's Parliament to pass weak legislation which managed to regulate the murders last year, the pressure on reluctant Prime Minister Trudeau to outlaw the profitable thoug grisly business continues to build.

Fights against polluters of the atmosphere, such as New England's famous Boston Edison, are continuing and ecology reformers hope to score a number of successes. Yet, the danger is that many of these activists will be easily co-opted by the small deeds and windy rhetoric of the powerful corporations.

In fighting for anti-pollution devices on automobiles, the goal is so limited that success can easily co-opt the reformer. Improve the automobiles so that more roads will be built, more iron can be mined, and more oil can be pumped. All of these efforts while the government mouths its concern for pollution.

Ecology, as it develops into a portion of the Movement, threatens to become the Movement's weak flank, where the danger of co-optation from inadequately-funded governmental gimmicks is the greatest.

This is in fact what most Establishment politicians and media seck from the ecology issue. Worried by the dangers of the heated anti-war fervor among many students, bothered by the growth of an anti-Establishment consciousness, fearful of the potentialforce of a growing opposition to racism, these men in power are seeking to use the ecology issue to bring radicals under their leadership once more.

Motherhood and Co-Optation

The issue of ecology-a perfect motherhood issue-affects everyone so that logically one can argue that there is no oppressing class. The ecology issue, unlike civil rights and Vietnam, was not a grass-roots movement among students. Nixon, for example, by turning attention away from the divisive issues of the war and white racism-where certain classes feel themselves grievously exploited, namely, young people and blacks respectively-can unite the nation behind the consensus of ineffectuality that he seeks. Workers and bosses are both affected by pollution, of course, so that traditional leadership can assert itself to restore our endangered environment.

Pollution is a profitable business. The ecology movement must be cooped to insure that a profitable level of pollution is maintained. " Let's face it-waste products are a fact of life we have to recognize. " says Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, Nixon's science advisor. " Clearly, the U. S. will be producing more waste in the future-not less. " DuBridge, like many others within the Nixon Administration, is assuming a growth economy, where progress is determined by the amount of garbage produced by a society.

What DuBridge seeks from ecology is simply to " determine reasonable levels of pollution consistent with good health. "

Pollution Profits

On Wall Street, pollution industries have emerged as one of the hottest growth issues for the coming decade. Research-Cottrell, Inc., the largest corporation devoted entirely to environmental systems, has quadrupled its sales within the past five years. Many of the pollution control industries are subsidiaries or divisions of the largest corporate polluters in the nation. Forbes Magazine notes that there is "cash in all that trash."

In its May 1970 issue, Ramparts details the growth of the "Pollution-Industrial Complex." Just as Chrysler profits from all of its parts that quickly break, both in replacement items and new purchases, many industries are seeking to profit from the spiraling growth of pollution-instead of paying the social costs of a ravaged environment.