Thus, writes Martin Gellen in Ramparts, "pollution control, developed as a complementary industry, is a way to insure that the favorable balace between costs, sales, and profits can be maintained and business can continue as usual-indeed, better than usual, for pollution control means new investment outlets, new income and new profits; the more waste the better.

"Polution control as conceived by the pollution control industry is merely an extension of the same pattern of self-seeking exploitation and market economics which is at the root of the environmental crisis itself."

It would be fine if American capitalism, raising the proud banner of the profit motive, can rise to the challenge of growing pollution. Fine, yet none of the problems from which this growing ecological concern has diverted us would have been solved. By protesting pollution, we simply would have provided another market for American industry.

" Ultimately, " declares the Wall Street Journal, " preservation of the environment may have to take absolute priority over social stability and welfare. "

IN MANY ways ecology is too narrowly defined. It has the potential to become not a ruse to re-invigorate a sluggish economy and divert radical criticism from issues of oppression, but the means to the realization that the greatest polluter of the earth is American corporate capitalism, whose continued health is based on continued expansion-expansion of the economy, of markets, and, crucially, of the population.

This is not to say that Soviet industrialization, for example would not pollute most of the earth given a change. American corporations, notably the powerful automobile and oil lobbies, have expanded throughout the world and have crucial influence on government policies. This influence is especially visible in domestic policy.

In this decade Los Angeles-one-third of which (two-thirds in the downtown area) is covered by cars, trucks, and the facilities to service them-plans to spend during the next decade $10,000 per family on new highway construction. During the same period, only $3090 per family will be spent in L. A. on schools, hospitals, parks, recreation, water supply, etc.

Mass transit, electric cars, and other improvements in pollution-free transportation have been kept in a state of continual infancy because of the powerful influence of the greedy and privileged petroleum industry in all levels of government.

Ecology, conceived as an anti-pollution reform campaign, will be absorbed and deactivated by expansive American industry. The war, poverty, racism, where the contrast between who profits and who loses, brought out after years of organizing, education, discussion, and radicalization, are the important issues remaining before us.

Dr. Paul H. Ehrlich, of Stanford University, warns political activists not to stray from the "real" issues of Vietnam, poverty, and racism with a pious concern for the environment.

"Your cause is a lost cause without population control, and race, war, poverty, and environment are really part and parcel of the same big mess. The wars we're fighting in Vietnam and Laos, for example, are immensely destructive to the environment. We've defoliated an estimated 20 per cent and much of the ecological destruction there is going to be permanent," says Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.

The government which is advocating pollution reform, Ehrlich notes, is closely tied to the same groups which are the heaviest polluters.

The Interior Department, for example, thought it was established ostensibly to further conservation, is more generally found in the service of industry.

Its laws, regulating strip mining, for example, flagrantly favor the desecration of the land for, as Secretary Hickel declared. "the stimulation of individual incentive to seek out and develop valuable minerals which are essential to the continued growth and prosperity of this nation."

Recently, at Interior, John F. OLeary, head of the Bureau of Mines, was replaced because of pressure from the mining industry. O'Leary, the industry thought, was too strongly enforcing mine safety regulations recently passed by Congress to protect miners.