Other government agencies (need anyone mention the Pentagon?) are similarly tied to the industries that they are supposed to regulate. The Labor Department dismissed Jock Yablonski's allegations of gangland corruption on the United Mine Workers until Yablonski and his family were found murdered.

The Department of Agriculture, says Ehrlich, is "a subsidiary of the petrochemical industry that produces DDT and other insecticides."

On the Environmental Teach-In, Ehrlich offers advice. "I hope that the participants will zero in on the politicians, make it clear we aren't going to settle for their lies and do-nothing attitudes," he says.

And We All Knows Who Pays

Ecology, however, is attracting into its ranks all the liberals who used to spend their wasted time agreeing with goals while opposing tactics. If Boston Edison pollutes the atmosphere, well then, picket Boston Edison and make them fess up. The problem remains, when Boston Edison reforms its smoke, who pays?

The consumer pays, of course. Because of anti-pollution campaigns, the working man finds that automobiles cost more, electricity costs more, and his taxes are higher. His money is also probably providing employment for thousands of trained ecologists. The profit-makers will not pay.

Most of the focus of the ecology campaign is elitist. With only a very limited amount of governmental money available, reformers stridently demand that several rivers be cleaned up. Anti-pollution campaigns are a luxury of an affluent society. So the money, instead of going directly into the hands of the poor and the minorities, hires anti-pollution industries, off spins of the polluters, to construct elaborate drainage and filtering systems. Naturally, everything is financed at taxpayers' expense.

Clean rivers, like their pollution, are a bourgeois preoccupation. As though atoning for the poor job their class had done in running the nation, these young middle-class whites demand that the government clean up the Charles River. The government obliges, at heavy expense, and the Charles is cleaner. Because of this, every Sunday afternoon Harvard students may frolic along its grassy banks without fear of death, enjoying the view and throwing Frisbees.

The starving Third World nations cannot afford the luxury of being concerned with their polluted rivers. The blacks in Roxbury could care less about the pleasures of lounging along the banks of the Charles.

SO, WHILE American population grows, the nation's economy pushes its way over other peoples so that its inhabitants can enjoy a higher and higher standard of living. Per capita consumption of commodities and services in the U. S. continues to rise. Billions of dollars are required to halt the continuing decay of a nation where a gutting progress is its most important product. The billions of dollars of anti-pollution funds would be reinvested to re-invigorate the American economy, making its oppressions all the more efficient.

American economic growth-the population growth which underlies much of it, the search for more markets which underlies the rest-must be halted if we are ever to live in a clean world.

Planned Obsolescence

Ours is a society which encourages everyone to buy an automobile of his own-the bourgeois dream, any young hitchhiker has seen the drivers, roundly nestled in their own little piece of machine that belongs to no one else-so that the automobile will provide more industrial and capital growth by quickly breaking down. Ultimately the old parts are discarded and a new, sexy automobile is sold to the motorist, who proudly blasts his horn at any who dare cross his path.

Other machines-radios, toasters, washing machines-quickly fall apart as well. Yet every American family must have one, the newest model, for gimmicky advances are always putting the older models out of date. And industry continues to prosper.

If enzyme-active Axion is polluting the lakes and rivers of the United States, it proves to the makers that people are using their product. So they quickly affirm their concern for the environment in costly advertisements and then come out with a "new, improved" product.

In our merchandising society, where a woman's cleavage and a sexy scene can convince people to smoke themselves into a cancerous death, the deepest, most radical meanings of the ecology campaign are rapidly being deactivated.

Ecology Action and People

Ecology Action, at 925 Mass Ave., was formed in October so that people could get together as people, for ecology to them meant a strengthening and improvement of human relationships. Soon, however, reporters and newsmen were calling them up asking for the facts on pollution. Soon they were getting calls demanding information on the calm eruptions in Newport and the butterfly invasion of Trinidad.