America's polluted waters - 29 July 1988

One of the very first talks I did, I mean in this series, was about the end of summer. Well this atrocious burning summer is not over yet, as Vice President Bush would say, darn it, but because that very early talk was printed I have a copy of it. I looked at it the other day to see how if things have changed. Let me read a bit of it.

“The official end of summer” I said “ is Labor Day, so that at the beginning of September you packed up at the cottage by the sea, on the lake, in the mountains and this was the general routine. The swimming trunks squeezed for the last time, the ashtray is filled with mouse seed and rat paste, the storm shutters hammered into place – we are on the top of a cliff that faces due north-east which is where the most damaging winter storms come from – fetch in the porch furniture and from outside the rusty barbecue grill we haven’t used in four years, phoned the electric company to turn off the current, the phone company to disconnect, draw all the curtains, sprinkle moth flakes on the rugs, try to hide the smelly fishing rod in a dark closet and fail, your wife coming at you saying 'Could this be bait?' It was – for an uncaught striped bass, the noblest of the small game fish and the best eating fish.”

I’ll stop there with a deep sigh. The striped bass is no more, or rather he’s there, especially in the fall, but not to be caught, not to be bought. He breeds in the Hudson river which has now just about taken its fill of industrial and other wastes. We are 100 miles east of the mouth of the Hudson and you’d think by the time he’d swum so far he would be fat and healthy and toothsome. Not so. As far as we are concerned, we are told, he’s gone for good.

Well we left and drove back to New York City – we are in the late 1940s – I noted something very up-to-date and enviable in those days. As we curved round and down off the Triborough Bridge coming into Manhattan there was a billboard advertising a de luxe apartment building shortly to be opened. It had stars printed against the features it was specially proud of – thermostat heat control in each flat, all-electric kitchen with deep freeze, laundry and dish-washing machine and garbage disposal unit, air-conditioned units "available in summer" – not many changes there.

I’m surprised, though, that we had garbage disposal units then and instead of the post-war town lockers a private deep-freeze section in what we used to call the ice-box and now call – one bit of slang picked up from England – the fridge, and in such a building there would be no longer just air-conditioning units "available for summer", the whole building would be air-conditioned from the start.

There was, however, at the bottom of this soaring billboard a jolting note. It said "Adequate sub-basement atomic bomb shelter”. Today such a note would guarantee no buyers for those flats, however de luxe in other ways. Those signs seem to have vanished and, we must hope, for good.

This summer, which has kept more than four-fifths of North America frying and stewing, there are gloomy changes. The worst of them were arrested in my mind by two television pictures I’ve just seen. One is a picture-postcard beauty of a majestic, very still, lake between dark, forested mountains. It is Indian Lake, one of the more than 200 lakes up in the Adirondack mountains in upstate New York where over two million acres of forest reserve provide, have provided for well over a hundred years, a summer paradise for millions of New Yorkers, New Englanders and down-dropping Canadians.

Indian Lake, a picture to drool over, is in merciful contrast with the other picture which was a photograph bang on the cover of one of our weekly news magazines and then shown on television. It’s of a splendid stretch of white sandy beach along the New Jersey shore. All you see is a horizontal line dividing the beach from chafing blue sea, two empty trash baskets, in the foreground a big rectangular red sign nailed to a post it says, "Beach closed. Health hazard."

The water on the edge of the sand is no lake; it’s the Atlantic Ocean. Similar signs have suddenly appeared on four or five of the Long Island ocean beaches. In fact, most evenings now the summer story on television news shows includes white, bare beaches and muscular young lifeguards atop their high ladders. They’re there not to get people out of the water but to stop them getting in it.

What about that idyllic picture of Indian Lake way up there in the mountains of upstate New York? Same story – what fish there are are dead. The neighbouring beavers have taken off for safer quarters, the loons bob on the edge of the lake but crazy as they’re known to be, they’ve known better than to try and raise their young there. They depart at regular intervals for some other water not yet polluted.

I’m afraid the story spans the continent from the northern coast of Maine down 500 miles to the coast of Delaware, and the poison pours into the great bay that laps against the shores of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, that bay which an old Baltimorean passionate for the wonderful Maryland crabs and the other seafood called "the protein factory of Chesapeake Bay". Today he could better call it "the toxin factory".

The melancholy picture spans America from sea to shining sea. The acid test, if you’ll excuse the expression, is the level of toxic chemicals in the livers of fish and they’ve been found abundantly in the water off Puget Sound in the extreme north-west of the Pacific coast, down along the coast of the states of Washington and Oregon.

Then there’s the healthy stretch along northern California, the toxins taking over again at San Francisco bay and on down to the Mexican border; same the coastlines of Texas, Louisiana that look out into the Gulf of Mexico. Just now, it seems, the only absolutely clean sands and harmless ocean are from North Carolina down and round the Florida peninsula and along the Gulf coast of Georgia and Alabama.

Wait – I didn’t look closely at the map. That great curve of liquid purity is not so pure after all. There are reported toxins and no pesticide contamination. What there are, though, are clusters of little symbols which signify shorelines one-third of which are closed to commercial shellfish harvest.

How about the greatest inland reservoirs in the world, the so-called Great Lakes – Superior, Michigan, Huron, Eyrie, Ontario – from the western end of Superior at Duluth to the outlet of Lake Ontario 1,160 miles, the great prize for which the English fought the French for so many years.

It seemed way back in the 1960s that those silly warnings of gloom and doom for the Great Lakes were just the usual patter of environmental freaks, but by the end of that decade Lake Eyrie was dying.

The state governments woke up slowly and the Federal government a little later. The Great Lakes, after all, did not offer a bottomless pit for industrial waste. The other four lakes too began to mock the definition in almanacs, encyclopaedias, “a group of huge, freshwater lakes”.

Perhaps the lucky factor in the plight of the Great Lakes was that they encompass large parts of both Canada and the United States. The two countries alarmed each other, they blamed each other. From time to time the Canadian prime minister and the American president met and asked each other what are you going to do about it.

Beginning in the early 1970s the two governments together have spent something like nine thousand million dollars on the cleaning job. In the late '60s about half a million pounds of factory and sewage wastes went into the lakes every day. Today it’s only fifty thousands pounds.

It’s something. It’s a great deal, but not, evidently, enough because now they are the dumping ground for newer or more ubiquitous chemicals and the toxins born on the wind and good old acid rain, another fetish 20 years ago, it seemed, of the "good earth" nuts.

Acid rain is pouring down its poisons not only on the lakes but on all the forests and crops of the lands that lie east of the industrial midwest. We all hear these statistics and are suitably impressed or depressed and then you hear about something close to home, the inedible striped bass, the maple forests of Vermont actually wilting, and you’re shocked, resentful.

The other night one of the networks did a whole raft of beach interviews with young and old about the new signs, "Beach closed", "No swimming", "These waters hazardous", and so on. They were not rich summer folks, not the bad and the beautiful in The Hamptons who find the prohibition signs on the beach an awful nuisance. Many of them merely look at the ocean anyway and never go near it; they have their pools and they can be filtered.

No no, these were ordinary working-class mothers, sons, daughters, fathers doing what they’ve always done in their thousands, getting away from the searing heat at weekends to the blessed beaches of the Jersey shore or Long Island. Their reactions were uniform – they were outraged, as if the government had done it on purpose.

The worst misfortune hit those beaches which last week found themselves littered with clinic garbage, hospital waste of every gruesome sort from syringes and bandages and decayed organs to the corpses of laboratory rats. Mayor Koch, just back in time from telling Amsterdam how to deal with drugs, expressed astonishment and got busy looking for the culprit hospitals.

Of course it would happen that one of the interviewees on such a beach was a recent Russian immigrant living close by Coney Island in what has become a Russian refugee colony, a strong burly man, a Dostoyevsky police-chief type.

He pointed accusingly at the mess and the forbidding sign. In a rich guttural voice he said, “What is this? The Land of the Free? The Soviet Union?”

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