Word: publicize
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Clearly, the U.S. is now buffeted by a public atmosphere that has grown chronically and pervasively cautionary. Apprehensive outcries wail forth from broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, posters, labels, environmental journals, medical tracts, Government reports, even books. One of the books is a brand-new broadside by Dr. Charles T. McGee, a clinical ecologist of Alamo, Calif., who is quoted above. His 220-page polemic issues a general alarm about multifarious dangers that lurk in every nook and cranny of contemporary civilization. Even fluorescent lighting, he says, may, in some weird way, weaken the muscles. The book, billed as a "crash course...
States and communities are in effect trying to cope on their own. Well before really cold weather had set in, the Hartford city council declared a "finding of public emergency" and authorized city managers to overspend by $500,000 for energy emergencies. Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso called the legislature into special session to ask for $5 million in appropriations and $11 million in borrowed funds to support loan programs to small oil dealers, homeowners and municipalities. She estimates that 40,000 families in the state will need help, mostly to pay oil bills...
...there are indications in this cold season that Americans are beginning to believe that conservation offers the only way to fight back. Newly built homes everywhere are generally more energy efficient than the houses of a decade ago. Some public utilities across the country are offering (along with bill-stuffer assurances that nuclear energy is a good thing) free or low-cost energy audits of ratepayers' houses. The offers are being accepted by the hundreds of thousands. "There are frenzied people out there," says Austin Randolph, who handles such audits in Westchester County, N.Y., for Consolidated Edison. For a nominal...
...system under stress, however, solutions sometimes create problems. Massachusetts has become the first state in the nation to ban urea formaldehyde foam, the largest selling type of blown insulation. Public Health Commissioner Alfred Frechette says that "we find there is significant correlation between the foam insulation and such formaldehyde-linked illnesses as respiratory difficulties, eye and skin irritations, headaches, vomiting and severe irritation to the mucous membranes." Massachusetts estimates that some 7,000 houses in the state?and many more across the country?are insulated with formaldehyde. The cost of removing the stuff, where it can be removed, might...
...this unbudgeable stubbornness, of course. Despite the inventiveness that it accompanies, it is at its roots a resistance to change. And the changes that the society has shown itself willing to make so far are small ones. They do not inconvenience in serious ways. Yes to insulation, no to public transportation. Write to the nice people at Vermont Castings for a Defiant wood stove brochure, set aside, for the moment, the necessity to think through a profound unease about nuclear power and a disbelief in the quick fix of synthetic fuels. Get through the winter, and make the tough decisions...