Word: publication
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Still, while the critics may be down, they are not out. The public may think such issues as the imminence of global warming and the danger of toxic wastes are settled, but scientists do not. Their disagreements about ecological threats make life uncomfortable for the activists, who fear that any apparent uncertainty will give policymakers an excuse for inaction. Critics respond that environmental false alarms have produced bad policy. While some naysayers are economists, industrialists and bureaucrats who view environmentalism as an irrelevant disruption of the real business of the world, others are sophisticated scientists who maintain that...
...that obsessive concern with cancer-causing chemicals in foods, pesticides and toxic wastes has produced a regulatory tangle at EPA and a superfluous Superfund to clean dump sites. Government restrictions on man-made chemicals are absurdly stringent in proportion to ; their risk, says Ames. He notes that while the public panicked last spring because of trace amounts of the synthetic growth regulator Alar found on apples, many fruits contain natural carcinogens in concentrations 1,000 times as great. Observes Ames: "Eating vegetables and lowering fat intake will do more to reduce cancer than eliminating pollutants...
Companies that refuse to clean up their acts could be forced to do so, either by increased government regulation or public pressure. In September an alliance of environmental groups, bankers and investment-fund managers, known as the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, unveiled a set of guidelines for corporate conduct called the Valdez Principles (a name taken from the Exxon Valdez, the tanker responsible for the Alaskan oil spill). Firms that agree to the guidelines must pledge, among other things, to conserve energy, reduce waste and market environmentally safe products...
...small but symbolically important first step would be to halt deforestation of ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Incredibly, the Government spends $40 million yearly building logging roads and subsidizing the destruction of virgin forests on public lands. If the U.S. protected its last old-growth woodlands, American officials would have more credibility when asking tropical nations to stop the relentless cutting of their rain forests...
...When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight," Samuel Johnson once wrote, "it concentrates his mind wonderfully." The threat of impending ecological doom seems to be having the same effect on public opinion. If historians remember 1989 as the year the Iron Curtain collapsed, it has also been the year that concern for the environment reached a new peak...