Document Rq3b36yxJKNQjGee5wMZrv7E

The Sea THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 2, 1973 Backtracking like this, however, only dem onstrates how limited knowledge is about pollu tion of the sea, and. as in many an unpolished Pollution of Oceans Behind the Indifference and unawareness of science, conflicts crop up between the results most people and many governments lies the of separate investigations. In the ocean-pollu Is Enormous Threat, most unfathomable difficulty: a great gap in tion field, though, the stakes can be high. A scientific knowledge about pollution of the donnybrook of major proportions is growing seas. A gush of research following oil spills of around questions about the long-range effect of But Few People Care the 1960s barely has begun to lay the ground oil in the oceans. The petroleum industry work for decades of study needed before people argues that oil degrades, or breaks down biol can know Just what pollutants are in the sea, ogically, in the sea and therefore isn't harmful how much there is of them, where they go once for very long. Other researchers, with evidence Scientific Uncertainty Adds there and what effect they eventually will have to the contrary, say damage from a single oil on life in the oceans and on land. spill can be felt for decades. To the Problem; `Business as Panoply of Pollutants Max Blumer, a senior scientist at Woods "Despite broad general consensus about the Hole, is conducting ah exhaustive study of the Usual, Pending Annihilation' contaminants which represent the greatest effects of a relatively small oil spill that took threat of global pollution," says Robert M. place in Cape Cod's Buzzard's Bay in Septem White, head of the National Oceanic and At ber 1969. Long after the visible presence of oil How Dangerous Is Oil Slick? mospheric Administration, "knowledge of their has gone, small amounts are persisting in a full extent, their fate and their impact on the surprisingly wide area around the site of the ocean ecosystem is scanty at best." spill. Among Mr. Blumer's conclusions to date What is known is that in the most intense in By Barrv Newman - stall Reporter oI The Wall Street journal It is the last pollution. stances of contamination around coastal areas, pollution kills. The evidence is clear enough Last to seep into public consciousness; last from the quick death of marine life after larger to be treated by the rule of law; last to be ana oil spills, the fact that 30r,i of this country's lysed by science. J clam and oyster beds are fouled by human J wastes, and the near absence of life in harbors It is the last pollution because it is into the striken by a panoply of pollutants. oceans--the ultimate sewer--that all the The body of knowledge is growing steadily, ! wastes of man that aren't piled or buried on fed by platoons of scientists in dozens of gov land must find their way. And it is the last pol ernment, university and industry laboratories. lution because if the oceans--source of most But every new revelation seems to open a Pan oxygen--are poisoned, life on earth as we know dora's box of questions and contradictions. it cannot go on. Even basic statistics on the amount of oil is that "oil degrades slowly only in marine se diments, and it may be completely stable once it is taken up by organisms." Extremely low concentrations of oil and other pollutants may have "seriously damag ing biological effects," Mr. Blumer warns, adding that "our general ignorance" of the de tails isn't an excuse "for complacency if such effects aren't immediately obvious in gross ob servations of polluted areas." With its own army of petroleum chemists, the oil industry is squaring off against the con clusions of the Woods Hole study. "Oil is messy and ugly and gets on people's feet," says Arne The enormity of the prospect has led some entering the sea via spills have varied wildly. Gabrud, director of environmental affairs for to statements like these: Now those unreliable estimates are themselves the American Petroleum Institute, "but it's no Sen. Ernest F. Hollings: "We.are killing the being upset by fresh suggestions that a huge where near as insidious as ocean dumping of great oceans of this planet, and unless we stop percentage of oil pollution comes not from garbage or heavy metals, or so serious as to spills but from airborne anti-exhaust emissions justify interminable delays in needed projects This is the fourth of a series of articles drifting to the ocean surface. Here again, there / like the Alaska pipeline." on the sea. aren't any numbers to trust. The best esti The institute is spending (500,000 a year on this madness, mankind itself may perish from the face of this earth. And that would be the irony of all ironies --man having evolved from the oceans, only to die because he has killed the very source of all life." And Jacques Cousteau, ocean explorer: "I think if nothing was done today, maybe 30, 40 or 30 years would be the end of everything." These are momentous predictions. Yet the soothsayers are being shunted aside by govern mental unconcern, public unawareness and sci entific uncertainty over their prognostications. Sharing the Riches : There is a "brick wall of indifference" to ! ward ocean pollution at meetings leading to the coming United Nations-sponsored Law of the Sea Conference, says John Hussey, an ex pert on the Senate Commerce Committee staff. "Everybody wants to share in the riches of the ocean." he says, "leaving protection of ocean resources off in a corner." The public seems unaware of ocean-pollu tion issues, despite the upwelling of interest after a few dramatic oil spills. Organized envi ronmentalists have taken until this summer to address the problem, in the form of a last-min ute Sierra Club attempt to influence the Law of the Sea talks. "People had too many things to look at all at once when the environmental movement hit," says Gene Coan, the Sierra Club official directing the effort. "Ocean pollution is tough to get hold of. It is an order of magnitude more complicated than any pollution problem con fined to national boundaries." mates, says Mr. White, "are still tenuous." oil-pollution research. It has financed a study, The Ubiquitous Chemicals still unpublished, that Mr. Gabrud says will Breakthroughs are being made in the dis show that marine animals contaminated by oil covery of new forms of pollution far out to sea. "cleanse themselves" when placed in clean The most celebrated reyclationjias been that a water. Mr. Blumer doesn't doubt the findings. chemical family called polychlorinated_biphen- He only asks that they be "placed before the yls, used in paints, inks' and plastics, can be scientific public" for scrutiny. found in virtually every organism in the North Other scientists, however, com pis ;n of feel and South Atlantic, at depths up to 11,000 feet. ing pressured by the industry's public-relations But how these chemicals--as well as plastic front. "You can really catch hell trying to pub particles and the propellants in aerosal cans-- lish a paper on petroleum in the sea," says an have become so widespread is'a mystery. How other Woods Hole scientist. "They try to deny dangerous they are. in small doses over the everything you say, attack your analytical long t-Lji. is another enigma. (In large doses methods and completely discredit you." ithey '.a- change behavior and reproductive^, Nevertheless, the U.S. Congress has taken 'pat'the same manner as DDT, another!^ steps to curb the most obvious oil spills. Legis .almost uj `versal contaminant. Monsanto, they lation applying to all the nation's waterways ;only V S. producer, has stopped making the po-V went into effect in 1972 outlawing any spill that lychlorinaied b! ,. :yls.) J forms a visible sheen on the water. Civil penal i Bostwick Ketcl.um, Associate Director of ties were provided and a fund of public money the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, established for cleaning up spills when those adds that "a variety of synthetic organic chem responsible can't be found. The results appar icals, including other pesticides, detergents ently have been substantial. "I used to be able and pharmaceuticals are also undoubtedly reaching the marine environment with impacts that are virtually unknown." Scientific advances are sometimes softening earlier fears of ocean hazards. Not long ago, it was thought that the crown-of-lhorns starfish was destroying coral reefs because of some man-induced perversion. Now, evidence indi cates the starfish's unfortunate appetite is a natural one. Mercury contamination was be , to go up Arthur Kill and see an oil slick almost any time," Richard Dcwling, an Environmen tal Protection Agency surveillance director, says of a notorious New Jersey estuary. "I can't do that any more." Further legislation calls for new safety stan dards in tanker construction and a harbor traf fic control system. Solid waste also has come under federal supervision with a 1972 law set ting up a permit system for ocean dumping. lieved to be a great modern threat until the Smithsonian Institution found comparably high DSW 282309 levels of the metal in fish that had been pre served for thousands of years. STLCOPCB4063638 Page 2 . But there are problems. Environmentalists and others accuse the Coast Guard and the ; EPA of foot-dragging on enforcement. The ad-.! ministration has impounded funds on another bill intended to improve planning of coastal de velopment. Technology for cleaning up big spills remains backward. (At August hearings- on its proposed J350 million refinery off the Maine coast, Pittston Co. admitted a spill in a four-knot current couldn't be contained.) : Perhaps the most telling problem, though, is the one that distinguishes ocean pollution from the earth'5 other environmental ills: Pollution of the sea is an international phenomenon that can never be controile'd by the laws of a single nation, no matter how forceful they are. "Refuse dumped inside the Peruvian terri torial waters equals refuse dumped around the shores of Polynesia," Thor Heyerdahl, the an thropologist, told a Senate committee after seeing globs of oil throughout his drift across the Atlantic in a reed boat. "Refuse dumped in side the Moroccan territorial waters equals re fuse dumped inside the Caribbean sea." International' controls plainly are the only means to deal with the problem because "terri torial" . seas are perpetually mixing. The threat, moreover, can only grow worse as oil shipments multiply and offshore development, of superports and refineries becomes a reality.; There already are a few controls, among! them three international conventions dealing; with prevention of oil pollution from tankers j and liability for spill damage. Critics including! the Sierra Club attack them as unenforceable.' Last November, 91 nations endorsed interna tional controls over ocean dumping by ships and aircraft. The rules are stronger than dumping legislation adopted in the U.S., but j they don't touch at all on questions of land- source pollution. j . It remains for the Law of the Sea Confer- ; ence, convening in New York in November and j then in Santiago next May, to draft genuine j international ocean-pollution controls. Yet the; prospects seem dim. "It is as though ecology .. .; and Stockholm (the UN Conference on the Hu- ( man Environment of last year) had never hap-; pened," says Brian Johnson, a British authority ; on international law. "It looks like business as usual, pending annihilation." At this stage, the conference seems unlikely to create an independent pollution regulatory authority, provide any significant enforcement, capability or impose any controls over ocean 1 pollution that originates on land. In the newest | and potentially most competitive area of deep-1 sea mining, the conference isn't expected to ask for "impact statements" or to separate the agency that will encourage mining from the one that will regulate it. The Sierra Club Is outraged at the situation. ! ` 1 the mining issue, the club maintains, the - .'erence may throw away a rare chance to : jeed cautiously before any environmental < mage is done. Companies intent on mining ` seabed, on the other hand, are itching to -t started. They insist damage won't result ;- om what they plan to do. Perhaps they're. :.ght, but the potential for pollution by deep-! ' . 2a mining--which has never been attempted n a grand scale--is substantially a scientific unknown. Nobody has proven that it might be harmful, and until that is done, it seems unlike- 'y that an international conference worried about commercial considerations and mtner- ; t ls shortages will endorse tough rules to con i trol it. ; As with pollution by oil and plastics and! isolid wastes, the issue of mining pollution is, again hamstrung by the dearth of fundamental, .scientific knowledge. "The root of all these j problems is that we don't even know what to I predict will happen in a natural ocean environ-j ment, much less in a polluted one," says Rich ard McGrath, a young marine biologist. I Mr. McGrath is one of the legion of scien-: tists doing the tedious work of gathering "base-1 line" information about the character of the! sea. He is working on one small project for the I National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-. tion. His job is to find out what is alive at the bottom of Raritan Bay, a triangular funnel through which pollution from the factories and refineries that dot the shores of New Jersey's, Arthur Kill pours into the Atlantic. ; On his 50th excursion in nine months, the' waters of Raritan Bay are smooth and greengray as the oceanographic agency's converted; Army tugboat glides through the garbage at the leading edge of New York harbor's ebb tide. For seven hours under a steamy sun, Mr. McGrath and several college-student helpers grab samples of the black, oily muck from the bottom of the bay in the jaws of a small, spring-operated dredge. Each sample is sieved, and each living worm, clam and crustacean is saved in a bottle. , Back at a laboratory on New Jersey's Sandy Hook, every animal in every sample will be picked out, identified and counted. It can take one researcher two weeks to finish work on a single bottle. The purpose is to provide some touchstone for future measurements of the effects of pollution in the bay and efforts to abate it. "After a while, every worm begins to look the same," says Barry Trotsky, one of the stu dent aides. "It isn't the kind of work you dream of when you hear the word `oceanogra phy,' and it may take 50 years for the results to be appreciated or understood. But it's the work that has to be done." 1 sw 282310 ip STLCOPCB4063639