[Birds chirping]
[Speaker 1:] [Reciting poem] Today, no breath of life's allowed,
for Autumn spins her silken shroud.
Thread upon thread, the earth is bound.
November's needle makes the round.
No wind may lift the fallen leaf.
No flower split the face of grief.
No flight of birds distract the eye
across the smooth unraveled sky.
So still the day, so pure, so bare.
Imprisoned in her crystal stair
Earth waits a miracle, man too.
This is the day all saints pass through.
[Heavy equipment movement and engines grinding]
[Sounds of industry, faint music]
[Sounds of industry, piano music]
[Hammering]
[Sounds of industry, faint music]
[Hammering]
[Construction activity]
[Whistle blowing]
[Music]
[Can clunks]
[Plastic unwrapping]
[Music]
[Can opening, metal twisting]
[Music]
[Tinfoil ripping]
[Plastic wrap ripping]
[Lunch pail thuds]
[Music]
[Countdown to Collision]
[Apple crunching]
[Speaker 2:] That seems to me one trouble with the present world,
is that people think they've got to change everything.
[Speaker 3:] Ice cream cone, or a sucker,
or a box of Cracker Jacks.
Cracker Jacks only used to be a nickel, you know.
[Speaker 4:] But you take a person my age,
and we live back in the past lots of the time.
[Speaker 5:] [?] then as we have now,
but I think it's because we have more people.
[Speaker 6:] Well, it was clean.
There wasn't a lot of trash in it like there is now.
[Speaker 7:] I think it will be a pretty unusual place
in the year 2000.
[Speaker 8:] Smoke, I guess, probably from trucks, cars, and factories.
[Speaker 9:] The Bible said that men should not live by bread alone, but by the word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
And I believe it with all my heart.
[Speaker 10:] What I'm mainly concerned, it is, is the children...
Uh, it is, and it just seems like no one does anything to better it.
[Speaker 11:] And another thing, the smog in my eyes is killing me.
I think this could possibly be a very aggravating thing to me.
[Speaker 12:] The world can only handle so many people, and I think we've about reached that limit.
[Speaker 13:] It's getting away from us.
Pretty soon, we're all gonna be drowned in this mess.
[Speaker 14:] I think we're finding a rather crowded world.
[Speaker 15:] Water pollution, air pollution, and nobody's doing anything about it.
[Speaker 16:] I don't expect to reach my middle age.
[Speaker 17:] In school, I say something,
and people say, oh, why don't you shut up.
[Speaker 18:] Something that is constructive, always destruction.
I can't understand that.
[Speaker 19:] I would try to keep it to one.
One natural, and maybe adopt some.
[Speaker 20:] LSD and speed, heroin.
[Speaker 21:] Charlie Brown.
[Speaker 22:] It's dirty air.
[Sighing]
[Speaker 23:] He works hard enough, because sometimes he has to work seven days a week.
He never comes home.
[Mumbling]
[Speaker 21:] Crowded.
[Speaker 22:] Gotta wave.
[Speaker 19:] Of course.
[Speaker 18:] To a mass revolt.
[Speaker 17:] A mass of gas.
[Speaker 23:] I don't what the answer is.
[Speaker 24:] The whole world is going to...
[Speaker 15:] To garbage.
[Speaker 14:] Your returnable type...
[Speaker 25:] Your [Inaudible].
[Speaker 12:] It's a population explosion.
[Speaker 26:] Generation to gen...
[Speaker 11:] Shortcomings.
[Speaker 10:] [Inaudible]
[Speaker 8:] Well...
[Speaker 27:] 30 years ago...
[Speaker 6:] [Inaudible]
[Speaker 28:] I miss them.
[Speaker 4:] Can remember...
[Speaker 3:] Too much.
[Speaker 2:] [?]
[Clearing throat]
[Music]
[Water splashing]
[Music]
[Traffic sounds]
[Music]
[Jet engine whines]
[Music]
[Transit bus engine]
[Music]
[Ship horn blows]
[Music]
[Train wheels clanging]
[Train horn]
[Airplane propeller and engine]
[Water flowing]
[Helicopter engine]
[Music]
[Dogs barking]
[Music]
[Siren wailing]
[Music]
[Earth-moving equipment]
[Silence]
[Screeching tires]
[Crashing]
[Police sirens]
[Police radio chatter]
[Phone ringing]
[Baby crying, horns honking]
[Speaker 29:] Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome aboard 20th Century Airlines flight 1980.
We'll be fleeing almost indefinitely.
They seem to have us in a holding pattern of some sort around the sun, I think.
[Laughter]
Umm.
Unfortunately, it may be necessary to move
some of you folks in first class back into the economy section.
We may not have enough dinners aboard or enough wine.
Of course, we have plenty of snacks.
We'd just like to request that you keep your trash in and around your own seat.
Otherwise, we seem to be in good shape.
We have enough air for years in this, sort of, cruising.
You may think it smells a little funny,
but then, so does the water.
However, you can reuse all the water you want.
We just pump it right back up there again and again.
Now, in the unlikely event there should be a temporary failure in the cabin air and water supply,
a compartment over your head will open automatically,
and a rubber Halloween face mask will drop down.
Just pull it over your head and amuse one another as best you can.
Now, if some of you people on the night side care to look out, you can see the moon.
[...]
[Music]
[Hugh Downs:] Where are we going?
[Music]
Who knows?
In any case, it shouldn't take too long to get there.
Our tickets are bought and paid for, and we are well on our way.
As you know, the population of the planet will about double in the next 30 years.
We continue to multiply and expand,
and our grossest national product is waste,
increasing at twice the rate of the population,
amounting to billions of tons every year,
rising from the earth, sinking on the surface of the land,
and always in the end pouring, settling,
draining into the rivers and oceans.
[Music]
Leaving behind only the large rusting objects
and the trillion indestructible cans and plastic things.
[Music]
And also, the growing trace of poison
that accumulates in living tissue
and increases on up the food chain to man himself.
[Music]
In this country alone, a ton of air pollutants each year for each man, woman, and child.
Now, there are hundreds of thousands of toxic gases, which we can't even identify.
New ones created every day by photochemical reactions
high up in the super pollution that we breathe.
[Music]
Of course, most of the solids end up in our water,
along with raw sewage, oil, nitrates, phosphorus,
detergents, organic nutrients, mercury, and a thousand more.
Our consuming thirst for unrestored quantities of water will soon be impossible to quench.
As our residues are discharged ever downstream to assure eventually a septic world
beyond the natural limits of waste and delusion.
There is now no corner of the globe that does not receive its share of industrial fallout.
In the forests and fields that some of us have known,
the marshes, the estuaries, the plains and mountains,
the last of the wilderness itself,
all shrink from the expanding presence of man.
[Music]
We are now paving a million acres a year.
And those who flee from the countryside, which can no longer support them,
in turn create the choking suburban sprawl of megalopolis
and join lines of commuters who move at horse-and-buggy speed on superhighways
built to get them into traffic-clogged cities,
where they can find no place to park their high-pollution automobiles,
which most of us seem doomed to drag through life along with a growing collection of the products of planned obsolescence.
[Music]
This is the bright future promised by technology.
This is the utopia we have made for ourselves,
by coupling the Industrial Revolution to an expanding population.
[Music]
And now, we will pay the price, because our fathers progressed so admirably.
Now, the simple pleasures, the moments of peace, the things of beauty, are becoming harder to find.
Under a growing barrage of noise and nerves and electronic bad taste,
in the service of somebody else's limited interests.
It must be realized that all of our environmental ills are byproducts.
They are the results of the way we live and eat and travel.
The way we build our cities, and what we consume,
and how we entertain ourselves.
And all of our problems aggravate and feed upon one another in ways that we don't yet understand.
Many scientists now believe that we may be entering the twilight of human existence.
In this age of affluence, of technological marvels and medical miracles,
is paradoxically also the age of chronic ailments, of anxiety, and even of despair.
An age in which our fellow creatures face destruction within the same delicately balanced ecosystem that supports us.
And in which our legacy to our own children
is a rapidly growing number of ways to die.
It is as simple as that.
[Music]
[Hugh Downs:] There is some good evidence that most of our people are deciding on a different road to the future.
It's not without significance that the president has signed into law a unique bill establishing a national policy
to permit conditions under which man and nature can co-exist in productive harmony.
A Council on Environmental Quality was established
that requires that all federal activities be subject to review as to their impact on the environment.
There is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to do research on long-range pollution problems.
The Environmental Protection Agency was created to mount an attack on the interrelated problems of air and water pollution,
solid waste, pesticides, radiation, and noise.
State and local governments, industries, unions, universities,
and other institutions are working to adjust themselves to this new awareness.
A more careful evaluation is now being made of the Alaska oil pipeline proposals.
The jetport once planned for the Florida Everglades is not being built.
The manufacturers of all our goods, from soaps to cosmetics, to cars and soda crackers,
are eagerly seeking ways to demonstrate that they too care about the ecological questions which trouble us.
These changes in attitude reflect that we, the people, have discovered that it's our air, our water,
and our planet that are in jeopardy.
To hold our institutions to making these difficult adjustments,
we must reject the concept that the only freedom of choice we have left is in the supermarket.
We must lay our hands on the levers of change and renewal in our society.
The issues are complicated. Some of the choices and trade-offs, as the experts tell us, are hard to make.
But if we don't participate in making these difficult decisions, they will make them for us.
We can have the kind of environment we want. But the price is involvement.
There's hardly a conservation or consumer organization in this country
which is not striving to better understand and influence this movement toward ecological responsibility.
We can join them.
We can participate in the pollution hearings in our communities and states.
We can stop assuming that we have to accept ugliness and obsolete land use and zoning laws,
a high rate of noise, congestion, pollution, open dumps, and doubletalk
as the price of progress.
We can find out who is polluting our land and water and ask them why.
We can be a thorn in the side of those who think our ecological concern is a passing fad.
We could sometimes wish it were a passing fad, because then it would go away, as fads do. But it isn't.
And when enough of us have begun to earnestly commit to these principles, we'll begin to face the facts.
In our free and open society, the first place to look for the ecological villain is in the mirror.
Only then will we be on a high road toward the future, and only then will we have begun to take personal responsibility
for the direction of this nation.
After all, this is what our founding fathers had in mind from the beginning.
[Music]
[An Airlie Production]
[Executive Producer: Murdock Head, M.D.]
[Commentary by Hugh Downs]
[Producer: Frank Kavanaugh]
[Director-Editor: Charles E. Francis]
[Cinematographers: Charles Durie, Charles Strathman]
[Paul Noonan, Raymond Garcia, James Carpenter]
[Special consultant: Thomas F. Williams]
[Produced by The George Washington University Medical Center]
[Department of Medical and Public Affairs]
[In cooperation with The American Academy of Family Physicians]
[and the District of Columbia Medical Society]