Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 33, Number 7. 27 May, 1970
This torn nation, blah, blah
This torn nation, blah, blah
But there's another reason why few people wanted to clap Gaylord Nelson. The students who are committed to improving the environment are worried about the fact that the Government is trying to co-opt the ecology movement. We're all sick of the line that this is the one movement that can unite this torn nation, blah blah. The axiom of the student movement is that the capitalist system is responsible for the mess the United States is in. Is it surprising that a system seeking to turn everything into gold ends up turning everything into garbage? We must buy less, share more, to save the non-returnable and non-refundable earth. But, although contradicting their principles, the corporations are climbing onto the bandwagon. The car manufacturers thrive on planned obsolescence and keeping up with the Joneses. Yet Henry Ford II says he has committed his company to researching automobile pollutants and has plans for building a $7.5 million research centre to study the problem. Meanwhile the Rouge River in Detroit flows on past the Ford works and carries its massive concentration of pollutants into Lake Erie. Dow Chemical spends vast amounts on combating pollution in its factories so that the napalm made there can be used to ruin Vietnam. I May's Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus newspaper, says: "If Americans continue to demand new cars every 3 years, and bigger and more advanced color television sets, efforts to curb pollution and to preserve resources will be as ineffectual as enrolling a pregnant teenager in a sex education class".