DATE: Wednesday, July 16, 1997              TAG: 9707160001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B13  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: GLENN ALLEN SCOTT

                                            LENGTH:   94 lines

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL WHEN TRASHING U.S. GOT TO BE TOO MUCH, WE TIDIED OUR HABITS

We are more than a half-century from the scarcities of World War II, when Americans on the home front were exhorted to ``Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.''

A people who had just emerged from the Great Depression thought that preachment reasonable. ``Waste not, want not'' was the rule by which Americans lived after the Crash of '29.

``Consumer'' wasn't in the national vocabulary back then. Abundance was a sometime thing. Most people scraped by. The rich didn't flaunt their wealth.

Unlike today, few Americans lived on credit. Running up bills was risky business. Making ends meet was the relentless challenge. Banks weren't deep into the consumer-loan business. Traumatized by the wave of financial-institution failures when the economy tanked, bankers were cautious lenders.

That changed as prosperity spread in the postwar years. By the 1970s, banks were showering credit cards on people with histories of spending recklessly and ignoring bills.

The United States had become the globe's leading consumer nation. Americans had developed a gluttonous appetite for goods and services. Saving instead of buying seemed un-American. Thrift was out. Consumption was in.

We also had become wasteful.

Social critics lamented ``the throwaway society.'' The Wastemakers by Vance Packard became a non-fiction best-seller. The book was fat with troubling statistics.

Meanwhile, landfills were overflowing. How to cope with the explosive growth of trash and garbage became a top worry of municipal and county officials. Norfolk City Manager Tom Maxwell explored shipping out the seaport city's solid waste in empty Norfolk & Western coal cars rattling back to Southwest Virginia. Might the odiferous loads be dumped into the shafts of abandoned mines in the hill country?

Nothing came of the notion. But shortly before Norfolk City Council fired him, Maxwell reached an understanding with his Virginia Beach counterpart that could have altered the history of South Hampton Roads, possibly for the better. In exchange for water, Virginia Beach would take Norfolk's solid waste.

Although Virginia Beach was developing at an accelerating rate, its truck farms being eradicated by residential subdivisions, the city had space enough for a range of Mount Trashmores. In any event, the proposed deal went down the tubes.

All this time, grass-roots unhappiness about the trashing of America the Beautiful was spreading, setting the scene for the popular movement to protect our environment.

The anti-litter campaign was a harbinger. Roadsides were a mess. States outlawed tossing refuse from motor vehicles. Highway signs proclaimed: ``MAX FINE TO LITTER $50.'' A literalist wondered who would pay Max Fine $50 to scatter trash when everyone else was doing it for nothing.

So there were snickers. Was there a snowball's chance that those of us inhabiting the Land of the Free would cease and desist from flinging hamburger wrappers and paper cups to the wind? Ha! But over the decades, roadsides became tidier.

The push for a cleaner environment became a revolution targeting gas-guzzlers and polluting industries and farms.

The revolution became a crusade when the populace recognized that toxins being poured into waterways, air and soil were threatening human and other life.

Despite its excesses and the inevitable backlash, the crusade has yet to run its course. Americans in great number still favor - within reason - shielding forests, neighborhoods, waterways, groundwater, the seas, the air, historic buildings from pollution and destruction. We favor, too, protection of endangered species. Our commitment to saving natural resources deepens and widens.

Recycling is routine in tens of millions households, although some economists contend the benefits are illusory. Those who remember the Great Depression - a dwindling army - tend to approve. Wastefulness is arrogance inviting catastrophic consequences. Best not to provoke the Olympian gods eager to cut us down to size.

In the 1960s, Lake Erie was pronounced dead, killed by humankind's disregard. It is recovering because we resolved to resuscitate it. Legislation spurred by alarm compelled polluters to clean up their acts.

The cleanup goes forward. Dirtying the environment is no longer acceptable.

Which is as it ought to be.

We still hear that anti-pollution standards are impossibly high and destroy jobs and businesses. Some companies move operations to foreign lands where wages are cheaper and pollution is tolerated, as it was for so long in the United States and elsewhere in the West.

But nothing exceeds like excess, as some wit observed. Extensive injury to the environment inflicted within the borders of the former Soviet Empire attests dramatically to the lethal peril invited by indifference to pollution.

We are stewards of the Earth. We don't own it. We walk upon it and hold title - for a time - to patches of it. Our sacred duty is to care for it, lovingly, and thus for each other and others not yet born. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The

Virginian-Pilot.

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