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REMARKS TO REGIONAL CLEAN AIR INSTITUTE,
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COUNTIES, NEW YORK CITY

May 8, 1967

Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Fresh air is as natural and necessary and normal as human life...
so essential that we have assumed its existence a constant in nature and
presumed upon its capacity to replenish and sustain itself.

In past centuries organized political society regarded human life in
much the same way — God ordained that man was to be born, to re-
produce, to suffer and to die. The fittest were to survive. Each man
was to contribute according to the station of his birth and not accord-
ing to his ability, his talent or his desire. War decreased the surplus
population and the iron law of wages proved that neither individual
volition nor enlightened government could alter the pessimistic course
set by a grim Malthusian Nature. We shudder when we review these
cruel, barbaric and fallacious premises which justified the actions of
political authority in the past. All that we as progressive adminis-
trators seek to accomplish contradicts the underlying presupposition
of these concepts. We know that human life and the individual is a
vital, viable and above all valuable entity. That the individual is not
a means but an end, not a commodity to be abused for society's gain
but the essence and reason for society's being. That if we take for
granted the individual's soul, destroy the individual's identity and
ignore the individual's natural capacity we will undermine the de-
velopment of our society as a whole and inevitably destroy the philo-
sophical foundation upon which our particular political system was
built.

If all this is true of human life, ladies and gentlemen, it is more
true of the air upon which human life depends. We can no longer
afford to ignore, to abuse, to contaminate our air with the justifica-
tion that it is an expendable means to achieve greater gains for the
glory of civilization, that it is an infinite source for the disposal and
elimination of the forces of our factories and furnaces, that it can
never be exhausted nor consumed by a geometrically exploding popu-
lation on an arithmetically developing planet.

The capacity of air, like the capacity of an individual — no matter
how talented — is finite. Nature has provided us with a twelve and
one-half mile layer of air for animal life to breathe and vegetation