“Sailing is like dancing, see, and I love to dance.” The boat that Captain Allan Aunapu likes most to dance with is the Clearwater (above)—the first Hudson River sloop built in this century.
The Clearivater’s ancestry goes back to the days when the Dutch traded on the Hudson in their flat-bottomed sloops. After the British took over in 1664 a blend of English and Dutch design to handle the river’s fluky winds and mean currents produced the famed nineteenth-century Hudson River sloop— broad in the beam, high in the stern, with an enormous mainsail. The boats averaged sixty to ninety feet in length and had masts over a hundred feet tall. At one time as many as eight hundred carried passengers and cargo between Albany and Manhattan. But steam— locomotives as well as boats—began to take over along the Hudson Valley in the early 1800’s, and by the end of the century the sloops were gone. With steam came industry, large centers of population, and pollution. Today the river is a receptacle for more than 200,000,000 gallons of raw sewage a day.
Four years ago a number of Hudson Valley residents, including folk singer Pete Seeger, decided that a return of the old sloop might help spark a sense of pride in the river and its heritage. They formed the Hudson River Sloop Restoration, Inc., and raised $175,000 to have the Gamage Shipyard in Maine build a seventy-six-foot replica, which they christened Clearwater. Last summer she sailed the river with a cargo of singers, including Seeger, and put on seven festivals with a message—care about your river and help clean it up. At the sloop’s helm was twenty-eight-year-old Captain Aunapu, who though no musician, can be decidedly lyrical when talking about the Clearwater on the Hudson: “When you’re running with a good wind up the river with that sixty-six-foot boom swung out over the water and maybe a full moon hanging off the end, or you’re sailing through the Highlands and you have to tack right up close to the brow of the land and the wind comes down hard from between the mountains, you’re dancing, dancing with the wind and the tides and the land in the most magnificent machine man ever invented. We want always to keep her under sail, never turn on her engine. We don’t want people to look up and just see a mast being pushed through the water; we want their eyes to light up with a vision of what a beautiful part of his environment man can be.”
This spring the Clearwater is sailing south to Washington, D. C., where she will lend her special grace to the national environmental teach-in on April 22.
“We get richer and richer in filthier and filthier communities until we reach a final state of affluent misery—Croesus on a garbage heap.” —John W. Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition.
QUIET PLEASE
By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE
Overexposure to excessive noise is the major cause of hearing loss in America. Nearly everyone, in fact, has lost hearing ability without realising it. Power-driven appliances have made American homes the noisiest on earth, and “relaxing quietly at home” is fast becoming a thing of the past, for people never do get accustomed to noise. According to medical evidence, instinctive reaction to loud noise is fear and an impulse to escape. The heartbeat increases, arteries constrict, pufnis dilate. One prominent scientist asserts that violent noise may even harm unborn babies.
Out on the street things are worse still. Air compressors, pile drivers, jackhammers, sirens, traffic, all add up to a noise level known to destroy hearing cells at prolonged exposure. “The saving quality heretofore, ” says one report, “has been that community noise has been a short-term exposure … as the power use of both home and street increases, steps must be taken to limit the noise output. ”
Down on the farm there is again less and less quiet. A recent government study reported that 90 per cent of fifty-eight new farm tractors tested made enough noise to be considered unsafe when the operator was subjected to it for a normal working day. And 65 per cent of such farm equipment as corn pickers, combines, and beet pullers exceeded recommended noise levels.
The Selective Service says that loud music is apparently to blame for the partial deafness that causes many draftees to be rejected. But it took the outrage of jet engine noise and the promise of a supersonic transport plane (see page 114) to finally stir people to action. In Inglewood, California, near Los Angeles Airport, where the din of air traffic has been described by one victimas ” the equivalent of thirty Niagara Falls, ” two schools were closed because jets made teaching impossible. Near Kennedy Airport, on Long Island, one million people live within a zone of “unacceptable annoyance,” as the F.A.A. describes it. Recently such besieged communities from twenty-three states formed NOISE, a Washington-based lobby.
Only in December did the F.A.A. begin to quiet the airways by setting regulations for the newjumbojets. But the enormous new Boeing 747 is exempt, and not until 1971 are controls expected for jets now in operation. The only significant federal action has been in setting limits for industrial noise levels. Although authorization for such action has existed since 1935, nothing was done until 1Q&Q. Even then, the original proposal was compromised under pressure from such high-noise industries as textile manufacturing and set at ninety decibels, five more than experts consider safe (see chart).
Unlike most pollution problems, it is relatively easy to do something about noise levels. The technology is available and in many instances costs little. All the public has to do is … make some noise about it.
COUNTDOWN FOR POLAR BEARS
By ELIZABETH N. LAYNE
For the past few years light planes, boats, and snowmobiles have been taking hunters to the polar ice cap in such numbers that the polar bear may be threatened with extinction. The animal is being killed as never before. Even with strict regulation, the annual kill in Alaska (about four hundred) has more than tripled in twenty years and brings to the Alaskan economy over $600,000 a year. Of the five interpolar countries— Canada, United States, Norway, Denmark (Greenland), U.S.S.R.—only Russia fully protects the polar bear. In Norway a hunter can trap bears by setting a baited gun. This often means cubs are left to die after the sow has taken the bait and been shot. With a snowmobile, a whole string of such traps can easily be maintained. The snow-mobile has also become standard equipment for Eskimos and Indians in Canada, where by far the greatest number of bears are killed—six hundred a year.
In 1968 an international “Polar Bear Group” was formed under the auspices of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (I.U.C.N.) to study the bear’s migration patterns, population, and ability to withstand arctic conditions. But unfortunately polar bear tracking and counting devices are still in their infancy. The current technique of state and federal teams in Alaska begins with finding the bear, using a ski-equipped light plane and a helicopter. Twenty minutes after the animal has been tranquilized with a dart gun fired from the helicopter, he is turned loose with a tag in each ear, an experimental collar about his neck, and big purple numbers on his flank to warn off hunters. He will also have been weighed by being dangled in a net from the helicopter, and he will have had one small tooth removed. (Like the rings of a tree, a tooth cross section will show his age.) Preliminary evidence from four hundred polar bears tagged during the past three springs indicates that the bear is not circumpolar, as was thought, and that there may be separate regional races. If true, this would mean each interpolar country could manage its own bear population.
The polar bear is large (up to a length of nine feet and a weight of one thousand pounds) and carnivorous (primarily seals), and he wanders over the ice drift some twenty to forty miles a day in search of food. In fact, the bears never go to land except to have their young, and fewer and fewer of them are doing even that. They are tough animals to study. The best hope for successful tracking of the polar bear lies in electronic transmission—a radio transmitter on the bear’s collar that will send a beep to an earth-circling Nimbus satellite. A transmitter and battery able to operate at 50 degrees below zero and to withstand frequent plunges into icy waters is being developed, and by 1971 polar bears will doubtless be tracked by satellite. But a simple counting mechanism is also badly needed. Population estimates vary widely—from ten to twenty thousand. The Alaskan teams are currently experimenting with airborne infrared scanning devices—the trick being to distinguish among the radiation thrown off by seals, bears, and arctic foxes.
James Brooks, who heads the federal government’s team in Alaska, is worried that the enormous increase in human population there, brought on by the oil strike, will mean far too many dead bears. “The American kill is already at maximum safe levels,” he says. Meanwhile, two of this country’s most prestigious hunting groups, the Boone and Crocket! Club and the National Rifle Association, have at least removed the polar bear from their trophy list.
