"There is nothing proved about carriage of diseases by human sewage." Percy Dowse, Chairman Hutt Valley Drainage Board and Mayor of Lower Hutt City, 6 July, 1670.

The "New Yorker" magazine carried a cartoon showing two elderly male croquet players with one old player complaining to the other: "As far as I'm concerned all this damn flapdoodle about the environment is just a trick to take our minds off the Cormmies."

The super-patriotic and ultra-conservative Daughter of the American Revolution passed a resolution saying that the pollution problem "is being distroed and exaggerated by emotional declarations and by intensive propaganda."

Several newspapers, especially in the South, made ominous reference to the fact that the much-publicised "Earth Day" (April 22) was celebrated on the anniversary of Lenin's birthday.

Said the "Richmond News Leader": "The date was not selected by chance. Here we have a classic example of how the Communists pervert idealism and worth-while causes to their own purposes."

Glen Kimble, the director of air and water resources at the huge Union Camp paper mill in Savannah, Georgia, has been one of several industrialists to complain about ecology "hysteria." "People get extremely emotional about losing a species," he said, "but animals have been dying out every year back to the dinosaurs, and in most cases man had nothing to do with it.

"For that matter it probably won't hurt mankind a whole hell of a lot if the whooping crane doesn't quite make it."

And, of course, the anti-ecology folk still have that old quote of the Governor of California Mr Ronald Reagan to fall back on... "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen 'em all."

The ranks of the anti-ecologists are expected to swell when more and more State and Federal pollution controls come into effect.

The Armco Steel Corporation recently shut down eight open-hearth furnaces in Houston rather than install anti-pollution devices.

Also fuelling the current pollution controversy in the United States, is the feeling that ecology is a fad — no more lasting to the average American than the hula hoop.

Some observers believe that a housewife may buy low-phosphate detergent for several weeks in a burst of civic pride but will eventually return to her old favourite — even though it has a river wrecking phosphate content of 47 per cent.

The radical Students for a Democratic Society have publicly endorsed the "anti-ecology" movement, for the simple reason that arch-enemy President Nixon has supporter the "pro-ecology" position.