The assault on the purity of the environment is the price that we pay for many of the benefits of modern technology. For the advantage of automotive transportation, we pay a price in smog-induced diseases; for the powerful effects of new insecticides, we pay a price in dwindling wildlife and disturbances in the relation of living things and their surroundings; for nuclear power, we risk the biological hazards of radiation. By increasing agricultural production with fertilizers, we worsen the water population.
The highly developed nations of the world are not only the immediate beneficiaries of the good that technology can do, which are also the first victims of environmental diseases that technology breeds. In the past, the environmental effects which accompanied technological progress were restricted to a small and relatively short time. The new hazards neither local nor brief. Modern air pollution covers vast areas of continents: Radioactive fallout from the nuclear explosion is worldwide. Radioactive pollutants now on the earth's surface will be found there for generations, and in the case of Carbon-14, for thousands of years.