WhackyNation

Year after year, without fail, American fishermen and the U.S. Coast Guard keep reporting that foreign fleets, most of them from Asian nations or Russia, are taking fish illegally in our waters off the Pacific Coast. And for years our federal government has looked the other way or said it could find no violations.

In fact, the U.S. has not only ignored the complaints, but in many instances defended the fishing tactics of Japan, Korea, Russia, and other violators. I think that, at times, our State Department is the best foreign ministry other nations have, and that feeling persists each year.

It is not unusual, for example, for foreign ships to cross into our North Pacific waters under cover of darkness or low clouds and illegally catch an estimated 10 billion pounds of fish. And all this happens despite the fact that Congress declared several years ago that no ships could come within 200 miles of our Northwest and Western shorelines without our permission.

Ten billion pounds of fish is nearly three times more than scientists say should be caught without endangering the ocean’s fish supply. We seem to be the only fishing nation that does nothing about international poachers, but we restrict our fishermen severely.

However, Japan, Korea, Russia, and other nations do nothing about restricting their fishermen in their own waters. For example, you don’t see Japanese or Korean fishermen taking fish in Russian waters, nor do you see the Russians fishing in Japanese and Korean waters — and for good reason.

Our do-nothing federal government should take a tip from the Russians, for instance, and remove the wraps from the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Air Force and give them full authority to patrol our waters, taking the strongest action necessary to chase poachers out of our waters.

To do it, we will have to give the State Department a shot of starch in the back and a swift kick a little farther down to force it to take action against any fishing vessel or fleet that dares cross into the 200-mile zone without first getting permission from the Coast Guard or the Navy.

Something must be done to stop the illegal poaching and, also, to cut back on the fishing fleets that drag the ocean with expansive nets to take millions of fish in one operation. I wish the federal government had listened to my old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, before she died in 1994.

Known internationally as a highly experienced marine scientist and oceanographer, Dr. Ray tried often to warn government and everyone concerned that, as she put it, “The fish population in all the earth’s oceans and other waters is not unlimited. If we keep up the constant scooping up of sea life in those horrendous nets, we will one day discover that most species of fish are gone forever.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Ray’s warnings were not heeded by the federal government, nor by commercial and sports fishermen. And, worse yet, her warnings have had no effect on the ears of officials and the fishing industries of other nations around the world.

Have we forgotten so soon? Two years ago, University of Washington researchers working in Africa, produced a new study, published in the journal, Science, that gave dynamic support to my contention and the contention of many scientists that the greatest mistake made by the U.S. and foreign nations in the 20^th Century was the decision to ban the miracle pesticide and insecticide, DDT.

The U.W. study, reported by the Associated Press, told us that malaria

is fueling the spread of AIDS in Africa by boosting the HIV in people’s bodies for weeks at a time, pinning down the deadly interplay between the dual scourges. It’s a vicious cycle, as people weakened by HIV are, in turn, more vulnerable to malaria.

It’s necessary to repeat some history. The new pesticide, DDT, was created by scientists to combat malaria primarily, and it soon proved its worth when it was introduced in the 1930s, not only in the U.S. but also in those countries with climates and conditions conducive to promoting malaria in mosquito-laden swamplands.

At the time, the total number of deaths attributed to malaria was approximately 3,000,000 a year! After the application of DDT in swamplands everywhere, the number of malaria cases dropped to a few hundred and by mid-century was headed for total elimination! It was a remarkable achievement, one that has never been matched in the world.

Then, along came Rachel Carson’s scientifically inaccurate book, Silent Spring, which sparked extremists in the new environmental movement to demand that DDT be banned everywhere, because, they said, they had discovered it was harmful to the eggs of eagles. It was not only a ridiculous assumption but one which eventually would cost the lives of millions of people, most of them babies and children.

After the extremists succeeded in forcing the U.S. to order its ban on DDT, many nations the world over followed suit. And the “malaria holocaust,” as I would hasten to call it, began. A terrible disease, which had neared its worldwide elimination, thanks to DDT, returned to plague the earth once again — and deaths from malaria annually have climbed back toward the 3,000,000 figure!

My longtime colleague, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, detailed the remarkable DDT story in our second book, Environmental Overkill. But, despite that story and the entreaties of many scientists, no action has been taken by Congress or other nations to reinstate DDT as the greatest antidote to malaria ever developed.

Today, with the scary news from the U.W. study that malaria and AIDS are linked and abet each other, it is doubly important that the U.S. and other nations launch a new movement to bring DDT back into worldwide use to save the lives of many millions of people each year.

When I referred to a “malaria holocaust,” I was intentionally referring to the Nazi holocaust that resulted in the murder of more than 6,000,000 Jews and millions more who defied Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. By my reckoning, the deaths from malaria since the ban on DDT has exceeded 100,000,000 — and that is undoubtedly a conservative estimate.

All this came about as a result of a silly charge that a few eagle eggs were supposedly harmed. Shouldn’t we be indicting the extremists for genocidal murder?

Way back in 1989, my old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, former governor of Washington State and an internationally noted marine scientist and oceanographer, addressed two of the nation’s largest garden organizations, meeting together at a national convention in Rochester, New York.

They were the Garden Clubs of America and the National Association of State Garden Clubs. The topic of her address was “The Greening of America,” an idea that had grown out of her state program, “The Greening of Washington.” Her proposal was to create a national movement encouraging tree, shrub, and flower plantings on buildings, streets, highways, everywhere in order to absorb pollutants, principally CO2, carbon dioxide.

Although her talk was greeted with applause and a lot of head-nodding, nothing came of the proposal on a national basis, much to her disappointment and mine. I was specially disappointed, because it was I who had planted the original “Greening of Washington” idea in her mind and helped make it part of her statewide program.

I had also suggested that she broaden her proposal to make the “Greening” idea a national program, after its seed was planted in Washington State, to coin a phrase. Unfortunately, the idea eventually died in both the state Legislature and in the meeting halls of the two garden clubs.

After all these years, I still have hopes that both Washington State and the two national garden clubs will resurrect the idea and run with it. Some progress along the “greening” line has been noted in a few areas, but much more remains to be done.

One wonders why the environmental extremists don’t get off their erratic high horses and embrace a program such as the one Governor Ray proposed to the garden clubs and others. It seems to me that the exteremists would be doing themselves and the nation a gigantic favor in doing so.

Also, I don’t understand why President Bush, who has been critical of the extremists’ wild pronouncements, doesn’t declare a sane and safe environmental policy for the United States — a policy that puts the welfare of human beings above that of the plant and animal world.

At the same time, the President should declare once and for all that he is not a proponent of the global-warming hokum and that the world’s responsible climatologists and other scientists have stated clearly that global warming is a myth that should not be used to fortify American policy.

It should not be difficult for the noisy environmental extremists to understand that their preoccupation with outlandish, far-fetched schemes has, in fact, severely hindered the cause of responsible environmentalism. Dr. Ray and I helped pioneer the original environmental movement in the Pacific Northwest, but we both left the movement when the extremists, inspired by Rachel Carson’s scientifically inaccurate book, Silent Spring, took over the movement in their search for political power.

The other day, an intriguing newspaper headline caught my eye, and I was drawn to the details of the report from Hamburg, Germany. It read: “Italy dumps trash issue on Germany.” The New York Times article included this amazing statement:

So, for the time being — 11 weeks, actually — a 56-car train will arrive in Hamburg every day after a 44-hour journey bearing 700 tons of Neapolitan refuse.

It’s only a temporary arrangement, say the Germans, but they were happy to solve a seriously growing problem in Naples and environs, where the garbage was piling up in the streets, because the Italians had not yet found a solution to their problem until the Germans suggested using the Hamburg incinerator.

Germany and several other European nations have already found the answer to the mounting crisis of refuse. It’s adequate, newly developed incinerators that are so well equipped that no fumes, odors, gases, or any other residues escape the fires of the new incinerators.

I was immediately drawn to the Hamburg report because of the attempt made by my old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, and me when she was governor of Washington State and tried to persuade the legislature to invest a little time, money, and research into the newly designed models of incinerators that had just been produced.

As in most American states, Washington — and particularly the heavily populated western side of the state — was running out of landfill areas as repositories for garbage and other wastes. Unfortunately, the legislature failed to follow up on Dixy’s proposal for new incinerators in Eastern Washington — and hasn’t to this day.

A few other states have adopted the new incineration methods, and they are saving considerable land areas for other, more important purposes than repositories for garbage and other wastes. Once again, as in so many other cases, the environmental extremists are the culprits, who have opposed utilizing the new incinerators on the basis of groundless charges that they produce dangerous pollutants.

In the meantime, Germany and some of the other northern European nations have solved their garbage problem and their overflowing landfill crisis by installing incinerators of the new breed in various cities. The Germans apparently don’t pay much attention to the “pollutant” rants of the environmental extremists. We should follow their lead.

Here’s a significant paragraph from the Hamburg report:

The Europeans have developed state-of-the-art incinerators that minimize noxious emissions with a series of filters and have put the energy generated to good use, by heating homes and water, for example.

Dixy’s proposal included the note that incineration not only would get rid of garbage and other wastes. She emphasized that the newly developed incineration plants could also produce considerable energy for the immediate areas. That should have been enough to promote the proposal to the legislature. But it’s another case of politicians and environmental extremists getting in the way of real progress.

Memories! Memories! I worked in the United States State Department for only a year back in the 1970s, but it provided me with more humor — some of it bitter humor — than any other place I have worked for much longer periods. I don’t know what it was about the place, but I’m guessing the humor stemmed from the fact that the department’s workers were always in a state of flux — away from the department, that is.

The travelingest man of them all, by far, at the time was the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, who was rarely in the office. In fact the standing joke of the day was that a security guard spotted the secretary in the hall one day and asked him to produce his identification card.

When I was there, an official said laughingly that the executives and employees of the department were passionately dedicated to the task of keeping diplomats of other nations from knowing what the staffers were doing — but that, unfortunately, they were so successful that the members of the department didn’t know either! Oh, yes, and speaking of Mr. Kissinger, it was said that he came very close to resigning once because he had to stay in Washington for three days!

By far the funniest incident I saw firsthand occurred the day I attended a meeting of executives called together for a message from Tom Foley, former Speaker of the House and, at the time, our ambassador to Japan. Assembled in the room were all of the men and women in charge of our relations with all the countries of the world.

One by one, the foreign-desk secretaries told Foley what the U.S. was doing for the various nations and how much money we were sending each one in aid. Finally, Foley, apparently exhausted by the litany of U.S. giveaways, told the group:

“You’re all doing your jobs well. But I earnestly believe that what we should have in the State Department is an American desk working on bringing some of those millions of dollars back to the U.S. treasury.”

There was laughter in the room, but it seemed to me that many of the staffers were grimacing because Foley had touched a most delicate nerve.

In the summer time that year — 1975 — the natives were, as usual, suffering through days in the upper 90s and 100s. I remember that the joke of the day came from a columnist who wrote that “the greatest villains of the day were those who equipped Washington offices with the air conditioning that kept Congress in session.”

It was left to a Japanese foreign official to supply the most delicate incident I can remember from those days. I worked as communications director of the department’s Bureau of Oceans and Scientific and Environmental Affairs, as well as an aide to the bureau’s chief, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray.

It was common knowledge that Dixy detested cigarettes and cigarette smoke. I seated the Japanese gentleman in a chair opposite Dixy in her office. Of course, her faithful dog, Jacques, a French poodle, was also there. Just as the Japanese fellow pulled a cigarette from his pocket, playful Jaques leaped upon his lap and nestled there.

‘You’re not going to smoke that, are you?” snapped Dixy. The visitor smiled and said: “If I must put up with your dog, you should put up with my cigarette.” Taken aback, Dixy finally smiled and nodded approval, saving the day.

May 18! It’s a day my memory takes me back to that most fateful time — a time in which Mother Nature reminded all of us of her power, her temper, and what she could do in an instant of violence. Her tantrum shook up the beautiful state of Washington as never before.

Few persons were on duty in the Governor’s office in Olympia that Sunday, May 18, 1980. Governor Dixy Lee Ray was making a speech in Seattle when she received word of the catastrophic eruption of Mount St. Helens. She was ten minutes into her talk, broke it off immediately, and rushed to the airport, where her plane took her up to view the eruption.

From her plane, the Governor called the entire State Patrol and National Guard to duty. She stayed in the air relaying orders most of the day, because the horrendous blanket of ash had blocked virtually all communications except for those messages relayed by the State Patrol’s microwave system. A phone call brought me to the Governor’s office, and suddenly it seemed all other staffers were there, too. The reaction everywhere was stunned disbelief. This couldn’t be happening to us! With a few others, I climbed the stairs in the Capitol building to view the eruption firsthand.

What an alarming sight it was! The huge blanket of brown and gray ash covered the horizon and rose thousands of feet into the air. From our perspective, it seemed to be headed everywhere — north, south, east, and west. And that’s exactly where it was headed, as I discovered soon thereafter.

We remembered that just two days earlier, a large group of residents in the Mount St. Helens area had filed a lawsuit against the Governor in which they demanded that they be permitted to return to their homes in the danger area. An evacuation had been ordered because of alarming tremors from the mountain area, and the Governor and the State Patrol had ordered many out of the area until the danger ended.

I wondered how many of the residents and visitors had defied the Governor’s order to stay out of the area and how many of them were among the 57 persons who died that fateful day. If only they had obeyed the State Patrol’s orders and not sneaked past the Patrol’s restraining ropes on the roads leading to the angry mountain.

In retrospect, I’d have to say that the dominant feeling on that terrible, historic day was one of complete helplessness at a time Mother Nature took things into her own hands — and permitted no human interference. One day later I was in Eastern Washington for a government conference and, with several Washingtonians, visited forests and caves in the Pullman area, where we found layers of ash that had just been deposited by Mount St. Helens.

A short time later, a group of residents in the Mount St. Helens area decided to file a damage suit against the Governor, blaming her for many of the deaths from the eruption. What a misguided effort it was! The truth was that Governor Ray’s action ordering the State Patrol to cordon off the area actually resulted in saving many lives. It was unfortunate that so many others defied the orders and sneaked back into the area just as the eruption devastated millions of acres around the mountain.

As should have happened, the suit was eventually quashed, because it had no substance. But I was disturbed because Governor Ray should have been praised for saving lives, not castigated for the deaths.

Thanks to the news service, The Globalist, we have learned that the International Energy Agency has forecast the extremely disturbing news that the world’s existing oil reserves will last, at most, for about 40 years — and that it may be even fewer years if the world’s population growth continues on its present course.

It is serious news particularly to the United States, whose economy is so dependent upon a steady supply of oil, but it should also be of earth-shaking importance to other nations that are so reliant on oil to sustain economic growth. Only 40 years! If my wonderful old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, were still alive, she would be shouting: “I told you so!”

Why would Dixy be horrified by the news today? For very good reason. She and I detailed her remarkable Energy Plan in the two books we co-authored, Trashing the Planet and Environmental Overkill — and also in my most recent collection of her proposals in She Should Have Been President; The Wisdom of Dixy Lee Ray.

Some repetition is necessary here. Way back in 1973, President Nixon, deeply concerned over the severe energy shortage, asked Dixy, then chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, to come up with a program he could present to Congress to end the energy crisis and make the nation energy self-sufficient.

Dixy, herself a renowned international scientist, went to work immediately. She asked many of the reputable scientists she knew well in industry and at colleges and universities to present their proposals for ending the energy crisis. She pulled all their ideas together with hers and, with my help, prepared an energy report for the President.

In December of 1973, she took the report to the White House and presented it to Nixon. He thanked her for it, but she could see that the Watergate scandal had already taken its toll and that he knew he would not finish out his term as President. Despondent, he put Dixy’s report on a shelf in the Oval Office and never presented it to Congress.

In that report, Dixy’s proposals and those of the nation’s best scientific minds outlined an energy program which, if Congress had adopted it, would have ended energy crises for all time. It foresaw the eventual end of the oil supply and urged the nation to follow a program in which all potential energy resources would be utilized — including nuclear, coal, wind power, harnessing of the sun’s rays, and many other resources that could be tapped.

If Dixy’s report had reached Congress and had been accepted as national policy, we would not be involved today in wars to protect future oil supplies, nor would we have to pay today’s staggering price increases at the gas station. Also, the nation’s economy would not be careening toward another recession

In addition, we would be able to thwart the environmental extremists’ political moves that resulted in stopping construction more than 30 years ago of much needed nuclear-power plants and new oil refineries. Do we still have time to undo the terrible damage done by the extremists and revitalize our energy supply?

Forty years is a relatively short time, so we had better urge Congress to adopt Dixy’s remarkable program as soon as possible. If her energy report cannot be found at the White House, I have a couple copies on a shelf in my study at home. I would be eager to send one to the President and the other to Congress! But hurry, please!

We have already chronicled the many instances in which the extremist wing of the environmental movement has cost America huge sums of money and the lives of millions around the world. Well, in case you missed it, here’s another chapter you can add to what I have called the extremists’ “book of misdeeds.”

It goes back 20 years or more, and it is a chapter that has been forgotten, unfortunately. Way back in the late 1980s, a spectacular and terribly damaging fire in downtown Seattle brought the issue to a head, because the cost was way up in the millions.

At the time, I was serving as the commentator for Seattle’s KIRO-TV and Radio and as editorial analyst for the station. I tried to alert the business community and the citizens who would have to pay for the great fire damage. Also, I asked my viewers and listeners to start asking some penetrating questions about the fire.

In the beginning, neither the Seattle Fire Department nor Seattle’s City Light, whose installation had gone up in the blaze, knew what started the fire. Nor did they know why the skyrocketing number of fires had struck city undergrounds, office buildings, hotels, and other buildings in the preceding years.

Because my old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, and I had studied the problem earlier, I suggested on the air that it seemed to be a strong coincidence that such fires, particularly in underground installations, had jumped dramatically since the Environmental Protection Agency, at the behest of the extremists, had banned liquid PCBs as an insulator, to be replaced by mineral and other oils.

Reliable PCBs, used wisely, had been a mainstay of electrical installations for at least 50 years. The reason was that they had a very high flash point and, as a result, didn’t catch fire. They had proved to be safer, but they were outlawed in high concentration when government knuckled under to unfounded charges by militant environmentalists.

PCBs are dangerous only when they are misused, and their toxicity has been overrated. That’s not my judgment. It comes from such reliable sources as the American Hygiene Association and numerous studies by reputable toxicologists in the United States and foreign countries.

Of course, care must be used in disposing of PCBs, because they are difficult to degrade. But that danger is a minor one compared to the deadly nature of urban fires sparked by the highly flammable oils that political agencies foisted upon us, particularly in the crowded cities.

It reminds me once again of Dr. Ray’s proposal for creation of a Science Court made up of highly reputable scientists. That court — and not politicians or environmental extremists — would deliver decisions on such issues as PCBs, DDTs, and other chemicals and materials that pose no threat when used properly but are needed in today’s world.

So, add still another chapter to the mounting list of issues in which the environmental extremists have cost us millions of lives and trillions of dollars that could have been saved.

One of the many reasons my wonderful, brilliant old friend, Dixy Lee Ray, and I got along so well in our 45-year friendship was that we were both hopelessly devoted to proposing and developing new ideas in every field imaginable. She was way ahead of her time, thanks to her extraordinary brain power, and so was I, although I don’t profess to have the brain she did.

In Dr. Ray’s case, for example, she tried to popularize such ideas as a two-way water system and the development of much needed energy from such sources as the manure produced by animals in the nation’s vast farmlands. Fortunately, the potential of manure as an energy producer has finally caught on in several regions — but the two-way water system remains just a dream.

It was at least 40 years ago that I first heard Dr. Ray suggest to farm groups that they were ignoring one of many new methods of producing energy. At the time, the proposal to use the fecal matter of cows, horses, and other farm animals seemed like a joke to many farmers, as well as to others. But “cow power,” as it is sometimes called, has become a reality today. Manure digesters are producing electricity and at least two different kinds of fertilizer.

It was also about 40 or 45 years ago that Dr. Ray, a world renowned marine scientist, was invited by the Saudi Arabia government to visit that nation and consider a very lucrative offer to serve as a government scientist, primarily because she was an international expert on desalinization, the process of turning salt water into safe drinking water. Like other Middle Eastern nations, Saudi Arabia was experiencing a severe shortage of clean water. In fact, the Saudis told her clean water was far more precious than oil to the oil-rich Middle East.

As I have related in other commentaries, Dr. Ray went to Saudi Arabia to talk to officials there about their serious water shortage. After two weeks, however, she turned down the Saudis’ offer and returned to her home on Fox Island, Washington. She told me her reason for the rejection was that, after seeing how women were enslaved and so poorly treated in Saudi Arabia, she wanted no part of the long-term offer the Saudis had made her.

However, in addition to the desalinization program she proposed to the Saudi government, she also suggested that all nations of the world, including Saudi Arabia and the U.S., should consider a two-way system of water production and use, in view of the fact that clean-water shortages were being reported everywhere.

As she proposed it, the ingenious system would consist of one water line to provide clean water for drinking, cooking, and bathing and another to offer recycled water for scrubbing floors, washing cars, watering the lawn and the garden, and all the other chores that do not require clean water. In effect, Dr. Ray’s plan would recycle used water from showers, baths, rain runoffs, and many other sources to be used for scrubbing floors, and so forth.

It’s an idea that the U.S. still hasn’t looked at and considered seriously. With water shortages being reported increasingly in many parts of the nation, a two-way water system makes a lot of sense and deserves to be given a lot of consideration, especially by the large urban areas, where the shortages are most alarming.

As the United States and most other nations of the world writhe under the costly damages wrought by rapidly advancing oil prices — and internal conflicts and an international war on terror are linked to the ravages of Big Oil — I recall the efforts of my wonderful old friend, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, to forestall today’s crisis.

As a co-author with Dixy of two national best-sellers, Trashing the Planet and Environmental Overkill, I was well aware of her appeals to reason when she served as chairman of the old U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and for years thereafter as a speaker, along with me, on the national lecture tour.

In fact, I eventually gathered her speeches and mine on many subjects, but primarily on the energy crisis, and published them recently under the title, “She Should Have Been President; The Wisdom of Dixy Lee Ray.” Prominent in the book, as it was in her speeches and mine, as well, was Dixy’s proposal to bring the U.S. close to self-sufficiency in the production of all forms of energy.

If the U.S. and the Presidents she served had adopted Dixy’s energy plan, we would not now be engaged in the wars in Middle East and Afghanistan and would not have to rely on Venezuela and other nations for a supply of oil. Venezuela’s Communist dictator, Hugo Chavez, has used his nation’s oil supply as an anti-U.S. weapon.

On two occasions, Dixy was considered to be the leading candidate for the job of science adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. In each case, politicos in the Ford and Reagan camps prevailed upon them to put aside any thought of giving such an important job to the former atomic-energy chief and a woman who was such an independent individual that she could not “be controlled.”

If Dixy’s extraordinary energy plan had been adopted by Ford or Reagan, the U.S. would now have many more nuclear power plants. And research into solar power and all other potential energy sources would have been carried on full steam ahead. In addition, many more oil-refining plants would have been built in the U.S., in defiance of the environmental extremists, who shut down the American oil industry, in effect.

The most important aspect of Dixy’s plan would have been to eliminate our dependence on oil from Middle East countries, as well as Venezuela and other oil-rich nations. Without a U.S. market, O.P.E.C. and all its members would have been shorn of their power to influence the economies and affairs of the U.S. and European, Asian, and African nations.

Dixy’s plan was first placed in the hands of President Richard Nixon, but he put it on the shelf in the Oval Office and never presented it to Congress because he was already embroiled in the Watergate scandal and lost all interest in governing. What a tragedy that was! I presume her report still lies on that presidential shelf. If only it could be given a decent hearing by Congress!

Once again, a bitter tug-of-war has developed over the future of the B Reactor at Hanford, Washington, which has great importance because it was the first of many nuclear-producing plants in the U.S. — and provided the first nuclear materials used in the historic explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, as well as for the bombs that ended the war with Japan.

One side ranges from total eradication of the Hanford and all other nuclear-producing plants in the U.S. to the costly removal of all radioactive waste alone. The other side consists of the residents of the Hanford area in Richland, who want the B Reactor and environs preserved as a museum.

As far as I am concerned, both sides are wrong — and how well I know why they are wrong. When I retired from the editorship of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1965, I was hired as a communications consultant to my old friend, Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, who was the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

One of my chores with the A.E.C. was to visit the various nuclear installations in the U.S. to meet their directors and to discuss the much needed requirement for adequate dissemination of news about nuclear power to the public. In the process, I met some of the most brilliant scientists in America.

But, even more important, I saw firsthand how important all the nuclear installations were to America’s role as the foremost power in the world — power for peace, that is. Even while Dr. Ray was serving as chairman, the debate began over what to do with all the nuclear installations, like Hanford, after the Cold War subsided.

I’ll never forget Dr. Ray’s strong pronouncement — and how I wish Congress had listened to her then and adopted her proposal. Dr. Ray emphasized that America and the world were now deeply involved in the production of energy of all kinds to raise the standard of living of all nations.

Therefore, she said, it was incumbent on the U.S. to avoid destroying the nuclear facilities but imperative upon us to turn all of them, Hanford above all, into modern facilities to explore all the methods of producing the much needed energy for all regions of the nation.

I helped her relay her message to leading congressmen and to the directors of all the nuclear installations. Dr. Ray wanted all the stations to probe the potential of solar energy, wind power, coal and gas power, nuclear power, and all other forms of power.

Unfortunately, her message was set side by Congress — and the news media, as could have been expected, either ignored her plea or disagreed with her and wanted the nuclear plants torn down. Dr. Ray’s message is still valid and her proposal deserves a full-scale review by Congress.

I am in sympathy with the people of Richland, who want Hanford’s B Reactor and environs preserved as a museum because of their gigantic importance in American history. But I wish they would carry the fight one step further and embrace Dr. Ray’s proposal — which, in fact, would preserve the installation but turn it into an even greater advantage to the U.S.

One of the many reasons my wonderful, brilliant old friend, Dixy Lee Ray, and I got along so well in our 45-year friendship was that we were both hopelessly devoted to proposing and developing new ideas in every field imaginable. She was way ahead of her time, thanks to her extraordinary brain power, and so was I, although I don’t profess to have the brain she did.

In Dr. Ray’s case, for example, she tried to popularize such ideas as a two-way water system and the development of much needed energy from such sources as the manure produced by animals in the nation’s vast farmlands. Fortunately, the potential of manure as an energy producer has finally caught on in several regions — but the two-way water system remains just a dream.

It was at least 40 years ago that I first heard Dr. Ray suggest to farm groups that they were ignoring one of many new methods of producing energy. At the time, the proposal to use the fecal matter of cows, horses, and other farm animals seemed like a joke to many farmers, as well as to others. But “cow power,” as it is sometimes called, has become a reality today. Manure digesters are producing electricity and at least two different kinds of fertilizer.

It was also about 40 or 45 years ago that Dr. Ray, a world renowned marine scientist, was invited by the Saudi Arabia government to visit that nation and consider a very lucrative offer to serve as a government scientist, primarily because she was an international expert on desalinization, the process of turning salt water into safe drinking water. Like other Middle Eastern nations, Saudi Arabia was experiencing a severe shortage of clean water. In fact, the Saudis told her clear water was far more precious than oil to the oil-rich Middle East.

As I have related in other commentaries, Dr. Ray went to Saudi Arabia to talk to officials there about their serious water shortage. After two weeks, however, she turned down the Saudis’ offer and returned to her home on Fox Island, Washington. She told me her reason for the rejection was that, after seeing how women were enslaved and so poorly treated in Saudi Arabia, she wanted no part of the long-term offer the Saudis had made her.

However, in addition to the desalinization program she proposed to the Saudi government, she also suggested that all nations of the world, including Saudi Arabia and the U.S., should consider a two-way system of water production and use, in view of the fact that clean-water shortages were being reported everywhere.

As she proposed it, the ingenious system would consist of one water line to provide clean water for drinking, cooking, and bathing and another to offer recycled water for scrubbing floors, washing cars, watering the lawn and the garden, and all the other chores that do not require clean water. In effect, Dr. Ray’s plan would recycle used water from showers, baths, rain runoffs, and many other sources to be used for scrubbing floors, and so forth.

It’s an idea that the U.S. still hasn’t looked at and considered seriously. With water shortages being reported increasingly in many parts of the nation, a two-way water system makes a lot of sense and deserves to be given a lot of consideration, especially by the large urban areas, where the shortages are most alarming.

My old friend and collaborator, the late Dr. Dixy Lee Ray, was making speeches more than 40 years ago in which she forecast that the energy of the 21st Century eventually would spring from hydrogen. But, she warned, it would never happen unless the U.S. and other nations first agreed to build enough nuclear reactors to produce the needed hydrogen.

The farsighted Dixy, a great scientist in her own right and once chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, knew what she was talking about. Other reliable scientists have since agreed with her and called for a combination of the two entities, nuclear power plants and the production of hydrogen for fueling the entire nation at a much lower cost and with no possible shortages of power.

One would have thought that the U.S. would have embarked on such a dual program a long time ago so that hydrogen energy would already be a going concern. But, no. The environmental fear-mongers, the rabid anti-nuclear clan, and, yes, even many Democrats have unwittingly held up both ends of the needed combination. They have thrown roadblocks into the once ambitious plan to build many more nuclear plants in America, and, thereby, postponed the hydrogen-energy revolution they profess to support.

Simultaneously, environmentalists and anti-nuclear forces in Europe have persuaded European nations to champion hydrogen energy on one hand but to oppose the construction of more nuclear-power plants on the other! It is grossly idiotic! They can’t have one without the other!

It is not surprising that one of the loudest and most obnoxious voices behind the campaign to persuade European nations to oppose building more nuclear plants was one Jeremy Rifkin, a Neo-Luddite who has been a loud and deeply misinformed voice that opposes any advances in technology, biotechnology, anything nuclear, and, in fact, anything that smacks of future progress.

The U.S. has championed the need for more nuclear power to create the hydrogen energy of the future. But loud-mouthed Rifkin called the American po