Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
For many environmentalists, the supersonic transport represented
the kind of familiar backyard threat to Americans' everyday quality of
life that Sam Hays later identified as the driving concern behind the
postwar American environmental movement in his touchstone 1987
Beauty, Health, and Permanence.
Among its many liabilities—the SST
was louder, less fuel efficient, and more costly than any other aircraft
of its day— citizens' groups and environmentalists worried most about
the deafening shock wave the aircraft would leave in its wake: the sonic
boom. Traveling at speeds exceeding Mach 1 (the speed of sound, about
340 meters per second, or 760 miles per hour at sea level), the SST prom-
ised to leave a rumbling blanket of disruption over the landscape below,
a sharp and crackling clap that would shake windows and in some cases
even damage buildings.
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As a bicoastal commuter jet, the SST would
visit this disturbance upon thousands of communities across the nation
on a daily basis.
In 1967, popular opposition to the SST coalesced around two Harvard
professors, biologist John Edsall and physicist William Shurcliff. Influ-
enced by Lundberg, who by 1966 had expanded his criticism of the SST
to include the sonic boom issue, Shurcliff founded the Citizens League
against the Sonic Boom, with himself as director and Edsall as his deputy.
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Shurcliff lobbied Democratic members of Congress to pressure the FAA
and NASA to reassess the supersonic transport in light of tests conducted
over Oklahoma City that demonstrated just how disruptive daily sonic
booms could be.
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Shurcliff complained that the tests had not been ade-
quately considered in NASA's pro-SST report on the sonic boom, that in
fact the tests' results undermined the cost-benefit analysis behind NASA's
support.
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While Shurcliff lobbied Congress to reevaluate the Oklahoma City
tests, he also began to pitch the sonic boom problem to American envi-
ronmentalists— particularly the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society.
In order to sell the cause to organizations like the Sierra Club and its affili-
ated environmental organizations, Shurcliff noted that sonic booms would
disturb wildlife and the tranquility of wildlands. Secretary of the Inte-
rior Stewart Udall echoed Shurcliff's concerns on the front page of the
Washington Post,
where he publicly “decried the boom's impact on wildlife,
national parks, and adobe structures built in the Southwest by Indians.”
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Though marginal compared to more prominent environmental affronts
