Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
like logging and mining, the threat that sonic booms presented to both
Indian heritage and the American wilderness experience resonated among
many members of U.S. environmental groups.
The Citizens League's fight against the SST played out within the
familiar patterns of legislative lobbying, litigation, and environmental
monitoring that have come to characterize modern environmental poli-
tics. Like the bulk of the environmental activism of the period, opposi-
tion to the sonic boom began with a grassroots organization representing
a large constituency of concerned citizens and flowered into a national
campaign to protect Americans' quality of life. The Sierra Club, the
Wilderness Society, and later Friends of the Earth, Environment!, the
Natural Resources Defense Council, and other major environmental
groups all moved to oppose the SST. Their campaigns achieved notable
success.
Environmentalists also quickly expanded their criticism of the SST,
turning from sonic booms to the related issue of airport noise pollution.
In addition to producing sonic booms in flight, the SST engines roared
at decibels well above the threshold dictated by noise regulations on the
ground. Citizens' groups had already persuaded the FAA to regulate con-
ventional aircraft noise at America's airports, and the SST would negate
these gains. Amid public concern over both the SST and Boeing's new
747 jumbo jet, in 1968 President Johnson signed a noise abatement bill that
seemed to preclude the widespread adoption of SSTs at American airports.
The SST issue should have been put to bed right there, long before its
impact on the atmosphere became a concern.
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But the SST was nothing if not resilient. Its economic and environ-
mental liabilities notwithstanding, the plane still had considerable politi-
cal support— most importantly from Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon.
Nixon pushed for the SST for two main reasons. First, Nixon's advisors
feared that without an SST, the United States would “take a back seat in
aviation history for the next decade.”
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The Johnson administration had
invested considerable money in the project, and the Nixon administration
hoped to capitalize both economically and politically on that investment.
Nixon and his staff expected that international SST routes would expand
rapidly, and the market for the planes would expand in turn, giving the
nations that manufactured the planes an advantage in their “balance of
payments.”
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Second, the administration worried that canceling the SST
