Private enterprise, local, and state governments must identify and recognize common goals in environmental planning, Wesley E. Gilbertson, chief of the Division of Environmental Engineering and Food Protection of the US Public Health Service, told the American Medical Association's 17th Annual Conference on Rural Health in Columbus, Ohio, March 6 and 7.
Gilbertson pointed to California as a state in which such cooperation "may develop into the first real machinery in that State for effective, long-range decisions in the environmental health field." It can be done in other States as well," he said. Problems of waste disposal, water pollution, legitimate uses of water, and the increasing use of chemicals in agriculture confront rural fringe dwellers in appalling proportions, and "we are trying to solve the environmental problems of the 20th Century with 19th Century machinery, practices, principles, and laws."
Unplanned rural and suburban fringe development cause undesirable and dangerous conditions,