The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.

What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.