Growing up in the 1970s, I took for granted the piles of trash along the road, the washed-up tires on beaches, and the smog that polluted the city air.
Those scenes are the reason why first Earth Day: April 22, 1970 — energized the nation. In it The largest single-day public demonstration in American history.approximately 10% of the population took to the streets to shout together: “Enough is enough!”
Both Republican and Democratic politicians listened. Over the next decade, all of the country's key environmental laws were passed with strong bipartisan support, including the clean air law, clean water law and Endangered Species Act.
These laws are taking hits right now, including from the Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency created in 1970 to protect the environment. Agency leader Lee Zeldin boasted “sticking a dagger straight into the heart” of environmental regulations. President Trump regularly mocks environmental laws as Job destroyers and government overreach.
The conditions that made these laws necessary have been largely forgotten, allowing critics to focus exclusively on the costs and ignore the very real benefits and achievements of the laws.
That's why I was excited learn recently about him Documerica Project: 20,000 photographs taken between 1972 and 1978 that clearly show how dirty the United States used to be. Looking back should make people realize how much better the environment is today.
Environmental protection was a bipartisan effort in the 1970s: the EPA was created by President Nixona republican. The agency's first leader was William Ruckelshaus, a Republican congressman from Indiana.
Inspired by the famous Photographs of Depression-era farm workers. Commissioned in the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration, Ruckelshaus EPA commissioned a nationwide photographic registry. The goal was to create a “visual baseline” that demonstrated the agency's future progress.
To say that the American landscape was littered with trash in the 1970s is not simply a poetic phrase. Waste disposal was a matter of local legislation and illegal dumping was common. Drums of pesticides and chemicals It could be sent to the local landfill along with tires and almost anything else that people and businesses wanted to get rid of. When the garbage can was full, it was covered with topsoil and became open groundready for recreation or building construction.
One place where this happened was Love Canal, a neighborhood near Niagara Falls, New York. A landfill containing decades of chemical drums from Hooker Chemical Co. was lightly covered and sold to the city for $1. TO the neighborhood was built on the land.
Only when people realized high levels of spontaneous abortions and cancer groups among residents, and they saw debris leaking through the basement walls, minds changed.
In 1976, Congress approved the Resource Conservation Recovery Act Track waste materials from creation to disposal and set strict standards for how to dispose of them. But by then, decades of unregulated waste disposal had contaminated sites across the country. The contaminants, toxicity, and people responsible were often unknown.
Four years later, the 1980 law known as “Superfund” establish standards and assign financial responsibility for the cleanup of hazardous waste sites. The law created a multimillion-dollar fund that could pay for cleanups and required potentially responsible parties reimburse the government or clean up the sites at your own expense.
Suddenly, companies paid much more attention to waste disposal.
Like landfills, in the past all types of waste were deposited in rivers, lakes and ports. A federal law existed, but it was ineffective and relied on states to set limits and enforce them.
In 1978 I had the misfortune of capsizing while boating on the Charles River in Boston. My embarrassment led to a visit to a dermatologist when I broke out in rashes the next day. You fell into the Charles at your own risk.
Environmental advocates were not kidding when, in the 1960s and 1970s, they declared “Lake Erie is a dead lake.“due to all the industrial pollution that pours into its waters. An oil spill in Cleveland's Cuyahoga River It burned down in 1969 – actually the twelfth time the river had burned within a century.
He Clean Water Act of 1972 sought to create a national standard, requiring companies that wanted to dump waste into waterways to obtain a federal permit and use the best available technology to reduce the amount and toxicity of what they dumped. The law also provided billions of taxpayer dollars to upgrade wastewater treatment plants so they wouldn't just dump raw sewage into the water.
The ambitious goal was to completely eliminate water pollution and make all the country's waters safe for swimming and fishing within a decade. Those aspirational goals for the country's waters have not yet been fully met, although Ruckelshaus used to joke about it. at least they are not flammable. And now, the Charles River and other urban waterways that people avoided in the 1970s feature all kinds of recreation, with little to no risk of rashes. even while swimming.
Perhaps the most obvious improvement since the 1970s has been in air quality in the United States.
the horrible smog around Los Angeles It is well known. But many other cities were covered in polluted air that led to respiratory diseases and millions of premature deaths throughout the country over the decades. In Pittsburgh it was only half-jokingly said that one had to floss after breathing.
He Clean Air Act of 1970 was the first law that required the EPA to establish Nationally uniform standards for air quality.. In a short time, Lead was removed from gasoline., Catalytic converters were required. in cars, Acid rain is over and the smog sources They were strictly regulated. An EPA study found that the benefits under the law exceeded the costs by a factor of more than 30 to 1 and, in 2020 alone, prevented more than 230,000 premature deaths.
I could go on with pictures and stories about laws from the 1970s that changed the way Americans treat our lands and waters. But it all comes down to two simple facts. Firstly, with the exception of greenhouse gases, which have been indeed unregulatedevery important environmental health measure has improved significantly during Ilast five decades. And second, all of these improvements occurred during times of strong economic growth, with Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product quintuples.
Calling these laws “job destroyers” makes no sense. They created jobs and stopped environmental killers. Regulations have their costs, to be sure, but Documerica's photos show how far the nation has come and what is at risk if we forget.
James Salzman is a professor of environmental law at the UC Santa Barbara School of the Environment and the UCLA School of Law. This article was prepared in collaboration with the conversation.
