This is what America looked like before the EPA cleaned it up

[Panich52]

RawStory



February 24, 2017
Kendra Pierre-Louis
Posted with permission from Popular Science
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It wasn't pretty

In 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon signed an executive order creating the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It was a time when pollution made many of our nation's rivers and streams unsafe for fishing or swimming. Back then, New York City's air pollution was so thick that you often couldn't see the city's iconic bridges. Forty-seven years later, there is serious talk of dismantling the agency, or at least slashing its size by two-thirds.

From 1971 to 1977 the nascent agency, in an act of prescience, enlisted the services of freelance photographers to help us remember. These photographers captured images of America's environmental problems before we'd cleaned them up. In 2011, the US National Archives digitized more than 15,000 pictures from the series "Documerica". Here are some of the most compelling.

If you like these images, please read our series on the EPA past and present. It begins here.


Many more pix:
http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/this-is-what-america-looked-like-before-the-epa-cleaned-it-up/


I remember when Cuyahoga River caught fire & Pittsburgh's CB handle was "Smoky City." I even grew up in WV town where main creek thru middle of town was sterile & looked yellow from coal mine waste that drained into it many years before I was born. (Not until late 80s did it begin to look like a normal creek.) Disgusted that SCROTUS wants to return to those days, esp since he seems so bent on emulating Nixon in other ways.

[Thinkingabout]

1. Many of the regulations have occurred to clean up our environment, the industries claim

They would regulate themselves but we know this has not happened and left to them it will not happen.

I remember riding as a child and the vehicles around me smelling, it doesn't happen very often these days and it is very offensive. When the devices were first added to vehicles we cried it resulted in poor performance and possibly was true but we have survived.
I really do not want to return to those days.

[roamer65]

2. I remember being on a MI lake in a fishing boat with a paper mill nearby in 1971.

The smell was so bad I got sick and threw up over the side of the boat.

I also remember the alewives washing up on the beach of Lake Michigan. That was awful as well.

The EPA was the only thing that Nixon did right.