In '72, EPA battled pollution; now it's politics
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A polluted drainage ditch that once flowed with industrial waste from Lake Charles, La., petrochemical plants teems with overgrown, wild plants today.
A light-rail line zips past the spot where a now-defunct Portland, Ore., gasoline station advertised in 1972 that it had run out of gas.
A smoking Jersey City, N.J., dump piled with twisted, rusty metal has disappeared, along with the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan that were its backdrop.
Forty years after the Environmental Protection Agency sent an army of nearly 100 photographers across the country to capture images at the dawn of environmental regulation, The Associated Press went back for Earth Day this year to see how things have changed. It is something the agency never got to do because the Documerica program, as it was called, died in 1978, the victim of budget cuts.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_EARTH_DAY_THEN_AND_NOW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-04-21-10-53-57
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