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

[Panich52]

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


xp GD

[unblock]

1. and to think i'd trade donnie for nixon any day.

[gopiscrap]

2. wow

[rzemanfl]

3. I remember in the early '70s sections of the Wisconsin River being declared

"unsafe for boating."

[FuzzyRabbit]

4. In Tacoma, Washington in the mid 1960s

if your new car had a vinyl top, the pollution from the smelter would ruin it within a year. Nearly everyone at my college had a nagging cough from the acid in the air. But at least the air was clear, unlike Seattle which had frequent smog as bad as Los Angeles.

We forget so easily.

[Progressive dog]

5. So that's what a great America looked like

according to the psychopath and his followers. IF the psychopath has a working memory, then he knows how bad it was. Even a sheltered child of wealth must have had to occasionally breath the outside air in NYC.

[Panich52]

6. SCROTUS says he wants EPA trimmed to core mission

protecting clean air & water. Thinks worrying about carbon reaching too far. (Remember that he tweeted that climate change fears are a myth created by China.) Yet one of his first attacks was to rescind Pres Obama's restriction on coal mine runoff going into streams.

Sure would like to know his definitions of "protection" & "clean water."

[Progressive dog]

7. Core mission means keeping

the dirty air and water where he doesn't have to see it.