Pollution | Introduction
The book Silent Springby Rachel Carson, first published in 1962, awakened a passionate minority of environmentalists to the extent of the pollution problem in the United States. Carson chronicled the toll that decades of indiscriminate pesticide use, in particular DDT, which has since been banned, had taken on land, water, and human health. In an era when the environmental movement was still in its infancy, and notions of protecting the environment remained alien to much of the public, the pollution described in Silent Spring strongly affected many young readers. Former vice president Al Gore, who read the book as a teenager, recalls, “The publication of Silent Spring can properly be seen as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. For me personally, Silent Spring had a profound impact. . . . Rachel Carson was one of the reasons why I became so conscious of the environment and so involved with environmental issues.” In the wake of Silent Spring, it seemed that the battle lines were officially drawn between the fledgling environmental movement and corporate leaders who, according to Gore, dubbed the book “hysterical and extremist.”
As the 1960s wore on, a series of high-profile episodes of industrial pollution lent increasing authority to the environmental movement and its call for comprehensive pollution regulations. Nineteen sixty-nine proved to be a particularly rough year for the public relations departments of industrial polluters. In March of that year, an oil well operated by the Union Oil Company off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, blew out, covering more than four hundred square miles of ocean and thirty miles of beaches with bird- and fish-killing sludge. As Mary Graham comments in her book The Morning After Earth Day, “The spreading puddle of oil, from a well in the ocean floor that leaked for more than a week before company employees brought it under control, provided television viewers across the country with repeated reminders that government and industry had failed to prevent a disaster.” Before the year was out, the public received yet another reminder that pollution was a serious problem, this time seeming to defy the laws of nature—the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught on fire. The river was so coated with oil and other flammables that it ignited when sparks from a passing train made contact with the river’s surface. Graham quotes a Cleveland State University professor as saying, “The river ‘burned on newscasts all over the world.’. . . It became ‘a vivid symbol of the state of many of America’s waterways.’”
Watching a river burn was a novel sight for American television viewers, and one that must not have inspired much confidence in politicians or corporate leaders. But in 1969, most Americans remained unconcerned about the environment. In fact, according to a White House poll conducted by Opinion Research of Princeton, New Jersey, in May 1969, one month prior to the Cuyahoga River fire, a mere 1 percent of the public expressed concern for the environment. Less than a year later, however, on April 22, 1970, the nation’s first Earth Day demonstration galvanized tremendous public support for the environmental movement. The event was organized by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin as a nationwide teach-in to inform Americans about the extent of pollution in their country, and what actions could be taken to prevent further environmental degradation. Earth Day 1970 turned out to be the largest organized demonstration in the nation’s history, with over 20 million people participating in events held across the country. The enormous turnout meant that politicians could no longer ignore the environmental movement and its legions of new supporters. A second Opinion Research poll conducted in May 1971 showed that 25 percent of the public had grown concerned about the environment.
The response from government was startlingly swift and effective. President Richard Nixon submitted a plan to Congress on July 9, 1970, to reorganize the numerous agencies responsible for overseeing environmental programs into one department. The result was the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970 to develop and enforce the nation’s pollution regulations. In the early 1970s, Congress gave the EPA plenty of new laws to enforce as it embarked on an unprecedented run of environmental legislation. Its first major achievement was the Clean Air Act of 1970, which directed the EPA to set national air quality standards to protect public health and the environment from industrial and automotive emissions. The Clean Water Act, which followed in 1972, established limitations on the amount of pollutants discharged by industry and city sewer and water treatment systems into rivers, lakes, and oceans. In 1976, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) instituted a framework for the “cradle-to-grave” management of hazardous and nonhazardous wastes. The impact of these laws was soon felt by the numerous cities and businesses that were found in violation of the new clean air and water standards and consequently sued by the EPA.
Thirty years after Americans first awakened en masse to the pollution in their midst, it is clear that important progress has been made in cleaning up the country’s air and water. Companies like General Electric (GE) can no longer dump carcinogenic chemical waste into rivers, as GE did for many years from its factories along the Hudson River. New technologies are enabling power plants to generate electricity while producing less harmful emissions. Urban areas have reduced smog and ground-level ozone through the phase-out of leaded gasoline and the introduction of cars and trucks that emit far less pollutants than those on the road just ten or fifteen years ago. The general perception is that the shocking pollution depicted by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring is largely a thing of the past, thanks to public concern and political action.
The reduction in obvious sources of pollution—the factory funneling toxins into the town river or the neighborhood hazardous waste site—may have lulled the public into a sense of complacency. The big culprits are largely under control, but pollution is also caused by less visible sources that are difficult—and costly—to contain. Examples include runoff from urban sewer systems, animal waste from farms, toxic gasoline additives leaking into groundwater, and ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) used for refrigeration. Because the sources of pollution have grown simultaneously more complex and less visible to the public, mustering support to further reduce pollution is difficult. Explains Jack Lewis, a former assistant editor with the EPA Journal,
The challenges of the future involve extremely important but less visible problems of cross-media pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, radon contamination, and protection of air and water supplies against ever-proliferating types of toxic chemicals in trace concentrations. . . . Unfortunately, in many cases, the public’s evaluation of what most needs fixing . . . does not always square with expert scientific analyses of the most pressing dangers confronting [the public] . . . and their natural environment.
It may be that, much as in Rachel Carson’s era, public awareness is lagging behind the increasingly complex problem of pollution. Rivers may no longer be catching on fire, but a dramatic image often serves to coax a distracted public into action. Although today’s pollution problems lack the visible impact of the past, they should be taken no less seriously. Pollution: Current Controversies examines the debate over which sources of pollution are most threatening to human health and the environment and what measures business, government, and the public should take to reduce these threats.
