5 Reasons to Like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

President Richard M. Nixon, a Republican,
established the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December
1970.

Forty eight years later, Donald J. Trump
made abolishing the agency a talking point in his presidential
campaign. His first EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, cut climate
monitoring programs, proposed new rules on how science is reported
and rolled back clean car standards before resigning in July,
following a string of personal controversies.

The recent headlines might lead you to
wonder: Why do we have an EPA, anyway, and what does it
do?

Nixon didn’t really want to create it.
The first EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, a
third-generation Republican lawyer and politician from Indiana,
later
recalled^[1] that Nixon created the
EPA “because of public outrage about what was happening to the
environment. Not because Nixon shared that concern, but
because he didn’t have any choice.” That April, 20 million
Americans had gone outside to participate in the first Earth Day
celebrations.

Nixon had other things on his mind. Six days after Earth Day, he
authorized American troops in Vietnam to invade Cambodia, an action
that brought more demonstrators into the streets. To Nixon,
according to Ruckelshaus, antiwar protesters and environmentalists
were birds of a feather—“both reflected weakness in the American
character.”

After establishing the EPA, Nixon took little interest in its
work. “Every time I’d meet with him, he would just lecture me about
the ‘crazies’ in the agency and advise me not to be pushed around
by them,” said Ruckelshaus. “He never once asked me, ‘Is there
anything wrong with the environment? Is the air really bad? Is it
hurting people?'”

In fact, it was. There were many things wrong with the
environment in 1970. Here are five ways our world has changed for
the better since then, thanks in part to the EPA.

Before the government began to rein in pollution from
smokestacks and tailpipes, dense, dark, and even choking smog was a
frequent occurrence in American cities and towns. In 1948,
spectators at a football game in Donora, Pennsylvania, couldn’t see the players or
the ball^[2] because of smog from a
nearby coal-fired zinc smelter; 20 people died. In Los Angeles in
the 1960s, smog often hid the mountains.

The Clean Air Act^[3] of 1970 gave EPA the
authority to regulate harmful air pollutants. One of the most
dramatic success stories was lead, which was widely used in paint
but also in gasoline to improve engine performance. EPA estimated
that more than 5,000 Americans were dying every year from heart
disease linked to lead poisoning; many children were growing up
with diminished IQ.

By 1974, EPA had begun a phaseout of lead from gasoline. The
gradual effort took until 1995 to completely end the practice, but
the result has been a measurable 75 percent drop in blood lead
levels in the public.

Thanks to Clean Air Act rules, the levels of many other toxic
substances in our air, such as mercury^[4], benzene, and arsenic,
have also dropped substantially. A major update to the law in 1990
allowed EPA to reduce sulfur dioxide
emissions^[5] from power plants, the
main cause of acid rain. Life has begun to come back in acidified
lakes in the Adirondacks.

Complying with EPA’s air pollution rules has been costly—they’re
the biggest burden the agency imposes on the economy. But the
federal Office of Management and Budget, analyzing data collected
from 2004 to 2014, estimates that the health and other benefits
of the rules exceeded the costs^[6]
by somewhere between $113 billion and $741 billion a year.

In the early 1960s, when Ruckelshaus was a deputy attorney
general in Indiana, he was assigned to the Stream Pollution Control
Board. The board had rules against pollution but wasn’t enforcing
them much. Ruckelshaus and a sanitary engineer “would go around the
state in a panel truck and collect samples out of streams choked
with dead fish,” then try to prosecute the grossest violations. In
general, he recalled, states like Indiana were more worried about
losing industry to other states with laxer rules than about
preventing pollution.

Industry wasn’t the only problem. Before 1970, most cities and
towns simply dumped their sewage directly into waterways, with
little or no treatment. Intrepid bathers in Long Island Sound were
routinely surrounded by bits of used toilet paper. Stinky algal
blooms were common, as were fish kills.

The Clean Water Act led to tens of billions of federal dollars
being invested in municipal sewage treatment plants. The law’s
simple goal is to make every river, stream, and lake in the U.S.
swimmable and fishable. We’re not there yet: The Cuyahoga “is not
on fire anymore, but I wouldn’t swim in it,” William Suk of the
National Institutes of Health told National Geographic a few
years ago. But people do swim in Boston Harbor and the Hudson
River. And the toxic cesspools that literally catch on fire have
largely become a thing of the past.

In her seminal 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
popularized emerging research that showed DDT was wreaking havoc on
birds by making their eggs thin to the point of disintegration.
Beloved birds like the bald eagle and peregrine falcon teetered
toward extinction. A colorless, nearly odorless insecticide, DDT
had been a valuable weapon against disease-carrying mosquitoes and
also a boon to farmers. People had so little notion of its dangers
they let their children play happily in the
spray.^[7]

Carson’s book changed the culture, setting the country on the
road toward Earth Day and the EPA. In 1972, Ruckelshaus effectively
banned the use of DDT in the U.S., except in limited cases where it
was needed to protect public health. That same year Congress passed
the Federal Environmental
Pesticide Control Act^[8], giving EPA more clear
authority to regulate pesticides in general based on their impact
on health and the environment.

Until the 1970s, hazardous chemical waste was general disposed
of like ordinary trash—at best in an unlined municipal landfill
from which toxic chemicals could seep into groundwater, at worst in
open dumps, where runoff from corroded barrels might contaminate
streams. The country was dotted with thousands of such dumps.

In 1976 Congress passed the Resource Conservation and
Recovery Act (RCRA)^[9], giving EPA the
authority to regulate hazardous waste from cradle to grave. EPA now
tracks chemical waste from hundreds of thousands of facilities; it
requires landfills to be lined and water leaching through them to
be collected before it can contaminate drinking water. RCRA also
regulates municipal waste and has given a big push to
recycling.

If RCRA is about handling waste right in the present, the
Superfund law is about cleaning up the dumps of the past. In 1978,
hundreds of residents of Love Canal, New York, near Niagara Falls,
were sickened; their planned community had been built on an old
toxic waste dump operated previously by the Hooker Chemical
Company. The neighborhood was eventually demolished and cleaned,
and the incident helped jump-start the Comprehensive Environmental Response,
Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980^[10], commonly known as
Superfund^[11].

Under that law EPA is slowly trying to clean up a nationwide
legacy of Love Canals, recovering costs where it can from the
original polluters. As National Geographic reported^[12] in 2014, nearly half of
the more than 1,700 Superfund sites have been fully addressed—but
even many of them have to be monitored indefinitely. It’s a project
for the century and a lesson for the future. Some 49 million (or
nearly one in six) Americans live close to a Superfund site.
(Find out if there’s one
near you^[13].)

There’s a common theme to all of EPA’s work: In a crowded world,
simply dumping waste of whatever kind in the air, water, or land
isn’t safe anymore.

Like government agencies in nearly every other country in the
world, EPA is now trying to extend that principle to carbon
dioxide, the waste gas produced by burning fossil fuels, which is
warming the planet. In August 2015 the agency finalized its Clean
Power Plan, which for the first time sets a national limit on
carbon pollution from power plants. The goal is to reduce their
emissions by 32 percent by 2030, relative to 2005 levels.

The plan is a central part of the U.S. commitment to the new
global agreement to limit climate change^[14], which most of the
world’s nations approved in Paris in late 2015. The CPP hasn’t yet
taken effect, however, because it’s currently being challenged in
the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington by Scott Pruitt, the
attorneys general of 23 other states, and a raft of utilities and
fossil fuel companies.

In nominating Pruitt to be EPA administrator, Trump attacked
what he called the agency’s “out-of-control anti-energy agenda.”
Pruitt, he said, “will reverse this trend and restore the EPA’s
essential mission of keeping our air and our water clean and
safe.”

After retiring from that mission decades ago, William
Ruckelshaus went on to serve as an executive at Weyerhaeuser, the
lumber company, and Browning Ferris, a waste management company. He
has also served on the board of Monsanto.

“I’ve had an awful lot of jobs in my lifetime … ,” he said
later. “But it is tough to find the same degree of fulfillment I
found in the government. At EPA, you work for a cause that is
beyond self-interest and larger than the goals people normally
pursue. You’re not there for the money, you’re there for something
beyond yourself.”