The 35th birthday of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed last December 2 with little fanfare. EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson noted at the time that, "Over the last three and a half decades, through the use of innovative and collaborative approaches to environmental protection and a commitment to responsible stewardship, we have made remarkable progress in our ongoing effort to make the air cleaner, water purer, and the land better protected."
He is surely correct. It's safe to say that no government agency has played a more pivotal role in our collective health and welfare—and that of our children—than the EPA, so credit is due. We are all better off for it. That's not to say the progress hasn't been slowed by controversy—some deserved, but most the natural consequence of balancing emerging science with politics.
The bad old days
Most Americans aren't old enough to remember how bad air, water, and pesticide pollution were in the 1960s. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962, attacked the indiscriminate use of pesticides and began a revolution in public opinion—especially when she noted that "the common salad bowl may easily present a combination of organic phosphate insecticides" that could interact with lethal consequences. Seemingly for the first time, people were aghast at the destruction of nature and began to band together to demand that the government take action to protect their health.
When the world's environmental problems began to draw international attention, the blame game began. In May 1969, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant gave the planet only 10 years to avert environmental disaster and blamed the lion's share of the pending planetary catastrophe on the U.S. That same year, Under Secretary of the Interior Russell E. Train noted, "If environmental deterioration is permitted to continue and increase at present rates, [man] wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell [of surviving]."
As environmental consciousness became one of the defining issues of the era, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act on New Year's Day 1970 and named Train (a future EPA administrator) chairman of the first Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). By December of that year, the CEQ had become the EPA, and the Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1970 had become the law of the land. That it took less than a year from formation of the CEQ to passage of the CAA showed how quickly government could respond to a grass-roots idea whose time had come.
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