Editorial

Protecting Earth requires vigilance

Posted

In 1970, Americans finally awoke to the horrifying toll they were taking on our fragile environment. That year, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, landmark legislation that regulated the airborne pollutants that factories, power plants and cars had spewed into the skies for decades.

Thank goodness Congress acted. We need only look to China and India to see what rapid industrial expansion, unchecked by environmental regulations, looks like. Toxic smog now chokes many of China’s largest cities, and many people there wear masks simply to walk the streets.

America was on such a collision course with Mother Earth until the federal government, emboldened by a burgeoning environmental movement sparked by Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring,” passed the Clean Air Act.

Two years later, in 1972, Congress acted again, approving the Clean Water Act to protect our streams, rivers, lakes and oceans from industrial dumping. Our waterways are far from pure, but we no longer worry that oil and chemical spills will catch fire and burn in uncontrollable conflagrations. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire 13 times between 1868 and 1969, according to the website ohiohistorycentral.org.

In 1970, the U.S. also led the way in forming the now international Earth Day movement. U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat, founded Earth Day after witnessing the environmental devastation caused by an infamous 100,000-barrel oil spill in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, according to the nonprofit Earth Day Network. On the very first Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — some 20 million Americans took to the streets and parks to protest widespread industrial damage to the environment. That mass protest led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and inspired states to form their own such agencies. In New York we have the Department of Environmental Conservation.

According to the Earth Day Network, “Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders.”

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