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| Protesting pollution on LaSalle Street, 1970. |
In 1889, the American correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan and was momentarily impressed.
“I have struck a city — a real city — and they call it Chicago,” Rudyard Kipling, 23, informed his readers in northern India. "The other places do not count."
But initial approval evaporated as he looked around, noting: "Its water is the water of the Hughli," — a branch of the Ganges in West Bengal famous for its pollution, "and its air is dirt."
Unregulated industry — enormous stockyards dumping into the canals, making them, in Kipling's words, "black as ink, and filled with untold abominations," smokestacks belching filth — will do that. Today when we call Chicagoans "gritty" we are speaking about toughness; 137 years ago, it meant they were coated in coal dust.
What changed? Well, conscientious businesses, concerned about the effect pollution was having on the quality of life of their neighbors, took it upon themselves to clean up their acts and ...
Ha-ha, just kidding. Early April Fool's. No, of course, business, then and now, cares only about short-term profits. But government forced them to act in a socially-responsible fashion, setting health standards and limiting pollution. Only then did city dwellers breathe easier, and "grit" could fade into colorful metaphor.
I was reminded of this flipping open the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine and coming upon "The Dismantling of Environmental Protections — A Grave Threat to America’s Health" by a pair of Harvard doctors, Adam W. Gaffney and David Himmelstein, joined by three other health experts.
They start with another once notoriously dirty city — Cleveland — and the 1969 combustion of its Cuyahoga River, so polluted it caught fire, "sparking national attention to environmental degradation."
A president not famous for his selflessness, but Cincinnatus compared to our current commander-in-chief, took decisive action:
"In his State of the Union address seven months later, President Richard Nixon lamented that Americans were being 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water' and proclaimed that clean air and water should 'be the birthright of every American.' At Nixon’s urging, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act (CAA) with bipartisan support. Air-quality upgrades mandated by that act and enforced by the EPA are among the most effective health interventions of the past half-century, having reduced air pollution by 75% in the United States and saved at least 200,000 lives per year."
Now our birthright is being taken away — it isn't just voting. Our country is in full retreat regarding the environment.
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I'm utterly baffled as to why these crackpot Re Thug Licons want to do away with environmental controls.
ReplyDeleteMost of them have grandchildren, do they want them growing up in a polluted world? Because it sure looks that way.
And I can't say that it's because they're all Jesus freaks that believe in that second coming idiocy, because the current EPA administrator is Lee Zeldin, a Jew from New York.
And maybe the French government can force that wind turbine company to give back the cash & force them to install the turbines!
Giving them up for more oil drilling is insanity!
M O N E Y for people who already have a lot and figure their money will insulate them and theirs from all harm.
DeleteMoney can only do so much. It can protect, and shield, and insulate, but even if those rich people die in their own beds, they are still going to die one day. Their money may postpone the inevitable to some extent, and perhaps buy them a little more time, but nothing more.
DeleteWhen their time finally comes, all that moolah will be worthless to them, and it will not be accompanying them to whatever hell they find themselves in (Assuming there even is one, which Jews do not believe...I don't.) They will be as broke and as naked when they leave this world as they were on the day they entered it. And good riddance to them.
But it won't save them from polluted air, unless they stay inside 24/7 with massive air filtration to keep out the pollutants. Considering that these insane rich people are buying huge estates out west, supposedly to enjoy the Big Sky Country, which will be as unbreathable as Los Angeles at its worst smog level in the 1950s & building $100 million mansions on the South Florida Atlantic coast, mansions that will be destroyed by a hurricane one day, none of this makes any sense.
DeleteFace it, dude...America is Paradise Lost. The good places, like California and Florida, are gone...paved over... and they have been for decades. Or else they are unaffordable and overcrowded by the richies. There is no Nirvana left anymore...nowhere to escape to...and to enjoy what they once were.
DeleteWhich somehow makes it easier to be an old geezer in deep red Ohio.
It's as good a place to die in as anywhere else. Highly unlikely I will still be around by the end of the 2030s.
Trump has the uncanny ability to make everyone and everything he touches a lesser version of itself. Including Mother Earth.
ReplyDeleteTo quote prescient author Rick Wilson, "Everything Trump Touches Dies".
ReplyDeleteOf course it isn't only Trump. Virtually every businessman out there .. dealers in fossil fuels, timber, AI and data centers, Big Pharma .. are guilty of extreme shortsightedness. But they'll be gone when their grandchildren are struggling to survive on the planet Grandpa killed. Lots of dollars but no air or water. Lots of plastic but no edible food.
Quarterly profits and stock prices are all that matter.
DeleteFossil fuel replaced the burning of wood.
DeleteFossil fuels enable us to get from one end of the country to the other in days or hours instead of months
Fossil fuels enabled us to grow enough food to nourish 8 billion people on a dailey basis.
We can reduce their use but they are essential.
Everyone wants someone else to use less they want the government to force others to use less but they want to use as much as they always have and more.
Bigger houses for their trip bright green lawns golf courses
We are to blame for this the administration is only doing the thing people want
Richard -- even a broken clock is right twice a day -- Nixon did a good thing. Belated but sincere thanks are in order.
ReplyDeleteHated disco when it was the thing...I was a geeky dork with no money and couldn't dance to save my life. But after what followed...rap, house, hip-hop, electronic dance music...disco sounds like Mozart or Beethoven. Same with Nixon. He looks better and better every day, as do (but to a much smaller extent) Reagan and Bush 43.
DeleteNixon was even a baseball fan, and a fairly knowledgeable one. 45/47 loves no sport and has never even had any pets. Everything Felonious touches either dies or turns to shit, often quite literally. His trail of destruction will take decades to repair. Much of it probably never will be.
The Orange Rapist is also raping the environment...not for his own pleasure, but for the usually greed-headed reason...money. To line his own pockets, and those of his supporters and cronies.
I agree. Nixon seems like less of a "Dick" now. And he enjoyed dogs, so there's that.
DeleteHe also wanted a national health care insurance for everyone. He was a truly weird man, somewhat socially liberal, but also a total paranoid loon that thought every Democrat was after him.
DeleteObviously he was mentally ill, but he was sane compared to the current demented & deranged child rapist!
Huh, it's almost as if having an utterly incompetent, corrupt, self-serving president leading an administration filled with people hand-picked to allow him to do whatever he wants is not working out well for average Americans or their descendants. Who could have guessed?
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this ongoing shit-show has real consequences, detrimental to many in service of benefits for the few, is infuriating, indeed.
Is there nobody who works for this dotard who's embarrassed to see him given him made-up-awards, his face on coins, his signature on money, his name on whatever he wants it on? As our genial host has pointed out before -- one might kinda understand folks falling in line behind a tough guy or somebody with a brilliant mind and an inspiring agenda for the country. But this orange, clueless, bone-spurred felon and long-time charlatan? It remains very, very hard to believe, even as we witness it unfolding every day.
I don't think Trump has any real 'friends' because he sees everything and everyone through a transactional lens. But surely there are some oligarchs who would benefit from clean energy instead of fossil fuel, and who still hold transactional value for Trump. Where are they?
ReplyDeleteTrump's hostility toward any action that would reduce our negative impact on the earth - and the US in particular - is excessive and irrational. His embrace of fossil fuels makes even less sense when we see him indiscriminately bombing and burning oil in the Middle East, while pushing for large AI data centers that require inordinate amounts of electricity and water in the US. Just as he can't articulate a war plan in Iran (other than to feel the strategy in his bones), neither can he articulate why he's so opposed to wind or solar energy. Yes, yes, sometimes there is no breeze, and our nights are spent in darkness. But both forms of energy generation still hugely benefit our power grid. Initial wind turbine designs killed a lot of birds. That is true. But a Norwegian study found that avian mortality can be reduced by 70% by painting one turbine blade black.
I suppose its useless to try to understand what is driving Trump's insanity on this issue. But I don't think we can dismiss "vengeance" as at least a contributing factor. People who value the environment are quite often people he hates. And environmental regulations have stymied him in ways he cant forget or forgive, from his golf course in Bedminster to the one in Scotland. EPA fines probably factor in, too, like when his building in Chicago illegally took water from the river and dumped it back at an overheated temperature which harmed wildlife. That fine was settled for $4.8 million. But his list of environmental violations is long and never-ending.
Thank you, Mr S., for addressing environmental concerns in today's column. In just a few weeks we'll celebrate Earth Day. Like the EPA and CAA , Earth Day was founded in 1970 during Nixon's presidency.