Activity 4.1 – US Environmental History and Major Regulations

When people first came to America, they did not think about trying to conserve natural resources. They thought that everything was in abundance and they could never run out because America was such a big place. When they depleted the land they were farming, they would move to another piece of land. When they hunted all the game in the forest, they moved to another forest. They used everything to depletion because they did not know any better. They did not know how to conserve, or see a reason to if they did. America was huge and there was plenty of space for everyone! There was no point in trying to take care of the environment.

            However, some people did start to realize what they were doing was not very ethical. In the book Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation they explain, “there were always some who were alarmed at widespread agricultural practices that were wasteful, inefficient and, using the modern terminology, unsustainable. By the early 1800s the cumulative impacts of soil erosion and infertility, decreasing crop yields, and natural barriers to expansion such as terrain and poor transportation to markets led to an organized effort to understand the causes of these problems, invent and experiment with new, more soil conserving and less wasteful practices, communicate what was being learned to the public, and begin to build government institutions to promote better stewardship of the land and its resources” (Theis 17). These organized efforts were mainly associated with farming, but ended up helping with other environmental concerns, like forest conservation. The field of environmental science was really established in the mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation  lists a number of federal institutions that were created at this time. They say, “Legislation forming the Departments of the Interior (1849), and Agriculture (1862), the U.S. Forest Service (1881), the Geological Survey (1879), and the National Park Service (1916) were all enacted during this period. It was also the time when several major conservation societies, still active today, came into being: the Audubon Society (1886), the Sierra Club (1892), and the National Wildlife Federation (1935)” (Theis 17).

            In the mid to late 1800s, more areas were becoming urban, and people started wanting to feel connected to nature. There was a new appreciation of nature. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, was a well-known political activist and lobbyist at the time. He helped influence President Roosevelt who “was responsible for 225 million acres of land added to the U.S. Forest Service, and the creation of 50 wildlife refuges and 150 national forests representing, in total, 11 percent of the total land area of the 48 contiguous states” (Theis 24). Roosevelt was already an avid outdoorsman, but Muir helped give him a push to want to save the environment. Americas conservational movement, from 1850 to 1920, was a great start in helping the environment, “and laid foundation for future advances in environmental policy” (Theis 26).

            After 1920 people started to pay less attention to the environment because of the large scale economic hardship after World War I. Farmers began to mismanage their soil and they created the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. After World War II the economy picked back up, and people were tired of rations. The factories that were turning out cars and guns for the war were now turning out consumer good. There were very few laws on waste management, so companies could pollute the air and water as they pleased. Some Americans were concerned about this, and “people in the most contaminated areas could sense the effects of poor air quality” (Theis 31). Some major images that really opened people’s eyes to the amount of pollution were Noon in Donora, showing Philadelphia covered in smog, and the Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969.

            Rachel Carson, a marine biologist and conservationist who worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, wrote Silent Spring in 1962 “about the impact of the widespread and indiscriminate use of pesticides”, specifically DDT (Theis 34). She received a lot of backlash, but eventually DDT was banned in the United States. Then in 1970, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established “just eight years after the publication of Silent Spring” (Theis 34). The people of the United States were becoming more environmentally aware. Since then the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA for short, has helped create and enforce many laws to protect our environment. The book Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation explains that one law, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA), is particularly important “because it provides a legal basis for U.S. environmental policy, and lays out its terms clearly and unambiguously. NEPA established a national goal to create and maintain ‘conditions under which [humans] and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans[emphasis added]’” (NEPA, 1970 qtd. in Theis 34).

            Over all the United States has become increasingly more aware of our impact on the environment, and we are slowly changing for the better.

           

           

Government and laws on the environment

References:

Theis, T., & Tomkin, J. (Eds). (2018). Sustainability: A comprehensive foundation. OpenStax CNX.  THEISandTOMKIN_Sustainability-a-Comprehensive-Foundation-45.1.pdf

Time Graphics - https://time.graphics/