1970s Environmental Issues

What really caused the sudden upsurge in concern for preserving America’s environment at the beginning of the twentieth century? To what extent was this concern motivated by nostalgia for an older America, and to what extent by a desire to preserve nature and natural resources for future generations?

The environment has changed over the years. Back in the 1980’s people were concerned about the environment. That was the earliest people began to worry about the whole environment. During this time people find out the environment was getting polluted more and more each day. Many people don’t know that the environment has a very important role in life. It just isn’t about the trees anymore like people thinks it does.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency or EPA was initially proposed in 1970 by then President Richard Nixon. The agency was created to build on other environmental regulations enacted by the federal government and to consolidate those efforts to be managed by one government agency. It was also a reaction to the public’s growing concern over pollution and other environmental issues. Chemical waste was commonly released into bodies of water creating unsafe drinking water and rivers catching fire. Industrial air pollution, such as acid rain and smog, was also affecting manufacturing cities with coal-powered plants. There was little serious regulation on pollution until major environment laws started being passed by Congress in the early sixties.

In the first two centuries of U.S. history was a widespread environmental destruction. In the 19th century there were four people who played a key role in protecting the environment; Henry Thoreau, John Audubon, George Marsh, and President Theodore Roosevelt. The modern environmental movement was in the 19th century Europe and North America as they exposed the cost of environmental negligence. Rachel Carson a Marie Biologist wrote a book in the 1960’s

The 1970’s represent a pivotal point in history that rewrote how America viewed its environmental policies- both on a policymaker and citizen scientist standpoint. As the public became more aware of environmental issues, concern about pollution, improper disposal, dwindling resources, radiation and poisoning enraptured a growing number of supporters. These supporters made it so that unlike the Progressive Era’s conservation movement (1890’s-1920’s), which was mainly elitists, this modern movement was pushed by “the common man.” It was an era that celebrated leaders such as John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Jefferson. One of those leaders in the forefront of these radical changes was Congressman Morris K.

Before the 60s there was little to no talk about environment protection but eventually in the heap of the Vietnam War people changed their ways and values about the environment and realized this is a massive issue in the United States and around the world. While protesting the War in Vietnam the protesters were asking for environment protection immediately. The scenes of protest for the long and traumatizing and the push for environmental protection was seen by both the White House and Congress and both branches were thoroughly impressed. This led to the 26th amendment in 1971 that changed the age to vote to 18 years old. This opened a whole new section for politics and made people double check their values in society in order to change and stand up for issues for America and for the rest of the

Over the past decade a concern for protecting and preserving the environment has developed amongst United States citizens. Citizens have been promoting clean air, clean water, and clean land. Clean air means protecting the public from airborne contaminants known to be hazardous to human health. The Clean Air Act of 1970 is a law designed to control air pollution on a national level. It requires the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop and enforce regulations in order to protect the people (Environmental Protection Agency 2013). Clean water is water which is safe enough to be consumed by humans or used with low risk of harm. The Clean Water Act of 1972 was developed to restore and maintain the chemical, physical,

As a result, enactment of environmental laws and policy implementation developed into a political debate between both Republican and democratic politician in the 1960s. By the end of the 1960s numerous environmental bills aimed at protecting the environmental from pollution, degradation, erosion, deforestation, land ownership were introduced on the floor of the U.S senate. These policy actions action give birth to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a comprehensive environmental policy conceived in the late 1960s by Henry M. Jackson a democratic senator from Washington State and signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), is a landmark environmental policy that has helped in shaping the environmental policy arena and have proven to be one of the most important environmental policy Act of the nineteenth-century. The author of Environmental Law Handbook writes, “The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969(NEPA) has been heralded as the Magna Carta of the country’s environmental movement. It was signed into law on January 1, 1970, to address the need for a national environmental policy to guide the growing environmental consciousness and to shape a national response”(Sullivan

In the 1970’s there was growing confusion regarding environmental policy due to certain states creating environmental protection laws which were largely ineffective. To ease confusion, fix national guidelines, and monitor and enforce them President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA functions under three federal departments: the Interior, Agriculture, and Health, Education and Welfare departments. The original role of the EPA was to administrate the Clean Air Act which was enacted to reduce the air pollution caused by vehicles and industry. The EPA has since grown to enforce at least 12 major statutes such as: ocean dumping laws, safe drinking water, insecticides, and asbestos hazards in

When thinking of the environmental movement in America, it is presumably just thought of as the effects climate change and left-winged ideas, but the history of the movement is much more complex than its current state. As Europeans began colonializing America, the wilderness was a vast and plentiful resource and new settlers quickly conquered new land. As America was created into an industrialized and urbanized nation, debates occurred on what environment of our newfound country should hold. The environmental movement started with conserving and preserving wilderness resources as an American idea, which is shown in the film Simba: King of the Beasts, and shifts to the modern environmental movement were the effects of industrialized American have effects on human health and quality of life shown in the film Blue Vinyl.

President Richard Nixon officially created the Environmental Protection Agency, otherwise noted as the EPA, in the spring of 1970. However, concern for the environment and its protection began long before the government regulatory body. In years prior, environmentalism had planted its roots as a growing focus of many American citizens. Before the focus on the environment as we know it, there were multiple individuals who stressed the importance of nature and brought attention to the degradation of the environment through industrialization. Famous literary scholars first expressed their concern during the 1850’s—a direct response to the Industrial Revolution. Henry David Thoreau, with his ode to nature through Walden, or Life in the Woods, captured the importance of nature in a transcendental sense; while later in the nineteenth century, John Burroughs took a more realistic approach with his 27 volumes of essays on his experience with nature. In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal brought the sense of ecology into government acts; among which were The Soil Conservation Service—reducing the effects of erosion on agricultural land, and the Pittman-Robertson Act, responsible for funding state fishing and wildlife programs from taxes on hunting and fishing equipment.1

Most historians look back on the sixties as a time when the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the peace movement not only came to the forefront of public awareness, but represented the totality of social justice issues for that era. In “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties” Adam Rome puts forth his argument that one of the most important and vital movements that coevolved during that decade, the environmental movement, has long been denied its proper place as one of the most consequential and significant movements of the time. His overall topic—an attempt to validate a relationship between environmentalism and the more familiar societal issues of the 1960s—is more specifically articulated in his thesis, which asserts that, “The literature on the sixties slights the environmental movement, while the work on environmentalism neglects the political, social, and cultural history of the sixties”

The world population surpassed 3 billion in 1960 and continues to put a strain on natural resources and the environment (Ortiz-Ospina and Roser, 2016). During the mid to late twentieth century, the environment became a popular topic in politics. Walls declared, “by 1988 Democratic and Republican Presidential candidates alike were hailing themselves as champions of the environment” (Walls, 2014). The Boomers and the general population were “increasingly environmentally conscious and supportive of the green movement and green products and services" (Williams and Page, 2010). According to David Walls, “Seventy-five percent of Americans in 1989 identified themselves as environmentalists… all the more remarkable given that twenty-five years

The Article, “Uncertainty, Risk, Trust, and Information: Public Perceptions of Environmental Issues and Willingness to Take Action” written by Reneé J. Johnson and Michael J. Scicchitano in its current form is unfit for publication. Johnson and Scicchitano should be commended for identifying a gap in our ability to accurately quantify the strength and intensity of environmental concerns. This gap is certainly worthy of further study; however, their execution and attempt to quantify this phenomena does not have the necessary wherewithal to close the gap in the literature as it stands.

Environmentalism in some form goes back decades consisting of a variety of activities that led to policy for preservation and protection open places and spaces (see Ch. 3). Past conservation groups appealed directly to the public and decision-makers, especially youth and counterculture, and