The Birth of EPA
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by Jack Lewis
T he official birthday of EPA is
December 2, 1970. Like any other
birth, EPA's needed progenitors, and a
family tree stretching back for years.
Surely no factor was more pivotal in the
birth of EPA than decades of rampant
and highly visible pollution. But
pollution alone does not an agency
make. Ideas are needed-better yet a
whole world view-and many
environmental ideas first crystallized in
1962.
That year saw the publication of
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, first in
serial form in the New Yorker and then
as a Houghton Mifflin best seller. This
exhaustively researched, carefully
reasoned, and beautifully written attack
on the indiscriminate use of pesticides
was not exactly light reading. Yet it
attracted immediate attention and
wound up causing a revolution in
public opinion.
An inveterate bird-watcher, Carson
derived her missionary zeal from her
fear that fewer species of birds would be
singing each spring unless pesticide
poisoning was curtailed. The readers of
her book, however, were less alarmed
by the prospect of a silent spring than
they were about people dying from any
number of hidden poisons lurking in
what had previously seemed a benign
environment. It was not hard to wax
hysterical after reading in Carson's book
that the common salad bowl may
easily present a combination of organic
phosphate insecticides that could
interact with lethal consequences to
the unsuspecting salad muncher.
Silent Spring played in the history of
environmentalism roughly the same role
that Uncle Tom's Cabin played in the
abolitionist movement. In fact, EPA
today may be said without exaggeration
to be the extended shadow of Rachel
(Lewis is Assistant Editor of the EPA
Journal.)
6
Carson. The influence of her book has
brought together over 14,000 scientists,
lawyers, managers, and other employees
across the country to fight the good fight
for environmental protection.
Skeptics then and now have accused
Carson of shallow science, but her
literary genius carried all before it.
Followers flocked to Carson's
cause-rendered all the more sacred by
her premature death in 1964. Suddenly,
everywhere people looked, they saw
evidence of nature's spoilation. Concern
over air and water pollution spread in
widening eddies from the
often-forgotten core of the movement: a
highly detailed and intellectually
challenging book about commercial
pesticides.
The issue of the environment
exploded on the country like
Mount St. Helens.
The disillusioning effect of the
Vietnam War enhanced the popularity
of Silent Spring. When people heard of
the defoliation tactics used in the
jungles of Indochina, they became more
receptive to the environmental ideas
advanced by Carson and her countless
imitators. The cognoscenti even began
using a more arcane term-ecology
in reference to a science of the
environment, then still in its infancy.
The period 1962 to 1970 witnessed a
slow erosion in the popularity of the
word conservation, as man himself
replaced trees and wildlife as the
endangered species, bar none.
Overpopulation and industrialization
had left mankind trapped in a
deteriorating environment. The damage
was not just esthetically displeasing but
threatening to the very survival of man.
Environmentalism gained strength as a
movement dedicated to ending-and if
possible-reversing this decline in the
human environment.
Everywhere television programs,
symposia, and teach-ins raised the
burning question: Can Man Survive?
In May 1969, U Thant of the United
Nations gave the planet only ten years
to avert environmental disaster; the
following month, he blamed the bulk of
planetary catastrophe on the United
States. Under Secretary of the Interior
Russell E. Train spoke skeptically at the
April 1969 Centennial of the American
Museum of Natural History: If
environmental deterioration is permittedf
to continue and increase at present
rates, [man] wouldn't stand a snowball's
chance in hell [of surviving].
By late 1969, the subterranean
rumblings heralding the impending
explosion could already be heard. On
August 31, Senator Ted Stevens of
Alaska complained: Suddenly out of
the woodwork come thousands of
people talking about ecology. On
October 20, Robert Bendiner-in a
signed New York Times editorial-had a,
startling prediction to make: Call it
conservation, the environment,
ecological balance, or what you will, it
is a cause more permanent, more
far-reaching, than any issue of the
era-Vietnam and Black Power
included.
The Nixon Administration, although
preoccupied with an unpopular war and
a recession-ridden economy, took some
stopgap action on the environmental
front in 1969. In May, President Nixon
had set up a Cabinet-level
Environmental Quality Council as well
as a Citizens' Advisory Committee on
Environmental Quality. His critics
charged that these were largely
ceremonial bodies, with almost no real
power.
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The Birth of EPA
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