News From a Changing Planet — #1
Hello, and welcome to the first installment of News from a Changing Planet.
I'm Tatiana Schlossberg, and I write and report about climate change and the environment. My book, Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have, comes out on August 27. (Pre-order your copy today!)
This is a newsletter about our changing planet, in which I plan to cover things like: climate news, climate solutions, the effects of climate change, environmental impacts, environmental history, new research, regulatory changes and why they matter, and hopefully answering some of your questions. I would love to hear from you about what you'd like to see here, and what is or is not working for you.
Now, I'd like to turn to what you came here for: the history of industrial pollution in Ohio. Just kidding but not really!
When I think about what life must have been like in 1969, the first things that comes to mind aren’t smog, burnt cars, and sewage and toxic waste swirling together in almost every single urban waterway. But they should be.
Fifty years ago yesterday, June 22, (an anniversary that happened before this newsletter existed), oil-soaked debris in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire for at least the thirteenth time. This particular fire, which was actually relatively small compared to the earlier ones in the river, has been credited with changing everything – with giving us the clean air and clean water that we take for granted today.
It’s somewhat of an exaggeration to say that the Cuyahoga fire is responsible for all of America’s environmental reforms. But it is true that the Cuyahoga River was a symbol of the significant and dangerous pollution that poisoned most American cities by the late 1960s: dozens of oil refineries, steel works and other factories sat near the Cuyahoga, dumping all of their waste into the river, which empties into Lake Erie, currently the source of drinking water for 11 million Americans.
It’s hard for people like me, born when the EPA was decades old, to understand how contaminated cities (and the environment in general) were. (To get a better sense, check out the archives of the Documerica Project, an 1970s EPA initiative that sent freelance photographers around the country to photograph pollution.) Pollution was everywhere, but the Cuyahoga River fire and a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara that same year made people recognie that this pollution was dangerous, unacceptable, and unnecessary. The next year, environmentalists organized the first Earth Day, which brought 20 million Americans (then, about 10 percent of the population!) out to the literal and figurative streets.
In the midterm elections that year, voters defeated 7 of the 12 members of Congress with the worst environmental records, nicknamed “The Dirty Dozen” by environmental advocates, sending a powerful message about what mattered to Americans: air they could breathe, water they could drink, or swim and play in, an environment that hadn’t been handed over to polluters. All together, these events helped spur the creation of the EPA, the expansion of the Clean Air Act, and the passage of the Clean Water Act, some of the most important and successful environmental measures in history.
In the nearly 50 years since then, we’ve come to take that hard work for granted.
It is because of the Clean Air Act that President Trump can even plausibly say, “We have the cleanest air in the world in the United States, and it’s gotten better since I’m president,” though neither of those claims is true. It is because of the Clean Water Act that the EPA recently announced that it’s okay to eat fish caught in the Cuyahoga River.
But these are qualified successes: air quality in the United States is getting worse, according to the American Lung Association. Air pollution killed more than 80,000 Americans in 2017; nearly a quarter of Americans get their drinking water from sources that violate federal safety standards, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council; minority and low-income communities suffer disproportionately from pollution and from the effects of climate change.
The Trump administration wants to undo that progress, and make life easier for industrial polluters at our expense. So far, they have undone (or tried to) at least 83 environmental regulations. With actions like these, the everyday pollution we live with, which already kills us, will be much worse. And they are taking these steps at precisely the moment we can least afford them, as some of the inevitable effects of climate change take hold. These actions will make climate change more dramatic; climate change will worsen the effects of these problems.
This anniversary, whether it’s precisely accurate or not, should remind us that a clean environment requires our constant attention. We have to keep demanding powerful governmental regulation and oversight, since it’s clear that polluters won’t do the right thing on their own.
Climate change is already here. Its effects are going to make life different, and likely more difficult, for all of us. As we look to our climate-changed future, we can learn another lesson from the environmental successes of the last 50 years: organizing, demonstrating and voting can make a difference. We just have to get out there.
Tatiana
Pre-order your copy (or audiobook! read by me!) of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have.
Find more of my work here.