Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Like virtually all Americans, I don’t want drinking water or the air we breathe—my own, my family’s, or anyone else’s—polluted. But I don’t understand a lot about toxic chemicals. I’m probably above average as far as my education goes—I took a lot of science classes in college and grad school, including ecology, biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, and both human and avian physiology. To understand how regulations are crafted, enacted, and enforced, I also took a couple of graduate-level environmental law classes.

But like every single person in the country, it’s impossible for me to keep up with all the environmental risks to me, my family, and birds even as year after year, more pesticides, plastics, and other materials are formulated, and more waste material incinerated and dumped in landfills and the ocean.

The Clean Air, Clean Water, and Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Acts did not itemize every possible contaminant. That would have been impossible then and orders of magnitude more difficult now, considering that more than 800 pesticides are currently registered by the EPA for use in the United States and more than 17,000 pesticide products are currently on the market here. More than one billion pounds of pesticides are applied in the United States every year, and that amount is mushrooming because many of our food crops are genetically modified to withstand increasingly heavy herbicide applications as more and more weeds grow resistant.

Pesticides are only a fraction of the dangerous chemicals released into our air and water. Emissions from manufacturing and power plants, refineries, and incinerators; waste byproducts from manufacturing all kinds of chemical products; and those chemical products themselves can be toxic. How could anyone possibly keep track of all this?

The genius of environmental legislation enacted in the 1970s was to empower the brand new Environmental Protection Agency to make environmental assessments about a whole panoply of potentially toxic chemicals, setting national standards for how much of any toxin can be released into the air or water. This is exceptionally complicated but essential to prevent environmental disasters.

Last summer when he was 2 years old, my grandson knew that before we could take a walk or play outside each morning, we had to check the air-quality index. Children today have lost the fundamental American freedom to play outside without risking their health. Walter is a child of privilege—the houses he plays in have high-quality air filters. How about the many children whose families don’t have them? Cleaning up all these environmental messes, and preventing as many as we can before they become dangerous, is what we count on the EPA’s scientific and administrative staff to do—vital work that we all depend on for our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness whether we’re 2 years old or 72.

The extraordinary popularity of the first Earth Day put a lot of pressure on the Nixon administration. On July 9, 1970, less than three months after that inspiring and empowering day, Nixon proposed consolidating the piecemeal government pollution control programs into a new Environmental Protection Agency, and the House and Senate quickly approved. In its first year, the EPA had a budget of $1.4 billion and 5,800 employees. At its start, the EPA was primarily a technical assistance agency that set goals and standards, but soon Congress gave it regulatory authority, too.

I remember the elation I felt when the EPA opened for business on December 4, 1970. Soon the Cuyahoga River would no longer catch fire. Birds would stop dying from the insecticides that took out way more than the insect pests they were targeting. Gary, Indiana would stop smelling so bad that we’d quite literally be gagging whenever we drove between Chicago and East Lansing. I felt as joyful and triumphant as Princess Leia at the end of the first Star Wars movie. Our long national nightmare would soon be over. Of that I was absolutely certain.