Crafting Invincible Environmental Protections, Part 1

How bad it used to be

(Listen to the radio version here.)

Me on my Grandpa’s front porch in Chicago around 1955. It took me a long time to have a clue about pollution.

When I was a little girl in Northlake, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, the creek that ran through town flooded after just about every storm. Addison Creek was a couple blocks from my house—far enough that my yard never got seriously inundated. We’d sometimes find crayfish in our yard, but only once can I recall bullheads stranded in puddles on Whitehall. The creek ran right along Russ’s street, and so his yard flooded fairly often.

Russ and his sister Jeanie in their flooded front yard, around 1954.

A dam had been constructed to control the flooding, but clearly didn’t succeed in its purpose. It did, however, churn up the phosphates in the water flowing over it so much that soapsuds billowed up and floated through the air like miniature cumulus clouds, drifting over our yard whenever the wind was southwesterly. My mother told us that the soapsuds were proof that the water was clean, but even before I ever heard the word pollution, I was pretty sure she was wrong about that.

On balmy summer evenings the DDT truck would roll down Whitehall. When we heard the truck coming, my sister and I always closed the windows for the evening, but a lot of kids jumped on their bikes to chase it—the winner was the first to get a grip on the grab bar in back. My brother would tell us who won when he came home drenched and smelly. All of our windows were coated on the inside with an oily brownish-amber residue from my parents’ Pall Mall cigarettes, and the front windows, upstairs and down, were also coated on the outside with an oily residue from the DDT spraying.

One morning after the DDT truck had gone through, before the elm trees in our front yard died of Dutch elm disease, I found an adult male Baltimore Oriole dead on the lawn—I knew what he was because he looked exactly like the stamp in my Little Golden Bird Stamps book that my Grandpa had given me. That was the only oriole I ever saw throughout my childhood, and his poor, lifeless body was sticky from the DDT.

Snow always looked sparkling white as it was falling, but within hours, the snow along streets in our town would have a pitch-black crust. I never wondered why as a kid—it was a simple fact of life. It wasn’t until I was in college that I learned that it was from the lead spewing from cars and trucks, all running on leaded gas.

We closed our car windows tightly whenever we were approaching Gary, Indiana, but the smell was still overpowering. In 1967, when I was in high school, in a nationally publicized event, several hundred million pounds of alewives washed ashore on Lake Michigan. On at least one day the smell of the rotting fish even reached Northlake, a full 14 miles from the lake.

I knew nothing about fires breaking out now and then on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, but on June 22, 1969, just after I graduated from high school, a fire erupted that in some places reached 5 stories high. That made the national news. It was obvious even to the most ignorant among us (like me!) that somebody needed to do something.

I never heard the word ecology until Russ took a summer workshop in Missoula, Montana, the summer before our senior year in high school, and I didn’t have a clue what it meant until college.

Russ had read, on his own, about environmental issues since he was in high school or even earlier, and was, from the start, determined to do something to make things better. While we were dating and when we were first married, I did what I could to hide my ignorance, pretending to understand what he was talking about, but little by little, I learned more and became equally committed. His sister Jeanie took this photo.

Fortunately, a lot of people did understand a lot about ecology and the fundamental importance, for every one of us, of clean air and water. During the 1950s and early 60s, working with Rachel Carson as their in-house editor, Chandler Robbins and others at the US Fish and Wildlife Service were publishing papers about the effects of pesticides and industrial chemicals on wildlife. I don’t remember hearing about Rachel Carson until college, but Silent Spring came out in 1962, when I was in sixth grade. In October 1968, when I was a high school senior, Joseph Hickey published his seminal paper about DDT and eggshell thinning in the critically endangered Peregrine Falcon, a bird I don’t think I’d ever heard of at the time.

The upwelling of environmental research provided a scientific basis for a community of lawyers and policy wonks to start crafting sound policies and legislation to clean up the mess. But for their ambitious laws to get through Congress, they needed massive public support, which was sparked by the first Earth Day, in 1970. And almost miraculously, the whole nation (well, at least a lot of people) came together in support of some of the most important legislation of my lifetime. People breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts, carefully written to be invincible, all within three years of that first Earth Day. Problem solved!

Or was it? Tragically, there's a Part 2 to this story.

We bought our brand new 1971 Ford Pinto, “Sammy,” a few months before we got married in March 1972. It cost $2,000, way more than we could comfortably afford, but it got much better mileage than any used cars we could find. Like EVERY car at that time, it ran on leaded gas.