A burning river and a book on pesticides helped create America's EPA
In 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, provoking a national outcry and criminal charges against big steel firms. Seven years earlier, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had warned Americans about careless pesticide use. By the end of 1970, Richard Nixon had created an agency to deal with such problems: the Environmental Protection Agency.
Congress had been circling the issue for a decade. A 1959 bill by Senator James Murray proposing a national environmental policy failed because the conservation movement was still weak. Growing public concern changed the mood, and in 1969 Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which Nixon signed on 1 January 1970. It required a detailed environmental impact statement for every major federal action that could significantly affect the environment.
Nixon proposed the new agency on 9 July 1970 as a reorganisation, pulling pollution programmes out of several departments, including pesticide work from Agriculture and the Interior. Under the rules of the time, Congress had 60 days to object; it did not, and the EPA opened on 2 December 1970. It began with 5,800 staff and a $1.4 billion budget, inheriting 84 sites in 26 states. Early employees remembered an enormous sense of purpose, and tens of thousands of people applied to join.
Not everyone was convinced. Many in business assumed environmentalism was a passing fad, and the first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, felt pressure to prove to a sceptical public that government could actually deliver. Initially the EPA mostly offered technical help and set goals, but new laws soon gave it teeth: a major expansion of the Clean Air Act in December 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, which set mandatory standards for public water systems serving 90 percent of Americans.
Today the agency is not a Cabinet department, though its administrator usually has Cabinet rank. It has ten regional offices and 27 laboratories, and more than half of its roughly 16,000 staff are engineers, scientists or environmental specialists. Much permitting and enforcement is delegated to states and tribes.
Source: United States Environmental Protection Agency
