Kristi Noem and I were both born during the first year of the Environmental Protection Agency's existence. We thus struggle to fully comprehend the degradation of America's land, water, and air that motivated a Republican President to create a federal agency to regulate environmental matters. Well, I struggle; I don't think Kristi struggles, because she doesn't try.
Fortunately, the EPA made an effort to document America's environmental conditions when it began its work. Starting in November 1971 (a month after Mom and Dad brought baby me to Madison, and the same month Kristi was born) and 1974, over 100 DOCUMERICA photographers took more than 81,000 photographs of our cities, parks, lakes, streams, mountains, and almost anything else one could lay lenses on.
The National Archives and Records Administration has catalogued 22,000-some of the best images and digitized nearly 15,000. The Atlantic offers a 46-image slideshow that includes these photos:
The archives don't include much of South Dakota, but there is one shot of a creek polluted by the Homestake Mine (see Interested Party for further discussion of South Dakota's watersheds as chemical toilet).
Congresswoman Noem makes the incredible claim that the EPA is "out to do us all in... and close all our businesses." These pictures show what the EPA's real mission is: to prevent us from turning the clock back forty years to a junky, oily, smoggy America where big business profited by dumping its externalities without compensation on the rest of us.
Possibly the best post that you have ever had here. I can remember clearly at that time wondering what in the world acid rain was. South Dakota was insulated from the problems that the rest of the country had, or so we thought. Unfortunately forty years haven't changed the attitudes of the state much.
Those attitudes include, if you cant see it that means its not really there. Its never happened before and it isn't happening now. My folks didn’t use to have to dispose of these things this way and nothing ever happened to them. And the ever popular, we hate change and we aint a gonna do it.
From coal fired plants to fracking the future is now and like it or not the health of our planet has been thrown in the big pot at the center of the poker table with no limits. The burning question at this time is, do we continue to play the game with those interest or do we stop playing and start to heal what has already been broken. The EPA doesn’t limit job growth. Look at it like a vaccination, if we use it now it will give us the opportunity to grow our way out of a dirty situation. If we get rid of it we will surly die a long slow death.
My life lessen in the environment came in the late eighties. At that time there was a small hydro electric dam on the Little White River just west of the town of White River. This dam had been in operation for over sixty years and at one time supplied the electricity for the town before the rural electric came along.
At that time I used to spend a lot of time at White River because I had friends that I coon hunted with and that meant three or four days a week that I would be there. It was during one of those times that I learned what chemical mud was. The dam was owned by an engineer from California but run by the Littaus, the same family I hunted with, so I got to spend a lot of time looking around there. One day I got a call from Otto, the man in charge , that they were going to blow the dam to get rid of all the mud that had built up during the year to make room for more water and in turn make more electricity. Having never seen anything like this of course I wanted to see it.
When I got there the Littaus were in the process of taking out the first plank and so I stepped down to give them a hand. I think there were ten in all but I really cant remember. We would take a plank out and let the water get down to that level and then so on and so on.
When we got to the last three or four planks there was just to much mud pressing against them to pull them out so we set a small charge and blew the final part of the dam that was holding back thousands of tons of mud and other things. In truth I was warned not to get to close but I just couldn’t help myself I just had to see what was going through that dam.
First it was alright, just mud and water. Then it turned into the most beautiful rainbow colors that you have ever seen, and then the bubbles came. When that happened I was standing right above the dam and I just about didn’t make it back along the runway. Tight chest, hard time breathing, fast heartbeat, and more then my usual trouble seeing.
I turned to Otto and asked him what had just happened and he told me that what we were seeing and smelling was the accumulation of a hundred years of things being poured or farmed or dumped into what looked on the surface to be a pristine little river. That is the day that I started to think differently about the water that we drink and the air that we breath. That toxic mud went from that dam to where the Little White runs into the Big White. From there it goes into the Missouri River, and from there to the Mississippi then down to the delta and on to the Gulf.
It was just one little river but it did start here in South Dakota. How many more are there? Its hard to say but how many would it take? I know I'm a different person now then I was before that day. If I hadn't seen and smelled it I would have never believed what had happened. All I could think about for a long time was that I swam in that water whenever I wanted to.
We cant take responsibility for what happened a hundred years ago but we can start to clean up the mess and that’s where EPA comes in. Without that agency it could and would happen again and again. Without EPA the process called “fracking†and the toxic mud from the tar sands would continue to do what that chemical brew in the Little White was doing. Shit, mud, water, and chemicals all run down hill. Kristi slip into that two piece and tie that hair back and come on out for a swim. Ladies first!
The EPA will never be able to fix all the environmental problems, but it can stop other problems from becoming the next Little White River if it is given a chance.
I am The Blindman
[CAH: Bill, any post that gets you to share your wisdom must be a good post. I appreciate the time you take to add to my stories with your experience and perspective. Thank you.]
I personally would like to regulate farmers a little more. Including spraying chemicals and ripping out rows of trees without planting anything new. We need to put some strings on that subsidy money.
The James River is still at flood stage ensuring a repeat of flooding in 2012 and farmers are responsible for impairing every waterway in the chemical toilet:
http://madvilletimes.blogspot.com/2010/01/denr-releases-draft-report-on-water.html
Interesting post Cory. I'm not that old, or maybe I am, but I remember Love Canal along with seeing images like you posted. Before some regulatory oversight was created to address these issues our environment was getting trashed. The current batch of Conservatives would have you believe that if you just stop regulating business they will do the right thing environmentally. Human nature proves otherwise.
Went on a vacation/family trip to DC/NYC/Niagara/Ohio/Detroit circa '69. Dad barely smoked for over a week and said he didn't feel the urge as the air was so "rich". I'm not sure where these modern republicans are from but it is not from the party of great natural resource conservatives like TR Roosevelt or Nixon (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA, EPA, etc.).
Hi Mike and everyone else. Please let me explain my first post. I am not condemning modern day farming practices, nothing could be further from the truth. What I was saying was that the way that people farmed in the twentieth century is no longer the way that a successful farmer works his ground.
In the first place the use of chemicals is limited by the new methods of farming. The fact that those chemicals have extremely short active life spans and the cost of both the chemicals and their application have forced farmers to change their ways to survive. I might add that the methods of application have changed also. From the size of the drops that are applied to the GPS navigation systems, less means more when it comes to yields.
No-till farming is nothing new but it has been taken to a whole new level in the last twenty years. Erosion from both wind and water is almost nothing now for one simple reason, the size of the particulate mater. Back in the thirties when the great dust bowl happened they thought you had to farm the hell out of the land to make it produce. No-till is very minimalistic in those terms. You used to be able to measure dirt in microns, now it is measured in clumps. Heavier dirt means less erosion from the wind. Also the little terraces that are formed in no-till makes runoff from big rains something of the past. Less runoff means less chemicals released into the environment and better residual moisture for the plants to use until the next rain.
Farmers now also take advantage of the rotation of certain crops to compliment each other. For example one crop might get something out of the air that the next crop needs and leaves that in the soil. The next crop might use its root system to break up the ground deeper to make nutrients easier for the crop in the next years rotation to obtain and thereby needing less application of fertilizer and chemicals and in turn less money for better results.
I admit that there are still some farmers that want to continue to bang their heads into the wall and farm the way their folks did fifty years ago. But even those people are starting to realize that what they are doing is to expensive and even if they don’t want to consider the cost to the environment they do understand their bottom line. Its funny how the two go together.
We have always known that the measure of a healthy farm is the number of worms per square meter of ground. They found out long ago that worms don’t get along well with chemicals, and neither does the wildlife that also depends on that ground for survival.
Good farmers are worth every penny they get for their crops. For those that aren't good farmers, it wont mater because they wont be in the business for very long anyway subsidies or not.
We ranch here on Pass Creek. With the exception of some oats or millet we don’t farm much. We do however have many friends that farm. We all have one thing in common, the desire to have the healthiest land we can have for the purpose that we are using that land. Are there mistakes made? Yup but you will very rarely find a farmer or rancher making the same mistake twice, it just cost to damn much. Nuff Said
The Blindman