
What America looked like before the EPA, in photos - AJRF
https://kottke.org/18/03/what-america-looked-like-before-the-epa-in-photos
======
kochb
Hey all, we need to go meta for a sec and talk about why this article doesn't
belong here, and how culturally this is a step in the wrong direction for HN.

First off, this is blogspam, the original Popular Science article is a bit
better. There's a reason blogspam is discouraged by the guidelines.

More importantly, this is a particularly pernicious blogspam because the
selected photos (atlas, burning boat, water glass) mostly illustrate problems
that have comparables right now. It excludes the smog and coal burning
illustrated in Popular Science that do a better job at illustrating both
pollution and the EPA's achievements.

These problems make this article a poor fit for Hacker News. I think we should
be all sad to see such an intellectually empty article ranked this highly.

~~~
roenxi
Also on the meta front, I don't actually see any discussion of the pictures
themselves. For example, I can't figure out what the problem with the Atlas
Chemical Company is by inspection - that looks a lot like industrial levels of
water vapour.

Only in the mine water example do I see what the issue is clearly. The
discussion seems to have gone straight to related political issues and the
broader environment. Interesting, but the article isn't being discussed.

~~~
ABCLAW
Those stacks aren't popping out water vapour. Check the size of the stacks and
the factory - there's no scrubbers or fractionation columns preprocessing the
waste gasses.

Paper mills are very polluting enterprises - the water you're seeing is a thin
sheet with a mostly laminar flow. It is opaque. This is not normal. The level
of waste solutes in the raw ejecta is absurdly high, and is comprised of
decomposed organic material & high oxygen content which leads to algal blooms,
bleaches, heavy metals, chelating agents, etc.

I think the burning barge is pretty self explanatory.

~~~
Someone
_”I think the burning barge is pretty self explanatory.”_

Is it? The photo doesn’t tell whether that was something that happened
regularly, and stuff like that happens today, too.

[https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-
news/?category=incidents](https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-
news/?category=incidents) taught me that the Maersk Honam (built in 2017; can
hold over 15,000 TEU) caught fire on March 6 and was evacuated. Worse, that
doesn’t seem to be that exceptionally. [http://www.seatrade-
maritime.com/news/europe/maersk-honam-jo...](http://www.seatrade-
maritime.com/news/europe/maersk-honam-joins-a-growing-list-of-horrific-
containership-fires.html) lists about one every year.

------
hliyan
When I was younger, I honestly believed in the explanation that left to their
own devices, free enterprise will work to protect the environment, as anything
that hurts the market will hurt profits. What I didn't take into account was
that this argument doesn't work for enterprises run by beings with limited
lifespans. All except the most empathic humans will not incur any cost to
avoid consequences that are beyond their lifespans (or, in some cases, beyond
their immediate offsprings' lifespans). That is why I believe that Adam
Smith's invisible hand will fail to help the environment...

~~~
ekianjo
On the contrary. Give property rights to everything and individuals and
corporations will have every incentive to protect what they own, be it
environmental resources or anything else.

~~~
zaarn
Corporations have incentives to maximize short-term profits at the sacrifice
of environmental resources and common decency (dump the chemical waste in the
river and pay your employees the lowest possible wage).

This obviously means the company will quickly run out of resources and
employees but depending on the severity of the deployed sacrifice, this can
take decades, a time span that corporations have shown on several occasions to
not care about.

~~~
ekianjo
My point was, make the river a private resource worth money to some
organization or someone, and they will fight that corporation where it
matters. Counter-balancing incentives work best, and we have already seen this
kind of system work better than regulations.

~~~
zaarn
As a public utility, the river is worth money to the government. If it goes to
waste, less people will be able to use it to make money, which leads to less
taxes.

Any agency brought up to protect the environment has per it's mission an
incentive to protect the environment and doesn't suffer the problems of a
corporation, namely limited funding. A government agency doesn't need to make
profit to receive lots of funding if it's important enough.

------
zhyder
It's unfortunate that the EPA is under attack by conservatives who want
limited government. If you start from first principles about what the min
viable government should do, a big part of its charter would be to prevent
major tragedies of the commons. And the environment is a textbook example of
something that'd suffer the tragedy of the commons without government
oversight.

I prefer a bigger government with a bigger social safety net with universal
basic healthcare, etc. But I can understand conservative opposition to that;
at least those don't produce tragedies of the commons. (They arguably do to a
lesser extent: if people's basic needs are met, they're less likely to resort
to crime to fulfill them. And a greater rate of crime is a tragedy for all;
ask anyone who's paid a premium to live in a "safe" neighborhood.)

~~~
swebs
On the other hand, does the EPA really require 8 billion dollars per year when
the protection laws have already been passed and improvements have already
been made?

In a software project, you allocate $x per month during development, and only
$(x/10) for maintenance after it has shipped. Is there a point where the EPA
can say "mission accomplished" and downsize to maintenance/enforcement mode,
or is this just a typical government organization that will happily consume as
many tax dollars as it can get as long as it can?

~~~
rayiner
Yes it does, due to the structure of the environmental laws.

In a libertarian system, you’d simply ban pollution (I.e. ban the
externalizations of environmental costs), and then let the market and the
courts hash things out. If a company was found dumping pollutants into the
water, people would sue them, and the costs of all of that would get properly
priced into the company’s products.

But the environmental laws are all about the various ways in which companies
_are allowed to pollute._ Companies can dump poison into rivers, so long as
they conform the EPA limits. Those limits are, by design, not set any
“correct” level (as above, the “correct” level is zero—forcing the externality
to be fully internalized; from an economic efficiency point of view, all
environmental externalities must be borne by parties to the transaction,
either the company or its customers). Instead, the limits are of a “best
effort” nature, and a “how to get there from here” nature. For example, the
law requires air polluters to install “the best available control technology”
on smoke stacks. What does that mean? Well, that requires continual review and
revision.

The EPA doesn’t exist to enforce laws that prevent pollution. It exists to
_manage_ all the pollution that the law allows.

~~~
celeritascelery
“Banning” pollution is not realistic. Any economy of this scale is going to
produce pollution. And while some technologies like fossil fuels are worse
then others, there is no pollution solution. So the best the EPA can do it
manange the pollution we do create to mitigate the harms.

~~~
rayiner
That's the point. In an idealized economic abstraction, banning pollution
(more accurately, creating a cause of action for damages in connection with
any level of pollution) would force the cost to be internalized. You can let
phosphorous from your farm leach into the river, but any downstream property
owners can sue you for reducing their property values by causing algal blooms.
If the value created by your farm exceeds the externalized cost of pollution,
you keep your farm, pay off the property owners, and pass the costs of that
into people who buy your meat and vegetables. When the costs of pollution are
priced into those products, the market will properly balance the benefits of
farm products against the harms of farm pollution.

But that's wildly impractical. Hence the existence of the EPA, which is tasked
with managing pollution, and using central planning to balance the benefits of
productive activity against the harms of pollution.

------
DanielBMarkham
It's important to tell a balanced story. _Parts_ of America was like this.
_Most_ of it was not.

Civil suits failed to curb industrial emissions in built-up areas, which then
spilled over everywhere else. The EPA was a godsend.

I didn't understand the problem until the first time I visited L.A. Wow, what
a mess. The air was so thick. It was disgusting.

It's amazing the progress we have made. But the EPA, like so many other
agencies (I'm looking at you, TSA) is an agency without a limiting factor. You
come up with a devil, you pass a bunch of rules, then you spend the next few
years issuing press releases about how you're saving the world.

What's happened to American politics in many areas is that there are no
feedback loops. When I look at the smog in LA back in the day and how the
skies look now? That's a feedback loop. My government is doing something I
want them to do. But when they talk about parts per billion versus parts per
trillion? It's not evidently clear to me as a voter that we're not just
continuing to expand our empire, just like the rest of the agencies.

I love what the EPA has done and I support them. But without some kind of
limiting feedback loop my support really doesn't mean much. It's just a
platitude. I don't support any agency that just runs off on their own taking
more and more control over things for reasons I don't understand (or reasons I
do understand but disagree with.)

So sure, EPA yay! So what the hell does that actually mean?

ADD: No matter what the group, big corporate governance groups, local town
councils, Non-profit boards, or federal agencies, _political groups exist for
political reasons_. We may laud their goals and love some of the things
they've done, but when you are chartered because politics, and you get funding
because politics, and people love or hate you because politics -- your primary
concern is political. That's not a knock on anybody, that's just the logic of
how these things work.

~~~
anentropic
yes, how awful it would be if you ended up with _too much_ environmental
protection

~~~
zeveb
Environmental protection isn't free, but comes at an economic cost. Too much
for the benefits and you will have a net loss.

------
pavlov
Americans love their freedom. Which is more important: the freedom of
corporations to innovate in extracting natural resources, or the freedom of
citizens to pursue happiness without being poisoned by drinking water?

The last photo on that page shows Mary Workman holding a glass of well water
that the Hanna Coal Company rendered undrinkable. Something to remember for
those who pine for the days of "great coal jobs" and that unrestricted
American entrepreneurial spirit of the 1950s.

~~~
stordoff
Not to take away from the broader point (I think the EPA and like
organisations are very important), but would Workman not have recourse through
other means (e.g. under nuisance)?

~~~
pavlov
Recourse after the fact will move some amount of dollars from one bank account
to another, but it won't restore destroyed environments and ruined health.
Life is hard to replace, money isn't.

------
Tepix
The original quote by Alanis Obomsawin, an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve,
was about Canada:

"Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which
leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of
deficiency. _When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last
river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too
late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money._ "

------
awful
I lived then and these pictures are very shallow and only show a little of
what things were like. They should show things like Fishkill, NY, and how we
would dump trash out in the sea, how every area had an impromptu dump down by
the river where old mattresses and wash machines ended up and took decades to
clean up, where people thought it was OK to dump their auto oil directly onto
the ground, massive exposed unlined dumps where auto and household chemicals
would leak eventually into aquifers, companies dumping things like chrome
plating, benzene enough it floated on drinking aquifer (see Love Canal, etc.),
where a guy thought it OK to buy medical waste and bury hundreds of the
barrels in his back yard "because it was _his_ land", or along Lake Erie where
you could not even get near it from stink of dead Alewives(arguably man-made).
The environment was worse than they portray in this pictorial.

~~~
bsenftner
I live in Van Nuys, CA, where the aerospace industry used to have
manufacturing. Three blocks from me is the "great little bike path" that
stretches the length of the valley. Guess what? That bike path is a paved over
Superfund site. All of Van Nuys has toxic earth 6" to 10" down. I refuse to
eat any fruit or vegetables grown in the area, while everyone around me thinks
I'm being paranoid.

------
pandler
If you follow some links, you can find the whole collection (15000 images!):

Documentation project overview:
[https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542493](https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542493)

Archive contents:
[https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.parentNaId=54249...](https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.parentNaId=542493&f.level=item&sort=naIdSort%20asc)

Link to the original PopSci article: [https://www.popsci.com/america-before-
epa-photos](https://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos)

Traveling outside the US (been moving around for almost 5 years now) has
opened my eyes to the value of some of the consumer/environmental/etc
protection/safety agencies/laws in the US that I didn't appreciate before.

Some examples not necessarily related to the EPA:

\- Auto emissions regulations (or lack thereof)

\- Waste disposal (e.g. burning trash on the side of the road or dumping trash
in public places)

\- Worksite safety (ever see a worker on a commercial build site wearing flip-
flops two stories up on a rickety wood scaffold held together by twine,
welding with no protective gear?)

\- Building codes, both for safety and accessibility

\- Marketing spam (depending on location, I'll get a handful of marketing sms
a day - I have a newfound appreciation for CAN-SPAM[1])

You can argue that certain regulations go too far or maybe they don't go far
enough, and those are important question to ask.

However, and this photo-documentary project underlines this, I've personally
come to the conclusion that the importance of environmental regulations can't
be understated. It affects the lives of literally everyone, in a "the air I
breathe" and "the water I drink" and "the food I eat" and "the space I occupy"
kind of way.

[1] [https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-spam](https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-
spam)

~~~
shrx
Thanks for digging up the links, really awesome collection of photos.

------
kerrsclyde
The next battle is plastic. Consumers and corporations both love the
convenience but we cannot go on producing endless steams of virtually
unrecyclable, non biodegradable waste from a finite resource.

Difficulty mixed with opportunity.

------
simula67
After EPA :
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/An...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Animas_River_spill_2015-08-06.JPG/1280px-
Animas_River_spill_2015-08-06.JPG)

~~~
titzer
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_water_spill)

The EPA didn't create this mess. They did screw up handling it, however. What
happened was that the EPA accidentally released the waste products from an
abandoned mine that had been accumulating in a reservoir for decades _all at
once_. What do you think would have happened without any regulation at all?
That shit would _already_ be everywhere.

~~~
eadmund
Well, for one think it'd have been diluted over the course of decades rather
than all being released at once. That would have been far better for the
environment.

~~~
titzer
Well, no. The plan with capturing and concentrating the waste is to then treat
said waste and dispose of it properly so that it doesn't enter the ecosystem
_at all_. Dispersing it slowly over time is like slow death: it all
accumulates eventually, since arsenic, lead, and other toxins don't just
evaporate into nothingness.

------
nanis
The direction of causality presumed in the title is mixed up. The EPA did not
materialize in a vacuum. It came about in a context of increased concern about
pollution which had exceeded tolerable levels _AND_ the U.S. had grown to the
point where the country as a whole was wealthy enough to care about such
things. Because enough people wanted less pollution, the politicians did
something.

What they did was not necessarily the "best" thing. The title of the post
should have been "What America looked like before the enough Americans began
caring for the environment, in photos".

PS: I grew up in a really polluted city.

------
tonyedgecombe
I've never really understood why conservatives are so reluctant to look after
their environment, after all they get to live in it as well.

~~~
burfog
They aren't reluctant, but you have to speak their language. You may be eager
to see a government agency placing limits on businesses, but that won't go
over well at all.

A better approach is to speak in terms of paying for what you damage. The
economy matters, and you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet... but you
pay for anything you break.

So you end up charging a price, preferably to be paid to those who are
affected, and the market responds by cutting pollution. It's almost like fine
or cap-and-trade, but without the arbitrary limit that would cause offense.
The result may even be better, since you won't always end up exactly at the
limit.

Tainting and spoiling are usually bad to the conservative mindset, but watch
out for property rights. You get to mess up your own stuff. If you bought it
and you own it, you can ruin it. Arguing for restrictions that infringe on a
person's property won't get you very far at all.

~~~
cimmanom
But what affects just one's own property vs affecting others? Can I dump toxic
waste on my own land? What happens when 10 years later it starts leaching into
the soil and poisoning nearby streams and farms? What about the animals who
eat on my land and then run back into the forest where they get shot for
someone else's dinner, and that someone else ends up consuming elevated levels
of heavy metals? What about the person who buys the land from me? Do I have to
disclose the presence of the waste to them?

~~~
LyndsySimon
> Can I dump toxic waste on my own land?

Sure, it's your land.

> What happens when 10 years later it starts leaching into the soil and
> poisoning nearby streams and farms?

Those impacted landowners now have a tort claim against you, which they should
pursue.

> What about the animals who eat on my land and then run back into the forest
> where they get shot for someone else's dinner, and that someone else ends up
> consuming elevated levels of heavy metals?

They now have a tort claim against you, which they should pursue.

> What about the person who buys the land from me? Do I have to disclose the
> presence of the waste to them?

Yes, you should. If you don't, the purchaser now has a tort claim against you,
which they should pursue.

\---

I know I'm being a bit trite with the above, but I mean no offense. The
difference here is one of strategy, not base ideas. I (and other libertarians)
believe that people who harm others through their action should be responsible
for that harm. Proponents of the EPA believe that people should be limited by
government regulation to a minimal level of harm.

I'll also grant that, prior to the EPA, the tort system in the US was
ineffective at resolving these issues. I don't believe that was a problem with
the process itself; it was (and remains) a problem with the courts.

~~~
awful
We already tried this (ex. gasoline stations) and it doesn't work: there is no
way someone who pollutes an entire aquifer with barrels of toxin can be made
to financially or mechanically remediate it. It always falls upon the
government to do so.

~~~
burfog
Requiring payment in advance solves most of that. The rest isn't solved by any
current or proposed idea; some people will just be sneaky.

------
arxpoetica
Living in Vietnam like my family does, I think about this frequently. Asian
countries suffer from some of these same industrial problems that the West
suffered from a generation ago. It isn't clear to me if these are problems
that we've collectively just offshored to more developing nations, but there
does seem to be a pattern as (Tiger in the modern case) economies
industrialize and reach a certain hard-working xenith.

------
cimmanom
That's without even showing the Cuyahoga river burning, the oil slicks and
dead animals in Newtown Creek, or any superfund sites.

~~~
jhbadger
Yeah, I was really expecting either Cuyahoga or the infamous "Valley of the
Drums" with leaking barrels of toxic waste

[http://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/valleydrum.html](http://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/valleydrum.html)

------
whiddershins
Please link to at least the popular science article which has more than three
photos.

------
rufusroflpunch
I realize that HN generally skews left politically, but this is literally
nothing more than a puff piece. There's nothing of value here.

~~~
hagbarth
Wait, what makes the EPA a left thing? It was proposed by Richard Nixon.

~~~
LyndsySimon
It has certainly been politicized, by both sides. The Democrats have used it
as a tool to regulate industry to accomplish political aims, and the
Republicans have used it as a symbolic scapegoat of the Democrats.

"The EPA" !== "environmental protection". It's a government agency, with all
the baggage that goes along with it. One can be opposed to the very existence
of the EPA while still being strongly supportive if its nominal mission.

------
singularity2001
notice all the beautiful yellow flowers next to the horse. the good times
before monsanto, bayer et al

------
ThomPete
This is not because of EPA but because of humans who have more prosperity and
start caring and having the political power to care about their environment.

The EPA is an expression of that and for a while when there were things that
were objectively problematic in the USA it was a great organization.

Today I am not so sure as I think it's been too politicized.

There is an interesting debate about it here:

[https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/climate-
change...](https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/climate-change-epa-
has-gone-overboard)

------
_red
This is sort of a contentless post.

Certainly the EPA performs a valid role, however that is not to say that any
attempts to constrain its increasing creep of scope and overreach of power is
automatically _bad_.

Is it possible to find pictures from the late 60s showing pristine beautiful
nature shots?

Is it possible to find pictures from late 60s showing clean and tidy small
town streets?

Is it possible to find pictures from 2018 showing residents holding dirty
water (ie. Flint, Michigan)?

Is it possible to find pictures from 2018 of dirty filthy slums?

Therefore, whats really the message? Let me guess....someone wants more money
for their budget?

~~~
Tepix
Are we on a sustainable path? Should the EPA get more money or less? Right now
they are getting a 25% cut. The reduction in regulations will help big
corporations, it may even create a few jobs, but it's not in the best interest
of the general public, including future generations.

~~~
LyndsySimon
> Are we on a sustainable path? Should the EPA get more money or less? Right
> now they are getting a 25% cut.

From my perspective, _everything_ in government should get less money. It's
not so much a statement against the EPA as it is a statement that the federal
government in particular is an order of magnitude too large and powerful.

> it's not in the best interest of the general public, including future
> generations.

I get where you're coming from, and sympathize with your position - but you've
not supported this statement. _How_ would cutting the EPA budget hurt us long-
term? Can those effects be mitigated through other, less costly policies?

