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.<p>First off, this is blogspam, the original Popular Science article is a bit better. There's a reason blogspam is discouraged by the guidelines.<p>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.<p>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.
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...
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.<p>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.)
It's important to tell a balanced story. <i>Parts</i> of America was like this. <i>Most</i> of it was not.<p>Civil suits failed to curb industrial emissions in built-up areas, which then spilled over everywhere else. The EPA was a godsend.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>So sure, EPA yay! So what the hell does that actually mean?<p>ADD: No matter what the group, big corporate governance groups, local town councils, Non-profit boards, or federal agencies, <i>political groups exist for political reasons</i>. 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.
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?<p>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.
The original quote by Alanis Obomsawin, an Abenaki from the Odanak reserve, was about Canada:<p>"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. <i>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.</i>"
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 <i>his</i> 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.
If you follow some links, you can find the whole collection (15000 images!):<p>Documentation project overview: <a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542493" rel="nofollow">https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542493</a><p>Archive contents: <a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.parentNaId=542493&f.level=item&sort=naIdSort%20asc" rel="nofollow">https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=*:*&f.parentNaId=54249...</a><p>Link to the original PopSci article: <a href="https://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos" rel="nofollow">https://www.popsci.com/america-before-epa-photos</a><p>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.<p>Some examples not necessarily related to the EPA:<p>- Auto emissions regulations (or lack thereof)<p>- Waste disposal (e.g. burning trash on the side of the road or dumping trash in public places)<p>- 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?)<p>- Building codes, both for safety and accessibility<p>- Marketing spam (depending on location, I'll get a handful of marketing sms a day - I have a newfound appreciation for CAN-SPAM[1])<p>You can argue that certain regulations go too far or maybe they don't go far enough, and those are important question to ask.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-spam" rel="nofollow">https://www.fcc.gov/general/can-spam</a>
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.<p>Difficulty mixed with opportunity.
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 <i>AND</i> 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.<p>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".<p>PS: I grew up in a really polluted city.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Today I am not so sure as I think it's been too politicized.<p>There is an interesting debate about it here:<p><a href="https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/climate-change-epa-has-gone-overboard" rel="nofollow">https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/climate-change...</a>
This is sort of a contentless post.<p>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 <i>bad</i>.<p>Is it possible to find pictures from the late 60s showing pristine beautiful nature shots?<p>Is it possible to find pictures from late 60s showing clean and tidy small town streets?<p>Is it possible to find pictures from 2018 showing residents holding dirty water (ie. Flint, Michigan)?<p>Is it possible to find pictures from 2018 of dirty filthy slums?<p>Therefore, whats really the message? Let me guess....someone wants more money for their budget?