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23 April 2020
Toxics
How ‘Filthydelphia’ made Earth Day a thing
Without the work of Philadelphians, Earth Day may never have become a thing.
Read the Full Article on
www.witf.org
23 April 2020
Toxics
As Earth Day turns 50, Pitt helps mine milestones of environmental action
The magazine Environmental Action is a time capsule of articles and essays on the great and small environmental policy topics of the day.
Read the Full Article on
www.post-gazette.com
19 September 2019
Justice
49 years of environmental victories, in photos
As delegates gather at the UN’s Climate Action Summit, we look at conservation milestones since the first Earth Day in 1970.
Read the Full Article on
www.nationalgeographic.com
01 December 2018
Climate
From 1991: The environmental impact of President George H.W. Bush
In 1988, George Bush stood on the deck of a boat in Boston's filthy harbor and proclaimed himself an environmentalist.
Read the Full Article on
www.nytimes.com
18 February 2018
Climate
Profiles in Scourges, Part 3: A Western Rebellion Comes of Age. And Rage.
There is striking parallel between Ronald Reagan's environmental wrecking crew of years past and the current administration. Here is part 3 in a series looking back at Reagan rollbacks and characters.
Read part 1 on Reagan's Interior Secretary, James Watt and part 2 on EPA chief Anne Gorsuch.
<p><em><a href="http://www.ehn.org/profiles-in-scourges-james-wattweekend-reader-for-sun-feb-4-2530539879.html" target="_blank"></a></em>In August 1980, a presidential candidate took the podium before his Salt Lake City supporters. "I happen to be one who cheers and supports the Sagebrush Rebellion. Count me in as a rebel."<br></p><p>The crowd roared. Three months later, they helped make the "rebel," Ronald Reagan, president. The Sagebrush Rebellion came to dominate politics in much of the west in the late 70's and 80's, but its sentiments were nearly a century old. The classic song "Don't Fence Me In" may have been written by a tenderfoot like Cole Porter, but it speaks for generations of miners and cattlemen who built the West.</p><p>Ranchers' ire at restrictions and the imposition of grazing fees simmered to the surface. Wayne Hage, a southern Nevada rancher, became a Sagebrush hero for defying federal grazing restrictions. His legal battle continued a decade after his death, culminating with a 2016 Supreme Court decision against him. A <a href="https://www.apnews.com/7df6f0e2d6f24944821883a882516918" target="_blank">second ruling </a>forced Hage's heirs to pay over half a million in grazing fees to the Feds.</p><p><strong>The spotted owl hatches causes and cookbooks</strong></p><p>Endangered species controversies didn't start with the Northern Spotted Owl. Shortly after the Endangered Species Act was passed and signed into law in 1973, biologists warned that a Tennessee Valley Authority dam project could exterminate a tiny fish called the snail darter. Americans took sides on whether a tiny fish with a comical name should stand in the way of human progress.</p><p>The new ESA also listed the Northern Spotted Owl as a "potentially endangered species." The owl and the timber industry share a fondness for old growth forests. Throughout the seventies and early 80's, state and federal officials plan a hodgepodge of buffer zones and protected areas for the birds. Unlike the snail darter, protecting the spotted owl was seen as threatening a major way of life and mode of commerce in the Pacific Northwest.</p><p>Conservationists' petition to list the owl as endangered was rejected by the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1987. In 1989, as loggers' protests mount and anti-spotted owl t-shirts and cookbooks hit the market, a <a href="http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20000806&slug=4035697" target="_blank">federal judge halted 140 Forest Service timber sales</a> to protect the bird. Logging restrictions, plus a nationwide housing slump, hit many timber towns hard. Hard feelings between loggers and environmentalists continue, and the "jobs-versus-environment" meme took an almost irrevocable hold.Owls and grazing rights were flashpoints, but government regulation brought multiple industries to the boiling point. Farmers balked at pesticide restrictions and the "Waters of the US" rule; Commercial fishermen, while acknowledging deep problems with the health of some fish stocks, fought against quotas and fishery closures; coal and oil workers found the ring of truth in the most daft climate denial theories. Rust-belt factory workers saw pollution controls as an end to their means.</p><p>Some of the movement's leaders found their absurd views to be taken seriously: <br>In 1995, Idaho congresswoman Helen Chenoweth held a hearing in Boise to investigate reports that ranchers were being visited by government "black helicopters" seeking to enforce the Endangered Species Act. (<em>Society note: Chenoweth married Sagebrush Rebellion firebrand Wayne Hage in 1999.) </em></p><p>Texas congressman Tom DeLay went farther, playing the Hitler card by routinely referring to EPA as "the Gestapo of Government."</p><p>The sons and daughters of Sagebrush rose again in recent years. In 2014, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy led an armed standoff with Bureau of Land Management officials over a million dollars in unpaid grazing fees. Two years later, Bundy's son Ammon led a month-long armed takeover of the headquarters of Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.</p><p><span></span>In all, some of the hardest working American communities found common ground in resenting regulation -- and even hating the regulators, scientists, and environmentalists they held responsible for it. But they hardly arrived there by themselves. Conservative media like talk radio and <em>Fox News </em>provided a constant drumbeat; Lobbying titans like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Farm Bureau Federation provided inside clout. And a phalanx of conservative and libertarian funders provided the cash.</p><p>With its faux populism and pipe-dream pledges to revive the coal industry, the Trump Agenda makes full use of all of this resentment.</p><p>But it didn't invent any of it.</p>
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11 February 2018
Originals
Profiles in Scourges: Anne Gorsuch. Weekend Reader, Sun. Feb. 11
There is striking parallel between Ronald Reagan's environmental wrecking crew of years past and the current administration. Here is part 2 in a series looking back at Reagan rollbacks and characters.
<p>
A sharp aggressive lawyer who rose in western conservative circles, then elected to the Colorado legislature as part of a self-named group called the "House Crazies," Anne Gorsuch made a career of challenging what she saw as repressive federal regulation.<br>
</p><p>
With Ronald Reagan's landslide election, she found herself at the helm of arguably the most "repressive" of the bunch, the Environmental Protection Agency. She cut an impressive figure. While Gorsuch was widely described as "charming," Denver's <em>Rocky Mountain News</em> added that "she could kick a bear to death with her bare feet."</p><p>
In less than two years, Gorsuch oversaw a 22 percent cut in the EPA's budget and cashiered nearly 20 percent of the EPA's personnel. A 1983 <em>New York Times </em>editorial <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/16/opinion/mrs-gorsuch-pollutes-the-epa.html" target="_blank">tore into her management style, </a>declaring "Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies in government. She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay."<span></span>
</p><p>
Environmental enforcement took a nosedive, as did the morale of career EPA employees. Gorsuch derided the "hysteria" of environmental groups, and pushed a wildly unpopular, ultimately unsuccessful proposal to <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article130205449.html" target="_blank">burn toxic wastes</a> aboard ships along the heavily-populated east coast.
</p><p>
Gorsuch differed from her Interior Department counterpart, James Watt, in two vital ways. First, she was not given to the i<a href="http://www.ehn.org/profiles-in-scourges-james-wattweekend-reader-for-sun-feb-4-2530539879.html" target="_blank">deologically-driven outbursts and poorly-timed jokes</a> that eventually cost Watt his job.<br>
</p><p>
Second, she instead found her way directly into political scandal. The Superfund program to clean up toxic waste sites came into being in the final days of the Jimmy Carter administration after the <a href="https://www.geneseo.edu/history/love_canal_history" target="_blank">Love Canal disaster</a> in New York State brought waste dumping into the spotlight. Superfund's great expectations sputtered, and Gorsuch's EPA seemed all too reluctant to tackle polluters and waste dumpers.
</p><p>
Congress launched multiple investigations into Superfund's struggles. Gorsuch refused to turn over thousands of EPA documents on the program, and was cited for contempt of Congress. A career EPA civil servant, Hugh Kaufman, took it upon himself to deliver much of the Superfund material to Congressional committees. </p><p> Rita Lavelle, a top deputy who oversaw the Superfund program, was convicted of perjury, sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine. Nearly 20 other EPA officials resigned, eventually including Anne Gorsuch.
</p><p>
A month before her 1983 departure, Gorsuch married Bob Burford, another of the Colorado "house crazies" who became director of the federal Bureau of Land Management.
</p><p>
In 1984, Anne Gorsuch Burford received another appointment from President Reagan to chair the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere. After non-binding votes of disapproval from both Houses of Congress, she turned the appointment down.
</p><p>
Her marriage to Burford was in divorce proceedings when he died in 1993. Retreating from public life, she spent many years in private law practice, specializing in chasing "deadbeat dads," according to her son, Neil Gorsuch.
</p><p>
Gorsuch was known for a two pack-a-day Marlboro cigarette habit, and on occasion smoked through public meetings and television interviews. She died of cancer in 2004 at age 62, but her legacy lives on: Neil Gorsuch, eldest of her three children, was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2017.
</p><p>
One more likely important difference between Anne Gorsuch and Scott Pruitt: In the early 80's, the Democrats still controlled the House of Representatives, and many Republicans still held strong sympathies for environmental protection. When Gorsuch departed, her replacement was William Ruckelshaus, a moderate Republican who had served as the first EPA Administrator in 1970. Ruckelshaus is widely viewed as having worked to restore public faith in EPA.
</p><p>
In 2018, there's speculation that Scott Pruitt could vacate the EPA job to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions should his rocky relationship with the President head further South. If so, potential Pruitt successors might include <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/146971/next-head-trumps-epa-andrew-wheeler" target="_blank">Andrew Wheeler</a>, awaiting a full Senate vote to become the top EPA Deputy Administrator. </p><p> Wheeler's bona fides include a stint on the Senate staff of uber climate-denier James Inhofe (R-OK), and as a lobbyist for coal and uranium interests. As a lobbyist, Wheeler held fundraisers for Inhofe and for Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), the current chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee.
</p><p>
In the 1980's, Republicans came to view riding roughshod through environmental values as a liability. </p><p>In 2018, it would appear to be a badge of honor.
</p>
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04 February 2018
Originals
Profiles in Scourges: James Watt. Weekend Reader for Sun. Feb. 4
There is striking parallel between Ronald Reagan's environmental wrecking crew of years past and the current administration. Here is the first in a series looking back at Reagan rollbacks and characters.
<p>James Gaius Watt was by all accounts a direct and plainspoken man. He said what he meant, and often found out how much trouble that could cause for him in Washington.<br></p><p>Born, raised, and schooled in Wyoming, Watt was a rising star among Western ranchers, farmers and miners who bristled against what they saw as intrusive federal control over their livelihoods. He worked for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the first of several nonprofit law offices focused on challenging public lands and environmental regulations.</p><p>President Reagan made Watt Interior Secretary in 1981 to the delight of the "Sagebrush Rebellion," the western groundswell that helped sweep Jimmy Carter out of office. Presaging Trump officials decades later, Watt's legal foundation had several pending lawsuits against the department he now ran.</p><p>What Watt did not have was the full backing of both houses of Congress. Republicans took control of the Senate in the Reagan landslide, but the House remained firmly in Democratic hands. But Watt was not completely hamstrung. He fired dozens of attorneys involved in environmental enforcement and announced his intention to lease the entire U.S. coastline for oil drilling, whether Big Oil wanted it or not. (They didn't).</p><p>Watt set up the <a href="https://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/minerals-management-service-does-what-james-g-watt-designed-it-to-do-in-1982.html" target="_blank">Minerals Management Service</a>, whose howlingly inept stewardship of energy resources blew up in a scandal involving drugs, porn, prostitutes and a rapidly revolving door between Big Oil and the government in 2008-2010.</p><p>He pushed for dramatic increases in coal leasing on public lands in the West, and for a moratorium on new National Park land. In other words, but for the plain-spokenness, he was a prototype for Trump-era governance.</p><p>Watt's deep religious values and apparent obliviousness to Washington culture made him a regular form of political comic relief. His edict that female Interior employees could not wear pantsuits to work was widely ignored. Washington Mall concerts by the Grass Roots and the Beach Boys drew his ire. </p><p>Watt, who later admitted he'd never heard of the Beach Boys, disinvited the band from the 1983 Fourth of July concert on the Mall out of concern that the clean-scrubbed, aging band would bring drugs, alcoholism, and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/04/07/watt-sets-off-uproar-with-music-ban/ddf51d7c-7161-46a9-a774-869fa71b6601/?utm_term=.93c933816366" target="_blank">"the wrong element"</a> to America's front lawn. He relented when Vice President George H.W. Bush and First Lady Nancy Reagan came to the band's defense.</p><p>That plainspoken streak continued. One of his ugliest quips came in 1981, foreshadowing the Bundy takeovers years later: "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used."</p><p>Watt suggested that the Interior Department's logo, featuring a bison facing to the left, should be flipped so the bison faced right. A herald of the partisan environmental divide we now face, Watt said where most saw Washington divided into Democrats and Republicans, he saw "Liberals and Americans."</p><p>Finally, a particularly unfunny joke told during a speech to the U.S Chamber of Commerce did him in. Bragging about the diversity among a coal leasing panel, Watt quipped, "We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent." </p><p>President Reagan received his resignation soon after.</p><p>He remained in Washington after leaving the Interior Department, working as a lobbyist. In 1996, he pleaded guilty to withholding documents from a grand jury investigating corruption in the Department of Housing and Urban Development. </p><p>In exchange for the guilty plea, the government dropped 18 perjury charges against Watt. He paid a $5,000 fine, served five years' probation and performed 500 hours of community service.</p><p>Watt faded from public life and retired to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he turned 80 last week. While he's had little to say about current rollback efforts, he praised the anti-regulatory push by former Vice President Dick Cheney, his Jackson Hole neighbor. "Everything Cheney's saying, everything the president's saying — they're saying exactly what we were saying 20 years ago, precisely … Twenty years later, it sounds like they've just dusted off the old work."</p><p>The same could be said for Ryan Zinke's leadership at Interior, but with a few crucial differences. Today, facepalming insults have been upgraded to Chief Executive status. Zinke and his cabinet colleagues have a volley of daily distractions and a compliant Congress to give cover as public lands, national monuments, endangered species and more lose their protection. </p><p>Not even an apparent scandal involving Zinke's Montana crony getting a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/puerto-ricos-bankrupt-utility-agreed-to-pay-whitefish-energy-double-what-linemen-make-documents-show/2017/11/13/7839cabe-c624-11e7-84bc-5e285c7f4512_story.html?utm_term=.5654a0697188" target="_blank">supersized contract</a> to re-wire hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico made a wave. </p><p> But James Watt was a prototype over 35 years ago.</p>
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19 January 2018
Justice
In Trump Era, author ponders what Teddy Roosevelt would do
The environmental legacy of past presidents tells us much about the current White House, whose occupant author Douglas Brinkley calls "a used car salesman of the worst kind." In this "Between the Lines" Q&A, the historian talks about what we can learn from TR and FDR, the future of the environmental movement and the role of journalists.
Read the Full Article on
www.sej.org
From our Newsroom
Fractured: Buffered from fracking but still battling pollution
A statewide network of fracking and conventional wells, pipelines, and petrochemical plants closes in on communities.
Fractured: Distrustful of frackers, abandoned by regulators
"I was a total cheerleader for this industry at the beginning. Now I just want to make sure no one else makes the same mistake I did. It has ruined my life."
Fractured: The stress of being surrounded
Jane Worthington moved her grandkids to protect them from oil and gas wells—but it didn't work. In US fracking communities, the industry's pervasiveness causes social strain and mental health problems.
Fractured: Harmful chemicals and unknowns haunt Pennsylvanians surrounded by fracking
We tested families in fracking country for harmful chemicals and revealed unexplained exposures, sick children, and a family's "dream life" upended.
Fractured: The body burden of living near fracking
EHN.org scientific investigation finds western Pennsylvania families near fracking are exposed to harmful chemicals, and regulations fail to protect communities' mental, physical, and social health.
LISTEN: Kristina Marusic discusses the "Fractured" investigation
"Once they had the results of our study [families] felt like they had proof that these chemicals are in their air, their water, and making their way into their bodies."