ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY. Following a decade of growing concern about pollution, and less than two months after the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, President Richard M. Nixon proposed creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Nixon presented the EPA proposal to Congress as a reorganization plan to consolidate the Federal Water Quality Administration, the National Air Pollution Control Administration, the Bureau of Solid Waste Management, and the Bureau of Water Hygiene, along with certain functions of the Council on Environmental Quality, the Atomic Energy Commission, and various other agencies into one agency. The primary mission of the new agency was to research the adverse effects of pollution and to establish and enforce standards to protect human health and the environment. Congress approved, and on 2 December 1970, the EPA opened its doors.

Nixon chose thirty-eight-year-old Assistant Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus as EPA's first administrator. Dubbed Mr. Clean, Ruckelshaus wasted no time explaining that the EPA's primary obligation was the protection of the environment, not the promotion of commerce or agriculture. Under Ruckelshaus, the EPA first attempted to establish and enforce air quality standards. It also went after water polluters. Immediately, EPA threatened Cleveland—whose Cuyahoga River was so polluted that it had recently caught fire—Detroit, and Atlanta with lawsuits if they did not clean up their waterways. The EPA warned business and local governments that it would use the power of the courts to enforce the nation's environmental laws. Initially, however, the agency's authority was limited because few strong federal environmental laws existed.

Major Environmental Legislation

This soon changed. The Clean Air Act of 1970 (CAA), signed into law only a month before the EPA began operations, gave the EPA significant new powers to establish and enforce national air quality standards and to regulate air pollution emitters from smokestacks to automobiles. To take just one of many examples, under the CAA, the EPA began phasing out leaded gasoline to reduce the amount of poisonous lead in the air. The Clean Water Act of 1972 (CWA) did for water what the CAA had done for air—it gave the agency dramatic new authority to establish and enforce national clean water standards. Under these laws, the EPA began an elaborate permitting and monitoring system that propelled the federal government—welcome or not—into almost every industry in America. The EPA promised industry a chance to make good faith efforts to implement the new standards, but warned that federal enforcement actions against violators would be swift and sure.

The EPA also took quick action under other new environmental laws. The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 (FIFRA) authorized the agency to regulate a variety of chemicals found in pesticides. Under its authority, the EPA banned the use of DDT, once viewed as a miracle chemical and sprayed in neighborhoods across America to stop the spread of malaria by killing mosquitoes, but later discovered to cause cancer and kill birds. The use of DDT had driven many avian species, including the bald eagle, to the brink of extinction and had inspired Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring (1962), which many credit as the clarion call for the modern environmental movement. In 1974, the passage of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) supplemented the CWA by granting the EPA power to regulate the quality of public drinking water.

The EPA's regulatory powers, however, did not stop with air, water, and pesticides. In 1976, Congress passed the Resource, Conservation, and Recovery Act (RCRA), which authorized the agency to regulate the production, transportation, storage, and disposal of hazardous wastes. That same year, Congress passed the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA), authorizing the EPA to regulate the use of toxic substances. Under TSCA, the EPA, for example, began the phase out of cancer-causing PCB production and use. The leaking of chemical containers discovered at Love Canal, New York, in 1978 drew the nation's attention to the problem of hazardous and toxic wastes already disposed of unsafely in sites across the country. To address this problem, Congress in 1980 enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Recovery Act (CERCLA), which provided a federal Superfund for hazardous waste cleanup and authorized the EPA to identify contaminated sites and go after those responsible for the contamination.

The EPA's Tasks

The Superfund measure was the last major environmental law passed by Congress during the twentieth century. Although Congress passed other important environmental legislation after 1980 and added important amendments to existing laws, CAA, CWA, SDWA, FIFRA, RCRA, TSCA, and CERCLA defined the basic parameters of EPA's regulatory powers. And the agency has since had its hands full. For example, each law required the EPA to identify any substance found in air, water, drinking water, pesticides, buildings, and waste—almost any substance found in the environment—that might be harmful to human health or the environment. The EPA then has had to identify how these substances do harm and at what doses. This has involved scientific investigation of gargantuan proportions, and the EPA is far from finished with the process.

The environmental laws have also required the EPA to determine threshold levels of regulation, another colossal task, and one that has involved more than just science. Often without much guidance from Congress, the agency has had to make difficult decisions about acceptable risks. Is a single death in one million acceptable? One in 100,000? One in 10,000? Despite its mission, politics and reality have dictated that economics play an important part in the EPA's regulatory scheme. Some substances are harmful at any level, but banning them entirely would cause catastrophic economic disaster, and in some cases would require devolutionary, and generally unacceptable, changes in the structure of modern society. The EPA's science, therefore, has always been tempered by economic and political reality.

Expanding Authority

That said, the EPA's regulatory role continued to grow during the 1980s, despite the conservative administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Following a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, the EPA began to monitor nuclear waste and fallout (though other agencies have the primary power to regulate nuclear waste). Hazardous waste leaks at Times Beach, Missouri, in 1982 accelerated the EPA's regulation of dioxins. A year later, cleanup action of the Chesapeake Bay prompted the agency to begin regulating pollution from so-called "non-point" sources, primarily urban and agricultural runoff. In 1985, scientists discovered a hole in the earth's ozone layer, and after the signing of the Montreal Protocol two years later, the EPA began regulating the phase out of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil in Alaska's Prince William Sound. The EPA fined the Exxon Corporation __BODY__ billion, the largest criminal environmental damage settlement in history.

During the 1990s, the EPA continued its attempt to fulfill its obligations under existing laws, and responded to the requirements of new laws and to the exigencies of environmental disaster and scientific discovery. The Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 forced the EPA to focus on the prevention—not just the correction—of environmental damage. In 1991, the agency created a voluntary industry partnership for energy efficient lighting and for reducing toxic chemical emissions, and a year later the agency began the Energy Star program to help consumers identify energy efficient products. In 1994, President William Clinton ordered the EPA to make environmental justice part of its mission, meaning that it would have to be certain that its regulations did not have a disparate impact on minority and low-income groups. On an old front, the EPA launched new initiatives, battling secondhand smoke in the name of indoor air pollution and creating a market-based permit trading program to reduce the sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain. By the end of the decade, it faced many new challenges, including a rapidly depleting ozone layer and global warming.

By the year 2000, the EPA had become the federal government's largest regulatory agency. It wielded a budget of nearly $8 billion and employed more than eighteen thousand people. Its ever-growing number of rules had cost the regulated community $180 billion at the twentieth century's end. The EPA's growth earned the agency many enemies in industry and among conservative politicians. It has even clashed with traditionally liberal political interests, like labor unions that fear environmental regulations will cost jobs and minority groups who resent the fact that too often environmental regulation has meant locating polluting industries and hazardous waste sites in low-income, predominantly minority communities, which have little political clout. The EPA has also received almost unending criticism from environmental groups, which believe that it has not done enough.

The Agency's Achievements

Despite its opponents and critics, the EPA has met with much success. In 2000, the air was much cleaner than it was in 1970—lead levels alone had decreased 98 percent—despite the fact that there were more cars on the road and the nation was more industrialized. Because of EPA regulations, in 2002 cars polluted 95 percent less than they did in 1970. As for water, the agency regulated pollution from 43,000 industrial facilities, preventing one billion pounds of toxics from entering the waterways each year. In 1972, one-third of the nation's waters were safe for fishing and swimming; in 2001, two-thirds were. The EPA's regulation of hazardous and toxic chemicals has saved innumerable human lives and has rescued whole species from the brink of extinction. The ban on DDT, for example, led directly to the recovery of the bald eagle, which in 1999 was removed from the endangered species list. By 2000, the EPA had led or coordinated the cleanup of half of the nation's thirteen hundred Superfund sites, and had a panoply of regulations in place to safeguard human health and the environment from hazardous wastes.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

Major Environmental Legislation

The EPA's Tasks

Expanding Authority

The Agency's Achievements

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