Growing up in the 1970s, I took for granted the trash piles along the highway, tires washed up on beaches, and smog fouling city air. The famed “ of 1971 became a symbol of widespread environmental damage across the United States.

That’s why the , energized the nation. In the , roughly 10% of the population took to the streets to shout together: “Enough is enough!”

Republican and Democratic politicians alike listened. Over the decade that followed, all the nation’s foundational environmental laws were passed with strong bipartisan support – the , , and more.

The “Crying Indian” ad began running on TV in the U.S. in 1971 and shows scenes of pollution that were common across the country at the time. The harms were all too real, though it was later revealed the actor was of Italian ancestry, not Indigenous heritage.

These laws are taking a beating at the moment, including from the Environmental Protection Agency – the federal government agency created in 1970 to . The agency’s own leader, Lee Zeldin, boasted of “” of environmental regulations. President Donald Trump regularly derides environmental laws as .

But the conditions that made these laws necessary have largely been forgotten. This environmental amnesia allows critics to focus entirely on costs while ignoring the laws’ very real benefits and achievements.

I’m an , so was excited to learn recently about the , courtesy of a by writer . It shows in clear photographic evidence how dirty the U.S. used to be and wakes people up to how much better the environment is today.

Across the U.S., including on Fifth Avenue in New York City, millions of people demanded environmental protection on the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970.

An inspired origin

Environmental protection was a bipartisan effort in the 1970s: The EPA was , a Republican. The agency’s first leader was Bill Ruckelshaus, a Republican congressman from Indiana.

Inspired by the famous commissioned in the 1930s by the Farm Security Administration, Ruckelshaus’ newly created EPA commissioned a nationwide photo record. The goal, as Leek put it, was to “, create a ‘visual baseline’ against which to judge their efforts, and introduce the agency to the country through art.”

In its few short years of operation, from 1972 through 1978, the produced over 20,000 photographs of rivers and farms, highways and city streets. The photos provide a vivid window into the state of the U.S. environment in the 1970s. Now, looking back, they highlight the progress made in the decades since, a demonstration of environmental laws’ successes far more powerful than graphs and statistics.

The landfill in Boulder County, Colo., in 1972 was just an open pit people could walk right up to and throw their trash in.

Solid waste

As a kid, every Sunday my father and I would load the back of our station wagon with trash barrels and drive to the town dump – literally a hole in the ground. My dad would back up to the edge of the pit, and I would enthusiastically run out for what we called “The Olympic Trash Throw!” pouring the barrels’ contents down to where a bulldozer rumbled back and forth, compacting the trash while gulls circled overhead.

To say America’s landscape was littered in the 1970s is not merely poetic phrasing. Waste disposal was a matter of local law, and illegal dumping was commonplace. could be sent to the local dump along with tires and just about anything else people and companies wanted to get rid of. When the dump was full, it was , ready for recreation or building construction.

One place where this happened was Love Canal, a neighborhood near Niagara Falls, New York. A dump holding decades of chemical drums from the Hooker Chemical Co. was lightly covered and sold to the town for just $1. The town was grateful. A .

Only when people noticed and among the residents – and saw oozing waste – did opinion change.

In 1980, a massive cleanup got underway in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls, N.Y.

In 1976, Congress passed the , which was the first law that tracked waste materials from their creation to their disposal and set tough standards for how to dispose of them. But by then, decades of unregulated waste disposal had contaminated sites all over the country. The contaminants, toxicity and people responsible were often unknown.

Four years later, the ” set standards and assigned financial responsibility for cleaning up hazardous waste sites. The law created a multibillion-dollar fund that could pay for the cleanups and required to reimburse the government or clean up the sites on their own.

Faced with requirements to track their waste and heavy fines if the disposal resulted in hazardous sites, companies paid much more careful attention to their waste disposal. No one wanted to pay for cleaning up a Superfund site.

Discarded tires litter the shorefront of Baltimore Harbor in 1973.

Water pollution

I had the misfortune in 1978 to capsize while sailing a boat on the Charles River in Boston. My shame turned to a dermatologist’s visit when I broke out in rashes the next day. You fell in the Charles at your peril.

Environmental advocates weren’t kidding when, in the 1960s and 1970s, they declared “” because of all the industrial pollution pouring into its waters. An oil slick on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River , but it was actually the the river had burned in a century.

Just as with dumps on land, all kinds of waste was being disposed of in rivers, lakes and harbors. There was a federal law in place, but it was ineffective and relied on states to set limits and enforce them.

The sought to create a national standard, requiring companies that wanted to discharge waste into waterways to get a federal permit and use the best available technology to reduce the amount and toxicity of what they did dump. The act also provided billions of taxpayer dollars to upgrade sewage treatment plants so they didn’t just dump untreated sewage into the water.

The badly polluted Niagara River flows into Lake Erie in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1973.

The ambitious goal was to end water pollution entirely and make all of the nation’s waters . Those aspirational goals for the country’s waters still have not been fully met, though Ruckelshaus used to quip that .

Even more telling, the Charles River and other urban rivers that people avoided in the 1970s now boast all manner of recreation, with little or no risk of rashes .

Smog blankets Salt Lake City in 1972.

Air pollution

Perhaps the most obvious improvement since the 1970s has been in air quality around the U.S.

The horrible is well known. But many other cities were that led to across the nation over the decades. In Pittsburgh it was only half-jokingly said that you had to .

The was the first law to require the EPA to set to protect the air people breathe. In short order, , on cars, , and the were stringently regulated. An EPA study found that the benefits under the law exceeded costs by a factor of more than 30 to 1 and in 2020 alone .

Smog was a problem in Louisville, Ky., and across the nation in the early 1970s.

I could go on with photos and stories about laws from the 1970s that protected wetlands, conserved open space, reduced pesticide use, increased recycling and made many other changes to how Americans treat our lands and waters.

But it all boils down to two simple facts. First, with the exception of greenhouse gases, which have been , every major measure of environmental health has . And second, those improvements all occurred during times of strong economic growth, with .

Calling these laws “job killers” misses the point entirely. They created jobs and stopped environmental killers. The laws now being demonized are the very reason the Documerica photos are images of the past, not the present. Environmental laws and regulations have their costs, to be sure, but these photographs still hold visceral power: They show just how far the nation has come and what is at risk if we forget.

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