Strong advocate for environment needed | Column
The U.S. is in desperate need of another Gaylord Nelson, former Wisconsin governor and U.S. senator and the founder of Earth Day. Nelson said, “The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture”.
The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1971, the Clean Water Act in 1972, and the Endangered Species Act in 1973.
Today that conservation ethic is under assault both in Wisconsin and on the federal level. To Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and President Donald Trump, all environmental regulations are “burdensome,” as if they were put in place just to be a hindrance to good Americans trying to make a living. In reality those regulations were passed because there was a need for them.
People under the age of 50 may actually believe that we don’t need an EPA and those “burdensome” federal regulations largely because they are too young to remember what life was like before those regulations were passed.
Prior to the passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972 most of our rivers were rolling sewers. The Fox River in Green Bay was famous for its “alligators,” which were floating masses of pulp waste that would rise to the surface due to gases produced during their decomposition. I recently talked to an older man who grew up in Green Bay about eight blocks downwind of the Fox River. He recalls, “On hot summer nights I slept with a pillow over my head to block the stench from the river.”
The most infamous of all was the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, which would periodically burst into flames because of all the oil floating on the surface. Lake Erie was polluted so badly that it was nicknamed the “Dead Sea.” None of these were extreme examples; any river flowing past a major city was used as a sewer.
My favorite canoeing river in my high school days was the Iowa. It was a beautiful river but was missing one very important thing: fish. There was a hog processing plant upstream and it killed everything in the river for at least 30 miles downstream. Not until the Clean Water Act was passed did fish return to that stretch of the Iowa; today it supports outstanding bass and northern pike fishing. In those days we just took it for granted that any stream close to industry would be horribly polluted and that there was nothing we could do about it.
Trump’s secretary of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, insists that states can regulate pollution better than the federal government. This reasoning ignores the lessons of history. The problem of turning regulations over to the states is that it triggers a race to the bottom as states compete to attract industry. Industry will go to the states with the weakest regulations. We need to have a strong EPA enforcing federal environmental regulations if we are to maintain a level playing field between the states.
There was a time when Wisconsin took pride in being progressive on environmental protection. However, under the Walker administration, Wisconsin is one of the states that is leading the race to the bottom.
Walker, Trump and their Republican cohorts are not looking out for the average citizen; they are serving multi-billionaires like the Koch brothers who can make even more billions if they are allowed to pollute with impunity from those burdensome regulations. Follow the money; wealthy individuals who benefit from an unfettered ability to pollute are financing the Republican takeover of government and they are getting a fantastic return on their investment.
Gaylord Nelson, we need a leader like you now.
Charles Frisk of Green Bay is president of the Baird Creek Preservation Foundation, vice president of the Clean Water Action Council, and a board member of the Brown County Conservation Alliance. He is a retired teacher and taught environmental science and biology at Luxemburg-Casco for 31 years.