Rivers were choked with industrial waste and caught fire. Americans coughed on thick, blackened air.
While some may not remember what life was like before the Environmental Protection Agency’s existence, it’s impossible for many who experienced it firsthand to forget. Former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman put it this way: “The country looked like a giant garbage dump.”
The air quality was so poor, particularly in cities, that the young and elderly were told to stay inside. “And so, that’s what spurred (people) to finally say, ‘We’ve got to stop this,'” said Whitman, a former New Jersey governor who led the EPA under President George W. Bush.
At a time of massive change and in the midst of anti-war protests, women’s movement marches and civil rights clashes, Americans came together to rally around the environment in the late 1960s.
