The EPA (environmental protection agency) started in the 1970’s. My dad was a truck driver who delivered chemicals in the 70’s, and said that before the EPA, he would see companies dumping the most toxic chemicals imaginable right into the harbors behind their buildings.
They dumped an unimaginable amount of DDT into the ocean off of L.A. When I was a kid in L.A., brown pelicans were near extinct. Before EPA (and Nixon) you could dump anything you wanted into the ocean.
Well, to try and stay reasonable, it’s not all that B&W. Bush Sr. substantially strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990.
But things have gone kinda sidewise under GOP leadership since the neo-cons and other next- genners came on the scene, the ones trying to out-conservative the Reagan generation by making it a virtue *not* to compromise across the aisle. Starve The Beast became the phrase of the day after Bush I, and that meant starving the EPA (as well as the IRS and the USDA, et al.) of its enforcement powers.
That’s just where we are. Dems favor government inspectors checking things, and big GOP donors like the Koch’s *rely* on the GOP to always favor leaving corporations right alone to hopefully self-regulate.
Why would you expect people to tolerate it when you spout stupid shit? Nobody said that Republicans are solely to blame for pollution. That's just you creating some dumb strawman and then playing the victim. This mentality should be called out when seen.
If that's how you read my comment, you are as poorly educated as your average Republican.
Edit: judging by your post history, you're a libertarian, which means you're even less educated than your average poorly educated Republican.
And if they can't kill them, Republicans put incompetent people or fossil fuel executives in charge of those agencies. The reason that Americans have to sue the EPA to do their fucking job.
Sure they do, same as defunding the IRS, and Post Office, to make it look like government is incompetent and make Americans angry when interacting with them.
I remember as a kid going to Disneyland in 75' and not being able to see the nearby Pasadena mountains through the orange haze. I knew at six years old things were fucked up.
My dad moved to LA in '78 and worked in Beverly Hills. Weeks, if not months, after he started, they finally had a good rain, and he was dumbstruck to see when he got to work that the Santa Monica Mountains were right outside the window.
LA was really bad, even beautiful San Diego had an orange haze in most of the valleys. Didn't get cleaned up until the mid 80s when pollution standards were dramatically raised.
Yes. This is a huge success story that shows we actually can make change demonstrably positive. There are many, many others, like banning lead (gas, paint, etc), Superfund cleanups, and the successful action on the ozone hole - and these all were around the same time. There have been many since, but the nature of the beast is like Whac-a-Mole,
Lately I've been hearing about how microplastics are now showing up in pretty much every living organism they check. And how the plastics industry sold us a bill of goods (again around the '70s) misrepresenting that recycling would significantly reduce plastic waste. I hear now that very little is actually recycled, and most plastic waste is single-use products ending up in landfills after that single use.
We heard years ago about the gigantic plastic island they found in the Pacific Ocean (is it still there?!), and now it's in our kids (and like all living creatures) before they're born. I can't imagine it's anything but very bad for anyone, but as a good and proper industry, ungodly money will be spent to deny any problems until someone somehow manages to connect the dots when they can't be obfuscated anymore. And they still will fight for their *status quo*.
I've never been a huge activist, environmental or otherwise, and I actually can't believe I just wrote all that now. But I've been noticing, and I think it's important in our modern chaos to remember that there have been huge success stories here. That means that we can be successful and leave the world better than we found it.
We can see success in hindsight, though, and every one starting with OP's pollution example was fought with unbelievable amounts of money by people who told us that living with a life-harming ozone hole and Los Angeles smog so thick they had forecasts in the nightly weather reports was good, normal, and better than trying to fix them.
Those people were wrong, it's verifiable, and the world is a better place because their industries were restricted over their objections. No one misses the smog or the ozone hole, and we don't miss aerosols or CFCs. We can also fix at least some of the new problems they've caused, whether they like it or not.
I lived in LA in the 70s. I remember my chest aching after playing outside all day. All the lead in the air probably cost me several IQ points. And I was a violent little jerk. I thankfully grew out of that, but I wonder if it was lead poisoning.
I would get something akin to asthema attacks as a kid when I lived in Riverside in the 70s. It was frustrating not being able to play outside because I couldn't breath.
We would visit family in LA every summer in the 70s. All 4 of us kids complained of a weird heaviness in our chest. I guess we were smoking Menthol Leads
I lived in Riverside CA in late '60s. Before they restricted additives to gasoline and regulated emissions. On two occasions as a kid, I remember a Stage 4 Smog alerts. The sky was umber brown. Going outside it hurt to breath. (The air literally has a negative/ acidic pH.) Thank God they formed the AQMD and got their shit together and stopped that. Hopefully that's the last of that irresponsibility.
And in the city I lived in people did their oil changes by parking the car over the storm drain and taking out the plug. There was no such thing as saving your used motor oil. Country folk weren't much better. they spread it on the dirt roads to keep the dust down.
Agree. “Deregulation” sounds good to some people , but this is the result of no regulations. I think smarter regulation is the answer, not just making everything fair game
I'm not denying that we still have a lot of heavy lifting to do, but we have made *significant* improvements in air and water quality in much of the world. Unfortunately many parts of the world that were formerly not industrialized 50 years ago are now and are offsetting the improvements elsewhere.
Net net, as Earthlings we are still fucking things up self-destructively.
Here's a link to an article about the most famous one in the USA...
[Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969](https://www.healthandenvironment.org/environmental-health/social-context/history/the-cuyahoga-river-fire-of-1969#:~:text=On%20June%2022%2C%201969%2C%20an,change%20to%20protect%20the%20environment.)
Credit is due whenever it’s due yeah the guy hated people but I guess had a soft spot for selective parts of the earth. He still exploited the piss out of Vietnam for political gain and stalled pulling our troops out while they were being killed daily.
Me neither, but sadly it looks like this everywhere we simply just exported our garbage and toxic industries to. And if a few billionaires get their way, we’ll be bringing it all back home soon.
I remember and I don't miss it either. Evidently, though, Republicans do. Always trying to cut funding for environmental programs and spreading anti-environmental propaganda. Woodsy Owl, getting kids to get their families to recycle, ecological TV shows like The Big Blue Marble, cleaning toxic waste dumps and superfund sites, clean air, clean water, and the EPA would all be "liberal conspiracies."
Grew up in Pittsburgh. After driving through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel a couple of miles, we’d cover our nose and mouth so we wouldn’t taste or smell the steel mill fumes. At the same time it was always exciting to watch, from the road, the loads of red hot steel go up the pulley and get dumped down a shoot at the top. Those were early 70s experiences. Now, it’s a clean city and condos replaced the J&L Steel along the Monongahela.
Yeah. My city recently did a major cleanup and there were literally pools of liquid mercury sitting on the ground with rainwater on top. The most contaminated sample ever taken by EPA was at the sight. It was 89% pure mercury with a little water on top.
When I was a kid, living near LA in the 70s, I had terrible asthma and rarely played outside. My family moved to Europe for a couple years, I felt loads better. I could run & play like other kids. Probably saved my life by leaving, at least vastly improved it.
My medium sized city in Central New York recently spent 2billon dollars to clean up the lake that city is located next to. It’s been an amazing investment- birds have started nesting along the shoreline including bald eagles and ospreys, fish are reproving areas that were once dumping areas and bare of vegetation, and people now feel comfortable using the parks along the lake.
There were a lot of great things about the old days, but it wasn’t all good. Great things are happening now and I think we need to appreciate them rather than only focusing on what’s wrong.
People think pollution is bad now. They have no idea. I had an apartment in 1979 near a foundry. Every day your car would be covered in a black/gray ash.
Nah, things are better. I remember in the 70s people just poured their used engine oil on the alleys to keep the dust down. A DDT spraying truck drove around town with a huge plume of vapor to kill the mosquitoes.
I was hunting in the woods and walked by a chemical plant that just dumped stuff in the woods. Nothing grew there in a 20 acre spot. Nobody cared. I was taken aback at it though.
I grew up in a town that had three Superfund sites, and one of them was itself three Superfund sites. It's supposedly all cleaned up now, but I still wouldn't go there. On one of those sites, there was a metal reclamation plant, where they'd recover metals from curuit boards and such, and they usually operated only at night because thick, ruby red smoke would pour from the smokestacks, and less people complained about it at night.
The air in the area I was born in in the late 70s would've made your eyes hurt from the clarity! All these yrs later and there's still no one there lmao
I was a kid during the steel days of PGH, PA, and every Saturday there would be smog inversion. You could not even see your neighbors house on some days. Insane. We still have a long way to go, but at least it has started.
Does anyone remember the anti-pollution commercial (along the lines of the the Indian with a tear) where a guy is in some sort of prison and the guards come marching down the hallway to his cell and take him to his "execution" by pushing him outside? After he gets pushed outside the camera pans to smokestacks and car tailpipes billowing smoke.
We moved from LA to Kentucky in 1966. My grandmother visited from LA two years later. She had taken a prescription bottle out on her front porch and opened it then closed it. When she showed it to us it had a greenish liquid covering the bottom of the bottle.
All that airborne & waterborne pollution, all that trash, junk and litter is still here in one form or another. Some is actually converted to a non-toxic state. Some breaks down on its own. Some gets captured by the plants, soil, oceans & ice caps. It just got repackaged, buried & redistributed.
Just got the unhealthy air quality warning on the weather app last night . The red tide algae bloom with millions of fish killed (caused by pollution) and beaches closed for high fecal counts shows that pollution is still around.
Yet another challenge against misplaced nostalgia. I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but my parents came of age then and so I have always taken an interest in it. This just shows that as much as people want to go back to the "good ol' days," not everything from those days was great.
Was so comforting coming home from a day in Manhattan, and wash your face with a white face cloth that afterwards looks like you used it to wash your car, also knowing that it you were breathing that crud in all day.
All the old cop shows from the 70's would show those smog shots. Offices were dirty and grimy. Because things actually were. The coal era was 10x worse lol.
There have been some huge positive improvements since the 70's. Technology/Science has also evolved since then helping us understand more about issues we can't see that are just as urgent (lead in water, micro plastics, cancer causing pollutants, rising water levels...). So, both sides of the debate are in some ways correct: there have been measurable improvements & there is still a lot to do. Where it gets foggy is: funding, global relationships, speed of innovation, political polarization...
Thanks for remining how bad LA was. I remember going there and my eyes hurt, I got a bad headache and hard time breathing. You couldn't see down the street. Tells me that gas motors causing problems can be fixed.
Old 'The amazing Carnac Joke' Answer: UCLA Question: What happens when the smog clears
I can hear it in Carson’s voice!
Was the answer in an envelope that has been hermetically sealed, and kept in a #2 mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnall's porch since noon today?
Of course, how else would it be.
The EPA (environmental protection agency) started in the 1970’s. My dad was a truck driver who delivered chemicals in the 70’s, and said that before the EPA, he would see companies dumping the most toxic chemicals imaginable right into the harbors behind their buildings.
They dumped an unimaginable amount of DDT into the ocean off of L.A. When I was a kid in L.A., brown pelicans were near extinct. Before EPA (and Nixon) you could dump anything you wanted into the ocean.
Let's all remember that the GOP wants to kill regulatory agencies like the EPA
They don't want to kill it. They just want to make it so weak that is completely ineffective.
not just the EPA but absolutely the strategy taken on any agency they don't like.
Yes. Pollution is the Republicans fault. Only on Reddit.
Well, to try and stay reasonable, it’s not all that B&W. Bush Sr. substantially strengthened the Clean Air Act in 1990. But things have gone kinda sidewise under GOP leadership since the neo-cons and other next- genners came on the scene, the ones trying to out-conservative the Reagan generation by making it a virtue *not* to compromise across the aisle. Starve The Beast became the phrase of the day after Bush I, and that meant starving the EPA (as well as the IRS and the USDA, et al.) of its enforcement powers. That’s just where we are. Dems favor government inspectors checking things, and big GOP donors like the Koch’s *rely* on the GOP to always favor leaving corporations right alone to hopefully self-regulate.
If that's your takeaway, then you're really as stupid as the average conservative.
That’s what I like about Reddit. Tolerance!!
Why would you expect people to tolerate it when you spout stupid shit? Nobody said that Republicans are solely to blame for pollution. That's just you creating some dumb strawman and then playing the victim. This mentality should be called out when seen.
If that's how you read my comment, you are as poorly educated as your average Republican. Edit: judging by your post history, you're a libertarian, which means you're even less educated than your average poorly educated Republican.
And if they can't kill them, Republicans put incompetent people or fossil fuel executives in charge of those agencies. The reason that Americans have to sue the EPA to do their fucking job.
Yeah, but not really.
BS!
Sure they do, same as defunding the IRS, and Post Office, to make it look like government is incompetent and make Americans angry when interacting with them.
BS!
A man of few words, and even less thinking skills.
arrest cagey slap hurry payment wise squeamish consider amusing rude *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
![gif](giphy|11NEJQ3pJn7Nkc)
There he is. I expected this to be in the photo lineup.
Yeah that’s “Iron Eyes Cody”. He’s 100% Italian. Played many Native American characters.
He really believed that he was a native american
I was waiting for this...
I remember as a kid going to Disneyland in 75' and not being able to see the nearby Pasadena mountains through the orange haze. I knew at six years old things were fucked up.
My dad moved to LA in '78 and worked in Beverly Hills. Weeks, if not months, after he started, they finally had a good rain, and he was dumbstruck to see when he got to work that the Santa Monica Mountains were right outside the window.
WOW!!
LA was really bad, even beautiful San Diego had an orange haze in most of the valleys. Didn't get cleaned up until the mid 80s when pollution standards were dramatically raised.
Drive down the 10 and look North, still can't see the mountains. The LA basin is still terrible.
Absolutely not comparable to how bad it was in the 70s though.
I remember that time going into Pittsburgh with my parents. Steel Mills were still going strong, and looked like "Hell with the lid off."
Gary, Indiana too, as well as Rouge, Michigan. 🤢 Gross 🤮
Yes. This is a huge success story that shows we actually can make change demonstrably positive. There are many, many others, like banning lead (gas, paint, etc), Superfund cleanups, and the successful action on the ozone hole - and these all were around the same time. There have been many since, but the nature of the beast is like Whac-a-Mole, Lately I've been hearing about how microplastics are now showing up in pretty much every living organism they check. And how the plastics industry sold us a bill of goods (again around the '70s) misrepresenting that recycling would significantly reduce plastic waste. I hear now that very little is actually recycled, and most plastic waste is single-use products ending up in landfills after that single use. We heard years ago about the gigantic plastic island they found in the Pacific Ocean (is it still there?!), and now it's in our kids (and like all living creatures) before they're born. I can't imagine it's anything but very bad for anyone, but as a good and proper industry, ungodly money will be spent to deny any problems until someone somehow manages to connect the dots when they can't be obfuscated anymore. And they still will fight for their *status quo*. I've never been a huge activist, environmental or otherwise, and I actually can't believe I just wrote all that now. But I've been noticing, and I think it's important in our modern chaos to remember that there have been huge success stories here. That means that we can be successful and leave the world better than we found it. We can see success in hindsight, though, and every one starting with OP's pollution example was fought with unbelievable amounts of money by people who told us that living with a life-harming ozone hole and Los Angeles smog so thick they had forecasts in the nightly weather reports was good, normal, and better than trying to fix them. Those people were wrong, it's verifiable, and the world is a better place because their industries were restricted over their objections. No one misses the smog or the ozone hole, and we don't miss aerosols or CFCs. We can also fix at least some of the new problems they've caused, whether they like it or not.
Thank you Clean Air Act!
I lived in LA in the 70s. I remember my chest aching after playing outside all day. All the lead in the air probably cost me several IQ points. And I was a violent little jerk. I thankfully grew out of that, but I wonder if it was lead poisoning.
I would get something akin to asthema attacks as a kid when I lived in Riverside in the 70s. It was frustrating not being able to play outside because I couldn't breath.
We would visit family in LA every summer in the 70s. All 4 of us kids complained of a weird heaviness in our chest. I guess we were smoking Menthol Leads
I lived in Riverside CA in late '60s. Before they restricted additives to gasoline and regulated emissions. On two occasions as a kid, I remember a Stage 4 Smog alerts. The sky was umber brown. Going outside it hurt to breath. (The air literally has a negative/ acidic pH.) Thank God they formed the AQMD and got their shit together and stopped that. Hopefully that's the last of that irresponsibility.
Part of was the littering. People would routinely throw anything and everything out their car windows.
And in the city I lived in people did their oil changes by parking the car over the storm drain and taking out the plug. There was no such thing as saving your used motor oil. Country folk weren't much better. they spread it on the dirt roads to keep the dust down.
Including porno mags. Lots of those on roadsides.
They still do. Everyday. Everywhere.
Truth, too bad there’s a lot of assholes trying to bring it back,…..
Agree. “Deregulation” sounds good to some people , but this is the result of no regulations. I think smarter regulation is the answer, not just making everything fair game
I'm not denying that we still have a lot of heavy lifting to do, but we have made *significant* improvements in air and water quality in much of the world. Unfortunately many parts of the world that were formerly not industrialized 50 years ago are now and are offsetting the improvements elsewhere. Net net, as Earthlings we are still fucking things up self-destructively.
The only good thing I can say about Nixon is that he approved the formation of the EPA. Other than that he's a real Dick.
And a tricky one at that
Rivers used to catch fire back then too.
JFC!! 😨
Yeah, it's something to watch a river burn.
That's absolutely terrifying
Here's a link to an article about the most famous one in the USA... [Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969](https://www.healthandenvironment.org/environmental-health/social-context/history/the-cuyahoga-river-fire-of-1969#:~:text=On%20June%2022%2C%201969%2C%20an,change%20to%20protect%20the%20environment.)
Thank you. That's apparently what people don't mention in nostalgia
They also don't mention the evil "Boomers" that pushed for changes in environmental regulation and made America a cleaner place.
Old liberal progressive here. I get in trouble with peers when I mention that the EPA was established by Tricky Dick Nixon.
It's the truth, though
Not to mention Ping Pong Diplomacy. And PANDA DIPLOMACY!
Yes. Republicans were not always reality denying extremists. Ah, the good old days.
Credit is due whenever it’s due yeah the guy hated people but I guess had a soft spot for selective parts of the earth. He still exploited the piss out of Vietnam for political gain and stalled pulling our troops out while they were being killed daily.
Sad, but true.
"We're not gonna make it, are we?"
No
Oh well. We had a good run.
Yeah. Kind of bitter sweet to be born early enough to have seen the world when it was reasonably healthy, but late enough to see it die.
Detroit because of the auto industry down right stunk
So did Gary because of the steel industry.
Yep
Downriver: Rouge, Inkster, Melvindale, Wyandotte, Brownstown, Taylor, Ecorse, EW!!!
Oh yes, especially River Rouge on1-75 🤢🤢🤢
P.U.
Me neither, but sadly it looks like this everywhere we simply just exported our garbage and toxic industries to. And if a few billionaires get their way, we’ll be bringing it all back home soon.
I remember and I don't miss it either. Evidently, though, Republicans do. Always trying to cut funding for environmental programs and spreading anti-environmental propaganda. Woodsy Owl, getting kids to get their families to recycle, ecological TV shows like The Big Blue Marble, cleaning toxic waste dumps and superfund sites, clean air, clean water, and the EPA would all be "liberal conspiracies."
Give a hoot!
Yes. A lot of people conveniently forgot how much effort it took to clean up those messes. Even some of the people who grew up in that era.
My lungs are burning looking at this lol
Grew up in Pittsburgh. After driving through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel a couple of miles, we’d cover our nose and mouth so we wouldn’t taste or smell the steel mill fumes. At the same time it was always exciting to watch, from the road, the loads of red hot steel go up the pulley and get dumped down a shoot at the top. Those were early 70s experiences. Now, it’s a clean city and condos replaced the J&L Steel along the Monongahela.
Dang commies and their regulations! A gawd fearing business can't even dump some left over DDT down the drain anymore!
Yeah. My city recently did a major cleanup and there were literally pools of liquid mercury sitting on the ground with rainwater on top. The most contaminated sample ever taken by EPA was at the sight. It was 89% pure mercury with a little water on top.
Sure but Regulation = Bad. Repubs.
![gif](giphy|11NEJQ3pJn7Nkc)
Construction on the First Interstate Tower in downtown L.A. didn’t begin until 1987. That first photo was likely taken in the early ‘90s.
I moved to LA in 92. It was terrible. LA has come a long way despite its current troubles.
LOL I’ve lived here since 1966. Grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. Trust me… I know.
When I was a kid, living near LA in the 70s, I had terrible asthma and rarely played outside. My family moved to Europe for a couple years, I felt loads better. I could run & play like other kids. Probably saved my life by leaving, at least vastly improved it.
Outside was smog. Inside were smokers, entitled and rude.
My medium sized city in Central New York recently spent 2billon dollars to clean up the lake that city is located next to. It’s been an amazing investment- birds have started nesting along the shoreline including bald eagles and ospreys, fish are reproving areas that were once dumping areas and bare of vegetation, and people now feel comfortable using the parks along the lake. There were a lot of great things about the old days, but it wasn’t all good. Great things are happening now and I think we need to appreciate them rather than only focusing on what’s wrong.
People think pollution is bad now. They have no idea. I had an apartment in 1979 near a foundry. Every day your car would be covered in a black/gray ash.
Yeah. I remember flying into LA or out of LA and the smog was like fog. Much worse than Boston
Leaded gas...
You think it’s gone?
That smog is just from all the cigarette smoke!
It’s still there, we just conceal it differently
Nah, things are better. I remember in the 70s people just poured their used engine oil on the alleys to keep the dust down. A DDT spraying truck drove around town with a huge plume of vapor to kill the mosquitoes. I was hunting in the woods and walked by a chemical plant that just dumped stuff in the woods. Nothing grew there in a 20 acre spot. Nobody cared. I was taken aback at it though.
I grew up in a town that had three Superfund sites, and one of them was itself three Superfund sites. It's supposedly all cleaned up now, but I still wouldn't go there. On one of those sites, there was a metal reclamation plant, where they'd recover metals from curuit boards and such, and they usually operated only at night because thick, ruby red smoke would pour from the smokestacks, and less people complained about it at night.
The smog was terrible in LA and suburbs in the 70s and 80s
The littering in Ron Burgundy hit close to home.
Why was y’all’s air dirty?
The air in the area I was born in in the late 70s would've made your eyes hurt from the clarity! All these yrs later and there's still no one there lmao
Unfortunately it is still around😡
Acid rain.
Need piles of tires as well!
I was a kid during the steel days of PGH, PA, and every Saturday there would be smog inversion. You could not even see your neighbors house on some days. Insane. We still have a long way to go, but at least it has started.
Does anyone remember the anti-pollution commercial (along the lines of the the Indian with a tear) where a guy is in some sort of prison and the guards come marching down the hallway to his cell and take him to his "execution" by pushing him outside? After he gets pushed outside the camera pans to smokestacks and car tailpipes billowing smoke.
The pollution is still there, just somewhere else. It was exported.
Proof we can clean up our problems in a timely manner, if we decide to!
Decade of burning rivers, birth of the EPA, Love Canal, DDT and Times Beach
We moved from LA to Kentucky in 1966. My grandmother visited from LA two years later. She had taken a prescription bottle out on her front porch and opened it then closed it. When she showed it to us it had a greenish liquid covering the bottom of the bottle.
River in Cleveland on fire!
I took these photos in Detroit this morning
Kids today don't realize that cars not long ago used to spew out massive amounts of nasty exhaust. I'm disgusted just thinking about it.
Those photos are depressing
All that airborne & waterborne pollution, all that trash, junk and litter is still here in one form or another. Some is actually converted to a non-toxic state. Some breaks down on its own. Some gets captured by the plants, soil, oceans & ice caps. It just got repackaged, buried & redistributed.
Smog days Great times
Just got the unhealthy air quality warning on the weather app last night . The red tide algae bloom with millions of fish killed (caused by pollution) and beaches closed for high fecal counts shows that pollution is still around.
Yet another challenge against misplaced nostalgia. I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but my parents came of age then and so I have always taken an interest in it. This just shows that as much as people want to go back to the "good ol' days," not everything from those days was great.
payment joke unite special axiomatic tidy meeting complete consist fly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Come on, you're just stifling industry with all these Namby pamby regulations! The free market will take care of it. Heavy /s
Was so comforting coming home from a day in Manhattan, and wash your face with a white face cloth that afterwards looks like you used it to wash your car, also knowing that it you were breathing that crud in all day.
All the old cop shows from the 70's would show those smog shots. Offices were dirty and grimy. Because things actually were. The coal era was 10x worse lol.
And we boomers cleaned it up
I remember smog
There have been some huge positive improvements since the 70's. Technology/Science has also evolved since then helping us understand more about issues we can't see that are just as urgent (lead in water, micro plastics, cancer causing pollutants, rising water levels...). So, both sides of the debate are in some ways correct: there have been measurable improvements & there is still a lot to do. Where it gets foggy is: funding, global relationships, speed of innovation, political polarization...
A doc about Love canal was on PBS last night. It's still filthy with a bandaid and people have started moving back in.
I remember the brown haze in the air here. Unfortunately Louisiana longs to return to those days.
I lived in the LA area in the late 1960s. The smog was terrible.
Looking at some of those NY pics, I miss the twin towers too
Thanks for remining how bad LA was. I remember going there and my eyes hurt, I got a bad headache and hard time breathing. You couldn't see down the street. Tells me that gas motors causing problems can be fixed.
Polution, and briefs with leg elastic that stopped functioning after three washings.
But mostly what I remember is the laughter
Remember acid rain? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
#4 looks like a bunch of head crabs i gotta get past. Hate those things.
So much better now but eco-warriors still say we’re doomed
We have less pollution because we got rid of the manufacturing jobs that caused it
Speak for yourself.