The Gifted Generation by David Goldfield

Author:David Goldfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER 18

PATRIMONY

When President Johnson signed the Clean Air Act Amendment in October 1965, he quoted the author of a book published three years earlier: “In biological history, no organism has survived long if its environment became in some way unfit for it, but no organism before man has deliberately polluted its own environment.” The author was Rachel Carson, and her book Silent Spring (1962) alerted Americans to what, slowly but surely, was happening to the environment: we were not only losing our patrimony, we were in danger of killing ourselves.1

Concern about the environment became a national movement by the mid-1960s. Efforts grew to find solutions that would keep people and nature healthy. Two decades of postwar growth had taken their toll. In Chicago by 1966, an average of forty tons of sooty particles fell on each square mile of the city every month. New York City established a task force on air pollution that year, concluding, after a killer smog enveloped Manhattan, “More poisons are pumped into the air in New York than anywhere else in the United States.”2

Writer Ed Christopherson decided he had had enough of urban living and decamped to the Big Sky Country of Missoula, Montana. “When I lived in New York, I used to watch the clinkers come down the air shaft and remember how great the pine-scented evening downdrafts smelled in Missoula.” But Missoula, by 1966, was the country’s second-worst smog area. Some Missoulans considered posting signs out on the highway: MISSOULA, MONTANA—DIRTY SKY COUNTRY.3

Denver was also once a fair pristine place now grown foul. A woman told a reporter in 1966 that when she moved into her house twenty years before “the yard had nice green grass and beautiful roses. The whole neighborhood was clean … you could see the mountains clearly most of the time, with snowcaps.” But as the traffic worsened in and around her neighborhood, she and her husband began having eye and sinus trouble. “The roses all shriveled and died. The lawn began to go. Half the time you can’t see the mountains anymore. I have to clean the house every day, and it’s still gritty and greasy.”4

In 1963, open fires, incinerators, chimneys, smokestacks, and tailpipes spewed 125 tons of chemicals into the American air; by 1965, that had climbed to 145 million, and with it respiratory diseases. Between 1955 and 1965, California recorded a 300 percent increase in emphysema cases.5

Although environmental issues had periodically surfaced since World War II, they had only occasionally pierced national consciousness before the early 1960s. The deteriorating air in major cities, concerns over radioactive waste from nuclear weapons testing, the fouling of waterways by industrial and agricultural wastes, and the destructiveness of suburban sprawl had built constituencies for federal regulations to protect both the environment and, therefore, human beings. Rachel Carson’s book became the catalyst for a movement.

In June 1963, Carson sat before Senator Abraham Ribicoff (D-CT) and his Senate Committee on Commerce in a windowless hearing room on the ground floor of the New Senate Office Building in Washington, D.

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