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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 “Crying Indian” commercial of 1971 became a symbol of widespread environmental damage across the United States.
That’s why the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, energized the nation. In the largest single-day public demonstration in U.S. history, 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 Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act and more.
These laws are taking a beating at the moment, including from the Environmental Protection Agency – the federal government agency created in 1970 to protect the environment. The agency’s own leader, Lee Zeldin, boasted of “driving a dagger straight into the heart” of environmental regulations. President Donald Trump regularly derides environmental laws as job killers and government overreach.
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 environmental law professor, so I was excited to learn recently about the Documerica project, courtesy of a wonderful article by writer Gideon Leek. 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.
An inspired origin
Environmental protection was a bipartisan effort in the 1970s: The EPA was created by President Richard Nixon, a Republican. The agency’s first leader was Bill Ruckelshaus, a Republican congressman from Indiana.
Inspired by the famous photographs of Depression-era farmworkers 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 “provide the EPA with a great deal of qualitative environmental data, 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 Documerica project 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.
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. Drums of pesticides and chemicals 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 covered with topsoil and became open land, 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 neighborhood was built on the land.
Only when people noticed high levels of miscarriages and cancer clusters among the residents – and saw oozing waste – did opinion change.
In 1976, Congress passed the Resource Conservation Recovery Act, 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 1980 law known as “Superfund” 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 potentially responsible parties 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.
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 “Lake Erie is a dead lake” because of all the industrial pollution pouring into its waters. An oil slick on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River famously caught fire in 1969, but it was actually the 12th time 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 Clean Water Act of 1972 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 ambitious goal was to end water pollution entirely and make all of the nation’s waters safe for swimming and fishing within a decade. Those aspirational goals for the country’s waters still have not been fully met, though Ruckelshaus used to quip that at least they are not flammable.
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 even while swimming.
Air pollution
Perhaps the most obvious improvement since the 1970s has been in air quality around the U.S.
The horrible smog around Los Angeles is well known. But many other cities were blanketed in polluted air that led to respiratory illnesses and millions of early deaths across the nation over the decades. In Pittsburgh it was only half-jokingly said that you had to floss your teeth after breathing.
The Clean Air Act of 1970 was the first law to require the EPA to set uniform nationwide standards for air quality to protect the air people breathe. In short order, lead was phased out of gasoline, catalytic converters were required on cars, acid rain was ended, and the sources of smog 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 prevented over 230,000 early deaths.
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 effectively unregulated, every major measure of environmental health has improved significantly over the past five decades. And second, those improvements all occurred during times of strong economic growth, with inflation-adjusted gross domestic product increasing fivefold.
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.
This article was updated on Jan. 5, 2026, to correctly identify a river in New York.
James Salzman, Professor of Environmental Law, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, University of California, Santa Barbara; University of California, Los Angeles
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
