Save Our Air and Water

Environmental Deregulation Fails

There is no Planet B

I grew up in Southern California in the 50s and 60s and remember well smog alerts caused by air quality so poor that my eyes watered when I played outside. I remember clearly flying into Los Angeles and seeing the basin filled with thick brown air from auto pollution. I remember seeing rivers in the Eastern U.S. clogged with waste and polluted from sewage and acid mine drainage. I recall standing on a street corner in Chicago in the 1970s and watching my shirt get dirty from flakes of ash dropping out of the sky.

After people complained about and died from dirty air and polluted water, governments finally stepped in, passing laws and creating agencies to start cleaning up our air and water resources. States and the Federal Government took aggressive action to eliminate or greatly reduce pollution from auto emissions, the dumpling of waste and pollutants into our lakes, rivers and oceans and started to regulate the industrial sources of many pollutants.

Generations reaped the benefits of cleaner air and water as a result of government imposed regulations. Unfortunately, we have let our guard down, secure in the belief that our governments will continue to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink as they have in the past.

After years of misleading and deceptive ads protesting the so-called job killing regulations that protect our water and air and promoting crackpot theories that people have no impact on climate change, the folks who currently control our state and federal governments are poised to undo the water and air protections in place in pursuit of profit and ideological purity.

In Wisconsin, Governor Walker and his climate change denier cronies in the legislature have already cut back funding for the environmental protection work done by the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Justice. Enforcement of existing clean air and clean water regulations has been curtailed. New regulations are being written by the regulated or legislators in their employ. Walker’s proposed budget will shift regulation of large-scale animal farm operations away from the DNR and its rules limiting manure runoff into water sources. Instead, he proposes to move them to the much more farm friendly Department of Agriculture. Scientific study of pollution sources has been drastically curtailed. Walker even proposes to eliminate future publication of the DNR Magazine, once a valued source of pubic information about the DNR’s efforts to protect our environment.

At the federal level, environmental protection is being dealt an even worse hand. 45’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is the poster child for White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon’s regulatory deconstruction program. Pruitt is the craven handmaiden for the fossil fuel industry and earned his chops suing the EPA for doing what Congress and the American people want it to do. He sued the EPA over a dozen times to block air pollution controls, to prevent fracking bans and, immediately after he was confirmed, vowed to aggressively roll back Obama era clean water and air regulations.

Pruitt has already directed EPA staff to begin work on rolling back regulations governing which waterways can be regulated, Clean Power regulations designed to cut back on power plant emissions, methane emissions on federal lands and many others. He praised the recent Executive Order allowing coalmine ash to be dumped into protected waterways, threating drinking water for millions.

45’s decisions to approve both the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines over legitimate environmental concerns further demonstrates his callous disregard for our health and safe water.

We have come full circle back to the environmental consequences ignorance of my childhood. Left unregulated, many of the polluters from yesteryear will be back. It will not take long to see the consequences in our air and water resources.

Those of us who see the connection between human activity, greed and climate change and believe that science, not profit, should drive how we treat the planet we inhabit need to work together to save our air and water. Pick an environmental advocacy group like the Natural Resources Defense Council, Clean Water Action, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, Earth Island Institute, Greenpeace USA, Friends of the Earth or League of Conservation Voters and join up. Write letters to our editors and legislators demanding clean air and water.

We know that business, industry and environmental protection can co-exist. We will not go back unbreathable air and undrinkable water.

Waring R. Fincke is a retired attorney and vice-chair of the Democratic Party of Washington County.