EPA authorities supervise a rapidly constructed holding pond containing water handled for elimination of chromium. A chemical spill resulted, June 20, 1974. NARA through Wikimedia Commons.
Nothing motivates me to write down as a lot as anger. My June 2024 Journal of American Historical past article, “‘Deliver Cash’: The Environmental Safety Company, Sewer Infrastructure, and the Racialized Geography of the USA,” is a working example. For fairly a while, I’ve been troubled by the mythology of the Environmental Safety Company (EPA) as an company one way or the other other than the federal paperwork and the bigger historical past of the USA. Exterior of the suitable, which has its explicit regressive tackle the company, many students and journalists have portrayed the EPA as an inevitable response to rising public concern with environmental degradation, and celebrated it as a nonpartisan piece of President Richard Nixon’s agenda.[1] When additionally put into the context of the Ronald Reagan administration’s assault on the EPA’s funding and regulatory authority, historians have portrayed the EPA as each a nonpartisan and heroic company simply doing its finest within the face of adversity. This narrative of embattlement has successfully shielded the company from crucial inquiry into its impact on the panorama of segregation in the USA. The near-total absence of the company from historic analyses of the late twentieth-century United States illustrates simply how efficient this mythology of exceptionality has been.
The seeds of the article have been sown within the fall of 2020, throughout peak COVID. In preparation for educating a category, I used to be studying by means of transcripts of hearings on suburban segregation that the U.S. Civil Rights Fee held in June 1971 with a number of federal businesses. As an environmental historian by coaching, I in fact gravitated to the hearings with the fledgling EPA. Readers of my article know that William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the EPA, testified for the company. Requested by the commissioners in regards to the company’s dedication to furthering honest housing (because it was obligated to do underneath federal civil rights legislation), Ruckelshaus walked a effective line between declaring the company’s common assist for civil rights laws and insisting on its restricted attain as a strictly regulatory physique, “not a civil rights company.”[2] Ruckelshaus supplied the Commissioners the next hypothetical:
Supposing we had a neighborhood that at the very least arguably was in violation of Title VIII when it comes to their housing insurance policies, it is perhaps an all-white neighborhood, and we’d challenge an order towards them to maintain their sewage downside, and within the means of that order we might say that the Federal Authorities will match a certain quantity of the funds crucial for the development of the plant. If we have been to—in some cases that is actually conceivable—say: “Except you alter your housing patterns we’ll refuse to grant this cash,” the neighborhood could also be completely prepared to say: “All proper, we received’t settle for the grant, and we received’t go forward with the development of the services.” We may try and implement the act by means of the courts however this has sure issues with it.[3]
I used to be shocked to learn this change. Not as a result of it shocked me that Ruckelshaus would outline the boundaries of the EPA’s duties so narrowly, however moderately as a result of his testimony so clearly illuminated the EPA’s acceptance of the intentional racial oppression and exclusion that characterised each the USA and its environmental coverage. Along with his hypothetical, Ruckelshaus successfully threw up his palms at the potential for intervening in any significant method into residential segregation. Furthermore, as my article illuminates, Ruckelshaus’s situation forecast in nice element how the implementation of the Municipal Wastewater Development Grants Program did in reality play out in native communities. Majority-white communities across the nation, however significantly within the mid-Atlantic and Midwest states, mounted fierce opposition to the EPA’s sewer building grants, exactly as a result of they believed them to be a way of forcing integration.
Beginning with Ruckelshaus’s testimony, I started to drag aside the threads of the EPA’s complicity in structural racism in its first decade of existence. By way of the Municipal Wastewater Development Grants Program created by the Clear Water Act, the company was approved to allocate billions of {dollars} to states for the development and renovation of sewer methods. In administering this system, the EPA made 1000’s of mundane selections that had profound ramifications on land use coverage, municipal finance, zoning, and public well being. And, as readers of the article now know, these selections reproduced—and in some instances worsened—patterns of racial confinement and useful resource hoarding.
The EPA’s selections have been problematic and induced lasting hurt. But even when the EPA, or a few of its staff, had wished to allocate its sewer grants in a method that challenged residential segregation, the bigger ecosystem by which the company operated would have made such a problem all however unimaginable. As Ruckelshaus’s 1971 testimony suggests, the federal authorities couldn’t in reality compel desegregation by means of withholding grant funds—as long as municipalities may fund their very own sewage enhancements, they may proceed to segregate. Furthermore, even municipalities that accepted EPA grants and continued to segregate their infrastructure have been hardly ever sanctioned.
For instance, in July 1975, Ohio’s quickly suburbanizing Delaware County obtained $11.4 million from the EPA to assemble a brand new system of intercepting sewers, a sewage assortment system, and a 1.5 million gallons per day wastewater therapy plant. In its grant utility, the county—which was 97.9 % white—had claimed that its system would service 90 % of the county’s Black residents, and 47 % of its white residents. Within the grant award letter, the EPA particularly required provision of service to the 2 villages by which the vast majority of the county’s Black residents resided. Nonetheless, as of February 1987, effectively after the completion of building, the county nonetheless had not supplied sewer connection to the 2 villages. The EPA’s sporadic efforts at negotiation didn’t compel compliance, and it declined to refer the case to the Division of Justice. And, given the Supreme Courtroom’s thorough evisceration through the Seventies of plaintiffs’ potential to show that they had been subjected to racial discrimination, it’s uncertain whether or not such a referral would have succeeded.
In brief, the EPA’s sewer grant program illuminates the failures of creativeness and implementation when it got here to federal civil rights enforcement.
This text, and the associated guide that I’m writing on the EPA, have been difficult to analysis. The EPA’s archives are scattered between the Nationwide Archives and Information Administration (NARA) in School Park, regional Nationwide Archives services, and presidential libraries. There may be little rhyme or motive as to the place any explicit file is perhaps situated. Furthermore, the unprocessed packing containers are notoriously disorganized. As I used to be advised by a former EPA worker, when the company moved from the Watergate Complicated to Pennsylvania Avenue within the Nineteen Nineties, packing was haphazard. Many paperwork have been swept into packing containers and shipped to NARA; many others have been merely left behind. Not solely does this imply that the company’s archival report is partial, but additionally that it’s underutilized, significantly the data saved within the regional services. At a latest go to to a regional Nationwide Archives facility, for instance, I realized that I used to be the one scholar who had been in to have a look at these data. (As an apart, I might strongly encourage graduate college students looking for environmental historical past subjects to discover what EPA data are held at their closest regional Nationwide Archives!)
Probably the most troublesome facet of this challenge to relate has been the experiences of native communities. Unsurprisingly, the voices of communities who opposed the EPA’s grants—predominantly white, extra prosperous communities—are preserved in newspapers, court docket instances, and, to a sure extent, the EPA’s archives. But the voices of communities who have been on the shedding finish of this story—rural communities denied grants, and concrete communities who gathered huge debt within the scramble to answer the EPA’s air pollution remediation mandates—are far harder to uncover. The closest I can normally get is the voices of annoyed native officers arguing their neighborhood’s case to the company’s regional workplace, or scattered testimonies within the EPA’s transcripts of public participation periods.
In writing this text, I got down to find the EPA throughout the historic panorama of its creation. I by no means anticipated diving into the intricacies of sewer infrastructure coverage or untangling one small a part of the mess that’s the municipal bond market. In contextualizing the company inside its historic second in addition to the longer historical past of environmental racism in the USA, I hope, at the start, to have dismantled the mythology that the company is one way or the other harmless of the racist historical past of the USA. Lest this challenge be learn as a takedown of the EPA, I may also clarify that my aim is to not condemn particular person EPA staff or the company as an entire. In reality, I believe that the EPA is important. If something, understanding the complete context of its historical past ought to allow us to start a crucial dialog about redesigning the company, and environmental coverage extra basically, to treatment environmental racism.
Jennifer Thomson is a historian and affiliate professor of historical past at Bucknell College. She is the creator of The Wild and the Poisonous: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Well being (College of North Carolina Press, 2019). Her present analysis examines how the USA Environmental Safety Company furthered the racialized well being inequalities and environmental hazards generated by federally-sponsored residential segregation.
[1] Scholarly examples embrace Robert W. Collin, The Environmental Safety Company: Cleansing Up America’s Act (2006); J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Setting (2000); Ted Steinberg, All the way down to Earth: Nature’s Position in American Historical past (2013); Russell E. Prepare, “The Environmental File of the Nixon Administration,” Presidential Research Quarterly, 26 (no. 1, 1996), 185–96. For journalistic accounts see Meir Rinde, “Richard Nixon and the Rise of American Environmentalism,” Distillations, June 2, 2017, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/richard-nixon-and-the-rise-of-american-environmentalism; Lily Rothman, “When the Setting was a Non-Partisan Situation,” Time, Dec. 2, 2015, https://time.com/4127200/epa-founded-1970/; and Nathan Rott, “How the EPA Turned the Sufferer of Its Personal Success,” NPR Morning Version, Feb. 17, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/515748401/how-the-epa-became-a-victim-of-its-own-success.
[2] United States Fee on Civil Rights, Listening to Held in Washington, D.C., June 14–17, 1971 (1972), 152.
[3] Ibid.
