Don't Breathe the Air

This book offers the first general account of the history of the evolution of air pollution as a policy issue in the United States during the crucial years from 1945 to 1970--the period when air pollution went from being an issue left in the hands of state and local governments, and ignored by them, to a major national political concern subject to powerful, newly enacted federal laws. The book includes a long chapter on the earlier history of air pollution in England and America from the 1200s through the early 1940s, then proceeds to considering three separate examples of air pollution in the United States: Los Angeles and the State of California, New York City, and the phosphate mining belt of rural central Florida. Los Angeles was the first place where public officials launched the first full-fledged, continuing campaign to research and control air pollution, and policy innovations made in Los Angeles and the State of California would be the source of most air pollution control policy in the United States and around the world. California's automotive air pollution problem, and the state's inability to force auto makers in Michigan to control their vehicles' emissions, ultimately led California to seek help from a higher authority--the federal government. Los Angeles was an unusual, almost unique example of a local government taking the air pollution issue seriously; the City of New York was more typical of the rest of the United States as an example of a pollution-plagued city making a more token effort to control air pollution, despite repeated efforts by citizens' groups to stimulate sustained action. New York's difficulties in grappling with its pollution problems, together with its inability to control emissions from industrial facilities across the Hudson River in New Jersey, ultimately led frustrated New Yorkers and local and state governmental officials also to seek help from the federal government. Although air pollution traditionally has been mostly an urban problem, rural central Florida illustrates the wider dimensions of the problem as an example of a heavily polluting industry causing serious health complaints and damage to the cattle and citrus industries in a rural area. Angry central Floridians had prolonged difficulty in getting meaningful control of phosphate industry emissions from their industry-friendly state government, which led them, too, to plead for federal intervention. In each of the three areas studied, women notably helped to lead the charge for cleaner air, but were frequently dismissed by male industrialists, scientists, and government officials. The final chapter of the book summarizes the overall evolution of federal policy and the growth of the anti-pollution wing of the early environmental movement from the 1950s through 1970, when the powerful new federal Clean Air Act Amendments of 1970 were enacted and the Nixon administration reorganized pollution-control bureaus within the federal government to create the Environmental Protection Agency, which would administer the Clean Air Act and other new federal environmental laws of the late 1960s and 1970s.