Research: Topics: Environment: Environmental Affairs in NY: An Historical Overview
Environmental Affairs in New York State: An Historical Overview
3. 1895 to 1970: The Conservation Era
Pollution Control: Water, Air, and Land
In 1950, New York had 14.8 million residents, and more than eight in ten lived in urban areas. The volume of wastes produced by cities was becoming impossible to ignore. Safe supplies of drinking water and fish were increasingly threatened by inadequate ways of disposing of sewage and garbage. Automobile exhaust was making the air unsafe to breathe, especially in summer months. In the nineteenth century, waste and filth were accepted by New York City residents as facts of life. In the 1950s and 1960s, new standards of science and sanitation made them intolerable – and outside of major cities, media images of rat-infested garbage and smoke-darkened skies fueled a sense of crisis.
New York State government had been in the business of regulating municipal drinking water since 1904, when the state Water Supply Commission was created. All cities except New York were required to submit their plans for new water supplies to the Commission, and the Commission began reporting on water sources, water quality, and methods of sewage disposal. When the State Department of Health was created in 1901, one of its duties was to investigate diseases caused by "overflow of the canals." But the first serious effort to control water pollution did not begin until 1935, when a federal Interstate Sanitation Commission was established to regulate sewage in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
Basic sanitation laws had a dramatic impact on health in America. Expectancy of life at birth increased from 47 in 1900 to 54 in 1920, 63 in 1940, and 70 in 1960, mostly because of sharp declines in viral and bacterial diseases.[84] Sewage treatment was a major contributor to these declines. By 1960, 80 percent of New York City’s sewage during dry weather was cleaned before it was discharged. But a lot of filth was not being treated. Sanitary engineeers in 1895 had combined the city’s storm sewers with its waste sewers. Each heavy rain overwhelmed the system and dumped millions of gallons of raw waste into the Hudson and the harbor. In 1965, voters passed the Pure Waters Bond Act and released $300 million for sewage treatment statewide.
Air pollution was largely unregulated in New York until 1957, when state law created an Air Pollution Control Board and empowered it "to enter and inspect any property or motor vehicle for the purpose of identifying pollutants."[85] The Board may have had the power, but its small staff could only enforce the law against the most egregious polluters. Air pollution was added to the jurisdiction of the federal Interstate Sanitation Commission in 1962, and the first federal Clean Air Act was passed in 1963. But the number one source of air pollution – the private automobile – was not regulated until 1970, when amendments to the Clean Air Act forced automobile manufacturers to install pollution control devices.
Garbage disposal laws also lagged behind the need. Before the federal Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965 was passed, state and local health departments regulated landfills, and they had widely varying standards. Some cities burned their garbage in open pits; others buried it in unlined trenches that allowed toxic liquids to ooze into the water table.
President Lyndon Johnson formed a Commission on Natural Beauty in 1965. The state followed with its own Natural Beauty Commission in 1966. Both were attempts to address the sense that America’s land, water, and air were fouled by the wastes of manufacturing and consumer culture. But like the early anti-pollution laws, these efforts had little or no effect on the public’s mood. Books, films, and television reflected the concern with increasingly shrill warnings. In a memorable 1971 television commercial, the actor Iron Eyes Cody, clad in buckskin and wearing a feather headdress, shed a single tear as he gazed upon a mountain of garbage.[86]
By the end of the 1960s, the Conservation Era had run its course. It was no longer enough to manage nature for human needs. Nature had become the environment, and most Americans agreed that the environment was in grave danger because of human activity. Instead of serving a modern society, nature now had to be protected from it. --
