The Environment and Natural Resources from 1968 to 1980

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the cluster of late-1960s pollution events — Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Cuyahoga River fire of June 1969, and the Santa Barbara oil spill of January 1969 — that converted a long-standing conservation tradition into a mass environmental movement.
• Explain the political reasoning that led the Nixon administration to sign the major federal environmental statutes despite a broader retreat from Great Society liberalism, including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Clean Air Act amendments of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the Environmental Protection Agency reorganization of December 1970.
• Account for the causes and consequences of the OPEC oil embargo of October 1973, including its connection to United States support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and trace its policy effects (Project Independence, year-round Daylight Saving Time, the fifty-five mile per hour national speed limit).
• Describe the second oil shock produced by the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Carter administration's energy program, including the National Energy Act of 1978, the cabinet-level Department of Energy created in 1977, and the symbolic White House solar panels of June 1979.
• Account for the Three Mile Island accident of March 1979 and the Love Canal evacuation of August 1978, and explain how each event reframed the public conversation about industrial risk and the limits of the postwar regulatory state.

Three convergent shocks at the close of the 1960s pulled the modern environmental movement out of the older conservation tradition that ran from Theodore Roosevelt to Aldo Leopold and made it a mass political force. The first shock was a book. Rachel Carson, a scientist and writer, published Silent Spring in 1962. Working from federal research files and from her own training as a marine biologist, Carson documented the way the synthetic pesticide DDT moved through food webs and accumulated in the body fat of fish, birds, and the larger predators that ate them. The chemistry of postwar agriculture, she argued, was producing a slow-motion poisoning of the continent's wildlife and a measurable burden in human breast milk. The chemical industry attempted to discredit the book; the Kennedy White House Science Advisory Committee studied her claims and confirmed them. Silent Spring sold roughly two million copies by the end of the decade, made the word "ecology" intelligible to a general audience, and made suspicion of industrial chemistry mainstream.

The second and third shocks were on water. On the morning of January 28, 1969, a Union Oil Company drilling platform six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, suffered a blowout that produced the largest oil spill in United States waters to that point. Roughly three million gallons of crude reached the surface across the next ten days and washed ashore along thirty-five miles of coastline, killing seabirds, dolphins, and seals. Television cameras carried the images of oil-blackened beaches into living rooms across the country and made offshore drilling a national political issue for the first time. Five months later, on June 22, 1969, an oil-soaked stretch of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire. The river had been so badly polluted by industrial waste from the steel mills and chemical plants along its banks that it had burned at least a dozen times before, but the August 1969 issue of Time magazine published a photograph of an earlier blaze and turned the Cuyahoga into the national symbol of urban water pollution. A river that could catch fire produced a kind of clarity that statistical reports could not (KC-8.1.II.D).

The political response came on April 22, 1970, with the first Earth Day. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, working with a young national coordinator named Denis Hayes, designed Earth Day as a national teach-in modeled on the antiwar teach-ins of the late 1960s. Roughly twenty million Americans participated, an estimate that would make Earth Day the largest public demonstration in United States history at the time. Two thousand colleges, ten thousand schools, and roughly a thousand local organizing committees ran rallies, river cleanups, and educational events across all fifty states. Earth Day did not produce any single statute, but it produced the political pressure that pushed almost every major federal environmental statute through Congress across the next four years.

The architect of the federal response was Richard Nixon, a Republican president who was not an environmental advocate by inclination and who was retreating from Great Society liberalism on most other domestic fronts. Two political calculations explain the signatures. The environmental coalition produced by Earth Day was bipartisan and cut across the suburban demographic Nixon needed for reelection in 1972. And the Democratic Senate, led by Edmund Muskie of Maine, was prepared to pass an even tougher Clean Air Act if the White House blocked the bill, a fight Nixon judged he would lose. Within fifteen months Nixon had signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on January 1, 1970, which required federal agencies to prepare an environmental impact statement before approving any major action with significant environmental consequences and which created the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) inside the Executive Office of the President; established the Environmental Protection Agency by executive reorganization on December 2, 1970, consolidating fifteen pollution-control programs scattered across five departments into a single regulatory body; and signed the 1970 amendments to the Clean Air Act, which set the first national ambient air-quality standards and required automakers to reduce tailpipe emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides by ninety percent by the 1975 model year. The 1972 Clean Water Act, the 1973 Endangered Species Act, and a sequence of amendments to existing pesticide and toxic-substance statutes followed in the same window. By 1973 the federal government had assembled a regulatory architecture that had not existed before 1969 (KC-8.1.II.D).

The energy half of Topic 8.13 began on October 6, 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, opening the fourth Arab-Israeli war in twenty-five years. The Nixon administration responded with an emergency airlift of weapons to the Israeli military. On October 17, the Arab member states of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, meeting in Kuwait City, voted to embargo crude oil shipments to the United States, the Netherlands, and several other allies of Israel. The OPEC oil embargo ran until March 1974, quadrupled the world price of crude from roughly three dollars a barrel to roughly twelve, and pushed gasoline prices in the United States from about thirty-six cents a gallon to about fifty-five. Service stations posted signs reading No Gas Today; lines of cars stretched for blocks at stations that were still pumping; and roughly twenty percent of the country's stations were closed on a typical day in the worst weeks of the winter. Several states adopted alternate-day rationing keyed to the last digit of the license plate. The embargo did not end the use of oil, but it ended the era of cheap energy that had underwritten the postwar economic boom and supplied one of the structural causes of the stagflation that defined the rest of the decade (KC-8.2.II.D).

Nixon's response was branded Project Independence, an announced goal of American energy self-sufficiency by 1980 through expanded domestic drilling, accelerated nuclear plant construction, and conservation. Project Independence did not meet its target, but it produced two pieces of legislation that briefly reshaped American daily life. In January 1974 Nixon signed an act placing the country on year-round Daylight Saving Time to reduce evening electrical demand, an experiment that proved unpopular through the dark winter mornings of January and February and that Congress repealed before the second winter. The same month he signed the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which conditioned federal highway funds on state adoption of a national maximum highway speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour, a limit that survived in some form until 1995 and that became the most visible single emblem of the embargo era for a generation of American drivers.

The second half of the decade brought a parallel set of shocks that broke public confidence in two of the decade's preferred technological substitutes for imported oil. On March 28, 1979, a stuck pressure-relief valve and a series of operator errors at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, allowed a partial meltdown of Reactor Unit Two. Roughly half of the reactor's fuel rods melted; the containment building held; offsite radiation releases were limited and produced no documented direct fatalities. But Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission advised pregnant women and pre-school children within five miles of the plant to evacuate, and roughly a hundred and forty thousand people left the region for as much as two weeks. The political damage was decisive. No new commercial reactor that had not already been ordered before March 1979 came online in the United States for more than three decades, and the construction of new plants effectively halted by the mid-1980s. The accident did to civilian nuclear power what the Cuyahoga had done to industrial water discharge a decade earlier.

Six months later, the second oil shock arrived. The Iranian Revolution of January and February 1979 deposed the Shah of Iran, a longtime American ally, and replaced his government with an Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iranian crude exports collapsed. The world price doubled again, gasoline lines returned to American cities, and the second shock produced even greater political damage to a sitting president than the first had. President Jimmy Carter had taken office in January 1977 with the most ambitious energy program any president had ever proposed. He gave a televised fireside chat on April 18, 1977, wearing a beige cardigan to underscore his theme that thermostat reductions were the cheapest available substitute for imported oil. He created the cabinet-level Department of Energy by executive reorganization in August 1977, consolidating energy programs scattered across multiple departments into a single agency, the largest reorganization of the executive branch since the National Security Act of 1947. He signed the National Energy Act of 1978, which combined five separate statutes covering utility ratemaking, natural gas pricing, energy taxes, and conservation incentives. In June 1979 he installed thirty-two solar-thermal panels on the roof of the West Wing of the White House and dedicated them with a press conference that framed solar power as the centerpiece of the country's energy future. The panels would be removed under President Reagan in 1986 (KC-8.2.II.D).

The decade's last environmental shock was a chemical one. Love Canal was a working-class neighborhood on the eastern edge of Niagara Falls, New York. Between 1942 and 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company had used the partially excavated Love Canal as a disposal site for roughly twenty thousand tons of industrial waste, including dioxin and benzene. In 1953 Hooker capped the trench with clay and sold the property to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for one dollar, with a deed clause noting the buried chemicals; the school district built an elementary school on the site and developers built houses around it. By the mid-1970s residents were noting unusual rates of miscarriage, birth defects, and chronic illness, and chemical sludge was bleeding into basements after heavy rains. A homemaker named Lois Gibbs, whose son had developed unexplained seizures after starting kindergarten at the elementary school, organized the Love Canal Homeowners' Association in 1978. The state health commissioner declared a public health emergency in August 1978; President Carter authorized federal disaster relief and ordered the evacuation of more than two hundred families. A second emergency declaration in May 1980 expanded the evacuation to roughly seven hundred more families. The Love Canal disaster produced the political pressure for the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, called the Superfund Act, which Carter signed on December 11, 1980, in the weeks between his defeat by Ronald Reagan and his successor's inauguration. The Superfund Act made polluters liable for the cleanup of abandoned hazardous-waste sites and established a federal trust fund to pay for cleanups when a responsible party could not be identified or could not pay (KC-8.2.II.D).

Across the twelve years between Earth Day and Superfund, the federal government built an environmental regulatory state on a scale that had not existed before. By 1980, the Environmental Protection Agency had a staff of roughly twelve thousand, regulated roughly seventy thousand chemicals, and administered a body of statute law that touched every major sector of the economy. But the same period exposed the durable tension between environmental protection and economic growth. Stagflation, deindustrialization in the steel and automobile sectors, and the OPEC shocks supplied a counter-narrative in which environmental rules were one of the burdens slowing American competitiveness, a counter-narrative that the Reagan campaign of 1980 wove into a critique of the regulatory state more broadly. Lesson 14 picks up that political response inside the New Right coalition; Period 9 traces what happened to the environmental statutes Carter signed in 1978 and 1980 once Reagan moved into the White House.

Four sources mark the political, legal, and human shape of Topic 8.13. Each one is hosted by a public archive and is in the public domain or is a public-record federal document.

1. (Causation) Of the three late-1960s shocks named in this lesson — Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, the Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River fire — which would you argue was the most consequential cause of the modern environmental movement, and why? Defend your choice with specific evidence.
2. (Continuity and Change) Compare the assumptions about the federal role in the economy that Richard Nixon brought into office in January 1969 with the policies he signed between 1970 and 1973. What had to be true about American politics for a Republican president to sign NEPA, the Clean Air Act amendments, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act?
3. (Causation) Trace the chain of decisions that ran from the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 to the fifty-five mile per hour national speed limit of January 1974. At which point in the chain do you think a different decision could have produced a different outcome, and what would the long-term political consequences of that alternative have been?
4. (Comparison) Compare Three Mile Island in March 1979 with Love Canal in August 1978. What does the comparison reveal about the difference between an industrial-risk story (a single event at one site) and a chemical-exposure story (a long-running buried hazard across a neighborhood) in shaping the politics of environmental regulation?
5. (Continuity and Change) Carter's energy program of 1977 to 1980 produced the Department of Energy, the National Energy Act of 1978, the Superfund Act of 1980, and the White House solar panels of June 1979. To what extent did the Reagan administration that followed dismantle that record, and to what extent did it survive? Defend your claim with specific evidence drawn from this lesson.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.