Oh! All That Horrible Pollution!!!

If you sit and watch the Evening News you see stories that make you feel like the earth is in it's last throes because of all the pollution. The air is horrible, the water is terrible, every where you look the environment is in terrible shape!

Stop right there!!!!!

Let's really take a look at this. A lot of the environmental wackos preaching their causes today were born after the real pollution had been cleaned up. During the late 1960's and early 1970's, when the Federal Government was debating the first Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, I can remember Walter Cronkite bemoaning the fact on one newscast that "it might already be too late to save the planet".
I graduated from college in 1965 and took a job working for the Uniroyal Footwear plant in Naugatuck, CT. Uniroyal also had a Chemical plant in Naugatuck. Now, a part of my job involved an occasional trip to one of our warehouses in Beacon Falls, which was the next town south of Naugatuck. The Naugatuck river ran through both towns and the road to Beacon Falls (Route 8) ran alongside the river. I never saw that river the same color twice. It could be any color under the rainbow and I'm talking red, yellow, green, brown, etc. Do you know what lived in that river? Maybe some bacteria! I'm sure, if you had waded across it, your feet would have fallen off. The Naugatuck river originated up around Winsted, CT and all the industries along the river dumped their industrial wastes and sewage directly into the river. To say the least it was a biological wasteland. Well, what's it look like today? It runs clear. The State is stocking salmon and trout in it. Now for those of you who don't know, trout and salmon require clear, cool, almost pristine water in order to survive. The river is very clean now.
While I was working in Naugatuck, the entire town would sometimes reek of ammonia, urea, or hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs) depending on what they were working on at the Chemical plant. As we went through the 70's and 80's those smells were cleaned up as pollution controls were put in place. The story was pretty much the same across the country. Coal fired power plants in the midwest spewed smoke into the air and the smog held heavy over many of the cities. As pollution controls in the form of scrubbers were added to these plants, the majority of that pollution went away, along with the "acid rain" it produced. The Cuyahoga river which runs through Cleveland was so polluted that once it actually caught fire.
The first Clean Air and Clean Water acts improved environmental conditions immensely in this country, the air is much cleaner, rivers are clean again, pesticides are not used as indiscriminately as they once were, and trash no longer litters the countryside the way it used to. So, when you hear these young Gung Ho environmentalists say that the environment is more polluted now than it has ever been, tell them to "shut up and do some research before they go spouting off again". Tell them to start telling the truth, and not spinning the stories to fit their agenda.
The environment today is practically pristine compared to where it was in the early '70's.