Environmental Protection Agency. Established by the Richard M.
Nixon administration in October 1970, in the wake of the first Earth Day that April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) became the agent and symbol of a vast expansion of the federal government's role in addressing a widely perceived environmental crisis. Initially proposed by a Nixon advisory committee seeking ways to streamline the federal bureaucracy, the EPA brought together under one institutional umbrella several long‐standing federal programs aimed mostly at pollution control. Through existing and new legislation that it implemented and defended in court, including Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and laws regulating pesticides and hazardous wastes, the EPA spearheaded the most far‐reaching federal intervention into the American economy since the New Deal.
During its first three decades, the EPA grew steadily in its size, responsibilities, and regulatory strategies, even as its fortunes fluctuated with the political climate. Though its founding laws and early administrators envisioned an “ecological” protection encompassing nonhuman as well as human life, the agency found its scientific footing by stressing environmental threats to
public health. Initially quite decentralized, the EPA under President Jimmy
Carter centralized and coordinated its programs, largely through quantitative risk assessments (starting with carcinogenic risks) and cost‐benefit analyses. Early appointees in the Ronald
Reagan administration assaulted the EPA's programs and damaged morale, but in the wake of the Love Canal exposé—a scandal involving long‐term toxic pollution by the Hooker Chemical Company in Niagara Falls, New York—Congress mandated a new and ambitious EPA initiative to control industrial wastes. Friendlier Republican administrations of the later 1980s and early 1990s restored money and muscle to the EPA's older programs while expanding its regulatory tools. Experiments with dispute mediation and market‐based incentives carried over into the Bill
Clinton administrations. During the 1990s, the EPA tightened pollution standards and began monitoring and regulating the effects of pollution on nonhuman species. In response to the environmental‐justice movement, the agency also moved to shed its white, middle‐class image by attending more closely to the disproportionate share of environmental risk borne by minorities and the poor.
See also
Carson, Rachel;
Economic Regulation;
Environmentalism;
Industrial Diseases and Hazards;
New Deal Era, The.Bibliography
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency , The Guardian: Origins of the Environmental Protection Agency, 1992.
Edmund Russell , Lost among the Parts per Billion: Ecological Protection at the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1970–1993, Environmental History 2 (1997): 29–51.
Christopher Sellers
