Who wants to make Ohio polluted again?
More than 50 years ago, the Ohio Environmental Council was formed by a group of ordinary Ohioans. Their motivation? Making sure events like the Cuyahoga River catching fire never happened again.
Prior to the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its state-level counterpart, the Ohio EPA, Ohio's water resources were under serious threat. It was so filled with industrial pollutants, the Cuyahoga River — a body of water — caught fire, not once, but multiple times during the 1960s. During this same time period, Ohio's Great Lake Erie was declared dead.
Our air quality wasn't much better. The air quality in Youngstown, Cleveland, and Steubenville was among the worst in the nation. Industrial waste was dumped on private property, while even more ended up in poorly lined dumpsites, contaminating our soil and leaching into groundwater. Fifty years ago, our national bird, the bald eagle, was on the verge of extinction.
In 1970, Richard Nixon established the U.S. EPA with a mission to clean up pollution, establish environmental standards and regulations, and develop policies for protecting the environment.
Today, we enjoy markedly better air quality than we did fifty years ago. People row and fish in our state's lakes and rivers. We've cleaned up many industrial brownfields and former mine sites. We've adopted highways and raised awareness about the importance of litter prevention. Bald eagles are routinely spotted nesting in counties around the state. The days of private landowners uncovering barrels of toxic sludge in their backyards are long gone.
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Or are they?
According to U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, ''President Trump has been very outspoken about his desire for Americans to be able to access clean air and clean water. We want air, land, water to be cleaner, safer, healthier.'
And yet, at the same time, Zeldin has announced a sweeping plan to allow far more heavy metals and toxins into the air from power plants, relax rules prohibiting mercury and arsenic from getting into our drinking water, and make it harder for neighborhoods downwind, or downstream of pollution to do anything about it.
We are old enough to remember an Ohio where bald eagle sightings were rare. Where children weren't allowed to swim in or even touch lake waters. And where smog, haze and air quality alerts were the norm and not the exception. Without the federal government's oversight of polluters, we risk those days returning.
In the absence of federal support, Ohio's state and local government agencies will have to pick up the slack. Do we have the resources to tackle this enormous challenge?
We pay taxes so our government will provide the basic services and protections we need to keep our communities safe, healthy, and livable. Without the US EPA upholding its end of the bargain, it's hard to see how we're going to protect the progress Ohioans fought so hard to make.
Ohioans deserve better than a return to the bad old days of pollution.
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