Having been born shortly after Martin Luther King Jr’s and Robert F. Kennedy’s assassinations I’ve seen a lot of changes during my time on this small insignificant planet in the vastness of the universe. Yes, I feel that way. We are so lucky as a species, yet we are going out of our way to screw this nice thing up. When I say we, I’m focusing my attention primarily on four nations. I live in one of them.

I grew up in a small town along the Rock River in Illinois. It had a bigger brother town on the Northside of the river and another big brother East of it that the 40th president of the USA was raised in. The area was considered the “Hardware Capital of the World.” in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. If you wanted fasteners of any type you could buy them in bulk from one of dozens of factories. You want to know what those factories did? They spilled their toxic waste into that river. There are still a few derelict buildings alongside the riverfront back in my hometowns. They are too expensive to redevelop and too expensive to tear down. It is a giant pile of toxicity. The manufacturing is not what people remember. It is the waste they see… Utter waste… Toxic putridity…

As a kid I remember fishing in the river and my father would only eat specific types of fish from the river. We did not have any eagles, hawks, pelicans, egrets, cranes, beavers, or river otters in our region. The water was too polluted. The river homes up stream sent all of their liquid waste directly into the river. It wasn’t uncommon to see toilet paper floating in the water. This was all in my first decade of life. We never swam in the river, yet there were people that waterskied, tubed, and swam at the sand bars in the pollution. My brother and I went to the pool or a pond that was secluded from the river’s flooding.

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, OH caught fire nearly a dozen times prior to 1970. This kind of spurned on the development of the Environmental Protection Agency. I became aware of the agency in elementary school. My father sold plumbing supplies during this era of my life and he was selling septic systems left and right. Then it was well filtration systems. Anything to do with water or waste water treatment became a big issue. I slowly saw the river recover between my 9th and 17th birthdays. I remember the first time I had ever witnessed a beaver swimming in the river near our home. This was followed by the cottonwood tree falling on a windy day thanks to their industrious chewing. It was awesome to see.

A couple years later we saw golden eagles and hawks returning to the waterway. By the early 1990’s the bald eagle population in the region exploded. Then Pelicans started migrating North within the next decade as the waterways had recovered enough to support all kinds of predators as the fish population improved and clams, crayfish, and other invertebrates exploded. Why do we want to roll back EPA protections?

My brother and I had terrible allergies and he had asthma. My parents smoked in the house, because that was the normal thing to do in the 1970’s. That ended in the latter part of the decade. My mother quit smoking entirely. Our health got better. My dad continued smoking outside until his quadruple bypass. 50 years of it took a toll on him. We lost him in 2019 to an aggressive brain cancer.

How about leaded gasoline? The smog and acid rain producing pollution that ran all across the United States. I remember the air quality in town got much better once it was retired from sale in my area around 1980. I remember the Shell Jobber I worked for sold limited quantities of leaded gas for older sports cars up to the mid 1980’s until it became cost prohibitive to store. Why do we want to go back?

Insecticides, Ozone depleting chemicals, Herbicides, and other chemically engineered solvents once they enter our water table were discovered to cause various cancers and other health issues. How times have changed as our science fully understands the dangers. I remember a time when we didn’t have to have training on what chemicals were used at work. Now it is imperative we have a yearly “Right to Know” training on things. Why do we want to go back?

Then there was the young man named Chad Pregracke who single handedly started a movement in the Quad Cities that led to his Living Lands and Waters Non Profit. I was working near the QC when he began making headlines in 1997 for his activism. https://www.livinglandsandwaters.org/who-we-are/meet-chad.html

Then the Geocaching CITO movement began. Cache In Trash Out are organized trash cleanups in designated areas to help neighborhoods regain some dignity. My wife and I participate in them as we are able, but we have a friend who organizes many CITO’s and the amount of trash we pick up is mind boggling. How can we be so careless??? Why do we want to go back to the “Mad Men” days???

I just know that capitalism is what drove the problems in our waterways, our drinking water, and our air. It still does. We need the EPA to keep waste caused by capitalism under control if we are going to take care of our planet. Speaking of which, this heat wave is awful… I remember a June in the 1990’s that saw lows in the upper 30’s thanks to Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines.

I just know, I don’t want my children nor future grandchildren to inherit a planet that is dying from the actions of capitalism. We can do the right thing, accept less profit, and use science to improve the health of our home…. …or we can just keep smoking and suffocate all the things we love to death… so it goes…