In the recent past, I have engaged current environmentalists in discussions that turn into debates. Usually both sides agree to disagree. A better way to address the subject of the environment is to give a biography both of myself and the environmental movement that I have experienced.

Growing up in the sixties and seventies was an exciting time. Conventional wisdom was being challenged in numerous areas; the sexual revolution, Vietnam and the environmental movement to mention a few. Problems from industrial pollution were evident in the Great Lakes. Michigan was an industrial giant but it came at a cost. But it wasn’t just industry that was polluting, but every day people threw their garbage out the windows of their cars; we buried our own garbage in our back yards and dumped used oil, anti-freeze, paints and thinners on our dirt driveways. Some homes had a long black streak of oil on the road in front of their homes as dust control. Sewage was directly drained into rivers and lakes. We had a favorite lake to swim in and it became so nasty with sledge and bacteria that the community closed and abandoned the beach area. Municipalities dumped the city waste directly into the Great Lakes and the surrounding rivers. Local counties allowed oil companies to spread their waste on the dirt roads for dust control. The smell burned our noses when I was a kid. Smoke stacks billowed out smoke and the ash particles settled on the surrounding areas. This was considered a reasonable cost for advancing civilization. Better to run sewer in river than have thousands of outhouses and third world conditions in our cities.

In the early seventies, Richard Nixon signed the law that formed the EPA. This allowed federal law to enforce standards for our environment. There were laws made before and after but this formed a federal entity to help out the states. Taxes and costs were cheaper for states that had no standards so we needed something to make it the same for everyone. This way the negligent communities didn’t put the diligent ones out of business. Stacks could no longer produce smoke and every area had to submit plans for controlling waste. Anything that could make it into the watershed, representing our rivers and lakes, had to be purified first. I grew up with strong environmental opinions and surprisingly the answer for us then was nuclear power. My spare time was spent drawing their systems out and designing nuclear cars. I was a weird kid.

My dad helped build a nuclear plant right next to a big city in Michigan. The company was building it to be environmentally responsible. The Three Mile Island incident caused an outcry against the plant. It was abandoned, my dad lost his job and they turned it into a natural gas power plant years later. It was an expensive lesson for the ratepayers in our state and the company. But they were just trying to be responsible with the environment.

I entered the workforce in the oilfield. Just before I started, they could drill a well by just mixing mud and digging a pit. It was thought that the waste put on top of the ground would stay there. Ever since the forties, everything was just buried after the job was done. No one worried about ground water. We could just start drilling away. That had changed. We were mandated to put extra pipe as a shield, approved lined pits, waste removal and no oils of any kind could be dumped out to soak into the ground. The companies spent millions cleaning up old messes from the previous generation. The town I lived in received Superfund money to clean up an old factory area.

After this time, I saw clean roadways; rivers and lakes clean up; the air quality around industrial areas improved greatly. Lead was banned from fuels and car exhaust was cleaned up. Our environment was cleaned up exponentially and the sacrifices given by the environmental movement back then were worth it. Everywhere you go, from a body shop to any large industry, you will see awareness and a commitment to keep our environment clean. That’s where I have my roots and in the next blog I will address environmentalism today.