SEARCHING FOR THE SEVENTIES: THE DOCUMENTERIA PROJECT

Abandoned automobiles and other debris clutter an acid water and oil filled five acre pond near Ogden, Utah, 1974. Photo: Bruce McAllister—The National Archives

Over the past thirty years, the relationship between the Environmental Protection Agency and the government that created it has been, to be polite, contentious. Born in the early 1970’s and put into implementation by Nixon, it’s often sited by conservatives as being wasteful and econony-stalling.  It’s such a hot button agency that it was one of the only agencies Gov. Rick Perry could remember in his famous “oops” moment from this election’s primary cycle.

But when the EPA was created, the US was, to quote TIME Magazine,  “an ecological mess. Poisoned smog cloaked cities like Los Angeles and New York. Rivers were full of industrial waste — TIME described Ohio’s highly flammable Cuyahoga as the river that “oozes rather than flows.”   Documerica, a project started by the EPA, documented scenes like this. The photos are stunning, drawing from more than 20,000 images in the National Archives.  As TIME says, “these are images from an America that seems further away from us than it really is, one that’s grimier and poorer.”

A lot has changed since then and things have significantly improved in a lot of these areas.  But the images stand as both a testimony to what the EPA has helped to accomplish and as a warning: this could easily happen again.

The show opened last week at the National Archive building in Washington, DC.  A selection of images can be viewed on TIME’s Lightbox blog.
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 18th, 2013 at 10:23 am. It is filed under Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.