Last year, I prepared a power point on the history of environmental protection and land conservation here in Polk and across the state for some talks I was invited to give.
I’m a bit of a history buff and for years have assembled a collection of dates and events in Florida environmental history as I discovered them.
I’m still finding material, which is unsurprising given the richness of information associated with any subject.
I was thinking more about this subject lately because of the constant drumbeat in Tallahassee and Washington to rollback the environmental advances that are the results of decades of efforts.
Tallahassee has cut funding for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the water-management districts, resulting in less enforcement and a brain drain as many longtime staff members were forced out, resigned or retired.
Tallahassee has also largely ignored a voter mandate to fund land and water protection.
Washington has cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency — some legislators have called for abolishing the agency — and the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the national parks and national wildlife refuges.
Washington has also put a hold on tougher air-pollution regulations and on regulations that would better define just how far upstream you can dump pollution, and it has opened former public conservation lands for mining.
None of these actions has occurred without pushback from traditional environmental organizations.
There are pending lawsuits challenging some of the decisions.
But sometimes it is important to step back and remember why the environmental regulations and land-conservation programs that are now threatened came to be in the first place.
The short answer is a combination of public outrage and changing politics brought these reforms.
Up until the 1970s, government environmental programs — if they existed at all — resembled those television identify-theft protection ads.
Government agencies were allowed to monitor problems, but not do much about them.
That was because the prevailing philosophy until then was that it was cheaper and easier to simply dump municipal and industrial waste into the nearest waterway on the assumption that nature would take care of it.
The solution to pollution is dilution, they claimed falsely.
Although scientists and environmental activists knew better and argued for better regulations, their arguments were dismissed because politicians and business lobbyists argued the regulations would hurt the economy or that more scientific research was needed, so such regulations could wait.
The classic image demonstrating the result of this mindset was the fire in the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.
The river caught fire in 1969, a year before the Environmental Protection Agency was formed, as it flowed toward Lake Erie. The fire was one of the events that provided an impetus for the agency’s formation.
However, the image many of us remember was from a more serious fire that occurred in 1952. The 1969 fire reportedly was extinguished before news photographers arrived.
And, to be fair to Cleveland, by 1969 local efforts were already underway to reduce pollution in the river.
But the idea that burning rivers could have been considered business as usual is outrageous.
Water quality in the river eventually improved — at great taxpayer expense — though its pollution problems continue because there are still so many poorly regulated sources in its watershed.
Most of the results of poor regulation have been less dramatic than blazing rivers.
There are ample local examples.
Every municipal and industrial sewer plant in Polk County historically discharged sewage into local rivers and lakes.
Lakeland’s sewage went to Banana Lake. Winter Haven used Lake Lulu and Lake Conine. Lake Wales used Lake Effie. All of them were connected to systems that eventually reached the Peace River. Bartow and Fort Meade discharged directly into the river. Mulberry discharged into a tributary of the Alafia River. Haines City’s effluent reached Lake Marion at the headwaters of the Kissimmee River.
Lake Lena Run, a canal that runs from Auburndale to Lake Hancock and collected city and citrus plant sewer wastes for decades, was known locally as “Stinky Creek.”
The result was opaque, algae green lakes in which game fish can barely survive. Toxic algae blooms floated down the Peace River.
When the sewer plants quit discharging into the Peace River, the river went dry in drought years because the sewer discharges had masked the decline in the river’s base flow as a result of overpumping from the aquifer.
Water managers concluded it would be impractical to force cutbacks in pumping to reverse the damage, so they voted to spend $174 million in taxpayers' money to turn Lake Hancock into a reservoir to supplement river flow during droughts and to build a treatment wetlands to remove the historic pollution from lake water before it reached the Peace River.
The project was important because the Peace River provides drinking water to counties downstream and flows into Charlotte Harbor, a major estuary that relies on adequate supplies of clean fresh water to function properly.
Sometimes it’s useful to remind ourselves that the reason environmental regulations are important is because everything is connected in the natural world and that local actions often have regional consequences.
We also need to remember that pollution prevention is more cost-effective than pollution cleanups. Consider that the next time you hear a politician propose cutbacks in environmental regulations.
Doing that is rarely in the best interest of the environment or your wallet.
Follow Palmer's environmental musings at www.lakebluescrub.blogspot.com.