It wasn’t just London. It is really important to realize how stinking filthy our industrial centers and even our suburbs were fifty years ago. It wasn’t all sunny summer days, shiny Cadillacs and backyard swimming pools.
The history of deadly smog alerts in the LA basin go back to the 1920s. It wasn’t cars or industry in those days, it was everybody burning their trash in barrels and pits in their back yards. Children were kept home from school and the elderly would drop dead in the streets until laws were passed and early, rudimentary environmental services were developed. By the 1950’s with the advent of the freeway system and traffic congestion, LA smog was a running joke—they were almost proud of it. In the 1960’s, trees couldn’t grow on the shoulders and medians along the freeways leading through town. The eucalyptus and oak forests in Cold Water and Topanga Canyons between the basin and the San Fernando Valley were dying, choked with bad air.
Pittsburgh was literally a hell hole from the 1880’s until the early 1950’s with the coal and coke-fueled steel industry pumping out tons of pollutants into the air every month. Child mortality rates were higher than anywhere else in the US and locals were suffering from emphysema and other chronic pulmonary disorders by the time they reached their mid-thirties. The quality of life in places like Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, Akron and Gary was shit. Here is a series of photos of various sites in and around Pittsburgh comparing each site in the 1940s and today. People finally began to get concerned only after the deadly 1948 Donora smog event when seven people dropped dead in one day and seven thousand got sick in the small steel mill town of Donora outside of Pittsburgh. .
St. Louis had a deadly smog event in 1939
From the 1920’s until the mid-80s you would get sick if you swam in the lower Hudson River.
The Cuyahoga River that flows through Akron and Cleveland, Ohio into Lake Erie was so polluted with industrial affluent that it caught fire in 1969. It was a big fire. Huge fish kills were occuring up and down the river and into Lake Erie for decades and nobody was doing anything about it.
Until about 1970, if you were driving from Sacramento to San Francisco, you would get hit with a wall of stench and raw sewage after you hit Walnut Creek just past Mt. Diablo. The was the San Francisco Bay coming up to greet you. It was so bad it would make your eyes water. But the locals from Oakland, Berkeley, Livermore, Marin and San Francisco didn’t notice. They couldn’t smell it because they lived in it. I’m sure @zenvelo and a couple others here remember. After you were in the City for a few hours, you didn’t notice it anymore.
Our environment in general is much cleaner today and it is important to know that. We need to pat ourselvess on the back every once in awhile and count our blessings in order to endure that fatigue and continue to fight for improvements. The incredibly severe pollution problems that occurred when we had only a third of the population we have today and a third of the cars, were much worse than they are today and this is forgotten. That is bad for two reasons. First, I don’t think a lot of the disappointment and depression many young people have today about our ecological plight would occur if they knew the headway that has been made during my short lifetime. And that these improvements are a result of a continuous political battle—an on-going but successful battle—to clean up our world. I don’t think these young people would be so despondent if they could be shown the improvements that have been made in the past fifty years and how life today compares to the environment then.
Second, it shows that the battle may be long and the successes come slow, but we are actually winning enough people over to get the new tech and other changes in before we drown in our own shit. You just have to continue the struggle against ignorance and greed, and work toward a healthier safer world to raise babies in. If it’s good enough to raise a kid in, it’s good enough for the rest of us. That’s a damn good arbitrary benchmark.
Republicans and Libertarians like to bitch about the EPA and other environmental regulatory agencies but none of these changes began to really get off the ground until the First Earth Day in 1969, a national demonstration, a Direct Action organized mostly by college kids to bring awareness to the mainstream of the filth and toxicity we were living in. America’s memory is short. It is important that the tragedies of Love Canal and other huge superfund sites are never forgotten.
This Cuban coffee is excellent.
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