Effects of Regulation on Environmental Health Essay

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start of the contemporary environmentalist movement has often been posited with the publication of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring in 1962. Carson's book was about the environmental effects from pollution due to the agricultural pesticide DDT (and several related chemicals). It was discovered that DDT stayed in the freshwater system for a long time and ultimately had a rather severe effect on wildlife: when consumed by birds, it made the shells of their eggs too fragile to be viable and ultimately decimated avian populations. Carson's title, Silent Spring, refers to the drastic decline in songbird populations as a result of DDT pollution -- the "sudden silencing of the song of birds" as she phrases it in the book (Carson 1962, 103). As a result of Carson's work, the federal government was forced to look at the issue of pollution. Previous regulation of pesticides had been focused solely on making sure that they were effective in killing insects and not fraudulent -- after 1962, regulation took a different turn, in considering environmental impact. It took ten years, however, for the Environmental Protection Agency (founded in 1970) to forbid the use of DDT entirely in 1972. Four years later, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 would empower the EPA to regulate and control chemicals that posed serious risk of harm to the environment.

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At around the same time of the first response to Carson's Silent Spring, government regulation to reduce air pollution became a priority, with the passage of the 1963 Clean Air Act, which was intended "to improve, strengthen, and accelerate programs for the prevention and abatement of air pollution" (Jacobson 2012, 176) . However, it would rapidly become clear that the original 1963 legislation did not go far enough in regulating air pollution, as the phenomenon of "acid rain" in the 1970s would demonstrate. Certain air pollutants like sulfur dioxide would mix with precipitation to cause highly acidic rain, which would have a devastating effect on large environmental areas -- as well as having a devastating effect on architecture, as the acid levels of the rain were actually high enough to eat away at marble buildings. By 1980, Congress was willing to act in order to fund a long-term study to evaluate the effects of acid rain -- within a decade, the preliminary results showed acid rain's devastating effects on species of fish in various lakes and….....

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