Don’t mess with the EPA

By: 
Megan Fischer

A world with rivers on fire and immense smog in cities was the reality before the Environmental Protection Agency was established. In Ohio, Cleveland’s reached unbearable rates by the time the EPA was established in 1970.

New York’s skyline was more something of a distant memory because the pollution of the city had gotten so bad. If there was a skyline, the tips of the buildings were held down by a blanket of dirty air.

Sometimes you can still see pollution groggily hanging over the high rises of downtown Denver. There’s always a spot that I could remember seeing if the pollution in the city was bad and hanging around on my many drives through.

Some days seemed to be better than others, but you could tell which days were going to be better for the mile high city.

On hot days in the summer, that smog would sometimes move south and into the Denver Tech Center. I can remember stepping outside on hot days and almost passing out from the rotten smell that was in the air. I can also remember stepping out of work at the martial arts center I worked at in the rain and wanting to rush home as quickly as I could to get away from the wet fuel smell and to my parent’s home in the country to open up the windows in my bedroom and enjoy the smell of rain in the woods.

The latter is a continuing problem that the growing city of nearly 3 million, if you could the 10 counties that are considered the metropolitan area.

But it’s gotten better, records have shown, It used to be much worse. For those of you who think the environment isn’t threatened by what happens in the cities of our country, I would ask you to reconsider.

All rivers from the middle of this country meet the ocean at one point in time. If you’re like me and love vacationing at the beach, think of all the things that we dump into our oceans every day.

I can remember flying over one spot on my way to Hawaii and seeing all just a part of the Pacific Garbage Patch, and it’s just all stuck out there. It made my heart sink when I thought about the fact that I knew exactly what I was looking at and I was in a commercial airplane thousands of feet above the ground. That stuck with me.

We have environmental problems even with the agency, and when their website disappeared from the White House’s website in January, it should have concerned all of us.

It’s not a democrat or republican issue. It’s a human issue.

We’ve gone to other high-pollution countries and have told them to learn from our mistakes. Do we really want them to have to come to use and remind us of those and have them tell us to learn
from theirs?

We all need clean air to breath and clean water to drink. If we don’t have those things, we die. If the GOP decide to go through with cutting funding to the EPA, I certainly hope their new health care proposal covers those who will be needing medical attention because of the polluted air they have been.

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