Environmental Conflicts in the 1980s

  • By:Roger Thompson
  • Content Type: Report
  • Publisher: CQ Press
    • Publication year: 1985
    • Online pub date:
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/cqresrre1985021400

Archive Report

Federal Deadlock

Pace of Environmental Decade Slowing

Fifteen years after earth Day marked the peak of national harmony on environmental issues, the public remains strongly committed to environmental cleanup despite the increasing costs and technical complexity of the unfinished task, and diminished federal support for enforcing laws unpopular with industry. Earth Day, April 22, 1970, focused national attention on environmental problems and opened the “Environmental Decade,” a period of unprecedented legislative activism in the passage of laws to remove harmful pollutants from land, air and water and to conserve the nation's natural resources.

It was a decade of success. Although “serious air and water pollution persists” in some areas of the country, the president's Council on Environmental Quality said in 1983, “unquestionably, overall environmental quality in the ...

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