Environmental Laws & Statutes

A.P. ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE PROGRAMPNW B.O.C.E.S. - TEATOWN

DANIEL BUCCI

The Late 1800’s

• 1870 - John D. Rockefeller incorporates the Standard Oil Company. Predatory business practices help it to monopolize the oil industry but lead to public hearings in the Ohio legislature and then federal "anti-trust" laws against monopolies.

• 1871 - U.S. Fish Commission formed to study decline of coastal fisheries.

• 1872 - Investigation of drinking water sources by the Newark Daily Advertiser uncovers sewage, animal carcasses, dead human bodies and industrial poisons.

The 1870’s

• 1874 - Charles Hallock establishes Forest and Stream magazine sparking a national debate about ethics and hunting.

• 1874 - German graduate student Othmar Zeider discovers chemical formula for the insecticide DDT.

• 1875 - President Ulysses Grant vetoes a bill protecting buffalo and other wildlife.

• 1875 - British Publish Health Act consolidates authority to deal with housing, water pollution, occupational disease, and other problems.

The 1880’s

• 1880 - First U.S. municipal smoke abatement laws aimed at reducing air pollution from factories, railroads and ships. Regulation under local boards of health under common law nuisance statutes.

• 1881 - Norway tracks first signs of acid rain on its western coast (Mongillo, 2001)

• 1881 - Dept. of Agriculture distributes pyrethrum seeds as the "insecticide of the future."

• 1885 - U.S. Biological Survey created, partly out of concern over the near extermination of the buffalo and the passenger pigeon.

The 1890’s

• 1890 -Yosemite National Park and General Grant national parks are authorized by Congress. Sequoia National Park also established Sept. 25.

• 1891 - Forest Reserve Act passes Congress. Over 17.5 million acres set aside by 1893.

• 1892 - Sierra Club founded by John Muir, Robert Underwood Johnson and William Colby "to do something for the wilderness and make the mountains glad."

• 1895 - Sewage cleanup in London means the return of some fish species (grilse, whitebait, flounder, eel, smelt) to the Thames River.

• 1897 - Forest Management Act authorizes commercial use of public forests in the United States.

1900 IS HERE!!

• 1900 - Lacy Act regulates interstate traffic in wild birds in order to stop importation of birds where they have become endangered. The act is a reaction to lobbying by the women's clubs and Audubon society . Birds, particularly egrets, were being slaughtered on a mass scale to provide elegant plumes for ladies hats.

• 1900 - Water pollution lawsuit begins in Supreme Court. The state of Missouri sues the state of Illinois and the City of Chicago's sewer system for polluting the Mississippi. Eventually, US Supreme Court allows the Chicago city sewer department to maintain a canal draining city sewage into the Des Plaines River and, eventually, the Mississippi River.

Important Figures of Their Time

• JOHN MUIR- was a Scottish -born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of conservation of U.S. wilderness.

• ULYSSES S.GRANT- president of United States at this time, signed on approval for Yellowstone National Park.

• ALDO LEOPOLD- was an American ecologist forester and environmentalist He was influential in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness preservation.

• SAMUEL P. LANGLEY- writes The New Astronomy in which he imagines a future in which coal has been depleted and people turn to solar energy: "The rivers are clean again, harbor shows only white sails, and England's 'black country' is green once more."