Preface

• Author: Sen. Tom Udall
• Pages: 11-12

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Preface

e 1960s were a time when Americans were beginning to awaken to the

destruction pollution was wreak ing on our environment and the urgent need

to halt that destruction. e Cuyahoga R iver in Ohio, lled with oil and

solvents, burned. A brown blanket of brown smog, caused by fuel combus-

tion, hung over Los Angeles. e pesticide DDT threatened extinct ion of

the bald eagle.

At that time, a few visionar y leaders were sounding the alarm —urging

America to recognize that heavily polluted lands, water, and air were killing

nature and threatening the public’s health. I’m proud to count my father,

Stewart Udall, as one of those ea rly voices. In 1963, when he was serving as

President John F. Kennedy’s secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior,

he wrote he Quiet Crisis—warning that, “America today stands poised on

a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of

increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an overall environment

that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.”

A year earlier, Rachel Carson—whom my father mentored and champi-

oned—had pu blished her groundbrea king book, Silent Spring, exposing how

DDT was thinning ea gle’s eggshells and killing our national symbol. e

chemical industry excoriated Carson. But she was undeterred in her mission

that the facts and the science come out.

Franklin Kur y, a young lawyer beginning his practice in Sunbury, Penn-

sylvania, was a lso at the forefront of the environmental movement of the

1960s. Franklin became a driv ing force behind a bill in the Pennsylvania leg-

islature passed to protect the state’s rivers and streams from the destruction

of coal mine draina ge. at was 1965. Not content with that early legislative

success, Franklin ran for the state legislature himself and won a seat as a

Democrat in a traditionally held Republican dist rict. He then began what

turned out to be a successful journey to a mend the state’s constitution to add

Article 1, Section 27—a provision that would forever protect Pennsylvania’s

environment and natural resources.

ese early leaders helped awaken America to t he importance, the impera-

tive of protecting our lands, waters, and air f rom pollution. ey rang in

an unprecedented era of environmental legislation—legislation that pa ssed

Congress with strong bipartisa n support. e Wilderness Act, Water Quality