EPA authorities supervise a hastily constructed holding pond containing water treated for removal of chromium. A chemical spill resulted, June 20, 1974. NARA via Wikimedia Commons.
Nothing motivates me to write as much as anger. My June 2024 Journal of American History article, “‘Bring Money’: The Environmental Protection Agency, Sewer Infrastructure, and the Racialized Geography of the United States,” is a case in point. For quite some time, I have been troubled by the mythology of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as an agency somehow apart from the federal bureaucracy and the larger history of the United States. Outside of the right, which has its particular regressive take on the agency, many scholars and journalists have portrayed the EPA as an inevitable response to rising public concern with environmental degradation, and celebrated it as a nonpartisan piece of President Richard Nixon’s agenda.[1] When also put into the context of the Ronald Reagan administration’s attack on the EPA’s funding and regulatory authority, historians have portrayed the EPA as both a nonpartisan and heroic agency just doing its best in the face of adversity. This narrative of embattlement has effectively shielded the agency from critical inquiry into its effect on the landscape of segregation in the United States. The near-total absence of the agency from historical analyses of the late twentieth-century United States illustrates just how effective this mythology of exceptionality has been.
The seeds of the article were sown in the fall of 2020, during peak COVID. In preparation for teaching a class, I was reading through transcripts of hearings on suburban segregation that the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held in June 1971 with several federal agencies. As an environmental historian by training, I of course gravitated to the hearings with the fledgling EPA. Readers of my article know that William Ruckelshaus, administrator of the EPA, testified for the agency. Asked by the commissioners about the agency’s commitment to furthering fair housing (as it was obligated to do under federal civil rights law), Ruckelshaus walked a fine line between declaring the agency’s general support for civil rights legislation and insisting on its limited reach as a strictly regulatory body, “not a civil rights agency.”[2] Ruckelshaus offered the Commissioners the following hypothetical:
Supposing we had a community that at least arguably was in violation of Title VIII in terms of their housing policies, it might be an all-white community, and we would issue an order against them to take care of their sewage problem, and in the process of that order we would say that the Federal Government will match a certain amount of the funds necessary for the construction of the plant. If we were to—in some instances this is certainly conceivable—say: “Unless you change your housing patterns we will refuse to grant this money,” the community may be perfectly willing to say: “All right, we won’t accept the grant, and we won’t go ahead with the construction of the facilities.” We could attempt to enforce the act through the courts but this has certain problems with it.[3]
I was stunned to read this exchange. Not because it surprised me that Ruckelshaus would define the boundaries of the EPA’s responsibilities so narrowly, but rather because his testimony so clearly illuminated the EPA’s acceptance of the intentional racial oppression and exclusion that characterized both the United States and its environmental policy. With his hypothetical, Ruckelshaus effectively threw up his hands at the possibility of intervening in any meaningful way into residential segregation. Moreover, as my article illuminates, Ruckelshaus’s scenario forecast in great detail how the implementation of the Municipal Wastewater Construction Grants Program did in fact play out in local communities. Majority-white communities around the country, but particularly in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest states, mounted fierce opposition to the EPA’s sewer construction grants, precisely because they believed them to be a means of forcing integration.
Starting with Ruckelshaus’s testimony, I began to pull apart the threads of the EPA’s complicity in structural racism in its first decade of existence. Through the Municipal Wastewater Construction Grants Program created by the Clean Water Act, the agency was authorized to allocate billions of dollars to states for the construction and renovation of sewer systems. In administering the program, the EPA made thousands of mundane decisions that had profound ramifications on land use policy, municipal finance, zoning, and public health. And, as readers of the article now know, these decisions reproduced—and in some cases worsened—patterns of racial confinement and resource hoarding.
The EPA’s decisions were problematic and caused lasting harm. Yet even if the EPA, or some of its employees, had wanted to allocate its sewer grants in a way that challenged residential segregation, the larger ecosystem in which the agency operated would have made such a challenge all but impossible. As Ruckelshaus’s 1971 testimony suggests, the federal government could not in fact compel desegregation through withholding grant funds—so long as municipalities could fund their own sewage improvements, they could continue to segregate. Moreover, even municipalities that accepted EPA grants and continued to segregate their infrastructure were rarely sanctioned.
For example, in July 1975, Ohio’s rapidly suburbanizing Delaware County received $11.4 million from the EPA to construct a new system of intercepting sewers, a sewage collection system, and a 1.5 million gallons per day wastewater treatment plant. In its grant application, the county—which was 97.9 percent white—had claimed that its system would service 90 percent of the county’s Black residents, and 47 percent of its white residents. In the grant award letter, the EPA specifically required provision of service to the two villages in which the majority of the county’s Black residents resided. However, as of February 1987, well after the completion of construction, the county still had not provided sewer connection to the two villages. The EPA’s sporadic efforts at negotiation failed to compel compliance, and it declined to refer the case to the Department of Justice. And, given the Supreme Court’s thorough evisceration during the 1970s of plaintiffs’ ability to prove they had been subjected to racial discrimination, it is doubtful whether such a referral would have succeeded.
In short, the EPA’s sewer grant program illuminates the failures of imagination and implementation when it came to federal civil rights enforcement.
This article, and the related book that I am writing on the EPA, have been challenging to research. The EPA’s archives are scattered between the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, regional National Archives facilities, and presidential libraries. There is little rhyme or reason as to where any particular file might be located. Moreover, the unprocessed boxes are notoriously disorganized. As I was told by a former EPA employee, when the agency moved from the Watergate Complex to Pennsylvania Avenue in the 1990s, packing was haphazard. Many documents were swept into boxes and shipped to NARA; many others were simply left behind. Not only does this mean that the agency’s archival record is partial, but also that it is underutilized, particularly the records stored in the regional facilities. At a recent visit to a regional National Archives facility, for example, I learned that I was the only scholar who had been in to look at those records. (As an aside, I would strongly encourage graduate students searching for environmental history topics to explore what EPA records are held at their closest regional National Archives!)
The most difficult aspect of this project to narrate has been the experiences of local communities. Unsurprisingly, the voices of communities who opposed the EPA’s grants—predominantly white, more affluent communities—are preserved in newspapers, court cases, and, to a certain extent, the EPA’s archives. Yet the voices of communities who were at the losing end of this story—rural communities denied grants, and urban communities who accumulated massive debt in the scramble to respond to the EPA’s pollution remediation mandates—are far more difficult to uncover. The closest I can usually get is the voices of frustrated local officials arguing their community’s case to the agency’s regional office, or scattered testimonies in the EPA’s transcripts of public participation sessions.
In writing this article, I set out to locate the EPA within the historical landscape of its creation. I never anticipated diving into the intricacies of sewer infrastructure policy or untangling one small part of the mess that is the municipal bond market. In contextualizing the agency within its historical moment as well as the longer history of environmental racism in the United States, I hope, first and foremost, to have dismantled the mythology that the agency is somehow innocent of the racist history of the United States. Lest this project be read as a takedown of the EPA, I will also make clear that my goal is not to condemn individual EPA employees or the agency as a whole. In fact, I think that the EPA is vital. If anything, understanding the full context of its history should let us begin a necessary conversation about redesigning the agency, and environmental policy more fundamentally, to remedy environmental racism.
Jennifer Thomson is a historian and associate professor of history at Bucknell University. She is the author of The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Her current research examines how the United States Environmental Protection Agency furthered the racialized health inequalities and environmental hazards generated by federally-sponsored residential segregation.
[1] Scholarly examples include Robert W. Collin, The Environmental Protection Agency: Cleaning Up America’s Act (2006); J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment (2000); Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (2013); Russell E. Train, “The Environmental Record of the Nixon Administration,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 26 (no. 1, 1996), 185–96. For journalistic accounts see Meir Rinde, “Richard Nixon and the Rise of American Environmentalism,” Distillations, June 2, 2017, https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/richard-nixon-and-the-rise-of-american-environmentalism; Lily Rothman, “When the Environment was a Non-Partisan Issue,” Time, Dec. 2, 2015, https://time.com/4127200/epa-founded-1970/; and Nathan Rott, “How the EPA Became the Victim of Its Own Success,” NPR Morning Edition, Feb. 17, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/02/17/515748401/how-the-epa-became-a-victim-of-its-own-success.
[2] United States Commission on Civil Rights, Hearing Held in Washington, D.C., June 14–17, 1971 (1972), 152.
[3] Ibid.
