Environmental Protection Agency

The u.s. environmental protection agency (epa) was established under President Nixon's Reorganization Act 3 of 1970. The creation of the EPA was part of a sweeping transformation of American environmental regulation that is often credited to the social movements that evolved around growing public and scientific awareness of environmental crises. The publication of Silent Spring, the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, and the Santa Barbara oil spill are often cited as significant events, which crystallized mainstream opinion around the need for a strong federal regulatory hand in ensuring environmental quality.

Strong federal environmental roles were minted in landmark laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). The EPA was created as an independent agency to administer many of these laws: few believed that the Department of Commerce, for example, could fairly and firmly regulate polluting industries that it was simultaneously promoting and protecting through trade policy.

Another narrative concerning the federalization of environmental regulation puts less stress on the achievements of environmental social movements, pointing to the fact that these movements were still nascent—and drowned out by antiwar and other social movements—at the time of these laws' passage and the EPA's founding. Regulated energy industries, which faced a welter of individual state-level regulations, also called for federal environmental regulation. These industries felt that the best longterm strategy would be to use their established influence with politicians, like Senator Edwin Muskie, to proactively shape the environmental debate and the ultimate form of federal environmental regulation. This would give regulated industries a single target, rather than 50 different targets, when attempting to influence environmental regulation. It has also been suggested that the founding of the EPA was the result of competition between President Nixon and Democrat senators with their eyes on the 1972 presidential election, over who would be perceived as “more environmentalist.” Because no political benchmarks concerning environmentalism existed, Nixon and his competitors continued to try and out-do each other.