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An Environmental Revolution
Just four months after his January 1969 inauguration, President Nixon established in his cabinet the Environmental Quality Council, as well as a complementary Citizens' Advisory Committee on Environmental QuaIity. Opponents denounced both as ceremonial and Nixon, ever sensitive to criticism, rose to the challenge. He had already asked Roy L. Ash, the founder of Litton Industries, to lead an Advisory Council on Executive Organization and submit recommendations for structural reform. In November, the President's Domestic Council instructed Ash to study whether all federal environmental activities should be unified in one agency. During meetings in spring 1970, Ash at first expressed a preference for a single department to oversee both environmental and natural resource management. But by April he had changed his mind; in a memorandum to the President he advocated a separate regulatory agency devoted solely to the pursuit of anti-pollution programs.
Forging such an institution actually represented the final step in a quick march towards national environmental consciousness. Congress recognized the potency of the issue in late 1969 by passing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This statute recast the government's role: formerly the conservator of wilderness, it now became the protector of earth, air, land, and water. The law declared Congressional intent to "create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony," and to "assure for all Americans safe, healthful, productive, esthetically and culturally pleasing surroundings." Henceforth, all federal agencies planning projects bearing on the environment were compelled to submit reports accounting for the likely consequences--the now famous Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). Secondly, NEPA directed the President to assemble in his Cabinet a Council on Environmental Quality. Undersecretary of the Interior Russell E. Train agreed to be its first chairman. The Council's three members and staff would assist the President by preparing an annual Environmental Quality Report to Congress, gathering data, and advising on policy. Signing the Act with fanfare on New Year's Day 1970, Nixon observed that he had "become further convinced that the 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is," he said, "literally now or never."
Pressing the initiative in his State of the Union Address three weeks later, the President proclaimed the new decade a period of environmental transformation. On February 10, he presented the House and Senate an unprecedented 37-point message on the environment, requesting four billion dollars for the improvement of water treatment facilities; asking for national air quality standards and stringent guidelines to lower motor vehicle emissions; and launching federally-funded research to reduce automobile pollution. Nixon also ordered a clean-up of federal facilities which had fouled air and water, sought legislation to end the dumping of wastes into the Great Lakes, proposed a tax on lead additives in gasoline, forwarded to Congress a plan to tighten safeguards on the seaborne transportation of oil, and approved a National Contingency Plan for the treatment of petroleum spills.