Environmental policies to be thankful for

This Thanksgiving Day, let’s stop with the doom and gloom for a brief moment to focus on how far the environmental movement has come since the days of riverside dumping stations and tossing old oil out in the back 40. It’s now hard to believe there was ever a time when these sorts of laws weren’t necessary.

National Environmental Policy Act: This is the grandfather of environmental policy. It set the stage for future action by making the “enhancement of the environment” a national policy instead of an obscure hippy obsession.

Clean Air Act: Although rather self-explanatory, it’s worth remembering how far we’ve come since the smog-filled cities brought forth by the industrial age. This protects against industry putting dangerous amounts of chemicals into the air while also addressing things like acid rain, ozone depletion and toxic air pollution.

Clean Water Act: Just as land and air became spattered with industrial waste, so did the world’s oceans. The Clean Water Act made industries, municipalities and even cattle feedlots responsible for cleaning the water. To put this into clear perspective, without this act you might still be flushing your toilet right into the stream behind your house.

Safe Drinking Water Act: Keeping feces out of the watershed is one thing, but making sure water is safe for consumption is another. The Clean Water Act gave us drinking water standards for every public water system in the United States. Before this act, it was still OK to have drinking water flowing through lead pipes.

Endangered Species Act: Before the 1970s, the likelihood of a species going extinct had more to do with supply and demand than anything else. The act protected animals with valuable hides and tusks, and even sought to bring some species back from the brink.

Superfund Act: This act was created to undo a lot of the harm humans had already done to the earth by naming and cleaning up hazardous waste sites. This also gave the EPA the authority to keep companies accountable for the messes they’ve made.