Americans, once 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water,' face return to bad old days

In 1889, the American correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer arrived on the shores of Lake Michigan and was momentarily impressed.

“I have struck a city—a real city—and they call it Chicago,” Rudyard Kipling, 23, informed his readers in northern India. "The other places do not count."

But initial approval evaporated as he looked around, noting: "Its water is the water of the Hughli," — a branch of the Ganges in West Bengal famous for its pollution, "and its air is dirt."

Unregulated industry — enormous stockyards dumping into the canals, making them, in Kipling's words, "black as ink, and filled with untold abominations," smokestacks belching filth — will do that. Today when we call Chicagoans "gritty" we are speaking about toughness; 137 years ago, it meant they were coated in coal dust.

What changed? Well, conscientious businesses, concerned about the effect pollution was having on the quality of life of their neighbors, took it upon themselves to clean up their acts and ...

Ha-ha, just kidding. Early April Fool's. No, of course, business, then and now, only cares about short-term profits. But government forced them to act in a socially-responsible fashion, setting health standards and limiting pollution. Only then did city dwellers breathe easier, and "grit" could fade into colorful metaphor.

I was reminded of this flipping open the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine and coming upon “The Dismantling of Environmental Protections — A Grave Threat to America’s Health” by a pair of Harvard doctors, Adam W. Gaffney and David Himmelstein, joined by three other health experts.

They start with another once notoriously dirty city — Cleveland — and the 1969 combustion of its Cuyahoga River, so polluted it caught fire, "sparking national attention to environmental degradation."

A president not famous for his selflessness, but Cincinattus compared to our current commander-in-chief, took decisive action:

"In his State of the Union address seven months later, President Richard Nixon lamented that Americans were being 'suffocated by smog, poisoned by water' and proclaimed that clean air and water should 'be the birthright of every American.' At Nixon’s urging, Congress established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act (CAA) with bipartisan support. Air-quality upgrades mandated by that act and enforced by the EPA are among the most effective health interventions of the past half-century, having reduced air pollution by 75% in the United States and saved at least 200,000 lives per year."

Now our birthright is being taken away — it isn't just voting. Our country is in full retreat regarding the environment.

"Yet during the first administration of President Donald Trump, nearly 100 environmental and occupational protections, including air-quality safeguards, were rescinded," they write. "Although many of those rescissions were delayed by litigation or reversed by President Joe Biden, they inflicted considerable harm on Americans’ health. The second Trump administration’s actions have been even more aggressive, portending greater harm."

Who benefits? The bottom line of big businesses receiving these breaks, often in return for big checks cut to you-know-who. Who will be hurt? You, your children, the neighborhood you live in, your city and country.

From abandonment of the Paris Accords fighting climate change, to loosening automobile emissions standards, to undermining electric cars, the Trump administration makes sure every day is Christmas for corporate polluters, not to forget their wholesale effort to scrap alternate forms of energy, with particular hostility toward wind — the Trump administration paid a French company $1 billion not to build wind farms in the Atlantic.

"This administration’s actions will undo the work of generations," the authors warn, urging, "We health professionals must call urgent attention to this silent but deadly assault on Americans’ health, work with broad coalitions to halt it, and ultimately rebuild the agencies, protections, and shared sense of trust and responsibility that have given us clean air and water and enabled us and our children to live longer, healthier lives."

We can't leave Kipling — future author of "The Jungle Book" and Rod Blagojevich's favorite author — without noting his other complaints. Chicagoans speak only of business, which to the young poet was “like listening to a child babble of its hoard of shells.” He scanned the newspapers, and immediately noticed Chicago’s tussle with another city over hosting a trade show, and never will the World’s Columbian Exposition receive quite the casual backhand that Kipling offered, reducing the struggle to “some sort of dispute between New York and Chicago as to which town should be given an exhibition of products.”

The Allahabad Pioneer, by the way, still exists, as The Pioneer, published in 10 Indian cities. Kipling wasn't their only literary star: Winston Churchill was a war correspondent, and in 1937 the paper tried to put George Orwell on staff.