Environmental Ethics In The 1970s

Environmental ethics
By the early 1970s, thanks to investigative writers like Rachel Carson who looked at the use of pesticides in Agriculture and especially thanks to the media attention surrounding Santa Barbara oil spill. There is this strong national trend in America towards Environmentalism -It became very popular.
The media really played a very big part in advancing that cause. In the early 1970s, the Keep America Beautiful organization was founded. This is essentially created and launched this new public service campaign. They designed a clean community system which was essentially a group of national local community anti- litter campaigns.
Their biggest contribution in terms of cultural icons was called, “The Crying Indian”. The

US postal service came up with a series of stamps that are written an environmental message, the, "save our cities, save our air, save our soil and save our water".
Keeping alive these issues of environmental disaster and the need for national legislation were the events themselves and the media really jumped on one after another. In the 1970s, there was the 3-mile island accident which is essentially a nuclear reactor that came very close to having a meltdown in Pennsylvania.
Due to some errors and a malfunction they released radioactivity into the air and over several days they planted thousands of gallons of radioactive water into the Saxton’s river. Children and pregnant women were evacuated and all sorts of reports of disability in children followed the years of events there. All of these was heavily shown in the media, television watch, newspapers covered

Quickly her son and daughter both developed blood diseases and other ailments. So, Gibbs began to look around and talk to other people and through her investigation discovered that the disease was very widespread throughout the community. In response, the government declared a state of emergency which was heavily publicized. Then President Carter waited in as well declaring the area a federal environmental emergency for the love canal by 1980. Congress in response to this also created a comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability act nicknamed, ‘The Superfund’. So, just like with the 3-mile island accident the results of the love canal were rather permanent. There was, of course, the public outrage inspired by the media. There was demand for much greater government intervention: cleaning up as well as preventing. Probably most important was the creation of the idea of the superfund. The Superfund was essentially a federal mandate that any time large corporations create environmental disasters there are on the hook for spending every penny to clean it up even if it means removing miles and miles of