Letter from Karen Mihan

EPA Changes Are Not Acceptable

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, is abandoning the EPA’s core mission of protecting America’s air, land, and water in order to give business and industry polluters easier access to America’s natural resources. New Yorkers won’t escape the harm to our environment and public health Zeldin’s wholesale deregulation will cause. New Yorkers know the historic fights we have won to hold polluters responsible.

Many of us remember Love Canal in Niagara Falls. From the EPA’s own website, “Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history….The canal was turned into a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite.” The toxic waste sickened many residents, as well as causing miscarriages and birth defects: 221 families were evacuated from the site. It took 15 years to win the federal court case proving culpability and 21 years more to clean up the site.
In 2013, PFOS (perfluorooctanesulfonic acid) was found in the public drinking water in Newburgh. The source of the contamination turned out to be firefighting foam used in trainings at Stewart Air National Guard Base. The city of Newburgh had to switch to a different water supply to protect its residents.

The South Bronx, a low-income community of color, has the highest childhood asthma rates in the country. There are 21,000 new cases a year. Heavy diesel truck traffic in highly populated areas is one reason; power plants and waste transfer facilities are two more. There are five schools in the impacted area, and students are forced to study and play amid the toxic fumes.

Carefully assessing regulations to ensure the EPA can carry out its mission while simultaneously ensuring homes can be built and businesses can thrive is a project Americans can get behind. The wholesale and thoughtless destruction of necessary regulations is not. The EPA, established under President Nixon in 1970, is meant to protect our rights to clean air, land and water. Dismantling the EPA will throw this country back to the dark days of rampant, uncontrolled industrial pollution. This is simply not acceptable.

Karen Mihan
Cooperstown