The EPA's '70s Documerica Series Is Beautiful and Still Urgent

The Documerica project was the brainchild of William Ruckelshaus, a Republican and the first EPA administrator. Among other projects like banning DDT, Ruckelshaus commissioned a nationwide photo record. He reasoned it would provide the EPA with a great deal of qualitative environmental data, create a “visual baseline” against which to judge their efforts, and introduce the agency to the country through art (it is virtually impossible to imagine any politician regardless of party expressing such a humanist sentiment today). By the time budget cuts killed the project in 1977, it had already produced 20,000 photographs—15,000 of which are available online in high resolution via the National Archives. The initiative gives a great deal of insight into what (pre-global warming) environmental stewardship used to mean in this country. It is also one of the best-preserved portraits of American life, a collection of comparable interest to the photography of the WPA or the daguerreotypes of the Civil War.

Some of the collection is straightforwardly environmental—documenting pollutants and endangered habitats. Oil gushing into waterways. Animals at risk from pipelines. Beaches soon to become condominiums.

Look, above, at egrets flying through the Everglades past a hand-painted sign encouraging drivers to “slo’ down [and] let ‘em live.” At second graders manhandling ducks. At a harmless and sweet Alaskan Parka squirrel enjoying a meal of dry frozen grass. Or look at the horns of a Caribou placed on the prospective route of a pipeline—we are told in the photographer’s caption that he has left them at the site of Pump #4.

In other photos, we see the desecrated environment of developed America. Dozens of egg cartons discarded on the side of the highway. A massive billowing industrial plant spewing smoke into a smog-filled sky—and, in the foreground, everyday Americans commuting, unthinking and uncaring, so accepting of environmental destruction that it no longer needs to be hidden.

Or speaking of the unhidden, look at the mountains of trash blotting out life in American cities. Trash piled high on city streets. Trash left to feed pests and spread disease. Trash left to stink. Trash left in plain sight, piled high, everywhere.

And, of course, if that’s what they are leaving in plain sight—you’d better imagine the hidden destruction is a thousand times worse. Bags of trash left to melt into the desert. Oil leaking out of tankers, snaking into waterways, into wells, into plants, animals, people.

Finally, the 70s were a time of insane and inhumane labor practices. The worst in the collection being a man hired to spray paint chain link fences. He is covered head-to-toe with silver aerosol paint, provided with only goggles for protection. Look at the layer of dried paint covering his face. Imagine the amount he must have inhaled through his mouth and nose. Imagine his skin scrubbed raw.