Toxic Airs: Body, Place, Planet in Historical Perspective

7. CHESS Lessons: Controversy and Compromise in the Making of the EPA

127 On November 29, 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson visited the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit organization, to begin a weeklong commemoration of the EPA’s fortieth anniversary and celebration of its accomplishments on DDT, acid rain, recycling, unleaded gasoline, secondhand smoke, vehicle efficiency and emissions controls, environmental justice, toxic substances control, cleaner water, and public engagement . One of the EPA’s first large-scale national projects had been the Community Health and Environmental Surveillance System, or CHESS, which attempted to combine epidemiological research and air quality monitoring . CHESS was an ambitious project, covering eight different geographic regions of the country and bringing together a wide variety of discipline and data analysis methods. The EPA intended to establish its federal authority over air pollution through CHESS, among other projects. However, CHESS proved extremely complicated to organize and implement and by the mid1970s questions were raised about the validity of its data collection and analysis . CHESS became embroiled in a controversy of supposed data distortion and overinterpretation, resulting in a 1976 congressional hearing.1 The EPA then used CHESS as a catalyst to reorganize its monitoring and research 7 CHESS LESSONS Controversy and Compromise in the Making of the EPA Jongmin Lee 128–––Jongmin Lee functions and reorient federal environmental management. Curiously, given its importance in the operations of the early EPA, there was no mention of CHESS’s role in air pollution monitoring and health surveillance in the celebration of the EPA’s fortieth anniversary. Moreover, interviews with former EPA professionals indicated that CHESS had no place in their collective memory. The absence of CHESS in history and memory provides a motivation to look for what it was and how it was forgotten.2 This chapter explores the aims of the early EPA and the legacy of its now-forgotten flagship program, CHESS. The controversies surrounding CHESS make it representative of the kinds of environmental projects that have characterized the EPA since its inception—complex in its organization, ambitious in its scope, and conflicted in its outcome. Ambitions On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon urged the nation to pay attention to the environment in the new decade: “The 1970’s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.”3 Through public hearings and research reports, activists and scientists had shown that smog wasn’t limited to Los Angeles and was becoming a national health concern. At the same time, local authorities received growing demands from constituents but had insufficient resources to meet them. Legislators responded by enacting and amending the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, but federal efforts were limited in scope and scale.4 To make things worse, some military bases and federal research centers were not complying with the very statutes the federal government wanted to impose on the states. Recurring pollution episodes alerted activists who, in turn, mobilized a concerned public. On July 9 Nixon responded with Reorganization Plan No. 3, creating the Environmental Protection Agency, a federal organization designed to monitor and protect air, water, and land wherever pollution occurred. What did it mean to have an integrated system of pollution control at the federal level? Why did the federal government need to protect the environment ? What impacts did the EPA’s activities have on how scientists, engineers, and medical professionals understood the problem of air pollution , one of the leading sources of public concern? Many health professionals linked air pollution to asthma or irritation of the eyes or nose; however, a lack of detailed indices and measurement devices for pollutants hindered accumulation of comparable data. As was the case in earlier eras, health CHESS Lessons–––129 effects researchers were still struggling to identify causal and proportional relationships between pollutants and disease, and knowledge of the transport of pollutants was insufficient to set up effective strategies to remediate large-scale pollution.5 In order to respond to urgent needs for environmental protection, EPA managers swiftly created an organizational structure to address its myriad challenges. The first leader of the EPA, William Ruckelshaus, set up ten regional offices to cooperate with state and local governments. The agency assumed responsibilities from an alphabet soup of predecessors and was also assigned new responsibilities that no agency had overseen. The EPA had to integrate research on different types...