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2. The Frog Champion
- University of Massachusetts Press
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{ 28 } CHAPTER 2 THE FROG CHAMPION 7 In October of 1995, not long after the discovery of deformed frogs, eightyfour -year-old state representative Willard Munger organized a hearing about deformed frogs and wetlands issues. He invited the school students, their teacher, and me to speak to a mixed assemblage of legislators and citizens. I was honored to be asked and excited to see both wetlands and frogs on the day’s agenda. Munger understood the connection, if others did not. He launched a bill in the state legislature to fund an investigation into the frog deformities. At the same time, he promoted new legislation to protect wetlands. A rumpled-looking, stocky man with a mumbling voice, Munger was a crafty legislator whose entire life’s work was aimed at protecting Minnesota’s environments. In a country made cynical about government, he remained optimistic that politicians could affect society in positive ways. Over the course of his lengthy legislative tenure, Munger authored and shepherded many laws and regulations related to wastewater treatment, hazardous waste, pesticides, parks and wilderness areas, recycling, energy conservation, air quality and more. Fish recovered in the river that flowed through Munger’s home city of Duluth, thanks to the new wastewater treatment plant he’d promoted back in the 1960s. Munger reminded me of my dad, who was a chemist, not a politician. Munger grew up in humble circumstances, as did my father, and both worked { 29 } THE FROG CHAMPION hard all their lives. Dad became a registered pharmacist while in college in California, having assisted in a drugstore in high school. As a druggist, he had put himself through the University of Southern California while he helped support his parents. My father had encouraged me through much of my life, as Willard Munger was doing now in his own way. They were also similar in their occasional curmudgeonly behavior. In the late 1960s, Representative Munger fought to ban DDT in Minnesota after Rachel Carson had raised awareness about the dangers of pesticides, DDT included, in her pivotal book, Silent Spring (1962). In Minnesota, newspapers carried stories of robins quivering and dying from eating DDT-laced earthworms that had consumed the fallen leaves from sprayed trees. At that time, the city was aggressively fogging its abundant elm trees with DDT to kill the beetle that carried the deadly Dutch elm disease. Unconfirmed legend has it that Willard Munger took a basket of dead robins to a legislative hearing to make his case for a ban of DDT. His efforts to ban the insecticide were thwarted because the state’s Department of Agriculture passed laws that gave them all regulatory authority over pesticides, rather than the nascent Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, formed in 1967 with the mission to protect the air, land, and waters of the state. At the federal level, however, the new US EPA, begun in 1970 under President Nixon, assumed responsibility for regulating pesticides, not the federal Department of Agriculture. In short order, the EPA banned the use of DDT nationally in 1972, and that same year the new federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act authorized the EPA to ban the use of pesticides that had unreasonable adverse effects on the environment. By the time DDT was banned, populations of eagles and other raptors had plummeted and many thousands of animals and other birds had died. In 1962, Carson’s Silent Spring had awakened the public. People could see DDT’s effects in their neighborhoods. They suffered from airborne smog. They knew their rivers were heavily polluted, fishless, even flammable. Expectations grew that the government would step in and take action to control toxic pollution, regulate chemicals, and protect the health of humans and wildlife. The first Earth Day, held in April of 1970, signaled a new era: Congress enacted several major environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The Clean Water Act (CWA), passed by Congress in 1972, has a stated goal to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters” and to make the nation’s rivers fishable and clean for swimming by 1983 (US EPA 1972; Gross and Dodge 2005; Andrews 2006). To [54.211.203.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:20 GMT) { 30 } CHAPTER 2 accomplish these lofty goals, pollutants could not be discharged into waters without regulatory oversight by the EPA. The EPA’s Office...