How did it feel, seeing the dictatorships collapse and look at the newspaper and see good news?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Franco 1975
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution 1974
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_in_Brazil 1985
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea#Sixth_Republic_(1987–present) 1988
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process 1983
The rivers of fire was one major thing that contributed to the formation of the EPA, actually. In the preceding decades, if was totally normal for industry to just dump whatever waste into rivers and nobody cared.
We still have far too much pollution going on, but I feel many people have forgotten just how egregious it was before government regulations were put in place to stop shit like that.
It’s pretty bad now, but more to the point, we’re still paying for the wanton destruction wrought decades ago. And now ‘conservatives’ (air quotes because in this case, it’s the opposite) want to roll back regulations because freedom.
I’ve been through river cleanups everywhere I ve lived. There’s always something toxic that corps got away with dumping for so many years and then just left it. Government on the hook for so many billions of dollars cleaning up the mess. Where’s that sense of personal/corporate responsibility we hear so much about?