The postwar suburban boom dramatically increased costs for schools, utilities, and other services. Rather than provoke the ire of residents by continually raising their property taxes, many local officials sought out commercial development to generate tax revenue. Even as outlying areas looked to strengthen their land use planning tools to guide development, the growth imperative—the pressure to add new development to pay for existing and projected commitments of services—discouraged most officials from insisting on robust environmental safeguards. The net result of the growth imperative, based in conservative attitudes about regulating property, was the conversion of agricultural and rural land for suburban construction, rising costs to provision services in more remote locations, and worsening pollution.39
Postwar growth especially threatened the Potomac River, which served as both the region’s major source of drinking water and the dumping ground of pollution. In 1940, Congress created the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin (ICPRB) to organize the four states and numerous localities in the basin in support of protecting the river’s health. The ICPRB, however, lacked any regulatory authority. Instead, states and communities were left to address their individual pollution of the river, which the imperative of growth discouraged.40 As a result, rapid development tapped the Potomac’s water without concerns about supply; produced waves of eroded sediment from site development; and overloaded the region’s main wastewater treatment facility at Blue Plains in Washington, which then dumped untreated sewage back in the river.41 Congress had little pressure to counteract these activities. Instead, it financed individual projects for drinking water, sewage treatment, and hydroelectric power to support postwar expansion.42
The widespread material abundance of postwar America, which had given rise to suburbanization, also sowed the seeds of modern environmentalism to counteract its negative impact. It featured two main aims. The first involved a shift of environmental concerns from conservation, which emphasized economical use of the productive capacity of nature, to quality-of-life interests in protecting nature for its scenic, recreational, and open space amenities.43 A good example of this in Greater Washington was a series of successful civic campaigns to block high-rise apartment construction along the Potomac waterfront during the 1960s.44 These cases tended to invoke an aesthetic clash between high-rise apartments and the landscape of single-family homes and open space that prevailed in affluent waterfront communities. More critically, the privileging of aesthetic over affordable housing obscured a social bias among the white middle class that viewed the waterfront as an amenity only for those who could afford to live nearby in single-family homes. As local environmentalists continued to advocate for reducing the scale of suburban development and preserving open space, they invited charges of elitism that proved hard to shake during the late twentieth century.45
The other major branch of modern environmentalism focused on the consequences of pollution for the environment and public health. Air pollution from industrial facilities and automobiles as well as the unsafe disposal of waste were issues across metropolitan America. Public environmental concern awakened through a combination of high-profile events such as the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the conflagration of the Cuyahoga River in 1969, along with the everyday local concerns about sewage backups, air that was difficult to breathe, and the loss of rural and forested land to development.46 Near the end of the 1960s, Congress passed several ambitious policies to conserve and protect natural resources.47
The most pronounced commitment to environmental advocacy in American history was made during the early 1970s. On January 1, 1970, Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law. Nixon was not an environmentalist, as his predecessor Lyndon Johnson perhaps was, but an opportunist who acquiesced to political pressure from Democrats and the public for strong environmental regulations. NEPA required federally funded projects or actions undertaken by a federal agency to undergo a comprehensive review process that involved the public. For large projects, an environmental impact statement (EIS) review process would identify the environmental impacts of the project, mitigation measures, and possible alternatives. These policies, an outgrowth of the “rights revolution” of the mid-twentieth century, insisted that ordinary people should have a meaningful voice in political decision-making.48
NEPA offered an expansive vision of sustainability at a time before that term came into vogue. It also coincided with a decade of unparalleled national policy making that included passage of the Clean Air Act (1970) and Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973), the Occupational Health and Safety Act (1974), and Superfund legislation (1980) to clean up hazardous waste sites.49 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created as part of the executive branch in 1970 to consolidate and coordinate enforcement of these policies. Its work soon became highly politicized given the strictness of these new policies and their punitive consequences.
While Congress and the EPA were major policy actors, their work would have been far less impactful without large groups of environmentalists working at all levels of government and society.50 Ten organizations, ranging from newer and more aggressive groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense Council to older conservation organizations with new agendas such as the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation, built an influential lobbing and litigation presence around their expertise.51 Their members, along with many local civic activists, built grassroots environmental movements across the United States, the coming-out party for which was the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.52
Although this national attention to the environment was quite significant, environmental protection in metropolitan America over time depended less on national policy decrees and more on the results of citizens and officials working on the ground at the state and local levels. This political devolution had its roots in the social reform programs of the Great Society that championed community empowerment during the late 1960s. Under the Nixon administration, devolution continued under the aegis of making federal agencies more responsive to citizens, but it also gave states and localities more flexibility in compliance.53
The issue of water pollution is a good example of this shift from policy to advocacy. Passage of the federal Clean Water Act created a permitting system with strict standards governing the discharge of pollutants into rivers and other navigable waterways. It also offered several billion dollars to help states and localities pay for wastewater treatment infrastructure to clean up pollution from sewers, industrial facilities, and other discrete sources. Yet these groups still had to stage the cleanup and determine who would pay the high costs not covered by federal funding. As a result, grassroots activists and national lobbies were critical for creating the political and legal pressure needed to advance environmental progress.54
Federal policies played less of a role in curbing suburban sprawl during the late twentieth century. NEPA and the environmental impact statement process, for example, applied to only a subset of development projects involving federal interests and focused more on mitigating impacts based on community concerns rather than ensuring a minimum standard of environmental protection. Federal policies also did little to protect rural land from suburban conversion; indeed, they promoted the consolidation of farming. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz highlighted the acceleration of this trend in the 1970s when he famously advised farmers to “get bigger or get out.”55
As part of the high tide of modern environmentalism, grassroots activities joined with supportive public officials in several Washington-area communities to curb pollution, the loss of open space, and the financial costs of sprawl during the early 1970s.56 After supporting rapid suburbanization for a quarter century, voters in Fairfax elected local leaders who enhanced land preservation and passed a 1973 ordinance that tied development to the capacity of existing infrastructure. A conservative state judiciary, however, overturned the ordinance as an undue infringement of private property rights. In 1976, voters elected leaders who returned the county to a dogged pursuit of commercial development to offset rising property taxes.57
Montgomery County benefited from having a more environmentally conscious population and officials committed to a model of compact planning.