This Is What America Looked Like Before The Epa Cleaned It Up

But what does America look like without the EPA? From 1971 to 1977 the nascent agency, in an act of prescience, enlisted the services of freelance photographers to help us remember. These photographers captured images of America’s environmental problems before we’d cleaned them up. In 2011, the US National Archives digitized more than 15,000 pictures from the series “Documerica”. Here are some of the most compelling. If you like these images, please read our series on the EPA past and present. It begins here.