Chapter 6 does a good job of addressing the water pollution in NYC by focusing on government legislation, and why once a law is passed, it just doesn’t clean everything up like we imagine it to. The chapter mentions that some early laws passed in the 19th Century and early 20th Century were just simply ignored because there was no strict enforcement that punished the entities or people who purposely damaged the waters by dumping waste and pollutants. We can also see that the law can also be fought against by powerful people as shown in pages 89-90 where anti environmental legislation groups tried to take down laws such as the Superfund Act and propose their own rules such as the Dirty Water Bill, both of which tried to help the wealthy owning these corporations. Even though these two proposals were eventually defeated, we can see that the law usually involves a lot of wasted time that could’ve saved a portion of the deteriorating environment, and the worst case is that the courts do overturn the laws and bills that are trying to protect the environment. There were a lot of examples of legislation that were passed in the 20th century that did indeed dramatically help restore the waters and prevent a lot of pollution, so there is definitely hope in the future for lawmakers to pass even more favorable laws for the environment if the courts do not favor the wealthy and powerful in our world.
I would also like to mention the author’s pessimistic tone throughout the book and particularly near the end of the chapter where she mentions how “the rivers will never be crowded with fish that one can walk across them on their backs” and brings up no matter how well restoration efforts and protective efforts are, these ecosystems will always be fragmentary. We will never be able to go back in time with the knowledge we have now regarding our environment, and some mistakes just have to be forgiven and not constantly mentioned if we are to make good progress towards the future. The waste and pollutants had to be dumped somewhere in the past, and our predecessors didn’t realize the terrible effects it would have on the environment. It would be great if we could all predict the future and know exactly what consequences our actions would have, but as we know that is not the case. The fact that we are making a lot of progress in restoring these damaged ecosystems should be viewed in an optimistic light, but the author always seems to take a negative jab towards the actions that were in the past instead of focusing on the possibilities that we can achieve in the future. At the end of the day, we are still humans and will continue to use the environment to our advantage as long as we still roam the planet, but some of us are making big steps to restore our damaged ecosystems and preserve them for the generations ahead of us.
