The Negative Echologies, Fossil Fools and the Discovery of the Environment

David Bond: The first wave of what we now consider landmark environmental legislation and also the founding of the EPA itself all happened in a tight cluster of a few years in 1970-1974. These are all initially responding to the crisis at hand and privileging threats to human health over economic cost, he says. Bond: I think the fossil fuel industry realizes the initial threat that the environment had to its operations and ends up finding ways of sort of bending and twisting and editing it into something else.