In 1970, Richard Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act, creating Amtrak. With the rise of automobiles, buses, and airlines, passenger trains had dwindled to less than 1% of intercity travel—fifty years before they had accounted for 98%. At the time, Amtrak wasn’t expected to last long. It was a Hail Mary, a last hurrah—a way to satisfy public nostalgia without excessive public spending. What Nixon didn’t know was that passenger rail wasn’t finished yet—highways were at their high point, planes weren’t getting any faster, and no one likes taking the bus. Amtrak survived and grew—increasing national ridership by 25% over the course of the decade and, over the last five, cementing itself as an American institution.
A great deal of that success can be attributed to a branding venture, designed to emphasize trains as a distinct experience from driving, flying, or taking the bus. To remind Americans that train travel was more spacious, more relaxed, more communal.
To do this, they needed to revamp the dilapidated service of the 60s. So the new Amtrak trains were rife with premium amenities: observation decks, table service, swag, and even cookies. (Joy Williams, in her 1972 short story “Train,” describes a magician, a TV room, and a near-infinite cocktail supply.) As you can see in the photos above and below, it worked—passengers were enthusiastic, memories were made, and good times were had. Back before the shushers had won and every car became the quiet car, Amtrak sold America on passenger trains as a convivial space of fellow feeling and common interest.
But the real story here isn’t Amtrak—it’s the pictures. The photos you’ve just seen documenting the early days of Amtrak’s hard sell come from another curious relic of the Nixon era: The EPA.
The EPA was signed into law in 1970 by Richard Nixon. “We need to know more about the total environment-land, water, and air,” Nixon told Congress about his plan to establish the agency. As he put it in 1972, the EPA was part of a bipartisan “revolution in values” whereby a “commitment to responsible partnership with nature replaces cavalier assumptions that we can play God with our surroundings and survive.” At the time—and for decades after—environmental protection was bipartisan, common-sense policy (for example, the same year Nixon created the EPA; Ronald Reagan signed sweeping CEQA protections into California state law).
Today, in the wake of the hottest year humans have recorded on Earth, and disastrous wildfires across California, not so much. The modern EPA under Lee Zeldin is working explicitly in opposition to the mission Nixon outlined. It is a regulatory agency concerned with deregulation. To quote Zeldin himself: “We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more.” Like the recently renamed Department of War, the modern-day EPA might be better termed as the EDA—Environmental Destruction Agency.
The Documerica project was the brainchild of William Ruckelshaus, a Republican and the first EPA administrator. Among other projects like banning DDT, Ruckelshaus commissioned a nationwide photo record. He reasoned it would provide the EPA with a great deal of qualitative environmental data, create a “visual baseline” against which to judge their efforts, and introduce the agency to the country through art (it is virtually impossible to imagine any politician regardless of party expressing such a humanist sentiment today). By the time budget cuts killed the project in 1977, it had already produced 20,000 photographs—15,000 of which are available online in high resolution via the National Archives. The initiative gives a great deal of insight into what (pre-global warming) environmental stewardship used to mean in this country. It is also one of the best-preserved portraits of American life, a collection of comparable interest to the photography of the WPA or the daguerreotypes of the Civil War.
Some of the collection is straightforwardly environmental—documenting pollutants and endangered habitats. Oil gushing into waterways. Animals at risk from pipelines. Beaches soon to become condominiums.
Look, above, at egrets flying through the Everglades past a hand-painted sign encouraging drivers to “slo’ down [and] let ‘em live.” At second graders manhandling ducks. At a harmless and sweet Alaskan Parka squirrel enjoying a meal of dry frozen grass. Or look at the horns of a Caribou placed on the prospective route of a pipeline—we are told in the photographer’s caption that he has left them at the site of Pump #4.
In other photos, we see the desecrated environment of developed America. Dozens of egg cartons discarded on the side of the highway. A massive billowing industrial plant spewing smoke into a smog-filled sky—and, in the foreground, everyday Americans commuting, unthinking and uncaring, so accepting of environmental destruction that it no longer needs to be hidden.
Or speaking of the unhidden, look at the mountains of trash blotting out life in American cities. Trash piled high on city streets. Trash left to feed pests and spread disease. Trash left to stink. Trash left in plain sight, piled high, everywhere.
And, of course, if that’s what they are leaving in plain sight—you’d better imagine the hidden destruction is a thousand times worse. Bags of trash left to melt into the desert. Oil leaking out of tankers, snaking into waterways, into wells, into plants, animals, people.
Finally, the 70s were a time of insane and inhumane labor practices. The worst in the collection being a man hired to spray paint chain link fences. He is covered head-to-toe with silver aerosol paint, provided with only goggles for protection. Look at the layer of dried paint covering his face. Imagine the amount he must have inhaled through his mouth and nose. Imagine his skin scrubbed raw.
The work showing environmental violation and abuse is important, vital, and still shocking, but what makes Documerica so interesting is that it wasn’t just a catalog of damage, but that it also tracked change. See, for example, how the series captured the undeveloped Santa Monica mountains—soon to be filled with the mansions of Mulholland Drive. Seemingly endless wilderness, being lined with oil pipes, and cut into cul-de-sacs—green mountains drawn out into generous lots.
In other photos, you can see how development affects more entrenched communities. Consider, for example, the lives of native Hawaiians in Honolulu—like the pineapple farmers and fishermen below.
And then look at their world reformed by development. Green hilltops covered in houses. High rise apartments stacked above car dealerships. Rainforest turned into golf courses.
And then look at how development has changed the face of the island. At the native Hawaiian in a hat for the Maui Country Club. At plump American housewives decked out in leis and woven hats.
One of the collection’s most interesting ideological inputs is that the environment is not merely the unbothered, the protected, the sacrosanct—but everywhere and anywhere. That American life and the American environment weren’t in opposition to each other but of a piece. It’s interesting to consider how Americans in situ, in cities, and in slums face similar environmental risks from pollution, degradation, and decay, as a squirrel might face from a pipeline.
It’s no secret that the New York city of the 70s was dangerous and impoverished—sprawling slums, inescapable graffiti, pulsing violence; it was a rough, lively, exciting place—full of burnt-out buildings, flooded streets, roaming unsupervised children.
But underneath those growing pains were the rumblings of, well, growth. Many of the most dangerous areas of New York’s past became the most desirable areas of New York’s future—especially in Brooklyn. And here, like in LA and Hawaii, the beginnings of change are clear. Just look (below) at these repainted brownstones, experiencing the early stages of gentrification—clean streets, fresh paint, empty stoops.
Or look at the photo (below) of an ungentrified brownstone across the street from Fort Greene Park. It’s beaten down. There’s trash in the street. And the neighborhood is clearly still all-Black. But the superlative architecture is obvious, and the strength and longevity of the buildings is clear too. Today, this has become one of the most expensive and gentrified areas in the borough—home to restaurants like Cafe Paulette, Sailor, and Olea—there is tennis, Whole Foods, and celebrities. As Danny Lyon, the Documerica photographer for New York photos said so well: “Brooklyn remains one of America’s best surviving examples of a 19th century city. Some of the best architecture survives in her ‘worst’ neighborhoods.” The last fifty years of Brooklyn brownstone fetishism have proved him right. Today, the average rent for a floor of a Brownstone in Brooklyn is $4000; the price to own is well into the millions.
Another changing city was Pittsburgh (which I’d be remiss not to mention). By the 70s, the clean air and development project the Renaissance was well underway and the worst excesses of the steel and coal industries had been curbed.
Just look at the improvement in smog over Pittsburgh as viewed through the Liberty Tunnel (above: left 1947, right 1974).
Which isn’t to say all was well. The stacks at Phillips Power Station still poured smoke into the sky (terrifyingly close to houses) and factories still poured black water into the Ohio River.
But it wasn’t just the surrounding area being polluted, but the city itself. See the massive pile of garbage blotting out the Pittsburgh skyline (depth removed via the creative use of a telephoto lens). Or at a massive overflowing dumpster on an otherwise genteel street (based on the graffiti, this dumpster has been an eyesore for some time). Even as Pittsburgh was being built upwards and renovated across, it was haunted by the environmental degradation that had made it rich on coal and steel.
That’s a key story at the heart of Documerica, a country of people made rich at the expense of the environment, but seeing the richness spoiled by a world they’ve destroyed—people buying bigger houses, and newer cars, getting outdoors enjoying themselves, all while somewhere—maybe just down the beach—toxic sewage and smoke were pouring out and garbage was piling up. Just look at the above: barefoot, California beachgoers being warned away from the expansion site of the San Onofre Nuclear Plant.
And that’s the real question the series poses. How are people so accepting of these horrors? Is it resilience? Or is it willful ignorance? Likely, some of both. The work of one of the best photographers in the collection, Woodson LeRoy, makes a case for resilience. LeRoy’s photos in Birmingham, Alabama, showcase the poverty and pollution suffered by poor Black residents in Little Korea—directly downwind of the city’s coal plants. You see them playing frisbee, relaxing on porches, moving their lawns—all as poison spews into the sky above them.
But LeRoy also decided to shoot the Alabama State Fair as part of his project for Documerica. Games, Ferris wheels, good times—for white residents and Black. It’s an open, interesting choice. Is the shoot at the fair a condemnation of the city’s priorities? Is it a celebration of a brief moment of community? Just a relic of a good time? It’s hard to tell. Is it fair to have a fair when things are unfair? Maybe not. Is it fun? Clearly, yes.
Documerica was an exploratory project. It didn’t have a hypothesis, and it didn’t come up with any specific thesis. There isn’t necessarily strong consistency between the interests and obsessions of the individual photographers who worked throughout the series. Some were very literal about what environmental photography meant, and others disappeared on flights of fancy.
But the series is an artistic success and a human one. It stands as a reminder of when government projects could be qualitative and exploratory. When America was not just a series of interlocking investments. It is a relic of a time when large humanist ideas could still inform policy and when the process of artmaking was considered more than wasteful.
How else would you have gotten one of the collection’s most enduring relics? Michael Reynolds’s experimental house made of wired together beer cans (above), a method he would devote five books to and would, for a time, cost him his architectural license. For Documerica, David Hiser followed the completion of one house and visited several others. The structures took 70,000 cans to complete. To get them, Reynolds would publish advertisements (15 cents a case) and, failing that, solicit empties in bars (above).
Because the materials were cheap (roughly 20% cheaper than conventional methods), industry investors were curious if the houses were workable, and because they were recycled, environmentalists were curious too. The experiment didn’t pan out. The houses leaked. They looked wonky. They were art pieces mainly, curious sorts of places, for hippies mostly. But they were creative. They were environmentally conscious. And they embodied an ambitious kind of wild genius that seems increasingly quaint in an age of safety, statistics, and software. Reynolds’s houses, like Documerica’s photos and the Amtrak of the ‘70s, recall a time when beauty was seen as a force for change, not as waste for money. When administrators saw value in art and design. When American creatives informed the industry, policy, and even science. It’s a connection worth making again.
