The benefits of the new environmental laws can be seen in the data; the harms became evident more slowly. Pollution in the Monongahela Valley — and nearly everywhere else — fell dramatically. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, between 1980 and 2005, lead levels in the air fell 98% nationwide, sulfur dioxide fell 94%, carbon monoxide fell 88%, and ozone fell 29%.
What was not so easily seen in the environmental data was the slow, steady erosion of working-class communities everywhere. This reality caught up to cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland in the 1970s and 1980s as federal air-quality permits began to force plants to shut down in urban areas and move to cheaper rural areas or overseas.
The American immigrant upward-mobility machine, so effective for so long, couldn't be sustained in the face of the environmental regulation required to reverse the damage from industrial pollution. The problem of what to do with the economy's "makers" — the miners, carpenters, lumbermen, masons, shipbuilders, teamsters, machinists, printers, and boilermakers — was never genuinely addressed by political leaders.
In outward appearance, the streets and avenues in the industrial towns didn't change; the row houses and cottages, with their clapboard siding and parapet roofs, looked the same from the outside. But property values in those towns began to decline and then stagnate in the 1970s, and those living inside the dwellings simply moldered, either on unemployment checks, retirement, or lower-wage jobs. Many younger people abandoned the towns. For those without resources or family safety nets to support them, poverty and welfare checks awaited.
Other countries faced with similar tensions did not succumb to the same capitulation: Cleaner air and water did not diminish the industrial vitality of nations like South Korea or Germany. Only in America, with its unlucky combination of Social Gospel moralism, labor-union corruption, and anti-labor corporate culture did the breakdown occur. To truly understand what happened to the American working class is to pass the test described by writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (probably influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) in 1936: The truest sign of intelligence is "the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
In coming generations, a cleaner, physically healthier country would take note of a disastrous degradation in working-class Americans' health and sense of purpose. Unlike Prohibition, which only directly affected the fifth-largest industry in the country, 1970s environmental regulation mandated air- and water-pollution restrictions so stringent that a permanent decline in roughly a quarter of the U.S. economy took place.
After decades of positive trends in environmental cleanup, the low-hanging fruit has been picked. An inability to appreciate the second- and third-order effects of such policies over the long term has done more damage to parts of America than might a terrible war.