“We are committed to enhancing our ability to deliver clean air, water, and land for all Americans,” wrote Molly Vaseliou, EPA spokeswoman on March 16, 2025. This quote comes from a published story about the planned elimination of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, the group most responsible for the science underlying EPA’s clean air, water and cleanup standards. The message here is that with the elimination of the staff of scientists who do the work needed to establish safe levels of chemicals in the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the land we rely on for food production and to raise our families, somehow we can still count on everything being okay. We cannot.
This can all be a little unrelatable at the national scale, so let’s look at how this applies to Cape Cod.
It being spring, you will soon hear the cry of a returning osprey. It was not that long ago that osprey, now numerous, were unusual rather than ubiquitous. The same can be said for the increasing number of bald eagles we now enjoy. I saw no eagles on Cape Cod growing up. The day I don’t see one is now the exception. Why are these birds back? Simple; we had scientists at the national level who came to understand that the use of DDT was responsible for thinning large raptor eggshells. Science was turned into regulations that removed DDT from use in our country and allowed these birds to recover.
Back in the 1980s, the people in the four towns surrounding what is now Joint Base Cape Cod were noticing strange things about their drinking water. Military training practices had contaminated the groundwater with jet fuel, a wide variety of volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), explosives like RDX, and perchlorate. It took the scientists and regulators at EPA to quantify the gross contamination, assess the risk, and order a cleanup of the contaminants so that the people of the Upper Cape can now confidently drink clean water.
If you are my age or older you might recall when acid rain was sterilizing all our ponds and killing off aquatic life. EPA scientists helped figure out that emissions from power plants in upwind states were interacting in the atmosphere and acidifying precipitation that was lowering the pH of our lakes and ponds. Again, the science was married to the regulatory authority needed to reduce smokestack emissions. You need to be over the age of 60 to have lived to see, and therefore fully appreciate, the improvement to our natural resources.
More broadly, the clear blue sky days you may now enjoy without a second thought are in part the result of air pollution control standards and rules that came from EPA. Other undesirable factors like disinvestment in domestic manufacturing also played a part in lowering pollution. The bad air days driven by high ground level ozone, airborne fine particulate matter, and car and truck emissions are far fewer because science-backed standards contributed to the effective management of these pollutants. Maybe you are one of the people still alive because the air you have been breathing is less polluted. Or maybe you avoided or experienced fewer asthma attacks because the air was better. It’s hard to prove or fully account for avoided bad outcomes, but it is undeniable that better air quality has been good for public health.
Good environmental protection standards rely on the best understanding of the complexities of the world we live in. It is not defensible to walk away from developing the science and lying to the public that all will be the same, or even better, without it. Without the scientific viewpoint at the table, all we are really doing going forward is implementing an ideology, whatever it is, untethered from its implications for the environment and, ultimately, public health.
If the administration wants to lower standards to promote some other objective, don’t gut the science, make your arguments on the merits of why not heeding the science is in America’s best interests. Shutting down the science is a tacit admission that perhaps they know the policies being pursued can’t win on a level playing field.
This should leave us all less trusting of official proclamations that there is “nothing to see here” more than ever before. Believe and follow these reassuring slogans at your own risk. Arbeit macht frei. Look it up.
