Each suburban environmental cost entered national debate at a different time

Evidence

The problems did not become apparent all at once. Though the postwar building boom was an environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Dust Bowl, the signs of trouble were not nearly so striking as in the 1930s. No black clouds darkened suburban streets at midday, no dust swept from the plains of Lakewood Park to the committee rooms of the nation’s capitol. Yet, one by one, the environmental costs of tract-house development became subjects of debate. Even before the end of World War II, a variety of people were talking about the need for energy-conserving “solar houses.” The septic-tank problem began to concern federal housing administrators in the late 1940s. The first questions about the wisdom of building on sensitive lands came a few years later, in the mid-1950s. Fortune and Life published influential essays about the loss of open space in the late 1950s. In the early 1960s – before the publication of Silent Spring, and long before the first Earth Day – the U. S. Geological Survey began to investigate the effects of suburban growth on water and soil. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 35

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar housing development sharply raised environmental costs that people then politicized — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 15

Broader Connections

• Postwar housing development sharply raised environmental costs that people then politicized #expands (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 15