Televised 1969 environmental disasters shifted public demand toward preventive regulation.

Evidence

Two of the most visually unsettling events, however, both occurred in 1969. These were the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio and the Santa Barbara oil spill off the coast of California. Along with the horrors of the Vietnam War, images of burning rivers and seagulls suffocated in oil were now being brought by television and national news magazines directly into the living rooms of millions of Americans. The immediate, visual confirmation of threats to the environment intensified public demand for environmental protection. Direct experience of an ongoing threat necessarily increases pressure in favor of measures to prevent the threatened occurrence’s taking place rather than merely to redress any consequential harm after the fact. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 285

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Environmental law’s sudden 1970s eruption masked decades of slowly building public concern. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 264; The Danatbank collapse introduced the banking crisis to the public. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 51