Environmental Timeline

By sigourneyweaver

  • The Lacey Act

    The Lacey Act prohibited the transport of illegally obtained wildlife across state lines, and outlawed hunting in Yellowstone National Park.
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    Enviornmental Timeline Project

  • Missouri vs Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago

    Missouri v. Illinois and the Sanitary District of Chicago:
    Missouri filed suit against Illinois to stop polluting the Mississippi River with waste from the city of Chicago. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Illinois, thereby allowing the City of Chicago to continue draining city sewers into neighboring rivers. The Court issued this concern: “It is a question of the first magnitude whether the destiny of the great rivers is to be the sewers of the cities along their banks or to be protect

  • Congress Burton Act

    Congress passed the Burton Act, which preserved Niagara Falls from hydroelectric power facilities.

  • Georgia v, Tennessee Copper Company and Ducktown Sulphur

    Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Company and Ducktown Sulphur:
    Georgia filed suit against the Tennessee Copper Company and Ducktown Sulphur because fumes from the companies were coming across the state border and polluting communities, killing forests, and making Georgians ill. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Georgia, that the Tennesse

  • Georgia v, Tennessee Copper Company and Ducktown Sulphur continued

    Copper Company must regulate fumes that were traveling across state lines. Chief Justice Holmes opined, “It is a fair and reasonable demand on the part of a sovereign that the air over its territory should not be polluted on a great scale by sulphurous acid gas, that the forests on its mountains should not be further destroyed or threatened by the act of persons beyond its control, that the crops and orchards on its hills should not be endangered.”

  • New York v. New Jersey and Passaic Valley Sewerage Commissioners

    New York v. New Jersey and Passaic Valley Sewerage Commissioners:
    New York sued New Jersey commissioners to stop dumping sewage in the New York harbor. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of New Jersey, and the dumping continued

  • New Deal plan during the Great Depression

    As part of his New Deal plan during the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to pass the Emergency Conservation Work Act. Under the Act, thousands of unemployed young men were recruited into a “peacetime army” called the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), also known as “Roosevelt’s tree army.” Their job was to protect against erosion and the destruction of natural resources. CCC camps existed in every state

  • Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act

    Congress passed the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act in an effort to control Dust Bowl storms, erosion, land use and conservation. Over 100,000,000 acres of U.S. prairie land were affected by the Dust Bowl. The catastrophe inspired the largest migration of Americans in U.S. history, as 2.5 million Dust Bowl refugees moved away from the prairie.

  • Water Quality Act

    President Johnson signed the Water Quality Act to strengthen federal water pollution laws and outline water quality guidelines for states/

  • Colorado River Bill

    Colorado River Bill ended a decades-long dispute in the American West by authorizing the construction of the Central Arizona water diversion project, allowing the seven states of the Colorado River Basin to draw from the river’s annual flow.

  • Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act

    The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (Superfund) was established to provide funds for cleaning of uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites, along with accidents, spills, and other emergency releases of pollutants or contaminants into the environment. The Act also gave the EPA power to prosecute polluters.

  • Lijan vs Defenders of Wildlife

    Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife:
    The Defenders of Wildlife sued the Department of the Interior to modify the Endangered Species Act to apply to U.S. actions taken in foreign nations, rather than actions only in the U.S. or at sea. Based on the Court’s earlier ruling in Sierra Club v. Morton, the Defenders of Wildlife had two members file affidavits saying that they had traveled abroad to observe the habitats of endangered species (the Nile crocodile in Egypt and the Asian elephant and leopard in