Jersey Girls

 

               On Saturday mornings, my mother would put us in the car and drive to McIlhaney’s Dairy in the north valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to buy a few bottles of milk.  My mother was a milk connoisseur who had been raised on raw milk as a young girl.  And even though McIlhaney’s milk was not raw, my mom felt nothing tasted better.  To her, it was worth a special trip to get it.

               When people think of dairy cows, they most often think of the large black-and-white Holsteins, which comprise ninety percent of today’s commercial dairy herds.  Holsteins are favored in the modern dairy business because they produce the most milk of all the breeds of dairy cows, up to nine gallons per day.  More milk means more profit.

McIlhaney’s herd, though, was composed of Jerseys, not Holsteins.  A Jersey cow is much smaller than a Holstein and golden-brown in color.  Not only is it smaller in stature, but it also produces a lot less milk per day, about six gallons.  Due to their lower production, Jerseys are not preferred by today’s large commercial dairies.  Less milk means less profit.

The distinctions don’t end there, though.  The milk itself is quite different between the two breeds, something my mom could tell just by tasting it. Holstein milk is composed of about four percent fat and three percent protein.  Jersey milk, by contrast, is more than five percent fat and nearly four percent protein, earning Jerseys the nickname “butterfat champions.”

Indeed, it was the Jersey milk’s fat that gave it the flavor and texture that my mother and a lot of other people loved about McIlhaney’s milk and why they would drive across town to buy a few bottles.

Few people are as particular as my mother when it comes to milk. But like my mother, milk still represents a tasty, wholesome beverage to most people. And while the consumption of milk has ebbed and flowed over the years because of changing consumer preferences, war-time rationing, and the Covid-19 pandemic, it remains a staple in American homes and school lunches. Consuming several daily servings of dairy is even recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture’s MyPlate nutrition guidelines.

It is hard to imagine milk as anything but a healthy part of the American diet. But the story of milk has always been controversial, and it is no different now.

 While many, if not most, people consider milk to be an essential part of a healthy diet (as recommended by the federal government), this wasn’t always the case. In the past, cow’s milk was often associated with disease, not with good nutrition. As late as 1938, milk was responsible for twenty-five percent of all disease outbreaks associated with contaminated food and beverages, so there is little wonder people questioned its consumption.

That milk could be responsible for disease is not surprising, because science could not have designed a better Petri dish than a bottle of raw milk. Raw milk is loaded with high energy protein, fat, carbohydrates, and sugar.  It is also rich in minerals including potassium, calcium, phosphorous, and sodium.  And, it is full of vitamins including A, B2, and B12. 

Consequently, bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, C. diphtheriae, and mycobacterium thrive in raw milk. These bacteria cause various human diseases, including tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, septic sore throat, and typhoid fever. Similarly, the H5N1 virus, which causes bird flu, has been found to be present in the milk of H5N1-infected dairy cows. In addition, Stanford University researchers found that a strain of human influenza called H1N1 PR8 could survive in refrigerated raw milk for up to five days.

In practice, these bacteria and viruses can arise in milk from a variety of sources: unclean conditions such as with dirt and feces; from within the cow itself such as with the mycobacterium bovis bacteria that causes tuberculosis in both cattle and humans; and from dairy worker mucus such as with the H1N1 virus.

Contamination by bacteria wasn’t as much of a problem when milk came from the family cow, because the family cow could be kept clean and well cared for and its milk only had to be transported from the barn to the refrigerator (or icebox). Moreover, the milk was consumed by a single family, not the public at large, which limited the spread of contamination. Therefore, the risks of disease were minimal.

By the late 19^th century, though, for the first time more Americans lived in the city than the countryside. My mother witnessed this firsthand when her family moved from their small farm in the rural south valley of Albuquerque to a housing subdivision on the city’s west mesa, leaving behind the family cow.

As a result of America’s urbanization, the development of commercial dairies accelerated, replacing the family cow. Milk from these commercial dairies came from cows that were more likely to be kept in crowded and unsanitary conditions. And their milk also had to be transported longer distances and, prior to refrigerated trucking, stored at higher temperatures than ever before. In the process, milk became a major vector of human disease.

To protect themselves from milk-borne illnesses, people took steps to purify milk.  The simplest and most effective way to do so was simply to boil it, which killed the harmful bacteria and viruses, rendering the milk safe to drink and to use in milk products like cheese, yogurt, and ice cream.

An important innovation that used boiling to sterilize milk was evaporation. A Swiss dairyman by the name of John Meyenberg, known as “Cheese John,” is credited with the innovation as well as the formation of the Carnation Milk Company.  In 1899, working with Kent, Washington, dairy farmers, Cheese John developed a process in which boiling was used to evaporate sixty percent of the water in milk, yielding a concentrated milk fluid.  The concentrate was then canned, which also required boiling.

Evaporated milk met a lot of consumer needs. Importantly, it was free from pathogens. And it could be substituted for conventional milk in many recipes or even diluted with an equal part of water to resemble fresh milk. Since it was canned, it could be safely transported long distances and stored at room temperature.

Evaporated milk had one big disadvantage, though: it had what people felt was a “cooked” or “caramelized” flavor.  Consequently, the public did not accept it as a substitute for fresh milk.

Another innovation, known as pasteurization, fixed not only the milk contamination problem but the taste problem, too. The process of pasteurization pre-dated evaporation, but it wasn’t adopted for commercial use until many years after evaporated milk came to market. 

The French scientist Louis Pasteur is credited with creating pasteurization. In 1857, he identified microscopic organisms, or microbes, in milk, beer, and wine that were responsible for making people sick. In 1863, Pasteur further discovered these microbes could be killed by raising the temperature of milk, beer, or wine to 104 degrees Fahrenheit and then quickly cooling them down.

Today, pasteurization uses a higher temperature (160 degrees Fahrenheit), but the idea is the same.  The big advantage of pasteurization over evaporation is that the milk is not actually cooked (boiled), which preserves its natural flavor.

Despite the advantages of pasteurization, it was not immediately adopted by the food industry. In what may be one of the biggest cliches of food processing, the Frenchman Pasteur focused more on wine than milk. Pasteurization of milk languished, and it wasn’t until the 1920s when market regulations finally required it in every corner of the country that it became the standard for milk safety and preservation.

With the widespread adoption of pasteurization, it appeared the problem of eliminating harmful contaminants from milk while still retaining its taste was finally solved. This was not the case, however, as new substances found their way into the milk supply, ones that were not eliminated by pasteurization.

Pasteurization solved the microbial problems that plagued raw milk; however, even milk that has been pasteurized is sometimes home to a variety of other substances with questionable, if not actually negative, effects on humans.  These substances include artificial hormones, antibiotics, and toxins, all of which are passed along to humans through the consumption of milk.

It is important to note that all milk, including human milk, contains a range of naturally occurring hormones including estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, and insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). Even soy milk contains nonsteroidal plant hormones called phytoestrogens.

About twenty percent of farmers, however, also inject cows with an artificial hormone to increase their milk production. More milk means more profit. This artificial hormone is called recombinant bovine somatrotropin (rBST), also known as recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). rBST was created in the laboratory by the food company Monsanto, using genetic engineering to insert the DNA sequence of the cow’s natural growth hormone (BST) into the DNA of the bacteria E. coli. rBST can increase milk production by as much as ten percent.

Even though rBST is injected into the animal, not added directly to the milk, the hormone shows up in the milk of injected cows. Naturally, many people are concerned about the health effects of rBST on the human body. It is important to note that rBST and BST are not active in human bodies, so scientists do not believe they directly cause health effects for people exposed to the hormones through drinking milk.

Cows treated with rBST, however, have higher levels of the hormone IGF-1 in their milk, and several scientific studies have found that IGF-1 at the high end of the normal range may influence the development of certain cancers, including prostate, breast, and colorectal. To date, however, scientists have not proved a definitive link between rBST, IGF-1, and cancer in humans.

Regardless of what scientists now believe, news of this possible correlation created a major backlash against rBST in the milk market. As a result, by 2010, one hundred of the nation’s top dairies, major grocery stores, and fast-food restaurants went rBST-free. Tillamook, Trader Joe’s, Starbucks, and Chipotle are but a few of the names of companies rejecting the artificial hormone.

Significant doses of growth hormones, coupled with overcrowding, stress, and immobility, subject dairy cows to a variety of health problems including infections (mastitis), muscle inflammations, fevers, and parasitic worms. Although dairy farming practices are regulated, they vary widely in terms of housing, feeding, milking, healthcare, and waste management, and many dairy cows are consigned to a short, brutish life.

These difficult conditions are in turn treated with a slew of drugs, including antibiotics (such as penicillin, florfenicol, sulfamethazine, and sulfadimethoxine), non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (flunixin), and anti-parasitics (ivermectin).

In many cases, the antibiotics used on dairy cows are the same ones used to treat human infection (for example, penicillin). And their overuse has led to medical concerns about the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The extent of antibiotic use in animal husbandry is staggering. Eighty percent of antibiotics manufactured in the U.S. are dispensed to livestock, not to humans. And a 2017 United Nations study reported that 141,000 tons of antibiotics were given to feed animals in that year alone.

When people drink milk in which antibiotic residue is present, they are in effect receiving a small, non-therapeutic dose of the antibiotic, creating an opportunity for drug resistance to develop. Furthermore, cows excrete the antibiotics into the soil, where bacteria in the soil can also develop resistance. When bacteria become resistant to the antibiotics which once effectively treated them, they become an even larger threat to human health.

Finally, cows are also exposed to a variety of environmental toxins resulting from human activities such as farming, burning fossil fuels, smelting, refining, and manufacturing. Independent studies have found the herbicide atrazine, as well as the insecticides permethrin, cypermethrin, chlorpyrifos, and diazinon, in milk samples supplied by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In that sense, not much has changed since scientist and environmental pioneer Rachel Carson called out the presence of the pesticide DDT in milk in 1962.

Given the plethora of contaminants possible in milk, whether originating from nature or from human activities, it is clear the regulation of milk is essential to ensure the product is safe for human consumption.

The regulation of milk began in the early 20^th century. A major factor showing that regulation was needed was the work of Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemist and physician who led the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Chemistry (the predecessor to today’s Food and Drug Administration) from 1882 to 1912. Wiley might be best known for a series of experiments he conducted on human volunteers (dubbed the “Poison Squad”) to test the effects of various food preservatives on the human body.

Wiley collected milk samples that he showed suffered from numerous dangers. Much of the milk he tested had been thinned with dirty water. Once thinned, it had to be thickened again; chalk and plaster of Paris were popular choices for thickening agents. Sometimes toxic dyes were added to make the “milk” look more golden instead of gray or blue.  And finally, preservatives were used because the resulting concoction was prone to rot. The most popular preservative was formaldehyde, an embalming compound.

As a result of Wiley’s work to expose unscrupulous food processors and tainted milk, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into the law the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. The act’s main purpose was to ban foreign and interstate trade in adulterated and misbranded food and drug products. It directed the Division of Chemistry to inspect those products and refer offenders for prosecution.

Even though the Pure Food and Drug Act was a milestone in the federal government’s involvement in the regulation of food and drugs, the law was primarily a truth-in-labeling law. It did not give the Division of Chemistry the power to set food and drug standards.

Without strong federal oversight, states and municipalities took up the cause to regulate milk. By the 1920s, milk regulations requiring pasteurization had reached virtually every part of the country.  The regulations, however, were a hodge podge of state and local laws: some jurisdictions restricted the sale of raw milk, while others did not.

To address the deficiencies in the federal law, in 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which replaced the Pure Food and Drug Act, and gave the Food and Drug Administration (the Division of Chemistry had been renamed in 1930) the power to establish standards for foods, drugs, and cosmetics. The new act remains the statutory basis for the federal regulation of milk today.

But it wasn’t until 1973 that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which was charged with overseeing the interstate sale of milk, ruled that nearly all milk had to be pasteurized if it crossed state lines.  An exception to the law was made for so-called “certified” raw milk.  Subsequent studies linked even certified raw milk with disease, however.  Thus, in 1987, the FDA finally mandated that all milk used in interstate commerce must be pasteurized.

               It should be noted that within state boundaries, the sale of raw milk is still permissible in all but twenty-one states. Of those states that permit its sale, some only permit on-farm sales while a handful allow retail sales, too.

In addition to pasteurization requirements, the federal government established standards for antibiotics, artificial hormones, and pesticides in milk. These are known as maximum residue limits, which are the maximum acceptable levels of pesticides and veterinary drugs in food and agricultural products that will not be a concern to human health. Specifically, the FDA approved the use of rBST in 1993.

Thus, after more than a century, it seemed that technology and regulation finally caught up with ensuring a safe milk supply. Having a safe milk supply would appear to be uncontroversial, but true to its history, the debates over milk rage on today.

Until recently, one of the biggest controversies about milk centered on conventional versus organic milk.  Even though federal regulations stipulate the maximum residue limits that are thought to be safe in milk, many people didn’t want any level of pesticides and veterinary drugs in their milk. And, according to an Emory University study published in Public Health Nutrition, conventional milk does, in fact, contain low to elevated levels of artificial hormones, antibiotics, and toxins, while organic milk does not. Therefore, as a matter of personal choice, many consumers made the switch to organic milk.

The most recent controversy, however, sets the milk debate back a hundred years: raw versus pasteurized. The resurgence of interest in raw milk is a social phenomenon that is driven by a variety of diverse groups, all converging at the same point. These groups include health food advocates seeking unadulterated whole foods, fitness enthusiasts trying to find the next superfood, and even status seekers willing to pay twice the cost of conventional milk for a status symbol.

Perhaps the most influential group, though, is the anti-science, anti-government faction that rails against governmental regulation, sparking a backlash against pasteurization. This group, led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, revels in defying the established science and ignoring the checkered history of raw milk.

Yet, defying the federal government doesn’t change the facts: the risks with raw milk persist.  From 1998 to 2018, 2,645 people were sickened by raw milk. Of those, 228 were hospitalized and 3 died.

Under Kennedy’s leadership, more than 20,000 employees have been terminated from Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA. As a result, in April 2025, the FDA suspended its quality control program for milk and other dairy products, due to the reduced workforce in its food safety and nutrition division. This downsizing sets the country back years in its efforts to ensure a safe milk supply and foreshadows a return of the bad ole days.

All of this would have demoralized my mother, who loved a simple glass of milk from McIlhaney’s Dairy. To her, there was nothing controversial about it and nothing sinister about the federal government trying to keep her milk free from contamination.

Today, McIlhaney’s no longer exists, and its small herd of Jerseys is only a childhood memory. The dairy’s disappearance is not the result of a decline in the demand for high-quality milk. Far from it. More than ever, health-conscious consumers desire milk which is free from germs, hormones, antibiotics, and toxins. In fact, in 2024, Americans consumed some forty million more gallons of milk than they did the previous year, reversing a slump in sales dating back to 2009.

Rather, McIlhaney’s disappearance is the result of the same factors that put many other family dairies (and family milk cows) out of business: urbanization, the rise of mega farms, and children who didn’t want to follow in the family business.

When my mother used to take us to buy milk, the north valley of Albuquerque was still populated with small farms and dairies like McIlhaney’s. But McIlhaney’s was prime real estate for the growth of the Albuquerque metropolitan area, a region that would balloon from 300,000 to 1,000,000 people. Eventually, as Albuquerque expanded, the dairy was pushed out in favor of single-family homes, churches, self-storage units, distribution centers, and other non-agricultural uses. Urbanization guaranteed there was no room for a dairy with its associated smells, solid waste, and effluence.

Over the same period, the business model for dairies changed, too.  It was a change that rendered small dairies obsolete while Big Dairy developed massive operations to produce ever more milk.  William McIlhaney, the patriarch of the family, lamented this fact in a 1996 interview when he noted that in his lifetime the typical size of a dairy had increased ten-fold, from one hundred cows to more than a thousand.

Given these factors, it is no wonder that William McIlhaney’s children didn’t want to follow in his footsteps. Dairy farming has become big business, one shrouded in controversy.  There was a time when a family dairy could provide a decent, albeit strenuous, living, and people would drive across town to buy its milk. Today, dairies are mostly the province of corporations filled with lawyers, marketers, lobbyists, and accountants.

In the end, the rise and fall of McIlhaney’s Jersey girls is the story of milk in America.

 

References

Aleccia, JoNel. 2024. “Raw milk sales spike despite CDC’s warning of risk associated with bird flu.” PBS News, May 14. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/raw-milk-sales-spike-despite-cdcs-warnings-of-risk-associated-with-bird-flu

American Cancer Society. n.d. “Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH).” Accessed March 20, 2025. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/recombinant-bovine-growth-hormone.html

Beyond Pesticides. 2020. “From Udder to Table: Toxic Pesticides Found in Conventional Milk, not Organic Milk.” Beyond Pesticides, July 9. https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2020/07/from-udder-to-table-toxic-pesticides-found-in-conventional-milk-not-organic-milk/

Carson, Rachel. 2002. Silent Spring. Mariner Books.

Douglas, Leah. 2025. “US FDA suspends milk quality tests amid workforce cuts.” Reuters, April 22. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-fda-suspends-milk-quality-tests-amid-workforce-cuts-2025-04-21/

Fuhrman, Joel. 2011. Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss. Little, Brown Spark.

Gitanjali, Poonia. 2022. “Why does the U.S. government have 1.4 billion pounds of cheese stored in a cave underneath Springfield, Missouri?.” Deseret News, February 14. https://www.deseret.com/2022/2/14/22933326/1-4-billion-pounds-of-cheese-stored-in-a-cave-underneath-springfield-missouri-jimmy-carter-reagan/

Goodman, Brenda. 2025. “H5N1 bird flu virus is infectious in raw milk cheese for months, posing risk to public health, study shows.” CNN, March 14. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/14/health/h5n1-bird-flu-raw-cheese

Jacobs, Andrew. 2020. “Is Dairy Farming Cruel to Cows?.” The New York Times, December 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/science/dairy-farming-cows-milk.html

Jordan, Rob. 2024. “Stanford study reveals flu virus remains infectious in refrigerated raw milk.” Stanford University, December 17. https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-study-reveals-flu-virus-remains-infectious-refrigerated-raw-milk

Korducki, Kelli Maria. 2025. “Why everybody’s drinking milk again.” The Hustle, May 2. https://thehustle.co/originals/why-everybodys-drinking-milk-again

Kunik, Kelsey. 2023. “Do You Really Need to Worry About Hormones in Your Milk? Experts Weigh In” Clean Plates, June 16. https://cleanplates.com/nutrition/hormones-in-your-milk-experts-weigh-in/

Lang, Tim and Michael Heasman. 2015. Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds, and Markets. Taylor and Francis. Kindle edition.

Long, Priscilla. 1999. “Carnation condensed milk first manufactured in Kent on September 6, 1899.” Historylink.org, August 6. https://www.historylink.org/File/1608

Marler, Bill. 2007. “A Legal History of Raw Milk in the United States.” Marler Blog, December 31. https://www.marlerblog.com/lawyer-oped/a-legal-history-of-raw-milk-in-the-united-states/

O’Cain, Jane. 1998. “Abstract: Oral History of William McIlhaney.” New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum, January 8. https://oralhistory.nmfarmandranchmuseum.org/detail.php?interview=63

Posner, Gerald. 2020. Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. Avid Reader Press.

Rosenberg, Martha. 2012. Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health. Prometheus Books.

Sciencedirect.com. n.d. “Evaporated Milk.” Sciencedirect.com. Accessed January 17, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/evaporated-milk

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 2018. “80 Years of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration, July 11. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history-exhibits/80-years-federal-food-drug-and-cosmetic-act

Valenze, Deborah. 2011. Milk: A Local and Global History. Yale University Press.

Velasquez-Manoff, Moises. 2025. “Some Raw Truths About Raw Milk.” New York Times, January 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/magazine/raw-milk-danger-benefits.html

Welsh, Jean A, et al. 2019. “Production-related contaminants (pesticides, antibiotics and

 hormones) in organic and conventionally produced milk samples sold in the USA.” Public Health Nutrition: 22(15), 2972-2980, June 26.

 

Steel Belts

 

               Al Unser was on top of open-wheel racing.  In 1970, he dominated the prestigious Indianapolis 500, known as the “Greatest Spectacle in Racing,” leading 190 of 200 laps and beating the next nearest finisher by almost thirty-two seconds – an eternity when you’re speeding more than 170 miles per hour.  That year, in addition to winning the Indy 500, Unser racked up wins at Phoenix, Springfield, Milwaukee, Du Quoin, Sedalia, Trenton, and Sacramento, earning enough points to easily make him the United States Auto Club (USAC) national driving champion.

               Unser, who later became known as Al, Sr. or “Big Al” when his first son was born, was from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and for a time attended Albuquerque High School along with my parents.  My parents remembered Unser as a quiet boy who preferred building and driving race cars to attending school. In fact, he never finished high school, dropping out of Albuquerque High to focus on racing.

What he lacked in a formal education, though, Unser more than made up for with his knowledge and skill on the racetrack.  His racing education came in the form of building race cars at his dad’s garage on the city’s west mesa (on the path of the old Route 66) and tearing up Speedway Park, a quarter mile oval dirt racetrack at the end of Eubank Boulevard near the entrance to Kirtland Air Force Base.

               Years before he was the USAC champion, Unser was the Speedway Park champion. In 1957, at the age of eighteen, Unser won the Speedway Park championship with a record of twenty-three wins in twenty-eight races. He and his dad had built the car he was racing, powered by a flathead Ford engine. Unser would go on to win many more races across the country over the next decade, on his way to becoming an Indy 500 champion and a celebrity in Albuquerque where it all started.

               By May 1971, expectations were high for Unser to defend his title at the Indy 500.  At that time, my father was executive sports editor at the Albuquerque Journal, and the newspaper assigned him to travel to Indianapolis to cover the race in person.  My parents took the assignment as an opportunity for the whole family to experience the great American road trip, so they loaded us kids in the family car and drove to Indianapolis.

               Unser swept to victory again in 1971, setting a course speed record.  The next morning, the front page of the Albuquerque Journal led with the headline “Al Unser Wins Indy,” along with my father’s story and by-line, phoned in from the racetrack.  My father wrote, “Albuquerque’s Al Unser continued his incredible domination of championship auto racing Saturday by winning his second straight Indianapolis 500.”  No one had won back-to-back Indy 500s in 17 years.

               With Unser’s victory complete and excitement running high, we started our trip home to Albuquerque with plans to visit some of the nation’s landmarks along the way: Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (then called Custer Battlefield National Monument), and Yellowstone National Park.

               But first we headed north to Chicago and Lake Michigan, which are in the heart of the so-called “Steel Belt,” a region that arcs around the Great Lakes Basin and includes the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York, as well as the Canadian province of Ontario. At the time, the area was home to thirty million people.

               The Great Lakes Basin encompasses 94,250 square miles and twenty-one percent of the Earth’s freshwater. It includes Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario. For a family of desert dwellers from Albuquerque, the idea of that much water in one place was a marvel.  Prior to that, the largest body of water we had seen was Navajo Lake in the northwest corner of New Mexico, a twenty-four square mile reservoir formed by Navajo Dam on the San Juan River, a puddle by comparison.

               The day we arrived at Lake Michigan near Chicago, the sky was overcast. A light rain was falling, and the temperature was chilly.  A stiff breeze, which created a little chop on the water, made it feel colder than it was. Exhaust from the nearby industrial plants’ smokestacks added to the dull gray sky. We scrambled across some slimy rocks covered in algae down to the water’s edge. The shore was covered with rotting fish, and trash bobbed on the lake’s edge where the water lapped at the shoreline.

When we got to the water’s edge, we stared across the giant lake, amazed we could not see the other side. Huge ships floated on the horizon. To us, it resembled what we imagined an ocean looked like. But we were shocked by the sight and smell of rotten algae, dead fish, water-logged trash, and industrial air pollution. The shores of Lake Michigan were certainly no place for a picnic, and we didn’t linger long.

What we saw that day was the truth about Lake Michigan in the early 1970s: it was a giant cesspool. The lake was a toxic mix of chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, oil, garbage, fertilizers, detergents, and radioactive particulates. All of this was the direct result of the intensive agriculture, industry, and manufacturing that had been built within the Steel Belt. Factory discharge pipes, sewage plants, storm drains, dumps, disposal sites, smokestacks, nuclear power plants, and run-off from cities and farms were all responsible for the pollution. The United States Army Corps of Engineers even got into the act by depositing contaminated spoils from harbor dredging into other parts of the lake.

The same could be said for the rest of the Great Lakes, too. In fact, the Cuyahoga River, which is a tributary to Lake Erie that runs from Akron, Ohio, to Cleveland, was so polluted that the surface caught fire in June 1969. The event surprised no one: the incident was but one of a dozen fires that occurred on the river over the course of several years. Ironically, Akron was the headquarters of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, the manufacturer of the steel belted tires Unser rode to victory at Indy. Following the race, he was even featured in an Albuquerque Journal advertisement promoting specially branded “Firestone 500” passenger car tires.

Not only were the waters of the Great Lakes in terrible condition, so was the area’s air. Like the lakes, the air was a toxic mix of chemicals including sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ozone, volatile organic compounds (benzene, toluene, xylene, etc.), and fine particles. These were byproducts of industrial and agricultural combustion processes that were common in the Steel Belt, including coal-fired power generation, cement production, smelting, refining, and land clearing. The combustion of gasoline and diesel in automobiles and trucks was also a major contributor.

These air pollutants posed a wide range of risks to human health and the environment. In humans, exposure to them increased the risks of allergies, respiratory problems, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. Similarly, in the environment, they increased the risks of loss of biodiversity, disruption of the food chain, stunted plant growth, and poorer air quality.

A particularly significant threat to the environment from the polluted air was acid rain. Acid rain harms wildlife, especially fish, invertebrates, and trees; corrodes limestone and marble buildings and monuments; and leaches lead from pipes – as happened in Flint, Michigan, exposing 100,000 residents to unsafe levels of lead in their drinking water.

The term acid rain refers to rain, snow, sleet, hail, and fog with a pH level of less than 5.2. pH is a quantitative measure of the acidity or basicity of a liquid solution, ranging from 0 to 14. Water with a pH level of 7.0 is considered neutral. Any liquid with a pH level less than 7.0 is considered an acid. Rain and other precipitation become acidic through a chemical reaction between sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides. Combined with water, these compounds form sulfuric and nitric acid, which fall on the land in the form of precipitation. 

Presumably the rain that was falling on us the day we visited Lake Michigan was acid rain, unbeknownst to us.

In short, Lake Michigan was in such dire shape that at that time Neil Munro and William Kubiak wrote an article in the Grand Rapids Press entitled “Is Lake Michigan Dying? If It Is, What Should We Do About It?”, which explored the real possibility that Lake Michigan was on the verge of becoming a dead sea.

Not all was lost, however, because growing awareness of the issues began to cause a paradigm shift. The roots of this awareness can be traced back to Rachel Carson, the scientist whose 1962 book Silent Spring logically and earnestly articulated the great harm being done to plants, animals, and people by the indiscriminate use of toxic pesticides, especially DDT.

The unofficial start of the paradigm shift was New Year’s Day in 1970, when President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which had been approved by Congress the year before. With high hopes for the future, Nixon said at the signing that it was “…particularly fitting that my first official act of this new decade is to approve the National Environmental Policy Act.”

NEPA was a broad foundational piece of legislation that has been described as the Magna Carta of U.S. environmental law. NEPA didn’t directly regulate pollution or set specific environmental standards. Rather, it established a procedural framework that required federal agencies to assess the environmental consequences of their proposed projects and decisions before moving forward. These assessments were called Environmental Impact Statements and became one of the most important (and contentious) parts of U.S. environmental policy.

To further these ends, NEPA called for the formation of a Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to give the president expert advice on environmental matters. The CEQ was also charged with reviewing Environmental Impact Statements. Ultimately, President Nixon merged all the federal government’s environmental programs, including the CEQ, into an independent department called the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who’s first administrator was Assistant Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.

The year that began with an environmental flourish ended fittingly with a flourish, too: passage of the Clean Air Act, which Nixon signed into law on the last day of the year. The act was the evolution of clean air laws dating back to 1955, but it resulted in a major shift in the federal government’s role in air pollution control.

The Clean Air Act established National Ambient Air Quality Standards for six principal pollutants, called "criteria pollutants," that are common in outdoor air, considered harmful to public health and the environment, and that come from numerous and diverse sources: carbon monoxide, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, lead, ozone, and sulfur oxide.

To comply with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards, industry was required to reduce the criteria pollutants, which ultimately required an investment in technologies that can be generally described as “scrubbers.” A scrubber is simply a system which converts harmful pollutants into benign compounds as emissions are passed through it, effectively scrubbing out the pollutants before the air is released back into the environment.

One such system known to every car owner is the catalytic converter. The job of a catalytic converter is threefold: to convert carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide; to turn unburned oil and gas hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide and water; and to change nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and oxygen. These reactions occur simultaneously as the exhaust gas passes through the catalytic converter, converting the harmful pollutants (carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides) into less harmful or even benign compounds (carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, and oxygen).

Another scrubber technology, one that is typical on fossil-fuel power plants, is flue gas desulfurization (FGD). FGD removes sulfur oxides from the exhaust of these power plants by injecting a slurry of limestone (calcium) into the exhaust stream. The slurry reacts with sulfur oxide to form calcium sulfate, which is simply synthetic gypsum. Synthetic gypsum can in turn be used to manufacture wallboard (drywall) and cement or used in other agricultural and construction applications.

A final noteworthy scrubber technique is selective catalytic reduction (SCR). SCR also removes harmful pollutants from the exhaust of fossil-fuel power plants, in this case nitrogen oxides. It works by injecting ammonia into the exhaust stream, where the nitrogen oxides react with ammonia and oxygen to create nitrogen and water, both of which are benign to the environment.

Quite obviously, it costs more to install scrubbers on automobiles and power plants than to not install them. Therefore, business and industry complained about this new cost of compliance at the time, and they warned it would hurt their profits if they didn’t pass the cost along to consumers, a scare tactic to avoid compliance. In reality, the cost was minimal compared to the costs of polluted air harming human health and the environment.  

Nevertheless, by 1972 Nixon bowed to these types of unfounded business complaints when it came to cleaning up U.S. waters, and he reversed course as an environmental champion. He vetoed the Clean Water Act (a sister version of the Clean Air Act) that called for the regulation of pollutant discharges into U.S. waters. Congress, however, saw the wisdom of having clean water and overrode Nixon’s veto, making the act law in October 1972.

Like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act established a structure for the regulation of pollutant discharges, in this case into U.S. waters. It also set wastewater standards and made it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from a stationary source into navigable waters without first obtaining a permit. And it funded the construction of new sewage treatment plants.

Thus, the period from 1969 to 1972 was truly revolutionary in how the United States addressed the environmental problems facing it. During these years, the country adopted key pieces of federal legislation that would form the backbone of environmental policy for years to come. And that legislation led to important reforms in manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation practices that would eventually bring about profound improvements in land, air, and water quality, not just in the Great Lakes but throughout the entire country.

When my family visited Lake Michigan in 1971, the environmental paradigm shift was just beginning. I don’t know if my parents were aware of the changes or understood the importance of the laws, but perhaps that is one of the reasons why they took the family there in the first place: to see American history being written firsthand.

In the years following our trip, Al Unser continued to write history, too.

He won the Indianapolis 500 again in 1978. And in 1987, he won it for a fourth and final time just before his 48^th birthday, making him the oldest driver to ever win the race and one of only four drivers to win it four times. By the time of Unser’s final victory at Indy, Lake Michigan and the rest of the Great Lakes were on their way to a successful, yet tenuous, recovery.

In fact, Lake Michigan is practically idyllic today. It has even been described as resembling Lake Tahoe, the alpine body of water on the California-Nevada border that is famous for a historic water clarity of ninety-eight feet. The Clean Water Act has been crucial in reducing pollution levels in Lake Michigan over the years through the cleanup of contaminated sites, the restoration of natural habitats, and the removal of some invasive species. In particular, limiting agricultural and sewage run-off has had a huge impact on improving water quality.

By the same token, an overall decline in heavy industry in the Steel Belt, coupled with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards established by the Clean Air Act, have combined to significantly improve the air around the lake, especially near Chicago. Years of successful cleanup of emissions from transportation, power generation, and industrial sources have all contributed to falling levels of air pollution. And importantly, the problem of acid rain, once such a threat, has largely been abated.

Even the infamous Cuyahoga River in Ohio has been significantly restored. Birds and fish share the waters with kayakers, paddleboarders, and anglers, while diners enjoy high-end restaurants along the banks of the river.

Despite the success of federal and state laws regulating air and water standards, much work remains to be done in the Great Lakes Basin. Climate change, the man-made change in the average weather patterns that define the Earth’s global climate, poses significant new threats to the region. It is directly responsible for a variety of environmental problems in the region – all of which could lead to big impacts on fishing, tourism, and livelihoods.

In short, the region will be warmer, wetter, and windier than in the past. Both deepwater and surface water temperatures are increasing due, in part, to reduced winter ice coverage, which results in more solar radiation hitting the lake. Higher water temperatures are amplifying negative effects on the lake’s ecosystem, especially the all-important fishery. Water levels are increasing, too, which is eroding shorelines. Satellite imagery shows one hundred feet of shoreline has been lost near Chicago in just the past six years.

Climate change is also responsible for extreme weather events such as unusually high temperatures and humidity, severe storms, flooding, and wildfires. While man-made air pollution has decreased in Chicago, overall air pollution is sometimes in the danger zone, due to smoke from wildfires. In June 2023, for example, Chicago had the worst air quality in the world, the direct result of more than four hundred fires that were burning across Canada at the time.

Despite the obvious risks to America’s improved air and water quality from climate change in regions like the Great Lakes, Lee Zeldin, the current Republican administrator of the EPA, has proposed to repeal the landmark 2009 scientific principle known as the “endangerment finding” that enables the federal government to regulate greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. If adopted, the proposal would effectively eliminate the EPA’s own authority to combat climate change.

In defense of his proposal, Zeldin claimed without proof that regulations “were strangulating [sic] our economy” and he intended to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.” Zeldin’s statement is a far cry from those made by Ruckelshaus, the first administrator of the EPA, who was also a Republican. Ruckelshaus said the EPA had “no obligation to promote commerce or agriculture” and positioned himself as the governmental advocate of environmental progress, not merely a mediator between industry and the public. In fact, he envisioned the EPA as playing a crucial role in the “development of an environmental ethic” among businesses and citizens alike.

After a period of public comment, Zeldin’s proposal will probably be finalized next year (2026), effectively ending the federal government’s role in fighting climate change as well as its history of sound environmental policy dating back to President Richard Nixon.

While Lake Michigan faces new threats from climate change and a hostile EPA administrator, the lessons from the 1970s are clear: it is possible to protect and even restore polluted land, air, and water through effective environmental regulations.

Under these new conditions, Lake Michigan carries on, but Al Unser and Speedway Park in Albuquerque are both gone now. The racetrack was closed in the early 1980s as the city encroached on it. Noisy racecars don’t make good neighbors.  Unser died in 2021 at the age of 82 at his home in Chama, a small village in northern New Mexico where he lived out his retirement. He was one of the greatest racecar drivers of all time and was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1998.

Because of what I witnessed on my family’s great American road trip from Albuquerque to Indianapolis more than fifty years ago, I will always remember Unser, Speedway Park, and Lake Michigan. I will also always remember the environmental damage caused by America’s unconstrained and unregulated growth capitalism, as well as America’s wisdom in moving to protect and restore the country’s irreplaceable natural resources.

I still watch the Indy 500 every Memorial Day weekend and remember.

 

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