Corroding waste-disposal drums could be seen breaking up through the grounds of backyards. Trees and gardens were turning black and dying. One entire swimming pool had been had been popped up from its foundation, afloat now on a small sea of chemicals. Puddles of noxious substances were pointed out to me by the residents. Some of these puddles were in their yards, some were in their basements, others yet were on the school grounds. Everywhere the air had a faint, choking smell. Children returned from play with burns on their hands and faces.

Love Canal became the first time that federal emergency disaster relief was granted for a man-made disaster.

There are thousands of Love Canals all over the United States. Some we have found, some we have not. The EPA (and the regulations they enforce) is supposed to prevent new sites like this from being created, and to clean up sites like Love Canal.

Which is why Republican plans for the EPA are so terrifying. First, there is H.J. Res 46, which ...

… seeks to repeal updates to the National Park Service’s “9B” rules. The rules require detailed planning and set safety standards for oil and gas drilling inside the more than 40 national parks that have “split estate” ownership, where the federal government owns the surface but not the subsurface mineral rights.

Want to protect the Yellowstone River from an oil spill? Sorry about that. Because H.J. Res 46 would allow ...

… drilling [to] occur in national parks with little more than bare-minimum state regulations. The Park Service will have essentially no authority over oil and gas development proposed inside national parks. Leaks and spills could go unpunished without NPS authority to enforce safety standards.

But wait—there’s more. Congress is set to repeal President Obama’s stream rule, which prevents the coal industry from polluting water sources near mines. You can read the entire rule here. In short, it is there to make sure we have clean drinking water—a pretty important thing in just about anyone’s eyes. It’s up there with clean air, as far as necessities go. The reason Congress wants to repeal the stream rule?

Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) called it “one of the most onerous regulations that has come out of the Obama administration.” “Tomorrow, we’re turning the page on Obama’s war on coal,” said Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.). “There is nothing about ‘protection’ in this rule,” he added. “This was the death mill to coal. It came from an ideologically driven administration. It didn’t care about streams. It wanted to do one thing: kill coal.”

It should be noted that Rep. Johnson’s No. 3 campaign donor is Murray Energy, which bills itself as the “Largest Underground Coal Mining Company in America.” If the name sounds familiar, maybe it’s because Murray Energy has been fined—a lot—for labor violations, for campaign finance violations, and for environmental violations. Murray Energy surely has our best interests at heart.

The truth is that regulations are not killing coal, and coal mining jobs will never come back. As cleaner energy sources become more mainstream and less expensive, the coal industry will be no more than a shadow of its former self. The reason the GOP wants to kill these regulations is simply so that their buddies in the energy sector, who are pushing fossil fuels, can make more in profits. Do not let them fool you for a minute: they are not and will not be hiring any more coal miners. The demand just is not there. Clean water is being traded for corporate profits.

Laws and regulations like the stream rule are the reason we don’t have rivers catching on fire on a regular basis. They are the reason that 50 years from now some unsuspecting subdivision won’t turn into another Love Canal. Yet he current administration wants to cut the EPA by two-thirds.

[Myron] Ebell has suggested cutting the EPA workforce to 5,000, about a two-thirds reduction, over the next four years. The agency’s budget of $8.1 billion would be sliced in half under his prescription, which he emphasized is his own and not necessarily Trump’s. “My own personal view is that the EPA would be better served if it were a much leaner organization that had substantial cuts,” he said in an interview. Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a small-government think tank where he pushes the notion of “global warming alarmism” and against the science that says it’s a crisis.

If you hunt, fish, or like the outdoors in general, you may want to pay far more attention to this than you did to President Obama’s mythical plan to take your guns. Unless you like fishing on bodies of water that catch on fire.

At that very moment, we heard a loud whack! From outside in the fields came a sickening smack of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall. The last Truffula Tree of them all! — The Lorax

We need to stop the Trump administration’s plans to rip the the EPA apart—before our rivers catch fire again.

Before the last Truffula Tree falls.