I suppose a psychoanalyst would say that my concern for the environment is rooted in the fact that I was raised in a paper mill community.

I was raised in Camus, C-A-M-A-S, Washington, which is about 12 miles away from Portland, Oregon, but on the other side of the Columbia River.

It's a small town, it was then under 5,000 people, and essentially everyone in the town was either employed by the paper mill, or they were selling groceries or being doctors or employers or pharmacists to people who worked in the paper mill.

So it was in a very real sense a mill town.

The only image that anybody had of Camus was the place where the stink comes from. But that was viewed by all of the families that I knew as the smell of prosperity, that's the smell of progress.

The smokestacks that had unfiltered sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, the hydrogen sulfide smelled like rotten eggs, the sulfur dioxide had an accurate, very, very sharp thing.

Both of which, if they're mixed with rain, turned into acids. And since this was in Southwest Washington, it mixed with rain virtually every day. A hazy mist that is sort of constantly there would accumulate on surfaces and corrode them.

And then, it pitted the roofs of cars, destroyed the roofs of houses, and gave everybody sore throats. People were buying cars, and within six months a year the finishes on the cars were destroyed, and they were starting to model and rust.

And the mill, rather than cleaning up the air, it installed a car wash at the exit of the parking lots. So whenever you left the mill, your car would go through this spray that would spray off the accumulated sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

And there was a small slew near the mill, and every now and then you could outpass the Columbia slew, and there'd be a few hundred dead fish just floating in the water.

If you haven't experienced anything else, what you're experiencing is simply normalcy.

I'm Dennis Hayes. I'm president of the Bullet Foundation, an environmental philanthropy located in Seattle, and have been the chair of EarthDay.org for about as long as it has existed.

Back in the 1950s, when Dennis was growing up, there were hardly any air or water pollution controls, because, well, no one was paying that much attention to the environment.

You were just doing your job collecting your paycheck, going home, and moving on with life.

If you put the mill into question, you put your paycheck into question. So you didn't.

And that was the story, not just in Dennis's hometown, but in places across the country.

We were the most prosperous country in the world, and as a consequence, the most polluted.

It's a American city. You will find it very pretty, just two things. And what you must beware, don't drink the water and don't breathe the air.

All towns had various kinds of environmental insults that they were protecting, not just towns, cities, communities, and rural areas.

We didn't think of it as being anything special, and in fact, it wasn't anything special.

That drinking the water and breathing.

All of which raised the obvious question, isn't it possible to make paper without destroying the planet?

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