Keith Kozloff publishes op-ed in Star Tribune
The op-ed centers Kozloff’s experience at Carleton in Spring 1971.
Keith Kozloff published an opinion piece in the Star Tribune titled, “Decades ago, I broke the law to stop pollution. That era may be returning.” The op-ed centers on his experience at Carleton in Spring 1971, when he was participating in a special Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) program on campus. Kozloff later returned to Carleton as instructor in economics from 1989 to 1991.
In the spring of 1971, two college students sharing a dorm room hatched a plot to stop a corporation from polluting the Cannon River, which ran through their college town.
At that time, federal, state and local environmental protections were in their infancy. The National Environmental Policy Act and the Environmental Protection Agency had been in place for less than a year.
The two students attended Carleton College in Northfield, a town whose motto was “cows, colleges, and contentment.” The Cannon River, however, was anything but contented. A local company, the Schjeldahl Corporation, had allegedly been releasing untreated effluent into that river, poisoning the stickleback, a local gamefish now known as an indicator species for water quality. Schjeldahl’s effluent was tested by state officials and found to contain copper and cyanide. Despite promises to reroute its effluent into the municipal waste treatment plant, the company had stonewalled. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, created only four years earlier, had not yet taken action.