First it was foxes-to-guard-the-hen-house political appointments. Then it was undoing environmental protections.
Later came drastically cut environmental protection budgets; the erasures of publicly available data on everything from regulatory violations, violators and sanctions, to the simple words "climate change" from the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Now we have the actual muzzling of EPA scientists who were told last week that they could not present their research on climate change at a conference in Rhode Island.
If you think this is just more partisan, inside baseball in the beltway bulls-eye of Washington, think again.
The Clean Air Act took Chattanooga from it's "dirtiest" air label to the "Scenic City" outdoor mecca it is today, fueling a $1.2 billion tourism industry here.
EPA's $25 million Superfund effort dug 108,000 tons of coal tar quicksand from our Chattanooga Creek to pave the way for new development in Alton Park and along South Broad Street. It also forced the Department of Defense to pay for the cleanup of contamination left from the making of TNT at what once was the Volunteer Army Ammunition Plant. That site now is our very successful Enterprise South industrial park - home to our Volkswagen auto assembly plant.
Likewise, EPA forced the removal of acid-making metal residues from 10,000 acres in the Copper Basin, and that action brought life and fish back to the once-dead Ocoee River after copper smelting left a red stain near Copperhill, Tenn., that astronauts could see from space. The now green and beautiful Ocoee region became the 1996 Olympic whitewater rafting venue.
EPA scientists and engineers oversaw the cleanup of the Kingston Ash Spill after 1.1 billiongallons in slushy, toxic ash rolled liked a slow-motion tsunami from a TVA coal power plant's 60-year-old landfill to swallow 300 acres of suburban land and a 100-acre finger of the Emory River in upper East Tennessee. Today, the site is a community park.
Federally directed environmental efforts have a hand in our future, too.
It was EPA lawyers, after Volkswagen's diesel fraud became clear, who negotiated as part of VW's restitution that the Chattanooga VW plant may become a site for the manufacture of future VW electric cars.
And when people buy carpet in Dalton (and when Dalton residents drink their water), they are far less likely today and tomorrow to risk being affected by a chemical known as perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, which has been linked to kidney cancer, birth defects, immune system disorders and other serious health problems. The chemical that once made Teflon non-sticky and Stainmaster carpet somewhat stain resistant was outlawed, though residue may remain on land and in water.
So it would be a mistake to think that what happens to EPA in Washington isn't a local issue - whether we're talking policy about climate change and air, or about policy pertaining to chemicals and clean water.
That makes downright scary the recent New York Times report that the Trump administration's EPA abruptly canceled the presentations of two agency scientists and an EPA contract consultant who contributed substantial material to a 400-page report about the impact of climate change on Narragansett Bay, the largest estuary in New England.
"This type of political interference, or scientific censorship - whatever you want to call it - is ill-advised and does a real disservice to the American public and public health," said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. "We can debate the issues. We can have different viewpoints. But we should all be able to objectively examine the data and look at the evidence."
Robinson Fulweiler, a Boston University ecosystems ecologist, went a step further in an interview with The Washington Post, calling EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's move an "abuse of power."
"The silencing of government scientists is a scary step toward silencing anyone who disagrees," Fulweiler said. "The choice by our government leaders to ignore the abundant and overwhelming data regarding climate change does not stop it from being true or prevent the negative consequences that are already occurring and those that are on the horizon."
But there's more. Pruitt - a longtime ally of fossil fuel interests who, as the former Oklahoma attorney general sued the EPA at least nine times - isn't the only industry toadie who's been given the green light to roll back or dull environmental protections.
Nancy B. Beck, after she joined EPA's toxic chemical unit in May as a top deputy, went right to work rewriting a rule to make it harder to track the health consequences of PFOA - that chemical we have a lot of in the Dalton area. And if it's harder to track health consequences, it becomes harder to regulate it.
For the five years before Beck was appointed to EPA, she was an executive at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry's main trade association. Before that, she had worked in a testing lab at Estée Lauder, as a toxicologist in the Washington State Health Department, as a regulatory analyst in the White House. And, oh yeah, she once did a fellowship at EPA.
The New York Times recently noted that an EPA Office of Water top official warned in a memo obtained by the newspaper that the changes directed by Beck may result in an "underestimation of the potential risks to human health and the environment" caused by PFOA and other so-called legacy chemicals no longer sold on the market.
Like the chemicals in coal tar? Coal ash? TNT?
All politics are local.