Photo: US Fish & Wildlife Service

If you live in the United States, you can thank the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for extending your life. Americans in some places would lose on average more than 100 days of life to environmental hazards if not for regulations like the Clean Air Act. Just as a well-managed EPA can extend and improve Americans’ lives, a mismanaged one can jeopardize our health.

Now is an especially important time to understand the EPA. The agency endured more than 100 rollbacks to regulations under the Trump presidency. These will cause thousands of asthma attacks and premature deaths in the years to come and will accelerate global climate change. Now that the EPA is beginning to reflect the priorities of the Biden administration, lives can be saved. It remains to be seen whether the EPA under Biden will be able to halt and reverse the damage of the last four years.

In the political whiplash the EPA experienced as power cycled between the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, one thing has become clear: while legislators play politics with the agency, the stakes are life and death. With lives on the line and our planet in climatic crisis, the time to read, write, think, and act about the US EPA is now.