People old enough to remember the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show recall the days when our rivers stank (or burst into flames), the beaches were littered with rotting alewives, and our dumps were open pits where kids shot rats with their .22s. Fortunately, decades ago the country came together to pass air, water, wildlife, wetlands and toxics laws that have made America safer, cleaner and healthier.

The 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were times of monumental and nationally significant advances in the protection of Michigan's vast water resources. Spurred on by a public outraged by gross pollution, Michigan officials dealt aggressively with the sources of the problem, toughening laws and stiffening penalties for violations.

When the federal government fell short, Michigan took the lead, expanding and refining a host of environmental protections. We became a national leader and were the first to slash phosphates in our clothes detergents, ban DDT and pass truth-in-pollution legislation. We protected wetlands and adopted a state environmental act that gave citizens the critical right to sue those who would damage or destroy the state's treasured natural resources.

Today, looking at a much clearer Lake Michigan, a recovering Rouge River and cleaner air, it's easy to think we've put the old environmental threats behind us. But alarmingly, those of us watching closely are detecting an increase in firepower directed at long-established environmental protections. Attacks on environmental and natural resource protections are coming from both state and federal sources.

State legislators are using their budget-making authority to take down essential environmental protections, shrinking state support for environmental protections like a wool sweater in a hot dryer. They've passed budgets held together with gimmicks, tapping one-time revenue sources to pay for ongoing environmental needs. Since 2001, general fund support for the Department of Environmental Quality has dropped from $101 million to $28 million. The $10 million they've added in polluter fees hardly compensates for lost revenue. Next year, there will be no new cleanups started on any of the 4,200 leaking underground storage tanks threatening our water sources. Without new funding, in future years Michigan's environmental protections will collapse like dominoes.

Michigan has passed the point where we can use budget band-aids on our environmental and natural resource protection problems. People in leadership-our Democratic governor and the Republican-dominated Legislature-will have to face up to the reality that without significant modification of a tax structure designed for a very different economy, their legacy will be one of environmental loss and natural resource devastation.

At the federal level the environmental attacks are not disguised as budget cuts. More common are executive order rollbacks, rule tampering and Congressional riders meant to quietly weaken environmental protections.

Evidence abounds that these attacks do not reflect a public hostile to environmental protections. Rather it demonstrates that lawmakers are not hearing an environmentally-outraged public. Our challenge is to alert people to the threat of serious backsliding and encourage them to vote their environmental concerns. The next chance for them to do that will happen on November 2nd.