United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
Office of
Communications, Education,
and Public Affairs
Volume 18, Number 4
September/October 1992
175N92-010
EPA JOURNAL
Post-Rio: The Challenge at Home
-------
&EPA JOURNAL
United States
Environmental Protection Agency
William K. Reilly
Administrator
Office of Communications,
Education, and Public Affairs
Carl Gagliardi
Acting Associate Administrator
Charles Osolin
Director of Editorial Services
John Heritage
Editor
Karen Flagstad
Associate Editor
Teresa Opheim
Assistant Editor
Gregg Sekscienski
Assistant Editor
Ruth Barker
Assistant Editor
Nancy Starnes
Assistant Editor
Marilyn Rogers
Circulation Manager
Rich tenWolde
Intern
Editorial Assistance
Leighton Price
Design Credits
Ron Farrah
James R. Ingram
Front cover: Encroaching development
and its consequences must be addressed
as the United States works toward
sustainable development.
Photo by Larry is/ever tor
Gram Mailman Photography. Inc.
A Magazine on National and Global Environmental Perspectives
September/October 1992 • Volume 18, Number 4 • 175N-92-010
From the Editor
ndividualism is a great American tradition. It is expressed today in the
_ driver commuting alone to work; the detached, single-family suburban
home; and the second family home on a strip of waterfront property. In a
little over 200 years, this spirit has conquered a vast expanse of land from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, produced one of the world's most powerful economies,
and resulted in a lifestyle that is sought after by societies around the globe.
But America is much more than 249 million individuals. It is, in reality, a
complex, intricate organism, just as the human body is made up of skin and
blood vessels, bones, and lungs. If these systems are functioning well and
working effectively together, the organism will be healthy and operate
efficiently. These "life support" systems in our society include energy,
technology, transportation, industry, the land and the use we make of it, and
even people, the greatest resource of any society.
We need to view ourselves as a society composed of such systems and
take the time to ask, Are our systems operating well? If we persist in
seeing ourselves simply as a nation of individuals, fragmented by our own
interests and concerns, it is logical to expect that the vital systems of support
will deteriorate and threaten the quality, if not the very future, of the
American venture.
There are already many signs of trouble, from traffic jams to industry
struggling to remain competitive with the rest of the world, from pollution to
decaying city cores. The challenge for this nation, as we try to become a
better neighbor on the planet, is to lower our individual guards and declare
our interdependence with each other and with the "life supports" whose
condition will determine the health and strength of a future America.
EPA JOURNAL Subscriptions
The annual rate for subscribers in the U.S. is $10. The annual rate for subscribers in foreign countries is S12.50. The price of a single copy of
EPA journal is $3.50 in the U.S. and S4.38 if sent to a foreign country. Prices include mailing costs. Subscriptions to EPA journal as well as
other federal government magazines are handled only by the U.S. Government Printing Office. To subscribe to EPA journal, send a check or
money order payable to the Superintendent of Documents. The requests should be mailed to: P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954.
To change address, call or write: The U.S. Government Printing Office, Public Documents Department, Superintendent of Documents
Washington, DC, 20402; (202) 512-2262.
EPA JOURNAL is printed on recycled paper.
-------
CONTENTS
Post-Rio: The Challenge at Home
American Landscapes
A Photo Essay
A Call for Sustainability
by Russell E. Train
The Road from Rio
by William K. Reilly
Page 24
Page 32
4
7
11
Support Systems HHMHMBMMBMB
Powering the Future 15
by Robert H. Williams
States Fight Global Warming 18
by Pamela Wexler and Susan Conbere
EPA's Green Programs 20
by Eileen B. Claussen
Driving Home a New
Transportation Policy 21
by Senator John H. Chafee
The Environmentally
Friendly Vehicle 24
by John M. DeCicco and Deborah Gordon
The Auto Industry Looks Ahead 25
by Dean A. Drake and Treva Formby
Companies Change Course
by Frank Popoff
Building a Better Refrigerator 27
by Gary Fernstrom
Moving Beyond the "Tech Fix" 29
by John Gibbons
Resources
Page 48
Agriculture: Two Views
Green Subsidies? by Ken Cook
Looking to the Market by Stephen B.
Lovejoy and Kathleen A. Heaphy
33
Public Lands: Two Views 36
A Dismal Status Quo
by George T. Frampton, Jr.
No Fixes Needed
by William Perry Pendley
The Rising Tide 39
by Marya Morris
Linkages and Lifelines 42
by Douglass Lea
Great Water Bodies at a Watershed 45
by Wesley Marx
An Urgent Agenda 48
by John Adams
Sustainability and People of Color 50
by Mencer Donahue Edwards
Greening at the Grassroots 52
by Frederick Allen and Gregg Sekscienski
What's a Person To Do? 53
bv Dana Duxburv
A Skeptical Twist 54
by Jane S. Shaw and Richard L. Stroup
26 Departments
Newsline
News and Comment on EPA
Cross Currents: Reading Gore 57
by Douglass I.ea
Environmental Titans: Aldo Leopold 59
by Teresa Opheim
Habitat: City Life, Country Living 62
An excerpt from William Cronon's
Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
On the Move 64
New Names in Key Agency Posts
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is charged by Congress to protect the nation's land, air, and water systems. Under a mandate of national
environmental laws, (he Agency strives to formulate and implement actions which lead to a compatible balance between human activities and the
ability of natural systems to support and nurture lite.
EPA JOURNAL is published by EPA . The Administrator of EPA has determined that the publication of this periodical is necessary in the
transaction of the public business required by law of this Agency. Use of funds for printing this periodical has been approved by the Director of the
Office of Management and Budget. Views expressed by authors do not necessarily reflect EPA policy. No permission necessary to reproduce
contents except copyrighted photos and other materials.
Contributions and inquiries are welcome and should be addressed to: Editor, EPA JOURNAL (A-107), Waterside Mall, 401 M Street, SW,
Washington, DC 20460.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
1
-------
NEWSLINE
Battery-Powered Lawn Mowers To Be Studied for Smog Reduction
Under an agreement between
EPA and u consortium of electric
utilities and their associations, flic
environmental benefits of using
electric instead of gasoline
powered lawn mowers will be
studied. The consortium will
distribute up to 1,000 cordless
mowers to residents across the
country in exchange for their
gasoline mowers; they will then
gather performance and customer
satisfaction data from the
residents. EPA will test the
gasoline mowers to decide whether
to issue emissions regulations.
The consortium consists of the
Edison Electric Institute, the
Electric Power Research Institute,
and the following utilities:
Rnltimore Gas f-t Electric, Boston
Edison, Indianapolis i'ower &
Light, New England Electric
Si/slein, New York State Electric
& Gas, Oklahoma Gas & Electric,
Potomac Electric Power, Tampa
Electric, and Western Resources.
The New York Times
commented: " ... To most
people, it is n lawn mower, but
to the Environmental
Protection Agency it is an
'uncontrolled mobile source'
that becomes part of the
suburban swarm adding
measurably to smog on a
summer's day. And the time
has come, the agency says, to
clean it up, along with weed
eaters, leaf blowers, chain
saws, and a lot of other off-
road gas-powered machinery.
A lawn mower can easily spew
as much smog-causing
hydrocarbon into the air in an
hour as a modem car, experts
on pollution say, even though
the car has 30 times as much
horsepower .... This is because
modern cars have
microprocessors that can
precisely control an engine's
mix of fuel and air, injectors to
break the fuel into droplets of
optima! size, and catalytic
converters to catch anything
that passes through the engine
unburned. Lawn mowers and
other outdoor machines have
none of these. In fact, they
have all the pollution control
equipment of a '57 Chevy—
without a muffler.... Ten
utilities around the country
will each give away 100 newly
designed battery-powered
mowers, taking their
customers' old gasoline
models in trade and asking
them to test the new mowers
in the field—or, more
precisely, on the lawn—and
report back on their
performance. Meanwhile, the
EPA will haul the old mowers
into its labs to study their
emissions ...."
The Baltimore Sun reported:
" ... Don't tow your Toro to the
nearest Baltimore Gas and
Electric Co. [(BG&E)] office
just yet. The great lawn
mower giveaway is not quite
ready, and it may not be such a
sweet deal after all ....
Yesterday, BG&E spokesman
Art Slusark said his company
does not yet have any of the
100 electric mowers it plans to
distribute. The utility also has
not figured out how to give
them out, or even if the
mowers will be free .... Electric
mowers use very little
electricity, industry spokesmen
say. In fact, a single lawn
cutting uses less electricity
than it takes to burn a 60-watt
light bulb for an hour,
according to the Edison
Electric Institute, a utility
industry group. Using a'n
electric lawn mower all year
would cost less than $4 in
electricity. Many people
complain about fighting an
electric mower cord as they
mow. But the utilities plan to
hand out a new cordless model
made by Black & Decker Corp.
It can run for an hour, which
should be enough time to cut a
quarter acre. Then, it must be
plugged in for recharging ...."
Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.
Chicago Board of Trade to Run Auctions and Direct Sales of SO, Allowances
Hl'A has selected the Chicago
Board of Trade to run the
annual auctions and direct
sales of sulfur dioxide (SO,)
allowances under its acid
rain program. The1 first
auction will be held in March
and the first direct sale by
June of next year. Auctioned
allowances will be sold to the
highest bidder; direct sales,
which will be made on a
first-come, first-served basis,
are set by the Clean Air Act
(CAA) at $1,500 per
allowance, to be adjusted
yearly for inflation.
Market-based trading of
SO, allowances is the
centerpiece of the acid rain
program. Under the
program, EPA will give
existing sources (mainly
power plants) free
allowances based on
emissions rates and previous
fuel use. One allowance
gives a plant the right to emit
one ton of SO, a year. The
plant's total emissions cannot
exceed its total allowances. If
a utility reduces its emissions
more than required, it can
put its surplus allowances on
the market. To stimulate the
market, the CAA requires
that EPA set aside for auction
or direct sale up to 2.8
percent of the allowances
that it would otherwise make
available to existing utilities.
The auctions and direct sales
will also provide allowances
for new utilities, which are
not automatically entitled to
them under the Act.
The delegation to the
Chicago Board of Trade
begins with the first auction
next March ancl continues for
three years. EPA may extend
the delegation; it may also
revoke it. The board will not
be compensated by EPA, nor
can it charge fees to those
who buy allowances.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Dexter Corporation Settles for $13 Million in Fines
Dexter Corp., a Fortune 500
company that operates
facilities nationwide, has
agreed to pay $13 million in
criminal and civil fines for
violations at its
manufacturing plant in
Windsor Locks, Connecticut.
The plant manufactures
specialty paper products that
are used in the making of tea
bags, food packaging, and
disposable medical gowns.
The violations were charged
under the Clean Water Act
and the Resource
Conservation and Recovery
Act; the settlement resulted
from the combined efforts of
the State of Connecticut, the
U.S. Department of Justice,
and EPA.
Dexter pled guilty to eight
felony violations and agreed
to pay $4 million in fines for
illegally disposing of carbon
disulfide, a chemical used in
making viscose. During
transfer of the chemical to a
storage tank, some carbon
disulfide remained in
shipping drums; when the
drums were turned over, the
chemical, which is classified
as an acute ha/ardous waste,
was dumped on the ground.
It was also discharged into
the Connecticxit River
through an overflow pipe
from the tank.
Dexter, whose facilities
discharge more than six
million gallons of wastewater
a day into the Connecticut
River, also will pay $7.2
million for routinely
violating conditions of its
National Pollutant Discharge
Elimination System (NPDES)
permit. Inadequately treated
or, in some cases, untreated
discharges of organic
pollutants have depleted
oxygen in the river; aquatic
New Rule to Protect Agricultural Workers from Pesticides
A new regulation issued In/
EPA is designed to limit
exposure of agricultural workers
to pesticides, to reduce health
effects when exposure occurs,
and to educate zvorkers about
the hazards of using pesticides.
The rule, which substantially
revises standards set in 1974,
will affect 3.9 million
people—not only farnnvorkers,
but also those who work in
forests, nurseries, and
greenhouses. In announcing the
new standards, Administrator
Reilli/ said: "Agricultural
workers throughout America
now have a far greater
opportunity to protect
themselves and their families.
These workers will know, often
for the first time, zclicu the\j arc
working in the presence of toxic
pesticides, understand Hie
nature of the risks these
chemicals present, and get basic
safety instructions."
The Wall Street Journal
commented: "...The
regulations will raise national
standards closer to those in
California, which has the
nation's toughest
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
pesticide-handling laws, said
Linda Fisher, head of the
EPA's pesticide division. But
Shelley Davis, a lawyer for a
migrant-worker group, called
them a 'baby step forward.'
The revisions, the first in 18
years, will cover not just
traditional farm laborers but
for the first time employees
of greenhouses, nurseries,
and forests as well. There are
an estimated 20,000 to
300,000 poisonings of
agricultural workers a year,
with about 1,000 fatalities.
Hard statistics aren't
available because record-
keeping is so poor. To limit
worker exposure, the EPA
will require that by April
1994 employers train workers
in pesticide safety, post
safety information, and place
warning signs to keep
workers out of freshly
sprayed fields. Quarantines
barring re-entry to freshly
sprayed fields currently are
in place for only about 50
agricultural chemicals. The
new rules will set quarantine
times, ranging from 12 hours
to three days, for all other
pesticides, depending on the
chemical's toxicity. In a
change affecting pesticide
makers, new restrictions on
quarantines and protective
equipment \vill have to be
displayed on product
labels .... "
The New York Times
reported: "... The rules,
issued Thursday, require
employers to train workers in
the handling of pesticides
and post warnings of risks.
Their implementation was
caught in a struggle between
the Agriculture Department,
which said they could hurt
the agriculture industry, and
proponents of stiffer
regulations .... The EPA said
compliance could cost
companies up to $60 million
a year. Under the new
regulations, employers must
train wonkers to use
protective equipment, like
gloves or goggles, and
provide a place for them to
wash and get emergency
medical care. Employers
must post notices at treated
life has also been harmed by
the discharge of toxic
pollutants, such as chlorine.
The company will pay a
$1.8 million penalty for
failing to manage hazardous
wastes in accordance with
the law. According to EPA, it
illegally treated, stored, and
disposed of wastes; failed to
notify the Agency of
hazardous waste activities
and to document transport-
improperly managed
containers during storage;
and failed to maintain
adequate records and to
establish adequate financial
assurances to close the
facility safely.
fields warning workers in
Spanish and English of
pesticide risks, and they
must bar workers from the
fields for 12 to 72 hours after
spraying, depending on the
type of pesticide used and
conditions. The rules would
be phased in over the next
two years. By April 15,
pesticides must carry labels
warning that they are not to
be used in a way that would
lead to human exposure ....
Advocacy groups for farm
workers cheered some
aspects of the regulations but
said they did not do enough
to insure that workers were
trained about pesticide
exposure .... The rules would
not apply to Government-
sponsored pest control,
livestock uses, home
gardens or lawns, research
on unregistered pesticides,
or post-harvest activity.
Farm owners and their
immediate families are
exempt from the training,
decontamination, and
emergency assistance
rules, the EPA said .... " 0
-------
A PHOTO ESSAY.
American Landscapes
Fisher's Landing:
Martinez Lake. Arizona
by Jim Stone (1988).
Tie "Earth Summit" ot
.ast June—the United
Nations Conference on
Environment and
Development held in Rio de
Janeiro, Bra/il—brought
worldwide attention to the
fundamental interconnections
between economic activity and
the environment. In the wake
of the Rio conference, it makes
sense, as a beginning, to take a
closer look at the economic and
ecological connections that
surround us, starting here at
htnne in the United States.
It has been said that the 20th
century ended and the 21st
century began at the Earth
Summit. If that is true, then a
current exhibition entitled
Between Home and Hcaivn:
Contemporary American
landscape Photography,
organized by the National
Museum of American Art,
documents the American
landscape of the era now
ending. ttetuven Home ami
Heaven (a few images are
pictured here) depicts urban
grit in Manhattan, the textures
of a Kansas prairie, scarring
left from a strip mine in
Montana, and a plethora of
other images from across the
continent. Amidst the patterns
of abuse, the uneasy
coexistence of nature and
culture, and scenes of raw
natural grandeur is an
invitation for Americans to
form a more benign compact
with their land. By recognizing
limits to sustainability, such a
compact could ensure that the
land continues to provide both
inspiration—a heaven—and a
source of resources and
wealth—a home.
Between I lame and Heaven
has been displayed at the
National Museum of American
Art in Washington and the
Carnegie Museum of Art in
Pittsburgh. It will open this
winter at the New Orleans
Museum of Art and also will
travel to the New York State
Museum in Albany, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, and
the Virginia Beach Center for
the Arts. 0
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Photos Iran top to bottom: Smoky Hill Bombing
Range Tatgal, Tites by ferry fvans (1990);
Throe Mile Island Nuclear Plant, Susquehanna
River, Pennsylvania by John Plahl (1982);
Alaska Pipeline ty Skaet McAu/ey (1990).
All lour photos are Iron the National Museum
oi Amman An and ace gifts from trie
Consofcfafed Natural Gas Company Foundation
I .... • * : ' ' '"'•
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
-------
THE CHALLENGE AT HOME
Today's young people will inherit the
planet. Can it sustain their needs
and those of future generations?
Mike Brisson photo
EPA JOURNAL
-------
A Call for Sustainability
To ensure our future survival,
major changes are needed now
by Russell E. Train
he coming together of more than
170 nations under the auspices of
the Earth Summit was, if nothing
else, the first global acknowledgement
that environmental quality and
economic health are inextricably
linked—that the economic well-being
of the Earth's peoples depends directly
on the continued health of its natural
resources.
This synthesis of environment and
economics—and put forward in
Agenda 21, the lengthy charter for the
future adopted by the conference
plenery—known as sustainable
development, was only advanced,
not discovered, by the diplomats
in Rio. I suspect that if one were to
search the literature, one would find
references to the basic relationship
hundreds, if not thousands, of years
ago. 1 do know that 85 years ago, in the
annual message to Congress which has
since become known as the State of the
Union address, President Theodore
Roosevelt said, "To waste our natural
resources, to skin and exhaust the land
instead pf using it as to increase its
usefulness, will result in undermining
in the days of our children the very
prosperity which we ought by right
to hand down to them amplified and
developed."
The choice between crisis and
sustainable development is one our
(Train, a former EPA Administrator, is
Chairman of World Wildlife Fund.)
nation shares with the rest of the world,
and the only way to address it is
through international cooperation and
through U.S. commitment to leadership
at home and abroad.
As the world's single largest
economy, the largest user of natural
resources, the largest producer and
consumer of energy, and the largest
producer of carbon dioxide pollution,
the United States has not just a
special responsibility to exercise
world leadership but a particularly
high stake in meeting the
environmental challenges of the future.
I am convinced that the natural
processes that support life on Earth are
in serious jeopardy and that by acting
now—or not acting—our country is
choosing between two radically
different futures. If the United States
continues down its current path,
merely reacting to and trying to
repair environmental injuries, then
the nation's natural resources,
economy, and way of life will
deteriorate. However, if our country
pioneers new technologies, realigns
government policies, makes bold
economic changes, and embraces a
new ethic of environmentally
responsible behavior, we can expect the
coming years to bring a higher quality
of life, a healthier environment, and a
vibrant economy.
The time is now for new strategies to
address the environmental challenges
of the future. The National
Commission on the Environment (see
box on page 9) spent more than 18
months deliberating and debating ways
to address the overwhelming
environmental problems we face. Let
me share some thoughts of mine that
arose from the commission's work.
The Picture
Today
Over the past 20 years, an impressive
array of federal, state, and local
pollution control and resource
management programs, both public
and private, have been instituted in the
United States. Total U.S. expenditures
on environmental protection now
average more than 2 percent of gross
national product per year.
The United States had the foresight to
begin adopting stringent environmental
laws and regulations more than two
decades ago and to make sizable
economic investments in pollution
control and energy efficiency. As a
result, this country does not have to
contend with landscapes as blighted,
air and water as polluted, soils as
poisoned, or public health as ravaged
as those of Central and Eastern Europe.
The measurable environmental
progress made by the United States
should be a source of national pride.
Still, our country's environmental
achievements allow no room for
complacency. Despite numerous
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
-------
THE CHALLENGE AT HOME
victories, the United States is losing
the battle:
• Global environmental problems
to which we make no small
contribution—climate change, loss of
biodiversity, stratospheric ozone
depletion, for instance—are placing
both human and natural systems at
grave risk.
« The air in U.S. cities threatens to
deteriorate further as improvements in
auto emissions controls are
overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of
cars and miles driven and by
congestion. Meanwhile, indoor air
pollution is largely ignored.
• Disposal and cleanup of the vast
amounts of waste generated each year
pose ever greater difficulties and
consume an increasing proportion of
the limited funds available for
environmental protection. Indirect
sources of pollution, such as urban and
agricultural runoff, continue nearly
unabated.
• Encroaching land development is
displacing and undermining critical
ecosystems, such as wetlands, and
threatens rural landscapes, natural
areas, and biological diversity (see
article on page 42).
• Large areas of national forest and
other public lands and resources are not
managed sustainably (see article on
page 36).
• Farmlands are suffering from the loss
of soil and excessive use of chemicals
(see article on page 33).
• Aquifers, a major source of water
supply, are being consumed and
contaminated at an alarming rate in
many areas of the nation.
• Overfishing is seriously depleting
our most important commercial
fisheries.
• In many U.S. inner cities, the
physical environment has the look of a
wasteland.
While this litany of environmental
ills, familiar-sounding and by no means
complete, is a product of today's level of
economic activity and human
population, consider tomorrow. Over
the next 50 years—within the lifetimes
of many of us and of all of our
children—economic activity in the
United States is projected to quadruple
and global population to at least double.
If growth of this magnitude occurs with
today's industrial processes,
agricultural methods, and consumer
"And may we continue to be, worthy of consuming a
disproportionate share of this planet's resources."
Drawing by Lorenz. Copyright 1992 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
practices, the result could be both
environmentally and economically
disastrous.
Forecasts based on linear projections
are often wrong. In the case of
environmental conditions, such
projections may be too optimistic.
Ample evidence suggests that,
unless we act decisively, the price
will be serious—in some cases,
irreversible—environmental damage.
Clearly, it would be the height of folly
for the nation to sit back and simply
hope that the future will be greened by
an invisible hand. Excuses for inaction,
such as budget deficits and opposition
to taxes, abound. Yet the continuing
pursuit of politics as usual will almost
certainly guarantee failure.
There must be an end to ambivalence
about both the importance of
environmental policy and our
environmental policy priorities. The
United States must have a long-term
strategy for pursuing the goal of
sustainable development. Such a
balanced strategy may anticipate or
avoid severe local and regional
economic dislocations or stimulate
adjustment assistance and job
retraining.
Economic
Growth
Economic and environmental
well-being are mutually reinforcing
goals that must be pursued
simultaneously if either one is to be
reached. Economic growth will create
its own ruin if it continues to
undermine the healthy functioning of
Earth's natural systems or to exhaust
natural resources. By the same token,
healthy economies are most likely to
provide the necessary wherewithal for
investments in environmental
protection. For this reason, one of the
principal objectives of environmental
policy must be to ensure a decent
standard of living for all.
Sustainable development innovations
will themselves bring major economic
benefits. The economic advantage of
efficiently using materials and energy is
obvious, and the domestic production
and use of environmentally sound
technologies will reap profits both for
the U.S. firms that sell them and for
those who use them.
EPA JOURNAL
-------
The most efficient way to achieve
environmental progress is to harness
market forces. Here, the role of public
policy is to send the right signals to the
economy—"getting the prices right"
and making the marketplace work for,
instead of against, environmental
protection. Available tools include
social-cost pricing, taxes, and removing
or instituting subsidies.
The National Commission on the
Environment harbored no illusions that
market economics alone will put the
United States or the world on the path
to sustainable development.
Government, private, and personal
initiatives are also required.
Regrettably, the U.S. statutory and
regulatory system is woefully
inadequate, cumbersome, and
sometimes even perverse. A regime
that now emphasizes "end of the pipe"
cleanup must be radically reformed
into one that encourages pollution
prevention. Changing product design
or manufacturing processes to
minimize or prevent pollution is
obviously superior to mandating
expensive cleanup alter the fact. An
environmentally literate public will
encourage such efforts by demanding
environmentally acceptable products.
If environmental prevention is to
Agenda 21
Notional Commission
on the Environment
The National Commission on the
Environment is a private sector,
bipartisan panel of former EPA
administrators and business,
academic, and conservation leaders
convened in 1991 by World Wildlife
Fund and chaired by Train.
The goals of the commission are
to "undertake an independent
bipartisan review of U.S.
environmental policies, to articulate
a vision of the future—a future that
both preserves human choices and
protects natural systems—and to
recommend specific strategies to
achieve that vision."
The substance of the
commission's deliberations will be
summarized in a report to be
released in January 1993.
"Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted
with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a
worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health, and illiteracy, and the
continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our
well-being. However, integration of environment and development
concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfillment of
basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and
managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future ...."
—Chapter 1 (Preamble)
prevail over environmental cure, and if
the United States is to remain an
industrial leader, our country must
rapidly develop and deploy a wide
array of more efficient and
environmentally safe technologies.
This need for new technology is
particularly acute in transportation and
energy generation.
Energy
There must be a fundamental change in
how our country produces and uses
energy. No single area of activity is so
closely interwoven with the
environment. Were it not for the
world's predominant reliance on fossil
fuels for both energy production and
transportation, the problems of global
warming, acid rain, and urban smog
would be relatively minor. A
progressive shift away from fossil fuels
as quickly as possible in both the
energy and transportation sectors is
therefore crucial. Because the United
States uses in excess of one-fourth of
the world's energy—most of it
generated by fossil fuels—it must
accord this matter the highest priority.
We need dramatically different
economic incentives in the energy sector.
Coal, oil, and gas prices, for instance,
must reflect the environmental costs
associated with their combustion. Over
the long term, the United States must
develop alternative nonpolluting sources
of energy, principally from renewable
sources. Meanwhile, the country must
develop technologies that use energy
more efficiently, thereby consuming less
fuel (see article on page 15).
In transportation, the long-range
need is a shift in auto technology to a
nonpolluting source of energy.
Electricity—and in the long run,
hydrogen—holds promise as a
nonpolluting energy carrier. More
research on nonpolluting sources is
needed. The immediate need is for
incentives for more fuel-efficient autos
and for fewer miles driven (see article
on page 21).
In agriculture, in manufacturing
processes, in consumer products, and in
almost every other sector of the
economy, new technologies will
give the United States a competitive
edge as well as a healthier
environment. The worldwide market
for such technologies can only continue
to grow as the connections between
environmental and economic well-
being become more apparent. The
economic potential of trade in such
technologies is no secret: Japan and
Germany, among others, have already
moved aggressively into this field. It
the United States moves up in this
technology race, it will be because we
have at last understood that we mvd a
technological revolution, not just
another technical fix (see article on
page 29).
Land Use
Planning
A key failure in the U.S. effort to
address environmental needs has been
widespread resistance to land use
planning. I am not suggesting that the
federal government should impinge on
state and local governments in this
area, though certainly it should manage
its own property and facilities better.
State and local governments and other
regional groups should undertake land
use planning for a variety of reasons: to
protect environmentally sensitive areas,
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
-------
including watersheds, aquifers, and
wetlands; to maintain biological
diversity; to continue productivity of
agricultural land; and to protect sites of
natural beauty and of historic and
cultural value.
The Global
Environment
While the United States must put its
own environmental house in order,
there is no denying it has a huge stake
in addressing global environmental
problems. As environmentalists
Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos
have said, all of us have two
countries—"our own and Planet
liarlh." The threat of global climate
change, for example, certainly requires
national initiatives in the United States,
but the problem really can be
addressed only through a common
worldwide1 effort.
Similarly, the destruction of forests
will exacerbate global warming and
accelerate the loss of species and
ecosystems, foreclosing medical,
recreational, and trade opportunities
lor the United States, as well as
diminishing the world's shared
biological heritage. Economically, the
large and growing trade with
developing countries will ultimately
collapse unless these nations achieve
sustainable development. Politically,
U.S. national security interests depend
increasingly upon achieving a level of
international stability that can come
only from sustainable development.
The most critical need facing the
world is the control of human numbers.
Continued global population growth of
the current magnitude—1 billion more
people every decade—will swamp
economic and social progress, as well as
efforts to protect the environment. Our
country and every other country stands
to gain by efforts to stabilize world
population and improve living
standards in developing countries,
where 90 percent of projected
population growth will occur. The
burden placed on the environment is a
product of population and
consumption. The priorities for the
developed countries must focus on
switching to sustainable technologies to
reduce wasteful consumption; the
priorities for the developing countries
arc to develop sustainably and curb
population growth.
The United States must make a major
commitment to cooperate with the
world community to stabilize global
population, recogni/ing the linkages
between birth rates, child survival,
economic development, education, and
the economic and social status of
women. Universal access to effective
family planning information,
contraceptives, and health care is
essential.
The United States uses more than a quarter of the world's energy.
most of it from fossil fuels such as coal.
Environmental
Literacy
An informed citizenry with an ethical
commitment to care for the
environment is essential to the future
(see article on page 52). Success with
the necessary technological, economic,
and governmental changes is
predicated on the understanding
and support of the American
people—individuals and families,
government at all levels, and business.
The U.S. society and its schools must
pledge themselves to the goal of
ecological literacy. U.S. citizens must
have the knowledge, practical
competence, and moral understanding
to cooperate in building a sustainable
civilization. The pursuit of
environmental literacy will require
curricular innovations from
kindergarten through college, changes
in teacher education programs, and
expanded graduate programs.
All of us must develop a greater
sense of ethical responsibility for the
environment. Environmental ethics are
founded on an awareness that
humanity is part of nature and that
nature's myriad parts are
interdependent. In any natural
community, the welt-being of the
individual and of each species is tied to
the well-being of the whole. In a world
increasingly without environmental
borders, nations, like individuals, have
a fundamental ethical responsibility to
respect nature and to care for the Earth,
protecting its life-support systems,
biodiversity, and beauty, caring for the
needs of other countries and future
generations.
It is only within such a framework
that sustainable development will be
achieved. Religious institutions,
schools, businesses, governments, the
news media, and, perhaps, above all,
families must share in the tasks of
achieving it.
Humanity can live and prosper in
harmonious and sustainable balance
with the natural systems of the Earth.
Americans have an opportunity to rise
to the challenge of environmental
leadership as they have to the causes of
human liberty, of equality, and of free
and open markets. The challenge starts
at home. 0
10
EPA JOURNAL
-------
THE CHALLENGE AT HOME.
The Road from Rio
The success of the Earth Summit depends on how well
we follow through on its principles and programs
by William K. Reilly
T:ie United Nations Conference on
Environment and Development
OJNCED), the "Knrtli Summit,"
was a watershed event in
environmental history. The conference,
held in Rio de Janeiro last June, also
represented a diplomatic breakthrough
that opened up the possibility for a new
era of global economic growth coupled
seriously with environmental
stewardship.
Now the world community is
distracted by pressing political and
economic problems: the turmoil of civil
war and the threat of economic collapse
in Eastern Europe; political scandals
and an overextended budget in Japan;
high unemployment and second
thoughts about the extent of integration
desirable in the European Community;
and here in the United States,
absorption with reinvigoraling the
economy and effecting a presidential
transition. They will test the depth ol
commitments solemnly announced in
Rio. These are not the best of times for
making environmental history.
Nevertheless, this year in
Copenhagen the developed nations
took further aggressive—and
expensive—actions to phase out o/one-
depleting chemicals and to create a
permanent fund to help developing
countries do the same. 1 think Planet
Earth just passed the first post-Rio test!
More than 1 70 countries met in Rio
for one of the most important
multinational conferences in history.
We did so in recognition ol the
potential dangers to human survival
(Rcilk/ is Ailminixtrator of I:.PA.)
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
and the impediments to economic
opportunity that come from the
poisoning of our Earth, the disruption
of our planet's natural systems, the
degradation of human and ecological
health, and the depletion of our
productive natural resources.
The Rio conference was intended to
promote better integration of nations'
environmental goals with their
economic aspirations. Ambitions for
Rio ran high, and much was
accomplished. While the hopes of
some developing nations for vast
commitments of new foreign assistance
did not materialize, what was
extraordinary to me was how many
expectations were met—and how much
the world did achieve.
•l-'ninit'work Convention on Clinmtc
Change. More than ISO countries made
commitments to decrease greenhouse
gases, prepare national action plans,
and undertake much needed scientific
research and monitoring. The climate
convention puts us on a course to
address the critical issue of global
warming. Its first test will be the
timing and quality of national action
plans. The U.S. action plan will be
ready in January 1993.
• Comvntion on Biological D/t'crs/fy.
This treaty addresses the problem of
species loss worldwide, with a
commitment to national plans and
conservation strategies. The United
States' decision not to sign was the
subject of intense controversy and
criticism. All the other "G-7"
nations—the economic superpowers—
and nearly all developing countries did
sign. 1 believe this convention
ultimately will be adapted to meet U.S.
concerns, which are centered on this
convention's ambiguity regarding the
protection of intellectual property
rights, inadequate funding
mechanisms, and selective, negative
characterization and regulation of
biotechnology. Meanwhile, the United
States will continue to respect, even go
well beyond, the principles of the
treaty; U.S. commitments to protecting
wildlife remain unsurpassed anywhere
in the world. As the Director General
of the United Nations Environment
Program, Dr. Mustafa Tolba, recently
reminded me, it was the United States
which initiated the call for a treaty on
biodiversity, a call he greeted
skeptically and only later acceded to. 1
believe that all parties are
uncomfortable with the existing
exclusion of the United States and that
America's voice will yet be heard in the
councils ot the Treaty Parties.
n'fl Management. The United
States was a key participant in
achieving agreement among till
countries on principles ol lorest
management. The principles are an
advance, even if second best alter a
worldwide convention on torests.
President Bush had proposed such a
convention two years earlier, but
developing countries are simply not yet
ready for it, fearing a threat to their
sovereignty in the global concern tor
better forest conservation and
sustainable use. 1 was frankly startled
by the depth of developing countries'
anxiety about the industrialized world's
concern for forests. Many poorer
forest-owning nations genuinely fear an
11
-------
THE CHALLENGE AT HOME
"internationalization" of their natural
resources.
At Rio, the United States also
proposed a Forests for the Future
initiative, which aims to promote
sustainable use and conservation
through bilateral partnerships with
developing countries. Working steadily
with these nations on mutually selected
projects, we may both quiet the fears
and advance the cause.
• Agenda 21. This was perhaps the
most remarkable achievement of the
conference: an ambitious, 900-page
action plan tor protecting the
atmosphere, oceans, and other global
resources. Many of the ideas—
community right-to-know, compiling
information about toxic releases,
environmental impact statements—
originated in the United States. Agenda
21 represents an extraordinary new
global consensus on standards against
which to measure the environmental
performance of governments. No
doubt the press, non-governmental
groups, and the business community
will mine these documents for years to
come. The human rights commitments
of the 1970s and 1980s, the 1 lelsinki
Accords, am) others, offer a model for
how committed nongovernmental
interests can confer authority on moral
obligations and translate them into now
policies.
From a global perspective, the Earth
Summit marked the arrival of
environmental concerns on the
international stage as a major new
consideration in foreign policy. The
presence in Rio of foreign ministers,
prime ministers, development ministers
and presidents made the point lh.it
environmental questions must be
accommodated in decisions and
policies affecting trade, energy,
agriculture, and economic
development.
One of the most important lessons 1
look awav from Rio was the conviction
that tlie future of global environmental
protection, especially in the developing
countries, will not be achieved by
financial aid; it will be assured by trade.
It there is a single good example of that,
it is Mexico. Significant amounts of
capital, more than $25 billion, have
flowed into Mexico in the last few years
as a consequence of a climate of
friendliness, of openness to trade.
Protection for intellectual property,
privatization of inefficient—often
polluting—state industries, reduction of
non-tariff trade barriers, agreements
with creditors and the International
Monetary Fund, and proposals to
reduce tariffs have won confidence and
attracted capital on a scale far beyond
what aid might have brought. And not
coincidentally, Mexico is now spending
1 percent of its GNP on the
environment, which is more than most
developed nations spend!
Now, in the aftermath of UNCED,
the real work begins. The success of the
Earth Summit will be determined by
how well the nations of the world carry
out the principles of sustainable
development they agreed to at Rio.
This is not a challenge only for the
developing world. We in the United
States—at the federal and state levels,
in communities throughout our
country—have a central role to play in
the process. The Earth Summit
counsels all of us to reach new heights
of creativity and achievement. The
responsibilities and challenges before
us have never been greater.
One of our key tasks is to move
ahead with the new approaches to
environmental protection that we at
EPA have begun to apply over the last
few years—approaches that are more
risk-oriented, more inclusive, more
attuned to economic consequences.
A good example is our emphasis on
addressing the ecological stresses
affecting whole natural systems, such
as the Great Lakes, on a geographic
rather than piecemeal basis. The high
priority now being given to the Great
Lakes in all EPA programs greatly
improves our chances of keeping this
resource—the source of food, water,
recreation, and renewal for millions of
people—intact, healthy, and productive
for our own and future generations.
In terms of budget resources and
enforcement effort, the Great Lakes
program is unprecedented. In 1991,
fines and penalties in the Great Lakes
region alone surpassed the national
totals of only two years earlier. Greater
coherence of pollution control and fish
advisory policies among the Great
Lakes states, closer coordination of
Canadian and U.S. priorities, and
aggressive pollution prevention
programs by automobile companies,
chemical plants, and pulp-and-paper
mills add up to a new kind of
environmentalism—a synergistic
combination of highly diverse activities
directed toward a common goal,
improving and maintaining the health
of a large productive ecosystem.
EPA is using the Great Lakes model
to address other especially sensitive or
threatened natural resources—
Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico,
Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, the
Sacramento River estuary, Long Island
Sound, and many more.
Another initiative given new impetus
by the Earth Summit is pollution
prevention. EPA already has
developed a range of successful,
voluntary efforts to reduce or eliminate
waste at the outset of the
manufacturing and service cycles. Our
Green Lights program encourages the
use of energy-efficient lighting
wherever it is economically feasible.
(See article on page 20.) EPA's recently
unveiled Energy Star Computers
program will save energy by producing
computers that "sleep" when not in
use.
All of our pollution prevention and
waste minimization programs help
reduce energy consumption while also
reducing the release of harmful
chemicals into the environment. These
efforts will play a key role in enabling
the United States to meet the goal of the
Climate Change Convention: to cut
greenhouse gas emissions using a
benchmark of 1990 levels.
Still another initiative is EPA's
voluntary 33/50 Program, in which
1,000 manufacturing companies have
pledged to reduce their emissions of 17
high-priority toxic pollutants such as
benzene, lead, mercury, and cyanide by
at least one-third by the end of this
year, and by at least 50 percent by the
end of 1995. Commitments made to
this program to date will result in a
projected reduction of more than 350
million pounds a year of toxic
pollutants by 1995. In signing on to
these voluntary programs, companies
like Monsanto, General Dynamics,
Polaroid, AT&T, American Cyanamid,
Honda of America, and others are
EPA JOURNAL
-------
As part of the Izaak Walton League's Save Our
Streams program, volunteers count and identify
aquatic organisms in West Virginia's Little
Bluestone River. Committed citizens who
understand the principles of ecology are vital to
a sustainable development strategy.
Chris Dorst photo. The Charleston Gazette.
recognizing, either explicitly or
implicitly, that the only secure path to
long-term economic growth is the
"green" path.
The success of these pollution
prevention programs suggests a new
dynamic may be at work in U.S.
companies: They're finding ways to
reduce pollution by redesigning
processes, improving efficiency, and
cutting the costs of raw materials,
disposal, and potential liability.
Much that went on in Rio, in fact,
reflected the growing recognition by
the private sector that companies must
begin to incorporate environmental
concerns into their decision making if
they are to stay competitive in years to
come. International business groups,
such as the Business Council for
Sustainable Development (BCSD), led
by Swiss industrialist Stephan
Schmidheiny, were instrumental at Rio
in defining what environmental
leadership in industry means. The
book developed by Schmidheiny and
the BCSD, Changing Course: A Global
Business Perspective on Development and
the Environment, has become required
reading for enlightened business
leaders in the 1990s; it lays out the path
for the future of environmental
entrepreneurship.
Another key to sustaining the
momentum of the Earth Summit into
the next century is an informed,
educated citizenry. Environmental
education programs need to nurture a
more sophisticated understanding of
risk and the principles of ecology. We
must help students develop a critical
perspective, one that is aware of the
limitations and ambiguities of science
and appreciates the rigor of scientific
methods.
Above all, we must help our citizens
grasp the environmental reality of the
1990s: The greatest threats in the
developed world no longer come from
the belching smokestacks and oozing
sewer outfalls of the 1960s—most of
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
which have been tamed or eliminated—
but from the cumulative impact of
millions of individual actions. It is our
lifestyles, our habits, our daily choices,
which must be informed by an
environmental ethic: the choice to
recycle used oil instead of pouring it
down the drain; to buy an energy-
efficient light bulb or refrigerator; to
minimi/e the use of harmful chemicals
on our lawns and flowers; to practice
regular inspection and maintenance of
our cars to help curb air pollution; to
recognize that the character of our land
can discipline our expectations for its
use. Over the long term, our
environmental education goal should
be to instill a personal ethic of
stewardship among our people.
To fulfill the promise of the Earth
Summit, we will have to bend our
minds and our money to the task, just
as we did in cleaning up our own
environment. I believe that
environmental policy is the single most
successful of all U.S. domestic policies
of the past 20 years. What can you
think of that compares with it in
producing real results? The United
States was the first country to enact
national environmental laws, and
environmental conditions today are far-
better than they were 20 years ago—in
urban air and water quality, in nature
protection, in park and wilderness
protection, and the revival of
endangered wildlife.
Most important, we made this
environmental progress while our
economy continued to grow. Our
history shows us that economic growth
and environmental protection can go
hand-in-hand. Economic growth
financed environmental progress, and
in turn economic development became
healthier, more humane, and congenial.
The post-Rio world will demand a new
sophistication and capacity to integrate
economic priorities with new
international environmental priorities
on the part of governments and their
leaders. The experience of the United
States has a great deal to offer other
countries.
For our part, we in the United States,
as 1 noted earlier, have just won
international agreement on a 1995
phaseout of ozone-depleting substances
and we will continue to work with
industry on developing safe substitutes.
We will advance the Forests for the
Future initiative President Bush
announced at Rio; we will encourage
the transfer of U.S.-developed "green"
technologies to developing countries, so
they can pursue their development in a
way that is sustainable over the long
term; we will continue to lead the
world in promoting community right-
to-know internationally, both to help
the environment and to strengthen
democracy.
The Earth Summit presented an
unprecedented opportunity for
governments of .ill nations, at all levels,
to pursue strategies of sustainable
development. The question we must
ask ourselves today is: Flow do we
expand our economies to meet the
aspirations of our people, while still
protecting human health and the
natural resources on which lasting
economic growth depends? I low well
we answer this question will define our
quality of life in the 21st century. 0
13
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
This 30-kilowatt photovoltaic installation supplies power to a highway maintenance facility in Caples Lake, California.
Solar and other renewable energy sources may be important for a sustainable future.
Siemens Solar Industries photo.
14
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Powering the Future
Efficient use and renewable supplies are key
by Robert H. Williams
ustainable development requires
that clean, secure, and safe
energy be available for economic
growth. As the 21st century
approaches, the challenges implicit in
"clean/ secure, and safe" seem daunting
for the United States.
• Urban air pollution is putting
pressure on the internal combustion
engine. California has mandated that
2 percent of new cars must be
"zero-emission vehicles" by 1998;
the percentage rises to 10 percent by
2003. Other states may follow
California's lead.
• Domestic oil production has fallen to
9 million barrels per day (mmbd) from
the 1970 peak of over 11 mmbd. The
Department of Energy (DOE) projects
that output will fall to 4 mmbd by 2030.
It is generally expected that
conventional oil production will decline
after 2000 in all major regions outside
the Middle East.
(Williams is a Senior Research Scientist
at Princeton University's Center for
Energy and Environmental Studies. The
UNCED study scenario is detailed in the
book Renewable Energy: Sources For
Fuels and Electricity, edited by T.B.
Johansson, H. Kelly, A.K.N. Reddy, and
R.H. Williams, 1142 pp., Island Press,
Washington, DC, 1992. It is available
from the publisher.)
• If greenhouse warming is as serious
as most scientists believe, the world
may be required to reduce emissions of
carbon dioxide (CO,) substantially: by
60 percent or more to stabilize current
atmospheric concentrations. Much of
the burden would fall on the already
industrialized countries, which today
account for three-quarters of the
emissions.
Despite such challenges, the
prospects are good that energy can be
provided consistent with sustainability
goals. This will be illustrated by
describing an energy future for the
United States that emphasizes efficient
use and renewable supplies of energy.
The scenario was developed in an
assessment of renewable energy carried
out by an international team of experts
as an input to the United Nations
Conference on Environment and
Development (UNCED).
Improvements in efficiency can
reduce environmental and energy
security risks substantially. While it
has long been assumed that energy
consumption must grow in lock-step
with economic growth, U.S. energy
consumption remained constant after
the energy crisis of 1973 while the
country's economic output increased by
more than one-third. Although energy
use since 1986 has once again followed
economic output, the opportunities for
decoupling energy and economic
growth through investments in more
efficient energy use are substantial. In
the UNCED study scenario, during the
period 1985 to 2050, energy use
decreases by one-fourth (see figure)
while economic output increases nearly
five-fold.
Electricity (excluding losses during
generation) has accounted for a
growing share of energy use in the
United States, increasing from 6 percent
in 1960 to 12 percent in 1991. While
driven primarily by desirable
attributes—high quality, ease and
flexibility of use—the trend would be
reinforced if environmental concerns
become a major determinant of energy
carrier choice: It is generally easier to
bring environmental problems under
control with electricity than with
alternative carriers. In the UNCED
study scenario, electricity's share of
U.S. energy rises to 20 percent by 2050.
However, electricity demand grows at
only one-fourth the rate of the last
decade because of the emphasis given
to more efficient use.
Coal, which is the source for 55
percent of U.S. electricity production,
poses the greatest environmental
challenges in the power sector: It is
responsible for 85 percent of the sector's
CO, emissions and for most of its air
pollution. Air pollution problems are
likely to be solved by the coal
gasification technologies being
developed for use with advanced
power-generating cycles.
(Continued next page)
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
15
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS.
In the near term, these advanced
cycles will use gas turbines; sometime
during the next 10 to 20 years, they will
use molten-carbonate fuel cells as well.
These systems will produce only a tiny
fraction of the air pollution released
from current steam-turbine plants
equipped with scrubbers, and they will
be more energy efficient. Compared to
an average efficiency of 33 percent for
existing coal plants, these gas turbine
systems are expected to be 40 to 45
percent efficient, while fuel-cell
technologies could achieve efficiencies
of 55 to 60 percent. Nonetheless, the
concomitant reductions in CO,
emissions are not likely to be adequate
if the atmospheric concentration must
be stabilized.
Nuclear power produces no air
pollution or greenhouse gases, and its
Scenario for a Renewable Energy-Intensive
Future in the United States
CO' Emissions (Relative to 1985 = 1001
Hydrogen from
Intermitted
Renewable
Sources
2025 2050
The chart shows U S primary energy requirements, in exajoules IEJI per year, in a renewables-mtensive
gtobal energy scenario developed as part ol an assessment of future prospects lor renewable energy
worttwide fftenemWe Eneijy, 19S2! (One EJ equals 0 45 million barrels'day of oil) This scenario reflects
projections of the Response Strategies Working Group of the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
concerning demands lor solid, liquid, and gaseous fuels and electricity A mix of renewable and
conventional energy supplies was constructed to match these protected demand levels, taking into
account relative energy puces, endowments ol conventional and renewable energy sources, and
environmental constraints
Note Hydrogen intermittent renewable sources include the proton-excharxje-membrane (PEMI fuel cell
Intermittent renewable sources include wina and solar power
Source: Renewable fnergy Sources for Fuels and Eteclncrty. T B Johansson, H Kelly. A K N Reddy. and
R H Wfems. eds (Island Press. 1992)
use in generating electricity could
reduce dependence on insecure oil
supplies. Nuclear safety and
radioactive waste disposal, the issues of
greatest public concern at present, are,
in principle at least, resolvable with
technical fixes.
However, at high levels of nuclear
power development worldwide,
another issue—the nuclear weapons
connection to nuclear power—would
come into sharp focus: Millions of
kilograms of plutonium would be
produced annually in reactors; less than
10 kilograms are needed to make a
nuclear weapon. New reactor designs
that minimize plutonium production
and unprecedented levels of
international control over sensitive
nuclear facilities would be needed to
prevent diversions. To resurrect
nuclear power, the
industry must
convince the public
and investors that
safe, diversion-
resistant nuclear
power can be
provided at
competitive costs.
Producing
electricity from
biomass (plant
matter) is a
promising renewable
option. If the
biomass is grown
sustainably, there
would be no net
buildup of CO, in the
atmosphere. The
United States already
has biomass power-
generating capacity
equivalent to the
output of nine large
nuclear power plants;
the fuel is mainly
low-cost biomass
wastes. The steam-
turbine technology
used could not
produce electricity at
competitive costs
with more abundant
but more costly
biomass feedstocks,
such as biomass
grown on dedicated
plantations. However, electricity from
more costly biomass sources could be
competitive if produced with
technology adapted from coal,
involving gasification and gas turbine
power cycles. Especially promising are
turbines derived from aircraft engines
that offer high efficiency and low cost at
the modest scales needed for biomass
power plants. Biomass is inherently
easier to gasify than coal, and it
contains negligible sulfur, which is
costly to remove from coal. Several
demonstration projects are being
planned for this technology, which
could be available for commercial
applications in the late 1990s. Likewise,
molten carbonate fuel-cell technologies
being developed for coal could also be
adapted to biomass.
Crops grown on excess agricultural
lands represent a large potential source
of biomass for energy. To prop up food
prices and control erosion, the United
States holds out of agricultural
production some 80 million acres, an
amount that is expected to increase
substantially as a result of continuing
improvements in crop productivities.
Planting fast-growing trees or perennial
grasses is a proven strategy for erosion
control. Crowing such energy crops On
erodible and other excess croplands
would conserve the agricultural base
while providing new income for
farmers.
Most renewable energy technologies
are characterized by modest scale and
modular construction, making them
good candidates for cutting costs
through organizational learning—in
other words, from getting better
organi/.ed. Modern mass production
techniques can be applied to most
renewable energy technologies.
Moreover, the short lead times from
product design to operation make it
possible to identify needed
improvements by field testing and to
incorporate these improvements in
modified designs quickly, so that many
generations of technology can be
introduced in short periods.
The history of wind power in
California illustrates the phenomenon.
Wind power costs have fallen ten-fold
since the first farms were established in
the Altamont Pass in the early 1980s.
Electricity produced with wind turbine
H,
EPA JOURNAL
-------
technologies now coming onto the
market is cheaper than electricity from
new fossil-fuel power plants. Although
some of the more recent cost reductions
are due to technological improvement,
most of the progress has been made
through organizational learning. These
reductions are expected to lead to rapid
growth in the industry, which could
potentially provide electricity on a large
scale. In the 12 states of the Great
Plains and Midwest that account for 90
percent of the U.S. wind energy
potential, electricity generation from
wind could be up to four times the
amount of energy currently consumed
in the entire United States.
Although photovoltaic (pv) power
costs are about five times that of wind
power, these costs are expected to fall
sharply in this decade. The prospects
are good that some pv technologies will
enter electric utility markets before the
turn of the century. The absence of
scale economies and low operational
and maintenance requirements for most
pv technologies means that they can be
deployed on rooftops and windows as
well as in centralized power stations.
Because power from pv units installed
close to consumers is especially
valuable to utilities, we will probably
see such applications of pv first, before
costs fall to the levels required for
centralized configurations to meet
competition.
A problem posed by these
intermittent renewable sources is that
electricity is also needed when the wind
doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.
While the problem seems especially
formidable in light of the fact that
progress for electrical storage
technologies has been slow, it is not as
serious as one might think. Both pv
and solar thermal-electric technologies
produce the most electricity when
sunlight is the most intense; where
there are air conditioning loads, this
also tends to be the time of peak
electrical demand.
In the case of wind power, the wind
is usually blowing somewhere, so a
system of widely distributed wind
farms will provide electricity most of
the time. A significant penetration of
intermittent renewable sources can be
accommodated on an electric power
system if there are enough low-cost,
In addition to "conventional" air pollutants, coal results in 85 percent
of the power sector's emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
fuel-burning plants with the flexibility
to change their output quickly.
Advanced gas turbine power cycles
fueled with natural gas would provide
such flexibility. Natural gas is the
cleanest of the fossil fuels, and U.S.
resources are probably 40 to 50 percent
more plentiful than U.S. oil resources.
Meeting sustainability goals for
transportation will be more challenging
than for electricity production. Yet
even here the prospects are auspicious.
As described in a later article (see
page 24), the quest for /.ero-ernission
vehicles has cataly/.ed a substantial
effort to develop the battery-powered
electric car. The potential for replacing
internal combustion engine cars with
this technology is limited, however,
because several hours are required to
recharge the battery and the range
between charges is limited.
A promising alternative is the fuel
cell electric car. As in a battery-
powered car, the fuel cell provides
electricity to power motors that drive
the wheels. The proton-exchange-
membrane (PEM) fuel cell, developed
originally for space and military
applications, is a compact power
resource well suited for cars. In
operation, hydrogen fuel combines
with oxygen from the air to form water
vapor, the only byproduct. Refueling
takes only minutes for compressed
hydrogen gas. A hydrogen fuel-cell car
would be about three times as energy
efficient as a gasoline-powered internal
combustion engine car of comparable
performance. Prototype PEM fuel-cell
cars will be built in the mid-l'-WOs, and
commercial vehicles could become
available less than a decade later.
Experience shows that hydrogen can
be used safely, although it is often
perceived
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS.
example, photovoltaic modules on
0.1 percent of the U.S. land area could
provide enough hydrogen to serve all
light-duty vehicles powered with fuel
cells in 2020.
An alternative approach that requires
no hydrogen fuel infrastructure is to
use energy carriers that are converted
into hydrogen at the point of use. One
such carrier is methane)!, which can be
derived from natural gas with current
commercial technology and from
biomass with technology that could be
commercialized within the decade. For
fuel-ceil cars, methanol would be
reacted with steam under the hood to
produce hydrogen. The main
advantage of methanol is that, as a
liquid, it is easier to store than
hydrogen and can be distributed with
much the same infrastructure as is now
used for gasoline. A more exotic carrier
proposed recently is powdered iron;
steam generated by the fuel cell
onboard the car would oxidize the iron,
producing hydrogen plus rust. At the
refueling station, the tank of rust would
be exchanged for fresh iron, and the
rust would be recycled.
The U.S. energy scenario developed
in the UNCED study indicates what
might be achievable in meeting
sustainability goals through emphasis
on efficient use of energy and
renewables. By 2050, overall
dependence on oil and coal would be
sharply reduced, dependence on
natural gas reduced slightly, and
renewables would account for more
than half of primary energy, with
biomass accounting for more than half
of renewables. The net effect of both
the emphasis on energy efficiency and
energy supply shifts is a 75-percent
reduction in CO, emissions relative to
1985 levels (see figure on page 16).
Such a future could probably be
realized at energy prices close to
States Fight Global Warming
by Pamela Wexler and Susan Conbere
Except for the United States, every
major industrialized nation in the
world has agreed either to stabilize or
reduce emissions of carbon dioxide
(CO2), the most prevalent greenhouse
gas. Interestingly enough, given the
limits of U.S. national policy, concern
over climate has stimulated numerous
state and local environmental and
energy policy initiatives.
In May 1990, with support from
EPA, the Center for Global Change
initiated a project to collect and
analyze state and local legislative bills,
laws, and policy proposals having
either direct or incidental effects on
greenhouse gas emissions. The
material presented here derives from
the resulting report, entitled Cool Tools.
Groundwork to collect important
baseline data and set policy goals is
underway in a number of
jurisdictions. California leads in this
area, with 1988 legislation calling for
the state's energy commission to
(Wexler, formerly a Policy Ajialyst at the
University of Maryland's Center for Global
Change, is a Public Utility Analyst at the
Public Service Commission of the District
of Columbia. Conbere is a Research
Associate at the Center for Global Change.)
conduct a comprehensive study and
provide policy recommendations to
the governor and legislature. A
comprehensive plan in Vermont
includes a schedule of goals to
reduce both greenhouse gas
emissions and per capita
nonrenewable energy consumption.
Connecticut's 1992 legislature
strengthened its 1991 omnibus global
legislation, adding annual CO2
emissions reporting requirements
and calling for reduction goals in the
state's 1993 energy plan. Minnesota
launched a program to inventory the
state's CO, emissions and develop
incentives to reduce them.
But should states respond to
climate change, a global problem?
Implementing policies at the state
level is essential to slowing the
buildup of atmospheric greenhouse
gases. State and local governments
hold or share the authority to
regulate some of the most important
activities affecting emissions: utility
regulation, building codes, and land
use planning. Also, as large users
and taxers of energy, states make
policies that directly increase or
reduce greenhouse emissions.
Ultimately, whatever federal
program is developed, there will need
to be a complementary set of state
actions.
Consider electricity generation,
which represents approximately 35
percent of U.S. CO., emissions.
Established state authority over rate
making and plant siting now extends
to choices regarding fuels, as well as
conservation initiatives to defer the
need for new sources of supply.
Initiatives to capture the economic
benefits of least-cost planning for
electric and gas utilities are some of
the most significant actions states are
taking to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. Several states now require
that utilities give preference to
conservation and demand-side
management measures before
considering new power plant
construction. Numerous other states
have developed or are developing
least-cost planning processes through
regulatory proceedings.
Meaningful opportunities for
efficiency also lie in strengthening
state and municipal building codes.
At least three states and several
communities in California require
buyers to make conservation
investments when they purchase a
house.
In the absence of federal policy,
state and municipal initiatives provide
an ideal testing ground for
environmental strategies and
leadership for the nation. Small-scale
18
EPA JOURNAL
-------
present levels. The technologies
involved require advances but no major
breakthroughs. However, a new
energy policy dedicated to increasing
the energy productivity of the U.S.
economy and encouraging the
development and commercialization of
new energy sources that are both
economically and environmentally
attractive would be required.
The first priority should be to
eliminate the subsidies for fossil fuels
and nuclear energy totaling $10 billion
per year, or more, that distort markets.
Second, the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission should require nil states to
develop programs that require electric
utilities to pursue the least costly mix of
investments in energy efficiency and
new supplies, taking into account
environmental costs. Third, the federal
government should launch a clean car
initiative in cooperation with U.S. auto
producers, with the objective that
before the end of the first decade of the
21st century the U.S. industry will be
profitably producing a new generation
of personal vehicles with zero or very
low emissions. Fourth, the Department
of Agriculture should encourage the
production of wind energy on
croplands having good wind resources
and biomass energy crops on excess
agricultural lands. Energy production
from these sources would generate
alternative income for farmers and
eventually make it possible to phase
out most federal support for farm
income.
And, finally, the federal government
should encourage the demonstration
and commercialization of a wide range
of promising renewable energy options.
Taxes on gasoline or carbon would also
provide powerful support for the kinds
of innovation needed, but a strong
program could be built even without
such measures. 0
experiments allow for greater
innovation than federal ones.
Moreover, this "laboratory of the
states" allows a mix of
strategies—suitable to different parts
of the country having different
climates, tastes, industrial bases,
power sources, and commuting
patterns—to emerge. Modest trials
also facilitate evaluation, important
when one state's proposals are
adopted by other jurisdictions or
adapted for federal application.
Connecticut is among the leaders in
pursuing small-scale demonstration
programs, particularly with respect to
energy use by state agencies. Recent
legislation establishes energy
performance standards for new and
existing state buildings,
complemented by a technical advisory
group to recommend standards for
commercial buildings. Connecticut
has also set fuel efficiency
requirements for state fleet purchases
and has plans to increase public
transit ridership and occupancy levels
for passenger vehicles.
A 1991 National Academy of
Sciences study estimated that the
United States could reduce its
greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40
percent of 1990 levels at "very low
cost." Prominent on the list of low
cost options are areas appropriate for
state and local treatment:
transportation, efficiency investment
in new buildings, electric utility
supply decisions, and forestry.
As a practical matter, local
government is often more successful
than federal government at initiating
and implementing policy- Citizens
are more likely to respond positively
to statutes that address their
community's needs than to the
often broad or ambiguous guidelines
coming from national or
international bodies.
There are economic considerations,
too. States already tax gasoline,
electricity, and other forms of energy;
however, such taxes currently do not
reflect varying environmental
impacts, and thus fail to communicate
the true costs of energy. Incorporating
environmental costs into prices will
require complementing, replacing, or
augmenting direct regulation with
innovative fiscal tools to promote
environmentally beneficial results,
such as the sale of energy-efficient
equipment. Legislation enacted in
California in 1990, for instance,
imposes gradual gasoline tax increases
and earmarks portions of the revenue
for environmental damage mitigation.
Many state and local governments
participate in EPA's Green Lights
program, in which participants survey
existing lighting facilities and install
energy efficient equipment when it is
profitable and does not compromise
lighting quality. In Maryland,
participation in Green Lights is
expected to cut the state's lighting bill
by 25 percent for a savings of $10.5
million per year.
It makes sense for states to make
energy efficiency investments that
retain dollars in the local economy,
rather than spending them on
interstate or international energy
supplies. Particularly in the building
and utility sectors, states can realize
substantial opportunities for savings
that only come up every 40 years or so
as buildings stocks and electricity
generating plants are replaced. Solar
and renewable investments typically
provide several times as many jobs
per dollar as more capital intensive
fossil investments. Washington, for
instance, estimates that CO, savings
from tightening, residential energy
codes will reach 3.3 million tons
annually—with energy efficiency
savings worth approximately $16.5
million, at $5.00 per ton, by 2005.
That's a savings worth noting.
(Editor'* note: The Commonwealth of
Kentucky and the Kentucky Chapter of the
United Nations Association are
sponsoring a conference, "l-'roin Rio to the
Capitals—State Strategies for Sustainable
Development," on Mai/ 25 to 28, 1993, in
Louisville, Kentucky. The conference unll
bring together concerned citizens,
government officials, business and
industry, educators, and
nongovernmental organizations to discuss
how Agenda 21 can be interpreted and
implemented at state and local levels.)
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
19
-------
EPA's Green Programs
by Eileen B, Claussen
L?t's face it. If a healthy body can
serve as a metaphor for a strong
• market economy, America's
economy is pretty "sickly" in terms of
energy use. The symptoms are
rampant. We use twice the energy per
dollar of gross national product that
Germany and Japan use. Businesses
and consumers often make wasteful
decisions that are neither in their own
best interest nor the environment's.
Here's where EPA's energy-saving
"green programs," such as its flagship
"Green Lights" program, come in.
They are designed to apply just the
right regimen to help markets to
function better and improve the
environment. EPA's green programs
are revolutionary in a number of ways:
They are voluntary, not mandated by
law; participants enhance their profits
when they join (no compliance costs
involved); the programs harness the
power of the free market; and everyone
wins—environmentalists, businesses,
and government. Sound too good to
be true? Not so. Proof can already be
found in EPA's first generation of
green programs.
The premise is simple: When
energy is wasted, so is money. A
company paying $1 million annually
in lighting bills has to sell a lot of
widgets just to cover that expense. If
Company X could save $500,000 a year
by cutting its lighting consumption in
half (with an investment that amounts
to much less than the resulting
savings), this would reduce the
number of widgets it had to sell just to
balance the books.
Take the real-world example of the
Boeing Company, a participant in the
Green Lights program, which
encourages major U.S. corporations,
state and local governments, and other
organizations to install energy-efficient
lighting. Extrapolating from its
(Claussen is Director of EPA's Office of
Atmospheric Programs.)
experience to date, once Boeing fully
implements its Green Lights
agreement around 1995, it will have
netted enough savings to finance
production of a Boeing 757.
That's a $100 million aircraft,
essentially for free.
If energy efficiency makes such
bottomline sense, why doesn't it just
happen? The principal reason is so-
called "first-cost disease." A new
green technology tends to have a
higher price up front. Often that's
due to the sophistication of its design
and materials. In many cases,
however, a larger factor is low sales
volume for products just introduced
to the market. Remember how much
VCRs cost when they first came out?
Although green technologies might
carry a higher price tag, they recoup
the extra money spent on them—and
then some—by reducing energy bills.
Such products make obvious sense.
Unfortunately, the market often
doesn't inform corporate purchasers
that such choices even exist. Or, if the
choice is raised by a salesperson
promoting his or her product, it might
be dismissed as so much snake oil.
EPA's green programs cut through
these complications. For example, the
Green Lights program goes straight to
the top: EPA seeks out key corporate
managers, educates them on the
economic and environmental benefits
of high efficiency lighting, and gets
them to commit voluntarily to a
corporate-wide program to improve
lighting efficiency wherever
profitable. The commitment—a "Just
Do It" agreement—is a simple,
easy-to-understand prescription that
emphasizes flexibility and
performance rather than technical
requirements. (EPA also provides
other tools to help technical staff
verify product reliability and iron out
the details of implementation.)
By mid-October 1992, 658
organizations, including 12 state
governments, had joined this quickly
expanding program, committing 2.9
billion square feet—more than seven
times all the commercial space in Los
Angeles—to efficient lighting. They
are achieving average reductions in
lighting consumption of over 50
percent.
EPA is now designing other green
programs to spur large corporate
purchases that move highly efficient
technologies out of niche markets and
into the mass market. These include
heating, ventilating, and air
conditioning technologies and water-
heating technologies.
It isn't always enough to spur sales
of existing products. Some green
programs use market forces to bring
promising technologies off the
drawing board and into the
showrooms. The EPA Energy Star
Computer Program, initiated in June
1992, is one such flagship program
following a product identification and
manufacturer mobilization strategy.
With existing technology,
manufacturers participating in this
program will make "catnapping
computers" that power down to
drastically reduce their electricity
demands if no one is at the keyboard.
The "Golden Carrot*" Super Efficient
Refrigerator Program is another (see
article on page 27).
Some EPA green programs expand
opportunities for American ingenuity
in international markets. For example,
U.S. coal and gas companies lead the
world in recovering methane—a
greenhouse gas, but also a valuable
fuel—from coal seams and gas
pipelines. EPA is identifying
opportunities for these U.S. companies
to operate overseas, particularly in
Eastern Europe, Russia, and Asia.
EPA's market-oriented green
programs know only the limits of
human creativity and ingenuity. Their
revolutionary implications are far-
reaching. Green programs are helping
to reshape the way the United States
does business by building on the
strong link between economy and the
environment. This is an important
step toward true sustainability.
20
EPA JOURNAL
-------
PORT SYSTEMS
Driving Home a New
Transportation Policy
Recent legislation, leadership, and
commitment can get us there
by Senator John H, Chafee
Governments from all over the
world gathered in Rio de Janeiro
this past June to discuss
strategies for sustainable development.
Because transportation affects every
aspect of human life, the way this
country manages transportation
services in the future will determine, to
a great extent, whether our own
national strategies will result in
sustainable development.
The United States is about to
complete one of the largest public
works projects ever undertaken, the
Dwight D. Eisenhower System of
Interstate and Defense Highways.
In 1950, before the decision to
build the Interstate Highway System,
we had 49 million motor vehicles in
this country and 62 million licensed
drivers. That's considerably fewer
vehicles than drivers.
By 1990, the situation was reversed.
Along with the interstate highway
system came a nearly 400-percent
increase in the number of motor
vehicles in this country (190 million by
1990) and a 270-percent increase in the
number of licensed drivers (167 million
in 1990). In other words, we now have
23 million more vehicles in this country
than drivers. More vehicles mean more
(Chafee (R-Rhode Island) is ranking
member on flic Senate Committee on
Environment and Public Works and
IMS an author of ISTEA.)
vehicle miles traveled—three times as
many miles in 1990 as in 1950.
There is a connection between the
construction of the interstate system
and the increase in numbers of vehicles
and miles traveled. In 1956, the United
States adopted a policy to make its
biggest transportation investment in a
facility most suited for cars and
trucks—highways.
The interstate highway system
achieved the important objectives of
improving interstate transportation
and highway safety. These 42,000
miles, which represent only 3 percent
of our highways, carry 20 percent of all
traffic. This is a laudable achievement,
but it came with a price. It came at the
environmental and aesthetic expense of
both cities and rural areas. In order to
focus attention and money on
completing the interstate system, many
community needs were neglected.
Other countries made different
Some community needs suffered as the United States built its vast system of interstales and highways.
This 1960 photo shows how the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut through an old, established neighborhood.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
21
-------
SUPPOF
choices. European countries decided to
make major investments in transit and
rail facilities. Land use planning,
infrastructure investment, and pricing
policies promoted alternatives to using
a car. The result: 50 percent of urban
person-trips in Europe are conducted
by public transit, on bicycle, or on foot.
In the United States we manage only 15
percent.
Our highway system is one of the
best in the world—a system that
provides mobility for its citizens and is
paid for by its users. Once the user fee
has been paid, generally in the form of
a gas tax, highway users believe they
have thereby paid for these roads. But
this is a myth.
1 lighway users' gas tax payments are
not paying for a lot of things:
• The loss from the tax base of more
than 60,000 square miles (an area about
the si/c of Georgia) dedicated to
automobile infrastructure—for
example, roads, interchanges, parking
facilities, and gas stations
• The disposal of 200 million tires, 8
million junked vehicles, and 138,000
tons of lead from batteries each year
• Maintenance costs of existing roads
• Law enforcement costs
• Parking subsidies for the 90 percent
of nil commuters who park free at work
• Environmental degradation of our
air, wetlands, parklands, and historic
and cultural areas
• Energy security costs to maintain our
oil supply—half of all oil consumed in
the United States is used by motor
vehicles.
• Congestion costs—i.e., lost time and
productivity
• Costs associated with motor vehicle
crashes.
In a recent World Resources Institute
report, The Going Rate: What l! Really
Cos/s to Drive, Jim MacKenzie estimates
these costs
-------
it may be an improved transit system,
better land use planning, or an
intermodal facility. Performance, not
total lane-miles of pavement, must be the
measure of success.
Second, transportation decisions
have to be part of a larger planning
process that recognizes how
transportation touches every corner of
our lives. The way our neighborhoods
are zoned, for example, dictates
whether we get in our car for every
errand or whether we can walk to the
grocery store or the day care center.
Finally, people must be given
options. Policies have to be put in place
to encourage habits that will sustain
our environment—policies which will
provide mobility for everyone,
including those who do not have access
to a car.
If people are given the choice of
commuting to and from work either
alone in their cars, at 55 miles per hour,
using cheap fuel, or making three bus
connections, they will most likely
choose their cars. If the choice is to pay
$150 a month for parking, or walk or
bike a short distance to public transit
for the work commute, more people
may leave the car at home.
The Intermodal Surface
Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991
(ISTEA) makes fundamental changes to
our transportation policy. This new
law is based on the premise that we
must permanently change our habits if
we are going to maintain our mobility
and preserve the environment that
sustains us.
The 1991 transportation law gives the
U.S. Department of Transportation a
new mission: improving the
performance of the transportation
system rather than just building
additional capacity. The department no
longer has the single objective of
building new highways. Its objectives
now include clean air, energy
conservation, productivity, and
international competitiveness.
For the first time in the history of this
program, the transportation law
recognizes the connection between
transportation policy and clean air. The
law provides $1 billion per year which
can be spent only in locations that are
formally designated as "nonattainment
areas" under the Clean Air Act and can
be spent only on transportation projects
that will improve air quality. It
requires each state to conform its State
Implementation Plan for air quality
with its Transportation Improvement
Program. This means each state must
actually do the transportation projects it
promises to do to clean up the air.
The new transportation law renews
and expands on previously established
planning requirements. State and local
officials must now consider the effect of
their transportation policy on land use,
energy conservation, the environment,
and the efficient use of existing
facilities. The law also expands the
number of constituencies who will
participate in the planning process and
make project selection decisions.
ISTEA substantially increased the
federal research program for new
Performance, not total
lane-miles of pavement,
must be the measure
of success.
technologies that hold promise for
transportation systems that are more
efficient and more environmentally
responsible. These include high speed
rail, magnetic levitation, electric vehicle
research, and Intelligent Vehicle
Highway Systems (IVHS). Again, the
relevant standard is performance, not
pavement.
The new law includes a pilot
program to put in place congestion
pricing, such as tolls on heavily used
roads, especially during peak use times.
It is no longer enough to manage
demand. We must reduce demand.
Pricing incentives that charge true costs
for using a facility at peak times are one
way to reduce demand.
ISTEA recognizes that problems are
created as well as solved by our
transportation facilities, and that
transportation policy must address
these problems. The new law, for
example, requires that each state use a
minimum amount of rubber-modified
asphalt pavement. This requirement
will help dispose of at least a portion of
the thousands of scrap tires that are
discarded each year and are currently
being placed in environmentally
unsound waste piles.
The 1991 transportation law directs
states and communities to use a portion
of their highway funds for
transportation enhancements such as
bicycle and pedestrian facilities, historic
preservation, and scenic beautificarion.
The purpose of these projects is to
improve the community as
transportation investments are made.
ISTEA will not solve all our
transportation problems, nor will it
cure all other ills. It is less a mandate
for change than a compelling invitation
to change. It provides a blueprint for
the necessary first steps toward change
in our transportation policy.
States, faced with congestion, limited
resources, and clean air compliance
deadlines, also realize that we must
change our driving habits. They are
trying to provide these choices.
Unfortunately, if a recent example in
Virginia is an indication, changing old
habits will not be easy. Virginia
established High Occupancy Vehicle
(HOV) lanes in a very congested
corridor near Washington, DC.
Commuters in the remaining,
congested lanes cried out for relief.
They did not like the idea of carpooling.
Within one month of the new HOV
restrictions, before people had a chance
to get used to the idea of change,
Congress responded to the outcry and
directed Virginia to take the easy way
out—by getting rid of the HOV lanes.
We have already taken the easy
steps. If we are going to have a
transportation policy in the future that
we can sustain, and that will sustain us,
we are going to have to put up with
some temporary pain to achieve the
long term goals of environmental
protection, energy security, and
economic stability. Achieving these
goals will take laws like ISTEA, strong
leadership at all levels of government,
and the commitment of the traveling
public to leaving a car at home
sometimes because doing so is good
economic, energy, environmental, and
transportation policy. 0
SEPTEMBERyOCTOBER 1992
23
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
The Environmentally
Friendly Vehicle
What makes a green car?
by John M, DeCicco
and Deborah Gordon
What would the "green car" be
like? An oxymoron to some
and an environmentally safe,
personal mobility machine to others.
Think of the green car as an ideal
toward which the nation must strive if
it is to achieve an ecologically
sustainable transportation system.
Production, use, and disposal of such a
car would consume no fossil fuels and
generate no pollution.
The greenness of a car depends not
only on the machine, but also on how
and when it is used. A car is greener
with two people in it than it is with one,
and it's greener still with three. A car is
greenest if it's not used at all when
there's a cleaner way to go: by foot, by
bike, by transit, or by wire
("telecommuting"). The supporting
infrastructure—roadways and fuel
supply—would be built and
maintained without habitat
degradation or greenhouse gas
emissions. Finally, although the carbon
dioxide (CO,) emissions from a
vehicle's use are now about 10 times
those associated with its manufacture,
there must be parallel progress toward
a greener industrial system focusing on
reduced fossil fuel use and pollution,
(Dt'Cicco is a Research Associate for the
American Council for an Energy-Efficient
Economy in Washington, DC. Gordon ;.s a
Senior Policy Analyst for the Union of
Concerned Scientists in Berkeley,
California.)
minimal waste, and the design of
products for recycling or
refurbishment.
While we cannot expect to quickly
reali^.e this vision, the industry does
know how to make "greenish
machines," vehicles which will greatly
reduce the environmental impacts of
each mile driven. Today's cars and
light trucks average 20 miles per gallon
(mpg) on the road, resulting in average
CO, emissions of about 540 grams per
mile. With technologies now available
and in development, light vehicle
energy efficiency could be doubled,
thereby halving CO, emissions.
What would be the nuts and bolts of
a greenish machine? An electric
drivetrain is a good bet. Electric motors
have negligible direct emissions,
operate at high efficiency ever a range
of loads, and draw no power at idle.
When electric motors are used to brake
the car during deceleration, they can act
as generators to recover much of the
energy that today's cars dissipate
through friction. The significance of
this regenerative braking must not be
underestimated, since more and more
driving is done under congested, stop-
and-go conditions, in which most of the
energy supplied by the engine is lost to
braking. Electric motors are also quiet
and durable and couid be easily
recycled or refurbished.
To power an electric vehicle, we now
have to rely on batteries, which are
heavy, inefficient, and made with
hazardous materials like lead and acid.
The materials problems can be dealt
with through careful packaging and
through systems for recycling by the
battery supplier. The weight and
performance limitations are, however, a
challenge. If batteries are ever to see
widespread use as the sole source of
on-board power, major engineering
breakthroughs are needed.
Zero tailpipe emissions would
certainly be a major boon in urban
areas; this is why Los Angeles is
leading the way to get electric vehicles
on the road. However, the greenness of
an electric vehicle also depends on how
clean and renewable the electricity
generation system is.
More promising in the long run are
fuel cells—devices that
electrochemically convert fuel into
power. Hydrogen, supplied from a
renewable resource such as biomass, is
an ideal input for fuel cells. Although
hydrogen storage is presently
problematic, there are some promising
options: metal hydrides, carbon, and
an iron/water system. Hydrogen can
also be carried in natural gas or
methanol by using an on-board
"reformer," a device to break the fuels
into hydrogen and CO,. Analysis by
researchers at Princeton University
suggests that such fuel cell systems look
very promising as a long-run option for
vehicles that must be environmentally
sustainable and have low lifecycle cost.
A fuel cell electric vehicle would have
EPA JOURNAL
-------
high end-use efficiency, which is crucial
for keeping any renewable fuel
production to a scale that avoids
conflict with food production and
habitat protection.
The first generation greenish machine
could be a hybrid. The drivetrain
would combine a small, efficient
combustion engine with an electric
motor and a medium-size battery. The
engine could be constrained to operate
only under narrow conditions,
maintaining optimum efficiency and
minimal emissions. Battery range
limitations would be eliminated, and
the regenerative braking and efficiency
benefits of an electric drivetrain would
be realized. Use of hybrid vehicle
technology could more than double the
efficiency of light vehicles, pushing the
on-road average of cars and light trucks
to 50 mpg without reducing size or
compromising performance. Petroleum
supplies would be stretched, and they
would be used much more cleanly and
efficiently. Hybrid vehicles could also
operate on a diversity of fuels, with the
choice dictated by regional energy
resources and environmental
constraints.
Best of all, many of the technologies
needed to make an efficient hybrid
vehicle are already on the shelf.
Powered by proton-exchange-membrane fuel cells, the Green Car™
has a range of 120 miles and can achieve a speed of 100 miles per hour.
Energy Fanners photo.
Improved aerodynamics, low rolling-
resistance tires, high-efficiency mobile
air conditioners, and other improved
accessories already appear in new cars.
A variety of refinements allows today's
best engines to produce a given amount
of power at less than half the size of
older designs. Electronic control of
ignition and intake/exhaust systems
yields simultaneous lowering of
emissions and improved torque—the
rotational force needed to move the car.
Further efficiency enhancements can
follow from "lean-burn" designs,
including two-stroke engines and
advanced diesels.
Nearly all automakers have
prototypes of greener cars. No big
breakthrough, just good engineering, is
needed for practical hybrid vehicles.
Steady research and development
efforts could make fuel cell electric
vehicles a reality for the next century.
Ultimately, the challenge is much more
a matter of political will than technical
ability. With a national commitment to
heading in the right direction, we could
soon be driving progressively "greener
machines" down the road to an
environmentally sustainable
transportation future. 0
The Auto Industry Looks Ahead
by Dean A, Drake and Treva Formby
Before discussing "green cars,"
it is necessary to ask, "What is a
green transportation system?"
Fundamentally, a green
transportation system is one that
provides the greatest degree of
personal mobility with minimal
environmental impact. Such a
system would be a mix of mass
transportation and personal
transportation devices, primarily
automobiles, powered by a
(Drake is Manager of California and
State Activities at General Motors'
Environmental Activities Staff. Formby
is an associate engineer with the Staff.)
variety of fuels.
GM already produces and sells
intermediate-sized Lumina sedans
powered by methanol and ethanol
and pick-up trucks powered by
natural gas, and is readying a
commuter-type electric car for sale by
the mid-1990s. Each of these vehicle-
fuel combinations could be an
element in a green transportation
system.
But even in a green transportation
system, most of the personal
transportation requirements will
probably be met by highly modified
versions of vehicles powered by
internal combustion engines using the
new, cleaner-burning, "reformulated"
gasoline. Gasoline has the highest
energy content per pound of any
commonly available fuel. Internal
combustion engines burn this fuel
extremely efficiently and have the
performance characteristics most
people require.
All of our new technologies will be
needed to produce green cars and
efficient transportation systems. The
end result will be a transportation
system that preserves and even
increases Americans' freedom of
mobility, while ensuring that each
citizen will live in a healthy
environment.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
25
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
Companies
Change Course
Progressive companies will merge
economics and environment
by Frank Popoff
It is obvious the Earth Summit did
not—and could not—solve the
world's environmental problems, but
it did lay an important foundation for
continued progress. It helped bring
home the message that economic
growth and environmental reform
don't have to be mutually exclusive; on
the contrary, they go hand in hand.
For industry, the message is clear.
Progressive companies that further the
cause of sustainable development will
become more valuable and more highly
regarded in the marketplace. Those
that don't, place their future success at
risk.
The challenge now is to build on the
positive momentum that emerged from
the summit. There are two distinct
directions this nation can take to
balance economic and environmental
issues. First, the United States could
continue the command-and-control
approach—by enacting more
legislation, writing more regulations,
and raising taxes to pay for it all. Or
the country could make the transition
to a more voluntary, pro-active, and
free market solution. The latter
approach will be far more effective.
It has been proven time and again
that voluntary change by business is
(Popvff is Chairman, President, and Chief
r.xeculive Officer of the Dow Chemical
Company. He also senvs as Chairman of
the Chemical Manufacturers Association.)
less painful, more efficient, and more
economical for consumers, for
government, and for businesses
themselves, than regulated change.
Voluntary improvements offer
increased flexibility, lower compliance
costs, and market incentives.
Regulation and legislation have
resulted in a reluctant compliance
orientation in industry rather than one
of innovation and continuous
improvement.
Moving toward sustainability
requires building an economic
advantage after finding the costs and
benefits of environmental
improvements. Already, there are
positive results from this approach.
Although industrial production is
rising steadily, industrial pollution is
declining. For example, while chemical
industry production was up 10 percent
from 1987 to 1990, emissions to air,
land, and water during that time
decreased 35 percent. More companies
are realizing that the emissions they
produce are a sign of inefficiency, and
that waste reflects raw materials not
sold in final products. This idea is
discussed in Changing Course: A Global
Business Perspective on Development and
the Environment, a book prepared by the
Business Council for Sustainable
Development (BCSD). As part of
BCSD, I was among 48 business leaders
from throughout the world who helped
provide industry's input during the
Earth Summit process.
Changing Course explores the use of
several economic instruments that
would incorporate environmental
considerations into how businesses are .
run. Used judiciously, instruments
such as pollution taxes, deposit-refund
systems, and tradeable permits can
encourage environmental responsibility
through pollution prevention.
Another concept that deserves
further exploration is full cost pricing,
which means pricing goods and
services to reflect their true
environmental costs through
production, use, recycling, and
disposal. Shifting to this new paradigm
will be achieved gradually over the
next few decades. Already economists
are working to establish detailed costs
of various pollution and environmental
problems. Air, water, and earth should
no longer be considered free goods.
They are assets that should be
efficiently and appropriately allocated.
Achieving full cost pricing is a difficult
task which must evolve slowly so that it
will not shock the world's economic
and trade balance.
Changing Course creatively and
effectively articulates an industry
blueprint for working toward
sustainable development. The country
will not reach sustainability, however,
unless everyone involved lowers the
level of rhetoric and shows a
willingness to seek common ground.
The response to increasingly complex
environmental problems has been like a
26
EPA JOURNAL
-------
traffic jam with everyone honking their
horns and nothing much being done.
However, I do see signs that
"environmental gridlock"—the
adversarial relationship that too often
exists among government, industry,
and special interest groups—is
loosening. Through partnerships and
self-initiated programs, Americans can
do more good for the environment and
do it more quickly than they can
working separately.
EPA's 33/50 Program to voluntarily
reduce emissions is an excellent
example of government and the private
sector working together for everyone's
benefit. Another voluntary effort that is
reaping dividends is a program
developed by the Chemical
Manufacturers Association called
Responsible Care". Through
Responsible Care, companies publicly
commit to improve their
environmental, health, and safety
performance. Participants are
obligated, as a condition of
membership, to follow six "Codes of
Management Practices": community
awareness and emergency response,
pollution prevention, process safety,
Building a Better Refrigerator
by Gary Femstrom
Arterica's appliance manufacturers
have begun to grasp issues of
sustainability. However, they face a
significant "chicken and egg"
dilemma that inhibits the
development and commercialization
of "green" products. Most consumers
aren't willing to spend much money
up front on green products, including
more energy efficient ones, even
though energy efficient appliances
may pay for their higher cost several
times over in reduced energy bills.
Also, people are conservative on
brand and model recognition.
Because they don't tend to try new
models, new green products often fill
small market niches, with higher
prices resulting in lower sales
volume. These higher prices in turn
prevent higher market penetration
and economies of scale that could
lead to price reductions.
Fortunately, a group of players has
stepped into the marketplace to
provide financial incentives that will
encourage the development of energy
efficient appliances. Twenty-five
utilities—which service nearly a
quarter of all households in the
nation—have pooled almost $30
million for a contest among
manufacturers that will result in a
super-efficient refrigerator that is free
(Femstrom is Supervisor of Residential
Program Development and Evaluation
for the Pacific Gas and Electric
Company. He is also Chief Financial
Officer and a trustee of SERP.)
of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). The
initiative is called the Super Efficient
Refrigerator Program (SERP), and
EPA, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, and other agencies and
associations have worked with
Pacific Gas and Electric and the other
utilities to develop it.
To compete in the SERP contest, a
manufacturer must commit to
producing CFC-free refrigerators that
beat the 1993 federal refrigerator-
efficiency standard by at least 25
percent. Manufacturers may
improve their score by proposing
even greater efficiency goals. The
manufacturer must plan to assemble
the refrigerators in North America
and deliver them to dealers in
participating utility service territories
from 1994 to 1997. The earlier the
manufacturer plans to deliver units,
the higher the bid score.
In their proposals, bidders are free
to specify the amount of incentive to
be paid by the utilities, as long as
they don't ask more per refrigerator
unit than the ceiling set by
participating utilities. Manufacturers
will use the utility payment to lower
the price of the green refrigerators to
the same general price level as more
run-of-the-mill models. The lower
the incentive the bidder requests, the
more cost-effective to the utilities,
and therefore, the higher the bid will
score.
In addition to these competitive
factors, the utilities will evaluate the
bids for reliability factors, such as the
marketing plan, corporate
commitment to the project, and
experience with the technologies
proposed.
Bids were due from manufacturers
by October 15,1992. SERP will
evaluate them, and on December 1,
1992, two finalists will be picked.
They will then begin building
prototypes. On July 1,1993, SERP
will pick the competition's winner.
The winner will ship refrigerators
into participating utility territories
according to its proposed delivery
schedule, and SERP will pay the
manufacturer the incentives as these
shipments are made.
The number of refrigerators that
SERP subsidizes depends on the
structure of the winning bid, and
could range anywhere from 15(1,000
to 500,000 units. Any outcome in this
range will be a significant step in the
transformation of the refrigerator
market to greener technologies. EPA
estimates that the direct and spin-off
effects of SERP could save 3 to 6
billion kilowatt-hours per year by the
year 2000, saving customers $240
million to $480 million per year on
electric bills and helping utilities save
the high economic and environmental
costs associated with building more
power plants and distribution
systems. By 2000, SERP will reduce
annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions
by 600,000 to 1,200,000 metric tons.
SERP underscores the huge
potential for forward-looking utilities,
environmental groups, and public
agencies to work together to improve
energy efficiency, maintain jobs by
promoting greener technologies, and
reconcile environmental sustainability
with a high standard of living.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
27
-------
distribution, employee health and
safety, and product stewardship.
Ideally, Responsible Care will help the
chemical industry achieve progress that
would have been considered impossible
even 10 years ago.
To make sustainable development a
reality, every business and industry
sector will have to ask: What does
sustainable development mean for my
business or industry? What do we need
to do to become sustainable? By
developing principles that integrate
environmental considerations into all
economic decisions, industry is taking
an important first step.
Dow has developed a first set of
principles we will apply in our pursuit
toward sustainable development. Our
principles include commitments to
integrate environmental considerations
into all business decisions and to design
or modify our products and processes
to reduce environmental impact. Our
goal is to become a premier company in
the practice of sustainable
development.
Dow has proven that a responsible
environmental attitude can be good for
the bottom line. In 1986, the company
formalized its waste reduction efforts in
a program called Waste Reduction
Always Pays (WRAP). Through
WRAP, Dow seeks out cost effective
projects that reduce waste to the
environment, measure and track
performance, and recognize employee
excellence.
For example, a waste reduction team
in our Pittsburg, California, plant
received an award for identifying
opportunities to recycle a solvent used
in the production of an agricultural
product. The solvent was being
incinerated after a single use. Today,
solvent use at the Pittsburg plant has
been reduced 80 percent, and $8 million
per year is saved at full plant capacity.
The benefits are reduced costs and
reduced waste.
Unfortunately, much of the capital
spent on the environment today is in
response to legislation and regulation,,
which offers no return on investment.
Initiatives such as WRAP, which often
show a cost savings, motivate
companies to direct capital to pollution
prevention rather than end-of-the-pipe
treatment. For example, from 1988
,4s pan of Dow's Waste Reduction Always Pays (WRAP) program.
a technician at the Polycarbonate Research Plant in Texas
checks the quality of a recycled solvent, methylene chloride.
Dow photo.
through 1991, the plant at our Louisiana
division implemented 207 WRAP
projects at a cost of about $23 million.
That investment, however, has thus far
resulted in total cost savings of more
than $36 million.
By actively pursuing waste reduction
opportunities, Dow will reduce waste
management costs, improve
productivity of operations, demonstrate
to the public a commitment to
environmental protection, and show
that a voluntary program of waste
reduction can work without
government regulation.
With strong leadership and sustained
commitment, industry has the ability to
translate the challenge into
opportunities. By investing in products
that avoid or solve environmental
problems, performing life cycle
analyses on products, including
environmental costs in prices, starting
voluntary programs, and monitoring
our own progress, business can take a
strong leadership role in the quest for
sustainable development. Business
leaders look forward to improved
conditions for implementing these
solutions as governments begin to
deregulate markets, privatize
enterprises, and stabili/.e basic
economic conditions.
As my generation was growing up,
the images of progress were
smokestacks and bulldozers making
way for new developments. Let's hope
that the next generation better balances
economic progress and environmental
preservation. 0
EPA JOURNAL
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS.
Moving Beyond
the "Tech Fix"
Research and development should stress
resource efficiency
by John Gibbons
Our society has espoused a
number of overarching goals,
including economic strength,
environmental quality, and national
security. Some policy makers here and
abroad have begun to consider a goal of
sustainable development. Given the
general fascination with the "tech-fix,"
inquiries about the role of science and
technology in achieving sustainability
naturally follow.
Ample evidence supports the
notion that technology can contribute
substantially to sustainability.
Providing necessities and
amenities—shelter, food, health
care, mobility, recreation,
communication—makes varying
demands on the natural resource base
depending upon the sophistication of
the technology used. For example,
technology already exists that can
provide energy services, such as
heating and cooling, transportation,
illumination, and food preservation, at
much lower levels of fuel consumption
than commonly encountered.
Nevertheless, a fair amount of
uncertainty inheres to the concept of
sustainability. We have not yet come to
grips with Rene Dubos's assertion that
(Gibbons if Director of-the Congressional
Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).
The c>/(>u>s expressed arc the author's and
not necessarily those of OTA or the
Technology Assessment Board.)
just as important as food and shelter are
"the social amenities that make it
possible to satisfy the longing for quiet
empty spaces, for privacy,
independence, and other conditions
essential for preserving and enlarging
the peculiarly human qualities of life."
We also cannot project with accuracy
the extent to which technology will
expand or limit our own opportunities
and those of future generations.
These uncertainties, however, need
not deter us from measuring the
impacts, good and bad, that we
anticipate making on the natural
Technology gives us hope of
achieving sustain ability,
but no guarantees.
resource base, impacts which certainly
influence the ability of this generation
(and future generations) to sustain
itself. One important measure is the
amount of environmental damage
inflicted by human activities, especially
resource consumption and population
size.
The magnitude of environmental
damage is strongly influenced by
technology. The task, then, is to link
technology to achieving societal
goals—including sustainable
development—rather than to pursue
new technologies in a policy vacuum.
The challenges lie in three main areas:
prudent resource use; birth control; and
resource restoration.
Prudent
Resource Use
The value of many resources, like
electricity or oil, lies in the services they
provide. We can limit impacts on the
resource base by making no excess
demands: in other words, by using
resources efficiently. We can also help
sustain the availability of the services
using substitute resources.
For instance, ultimately/ noncarbon
fuel sources will be needed to meet
energy demand and control pollution.
To enable the multi-decade transition
to supplies such as solar technologies
or a new generation of nuclear power, a
strong research, development, and
demonstration (RD&D) effort is
needed—starting today. On the
demand side, enormous opportunities
exist to cut the amount of energy
needed to provide a given quantity of
necessities or amenities. Over the past
couple of decades, technology has
enabled major increases in services that
can be gotten from a given quantity of
energy, while simultaneously enabling
major cuts in pollution produced.
Scenarios for oil supply and demand to
2020 show the promise of several
aggressive approaches, such as
improving the average new auto
mileage to 40 to 50 miles per gallon
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
29
-------
SUPPORT SYSTEMS
KAL
BALTIMORE SUN
Baltimore
USA
KAL. Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate.
(mpg) and shifting to new fuels.
Forceful efforts could result in energy
savings of about 50 percent in
residential and commercial sectors and
about 33 percent in industrial and
utility sectors.
(lovi'rnment can speed the process of
researching and testing many energy
supply and end-use technologies.
I iowever, recent federal energy RD&D
budgets are about half of what they
were in 1980, funding for renewable
energy and conservation RD&D has
dropped by about 80 percent over the
last decade, and only about 5 percent of
the $3.7 billion federal budget for
energy technology RD&D in 1991 was
devoted to these two promising
alternatives.
"Green" product design is another
prudent resource-use strategy that
provides an opportunity to improve
U.S. industrial competitiveness while
addressing environmental problems.
Design is the stage where decisions are
made regarding the types of resources
and manufacturing processes to be
used in production; these decisions
ultimately determine the characteristics
of waste streams, including the ultimate
fate of the manufactured product.
Recent analysis suggests that simply
providing information to designers and
consumers about the environmental
impacts of products and waste streams
may help, but is not enough. Rather,
the environmental costs of production,
consumption, and disposal should be
accounted for at each stage of the
product life cycle.
The challenge to public policy
makers is to choose a mix of regulatory
and economic instruments that targets
the right problems and gives designers
the incentives and flexibility to find
innovative, environmentally beneficial
solutions (see figure).
Birth Control
Modern health care practices created
the population explosion by enabling
deep and rapid inroads into death rates
without corresponding cuts in
birth rates. In societies that
industrialized before the 20th
century, typically over many
decades, social adaptation to
slowly falling death rates was
followed by slowly falling
birth rates; the two were never
very far apart. But when
death rates fall rapidly, as
happened in the developing
countries over the last several
decades, without
corresponding decreases in
birth rates, populations
"explode."
The challenge to
practitioners of science and
technology is two-fold: to
enable leaders to understand
better the dynamics of
population growth, the
demographic changes that
attend it, and its impacts on
development and social
stability; and to develop and
make universally available
increasingly effective and
acceptable means of birth
control.
In the United States,
contraceptive research is
virtually at a standstill.
Restrictions on scientific investigations
of human reproduction impede
important new directions in research.
Fear of litigation also appears to have a
chilling effect on manufacturers'
interest in developing and introducing
new birth control measures. These
types of barriers must be removed
before technology can help fulfill the
unmet desires for effective family
planning services.
Different standards of living and
technological sophistication alter the
impact of population changes in
different countries. For example, a
small population growth rate in a very
affluent society like the United States
can increase pollution by as much as or
more than a large population growth
rate in a very poor society. All of us
hope that people in developing
countries will grow more wealthy and
that per capita additions to pollution
ultimately will stabilize or decrease
around the planet. Under those
conditions, technology and population
EPA JOURNAL
-------
si/o become the sole drivers of changes
in pollution and associated risks. Thus,
population stabilization—at home and
abroad—is an essential ingredient in
any long-term, comprehensive pursuit
of sustainable development.
Resource Restoration
Development practices have often left
natural areas unproductive and
seriously depleted resource stocks in
their wake. Of immediate concern to
the United States are those areas of the
country contaminated by toxic wastes.
It is clear that the federal government's
operations rank high among the
contributors to environmental
contamination, which is a serious and
complicated problem. Decades will be
required for cleanup of certain sites,
while others will never be returned to
pristine condition.
Of equal or greater concern are the
loss of old growth forest ecosystems
and the reduction in the Earth's
biological diversity. Both problems
have grown during the last decade
mmammmmmm^f^m Agenda 21 m—mmummmmom
"Decision makers should create more favorable conditions for
improving training and independent research in sustainable
development. Existing multidisciplinary approaches will have to be
strengthened and more interdisciplinary studies developed between
the scientific and technological community and policy makers and
with the general public to provide leadership and practical know-how
to the concept of sustainable development...." .
from development assistance concerns
to themes of global debate. As the
value of biological resources to
humankind has become more fully
appreciated, the connections between
these resources and global
environmental stability and economic
development potential have become
more compelling.
Little scientific effort has been
directed to increasing the direct
financial benefits from sustainable
management of natural forests to local
communities. In the United States, for
How Product Design Affects Materials Flows
Conventional Design
ENERGY r~l ENERGY
RAW MATERIALS,
MANUFACTURING
INDUSTRIAL^
MUNICIPAL
SOLID
WASTE
•'WASTE
In general, materials flow through the economy in one direction only — from raw
materials toward eventual disposal as industrial or municipal waste.
Green Design
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
DESIGN
FOR SAFE
tANDFILLING,
COMPOSTING.
AMD
INCINERATION
DESIGN FOR REUSE
By making changes in a product's design, overall environmental impact can be
reduced. Green design emphasizes efficient use of materials and energy, reduction of
waste toxicity, and reuse and recycling of materials.
Source: U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Green Products by Design, Ctaces for 3 Cleaner Environment ((! S
Government Printing Office 19921
example, the major underlying cause of
old growth deforestation and species
extinctions—lack of local alternative
employment opportunities for forest
workers—remains. Hence the forests
and their biodiversity are in jeopardy,
both at home and abroad, despite
momentum at the international and
national policy and planning levels.
Technology—to create new job
opportunities and to reestablish the
forests—is badly needed to make the
task of resource restoration less
expensive and more effective.
Technology gives us hope of
achieving sustainability, but no
guarantees. The United States is ideally
positioned to lead a global effort to
achieve sustainable development. We
are technically sophisticated, open, and
innovative, and we presently use a
major portion of the world's resources.
For technology to work to our benefit,
however, change must occur in other
spheres as well. Many traditional
public policies bias actions toward
higher resource consumption, rather
than toward greater resource efficiency.
These policies need fixing.
1 believe we also need to devise some
better measures of progress than the
Gross Domestic Product (GDP). We
continue to measure economic health in
terms of the rate of flow of materials
and energy through the economy—the
faster, the better. On that basis, human
and environmental disasters such as the
Oakland fire, the Los Angeles riots, and
Hurricane Andrew have one thing in
common: They increase the GDP.
Kierkegaard suggested an
alternative: "Progress should be
measured by the increase in man's
individuality." It is something to
consider, as we grapple with
sustainable development. 0
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
31
-------
RESOURCES.
Richard Thompson farms
without chemicals near
Boone, Iowa, by using
ridge-tilling and crop
rotation methods.
Mitch Mandel photo.
The New Farm.
32
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Agriculture: Two Views
Farmers must do more
than take green subsidies
by Ken Cook
For the past 30 years, ever since
Rachel Carson revealed the
ecological costs of agricultural
pesticide misuse in Silent Spring, the
louder voices in agriculture have
howled in protest whenever evidence
surfaced that modern farming
contributes to a serious environmental
problem, be it wetlands loss, surface
water pollution, or ground water
contamination. Chances are, however,
that we'll hear many of those very same
voices say just the opposite, and say it
just as loudly, over the next few years.
Agriculture's environmental problems,
far from being exaggerated, will be
discovered to be so severe that society
will be asked to pay farmers billions of
dollars each year to deal with them.
What will account for the reversal?
Will it be a response to the Earth
Summit's call for "sustainable
agriculture?" Alas, dear taxpayer, the
voices will be motivated by green of
another kind. Farm interests
throughout the industrialized world
have resigned themselves to the fact
that the only feasible, politically correct,
post-Rio defense against the growing
assault on their massive agricultural
subsidies is to put an ecological coating
on the flow of cash. It's quite a sight,
really: farm policy, big and
embarrassed, arriving at the new world
(Cook is Vice President for Policy at the
Center for Resource Economics in
Washington, DC.)
order all done up in the most delicate
shades of green.
Will the new color have a slimming
effect? A fellow in the business of
defending farm subsidies these days
really must keep an eye on his figures:
Agricultural protectionism costs
taxpayers and consumers tens of
billions of dollars each year here and in
Japan, and gobbles up most of the
European Community's revenues.
And quite apart from their cost,
agricultural subsidies in Europe, the
United States, and Japan have been
targeted during the current Uruguay
round of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as the
principal roadblock to freer trade
worldwide. That has put commodity
export subsidies, price supports, cash
payments, and myriad other forms of
agricultural protectionism on the
chopping block of the post cold-war
world.
GATTocrats emphasize, however,
that national subsidies made for
environmental purposes would remain
unaffected by proposed
reforms—they're "GATT-proof," as
they say in the trade. And therein lies
the inspiration for environmentally
friendly farm policies that are de rigueur
in Europe, and catching on here.
As Britain's Agriculture Minister
John Gummer declared at a recent
international meeting in The
Netherlands, "Farmers who benefit
from direct payments under the
reformed Common Agricultural Policy
should be expected to protect and
safeguard the countryside and its
wildlife."
The United States may be said to be a
season or two ahead of the fashion, at
least on paper. Since 1985, U.S. farm
policy has stipulated a conservation
quid pro quo for some two dozen forms
of farm benefits. Under those policies,
farmers who drain wetlands or farm
erodible lands outside the rules lose
their eligibility for most farm programs.
In fact, the supposed conservation
benefits were used to defend farm
programs from attack during the 1990
Farm Bill debate. U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) officials claim
great conservation gains under these
policies, but investigations by the
USDA's Office of Inspector General,
among others, show that USDA's
enforcement of the rules has been
exceedingly lax. Center for Resource
Economics research indicates that
thousands of farmers should have lost
program benefits for failing to protect
wetlands and fragile soils in recent
years, but all but a handful got off scot-
free. That means taxpayers still are
subsidizing soil erosion and wetlands
destruction on an extensive scale.
At the same time, U.S. policy has
conclusively demonstrated that farmers
will line up in droves for environmental
subsidies. Under the Conservation
Reserve Program, also established in
1985, farmers are being paid to plant
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
33
-------
RESOURCES.
grass and trees on more than 36 million
acres of credible land for a period of 10
years, with substantial soil and wildlife
conservation benefits. Current USDA
outlays for conservation reserve
contracts, at $1.6 billion per year,
exceed EPA outlays for Superfund.
If farm policies are to evolve another
turn in the environmental direction in
this country, as seems likely, some
fundamental questions arise. For
starters, what are the goals of such
policies? To begin with, they should
result in the use of pollution prevention
techniques that have proven efficacious
and cost-effective. Reasonable yield
goals and soil testing to reduce the
chances of fertilizer overuse; biological
or integrated pest control; "banding" of
herbicides along crop rows instead of
"broadcast" application over entire
fields; greater diversity in crop
rotations; and contour farming are
among the many simple tools available.
Modest though they might seem,
widespread use of such practices would
dramatically reduce environmental and
health risks associated with agriculture
while1 helping farmers' bottom lines. At
the same time, much more effective
measures need to be taken to conserve
ecologically valuable habitats, such as
wetlands, and the wildlife they contain.
Can anyone seriously believe that
such policies will succeed if they are
purely voluntary on the part of
farmers? Or that we can afford to pay
farmers for each and every step they
need to take to protect the
environment? We have never followed
such a course with a serious
environmental problem in any other
industry, and we cannot afford to do so
in the case of soil erosion, wetland loss,
water quality, or other problems
associated with agriculture.
If agricultural policy is to "green" in
the 1490s, so that taxpayers truly
receive environmental returns on
agricultural assistance, the
environmental performance expected of
farmers must be clear and workable,
and enforcement must be fair but firm.
Among other things, EPA and state
environmental agencies will need to
play a major role in framing
environmental goals for agriculture and
in determining when farmers are
meeting those goals. A green
agricultural policy presided over
exclusively by agricultural interests
may look new, but in fact will mean
business as usual both for taxpayers
and the environment, something
neither can afford. And without
reform, writer P, J. O'Rourke's
advice on farm policy will become
more and more persuasive: Take the
whole thing out behind the barn and
kill it with an axe.
Look to the market
to provide incentives
by Stephen B, Lovejoy
and Kathleen A, Heaphy
In recent years, agriculture has made
tremendous changes in response to
widely vocalized public concerns for
environmental quality. Farmers have
greatly cut their per-acre use of
agricultural chemicals, and millions of
acres now are better protected because
tillage has been reduced. Our research
at Purdue University suggests that
these changes have reduced the flow of
certain pollutants into surface waters by
20 to 40 percent. New programs that
assist producers in farmstead
assessment and environmental risk
should reduce environmental damage
even further.
However, the public is demanding
even greater improvements. Farmers
are ready to supply whatever outputs
the public wants, and most will be good
environmental stewards, if the
environmental goals are specific and
quantifiable. Some suggest that state
and national regulation is the best or
only way to achieve these
environmental goals. In essence, they
suggest that we treat the agricultural
sector just as we have treated other
industrial sectors and force producers
to adopt a specified set of management
(Unvjm/ is u professor in the Department
of Agricultural Economics at Purdue
University, West Lafayette, Indiana, and
Coordinator of Purdue's Center for
Alternative Agricultural Systems. Heapln/ is
a technical writer and editor with the Center
for Alternative Agricultural Systems.)
practices. While regulation has often
been viewed as a fair and efficient
method for achieving environmental
goals, there are characteristics of the
agricultural sector and the agricultural
production process that make it very
different from other industries.
Systems for producing agricultural
commodities vary from region to region
because of differences in rainfall,
temperature, soil productivity, and
other characteristics of the terrain.
These same factors, plus proximity to
water and seasonally, influence the
quantity of pollutants produced by a
given production system. These
characteristics will make a regulatory
approach to environmental quality in
agriculture much more expensive (per
unit of environmental improvement)
than it is for other sectors of the
economy. Instead of a few thousand
industries to control, there are a billion
acres of farmland and a few million
farmers and landowners. Enforcement
of command-and-control regulations
would be extremely difficult. In fact, it
might be impossible.
We need drastic change and not just
business as usual. We need new,
innovative ideas that help achieve
environmental goals in an efficient
manner without sacrificing other
important objectives such as property
rights and liberty. We need to take an
intensive look at property rights
systems and find innovative ways to
achieve our goals at the least cost. For
example, the following analysis of
34
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Rows of corn
alternate with alfalfa
on an Illinois farm—a
practice that curbs
erosion while
maintaining high
yields.
Tim McCabe photo. USDA.
Soil Conservation Service.
sar
wetlands is an example of how we
could use the marketplace to achieve
environmental goals.
Environmentalists want to save the
remaining wetlands. Many farmers
and developers see the wetlands or
drainage restrictions imposed on
owners of property through the Clean
Water Act and the 1985 and 1990 farm
bills as the government "taking" their
rights to productively use these lands.
In between are most Americans, who
want to see valuable wetlands
protected but also want land available
for food production and for
development of housing.
One solution to this dilemma is to
hold a wetlands auction and sell the
rights to protect or use wetlands to the
highest bidder. There is a great deal of
diversity in the wetlands values
associated with those rights that society
now possesses as a result of the Clean
Water Act and farm bill restrictions.
These rights—drainage rights—are
analogous to development rights or
mineral rights that are severed from
land surface ownership or direct
control of the property.
If the government held a wetlands
auction, we would begin to see
differences in the quantifiable value of
those rights for different purposes; for
example, farming versus habitat or
housing versus water quality. In
geographic areas where the value of
wetlands is high, organized groups,
such as conservation and
environmental groups, will bid for
those rights. However, where the
ability of wetland acres to supply the
desired environmental amenities is low,
farmers or the present owners will
outbid others in order to have the option
to drain those acres to increase planted
acres or to reduce management
problems. To compensate present
owners, the auction could be set up to
return one-half the bid price with the
remainder of the bid going to an
environmental improvement program.
Besides protecting those wetlands
that are most valuable while reducing
the loss associated with protecting less
valuable wetlands, the wetland auction
also provides us with great flexibility
for future decisions. As society's
knowledge about the environmental
benefits of wetlands increases, owners
of those wetland rights can sell those
they presently own or buy others. In
other words, these rights would be
transferable on the basis of market
processes, where voluntary buyers and
sellers come together.
The wetlands auction is a specific-
example ot more general efforts to
introduce market functions into
environmental protection. Other
market-based environmental protection
measures, outside the agricultural
sector, include tradeable air emissions
permits and tradeable development
permits. A significant benefit
associated with these market
procedures, often called free-market
environmentalist!!, is that they would
allow members of society—rather than
public bureaucrats or university
scientists—to place values on
environmental quality. 0
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
35
-------
RESOURCES.
Public Lands: Two Views
Traditional management policies threaten
both economic and environmental health
by George T. Frampton, Jr.
Over the- last several decades, it
has become increasingly obvious
lhat our future well-being
depends on more than just a larger
gross national product. An increased
understanding of our environment has
resulted in urgent demands for
preventing further degradation and
cleaning the pollution that has occurred
already.
To many, sustainable development
should be the goal for the future
management of the nation's public
lands. Unfortunately, sustainable
development stands directly contrary to
the status quo. Traditional federal land
management policies threaten both the
environment and the economic health
of local communities by emphasizing
commodity extraction over ecosystem
protection. Regions such as the Pacific
Northwest, the Greater Yellowstone
region of the northern Rockies, and the
Four Corners area of the Southwest are
particularly ill-served by the current
ti'deral policies.
Take logging of the ancient forests,
for example. Decades of excessive
logging on public lands throughout the
region have severely degraded the
habitat for several species, such as
salmon. Most of the spawning and
rearing habitat for wild salmon in the
Pacific Northwest is located on or
directly downstream from national
forests and other federal lands.
Logging and road building may
increase the amount of fine sediment in
streams by as much as 1,000 times. The
excess sediment adversely affects the
viability of salmon eggs and the
salmon's ability to feed. Salmon are
visual feeders and the higher levels of
sedimentation, in effect, hide food. The
American Fisheries Society estimates
that some 106 populations of West
Coast salmon are extinct and another
214 salmon stocks in the Pacific
Northwest are at risk of extinction.
Mining on public lands is an equally
egregious assault on the environment.
Across the public lands, tens of
thousands of abandoned mining sites
still are leaking acid, heavy metals, and
other hazardous wastes into streams
(Frampton /s President of
The Wilderness Society.)
Reprinted with special permission of King Features Syndicate.
36
EPA JOURNAL
-------
and rivers, while abandoned
tailings—mining waste—piles spew
poison-laden dust.
EPA has put 47 abandoned mine sites
on the National Priorities List for
Superfund clean-up action. Economists
estimate that toxic waste cleanup at
mine sites could cost $50 billion. The
National Park Service estimates that it
will take $45 million to clean up and
make physically safe more than 2,000
abandoned mine sites within Olympic,
Glacier, Death Valley, and many other
national parks and monuments.
The record on grazing on public
lands is just as dismal as that of logging
and mining. Overgrazing on public
lands, spurred by cheap fees, has
resulted in extensive soil erosion,
watershed destruction, and the
enormous loss of vegetation.
The damage from overgrazing is so
great that the Bureau of Land
Management (BLM) estimates that over
the next five years a minimum of $60
million of ecological restoration work is
needed. In its 1990 report on rangeland
conditions, BLM says that only 33
percent of grazing lands are in good to
excellent condition. The U.S. Forest
Service says that only 46 percent of its
lands used for grazing are in good
condition.
The economic damage from these
federally sponsored commodity
programs parallels the environmental
problems. Altogether, taxpayers
subsidize the private profit from public
resources to the tune of more than
$1 billion every year. This subsidy does
little to benefit the economic well-being
of the region.
Much of the West has changed
dramatically over the past 20 years.
The once predictable boom-and-bust
economic cycle has become a bust, with
ranching, mining, logging, and other
commodity-production industries
experiencing long-term declines. Other
enterprises such as high technology,
service industries, entrepreneurship,
government, and recreation and
tourism are becoming more important.
This trend can be turned to advantage,
and the West can be rebuilt and
diversified with an economy that
protects and restores the region's
outstanding environmental features.
To a great extent, sustainable
Agenda 21
"Expanding human requirements and economic activities are placing ever
increasing pressures on land resources, creating competition and conflicts
and resulting in suboptimal use of both land and land resources. If, in the
future, human requirements are to be met in a sustainable manner, it is now
essential to resolve these conflicts and move toward more effective and
efficient use of land and its natural resources...." __,,, , .,,
development is the foundation for
making a successful link between the
environment and the economy.
Communities seeking to diversify their
economies and wean themselves from
dependency on extractive industries see
this link plainly. The federal
government should recognize that a
reversal of its subsidized commodity
programs is an essential first step
toward providing genuine, long-term
community stability to rural areas.
Subsidized timber sales must be phased
out, grazing fees should match market
rates, and minerals taken from public
lands should be subject to the same
royalties as oil and gas.
Environmental and economic health
for rural communities today depends
more than anything else on maintaining
biological diversity, clean air and water,
wildlife habitat, and other natural
attributes.
The demands now placed on the
public lands bear little resemblance to
those faced 100, 50, or even 25 years
ago. Wildlife, recreation, scenic beauty,
clean air and water, and perhaps most
importantly, biological diversity, have
taken on new prominence in public
lands management. So has public
accountability for the federal land
stewards. The era when the
environmental and economic integrity
of our public lands is sacrificed for
private gain is over and is being
replaced by a new era of sustainability.
We have little choice but to make this
transition. We can no longer afford,
economically or environmentally, a
business-as-usual approach to public
lands management. 0
No so-called "sustainable" fixes
are required
by William Perry Pendley
Americans fear any ruse that
permits bureaucrats more
control over their lives, knowing
intuitively the truth of Ronald Reagan's
definition of Washington, DC: the land
on the banks of the Potomac
surrounded by reality.
The unreality of Washington is
nowhere more evident than in its
embrace of "sustainable development"
(Pendle\/ is President and Chief Legal
Officer of tin- Mountain States l.egnl
Foundation in Denver, Colorado.)
as a wise or even achievable public
policy. Federal bureaucrats may
breathe the rarefied air of Washington's
Mount Olympus-like atmosphere, but
their crystal balls are no better than
yours or mine.
Even if the bureaucracy were capable
of deciding what is "sustainable
development," the economic distress
accompanying such decision making
would be enormous. In Washington,
where everyone can say "no" yet no
one can give an authoritative "yes,"
decision making is measured in years,
not months.
More importantly, the call for
"sustainable development" makes no
sense because it is based, in part, upon
the notion that technology has
increased America's standard of living
at the expense of the environment.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
37
-------
America leads the world in protecting
the quality of the human environment
because the creativity of our technology
and the strength of our economy permit
us to do so. Since only a country with a
strong economy can spend money on
environmental protection, it is hardly
surprising to have found environmental
disasters in the economically hard
pressed, government managed
economies of Eastern Europe.
Another delusion underlying
"sustainable development" is that we
are running out of natural resources.
Yet every generation has left the next
generation with more, not fewer, usable
resources. The prices of coal, oil, gas,
and metallic ores are at or near all time
lows, denoting abundance, not scarcity.
Current predictions of gloom are as
erroneous as the forecast of the
"expert" who once intoned: "When
whale oil is gone, the world will be
plunged into darkness."
We in the western United States have
long recognized the need for good
stewardship and conservation.
Conservation, in Theodore Roosevelt's
sense of the term, means the wise use of
natural resources—mankind and nature
living together in productive harmony
for the benefit of mankind.
Some in the highly urbanized East
see the West as a land mass to be
managed, not for multiple use and the
economic well-being of those who live
here, but as a playground to be enjoyed
by urbanites. Of course, vast reaches of
the West are set aside for single
purpose recreational pursuits,
including millions of acres of parks and
wilderness areas. However, the federal
lands that remain are key to our
region's economy. As to those lands,
only the most disingenuous would
assert that the needs of future
generations are not being protected by
the economic activities now taking
place—activities like ranching,
timbering, mining, and oil and gas
development.
Grazing lands in the West are in the
best shape in decades. Wildlife in the
West—elk, deer, antelope, bear,
mountain lion— are at their highest
population levels since record keeping
began in the early 1900s. These lands,
which have supported economic
activity for generations, are being
managed for sustained development far
into the future, since it is the fervent
prayer of every ranching family that its
sons and daughters remain on the land.
The battle over grazing in the West
("Cattle-Free by '93," cry some zealots)
does not involve environmental
considerations but matters of culture.
As one federal judge concluded, some
find unique beauty in the droppings of
elk but are offended by the leavings of
cattle.
Timber is a story of untold success
and tragedy. The success is the fact that
there are more trees today than 40 years
ago, the result of thoughtful
reforestation programs and the
management of private and public
Federal bureaucrats may
breathe the rarefied air of
Washington's Mount
Olympus-like atmosphere,
but their crystal balls are no
better than yours or mine.
forest lands for sustained yield. The
tragedy is the manner in which—as a
result of endless, mindless appeals
by so-called environmental
groups—forested lands, devastated by
insect infestation and the victims of
"fuel" (decaying, dead, and downed
trees) buildup, are being permitted to
rot. In time, much of these once
beautiful forests will erupt into fire,
much like Yellowstone National Park
did, thereby releasing carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere, destroying
wildlife habitat, killing fish and game,
and wiping out vast, rich, renewable
resources.
As for mining, only mineral deposits
that represent the highest, most
efficient use for the least amount of
disturbance will be mined. Companies
that mine in America compete in a
world market in which cheap foreign
labor provides a tremendous advantage
(American miners are among the
nation's best paid workers). Thus,
mineral deposits in the United States
are only being developed—yielding
millions of dollars in revenues, salaries,
and tax payments to federal, state, and
local governments, not to mention
valuable natural resources—if the
deposits are world class, that is, if they
can compete with the rich ores found in
South Africa, Russia, or Brazil.
President Jimmy Carter once
predicted that the world would run out
of oil by 1990. Obviously, it did not.
What we have run out of is much of our
domestic production (exploration is at a
50-year low) not because the oil isn't
there, but because of "environmental"
regulations. While there are vast
regions of this country that contain
enormous hydrocarbon potential, we
appear to prefer to go to war in the
Persian Gulf and to permit the export of
some 400,000 energy-related jobs to
foreign countries. The irony is thaf the
United States is not thinking globally
when we look to the former Soviet
Union—with its dismal environmental
record—to produce energy resources
for us.
Calls for "sustainable development"
are based upon three fatally flawed
assumptions: that technology increases
standards of living at the expense of the
environment; that we are running out
of resources and must limit
development to ensure future
availability; and that government is any
better at telling us what type of
development is "sustainable" than it is
at telling us if it will rain tomorrow.
"Sustainable development" is simply
a code word. It is a code word for
federal land use planning, for more
government control, and for
centralizing enormous power in the
hands of bureaucrats who are
thousands of miles away from the
people whose lives they seek to control
and light years away from the real
world in which most of us live. 0
38
EPA JOURNAL
-------
RESOURCES.
The Rising Tide
Rapid development threatens
U.S. coastal areas
by Marya Morris
"As powerful as Hurricane
Hugo was, it will be surpassed
by bigger storms in the future;
population growth and
increased development along
the coasts suggest that these
future storms may cause even
more damage and loss of life."
—From Coasts in Crisis, U.S.
Geological Survey, 1990.
In October 1992, two months after
Hurricane Andrew ripped through
South Florida, this remark from 1990
has proven prophetic. Hurricanes,
storm surges, flooding, and erosion are
recurring realities in coastal
communities. Major natural disasters,
such as Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and
Hurricane Andrew this past August,
force us to refocus our attention on the
human, environmental, and financial
ramifications of intense land
development in and near coastal
wetlands, estuaries, and on coastlines.
The rights of property owners are
expanding, carrying with that
expansion the assumption that
environmental protection comes at the
expense of job creation and economic
(Morris is a Senior Research Associate at
the American Planning Association (APA)
in Chicago. She is the author of Wetlands
Protection: A Local Government
Handbook, published by EPA and APA in
September 1991.)
development. Preserving the natural
functions and values of coastal areas is
paramount to enhancing the economic
value of the coasts, ensuring the
stability of the coastal communities,
and sparing all taxpayers the cost of
misguided land-development practices.
The most rapid land development
and population growth in the United
States is occurring near the coasts.
According to the 1990 census, 50
percent of Americans currently live
within 50 miles of a coast; this number
likely will increase to 75 percent by
2010. Moreover, the National Coastal
Research Institute (NCRI) estimated in
1991 that coastal recreation and tourism
generates $8 to 12 billion annually- In
1985, NCRI estimated that 31.7 percent
of the U.S. gross national product
(GNP), almost $3 trillion, originated in
the 413 coastal counties (including
Great Lakes coastal counties).
Much of the land development
spurred by the population boom has
caused extensive damage on beaches
and dunes, and in estuaries and coastal
wetlands. This problem, combined
with existing threats of sea-level rise,
periodic storm damage, shoreline
erosion, and declining water quality,
poses continuing challenges to coastal
resource management.
In many cases, land development in
sensitive coastal areas has hampered
the ability of beaches, estuaries, and
wetlands to perform their natural
functions of erosion protection,
stormwater management, and pollution
control. Development that results in
harm to the environment, or that
ignores other negative external effects,
does not translate into an improved
standard of living or better quality of
life in the long run. When wetlands are
Annual Population Growth Rates,
1960 - 2000
United States, Coastal States, and
Coastal Counties
Percentage I—I United
Annual Growth I I Slates
Rate Coastal
States
1.5
1960-1970 1970-1980 1980-1985 1985-2000
Source: National Coastal Resources, Research, and Development Institute
(19901
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
39
-------
RESOURCES
Projected population and
development growth for
U.S. coastal areas
means that future natural
disasters may cause
even more damage than
did Hurricane Andrew.
Kattty Willens photo
Wide World
filled, millions of dollars must be spent
to build and improve storm-water
retention systems. When estuaries are
disturbed, wildlife habitats are lost
permanently and pollutants proceed
directly into bays and the ocean, where
they threaten human safety and the
fishing and shellfish industries. When
beach-front property is developed,
fragile sand dunes and coastal
vegetation are destroyed, thus
endangering marine life with pollution
and sediments from eroded beaches
,md increasing the likelihood and
magnitude of damage to private
property from hurricanes and tropical
storms. When coasts are developed,
expensive devices like seawalls, groins,
riprap, and imported sand must be
used to protect private property from
the inevitable encroachment of erosion
and waves.
In other words, current land
development patterns in coastal areas
are threatening the sustainability of the
entire coastal environment. Significant
changes in the nature and extent of land
development are required if we want
future generations to be able to use and
enjoy these resources.
While it would be difficult to argue
that these areas are underregulated, the
question is, Are the regulations
working? In the current economic
climate, any action that somehow limits
land development or business activity
will be perceived as "bad" or even anti-
American. This makes it incumbent on
environmentalists and those who value
these areas to make it crystal clear to
property owners in coastal areas that
ignoring regulations, or fighting their
passage, will, in the end, entirely
destroy the resource that gave their
property value in the first place. Some
of the current laws and
ordinances—described below—that
regulate development in coastal areas
offer glimmers of hope that these areas
can be saved.
Development in coastal and inland
wetlands is regulated by the Clean
Water Act's Section 404 permitting
procedure. The law establishes a
permit program that regulates the
discharge of dredged and fill material
into wetlands. Most individuals who
follow environmental news are aware
of the current, long-running debate
over the definition of wetlands. The
controversy stems from the 1989 federal
wetlands delineation manual, which
defined wetlands in such a way that
even some lands that rarely are wet are
wetlands. Because coastal wetlands are
usually fully immersed in water or
subject to tides, there is not as much
debate about their status as wetlands.
The wetlands permitting process,
however, allows far too many acres of
coastal wetlands to be drained and
filled for development.
There are other government
programs that have greater, albeit
limited, success than the Section 404
process in balancing environmental
protection and economic vitality in
these fragile areas. The goal of many of
them is to encourage land development
patterns that reduce negative
externalities, such as increased storm-
water runoff; contamination of ground
water, rivers, and bays from nonpoint-
source pollution; and erosion of
coastlines.
The federal Coastal Zone
Management Act (CZMA) of 1972
provides funding to the 32 coastal states
(including Great Lakes states) to
develop and implement programs for
the proper conservation and
environmentally sound development of
coastal areas. States spend the bulk of
CZMA funds on "improving
government decision making." The
specific activities undertaken by states
in this regard have been coordination of
permit review and procedures,
elimination of duplicative federal
EPA JOURNAL
-------
reviews in wetlands projects, and
preparation of handbooks to assist
property owners. The 1990 CZMA
amendments authorized new
enhancement grants that are to be based
on each state's assessment of its priority
needs and the development of multi-
year strategies to attain state goals.
A 1990 analysis of the CZMA
program by NCRI indicated that each
dollar of CZMA funds spent by states
was associated with an increase of $25
to $37 in coastal GNP due to coast-
dependent activities (e.g., fisheries,
off-beach recreation, and shipping), an
increase of $1.50 in coastal GNP due to
coast-linked activities (e.g., fish
processing and marine equipment
sales), and an increase of $482 to
$650 in coastal GNP due to
coastal-service activities (e.g., real
estate, retail, and hotels).
Section 320 of the Clean Water Act,
established by the 1987 Water Quality
Act Amendments, created the National
Estuaries Program. The purposes of the
program are to identify nationally
significant estuaries, protect and
improve their water quality, and
enhance their living resources. When
Congress reconvenes in January 1993,
the National Estuary Program is up for
reauthorization under H.R. 5070, the
Water Pollution Control and Estuary
Restoration Financing Act, and its
companion bill in the Senate, S. 2831.
The program requires that a
Comprehensive Conservation and
Management Plan be developed by a
local or state planning or management
agency for each estuary that is
participating in the program.
The program can be very effective in
implementing a regional solution to
protecting estuaries from pollution and
preserving wildlife habitat as the
following example from Buzzards Bay,
Massachusetts, illustrates. However,
the effort is limited to only 18 estuaries
in the whole country, which means the
majority of estuarine areas are still at
extreme risk.
A plan for Buzzards Bay estuary off
Cape Cod was completed in 1990. A
long history of industrial discharge at
Buzzards Bay had resulted in highly
contaminated sediment.. The sediment
was so bad that one part of the bay had
been designated as a Superfund site
and had been closed to fishing and the
public since 1979. The plan, now being
implemented by the Buzzards Bay
Project, serves as a guidance document
for local governments on how to
implement strategies to protect water
quality in the bay.
Specifically, the plan outlines several
action plans designed to tackle the
causes of nonpoint-source pollution.
One goal is to prevent or minimize any
new, direct storm-water discharges into
the bay from new subdivisions. In the
case of one local government, this
meant reducing allowable density of
single-family homes in a yet-to-be
developed area to lots of 70,000 square
feet, or a little more than 1.5 acres. The
Buzzards Bay project is working with
other local governments to implement
strategies that limit the number of
septic systems and to adopt bylaws that
strengthen their wetlands regulatory
authority. The plan for Buzzards Bay
serves as a model for other
organizations participating in the
National Estuary Program.
Sustainability in coastal areas
requires a modification of our patterns
of living, consumption, and land
development. The regulations put in
place must continue to balance the
economic needs of the community and
respect the rights of property owners.
But policies must also reflect the fact
that destruction of wetlands, beaches,
and estuaries will—in the long
run—cost taxpayers billions of dollars
in pollution cleanup, storm damage,
and other negative consequences.
These billions would not have to be
spent if only good planning could
minimize the effects of development
and allow natural processes to occur. 0
Intense development in Miami, Florida. Too often, coastal development brings
shoreline erosion and declining water quality.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
41
-------
RESOURCES.
Linkages and Lifelines
Biodiversity protection requires more
than the Endangered Species Act
by Douglass Lea
here's a whole lot of death out
there," remarks an English
conservationist as he watches
millions of frogs being annihilated by
speeding vehicles. An eight-lane
motorway had recently been built
across a migration route connecting
seasonal poles of the frog's traditional
habitat, and the consequences were
clear: a massive carnage that left the
ancient "frog-way" slippery with a
shiny soup of crushed amphibians.
On American roads alone, some 100
million wild animals are killed
annually. Less dramatic are the steady
extinctions of a multitude of obscure
flora and fauna, including, at the veiled
end of the spectrum, bacteria, fungi,
plankton, insects, and mollusks. On a
global scale, about 30 million species
are thought to exist, and nearly a
quarter of them will disappear during
the lifetimes of middle-aged human
beings.
As the human species spreads into
every available niche, wildlife
populations become stranded in
fragmented islands of habitat,
separated from migration routes and
normal ranges by roads, fences, dikes,
reservoirs, clearcuts, fields of
single-crop agriculture, residential
developments, and other products ol
human culture. Often capriciously
(Lcn, it writer tind ciiifor, ulso teaches in
American University's Washington
Semester Program.)
imposed on the landscape, these
overlays of geometry—straight lines,
hard edges, acute angles—seldom
mirror the natural borders and
demands of plant and animal
communities. Fragmented habitat
WELL,
PEOPLE SUCCEEDED
8/ooiVEftsiry
DOWN K> ONE SP£OE£
AMD TWEV ALWAYS
WOULD
AETHER.
A Pirv W£
-------
Agenda 21
isolates these communities, diminishes
genetic integrity and viability within
species, imperils species that have
highly specialized requirements, and
encourages exotic and opportunistic
species to immigrate and compete for
scarce resources.
In the midst of this teeming fertility,
pervasive slaughter, and encroaching
fragmentation, debate on preserving
nature's store of biological diversity, or
biodiversity, remains fixed on
individual species. Those species with
symbolic stature or political utility
attract the spotlight. As a result, the
stale air of impasse has settled around
the re-authorization of the Endangered
Species Act, the nation's flagship for
guarding biological treasures.
Arguments tend to revolve around the
costs and benefits of saving illuminated
species like the spotted owl, condor,
and snail darter.
True biodiversity occupies a more
generous realm. It refers to the full
sweep of intricate processes within
ecological systems, or ecosystems, and
habitats. It provides sufficient
redundancy for organisms to adapt to
the evolution and shocks in their
environment and sufficient variety to
resist inbreeding within isolated
populations. In The Diversity of Life,
Harvard professor and prize-winning
author E.O. Wilson defines biodiversity
as "the variety of organisms considered
at all levels, from genetic variants
belonging to the same species through
arrays of species to arrays of genera,
families, and still higher taxonomic
levels."
Managing vast arrays of life forms
with only the blunt instrument of the
Endangered Species Act violates
Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety.
Derived from cybernetic theory, this
law says the repertoire of responses an
entity can make to its complexity
reflects the complexity of that
environment. The Law of Requisite
Variety implies that a system of
strategic controls within the universe of
biodiversity-promoting
instrumentalities succeeds insofar as it
develops a level of complexity similar
to that posed by the universe of threats
to biodiversity. In these terms, the
federal Endangered Species Act,
however important in limited
"Despite mounting efforts over the past 20 years, the loss of the world's
biological diversity, mainly from habitat destruction, over-harvesting,
pollution, and the inappropriate introduction of foreign plants and
animals, has continued .... Urgent and decisive action is needed to
conserve and maintain genes, species and ecosystems, with a view to
the sustainable management and use of biological resources ...."
—Chapter 15
applications, constitutes a clumsy
response to the complex dilemmas
found in the real world of biodiversity.
Fortunately, the variety of responses
to those dilemmas evolves more rapidly
than the pace and sophistication of
legislative process. On a number of
fronts—publications, scientific
investigations, community projects,
school curricula, litigation, state
initiatives—the campaign to save the
world's biodiversity is beginning to use
a wider assortment of techniques and
tactics.
Scientific interest has recently
focused on mitigating techniques,
especially the wildlife corridor, a
variation on "greenwavs," which have
appeared in hundreds of local
communities and states. Most
greenways are designed for human use
and enjoyment—typically, an
abandoned railroad right-of-way
converted to a recreational trail.
Wildlife corridors are reserved for plant
and animal communities—either to
expand ranges and facilitate migrations
or encompass shitting habitats under
conditions of rapid environmental
change, such as global wanning.
Wildlife corridors serve as "geneways."
For example, birds that are unable to
survive in a shrunken forest reserve are,
nevertheless, able to participate fully in
the isolated ecosystem by migrating
along forest corridors between reserves.
When two or more fragments are
linked, the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts. In a depleted and
simplified exosphere, the mandates of
sustainable development, raised to an
ethical imperative by the Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro, validate the use of
coherent networks of ecological
corridors to save what is still pristine,
restore what is still retrievable, and
connect what is still green, To bind
remaining wetlands and wildlife
reserves, new restorations and nature
development areas, and mediating
corridors and buffer zones into an
extensive system of linear greenways is
to create a biological infrastructure for
an entire region or country.
Railroad and highway corridors often
have biological as well as recreational
values. David Burwell, president of the
American Rails-to-Trails Conservancy,
learned about the potential of wildlife
corridors 15 years ago when he
received urgent appeals from an official
of the South Dakota Wildlife
Federation. "He told me the
Milwaukee Road Railroad's proposed
abandonment of 600 miles of right-of-
way would seriously endanger South
Dakota pheasants," Burwell recalls.
"More than 90 percent of these birds are
hatched in the state's railroad and
highway corridors. The rest of their
habitat has long since been plowed
under."
Similar benefits are provided by
natural corridors that have suffered
relatively little from human occupation
or manipulation. In the Southeast, the
private purchase of the Pinhook
Swamp puts migrating bears out of
harm's way and ensures that other
plants and wildlife can move freely
along a 15-mile corridor between
Osceola National Forest in Florida and
Okefenookee National Wildlife Refuge
in Georgia.
Biodiversity has recently achieved
standing on its own merits. In Marble
Mountain Audiibon v. Rice, the Ninth
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in
September 1990, that a U.S. Forest
Service Proposal to log the 3,325-acre
Grider Creek watershed had failed to
consider its impact on animals using a
five-mile-wide corridor between two
wilderness areas situated 16 miles apart
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
43
-------
in northern California's Klamath
National Forest. Nathaniel Lawrence, a
lawyer for the Natural Resources
Defense Council, emphasi/.es that he
argued the case "strictly on the grounds
of using corridors to maintain
biological diversity and intentionally
ignored the menace to threatened and
endangered species." This case, in
short, transports biodiversity beyond
the policy gridlocks forming around the
Endangered Species Act.
Meanwhile, bioregionalism, a concept
long marginalized at the fringe of the
environmental movement, has recently
moved to the very center of the
biodiversity debate. A California
program called Natural Communities
Conservation Planning (NCCP) aims to
protect critical habitat "before it
becomes so fragmented or degraded by
development and other use" that its
species require listing under an
endangered-species program. The
program is designed to save critical
habitat and, at the same time, allow
Wildlife can migrate freely through the Pinhook Swamp natural corridor,
which runs between Osceola National Forest in Florida and
Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in Georgia.
Jimmy Walker photo.
"reasonable" economic activity and
development on affected land, much of
which is privately owned. The first
NCCP pilot program targets the Coastal
Sage Scrub ecosystem, which extends
from the Mexican border up the Pacific
Coast to Ventura County. Harboring the
California gnatcatcher and some 50
other threatened species, this ecosystem
demonstrates the advantages of multi-
species protection. NCCP's innovations
lie in the program's holistic approach to
biodiversity and its anticipatory
bias—that is, its attempt to stop incipient
problems before they become acute and
require institutionalized responses.
Experiments in protecting
biodiversity find sturdy underpinnings
in a growing library of scholarship on
the subject and in an expanding
number of students learning the
principles of conservation biology and
landscape ecology. In addition to E.O.
Wilson's volumes, the library now
includes significant contributions from
a wide range of experts, many of whom
can be sampled in landscapt Linkages
and Biodiversity, published in 1991 by
Defenders of Wildlife. A
comprehensive textbook, Landscape
Ecology by Richard T.T. Format! and
Michel Godron, has been available
since 1986. Biodiversity experts have
also formed the International
Association for Landscape Ecology.
Followers of this discipline perform
"gap analyses" to generate digital maps
that identify both species-rich areas and
other ecosystems inadequately
protected by existing reserves.
As the frog massacre on the British
motorway demonstrates, many
species—not just those officially
inscribed as endangered species—are
now extremely vulnerable. They are at
risk from depletion of stratospheric
ozone, enormous growth in human
populations and economic activity,
global warming, droughts, fires,
pollution, disease, and other
environmental shocks. British
authorities, realizing that biological
systems require margins of safety,
finally tunneled under the motorway to
reconstitute the ancient "frogway."
Thanks to enlightened management,
the frogs are safe again, and their
critical role in the maintenance ot
biological diversity continues. 0
44
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Great Water Bodies
at a Watershed
Pollution prevention and
a regional approach are needed
by Wesley Marx
You might not think that two
Pennsylvania farmers could help
watermen in the Chesapeake Bay
harvest more shellfish. But joe and
David Garber, by carefully applying
ferlili/.cr to their Spring Lawn Farm, are
helping to demonstrate how we can
achieve sustainable use of our great
water bodies.
The goal of sustainable use is critical.
From generation to generation, our
bays and coastal waters have provided
an economy and a way of life for
millions of people. They have helped
to enrich our lives and to define the
communities in which we live. Who
can imagine a Baltimore without
Chesapeake Bay, a Seattle without
Puget Sound, a Chicago without
Lake Michigan?
However, when we use our great
water bodies as cheap all-purpose
dumps, we can wind up with shellfish
quarantines, seafood health advisories,
and closed summer beaches.
Nationwide, there are 2,100 health
advisories for fish contaminated by
toxic chemicals, according to a 1991
National Academy of Sciences report,
Seafood Safety. Overfishing,
(Marx is the author of The Frail Ocean: A
Blueprint for Change in the 1990s and
Beyond (The Globe Pequot Press, 1991).
He served on National Research Council
funds on marine monitoring and on coastal
science and policy.)
development, and pollution threaten
"to destroy the harvest of wild
shellfish ... throughout the nation's
coastal areas," according to a 1990
report by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, Salmon
runs in California and the Pacific
Northwest are in serious decline as
upstream dams and canals divert river
flows. Our great water bodies can
become, in the words of the
accountants, "non-performing assets."
To keep our great water bodies fit to
perform, we have invested funds in the
last two decades to clean up discharges
from our sewage treatment plants.
However, as the Chesapeake Bay
region has learned, controlling
pollution at the "end of the pipe" is not
enough to ensure the goal of
sustainable use. Progress in cleaning
up sewage discharges has been offset
by the occurrence of slimy algal blooms
in the bay. These dense, greenish
blooms cut off light to critical seagrass
beds or submerged aquatic vegetation.
The blooms, as they decay, deplete life-
giving dissolved oxygen for finfish.
Nutrient-rich loads of nitrogen and
phosphorous feed these destructive
blooms. Phosphate detergent bans and
nutrient removal in sewage plants will
not suffice to roll back these destructive
blooms, which are nurtured by
livestock wastes and farm fertili/.ers
from the vast bay watershed. More
than a decade ago, scientists warned
that the bay would continue to
deteriorate without controls on
nonpoint sources of pollution in the
watershed.
Today, the Chesapeake Bay region is
undertaking the critical transition from
"end of the pipe" controls to a
watershed approach that embraces all
the impacts that converge on a water
body. Prompted by pressure from the
Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other
citizen groups, the governments of
Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and
Chesapeake Bay Drainage Area
NV
VA
ATLANTIC
OCEAN
NC
Source: Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
-------
RESOURCES.
Manure is held in a waste
management facility on a
demonstration farm in the
Chesapeake Bay
watershed. By enabling
farmers to apply manure
only as needed at optimum
times, the facility helps
prevent excess runoff.
Tim McCabe photo. USOA, Soil
Conservation Service
(he District of Columbia, in partnership
with EPA, signed an agreement in 1987
to cut nutrient loads to the bay by 40
percent by the year 2000. Pennsylvania
provides technical and financial aid to
farmers like the Garbers who develop
nutrient management plans to
minimi/e runoff of manure and
artificial fertilizers.
Maryland is working to enlist
virtually every citizen in the bay
cleanup. To help reduce soil erosion to
the bay, thousands of Mnrylanders
planted 1.4 million trees during Earth
Month in 1991. To help companies
reduce toxic discharges to the bay, the
state sponsors special workshops on
how to change to environmentally
compatible manufacturing processes.
To help fund such efforts, more than
300,000 citizens bought special
"Treasure the Chesapeake" vehicle
license plates.
Is the bay saved? Hardly. Its world-
famous oyster population is seriously
depleted. Nitrogen levels remain too
high. Phosphorous levels are dropping
and some seagrass beds are recovering,
but even this progress may be offset if
another impact converging on our
coastal regions is not controlled. The
bay watershed population will grow 20
percent by 2020, and a recent report
notes "unmanaged new growth has the
potential to erase any progress made in
bay improvements, overwhelming past
and current efforts." Environmental
groups are closely scrutinizing new
development proposals. Maryland and
Virginia have both established
commissions to recommend growth
management strategies. Clearly,
achieving the goal of sustainable use for
the bay is not going to be an easy
victory. But by shifting to a watershed
approach, the bay region has given
itself the opportunity to achieve this
goal.
To be effective, the watershed
approach also must take into account
what is happening in the air above. Up
to 30 percent of the nitrogen loads in
the Chesapeake Bay is aerial fallout
from regional smokestack and auto
exhaust emissions. Nearly 90 percent
of the toxic PCBs that enter Lake
Superior and make large lake trout
unsafe to eat comes from aerial fallout.
International agreements may be
needed to control this aerial assault.
While DDT cannot be used in the
United States, this persistent toxin
continues to enter the Great Lakes
system because of airborne sources as
far away as Mexico.
Coupling the watershed approach
with the concept of pollution
prevention can yield economic as well
as environmental benefits. By shifting
to reducing pollution at the front end,
we can reduce the need to build bigger
sewage plants, larger landfills, and
taller smokestacks. Pollution
prevention can make economic sense to
farmers and manufacturers as well. In
Wisconsin, Green Bay Packaging, Inc.,
finds it is more cost effective to recycle
its wastcwater than to meet
increasingly strict discharge standards
to the Lower Fox River. In learning to
reduce fertilizer runoff, farmers in
Pennsylvania have discovered that they
have been applying more fertilizer than
their fields can absorb. "By applying
less, the farmers can save both money
and our waterways," notes Victor Funk
of Pennsylvania's Bureau of Soil and
Water Conservation. By shifting to
water conservation, drip irrigation, and
wastewater recycling, cities and
farming communities in California can
reduce the need to divert river flows
from salmon rivers.
A watershed approach must be able
to bridge traditional political
boundaries and foster interagency
coordination. To do this, Congress
directed EPA to form the National
Estuary Program (NEP). An estuarine
region can use an NEP grant to fund a
broad-based management conference
and develop a Comprehensive
Conservation and Management
Program (CCMP). So far, EPA has
designated 18 estuaries for the NEP. In
1991, Puget Sound was the first region
to have its CCMP approved by EPA.
One priority goal: stepped up control
46
EPA JOURNAL
-------
of nunpoint pollution sources
responsible for closing some 40 percent
of the sound's commercial shellfish
beds. By treating storm runoff and
expanding its chemical source control
program, one paper mill in Tacoma,
Washington, is eliminating more than
one million pounds of potential
chemical pollutants each year.
The CCMP for the San Francisco Bay
and Delta system envisions a major
recovery of salmon runs and freshwater
wetlands—but only if standards are
adopted to ensure adequate freshwater
inflows to the estuary ecosystem. EPA
has stated its intent to set such
standards if California does not act by
1993. In 1992, Congress passed a bill'
supported by the Bay Institute and
other environmental groups that
requires the federal Bureau of
Reclamation to help restore salmon
runs damaged by its dam projects in
California.
Rimmed by wetlands, seagrass beds,
and mangrove forests, the Gulf of
Mexico sustains 40 percent of the
nation's commercial fish catch by
volume. However, severe pollution
and habitat loss are now overtaking this
magnificent water body. Nearly 60
percent of the shellfish beds are subject
to repeated health closures. Under the
Gulf of Mexico Program, the five Gulf
of Mexico states are cooperating with
EPA to develop regional action agendas
for nutrient loads, habitat loss, toxics,
marine debris, and public health
threats. The Soil Conservation Service
has established a plant center at Golden
Meadows, Louisiana, to supply
wetlands plants to community groups
working to restore coastal wetlands.
Eventually, much of the continental
United States will have to cooperate if
these initiatives are to succeed. The
Mississippi River, which empties into
the gulf, drains two-thirds of the
continental United States. Nutrients in
the massive river discharge trigger
oxygen-depressing blooms in the gulf
and contribute to a 3,000-square-mile
"dead zone" off the coast of Louisiana
and Texas. To help mobilize the broad
public support that will be needed to
protect the gulf from such piecemeal
destruction, Congress designated 1992
as the "Year of the Gulf of Mexico."
Given the current budget crunch at
all levels of government, there will be a
temptation to stint on protection of our
great water bodies. However, such
"savings" will be illusory. The marine
fishing industries, both seafood and
recreation, contribute more than $24
billion annually to the U.S. economy,
according to the National Marine
Fisheries Service. The more fishing
grounds we lose to pollution, habitat
loss, and uncontrolled growth, the
more jobs and businesses we
jeopardize.
By managing our water bodies for
sustainable use, we can restore jobs and
business opportunities while reducing
the current need to import half of our
seafood supply. Native Americans
learned how to use salmon and other
living marine resources without
depriving their children of the same
opportunity. We must provide the
same opportunity to our children. Says
Bill Frank, Jr., chairman of the
Northwest Indian Fisheries
Commission in Washington: "Care for
nature, for without her your children
will not survive." 0
A birdwatcher looks out over Tennison Bay at Fish Creek, Wisconsin. Our major water bodies enrich the lives of millions.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
Copyright, Mike Brisson photo.
47
-------
RESOURCES.
An Urgent Agenda
Nongovernmental organizations must reexamine
programs and priorities
by John Adams
Tii' United Nations Conference on
•.nvironment and Development in
iio last June changed history. For
those of us in public interest groups
who work for environmental protection
in the United Suites, it changed the
entire context of our work and it
changed fundamental ground rules.
Sustainable development is ,111 ideal
that many of us have cherished for a
very long time. Now that the largest
gathering of heads of state in history
has confirmed a need that we saw all
along, it would be easy for us simply to
congratulate ourselves. But Rio is far
from being merely a cause for
celebration. It also conferred
responsibility—the responsibility to live
up to ideals that we ourselves
promoted, and the responsibility to
make sure Ihis new international
agreement becomes a real commitment
instead of only words on paper.
Rio set a new standard by which the
work of U.S. environmental
organi/.ations should be measured. We
must all reexamine our programs and
priorities in light of the ideals of Rio
and ask whether we are in fact doing
our utmost to achieve a sustainable
society in this country.
(Adam* 15 Lxi'cntivc I >/>ivf<>;• of tilt-
Natural Rrso/mrs Dcfriw Council, a
national environmental advocacy
organization headquartered in
First, there is choice of priorities. Rio
forces us to ask hard questions. Are we
in fact devoting our resources to the
primary problems obstructing
sustainability in the United States? Are
we setting goals that we could defend
before the assembled delegates of Rio
and the nongovernmental
organizations that participated? Could
we defend them not just as important
local concerns or as issues that we have
traditionally addressed, but as priorities
of global significance?
The cardinal global problems are the
greenhouse effect, loss of species and
habitat, and imbalance of population
and resource consumption. The United
States bears special responsibility in
each of these areas. We are the primary
emitter of greenhouse gases, with an
average per capita energy consumption
many times that of the nations of the
Southern Hemisphere. We criticize the
destruction of tropical forests and loss
of tropical species, but we have
destroyed all but 5 percent of the
original forest cover of the 48
coterminous states, and we continue to
drive countless ecosystems towards
extinction. And we cannot in good
faith ask the nations of the South to
engage in family planning if we remain
unwilling to address the other side ot
the coin, our own grossly outsi/ed rate
of resource consumption.
Unless the U.S. environmental
community devotes substantial
resources to these problems, in a
deliberate program focused on creating
a sustainable society, we cannot claim
to be meeting.the standard we
ourselves helped set at Rio. It is our
task to push the envelope by creating
far-reaching solutions. We need to
continue our work on energy-efficiency
incentives, but we also need to secure a
carbon dioxide tax. We need to
preserve the Endangered Species Act,
but also to move beyond it with
large-scale ecological planning. We
need to keep promoting recycling, but
also to change the most basic attitudes
towards resources of all kinds in this
country, so that cleaner and cleaner
technologies are developed and waste
becomes taboo.
To reach goals like these, we must do
more than work on issues one by one.
The U.S. government has formally
committed itself to sustainable
development. It is up to us in the
environmental public interest
community to make sure that this
phrase, which is so poorly defined, is
made specific and applied to every area
of governmental activity and
government-regulated activity.
We must work for the creation of a
federal mechanism with broad
authority to review U.S. obligations
under Agenda 21. The United States is
the leading international proponent of a
free market system, yet we have never
faced up to the fact that at home we
provide heavy subsidies for massively
destructive practices.
48
EPA JOURNAL
-------
At a minimum, sustainable
development implies an end to
government subsidies lor overgrazing
livestock on public lands, for cutting
ancient forests, for supplying water far
below cost so that agribusiness can
grow monsoon crops in the desert, and
tor many other federal practices that are
degrading our natural resources past
the point of no return. It implies a
different way of figuring the gross
national product of this country, one
that takes account of the state of the
natural resources that fuel growth.
Environmental groups must move this
country—both its government and its
people—to come to grips with these
issues, or the U.S. commitment to
sustainable development will never be
realized in any degree.
Second, Rio demands that those of us
in the established U.S. environmental
groups examine our relations with
communities of color in this country. If
any single lesson emerged clearly from
the range and the strength of the
groups that participated at Rio, it was
th.it nongovernmental organizations of
the North and South must work hand
in hand, communicating with each
other as equals and following an
agenda that both determine together.
Until we can do this, we will not have a
world environmental movement, and
we will not be able to craft genuine
solutions to world environmental
problems.
The same lesson applies inside this
country. We in the mainstream
environmental movement are still
overwhelmingly European-American in
our staffs and boards, and our work
suffers from our lack of diversity. We
need to seek out organizations of
people of color as partners, draw on
their expertise and their ideas to help
shape our agendas, and stay in constant
communication with them.
"Sustainability" in this country must
mean sustainability for everyone—so
that the toxic burdens of industrial
waste are not concentrated
disproportionately in communities of
color and the poor—or it will be only a
facade.
Finally, there is the Sustainable
Development Commission, the new
United Nations body approved at Rio.
If the resolutions of Rio are to have any
force at all, it will be because of this
commission. Such a commission
provides a tremendous opportunity
and challenge for all of us to help
realign the world's powers, so that they
come to recognize the need to work for
sustainable development and to resolve
contentious global resource issues
through peaceful negotiation. We need
a commission with a sweeping
mandate, empowered to monitor the
implementation of Agenda 21 by
international organizations and
national governments, including the
United States. We need a commission
that can oversee the treaties signed at
Rio and watch over trends in global
environmental health. Such a
commission will require an
independent professional staff, expert
advisory bodies that include
nongovernmental and governmental
experts, and the staff and funding for
on-the-ground fact-finding capability.
We in the U.S. public interest
community have an overriding
responsibility to follow every step as
the Sustainable Development
Commission is created and to pressure
the federal government with every
means of persuasion at our disposal.
We must convince U.S. policy makers
to back a strong mandate and
For some participants,
the cultural diversity
of the Rio conference
highlighted
environmental equity
concerns back home.
Copyright. Sam Kittner photo.
substantial resources for the
commission. Moreover, it will be
important to make the United States'
first report to the commission a model
for other countries; not simply a
reworking of the annual Council on
Environmental Quality report, but a
serious, cross-sector review of U.S. laws
and policies with substantial input from
the public. One delegate to Rio,
initially skeptical about the potential of
the commission, later commented that
it would be the nongovernmental
organizations of the world that would
"breathe life into it." That
responsibility begins now.
There were many disappointments at
Rio: the weakness of the global
warming treaty, the failure of the
United States to sign the biodiversity
treaty, and the failure to take strong
action to address population pressures,
Third World debt, and resource
consumption in the developed world.
But the most disappointing prospect,
the greatest fear of all, is that the
potential to build on the true
achievements of the Earth Summit may
be lost—that the follow-up will be all
talk and no action. We in the public
interest community must strive to show
the world how to live by the
commitments made at Rio. 0
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
49
-------
RESOURCES.
Sustainability
and People of Color
Will America's underdeveloped places benefit
in the post-Rio world?
by Mencer Donahue Edwards
There have been few times when
the United States has engaged in
imagining "a better future" that
Americans of color have not
participated, often as leaders.
Therefore, it should surprise no
one to know thai a handful of
Americans of color were at the Harlh
Summit talking about sustainable
development—abroad and back home.
I lowever, it may surprise some
people to know that a key reason why
people of color may enthusiastically
embrace sustainable development is
because' thev hope it is a new road that
will lead to an old objective—a United
States of America transformed by the
guiding principles ol freedom, justice,
and equality.
C'ora Tucker, chair ol (irassroots
Leadership in I ialifax, Virginia,
articulated the meaning of this hope
when she was in Rio. Speaking to the
press, Ms. Tucker opined, "People talk
about what's going on around the
world. The same exact thing [goes on
in America I. There are so many
underdeveloped places in America, a
so-called developed country."
(f.'(/j
-------
safe livelihoods; and to secure our
social, political, and cultural
liberation ....
In doing so, they replaced traditional,
narrowly defined environment and
development issues with a
comprehensive social agenda rendered
as community development, self-
determination, and economic, social,
and political rights issues.
Third, sustainable development in
the United States must occur uniformly.
The challenge will need to be met in
Des Moines and East Los Angeles, in
Agenda 21
"One of the major challenges facing the world community as it seeks
to replace unsustainable development patterns with environmentally
sound and sustainable development is the need to activate
a sense of common purpose on behalf of all sectors of society ...."
—Chapter 27
Indianapolis and East St. Louis, in
Seattle and Philadelphia. People of
color know well that the benefits of
grand ideas have too often skipped
over their neighborhoods and barrios.
Even the ashes of south central Los
Angeles were unable to launch strong
policies and programs to support the
spread and advance of sustainable
urban and rural communities in the
United States.
Finally, it will not be credible to
promote sustainable development in
the United States and block it in the
developing world. Nonsustainabie
development in the rest of the world is
telt throughout our country, but it is felt
most powerfully in communities of
color. People who flee
nonsustainability in the developing
world usually are incorporated info
U.S. communities of color, thereby
increasing the high level of
vulnerability that already exists in those
communities. The impact of the
development struggles of countries like
Haiti, Guatemala, Somalia, South
Africa, Iraq, and Vietnam inside the
United States is representative of
America's global interdependence.
It is said that the 21st century began
in Rio in June 1<-W2. If it did, will it be a
better century for all U.S. citizens than
the 20th? If there is going to be
sustainable development in the United
States, is it going to be tor everybody,
or tor just one race, one gender, and one
class?
This is the future-focused challenge
people of color continue to offer the
United States. America may be able to
avoid sustainable development and still
enter the 21st century. The question is
how will America enter the 21st century
but avoid more mcltdowns like Los
Angeles? 0
Will social justice be part of the drive for
sustainable development? IIso, the future might
bring /ess of the frustration that caused the
destruction of south central Los Angeles.
Douglas Pizac photo. Wide World
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
51
-------
RESOURCES
Greening at the Grassroots
What polls say about Americans'
environmental commitment
by Frederick Allen
and Gregg Sekscienski
Ae Americans really becoming
"green" or are they just talking
"green"? What do they expect of
business? Do they believe the country
can strike a balance between
environmentalism and economic
development?
A look at some recent polling
information from The Roper
Organi/ation, compiled from
respondents' answers to multiple
choice questions, reveals some trends.
Individuals and the environment.
Americans are more concerned about
the environment than many other
"traditional" issues. When asked
recently what they believe to be a
"good description of the American
people/' the leading description was
"concerned about the environment,"
ahead of "loyal to country," "strong
sense of family," "friendly," and
"strong religious beliefs."
An increasing proportion of
individuals are trying to carry this
attribute over into their personal lives.
Another 1992 poll shows that 58
percent of Americans say they return
beer or soda bottles or cans to stores or
recycling centers on a regular basis.
Just three years ago, only 41 percent
claimed they did it on a regular basis.
Forty-three percent recycle newspapers
regularly (up from 20 percent three
(Allen is Senior Policy Advisor to the
Assistant Administrator for Policy,
Planning and Evaluation at EPA.
St'kscicnski is nn Assistant Editor for
EPA Journal.)
52
Personal Efforts To Help Solve Environmental Problems
(Done On a "Regular Basis") Percentage Change
from 1991
Return Bottles and Cans
to a Store or Recycling Center
Recycle Newspapers
Sort Trash to Separate from
Recyclable Material/Garbage
Use Biodegradable,
Low Phosphate Detergents
Buy Products in Pumps,
Not Aerosols
Use Biodegradable
Plastic Garbage Bags
Check Labels for
Environmental Safety
Buy Products Made of/
Packaged in Recycled Paper
Buy Products
in Refillable Packages
Compost Household/Yard Waste
Avoid Products from Companies
Not Environmentally Responsible
Take Your Own Bags
to the Market
Cut Back on Auto Use
Avoid Restaurants Using
Styrofoam Containers
Contribute Money to
Environmental Groups
Write Letters to Politicians
on Environmental Issues
58%
43
35
1 29
| 28
24
19
18
18
12
I
1 8
8
8
n 4
+ 10%
+ 6
+ 3
0
-3
+ 2
NA
+ 1
NA
NA
-2
-2
-2
-1
0
-2
Source: The Roper Organization
EPA JOURNAL
-------
years ngo), and 35 percent sort their
garbage (up from 14 percent). Twelve
percent avoid products from companies
they feel aren't environmentally
responsible, a proportion that has held
steady since 1989.
Business and the environment. The
surveys also indicate that Americans
want companies to show more
environmental concern. Seventy
percent say businesses have a definite
responsibility toward environmental
protection, yet only 35 percent of
Americans feel businesses are fulfilling
that responsibility fully or fairly well.
In fact, Americans feel that business'
environmental performance is
dropping. Fifty-seven percent of those
polled in 1991 said business activities
have worsened pollution problems
compared to 50 percent in 1983 and 47
percent in 1974. In contrast, 19 percent
of those polled in 1991 felt business
activities have helped reduce pollution
problems, compared to 26 percent in
1983 and 28 percent in 1974.
Many Americans also seem to
question the environmental claims that
many businesses make. Forty-two
percent of the public thinks
manufacturers make misleading or
exaggerated claims about
environmental benefits "fairly often"
and another 24 percent thinks they do it
"very often"—only 5 percent say almost
never, and 22 percent "not very often."
The economy and the environment.
Are the economy and the environment
necessarily at odds? Nearly two-thirds
(63 percent) say that the environment
and economic development "can go
hand in hand," while only a quarter
(25 percent) say we must choose
between them.
Moreover, 92 percent of those polled
agree with the statement, "We can find
a good balance between economic
progress and the environment." When
a choice is necessary, 64 percent say
environmental protection is more
important, while 17 percent say_
economic development is more
important; 13 percent say, "It depends."
At the same time, nearly equal numbers
agreed and disagreed with the
statement that, "The 1990s is the last
decade when environmental
catastrophe can be prevented."
Americans are concerned about the
environment. They are taking more
personal responsibility for the
environment and doing more on a
personal basis than they have before.
No longer is the environment simply a
problem for others to solve. At the
same time they are holding business to
a higher standard than before.
Fortunately, there is optimism that the
concerns of the environment and the
economy can be balanced. But for
many Americans, this optimism is
tempered by a sense of urgency. 0
What's a Person to Do?
by Dana Duxbury
s
Iustainable development appears
at first to be a complex national
or international concept, a way of
thinking that could result in nations
managing resources so efficiently and
sensitively that the resources are able
to sustain both a strong economic and
environmental base. Yet, we all, on an
individual basis/ can contribute to
sustainable development. How? By
conserving resources and reducing the
toxicity of what we buy, use, and
throw away. Our goal should be to
leave no footprints on the Earth as a
result of what we do in our own
homes and workplaces.
Some question whether sustainable
development is attainable. The more I
think about the concept, the more I
(Duxbury is an environmental consultant
and founder of Dana Duxbury &
Associates, which provides policy,
educational, research, and facilitation
consulting services on solid and hazardous
waste management issues to government,
industry, and public interest groups.)
realize that we will not survive on
this planet without respecting its
limits. Today, greed propels choices,
and short-term decisions are made
that have dire long-term results. We
should be guided by the African
proverb: "Treat the Earth well. It
was not given to you by your
parents. It was loaned to you by
your children."
As a start, each one of us can
work toward sustainable
development by taking the
following steps:
•Set a reasonable temperature for
home heating and cooling. Install
more insulation, keep furnaces in
good repair, and change furnace
filters. Turn off lights when not in
use and change to compact
fluorescent light bulbs. Encourage
the development of bike paths and
car pool lanes, support mass transit,
and help educate the public on the
importance of well maintained and
energy efficient vehicles.
•Use water conservation devices for
toilets and showers, and buy native
plants that require little water. Fix
dripping faucets and restrict lawn
watering and car washing. Also,
support moves to price water at its
true or replacement value and to set
up ground-water and watershed
protection programs. To protect the
quality of ground and surface waters,
carefully monitor what is poured
down the drain.
•Purchase products that are
repairable, reusable, durable, and
made with a minimal amount of
materials (including packaging).
Participate in recycling programs,
purchase products made of recycled
content, and compost kitchen and yard
waste.
• Look for alternatives to hazardous
products such as oven and drain
cleaners. If the hazardous products
are needed, buy only what you need,
use them according to label
instructions, and use them up before
taking them to a household hazardous
waste collection program.
•Use non-hazardous products or
alternative methods, such as beneficial
insects or integrated pest management
practices, on your land. If you do use
pesticides, use as little as possible.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
53
-------
A Skeptical Twist
Look to the marketplace
for sustainable solutions
by Jane S. Shaw
and Richard L, Stroup
chieving the goal of sustainable
development does not require
legislatively imposed changes in
technology or lifestyles in the United
States. Rather, the path to sustainable
development lies in preserving the
institutions that have led to economic
growth, because economic growth
improves human health and
environmental quality.
In its broad definition, sustainable
development is economic development
that meets the needs of the present
generation without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet
their own needs. This is a goal that all
welcome.
But many people mistakenly believe
that "meeting the needs of future
generations" means providing future
generations with exactly the same
natural resource base we have today.
Thus, their recommendations tend to
focus on, for example, preventing
resource use. While there is nothing
inherently wrong with developing
energy-efficient lights and energy-
efficient refrigerators, forcing such
innovations when they do not make
economic sense will most often be
wasteful and counterproductive.
(Shaw and Stroup are Senior Associates of
the Political Economy Research Center in
Bozeman, Montana. Stroup also is
Professor of Economics at Montana State
University.)
The Western World has a remarkably
safe and attractive environment,
especially compared with the Third
World and socialist nations. Our
system of property rights and decisions
made mainly in a market setting, with
the wealth that it has produced, is
largely responsible for that success.
By most available measures, the air
and water in the United States are
cleaner than they were a few decades
ago. Although we have cities that
suffer from air pollution, most violate
national standards only a few days a
The road to sustainable
development is to let the
forces that have worked
well continue to work.
year, and they are far cleaner than
cities, such as Mexico City, in the less
developed world. We have more acres
of forest in the United States than we
did in 1920, according to Resources for
the Future, a Washington, DC, research
organization specializing in the study
of natural resources. Life expectancy at
birth here is 76 years, compared with 47
at the turn of the century. The World
Bank's World Development Report 1992
reveals significant environmental
improvement in the industrialized
nations since 1970. For example,
particulate emissions in industrialized
countries have declined by 60 percent
and sulfur oxides by 38 percent.
Environmental problems do exist,
both in our nation and in the rest of the
world. But in the United States, the
environmental problems most people
fear are such things as hazardous
waste, global warming, ozone
depletion, and toxic air pollutants.
While these are legitimate concerns,
they must be put into perspective. Not
one of these threats has been shown to
harm the general population. In
contrast, the environmental problems in
the Third World are often deadly. For
example, there is widespread disease
from lack of clean drinking water and
refrigeration, and soil erosion and
depletion are common.
A persistent fear is that development
cannot be sustained because
nonrenewable resources such as oil and
precious metals will be used up. But
history tells us otherwise. To our
knowledge, the world has never run
out of a nonrenewable resource, and
there are no signs that it is doing so
now. The World Bank's World
Development Report 1992 helps explain
why. It points out that as metals prices
rose in the 1970s, people began
conserving metals and switching to
other materials. Fiber optics replaced
copper in telecommunications; coatings
54
EPA JOURNAL
-------
of tin, nickel, and zinc were used more
sparingly; aluminum and other
materials were recycled. In sum,
"many nonrenewables have become
more, rather than less, abundant."
It has always been this way in
market-based economies. At the end of
the 19th century, the demand for
cleared farmland and for wood led to
fears of a "timber famine." But as the
price of wood rose, people found
substitutes. For example, the railroads,
one of the biggest customers for timber,
developed steel ties and bridges to
replace wooden ones, and designed
them to last longer. The "timber
famine" went away.
The first recorded doomsday forecast
was probably in the 13th century, when
the heavy use of wood for charcoal in
England led to predictions that the
forests would, disappear. Instead,
people began using coal. In I8h5, a
prominent economist, William levons,
reared coal depletion: "The conclusion
is inevitable that our present happy
progressive condition is a thing of
limited duration." But he was wrong.
Thanks partly to the discovery of oil,
coal is plentiful today.
Market-based economies have a
natural incentive to reduce the
consumption of raw materials: the
profit motive. Early beverage cans, for
example, used a lot ot metal. In 1%5,
the production of 1,000 beverage cans
required 164 pounds of metal, most of it
steel. But by 1990, the cans required
only 35 pounds of metal, mostly
aluminum—a 78 percent reduction.
This reduction reflected both the switch
(o a lighter-weight metal, aluminum,
and a reduction in the amount of
aluminum used. Competition, not
government edicts, spurred the
companies to use less raw material.
Such competition and efficiency are
not found in economies where markets
are replaced by government decision
making. In his book The Wealth of
Nation* nnd the Environment, Mikhail
Bernstam reports that socialist
economies use more than three times as
much steel per unit of output as market
economies do. And market economies
use only 37 percent as much energy as
do the socialist nations to produce
$1,000 worth of product.
Pollution tends to fall in capitalistic
economies. In fact, although the data
are sparse, it appears that air pollution
in the United States was declining
faster before the Clean Air Act took
Critics say the government's price support policies encourage farmers to use pesticides excessively.
Hart Doner photo.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
55
-------
effect than afterwards, according to a
Brookings Institution report. Why?
Most pollution is waste. Smoke is often
unburnt fuel, and profit-making
companies try to save fuel by reducing
pollution. An early measure of
particulate density in exhaust plumes,
the Ringelmann number, was
developed by engineers to save diesel
fuel.
But demand for environmental
quality also is critical. Economic
growth itself spurs this demand. Until
they have food on their tables, most
people will not concern themselves
with the view from their windows.
Only after they have basic sanitation
will they be concerned about keeping
streams and lakes pristine. In the
United States today, people are wealthy
enough to willingly pay higher taxes
and higher prices for goods, if
necessary, to keep the environment
clean. In other parts of the world,
people are too poor to demand the
same level of environmental amenities.
A study by Gene Grossman and Alan
Krueger of Princeton University is
consistent with other studies in
suggesting that at low levels of income,
economic growth puts initial stress on
the environment, but after a certain
level of wealth is reached the
environment begins to improve. Using
World Health Organization data, they
compared levels of particulates and
sulfur dioxide pollution with levels of
income. They found that pollution
began to decline when per capita
income reached between $4,000 and
$5,000 (in 1985 dollars).
Another reason for our improved
environment is that our system of
common law helps to stop pollution,
which is an invasion of person or
property just as a personal assault is.
1 listorically, a person suffering
demonstrable harm from pollution had
the right (and the incentive) to demand
that damages be paid or that the
pollution be stopped.
While common law protection was
not complete, new research conducted
at Clemson University and the Political
Economy Research Center by Roger
Meiner.s and Bruce Yandle is revealing
that it did put significant limits on
environmental harm. Common law
protection largely has been replaced by
statutory laws such as the Clean Air Act
and the Clean Water Act, which require
the diversion of hundreds of billions of
dollars' worth of resources each year to
fight pollution. It is not clear whether
or not this approach is more effective.
By and large, Western countries with
market-based economies have been
good stewards of their environments.
They have not been perfect, of course.
Today, environmentalists decry the
19th century logging of the forests
around the Great Lakes, even though
many of the forests have grown back.
But people were poorer then. They
Energy Use Per $1,000 of Gross
National Product (1986)
1600
Kilograms ol Coal Equivalent
1200
'9QC
•600
•300
Market
Economies
Socialist
Economies
Note. Energy consumption was measured in kilograms of coal equivalent.
Market economies weie the United Stales. Canada. Japan, United Kingdom.
West Germany, France. Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Denrrark. Sweden.
and South Korea Socialist economies were the USSR, Czechoslovakia. East
Germany, Hungary. Poland, Romania, and North Korea
Source. The Wealth of Nations and the EmiionmeM by Mikhail Bernstam
(Institute of Economic Affairs, 1991)
wanted to use trees and clear land more
than they wanted scenic beauty. As
Americans' wealth grew (partly
because they used the timber and
cleared the land), their attitudes
changed and the environment
improved.
In our view, then, the road to
sustainable development is to let the
forces that have worked well continue
to work. We also should eliminate laws
that stand in the way of sustainable
development. Because government
policies often subsidize wasteful
activities, they can lead to
environmental degradation.
Economists Robert Stavins and Adam
B. Jaffe estimate that flood control and
drainage projects of the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers are responsible for
nearly one-third of the wetlands
drainage in the Mississippi alluvial
plain region. According to Christopher
Bosso, author of the book Pesticides ami
Politics, the government's price-support
policies for many farm crops have
encouraged overproduction and
spurred farmers to use pesticides
excessively. And current Forest Service
policy requires that winning bidders for
timber on Forest Service land must cut
the timber. Environmentalists
interested in saving the trees at their
own expense cannot apply.
Yes, the United States can achieve
sustainable development—by allowing
the market to spur innovation, reward
resource conservation, and hold
decision makers generally accountable.
In rare cases, government action might
help keep development sustainable.
Specifically, if and when scientists
agree that global warming is a more
serious threat than the economic
dislocations that severe emissions
controls will cause, government action
might be appropriate. But since the
environmental effects of such
dislocations will be serious, even that is
not certain.
Forcing changes in technology
and in living patterns by politically
directed central planning has been tried
in other countries. It has failed,
bringing waste and misery. It is
seldom the way to go. 0
EPA JOURNAL
-------
CROSS CURRENTS I
Reading
Gore
The Vice-President-elect
and his Earth in
the Balance
by Douglass Lea
Does Al Gore really mean it? Can
he pull it off? What shape will
the new environmental regime
take. In search of answers, Washington
policy wonks have spent much of the
time since Election Day trying to
decode the core of environmental
meaning and purpose in the life of the
Vice President-elect.
The clues appear compelling. Gore
held the first hearings in the House of
Representatives on Love Canal and
other toxic dumps. He took
unpublicized pilgrimages to the sites of
environmental catastrophe around the
world. Four years ago, he ran for
president on a platform showcasing
global warming and depletion of
stratospheric ozone. Other evidence:
Senate sponsorship of an international
group of parliamentarians interested in
global problems; a family tragedy that
helped forge a spiritual transformation
and a more demanding view of human
responsibility; a dramatic appearance
as leader of the Congressional
delegation to the Earth Summit in Rio
de Janeiro in June, 1992; and, finally,
the book.
Earth in the Balance: Ecology and lite
Human Spirit is a runaway best-seller at
$22.95. Its 368 pages are now
undergoing the kind of textual analysis
normally associated with
Kremlinologists and Talmudic scholars.
Its mere existence is a minor miracle.
Politicians are usually too busy to
embrace the solitude of the writer's life.
Full of rituals and ceremonies, their
lives are relentlessly public, and their
minds, unsurprisingly, are drawn
toward the serviceable banality.
The Gore book is an exception. It
presents a view of the turbulence
afflicting the global environment from
the perspective of one who has suffered
great turmoil in his own internal
ecology. A common denominator runs
from the personal to the global and
back again: spiritual crisis. As one of
Gore's heroes, Vaclav Havel, then-
President of the devastated Czech and
Slovak Republic, told the U.S. Congress
in March, 1990, "The salvation of this
human world lies nowhere else than in
human responsibility."
Gore clearly wants us to take on that
responsibility. He challenges
Americans with a "State of the World"
that reads like a litany of doom. It is
familiar ground to those who regularly
read Scientific American, Science, Nature,
and the Tuesday Science Section of the
Nar York Time* or to those who have
followed the periodic alarms from
environmental advocacy groups or the
Worldwatch Institute, the World
Resources Institute, and various
international agencies. Nevertheless, in
telling this oft-told tale with great
clarity, Gore makes good use of his
experience as a newspaper reporter, for
he retains an ear for the telling anecdote
and an eye for local color. New recruits
to the environmental movement are,
moreover, likely to be amazed by his
documentation of ecological
catastrophe—the depletion of
stratospheric ozone, overpopulation,
unchecked economic expansion, global
warming, loss of species and genetic
diversity, droughts, plagues, and other
shocks to our biological underpinnings.
In explaining these dilemmas, Gore
wanders confidently through a thicket
of concepts that have grown up around
[Gore] took unpublicized
pilgrimages to the sites
of environmental
catastrophe around
the ivorld.
the domains of information, ecology,
and personal development. 1 le
displays a casual fluency with
Information Theory itself and with
turbulence, Chaos Theory, equilibrium,
resilience, teedback loops, redundancy,
positive and negative feedback,
authenticity, thresholds, stewardship,
addictions, dysfunctions, and pattern
recognition.
During the recent Presidential
campaign, Gore's ideas, particularly
those collected in his book, were often
characterized as extreme. Of particular
interest was Gore's call for a "Global
Marshall Plan," the functional
equivalent of the U.S. program to
rebuild Europe after World War II, this
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
-------
time aimed at rescuing the global
environment.
In this proposal, Gore isolates five
large goals: stabilizing world
population; developing and sharing
appropriate technologies; developing a
new global "eco-nomics;" negotiating a
new generation of treaties and
agreements; and building a new global
consensus on the environment. "Each
goal/' he writes, "must be supported by
a set of policies that will enable world
civilization to reach it as quickly,
efficiently, and justly as possible."
Supporting policies are spelled
out—some specifically, others
generally—but this chapter also
contains many exhortations, the
fashionable "musts" and "shoulds" and
"oughts" of public discourse.
Under the rubric of technology, Gore
proposes a Strategic Environment
initiative (SEI), "a program that would
discourage and phase out these older,
inappropriate technologies and at the
same time develop and disseminate a
new generation of sophisticated and
environmentally benign substitutes."
Its name chosen to imply a parallel with
the Strategic Defense Initiative (SD1),
the Gore SEI includes tax incentives
and disincentives, research and
development funding, government
purchasing programs, assessment
procedures, a worldwide network of
training centers, export controls on
polluting technologies, and stronger
safeguards for intellectual property
rights. Most of these initiatives fit
neatly within the incoming Clinton
administration's emphasis on
promoting technological innovations
for economic growth, and the Vice
President-elect has already been
assigned "the responsibility and the
authority to coordinate the
administration's vision for technology."
Biotechnologies, particularly those
promising to reduce pesticide and
fertilizer loads, are likely to receive
accelerated approvals. And Earth
Summit conventions on reducing
carbon dioxide emissions and
protecting biodiversity are also likely to
find strong support from the new Vice
President. Gore will almost certainly
push to convert federal vehicles to
natural gas and to attain much higher
automobile efficiency standards.
While the proposal for a Global
Marshall Plan attracted much attention
during the election campaign, an even
more provocative concept—the "central
organizing principle"—has generated
little fanfare. "I have come to believe,"
writes Gore, "that we must take bold
and unequivocal action: wemustmake
Hie rescue of the environment the central
organizing ;in'iici/i/c for drifibifion."
(Emphasis added.) To illustrate by
analogy, Gore refers us to the West's
recent victory in the Cold War, where
he finds "a conscious and shared
decision by men and women in the
nations of the 'free world' to make the
defeat of the communist system the
central organizing principle of not only
their governments' policies but of
society itself."
In other words, rescuing the global
environment will not be achieved on
the cheap. Instead, it will entail the full
mobilization of our people and
institutions. Viewed as an organizing
principle, the Cold War changed
forever the shape of the military and
intelligence communities. It
reconfigured industry, banking,
education, housing, communications,
and transportation (particularly
highways). It also affected the
intangibles of mind and spirit—basic
values and traditions, community life,
family structure, career choices,
morality. Similarly, the struggle to find
a new equilibrium for life on Earth will
require a total reorientation of our ways
of being.
Although Gore's concept is
imaginative, he has been silent so far on
intermediate steps that would lead us
toward a focus on the rescue of the
environment as an organizing principle
or on the ways that such a reorientation
would resonate through our
institutions, values, and relationships.
In high office, Gore will be under
enormous pressure to ease his quest.
Here, in the matter of staying the
course, lies the unfinished promise of
the Vice President-elect's testament and
of his leadership on the truly ultimate
issues. 0
Al Gore, right, speaks at a news conference
during the Earth Summit He is joined by. from
left to right. Senators Bob Graham (D-Fbrida).
John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), and Steve
Symms (R-tdaho).
Joe Marquetle photo. Wide World
EPA JOURNAL
-------
• TITANS IN CONSERVATIONt
Living
the Land
Ethic
Aldo Leopold's vision
by Teresa Opheim
L<
h
• • | ike winds and sunsets, wild
things were taken for granted
until progress began to do
away with them," Aldo Leopold wrote
in the foreword to his book A Sand
County Alumnae. "Now we face the
question whether a still higher
'standard of living' is worth its cost in
things natural, wild, and free. For us of
the minority, the opportunity to see
geese is more important than television,
and the chance to find a pasque-flower
is a right as inalienable as free speech."
Aldo Leopold devoted his life to
preserving his expansive version of
"inalienable rights." In his time,
Leopold made seminal contributions to
ecology, wilderness preservation, and
wildlife management, among other
fields. Today, however, he is known
chiefly for his authorship of A Sand
Cmnih/ Almanac. In Almanac, Leopold
wrote of a woodcock's dance, the corky
bark of a burr oak, and other
observations typical of the genre of
nature writing. He also discussed
conservation issues, including, in his
words, "some of the episodes in my lite
that taught me, gradually and
sometimes painfully, that the company
is out of step." A Sand County
Almanac's most enduring passages,
however, are Leopold's presentation of
his now-famous "land ethic":
"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a
single premise: that the individual is a
member of a community of
interdependent parts. His instincts
prompt him to compete for his place in
the community, but his ethics prompt
him also to co-operate (perhaps in
order that there may be a place to
compete for).
"The land ethic simply enlarges the
boundaries of the community to
include soils, waters, plants, and
animals, or collectively: the land.
"This sounds simple: do we not
already sing our love for and obligation
to the land of the free and the home of
the brave? Yes, but just what and whom
do we love? Certainly not the soil,
which we are sending helter-skelter
downriver. Certainly not the waters,
which we assume have no function
except to turn turbines, float barges,
and carry off sewage. Certainly not the
plants, of which we exterminate whole
communities \vithout batting an eye.
Certainly not the animals, of which we
have already extirpated many of the
largest and most beautiful species. A
(Oplit'iin is uH A^ifttuit Editor for EPA
Journal.)
Leopold kept detailed records of his natural history observations. A colleague said of him: "Few men bved
the land so deeply as he loved America: few who have loved the land have examined it so carefully...."
University ol Wisconsin-Madison archives.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
59
-------
land ethic of course cannot prevent the
alteration, management, and use of
these 'resources,' but it does affirm
their right to continued existence, and,
at least in spots, their continued
existence in a natural state.
"In short, a land ethic changes the
role of Honit' s/?/>;r;;.s from conqueror of
the land-community to plain member
and citi/en of it. It implies respect for
his fellow-members, and also respect
for the community as such."
"A Pinchot-like Intent"
A Sand County Almanac has been called
a subversive book, one that questions
the deepest values of our civilization.
Leopold, however, did not live his life
as a subversive man. Although he had
the aesthetic and ethical sensitivity of a
Romantic, he was pragmatic and spent
his days working for change through
committees, governmental reports, and
articles directed toward garden club
members, hunters, and farmers. I It1
had, according to his biographer, Curt
Meine, "both a Muir-like appreciation
of nature and a Pinchot-like intent to
use nature wisely."
Aldo Leopold was born in 1887 in the
river town of Burlington, Iowa, to a
German-American family of avid
naturalists and hunters. The Leopolds
lived in a home atop the bluffs of the
Mississippi River. Although the
location offered spectacular wildlife
displays along the river's flyway, the
wildlife was diminishing rapidly by the
time of Aido's birth. Leopold left the
Midwest in 1904 to attend the college
preparatory Lawrenceville School in
New Jersey. He entered Yale
University in 1905 and graduated with
a Master of Forestry from the Yale
Forest School in 1904.
After graduation, Leopold joined the
U.S. Forest Service and headed to the
Ari/ona and New Mexico territories for
his first assignment. 1 le quickly rose to
become supervisor of the Carson
National Forest in northern New
Mexico, a position he coveted. After he
was striken with acute nephritis a few
years later, though, the physical rigors
of a supervisor's job were no longer an
option for Leopold, and he spent the
rest of his life working at less physically
demanding desk jobs and on consulting
projects.
Leopold wasn't long in the
Southwest before he began to notice a
development pattern of waste and
abandon. I le lamented the serious
erosion he routinely saw, and he came
to challenge the Forest Service's
assumption that heavy grazing by
domestic stock was necessary to hold
down grass that could carry fires.
Leopold noted that, before white
settlers arrived in the region,
Southwestern watersheds had
maintained their integrity despite
centuries of periodic wildfire.
The young Leopold's thinking on
watersheds was ahead of his time, but
in other ways he reflected the
conservation status quo. He was
instrumental in a campaign to rid
Southwestern public lands of
"varmints" such as wolves, foxes, and
bears, predatory animals that Leopold
said "are continuing to eat the cream off
the stock grower's profits."
Leopold grew to love the Southwest
deeply and knew that, before Anglo-
Americans pushed their way into every
continental cranny, a governmental
program would be needed to save any
remaining areas of wilderness. Leopold
wrote of the West and the nation's
expansion: "For three centuries that
environment has determined the
character of our development; it may,
in fact, be said that, coupled with the
character of our racial stocks, it is the
very stuff America is made of. Shall we
now exterminate this thing that made
us American?"
In 1922, Leopold drafted a wilderness
area plan that became the basis for an
In Leopold's Words
"We end, I think, at what might be
called the standard paradox of the
twentieth century: our tools are
better than we are, and grow
better faster than we do. They
suffice to crack the atom, to
command the tides. But they do
not suffice for the oldest task in
human history: to live on a piece
of land without spoiling it."
-"Engineering and
Conservation" (1938)
administrative designation of the Gila
National Forest as a wilderness area in
1924. His work set the pattern for what
eventually became a nationwide system
of wilderness areas. Leopold continued
writing about the importance of
wilderness areas his entire life, and
later, in 1935, he helped found The
Wilderness Society.
Ownership
and Obligation
In 1924, Leopold accepted a transfer to
the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in
Madison, Wisconsin, where he worked
for four years before leaving to become
a consultant on forestry and game
management issues. A life-long hunter
(for which he has been criticized by
Rachel Carson and others), Leopold
then surveyed wildlife habitat and
game restoration policy in many
Midwest states and helped inaugurate
wildlife research projects at a variety of
universities. He wrote Game
Management, still a classic textbook for
its field, and spent the last 15 years of
his life as chairman of game and
wildlife management studies at the
University of Wisconsin. According to
historian Susan Flacler, "Today he is
acknowledged by many in the field as
the 'father' of the profession of wildlife
management in America."
In Wisconsin, Leopold also focused
on soil erosion and other issues of what
he called "biotic farming." He wrote,
"Soil is the fundamental resource, and
its loss the most serious of all losses ....
The day will come when the ownership
of land will carry with it the obligation
to so use and protect it with respect to
erosion that it is not a menace to other
landowners and the public."
Leopold's extensive field work and
his acute powers of observation on such
a wide variety of issues—game
depletion, soil erosion, wilderness
preserves—reflected his understanding
of the science of ecology at a time when
that science was just coming of age.
Leopold realized that, at its basic, the
land was a complex organism that
functioned through the interaction of its
components. His keen understanding
of the complexity of the natural system
eventually led him to alter his thinking
on predators. Decades after leading a
campaign to eliminate predators,
GO
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Leopold then led the call for their
restoration to American public lands.
His reversal was eloquently described
in his essay "Thinking Like a
Mountain," which described his
interaction with a wolf he and others
had killed:
"We reached the old wolf in time to
watch a fierce green fire dying in her
eyes. I realized then, and have known
ever since, that there was something
new to me in those eyes—something
known only to her and to the mountain.
I was young then, and full of trigger-
itch; 1 thought that because fewer
wolves meant more deer, that no
wolves would mean hunters' paradise.
But after seeing the green fire die, I
sensed that neither the wolf nor the
mountain agreed with such a view ...."
The Shack
Leopold's professional work provided
the seeds for his theories about a
human relationship with the land, but it
was on his farm in Central Wisconsin
that Leopold refined those theories and
practiced his own personal compact
with the land.
In 1935, Leopold bought some land in
Wisconsin's Sand Counties Region.
The only building on the abandoned
Wisconsin River farm was a dilapidated
chicken house-turned-cowshed with
knee-deep manure on the floor. The
farm had bare, blowing sands, it had
been stripped of much of its timber,
and its marsh had burned. For those
who must go to towering mountains or
crashing seas to find displays of nature
they consider spectacular, the Sand
Counties land had little to offer. For
Leopold, however, the aesthetic appeal
of country had nothing to do with its
scenic qualities; he was interested in the
land's evolutionary heritage and
ecological processes. He sought to
restore his land to ecological integrity, a
goal he knew he would not live to fulfill
completely.
Leopold's first recorded act as a
landowner was to plant a food patch
for wildlife. He, his wife, Estella, and
their five children (all of the Leopold
children became well-respected
scientists) built birdhouses for martins,
screech owls, and wood ducks and
planted prairie grasses, wildflowers,
and shrubs. Through the years, they
planted thousands of pines—up to
5,000 to 6,000 a year—and Leopold
devoted a good deal of effort trying to
keep his trees healthy and free from the
deer, drought, and fires that killed so
many of them.
At The Shack, Leopold continued his
life-long record keeping. His detailed
journal includes entries such as the one
for May 31,1945, that only an
insomniac such as Leopold could have
observed:
Weather Warm, calm, ha/y at daybreak,
58 degrees at 3 AM. Changed suddenly
to cold NE wind at 7 AM, with a long
streak of cloud marking the \T. front.
54 degrees at 8 AM, cloudy.
41 degrees 6PM.
Daybreak Song A favorable morning
for early song:
2:45 song sparrow
3:00 " "
3:05 field sparrow
3:07 song sparrow
3:09 " ", field sparrow
3:1 1 field sparrow
3:15 Yeliowthroat, field spar.
3:18 Crested Fly field spar.
Indigo (after which all cut loose) ....
On April 21, 1948, Aldo Leopold died
of a heart attack while helping a
neighbor fight a grass fire. Just a few
davs before, Oxford University Press
had notified Leopold that A Sand
Connti/ Almanac would be published.
Albert Hochbaum, a former student
and colleague of Leopold's, said in his
eulogy for him: "Few men loved, the
land so deeply as he loved America;
few who have loved the land have
examined it so carefully; and few who
have examined the land have been so
articulate in detailing their discoveries."
Leopold once wrote that "No
important change in human conduct is
ever accomplished without an internal
change in our intellectual emphases,
our loyalties, our affections, and our
convictions." Given the momentous
way in which he was asking Americans
to redefine their relationship with the
land, the practical Leopold fully
expected the necessary adjustments to
take lifetimes. Said Leopold: "1 have no
illusions about the speed or accuracy
with which an ecological conscience can
become functional. It has
required 19 centuries to define
decent man-to-man conduct
and the process is only half
done; it may take as long to
evolve a code of decency tor
man-to-land conduct." Given
the urgency of today's
environmental problems,
Leopold's vision of a land ethic
remains poignantly relevant;
his patience for change is not. 0
(l:iii tor's Note: Quotations from A
Sand County Almanac (CXvfixv/
University Press, 1^49) are
reprinted ii'itii permission;
quotations from the essay
"Engineering and Conservation"
tire from The Mother ot the
River of God and Other Essays
by Aldo Leopold. I'.dited by
Susan /.. I'lailer and /. Raird
Callicott (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press)
Copyright 1997, the Aldo Leopold
Shack Foundation; reprinted by
permission of tlic publisher.)
Leopold planted thousands of pines
on his central Wisconsin land.
University of Wisconsin-Madison archives.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
61
-------
HABITATi
City Life, Country Living
From Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
by William Cronon
If I nm honest about the childhood
emotions that have defined my adult
passions and given a sense of direction to my
life, I have to admit that I am still—like many if
not most Americans who care about "the
environment"—a captive of the pastoral myth. I
still prefer the country to the city. But 1 have
been certain for a long time now that there is a
moral schizophrenia in that preference. Like
most who prefer the country to the city, I live in
the city, and am entirely dependent on the
intricate systems with which
it sustains my life. What now
most strikes me about my
urban home is how easily it
obscures from me the very
systems that enable me to
survive. Much as 1 say I love
"nature," that word usually
remains an abstraction in my
daily life—a non-urban ••••••«••••••«
quality of aesthetic or sacred
beauty to be looked at and "appreciated," not the
gritty web of material connections that feed,
clothe, shelter, and cleanse me and my
community. Living in the city means consuming
goods and services in a marketplace with ties to
people and places in every corner of the planet,
people and places that remain invisible,
unknown, and unimagined as we consume the
products of their lives. The market fosters
exchange relationships of almost unimaginable
complexity, and then hides them from us at the
very instant they are created, in that last moment
when cash and commodity exchange hands and
we finally consume the thing we have purchased.
Even/ city is nature's
metropolis, and even/ piece
of countryside its rural
hinterland.
'ti'il from Nature's Metropolis: Chicago
and the Great West In/ William Cronoii.
Copi/ri^ht 7997 In/ William Cronon. Reprint eti
with }>ennittivn of the publisher, W.W. Norton
f-r Ctnnpiun/, inc.)
62
This ability of the market to construct and
obscure relationships has been expanding for a
long time now. The market existed long before
there was a Chicago, and although it attained
new complexity in that city, it has since gone on
to become a fact of life in most places, no matter
how urban or rural. We are consumers all,
whether we live in'the city or the country. This is
to say that the urban and the rural landscapes I
have been describing are not two places but one.
They created each other, they transformed each
other's environment and
^^^^^^^""•"•"l economies, and they now
depend on each other for
their very survival. To see
them separately is to
misunderstand where
they came from and
where they might go in
the future. Worse, to
I^MBMBMHMBMM ignore the Henriv infinite
ways they affect one
another is to miss our moral responsibility for
the ways they shape each other's landscapes and
alter the lives of people and organisms within
their bounds.... We all live in the city.
We all live in the country. Both are second
nature to us....
|M]y most vivid childhood memory of The
City |is of] an orange column of vapor rising
from a smokestack in Chicago's steel-milling
suburb of Gary. ]t was and is an evil memory, a
symbol of an urban world doing harm both to
nature and to the people and other creatures who
lived downwind of that cloud. As a child, 1 was
always happy when we reached the end of our
journey, the cottage on Green Lake that seemed
about as far from that smokestack as 1 could
imagine. Now I am not nearly so sure. It turns
out that the green lake and the orange cloud had
more in common than I thought. The things I
experienced in each sprang from a common
history, as did my very ability to make the
EPA JOURNAL
-------
journey between them. Even the ease with which
I saw them as separate and disconnected, a pair
of alternatives with an obvious choice between
them—that too was part of their common past.
So when 1 now imagine a group of Chicagoans
sitting on the veranda of David Greenway's
Oakwood I iotel in the 1890s, on the far side of
the lake that would be my first childhood
experience of The Country, I also think about the
cloud of dark smoke that so many nineteenth-
century travelers saw hanging over the
Chicago skyline. I imagine the
coal from southern Illinois
fueling locomotives bound for
San Francisco, lifting Kansas
wheat to the tops of grain
elevators, sawing pine lumber
from Wisconsin, butchering
steers from Colorado, building
reapers destined for the Dakotas,
powering lights and elevators
in skyscrapers, heating the
homes of wealthy
suburbanites and poor
immigrants, carrying
travelers north to the
lake country. Like my
orange smoke, that
nineteenth-century cloud
raised serious questions
about the city's alienation
from nature. But those
questions were not to be
answered by a flight to the
country, for the country had helped make that
cloud, and vice versa. Green Lake was and is no
alternative to Chicago. To do right by nature and
people in the country, one has to do right by
them in the city as well, for the two seem always
to find in each other their own image. In that
sense, every city is nature's metropolis, and every
piece of countryside its rural hinterland. We fool
ourselves if
we think we cnn choose
between them, for the green lake and the orange
cloud are creatures of the same landscape. Each is
our responsibility. We can only take them together
and, in making the journey between them, find a
way of life that does justice to them both. 0
Illustration by
Jan Adkins
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1992
63
-------
ON THE MOVE
Rondeau
Fitzsimmons
Gagliardi
Dan ). Rondeau is the new Director of
the Of lice of Civil Rights, He plans to
emphasi/e training and education as
key tools in accomplishing the Office's
mission, particularly courses in
affirmative employment, the new Equal
Employment Opportunity complaint
procedures, and preventing sexual
harassment.
A 26-year federal employee, Rondeau
was the Deputy Director of Equal
Employment Opportunity for the U.S.
I'ublic 1 lealth Service (PUS), a position
lie held since 1984. Previously, he
worked for PI IS as a social science
analyst. 1 le began his federal career
with the U.S. Department of Labor.
Rondeau began his career in public
service as a Counselor Aide to the
Mayor's Committee for I luman
Resource Development and later served
as Director of Community Services and
the Youth Development Programs for
Detroit, Michigan. Educated in
Detroit's public schools, he holds
advanced degrees in Legal Studies
(MLS) and in Public Administration
(MPA) from Antioch University and the
American University, respectively.
Michael |. Fitzsimmons has been
promoted to Deputy Assistant
Inspector General for Investigations in
the (. Office of the Inspector General
(OIG).
Eit/simmons began work as a Desk
Officer for OIC in October 1987 and
was promoted to Senior Desk Officer in
1990. Before joining the Agency in
1987, he was a Federal Special Agent
with the Internal Revenue Service's
(IRS) Criminal Investigation Division
for 22 years. While with the IRS, he
served as an analyst on the staff of the
Assistant Commissioner; instructor in
charge of Special Agent Investigative
Training in Glynco, Georgia; and Senior
Special Agent in the Boston district.
Fitzsimmons graduated from Salem
State College in 1969 with a B.S. in
Business Administration.
Carl S. Gagliardi has been named the
Acting Associate Administrator for the
Office of Communications, Education,
and Public Affairs. Gagliardi has
served as Deputy Associate
Administrator since 1990.
He worked for EPA from 1983 to
1986 as a Press Officer and Deputy
Director of the Press Division before
transferring to the Department of the
Interior, where he served as a Special
Assistant in the Secretary's office, and
subsequently as Director of Public
Affairs for the Bureau of Reclamation.
He left the government to work with a
Washington-based public relations firm
before returning to EPA as Special
Assistant and Director of
Communications Strategy in 1989.
Gagliardi graduated from the
University of Maryland at College Park
with a B.S. in government and politics
in 1975.
Jonathan Z. Cannon is the new
Director of the Gulf of Mexico Program.
The program is based at the John C.
Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and
was established in 1988 to respond to
signs of long-term environmental
degradation throughout the Gulf
ecosystem. The program is focusing on
cleaning up marine debris; reducing
health risks from unsafe beach waters
and the consumption of shellfish;
reducing the impact of coastal and
shoreline erosion; preventing habitat
loss; and controlling nutrient
enrichment.
Cannon served at EPA from August
1986 until November 1989, as Deputy
General Counsel for Litigation and
Regional Operations in the Office of
General Counsel; Deputy Assistant
Administrator in the Office of
Enforcement and Compliance
Monitoring; and Deputy Assistant
Administrator and Acting Assistant
Administrator for Solid Waste and
Emergency Response. He received the
Agency's Gold Medal for Exceptional
Service in 1989.
He has been a partner with the
Washington, DC, law firm Beveridge
and Diamond since February 1990 and
was with the same law firm from July
1975 until August 1986. He holds a
B.A, degree from Williams College and
a J.D. degree from the University of
Pennsylvania. 0
EPA JOURNAL
-------
Wild rice in Chesapeake Bay.
Pat Haddon photo
Back cover: Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor. Maine.
Photo by Larry Letever for Grant Heilman Photography. Inc.
-------
£*:>.;;
------- |