YEAR-END REPORT TO THE MEMBERS OF EPA
fron Russell E. Train, Administrator
December 31, 1975
The Christmas reception that the Administrator's office holds every
year for the members and friends of the Agency is always a crowded and
convivial affair, and this year's was no exception. I was especially
impressed with how often and how enthusiastically people went out of
their way to tell me how much they enjoyed working at EPA and what a
real-sense of accomplishment it gave them. One young woman said to me:
"When people ask me where I work, I am always proud to be able to say
'EPA1:11
That is exactly how I feel after nearly three years with EPA —
years that have been among the most demanding and rewarding of my life.
We are, I think, more susceptible to "shell shock" and "battle fatigue"
than those at other Agencies and Departments, but that is only because
the issues that engage us are at the cutting edge of our society's
concerns and we are, as a result, always in the heat of the battle.
There were those, at the start of the decade, who predicted that,
as soon as times got tough and the bills came due, the country's cotinit-
ment to environmental improvement and integrity would evaporate as
swiftly and suddenly as it had seemed to emerge. Yet, as the polls
continue to show, our experience over the past five years has only
strengthened that commitment. The energy crisis, together with the
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mounting evidence that "pollution" is even more widespread and harmful
than we had thought, has increasingly brought horns to us the fact that
"environment" is not simply another "problem" to be "solved" or "crisis"
to be surmounted. It is, as William Shannon of the New York Times once
put it, the overall and underlying "context" within which we must weigh
and deal with the various economic, energy and other "crises" and prob-
lems that confront us.
If our efforts at EPA seam to reach out and touch the lives of
every American, that is because the health and well-being of every
American is directly affected by the condition and quality of his or her
environment. We have, as our constituency, not a single, separate
segment of our society actively involved in environmental "causes," but
every American who lives and breathes — as well as millions upon millions
of Americans who have yet to take their first breath. It is precisely
for that reason — because we have as our constituency the entire society
and the environment that sustains it, because environmental concerns are
suuh a vital and inescapable fact of every American's life — that our
job here at EPA is so demanding, so difficult, so controversial and so
well worth doing. It .is, I think, that sense that "the environment" is
something really worth caring and doing something about — that sense
that, behind and beyond all the thousand and one frustrations we encounter,
behind and beyond all the deadlines and the regulations and the guidelines
that make our hours long and, at times, our tempers short, we are dealing
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with some of our society's most basic concerns — that has seen us
through some very rough and wrenching experiences.
In my statement at the Fifth Anniversary Awards cererrcny I sunired
ap our progress and prospects in most of our major Agency programs, and
rather than amplify upon and inevitably repeat large portions of that
summary I would like, in this report, to focus upon sore of the major
lessons we have learned and some of the directions in which I think we
must move. I do not mean, in doing so, to overlook the tremendous con-
tributions that so many different people and programs have made to our
progress as an Agency or to ignore the many detailed and thoughtful
accounts and assessments of our progress and prospects that I have
received from our different offices, programs and regions. I have read
those accounts and assessments with great care and intend to make full
use of the very real insights and ideas they contained. As you probably
know, we recently held an all-day meeting of the entire top management
of EPA to exchange ideas and concerns about the present and future of
our programs. I hope that any of you who have thoughts along these
lines will not hesitate to communicate them to me.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the environmental effort did
not spring up overnight and out of nowhere, and that we had air and
water and other environmental laws on the books long before the start of
the Seventies. It was not just a few activists, but a broad cross-
section of the American people as a whole who decided that these laws
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just had not worked, that we could no longer afford halfway measures,
and that environmental hazard and harm had reached levels we could no
longer tolerate. It was in response to this gathering public consensus
that the President and the Congress began to construct a comprehensive
set of programs that would, as a matter of explicit national policy,
make environmental concerns an integral and important part of our
economic and social life.
The decade began with a Presidential State of the Union address
which called the environment "a subject which, next to our desire for
peace, may well become the major concern of the American people in the
decade of the Seventies." Accordingly, it proposed "the most compre-
hensive and costly program in this field ever in the Nation's history."
"We can," it continued, "no longer afford to consider air and water
cannon property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the
consequences. Instead, we should begin to treat them as scarce resources,
which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw
garbage in our neighbor's yard. This requires comprehensive new regu-
lations. It also requires that, to the extent possible, the price of
goods should be made to include the costs of producing and disposing of
them without damage to the environment."
As these words made clear, we knew that such an effort would be
costly. But we also understood that society was already bearing
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these costs in one way or another — in the loss of recreational uses of
rivers and beaches, in the increased treatment costs of our drinking
water, in the damage from air pollution to buildings, farm crops and
forests, and most importantly in human suffering and death, medical and
hospital bills, and time lost on the job because of illness. As a
result, we fashioned a set of programs that, by requiring the reduction
and control of pollution at the source, would not only shift the costs
of pollution from the shoulders of society as a whole onto those of the
polluter, but would encourage the development of processes and practices
that generate less pollution in the first place.
It must be said, at the same time, that — although we were already
experiencing economic difficulties — we were far more sanguine about
the economic outlook than we are today. The age of affluence, we believed,
was here for good, our economic troubles were merely temporary, and we
had every reason to look forward to a decade of vigorous economic growth.
We believed, in short, not only that our environmental problems had
reached such intolerable levels that we could no longer afford not to
deal with them, but that we had reached the point where we could, at
long last, afford to deal with these problems without running into
economic constraints.
We have since run into not only very real and rising economic and
fiscal constraints, but other kinds of constraints as well — energy,
agricultural, social. Nor should that come as any surprise: the more
our society succeeds in taking environmental concerns and costs into
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account in its activities and institutional arrangements, the more the
environmental effort itself most take other important concerns and costs
into account. There are, however, those who continue to argue that
environmental regulation, in and of itself, is an undesirable constraint
on growth and to ignore the fact that it is pollution, not its regulation,
that constitutes the real constraint on economic or any other human
activity that raises the level of harmful environmental pollution. If
pollution with its adverse effects on human health were to be unchecked,
I am convinced that even current levels of industrial activity would
soon prove unacceptable. Our society simply would not accept economic
or other growth at the expense of widespread harm to human health and a
degraded quality of life. In other words, effective environmental
regulation, applied across the board, gives us the essential framework
within which economic and energy and other kinds of human activity can
occur and grow and without which a high level of industrial activity, in
particular, simply could not be sustained.
At a time when Federal regulatory efforts are increasingly under
attack as distorting the workings of the free market with a bureaucratic
monkey wrench, it should be clearly understood that EPA is an entirely
different "animal" from such traditional regulatory agencies as the
Interstate Commerce or Federal Power Commissions, whose job is to get
rid of obstacles and inefficiencies that keep market forces from operating
freely. EPA was established not to keep these forces from operating, but
to make certain that they operate in the public interest by insuring that
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the market increasingly takes into account environmental costs that it
would otherwise exclude from its calculations. Left unregulated in a
highly advanced industrial society, all the normal economic incentives
of a competitive, free enterprise system work to encourage the disposal
of vast volumes of wastes into the environment, at the rapidly increasing
expense of the public health and welfare. Regulation is required to in-
ternalize this expense, thus utilizing the free market system to achieve
pollution abatement with greatest efficiency and at least cost. (The
only alternative, or effective supplement, to such regulation would be a
system of effluent and emission charges, and there has been little or no
movement in this direction.) In the area of environmental protection,
therefore, there can be no question of "deregulation." What must always
be open to examination — and what we, as an Agency, must do an increasingly
better job of insuring — is the efficiency and effectiveness of specific
regulatory approaches and timetables and the accuracy and adequacy of
the scientific data upon which these are based.
We have, I think, learned that we cannot, as an Agency, act as if
the environment is the only concern there is, or as if the effort to
reconcile economic and other concerns is no concern of ours, or as if
these other concerns were entirely external to our efforts. We could make
no greater mistake as an Agency than to behave as if we were simply and
solely an advocate for the environment in an adversary proceeding. The
American people have made it clear that they are willing to pay the price
for a clean and healthy environment. But this willingness could be jeopardiz-
ed if they are not fully informed of what the tradeoffs are or lose their
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confidence that the costs are no larger than they need be and that the
benefits are worth those costs.
Our success in reconciling the need for effective national standards
and regulations with the need to make these as sensitive as possible to
local and individual situations will depend very critically upon our
success in keeping the costs and complexity of our regulations to the
effective minimum. In this connection, I am concerned that we be sensitive
to the impact of environmental regulation on small business, on the
small family farm, and on small units of government. It is an unfortunate
fact that the complexities and economic costs associated with any across-
the-board regulation tend to impose relatively greater compliance burdens
on the smaller unit. Thus, there is a sort of built-in regressivity in
the system. To some extent this is probably unavoidable. Economics of
scale tend to operate in the environmental area as elsewhere. Bx^t it is
important that we try to minimize these effects as much as possible, and
each new regulation should be carefully examined from this standpoint.
I recently read an extremely penetrating article concerning the
apparent rejection of government we hear so much about and the resentment
against bureaucracies "out of control" and "obedient only to their own
internal urges." "There is," the article emphasized, "good cause for
disquiet because the bureaucracies are subject neither to the 'discipline1
of the market, nor to genuine public control." I have tried from the
very first to underscore the importance — indeed, the urgency — of
subjecting ourselves, on our own initiative, to the "discipline" of the
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market by trying to squeeze the greatest amount of environmental protect!*.
out of the dollars we spend, or require others to spend, as well as by
making certain that we spend our dollars, or require others to spend
them, where they will do the most environmental good. (Obviously, in
pursuing this principle we are necessarily subject to the constraints
and requirements of the several statutes under which we operate.) I
have also stressed again and again the fact that, precisely because we
are not directly accountable through the elective process to the people
whose lives we affect, it is all the more important that we work with
those who are thus accountable as well as with those who are directly
affected, not simply after the fact, but in the very formulation of our
regulations,.guidelines and plans. I have again and again emphasized
the need to help build upon the decision-making processes at the state
and local level and to have as many decisions as possible made at that
level. I fully realize that these are inherently difficult things to
ask of a federal bureaucracy, but I am also convinced that our job is
utterly unlike that of any other federal bureaucracy — that we are, as
I have said, on the "cutting edge" of society's concerns — and that we
will succeed only to the degree that we recognize that fact.
We have, especially over the past two years, demonstrated our
determination to minimize the social and economic impacts of our efforts —
to do all we can to meet our responsibilities in ways that will not put
people out of business or out of work or impose excessive and unreasonable
costs. We have the most open and rigorous process of economic impact
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analysis in the entire Federal government, and we must continue to
improve that process.
We have also undertaken a major effort to simplify and streamline
our regulations. To carry out our regulatory responsibilities we have,
in the past five years, issued a significant body of complex regulations.
But we recognize that our success over the next five years will be
measured by how clean the air and water become, not by the quantity and
complexity of our regulations, and we are therefore committed to a
continuing program of regulatory review.
It was suggested to me recently that Congress had in its environmental
legislation set standards and timetables for their implementation that
were simply not achievable, that EPA had been given an impossible mandate
to carry out. I certainly agree that EPA has a very difficult mandate
to carry out, one not fully achievable in all respects within the statutory
timetables even if we had all the resources we would wish — which, of
course, we do not. At the same time, I personally am in full agreement
with the Congressional approach of setting standards and timetables
which are action-forcing and technology-forcing. To do otherwise would
be to require only the lowest common denominator of what is currently
achievable. Such an approach would secure the best compliance record
and the least overall progress. The approach actually adopted, particularly
in the Clean Air Act, has forced technology and brought about strong
progress. The disadvantages of such an approach are that a certain
amount of nonattainment on schedule will inevitably occur and that there
may be increases in economic cost and technological inefficiency in some
cases. In my opinion, these disadvantages are far outweighed by the
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advantages. At the same time, having adopted the action-forcing approach,
there is a need to build greater flexibility into the administration of
the statutes. To make such flexibility truly effective will require
placing greater responsibility in our own regions and in State and local
governments. Finally, because such flexibility implies the exercise of
discretion, it is essentJal that the process be entirely open and that
citizen participation be active and effective.
We have had the most success, as an Agency, in carrying out those
parts of our environmental laws that involve the control of specific
sources of emissions or effluents by the application of technology. We
have had the least success in trying — often under deadlines imposed by
the courts — to require pollution control measures that involve very
real changes in lifestyles and land use patterns. These are changes
that can take place only over a period of time; they entail very basic
social and economic and environmental choices and tradeoffs that can
only be made by the people involved and effected through the political
process at the State, local and regional levels. I see such a process
as one in which societal choice evolves from the bottom up with open
"give-and-take" which recognizes and acconmodates to the extraordinary
diversity of needs, conditions and aspirations which make up this country.
Increasingly, in the years ahead, real and lasting environmental
progress must substantially depend on state and local initiative and
action. The Federal role must, inevitably, focus more and more not
simply upon the development of national standards and regulations and
guidelines, but upon encouraging and assisting in every way possible the
development of joint Federal, state and local decision-making processes
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that can enable the citizens of this country to really cone to grips
with environmental issues and make open and intelligent tradeoffs between
environmental and other needs and goals.
I would be less than honest if I did not say that, in icy opinion, we
still have a long way to go in de-emphasizing the role of our Washington
headquarters and in strengthening the role of our own field organizations
and of State and local governments. At the same time, having said that,
let me also say that EPA's regional organization is the best and most
effective that I know in the Federal government.
One of the major challenges to our society, and specifically to our
States and localities, is to deal effectively with what might be called the
issues of growth — the issues involved, for example, in trying to preserve
and maintain air quality, to control nonpoint source water pollution, and
to relate and reconcile different environmental concerns such as clean air
and clean water with each other and with social and economic concerns such
as housing, and jobs, and energy. These issues will involve an increasing
shift in emphasis from the abatement to the prevention of pollution. In
terms of technology, we need to seek increasingly over the next five years,
not simply to encourage the development of more sophisticated kinds of
"add-on" controls, but to push as effectively as we can for basic changes
in the processes themselves. In terms of life-style changes and land use
decisions, we need — as I have said — to get the States and localities —
and their citizens — to really come to grips with the complex and critical
issues posed by our patterns and pressures for physical growth.
We cannot deal with these kinds of issues by handing out a grant or
requiring the installation of a clean-up device. It is, moreover, in most
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cases not our job as a federal bureaucracy to make the basic decisions
and choices concerning these issues — it is the job of citizens themselves
to do so through the democratic political process at the State, local
and regional levels. It is our responsibility to see to it that citizens,
through the political process at these levels, do in fact face up to
these issues in full knowledge of the consequences of alternative choices
and consequences. It is, in other words, the federal responsibility to
"force" these issues by not only insuring that States and localities do
not continue to duck them, but by doing all we can to help them make the
appropriate institutional changes, and to assure them the financial and
technical resources they need to deal with them. As the federal government
increasingly emphasizes the need to turn responsibilities and problems
over to the States and localities, it must recognize their need for
adequate financial resources and other help.
As we move to put increasing emphasis upon the prevention as well
as the control of pollution, there is a growing body of evidence, and an
impressive array of expert opinion, that some of our most effective
"health care" dollars may well be the "disease prevention" dollars we
spend to cut and control pollution and other agents we introduce into
our own environment. The Department of HEW estimates that our total
national health bill this year will add up to about $120 billion. HEW
also estimates that 88 percent of that bill, or $92 billion, goes for
cure and care rather than prevention. We are spending around $1 billion
this year on research into cures and causes of cancer. The National
Cancer Institute has estimated that the actual cost of cancer to
people amounts to tens of billions of dollars a year. Yet the
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World Health Organization estimates from 60 to 90 percent of all cancer
is the result of "environmental factors" — again, in the broadest sense of
that term. Indeed, the Forward Plan for Health issued this year by HEW
states: "In recent years, it has become clear that only by preventing disease
from occurring, rather than treating it later, can we hope to achieve any
major improvement in the Nation's health".
All of this underscores the urgency of enacting a Toxic Substances
Control Act that will give us better information and regulatory capacity
for coping with the many new chemical compounds that we are introducing into
the commercial market each year. Chemical pollution represents a growing
threat to human health and to the environment. It also underscores the
fact that the struggle against disease must increasingly be waged, not
simply in the hospitals and the doctors' offices, but in our streets and
our homes and our offices, on our farms and in our factories, in our air and
our water, in our food and our products, in our personal habits and life-
styles. And it suggests that, if — in the words of one medical authority —
"environmental disease is becoming the disease of the century", then
environmental protection, in the broadest sense of the phrase, must increas-
ingly become the most important ingredient in any national health program.
In this connection, as in other areas, it is critically important that EPA
maintain a strong research effort. It is particularly important that we
improve our knowledge of the health effects of exposure to low levels of
pollutants.
If there have been any doubts that "environment" is a truly global
concern, and that all nations have a very real stake in the development of
effective international efforts in environmental protection aod. improvement
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they have been dispelled not only by the growing awareness of the inter-
national scope and seriousness of the pollution of the marine environment
and the spread of chemical contaminants, but by the emergence of the
ominous possibility that the release of fluorocarbons into the environment
may be depleting the layer of ozone that shields mankind from harmful solar
rays. There is increasing evidence that such depletion is occurring.
Earlier this year, I urged the preparation of an international regulatory
mechanism to take quick action should it be shown that f luorocarbons are,
in fact, eating away at the layer of ozone.
We can expect, in the years ahead, increasing pressures on EPA to
share its know-how on pollution control with a developing world faced with
extraordinary problems arising from population growth, food demand and
industrial development. The growing global demand for food will require
us to establish a more precise policy on how best to control the global
release of bioaccumulative, persistent pesticides. Developing nations will
increasingly discover human health problems associated with the vast array
of chemical compounds currently in use and under development. We will,
as a result, face growing requests from developing countries for EPA
experts to help in the establishment of environmental programs and to
deal with specific environmental problems.
We can head into the second half of this decade with a clear sense
of accomplishment and with a far better idea than we had five years ago
of the problems that we face and of the things we need to do.
We can take great pride in the fact that, faced with an extraordinarily
complex array of issues, and forced to proceed under stringent court-imposed
deadlines, we have put in place much of the regulatory machinery needed to
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ensure the eventual achievement of a sound and healthy environment for all
Americans. We have made some mistakes, of course. Our success has not
always been complete. But what is important about the past five years is
what we have demonstrated ^about our approach to regulation: our ability
to learn from our mistakes, our increasing success in taking costs into
account, our desire to open up our processes of rule- and decision-making
so as to include everybody affected, and our willingness to build plans
and programs from the bottom up so as to place as much responsibility as
possible in our regional offices and at the State and local level.
In this connection, we must work to broaden our base of public commu-
nication. Our entire society is, as I have said, the real constituency for
environmental protection, and it is important that we do not get in the
habit of looking to a narrow base. Labor has a strong community of interest
with EPA in its concern for health conditions in and around the workplace.
Health groups, farm organizations, and consumer groups all represent
other segments of our society with which we have strong common interests
and to whom we must reach out more effectively in the future. Our recent
Town Meetings have proven very worthwhile. We shall schedule more. However,
I want our Regional Administrators to take the initiative of arranging and
conducting meetings of this sort on a regular basis.
We need to constantly work at strengthening working relationships with
other Federal agencies, both in Washington and in the field. We need to do
the same within our own Agency. I believe we have done a remarkable job of
molding a single, integrated agency out of the many parts that were brought
together by reorganization plan in 1970. There is a fine spirit of teamwork
today among the top management of the Agency. Yet we must constantly seek
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to keep frcm becoming isolated within our own compartments. One of
EPA1 s most difficult challenges is dealing effectively with complex
problems that cut across the various programmatic areas within the
Agency. Problems of sludge and PCBs are examples. We have not always
acted as effectively as we should in such cases, and we must give a high
priority to strengthening our performance as an agency in this regard.
These are some of the challenges we face in the middle of our first
decade. We have every reason for pride in our accomplishments, our own
ability, and the importance of our work. At the same time, we know that
the greatest challenges still lie before us. The job of environmental
protection has only just begun. There is plenty of hard work for all of
us ahead. The need to bring the Federal budget under better control
will not make the job any easier but that too is a responsibility we all
must share.
While it is plain that we still have a long way to go, we can and
should recognize the substantial progress that has been made in protecting
the environment over a very short period of years. At a time when most
of the problems that affect our society often appear almost beyond
solution, we have demonstrated our ability to deal effectively with
environmental problems when we determine to do so. At the same time, I
must admit to great uncertainty as to the future. Without any doubt in
my own mind, the greatest single challenge facing man over the next half
century and more is the need to acknowledge and adjust to the reality of
physical limits. There has been little evidence so far that we are
ready to do so.
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Population growth continues to be an intractable problem over much
of the globe. Such growth will create tremendous pressures on the
world's resources and on the quality of life of all peoples. Not only
will the physical environment be subject to stress, but also the political
and social fabric of society, which in many areas is already fragile.
The United States will not be immune to those stresses.
We already see a tendency in our own society to- seek amelioration,
if not solution, of energy and economic problems by weakening environmental
protection. We have so far largely withstood these short-sighted attempts,
but I predict that they will become more intensive. The most significant
environmental costs tend to be long range in nature and not readily
recognizable. Chemical carcinogens, for example, typically do not
produce human cancers for twenty to forty years after exposure. Moreover,
because of multiple exposures, it is often impossible to relate a specific
cancer to a particular chemical as the causative factor. On the other
hand, the costs of reduced energy supply or of reduced economic activity
tend to be iimediate, readily identifiable, out-of-pocket effects which
all can see and feel. It is by no means certain that our society will
resist the temptation to buy short-term benefits in the energy or economic
area at the expense of long-range environmental (or other) costs.
Indeed, in a time of growing scarcity, the unhappy likelihood is
that we face a growing scramble for available resources. It is most
unlikely that the available "pie" will be any larger. If we are to
avoid destructive conflicts, we must learn to live within our means, to
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lower our material demands, to conserve energy and other resources, and
to reduce the waste that permeates our society. New technologies whose
success depends primarily upon wasteful expenditures of energy and other
resources must be rejected as anachronisms we can no longer afford. To
deal with this new reality will require a new set of social values and a
new kind of political leadership.
Moreover, it seems to me that we are only fooling ourselves if we
think that our present energy and economic problems are temporary. They
are not. There may well be short-term improvements in one or both,
particularly the economy, but the basic problems will not go away and
will probably get worse rather than better in the foreseeable future.
The basic causes of inflation appear to be deeply rooted, even institutionalized,
in our way of life. Thus, I have deep misgivings when it is suggested
that some essential environmental protection be deferred because of
current energy or economic conditions. Since these conditions may not
basically improve, deferrals could well prove permanent and we would
find ourselves caught up in a downward-spiraling process of decay in
environmental quality. The failure to enact federal controls on strip
mining because of short-term impacts on coal production and employment
is a case in point. It is entirely right — and EPA is fully committed
to this course — that environmental programs take energy and economic
needs into account but we must beware of mortgaging the quality of life
of future generations in the process. This may well be a problem we can
never begin to approach effectively so long as our society continues to
accord its highest priority to short-term, material values.
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Our ability to nvake intelligent choices for the future is further
constrained by our continued refusal to establish, as a natter of conscious
government policy, any mechanism for comprehensive long-range planning.
We continue to view planning as synonymous with government intervention
in decisions better left to private enterprise — as if lack of planning
can somehow provide a guaranteed future for free enterprise. This
strikes me as nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that, in today's
interdependent world. We badly need a process, even an imperfect one,
for identifying and assessing our choices for the future.
Related to this concern is the continued fragmentation of functional
responsibilities in the Federal government. The creation of EPA (as
well as CEQ) five years ago was a major step in improving that situation
in the environmental area, although much more could be done in this
regard. The environmental impact analysis provides another positive
step in that direction. Most of the significant problems of modern
society are inherently complex, and we need comprehensive decision-
making for dealing with them. Yet government continues to be functionally
compartmentalized, and interagency turf-fighting is prevalent. (The
committee structure of the Congress tends to perpetuate and aggravate
this problem. EPA testified before more than fifty different Congressional
committees and subcommittees in the last session.) This problem is
often even worse at the State and local level. Moreover, the authority
of city governments is typically circumscribed geographically in such a
way as to make it almost impossible for a city to deal comprehensively
with the crucial problems it faces or to raise the revenues required.
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As these remarks suggest, I feel overall that our institutional framework
for dealing with the rapidly changing and growing environmental and
related problems of our time is very inadequate. Internationally, it is
either nonexistent or of doubtful effectiveness.
Finally, I must express my concern over the continuing tendency
toward polarization of environmental issues. Perhaps in a society which
relies as heavily as ours on the adversary process, this may be inevitable.
On the other hand, shrill attacks from either side do little to contribute
to real progress. I believe that we in EPA must ourselves do more to
bring opposing viewpoints together in the course of program development.
Environmental protection should be a purpose which unites our society
rather than divides it. The control of pollution is sometimes viewed as
an undesirable interference with the free, market system. On the contrary,
it should be seen as an essential self-discipline without which high
levels of economic activity would be impossible. However, as we face
growing resource scarcities, we must recognize the potential for growing
conflict over the allocation of resources. This potential for conflict
is one that could be easily exploited. We need a leadership at all
levels that is willing to make its goal the quality of life of our whole
society and which resists the easy temptation of supporting the special
interests of part of that society. So far, environmental programs have
not become heavily embroiled in partisan politics. Indeed, they have
generally enjoyed broad political support. We must endeavor to keep it
that way. I have a strong feeling that the public is heartily sick of
political labels and most politicians (and bureaucrats!) as well. It
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seems to me that in this Bicentennial year our society should seek to
unite and work together, not in a spirit of partisanship, but in a
spirit of coitnon purpose that we may build a better life for all.
Surely such a purpose, based upon conservation of the incomparable
natural heritage that we share from the past, and directed to achieving
the highest quality of life for all Americans in the future, is one in
which we can all join.
In closing, let me say that I am not only proud to be working for
the protection of the environment at this stage of our Nation's history,
but I am also proud to be associated in that effort with each of you.
It is my impression that the public recognizes that the employees of EPA
are among the most able, dedicated and selfless in the field of government.
That is certainly my conviction. It is a great pleasure working together
with all of you, and I look forward to the experiences we will share
together during 1976.
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