B* insight POLICY PAPER
This supplement to EPA InSight contains up-to-date policy information from the
Administrator/Deputy Administrator to all EPA'employees.
April 1995
EPA-175-N-95-002
The Earth is in Your Hands
Working together, we can achieve a new generation of environmental protection
Below ia an Earth Day message
from Administrator Carol Browner,
which will appear in the Earth Day
issue of the EPA Journal.
Earth Day 25 is a time to
reflect on how we're doing in
protecting our environment.
Twenty-five years ago, in the wake
of the first Earth Day, our nation
created, virtually from scratch, the
most advanced system of environ-
mental protection in the world. In
the course of a very short history—a
mere quarter-century—we have made
tremendous progress. We no longer
have rivers catching on fire. Our
skies are cleaner. And U.S. environ-
mental expertise and technology are
in demand throughout the world.
In the years since the first Earth
Day, EPA banned lead in gasoline,
lowering lead levels in our air by
more than 90 percent and protecting
millions of children from harm. We
banned dangerous and widely used
pesticides like DDT. We closed
unsafe local garbage dumps all over
the nation and helped to make
recycling a household habit We
provided American towns with
substantial funding for wastewater
treatment—the second biggest public
works effort in U.S. history—result-
ing in cleaner rivers all over the
United States. All cars and trucks
now have standards for fuel
economy, set by EPA, that allow
consumers to choose a car for its
energy efficiency. And EPA has
played an important role in ensuring
that companies and others comply
with our environmental laws or face
stiff penalties.
Perhaps most important, the
nation has gained a new under-
standing. More Americans than ever
understand that to ensure a good
quality of life for ourselves and our
children, we must act as responsible
stewards of our air, our water, and
our land.
More to Do
But much remains to be done.
Thirty years after Rachel Carson
warned us in Silent Spring to reduce
our dependence on pesticides, we
have doubled our pesticide use.
Twenty-five years after the garbage-
filled Cuyahoga River spontaneously
caught on fire, 40 percent of our
rivers and lakes are not suitable for
fishing or swimming.
In 1993, people in Milwaukee,
New York, and Washington, DC,
were ordered to boil their drinking
water. In Milwaukee, hundreds of
thousands of people got sick from
contaminated water; 100 died.
Twenty years after passage of the
Clean Air Act, two in five Americans
still live in areas where the air is
dangerous to breathe. Fourteen
years after Love Canal, one in four
Americans lives within four miles of
a toxic dumpsite'. Asthma is on the
rise. Breast cancer is on the rise.
And the past 25 years have left
us with a complex and unwieldy
system of laws and regulations and
increasing conflict over how we
achieve environmental protection.
The result of this history? An
adversarial system of environmental
policy. A system built on distrust.
And too little environmental protec-
tion at too high a cost.
The Challenge We Pace
In the next 25 years, we must
maintain the progress we have
made, and we must build on that
progress. We must continue to
protect the health of the people of
this country, the health of our
communities, the health of our
economy, our air, our water, and our
land.
The environmental problems of
the future will be more complex
than ever. We can work together to
address these problems today, or we
fan handle them as expensive crises
tomorrow.
When President Clinton and I
arrived in Washington two years
ago, we believed that we needed a
fundamentally new system of envi-
ronmental protection. One that
protects more find costs less. And
one that builds on the strengths of
the last 25 years but overcomes the
deficiencies of the past.
We have an opportunity to
reinvent a system of strong public
health and environmental protec-
tions—to find solutions that work for
real people in real communities. We
must do it with common-sense, cost-
effective measures that produce the
very best environmental results for
the least cost.
In this new system, we need a
firm commitment to public health
and environmental goals combined
with flexibility, innovation, and
creativity in how we achieve those
goals. We must move beyond the
one-size-fits-all approach of the past.
We must work industry by industry,
community by community to prevent
pollution, rather than clean it up
after the fact We must involve thos<
who will live with environmental
decisions, to ensure that they have
every opportunity to be a partner in
making those decisions.
New Strategies for the Future
In the last two years, the Clinton
Administration has initiated a
variety of strategies to reinvent
environmental protection—to move
beyond a one-size-fits-all approach
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and move toward a flexible yet firm
approach to pollution protection.
These strategies will allow us to
achieve results that are cleaner,
cheaper, and smarter.
Last year we launched the
Common Sense Initiative, a fuhda-
mentally different way of doing
business that takes us beyond the
pollutant-by-pollutant, crisis-by-crisis
approach of the past to an industry-
by-industry approach for the future.
Beginning in six industries, we are
bringing together leaders of busi-
ness, state and local government,
the community, labor, and the
environmental movement to sit
down and examine environmental
protection in these industries from
top to bottom.
By working together, we will be
able to find answers to the tough
questions and arrive at solutions
never before thought possible—
solutions that will be cleaner for the
environment, cheaper for the tax
payer and industry, and smarter for
the future of this country.
Through our Brownfield Action
Agenda, we are working in partner-
ship with state and local govern-
ment., communities, industry, and
small business, to clean up the
contaminated pieces of land that sit
idle in cities across this country—to
bring them back to life, to remove a
blight on the neighborhood, to create
jobs, to create hope. We recently
lifted the Superfund stigma from
25,000 sites around this country.
Recognizing the need for quality
science in all that we do, we re-
cently launched our STAR program—
Science To Achieve Results—bringing
the best and the brightest from
across the scientific community to
assist us in our work, so we can
direct our resources to the highest
risks and do it using the highest
quality data. Five thousand graduate
students in science are competing for
100 fellowships in research at EPA
We’ve expanded our use of risk
assessment and cost-benefit analysis.
In fact, the National Academy of
Sciences has recognized EPA as a
world leader in using risk analysis.
These are some of the strategies
we are using to reinvent environ-
mental protection. All of these
strategies work for business, for
communities, and for people across
the country. All of these are new
strategies that will take us to the
future.
We Must Reinvent, Not Repeal
Last month, the President, the Vice
President, and I announced the
Clinton Adrninifilrabon’s regulatory
reinvention of environmental protec-
tion. Through a package of impor-
tant reforms, we will trust honest
business people as partners, not
adversaries—without sacrificing one
ounce of public health protection.
We will cut paperwork by 25
percent, saving 20 million hours a
year for business and communities.
Time and money should be invested
in making a product, not filling out
forms.
We will allow a six-month grace
period—’to give small business
owners a chance to fix compliance
problems instead of paying a fine.
We will reward companies that take
responsibility for finding and fixing
environmental problems. Our goal is
compliance with the laws that
protect public health and the envi-
roninent—not punishment
We will institute one-stop emis-
sions reporting and consolidate our
air-poUution rules. Instead of a
dozen different rules and a dozen
different forms, our goal is one rule,
one permit, one report.
Under our new Project XL—
excellence and leadership—we will
choose 50 businesses and communi-
ties and say to them, Heres the
pollution reduction goal. You know
your operation better than anyone
else. If you can figure out how to
reach the goal and exceed that goal,
then you can throw out the rule
book.
Through the Clinton Adrnuu-
strations regulatory reinvention, we
are refining environmental protec-
tion to make it more flexible, more
effective, more sensible, and more
affordable—to achieve the very best
environmental results for the least
cost.
These reforms will move us
beyond rigid, one-size-fits-all regula-
tion. But unlike proposals for regula-
tory reform being debated in Con-
gress, these reforms do not cross the
line to one-size-fits-all deregulation.
We need to reinvent environmen-
tal regulations—not repeal public
health protections. The Clinton
Administration’s regulatory
reinvention will help us work to-
gether to protect our health and our
environmentand do it through
common-sense, cost-effective mea-
sures.
After all the progress we’ve made
since the first Earth Day 25 years
ago, we cannot go back. We must go
forward.
Every American Must Help
it is the job of government to protect
the public. But government cannot
do the job alone. We need every
American to help ensure strong
public health and environmental
protections. Jornuig together is not a
matter of choice—it is a necessity.
We all breathe the same air, drink
the same water, and work and play
in the same environment. That’s
why EPA is using this 25th anniver-
sary of Earth Day to remind parents
and kids, communities and compa-
nies that “the Earth is in your
hands.” If we join together, we can
take the common sense steps we
need to take—and be proud to pass
along a safe, clean world to our
children and our children’s children.
NOTE. The Winter 1995 Earth Day
issue of the EPA Journal, including
this message, is available on Video-
text through ALL-IN-i by typing
VTX at the Email menu; then 7,
“Newsletters and Other Publics-
tions and 7 again, “EPA Journal”
To access V,deotext through I.AN.
please con tact your LAN administra-
tor for instructions. EPA Journal is
also avai{ ble on Internet through
EPA’s Gopher server
(earthl.epa.gov) and the World Wide
Web (www.epa.gov).
A limited number of copies of this
Policy Paper have been printed.
Please circulate or post on bulletin
boards, etc. Employees are invited to
send comments or suggestions about
the Policy Paper series to Kym
Burke, Internal Communications
Manager, OCEPA, by P mail or Voice
Mail (202-260-0336).
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