t®I
NEWS FOR AND ABOUT EPA EMPLOYEES
SPECIAL
WDR ANNIVERSARY
EDITION
May 22. 1984
Keeping Our Environmental Perspective
This week marks the anniversary of Administrator Bill Ruckelshaus' return
to the helm of EPA. Special activities in celebration of that event included
a visit with headquarters employees at a brown-bag lunch along the banks of
the Washington Channel (see photos) and a speech before the National Press Club.
In his remarks, Ruckelshaus spoke of the changes in the environmental situa-
tion since he first addressed the Club, and of the need for maintaining per-
spective when evaluating the "crises" of today. Excerpts of the speech follow:
. .1 consider myself uniquely fortu-
nate to have become a recidivist in my
present job, and to have been given some
of that rare perspective in connection with
our nation's efforts to protect the environ-
ment ... It's nearly impossible to
understand our current environmental
situation or to form an intelligent view of
what we still must accomplish without a good
understanding of where we've been.
... A little over thirteen years ago
... air pollution was obvious and perva-
sive and immediately threatening to public
health in many places. In fact, one of the
first things EPA did as an agency was to get
a court order shutting down the factories of
Birmingham, Alabama, to avert a threatened
health disaster. In 1970, sixty million
(Continued on back)
Videotapes of Ruckelshaus' remarks to employees have been sent to each Regional Office.

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people were on sewage systems that discharg-
ed raw sewage—two million tons a year of
organic wastes—into surface waters, around a
quarter of a million tons of toxic heavy
metals, and tens of thousands of tons of
other toxic chemicals into the same waters.
". . . pollution was pervasive and ob-
vious . . . No one can forget the Cuyahoga
River in Ohio bursting into flames. Many
responsible scientists were predicting the
death of Lake Erie. In Pensacola Bay, they
used to report fish kills in square miles of
dead fish. Vast areas of the Atlantic Coast
and the Great Lakes shoreline had been
closed to swimming and fishing . . . despite
the warnings, we used over 30 million pounds
of DDT; DDT residues in human tissue were up
to eight parts per million and the bald eagle
and other birds of prey were headed for
extinction in America as the pesticide des-
troyed their eggs. Wetlands continued to
vanish to the developer; Florida alone lost
169,000 acres and California lost nearly 50,000
acres in the decades between 1950 and 1970.
"It is in retrospect remarkable that al-
most all of my first speech in 1971 was a
defense of the environmental ethic. This
is another point of perspective: the immense
mental distance we all have come in our
attitudes toward the environment . . .
[EPA] demonstrated that the ideals of Earth
Day, which mainy in 1971 considered a vaporous
fad,, could be made to work . . .
"The problems that led to the formation
of the new Agency in 1971 are largely under
control . . . Between 1970 and 1981, although
we added 30 million people to our population
and increased the GNP by almost 36 per cent,
estimated particulates emissions declined by
53 per cent, sulfur oxides declined by 21
per cent and carbon monoxide declined by
20 per cent. Lead levels decreased
nationally 64 per cent between 1975 and
1982, as the use of leaded gas declined.
The trends for ambient levels of almost
all cities have also been steadily
declining. A decade ago, for example,
Portland, Oregon, could expect to have
a hundred or so days when the CO count
was in excess of the ambient standard.
Currently it's more like two or three
days.
We have provided municipal sewage treatment
for over 80 million Americans since 1970.
Most industries have installed water
pollution control technology, and as a
result, organic waste discharges from
industry have been reduced by 38 percent
When the controls mandated by our recent
effluent guidelines are in place, discharges
of toxic pollutants will have been reduced
by 96 per cent from 1972 levels.
And the environment has responded. There
is fishing and water recreation again on
many major rivers that people thought were
lost forever. Over 99 per cent of the
streams nationwide are designated for uses
equal to the "fishable-swimmable" goal
mandated by Congress in the Clean Water
Act. We've improved water quality on
47,000 miles of streams since 1972. Lake
Erie did not die. There are fish in the
Trinity River at Dallas, once written off
as a sewer. Over 22,000 acres on the New
Jersey shore have been re-opened for shell-
fishing ... I suppose the most symbolic
achievement of all has been the return of
the bald eagle; we have convincing scientifii
evidence that endangered populations of our
national bird have come back much more
quickly than expected, and that this
resurgence is strongly correlated with tt^F
ban on DDT.
"... Given reasonable goals we can
make reasonable progress against them.
The major sources of air and water pollution
we identified In 1971 are under control.
Note that this does not mean that they are
gone. Control of industrial and mobile
sources of air pollution and water pollution
from manufacturing and sewage are still the
subject of perhaps the bulk of EPA's ordinary
activity, but they no longer enter the
popular consciousness as overwhelming
problems.
I don't mention these achievements to pat
EPA on the head, nor do I wish to suggest
that the environmental challenges now be-
fore us, such as hazardous waste and toxic
chemicals, are in any sense trivial. But
these are real improvements, and they
should generate public confidence that we
can handle serious environmental problems.
Occasionally we should stop flagellating^
ourselves as a nation for problems unsold
and recognize that we are moving forward as
mankind has always progressed—one step at
a time.

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