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. ------- 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. ------- |