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Early life and influences
Q: To begin with, I would like to get some background on your pre-EPA years. You worked on the Ash Council which created EPA, but I would suspect that your interests in environmental issues were already forming by the time you began working for the Council. Tell me about where you grew up and what or who some of your early influences were, prior to taking on environmental protection as a career.
MR. COSTLE: I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and my early experiences there probably shaped my awareness of the need for environmental protection. I remember clean air and water. You could fish in almost any stream around the Seattle area.
Q: Did you fish?
MR. COSTLE: My dad and I fished near Mt. Saint Helen's, at Spirit Lake, in fact. I've done more since then, in Alaska, for instance. Fishing was one outdoor influence. Too many people today don't remember how environmental issues became part of the American political landscape. A handful of scientists had been ringing the alarm bell, and then the press picked up on it. The Cuyahoga River caught fire in Ohio. I remember a photograph on the front page of the New York Times captioned "The Skyline of New York." It was as if the negative was faulty, because the smog was so dense. Very few people could define the word "ecology." Now every school child can. There has been a profound change in our political value system. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, you almost took for granted that the air would remain clean and the water fishable and swimmable -- the goals stated in the '70 Clean Air Act and the '72 Clean Water Act.
Q: So the degradation that people were seeing by 1970 was, perhaps, a slow accumulation, but it became profoundly manifest in the late '60s.
MR. COSTLE: Exactly right. "Earth Day" in 1970 was a very significant political event, but its founders would tell you that they could never have organized it if the time wasn't right. In American political life, timing is everything.