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International interests
Q: You mentioned a bit earlier about going to Europe and then Turkey and experiencing those places. Would you say that was the origin of your keen interest in international work or would you say that came from something else?
MR. REILLY: The truth is that I think I developed my international interests as a high school student in Fall River, Massachusetts, who was just fascinated by some of the French convent girls who were sheltered from us non-French folks. I remember trying to crash the Franco-American dances and having people grill me at the door about "What's your name? What's your mother's name?" and then saying, "Well sorry, you can't come in here." There were five convent schools, I think then, and I eventually succeeded in dating one of those girls. I was very interested in French and in France. When I applied to college, I only applied to two schools, Georgetown and Yale. I made it very clear in my application that their junior year abroad programs were part of what I was applying for. I was true to that; I went on to study in France.
I've spent a lot of time abroad in the course of my life. I worked a number of summers and then studied one full academic year in France. I spent one summer in Switzerland working for the United Nations while I was in law school. I spent one summer hitch-hiking all over Europe - I used to hitch-hike whenever I went there. In fact, I hitch-hiked one summer starting out in Paris across England to Wales, to Ireland and all around Ireland, back across England and then across Belgium and to Germany up to Stockholm and back from Stockholm almost down to Vienna. I learned a lot doing that - that's a good way to get to know a place. I lived for a year and a quarter in Germany and went to language school there when I was in the Army. I lived for four months in Turkey, in 1968, when I went there on a regional planning project. I've had about 13 summer vacations in Italy. A friend has a place there that our family often goes to. I spent two weeks in Spain and two weeks in Mexico this past spring just working on language. I like Europe a lot and I've always thought it was very important. I was a history major in college, and believe, with DeGaulle, that "America is the daughter of Europe." Europe is obviously the cradle of our civilization, our values, and our institutions. And I have become very interested in Latin America. When I was President of World Wildlife Fund that was my principal area of interest. Mexico and Brazil were WWF's two biggest programs and Central America was a large one. I then set out to learn Spanish and came to understand that part of the world much better.
I'm sure that the international interest was the reason why I gave such priority to some things at EPA - like the Border Plan, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, for which I testified six or seven times. I discovered, incidentally, that, as far as I could ascertain, no environmental minister from any country had ever gotten involved in a trade treaty, nor had an EPA Administrator testified on a trade treaty. I thought that the NAFTA was very important to the environment but also very important to our Mexican-American relationship and the stability of Mexico. I continue to give a high priority to that and one of the public lectures I deliver in the fall at Stanford will be on international institutions, another one will be on trade and the environment, both of them very international in orientation.
We are part of a larger world and the environment of that world is one that cannot be managed successfully by one country. It cannot be managed because the pollutants travel and don't respect borders. It also cannot be managed because we are going to be in a web of trade relationships for which the environment can be misused for protectionist purposes, to exclude goods by claiming their production harms the environment, or to create a competitive advantage at the expense of the environment - by having lax controls that make your products cheaper, i.e., by creating a pollution haven. As we gradually relieve the tariff burdens on trade, countries will pursue their economic interests through other means. Very often those other means will be by saying, "Well, we're not clamping down on beef hormones to keep your beef out, but rather because it's environmentally unacceptable, and so forth." That will require people who are concerned about the environment to become much more knowledgeable about trade and to come to respect the need for free trade because it advances the environment, aside from advancing other aspects of welfare. But we need to advance trade interests with a sense of protection for those things that we value and don't want to see unraveled - which trade people, often insensitive to environmental controls, can unwittingly unravel. I don't know how I got there. Your question didn't necessarily lead all over there, did it?