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Ecosystem management
Q: Using risk assessment opens the door to dealing with ecological risks overall instead of just the how-much-pesticide-do-you-have-on-our-apple sort of thing. And looking at your tenure, it seems that the Agency moved more and more towards an ecological approach, maybe an ecosystem approach, of environmental management. It seems to me that the Agency has come full circle, in a sense, in that it inherited certain organizations like the Federal Water Quality Administration in the '70s that had been doing watershed management for many, many years - and moved towards that end-of-pipe approach and more industry-specific approaches - and now it's moving back again towards ecosystem management. Why do you think it's come full circle that way? Why do you think it took 20 years or 25 years to determine that maybe this ecosystem approach, or watershed approach, was truly valuable?
MR. REILLY: Well, the environment is a matter of more than health. Health certainly is very important, but the concept underlying the establishment of EPA was the Environmental Protection Agency. It posited an integrity of our natural systems of which we are a part and said to keep an eye on all of them. I think that the Agency has placed the emphasis in different areas at different times, but certainly in the latter '70s, the emphasis shifted to health. It's difficult to argue against emphasizing health. However the consequence of that, I think, was to create a certain imbalance in the Agency.
We, in my watch, tried to reassert the priority for ecological systems, particularly in view of the fact that the best scientists we could consult, who make up the Science Advisory Board, told us to. They told us that some of the major threats to the environment in the United States were, in fact, ecological - upper atmospheric ozone depletion, climate change, forest fragmentation, species loss - all of these properly the concern of an environmental agency like EPA. We didn't, however, for a moment have the kind of budgetary resources deployed in accord with those priorities. SAB said, "Raise the ecological priority of the Agency." It was a very welcome message to me. I went into the Agency believing that was important to do. We strengthened the budget for special ecologically significant systems like the Great Lakes and estuaries and wetlands systems.
I think there is a second reason, however, for attending to ecology. As compelling as it can sometimes be to talk about health, we have provided a very high degree of health protection for the people of the United States. In my view, the health of our citizens has improved significantly over the life of EPA - not certainly as a consequence only of what EPA has done, but of what it has improved. You cannot say the same thing about a number of ecological systems. Certainly through the Clean Water Act expenditures we have vastly improved some of our major water bodies, particularly the Great Lakes. We still do not have a handle on nitrates in the Chesapeake Bay nor nutrients in the Long Island Sound. We have substantial areas that are dead in those water bodies. Forty percent of the Gulf of Mexico shellfish beds are off limits at any one time because of pollutants that flow off the land. That really has always struck me as scandalous. I don't think we will be able to say, in the popular phrase of the moment, that we have attained a sustainable level of development until we function in harmony with these ecosystems and learn to keep them productive.
The public gets that, I think, to a surprising degree. One problem EPA has always had, particularly when it's communicating about health and pollutants, is a difficulty making clear to the public what the issue is. We complicate that problem ourselves by developing language that is so opaque as to defy penetration even by some specialists and often, I think, has led the public to think, there is something that is going on here; this is a trick to keep us out of the game. We are not, nor ought to be, fundamentally about reducing this effluent or that emission, but rather about protecting the totality of the environment. If you talk in those terms and identify places like the Chesapeake Bay or the San Francisco Bay or the Great Lakes, people get it. Those are the places they love, that's the way they understand nature, the outdoors, the environment. So, it's a way to reach the people and engage them in your work.
I always felt that education about the Agency's mission, about the state of the environment, about the choices the country had, was among the highest priorities I respected and the language to communicate about the environment is, in my view, more properly, ecological than health.