![[logo] US EPA](http://www.epa.gov/epafiles/images/logo_epaseal.gif){kind=logo}
Environment before EPA
Q: When you first became administrator, how powerful was the environmental movement? How did the government regulate environmental pollution before EPA?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: The first question about the environmental movement and its power has a lot to do with the second question. The big difference between the early 1960s (when we struggled to get anything done in Indiana) and the 1970s, was the shift of public opinion. There was no public support for the environment in Indiana in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Anything done was the result of individuals like myself or Jerry Hansler deciding, "This is terrible, we've got to stop some of this. After all, the law says it's wrong." It was not so much that I was an environmentalist; I was never committed to an environmental cause. It had more to do with being a Deputy State Attorney General assigned the task of enforcing a statute violated on a rampant basis. But the public did not support this view. If there wasn't some kind of odor problem or obvious health problem in a town, local people would not support action against local industry, because that threatened jobs. If a plant's management decided to relocate, it would be catastrophic to the local economy. So there was not much public support for our early efforts.
Public support only began to explode in the late 1960s. It led to the creation of EPA, which never would have been established had it not been for public demand. That I am absolutely certain of. Public opinion remains absolutely essential for anything to be done on behalf of the environment. Absent that, nothing will happen because the forces of the economy and the impact on people's livelihood are so much more automatic and endemic. Absent some countervailing public pressure for the environment, nothing much will happen. I don't conclude that it's either a strong economy or a clean environment; this is what our statutes reflect and people in the country sometimes tend to think of as the central issue to the environment. But I do think you've got to have public support for environmental protection or it won't happen. That's what shifted between the early 1960s and the time EPA was formed.
Q: When you became administrator, how did the government go about regulating the environment?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: Up to that point--up to the formation of EPA--it was largely a question of the states enforcing the environmental laws. The federal role was fairly peripheral. There was a National Water Quality Act in which it was possible to hold hearings on a pollution problem like the Great Lakes and hold the gross polluters up for public scrutiny. This tactic sometimes put enough pressure on polluters to do something, or moved the states to begin to enforce the standards. There was a man named Murray Stein in the Water Quality Office of the Department of Interior who was famous for holding hearings and beating up on local polluters. He would blow into town, have a big hearing, and hold the accused up for ridicule in the hopes that would stimulate people to act. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't.
But there was really no overall federal enforcement to speak of. Again, as a result of weak public demand and local fear of job losses, you didn't have centralized enforcement responsibility. It was left to the states, and they competed with one another so fiercely for the location of industry that they weren't very good regulators of those industries. Particularly in the whole social regulatory area--health, safety, and the environment--they just weren't very good.
As a result, we pulled these laws into the orbit of the federal government, establishing over-all standard-setting and enforcement; command and control, as it has come to be called. But the federal government also had the responsibility to delegate back to the states the administration of the various media programs like water and air. The belief was that the states had enough interest and infrastructure to enforce these laws. If they also had this "gorilla in the closet"--that is, the federal government, which could assume control if the state authorities proved too weak or inept to curb local polluters--the states would be far more effective. That's the theory. Prior to EPA, there was no federal oversight. There was no "gorilla in the closet." Absent that, it was very hard to get widespread compliance.