Early surprises

Q: During your first year, did the job surprise you or did you find things went essentially the way you thought they would?

MR. RUCKELSHAUS: Oh no, not at all the way I thought they would. I thought that pollution could be solved by mild coercion. Once the federal government set some standards and began to enforce them, people would fall in line and the problem would essentially disappear. I thought we knew what the bad pollutants were, knew at what levels they caused adverse health and environmental effects, and knew the technology needed to combat them. Finally, I thought all of this could be done at a reasonable cost within a reasonable time.

I was there about three months when I began to question every single one of the assumptions I had entered the agency with. I was no longer certain we knew what the bad pollutants were. We knew some of them, but we certainly didn't know all of them, nor their effects at very high levels. We had very little knowledge other than elaborate models and extrapolations on the effects of pollutants at lower levels. We knew almost nothing about the synergistic effect of these pollutants, what they might do in combination to public health or the environment. Even assuming we did know the effects, the cost of controlling them, in some cases, was prohibitive. Also, actions to redress these problems could be very time-consuming. The public had almost no understanding of all this.

So my view of the environment had been skewed and biased by my experience at the state level, where it appeared that all we needed to do to get rid of gross pollution was have the central government enforce standards. I thought we could do something about gross pollution, until I encountered the practice of zero health effects. Mandated by Congress, it threw us into a lot choppier waters.

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Early surprises

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