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Industrial polluters
Q: What was your overall relationship to industrial polluters?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: My relationship with industry in the early days of EPA was about what it should have been. We gave the benefit of the doubt to those who tried to figure out what we wanted and who tried to comply. The ones who wanted to confront the agency were treated in kind. In a way, it was serendipitous for the public image of EPA that some were willing to oppose us. Secretary of Commerce Maurice Stans responded to our actions by forming an organization called the National Industrial Pollution Control Council (NIPCC). Stans believed you answered pollution standards with voluntary compliance on the part of industry. NIPCC did get some pledges of compliance from industries and some agreement on the clean-up steps they were willing to take.
The problem with that--and I discussed it with Stans quite a bit--was that the free enterprise system doesn't work unless there are fairly clear rules defining competitive parameters. In the case of pollution, if you are relying on the good will of an industry--say the pulp and paper industry--to achieve a given environmental result, it only works if everybody plays. If you have significant expenditures that need to be made in order to achieve compliance, and only one competitor won't make the outlays, it won't work. So the government has to mandate a certain level of compliance necessary to achieve a given environmental result. Let manufacturers compete as to how they do it; don't tell them how to achieve the result. But tell them what you want them to do, and the free enterprise system will work. I don't think we ever made a lot of progress in the early years with voluntary compliance. I think it's working better today simply because EPA is more sophisticated. Industries are a lot more sophisticated. They understand they are going to have to achieve high standards eventually. The public isn't going to back away. It's not a fad. Almost no one at the top of major American companies fails to understand that they must pay attention to the environment; that confrontation with the government is an absolute waste of time; and that voluntary compliance merely averts the inevitable.
For example, I'm on the board of the Monsanto Corporation, which has pledged to reduce its toxic pollutants by 90 percent by the end of next year. That was a strictly voluntary decision on their part and has tended to pull the whole industry toward this objective. It resulted from a combination of prodding by EPA and public demand. That never could have happened 20 years ago. Never.
So my relationship with industry in the early days of the agency was fairly confrontational, almost by the nature of things. I would meet with industry groups from time-to-time and we had quite a few confrontations. I was threatened by people in the steel industry; not physically, but threatened that my job would be abolished. In fact, as a way of raising money for Nixon's presidential campaign, Maurice Stans would occasionally promise to campaign contributors that I wouldn't be around for the second term! Generally, it was a time in which industry was having some trouble adjusting to the new public demands represented by this new agency. To me, it didn't seem surprising.