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Environmental movement
Q: What was your relationship, and the relationship of the agency, to the growing environmental movement in the 1970s?
MR. RUCKELSHAUS: In the early days it was quite positive. I have a theory about movements in America, whether it is the women's movement, the civil rights movement, or the environmental movement. When they first start, they tend to point up imperfections in the society which are almost universally accepted as problems. They serve a useful function in highlighting past wrongs that every fair-minded person agrees should be righted.
It's only in the subsequent phases of the movement that they begin to get into more controversial questions, after the initial agenda of the movement has been quite uniformly accepted as a correct one which ought to be redressed. Congress then enacts the fundamentals of the movement, whether related to civil rights, women's rights, or environmental protection. You know, there are two ways of killing movements: either give them nothing, or give them everything. Some get everything they asked for, what do they do next? When the original agenda is enacted, then what? The movement doesn't break up, but holds together by finding a new agenda. The women's movement started with issues involving equal pay for equal work, something almost no one could deny. While it hasn't yet been fully achieved, everybody agrees it is the right thing. But once the original agenda is achieved, then what? Questions are raised about abortion rights, for example, which is more controversial, and not uniformly or universally accepted like equal pay for equal work. Civil rights experienced the same thing, as did environmentalism.
Likewise, in the early days of EPA, we accepted much of the initial agenda of the environmental movement. In fact, the new agency worked with environmentalists, whose demands helped create EPA in the first place. They were allies, at least in part; not locked in the confrontation that exists today between the agency and the environmental community. There still is a so-called "iron triangle" relationship between the environmental movement, the EPA staff, and the Congressional committee staffs. Some of it has to do with job security, some of it has to do with a certain amount of zealotry inside EPA (although I don't think it is anywhere near as rampant as some think).
Basically, the three parties have used each other. There has existed among them a symbiosis, in which the environmental movement used the agency as an antagonist to raise money and get more members; and the agency used the environmental groups to sue for objectives they were trying to accomplish, but could not otherwise gain. The same is true of the Congressional committees. But I would say that the agency's relationship, and my own relationship with environmental groups, was much more positive at the start of EPA than ten years later.