"A new ethic is required, a new attitude toward discharging our responsibility for caring for
ourselves and for the earth. This ethic must motivate a great movement, convincing reluctant
leaders and reluctant peoples themselves to effect needed change."
- Two thousand scientists, including 102 Nobel Laureates, from around the globe
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We live in a time of great change in New England. Environmental policies
must keep up with the times. To meet the next generation of environmental
challenges in an era of dwindling federal resources, those of us at EPA
in New England are bringing a new ethic to our work: a belief that consensus,
rather than confrontation, will achieve greater environmental results.
 With
this ethic in mind, EPA's New England office is transforming itself into
a laboratory for bold experimentation in environmental policy. In the
last year, many innovative ideas have gone from action plans to plain
action. Pilot projects launched last year -- such as the Urban Environmental
Initiative and the New England Environmental Assistance Team -- have become
the day-to-day work of EPA staff. Most important, these innovative approaches
are beginning to yield measurable environmental results.
This report is filled with new directions in environmental policy. Many of these new initiatives have
taken hold already; several are still in development. A few of those initiatives that are still in their
infancy are set out below as indicative of where the region's efforts are headed. EPA's reinvention
agenda for New England falls into three thematic areas:
Cultural and organizational change at EPA:
EPA is making its operation in New England more efficient and more accountable to the public
through a major management restructuring set in place this past fall. This re-engineering has
flattened the management structure from one manager for every five employees to one manager for
every eleven employees. The restructuring has also gotten rid of our old media divisions -- air, water
and waste -- and replaced them with place-based, sector-based divisions.
In addition, EPA is encouraging and rewarding high performance by its employees. Three years ago
at EPA, 80% of the region's employees received performance bonuses for exceptional work and
effort -- which amounted to little more than a modest salary supplement. This year, 20% of the
workforce received bonuses, rewarding and encouraging truly outstanding performance on behalf
of public health and the environment.
Sounder science and smarter economics:
Our decisions, increasingly, must be grounded in sound science and smart economics. To this end,
EPA is pushing forward on an initiative to define environmental results based on scientific evidence
-- also known as developing environmental indicators. These indicators will improve our future
State of the New England Environment Reports by providing a clearer sense of whether the quality
of our environment is improving or getting worse. And the indicators will provide EPA staff with
a better idea of which efforts yield the most meaningful environmental results as measured in sound
scientific terms.
And we are continuing to bring the market to bear on environmental problems. Initiatives like
Market-Based Emissions Trading are already letting the invisible hand work its magic on behalf of
New England's environmental and economic health. A new effort to promote effluent trading will
bring the same principles that are working to improve air quality to protect our waterways. And a
new $2 billion tax incentive, proposed by President Clinton this winter, would use the tax structure
to promote redevelopment of formerly contaminated sites, or Brownfields.
Education and empowerment:
EPA recognizes that we must draw upon the ingenuity and love for the environment of New
Englanders to help us protect our shared environment. That is the precept behind our many
community-based environmental protection efforts -- EPA's partnerships with environmentalists at
Waquoit Bay on Cape Cod and dairy farmers near Lake Champlain, with metal platers in Maine and
major corporations like The Gillette Company in Boston.
Empowerment is also what new programs, like StarTrack, are all about. EPA's New England office
recognizes that some companies are superb environmental citizens and deserve to be regulated
differently than others. StarTrack offers companies with proven records of environmental leadership
the opportunity to have an independent third party audit and monitor their environmental
performance in the place of EPA inspectors. This initiative has the potential to create a whole new
class of professional environmental auditors upon which, in the future, EPA will rely to ensure the
environmental integrity of corporations much the way the SEC relies on CPAs to ensure the financial
integrity of those same corporations today.
In our first State of the New England Environment Report, we promised to issue an annual report
on our progress as a society in protecting our public health and our resources. Each year, we will
strive not only to improve our environment but also to improve the quality of the data and other
information that we provide the public.
We encourage all New Englanders to challenge those of us at EPA to reach greater heights, hold us
accountable when we fall short of our ambitious goals, and most important, to join us in our work
to provide a cleaner, safer, healthier environment for all who will follow.
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