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  Round One - September 13, 2000 I grew up in Aldo Leopold's Sand County -- which is Sauk County, Wisconsin, to us locals. I was seventeen on the first Earth Day, and I remember spending the day with some other bright-eyed, conservation-minded friends picking up trash along the railroad tracks. The fruits of our labor, as it turned out, were carted off to a future Superfund site, also located in Sauk County, which, twenty years after entering the program, still hasn't been cleaned up. So thinking globally, based on this small local example, I might fairly ask: Have we made any real progress on the environment? The answer, resoundingly, is yes. My own experience demonstrates both the promise and the problems of environmental protection. The current U.S. environmental regulatory system, which dates back roughly to the first Earth Day, has produced immense benefits that we plainly can perceive in the air we breath, the water we drink, and the land under our feet. But experience has taught that this system, with its emphasis on centralized federal authority, has serious shortcomings, too. It encourages Americans -- people and businesses alike -- to do just the bare minimum; it breeds unnecessary litigation; it discourages innovation; and it values process over real results. The beleaguered Superfund program may be among the worst of the lot, but it is hardly alone in falling short of its original promise. We must solve this paradox in our own country if we hope to influence environmental progress on the global stage. What is needed is a vision for the future building on our past successes and learning from our mistakes. The United States is entering a new era of environmental policy, one based on a vision of public stewardship and personal (and corporate) responsibility. This emerging vision looks beyond the least we can do toward environmental excellence. People overwhelmingly want a clean and healthy environment. People also demand that environmental requirements go beyond rhetoric and actually achieve the desired results. They want to know what progress we're making and what their community's environmental conditions really are. And they want to be involved in making decisions. This vision already is translating into new policies. These policies, which have evolved as states and localities have taken on more and more of the responsibility for environmental programs, seek to build on past successes but differ radically in their implementation and goals from the federal command-and-control regime under which many of us have spent the better parts of our careers. This vision also recognizes that nature is a system with many different factors working together to seek a balance for optimal living. Our laws and programs should move away from the current single-issue, static focus and toward a system that integrates and balances many different issues. My short wish list for America's future environmental policy: 1. It should look to results. Federal regulators must establish priorities and set high standards based on the best data available, judge whether these standards are being met, and take swift action if they are not. The means used to achieve these goals should be left largely in the hands of the states, communities, and regulated parties. We should use market forces and new technologies. Innovation should be encouraged, with the results tested and widely distributed. 2. It should be information rich. This is the Information Revolution, after all. We need better scientific and economic information, data about actual environmental conditions, and measures that assess whether programs are working or broken. Without such information, we will continue to have difficulty setting logical priorities and identifying and dealing with new problems. 3. It should be participatory. Continuing local efforts and pilot projects produce innovation, deliver real improvements, and encourage people and businesses to trust in their government. However, trust is a two-way street, and participation requires personal responsibility and private stewardship. My two decades as an environmental regulator have shown me that the system won't work without each of these elements. To the question of politics -- or, I hope, the lack thereof. A successful twenty-first-century environmental policy will require a leader who can reach across partisan lines and bridge political differences on what should be the ultimate nonpartisan issue. It also will require a President who recognizes that environmental issues don't respect national borders and who can credibly address these complex issues on the international stage. I confess, I'm a Republican and a supporter of Texas Governor George W. Bush. I believe Governor Bush in two terms has put together a stronger bipartisan record on conservation and the environment than Al Gore has in twenty-plus years in Washington, D.C., precisely because Bush puts action and results above talk and posture. Finally, back to Sauk County, I want to end with a quotation from Aldo Leopold's classic A Sand County Almanac: "[O]ur bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy." As Leopold recognized -- decades before we all became environmentalists -- progress and conservation are out of balance only so long as one is valued greatly over the other. In my view, this insight does not require consigning anyone, in either the First or the Third World, to a second-class existence. Quite the opposite, in fact: we know today that environmental protection and economic progress can, and must, go hand-in-hand. Indeed, they are inseparable parts of the same story.
Round Three: Concluding Remarks -- September 20, 2000
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