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"USA, March 28, 2002 - Monitor Breakfast, Interview with EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, Dennis Cook/AP"
Christine Todd Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency and former governor of New Jersey, was the guest at Wednesday's
Monitor breakfast in Washington.
Monitor Breakfast
Selected quotations from a Christian Scientist Monitor Breakfast with
Environmental Protection Administrator Christine Whitman By David T. Cook
On criticism of the Republican's record on the environment: "If you look at the history of the Republican Party starting with Teddy
Roosevelt and the national parks system, Richard Nixon establishing EPA,
George Bush the 41st and the Clean Air Act, Republican presidents and
Republican governors, if you look what they have done around the country,
have been very attuned to the environment. What we have been very bad at is translating that into real life terms ...
explaining to people that we are not just doing this as an academic exercise
but we are doing it to make life better. On Environmentalists:
For environmentalists, you can never do enough, there is no halfway point,
there is no moving toward a goal. It is either you get there or you are not
going to get there. And that is what counts.
Many businesses, anything you do is too much because every decision we make
requires someone to either spend millions or billions of dollars or make
changes in the way they live their lives for benefits they may never see.
They may not see the air get clean in the way you can see open space be
preserved but they are all things we need to do." On which environmental issue is the No. 1 challenge:
"I would put it in terms of what I think our single greatest challenge is,
and I don't know how we are going to solve it all, and that is water.
I think water is going to be the biggest environmental issue that we face for
the 21st century in both quantity and quality. The agency doesn't really deal
with quantity much that falls more under (the Department of) Interior and
others. But (EPA) clearly has an impact on quality. As you look, not just for the United States it is around the world. If you
look at what is happening in the Middle East, there are some severe droughts
going on. Water is a major problem clean water in Afghanistan. We have a
million children dying a year from waterborne diseases around the world,
entirely preventable. And here in this country we look at enormous costs
anywhere from $480 billion to $1 trillion in infrastructure repair needs in
cities and around the nation. ... we have gotten really good at identifying and correcting the problem that
comes from a single source from a pipe that's emitting into a stream. We are
having now to get to the point where people understand what they do in their
driveway can end up somewhere far away and have a cumulative impact ... when you look at the problems we have in the West with the arsenic
standard, the cost of that, all of those things say to me that water is going
to be really one of our biggest challenges and I am not entirely sure that we
have it all down on how to solve that."
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