Flynn's Harp: Ruckelshaus' observations on environment

William D. Ruckelshaus, who has spent most of his life helping create, enforce or promote environmental laws and regulations, says government is obliged to step in on occasion, and probably spend more money, in helping to protect against cataclysmic disasters like the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Ruckelshaus, twice director of the Environmental Protection Agency, says “society must decide how big the risk of such disasters is and what we need to spend to protect against them. That’s what a regulatory system is about.”

Referring to BP’s preparation for a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon spill, Ruckelshaus said: “There’s no question that risk being weighed by the company was that nothing like this would come along. There’s also no question that if they had anticipated the possibility of anything like this happening, they would have spent a lot more time and money.”

“If they had gone last mile, it would have cost a $1 million a week,” Ruckelshaus estimates. “Think how much they could have saved had they planned for the worst.”

Ruckelshaus, who was chosen in the fall of 1970 by then-President Richard Nixon to be the first EPA administrator, noted in a telephone interview that 40-years-ago appointment had an amusing twist.

Ruckelshaus, now strategic director with Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, recalled with a chuckle that a friend of his had suggested to a Newsweek reporter that Ruckelshaus would be a good selection to head the planned new agency.

“When I read that, I went to (Attorney General) John Mitchell, since I was with the Justice Department at the time, and told him I hadn’t initiated that story,” Ruckelshaus remembered. “I thought that was the end of it. But a little while later, Mitchell called me and asked me if I wanted the job.”

So on December 1, 1970, Ruckelshaus assumed the reins of a new agency that had come into existence as part of an executive order from Nixon. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAH) was created by that same order.

Ruckelshaus recalled in an Earth Day 40^th anniversary piece in April this year in the Wall Street Journal that he quickly brought enforcement actions against three large cities for violating the Clean Water Act. That was followed by actions against the steel industry and other industrial polluters.

Ruckelshaus explained in the WSJ piece that “I knew that the job of the EPA would be far more contentious in the future if we didn't establish its credibility and its willingness to take forceful—and symbolic—action right from the start. The American people had to know we were serious about meeting their demands.”

Ruckelshaus noted that Nixon signed 16 major pieces of environmental legislation into law during his presidency. To the possible surprise of many, Nixon had initiated most all of them, but Ruckelshaus noted that Nixon’s environmental proposals nonetheless brought him into conflict with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

“Nixon would submit what he thought was good legislation on either clean air or clean water and the Democratic Congress would put in more extreme provisions than Nixon liked,” Ruckelshaus said. “That’s where the political overtones came in because what bothered Nixon was that no matter what he submitted on environmental issues, Congress took it further than he intended. So towards the end, Nixon was quite down on environmental legislation.”

Ruckelshaus returned to head the EPA in 1983 under Ronald Reagan after it became clear the agency’s image needed repair.

In all, Ruckelshaus has spent nearly a half century on behalf of environmental causes, from the time he was a 28-year-old assistant attorney general in Indiana when he obtained court orders against industries polluting the water supply and helped draft the 1961 Indiana Air Pollution Control Act.

Those involvements on behalf of the environment are way too numerous to begin listing, other than to say they continue today with his involvement with the Puget Sound Partnership and its clean-up Puget Sound initiative.

So it’s logical that his input would be of value as the nation grapples with what process to put in place to help reduce future risks of calamities like the BP spill.

“You can never eliminate the risk of these things happening, but there are steps that reasonably should be required to come as close as possible to eliminating them,” he said.

“The problem any society has in avoiding cataclysmic risk is that it is very hard to balance how much money should be spent to minimize the risk,” he said. “If you leave the problem of minimizing the risk just to the company involved, they’ll try to minimize the risk of the cataclysm occurring. So government has to step in on occasion and say we need to spend more to guard against this.”