Although the suggestion will strike some observers as sacrilege, the US should begin asking whether the Environmental Protection Agency has outlived its usefulness.
EPA began life in December 1970 with a good and legitimate mission: consolidation of federal efforts to improve environmental quality. Pollution in its many forms was a severe problem at the time, having been accepted for decades as an inescapable byproduct of industrialization. Change in public attitudes began in the 1960s, galvanized by Rachel Carson's warning about pesticides in the book Silent Spring. People properly began to see environmental degradation as a public problem requiring corporate solutions.
'Interrelated system'
In July 1970, then-President Richard Nixon sent Congress a message outlining plans to create the EPA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The document, available on EPA's web site, acknowledged growing public concern about the physical environment and structural problems in the federal government. The government, it said, offered no way to study the total environment-land, water, and air-as the system that it is and to address problems accordingly.
"Despite its complexity, for pollution-control purposes the environment must be perceived as a single, interrelated system," Nixon's message said. "Present assignments of departmental responsibilities do not reflect this interrelatedness." An effective approach to pollution control "requires pulling together into one agency research, monitoring, standard-setting, and enforcement activities now scattered through several departments and agencies." The agency would work "in close harmony" with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, established by the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969.
EPA and the laws it has implemented have been good for the environment. Air and water are cleaner than they were 44 years ago. Emissions of pollutants are lower. Toxic wastes don't fester in out-of-sight, out-of-mind dumps to the extent they once did. Yes, problems remain in all areas. They always will. They are, however, much less severe than before.
EPA's beneficial role in this progress has two vital dimensions. One is practical; as the documents that created the agency noted, a government unaccustomed to environmental regulation and enforcement needed a focused start. EPA's other dimension was symbolic; creation of an agency so named asserted priority attention-new at the time-to environmental protection.
The symbolic dimension was at least as important as its practical counterpart. It embodied and helped to advance emergent concern for environmental values. That concern now permeates culture. It expresses itself in the behavior of individuals, communities, businesses, and governments at all levels. Promotion of environmental values has become part of the national consciousness and no longer requires an organizing symbol.
Regulation and enforcement, however, remain as important as ever. Without standards for environmental performance, rigorously enforced, backsliding would happen. Business inevitably has elements willing to take unacceptable risks to grab competitive advantage. Sensible regulation can and should keep the irresponsible in check. Nowadays, though, most companies behave responsibly as a matter of corporate conscience. This is one of environmentalism's highest achievements.
Yet if culture has integrated environmental protection into its behavior and value systems-and it has, however imperfectly-should government not do likewise? Can agencies able to regulate other facets of personal and business behavior not now be entrusted with environmental performance as well?
Ask questions now
Under current leadership, EPA provides strong reasons to ask these questions now rather than later. Its aggressive, expansionist regulation tests constitutional boundaries and stampedes interests not specifically environmental, such as security and the economy. The agency has assumed more power than was intended for it in 1970. It should be dismantled. Its functions should be distributed among other agencies. With regulation better aligned with regulated activities and closer to competing national interests, environmental governance would improve.
EPA's supporters, mostly pressure groups, would wail about turning back the clock on environmental protection. They would be wrong. Times have changed. Attitudes have improved. So has the environment. America no longer needs an environmental rallying point, especially one so prone to breach its mission.