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TODAY Monday 29 December 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Owning the Public Health Issue

This morning's papers raise questions of public policy that will affect the fate of the Kyoto treaty and National Forest plans without ever mentioning climate change or timbering practices.

In the Wall Street Journal, Jackie Calmes reports that President Clinton soon will seek a $71 million increase for food-safety programs in FY 1999, on top of a 60% overall increase in the food-safety budget since the President's inaugural in 1993. The new allocations will be divided among meat and poultry testing, overseas produce inspections, and new scientists and testing equipment at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In The New York Times, John Cushman writes extensively on the uneven success of the Environmental Protection Agency in implementing the new pesticide standards contained in the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996. The new statute requires that risks to the health of children -- not risks to the health of adults -- constitute the standard for judging the acceptability of pesticides. When data are unclear or incomplete, the statute says, the EPA must apply a high while-we're-waiting standard that in many cases will be ten times more rigorous than the pre-1996 standard. As Cushman writes: "If rigidly enforced, that provision might rule out many uses of pesticides until costly and time-consuming new research could be conducted into how much residue children actually ingest and how the chemicals affect fetuses, breast-feeding infants and rapidly growing babies."

The chemical companies are frightened, of course. And EPA officials in charge of enforcing the old standards appear to be dragging their feet in substituting the new standards. Or say so the enviros, many of whom describe a willful pattern of non-compliance by EPA veterans in the Office of Pesticide Programs. For facts and hard-hitting quotes, check out the always-interesting Environmental Working Group.

EPA Administrator Carol Browner says she is dedicated to enforcing the new law and, on the basis of her tough and astute defense of new Clean Air Act standards earlier this year, it would be a mistake to underestimate her grit and abilities. She has in Dr. Phil Landrigan a senior adviser on children's issues who scares the hell out of the pesticide lobbyists.

And she occupies an increasingly important piece of ground on the political landscape: public health. The polls all show that American voters simply do not want to be told that full protection of their family's health must come at the price of a loss in economic prosperity. Any politician who tries to sell cost-benefit analysis at election time is doomed. Remember 1995: it was when Phil Clapp and other warriors beat the anti-enviro Republicans on meat inspection that the tide turned on a whole raft of issues. President Clinton never forgot, and he notices that voter approval of environmental-health measures keep rising in popularity from their already-high levels. Thus the announcement of new money for food safety; and thus too, I think, we can anticipate that the new pesticide standards will not be effectively attacked in public and might be effectively used by one electoral candidate as a weapon against another.

Almost every candidate will want to appear as "pro-environment." And because the "environment" as an issue tends to spread all over -- to cover national forests and global warming and recycling and endangered species and pleasant hiking paths through regional parks -- a lot of greens who work on issues with only the most oblique relationship with short-term threats to children's health will benefit from the rise in public concern.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

A plug, please, for an excellent service off-site. If you're interested in anything to do with environmental education courses for undergraduate or graduate students, check out the information available at Starfish, the syllabus-and-curriculum incarnation of the estimable Second Nature.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

12/23: Good Year for Vintage Climate
12/22: Save the Reefs
12/19: Mousemobile
12/18: Year of Fire
12/17: Ramblin' Man (Ramblin' Woman)
12/16: Big News on the Margins
12/15: The Hybrid As Savior
12/12: Good Week for the Dragon
12/11: Help Wanted: Unreasonable Extremists
12/10: Oh Boy! A Fight!
12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.