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TODAY Tuesday 12 August 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Right to No

Someone should check and see if Carol Browner had some kind of life-altering experience about a year ago. Either that or a lot of us underestimated the grit and fortitude of the EPA Administrator. Tagged as a lightweight by many lifer (male) enviros during her term in the first Clinton Administration, Browner has confounded the patronizers by wielding a big stick in the second.

She fought off enormous pressure from both industry and her Administration colleagues when she held tough on new standards for the Clean Air Act ("Bleeping Joan of Arc"). She artfully employed Republican anxiety about being depicted as the party of anti-environmentalism to ensure bipartisan support for EPA budget authorizations at a level much higher than anyone would have dreamed twelve months ago.

And now, according to John Cushman in this morning's New York Times, she is pushing hard to convert the Toxics Release Inventory into a much more accessible, usable tool for tracking industry performance at the factory level. The staff at EPA is putting together something called the Sector Facility Indexing Project (catchy!). SFIP will create a consolidated database that covers every major American plant producing paper, cars, steel, refined oil products, and a small number of key metals. If the President approves, by early 1998 you will be able to log on to the EPA Website and gain instant access to a broad spectrum of information on the environmental performance of a given facility. Available will be data on inspections, compliance records, pollution releases ("weighted" so that you can gauge relative toxicity), and the demographic characteristics of people living within a three mile radius of the factory.

Industry dislikes the proposal. Cushman quotes corporate representatives to the effect that undigested data -- or worse, data that are "weighted" by unfriendly or incompetent measurers -- may mislead more than they will educate. Information needs to be "properly characterized," says one. The public could be "unduly alarmed" by out-of-context information, says another.

I think they're right to a large extent. It seems likely that the creation of SFIP will lead to investigations and reports (by environmental and watchdog groups of all stripes) that will describe factory operations and corporate intentions in language that is hyperbolic, injudicious, intemperate, unfair, and sometimes even hysterical and unconscionably alarmist. I agree with corporate analysts when they say that links between chemical releases and human illnesses are more often asserted than proven. But so what? In what other areas of civic life do we withhold information because people may not handle it in a mature manner? And who is it that should bear the burden of proof about threats to public health? Why are chemicals innocent until proven guilty?

We should equably accept the possibility that chemical pollution will, in retrospect, not appear to have been so serious a problem as many of us in the late 20th Century thought it was. It may well be that in worrying so much about toxic threats to human health we ignore -- to our grandchildren's peril -- threats that emanate from precipitous losses of biodiversity. But we just can't tell yet. Notions that obstruct the search for more certainty -- from "undue alarm" to "proprietary information" -- must yield to the overwhelming need of the body politic to learn more. The truth will wiggle its way through.

Bill Clinton should say about Carol Browner's zeal what Lincoln said about Grant's drinking: have a case of the same whiskey shipped to all my other generals.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Dip into our op-ed archives for an excellent summary of the issues of chemicalization. J.P. Myers, President of the W. Alton Jones Foundation and co-author of Our Stolen Future, describes things persuasively in "Future Chemicals, Chemical Futures."

 

Recent "Today" columns:

8/11: Cleavage
8/08: The Monsters from 12,000 BC
8/07: A Little More Room
8/06: Big Victory, I Guess
8/05: Necessary Vulgarization
8/04: More Crime, Please
8/01: Wise Use, Smart Use
7/31: DC Blues
7/30: Atlanta and Salina
7/29: Herons and Frogs

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