Ruckelshaus, William

Environmental Protection Agency

Ruckelshaus was appointed the first director of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by President Richard Nixon in 1970. The mission of the EPA was to treat the environment as a whole, establish and enforce federal environmental regulatory protections, conduct environmental research, provide assistance in combating environmental pollution, and assist in developing new environmental policies. The EPA was created as a strong, independent agency consolidated from several existing environmental programs into an overarching umbrella. It coincided with the first Earth Day and increasing concern worldwide about the environment and human health. Nixon's State of the Union Address outlined 37 environmental goals, including clean water, improved national air quality, and cleaning up contaminated land (or “brownfields”) among other proposed initiatives.

While Nixon's administration established the mission, Ruckelshaus set the tone for the agency. He emphasized the need for transparency, communication, enforcement, and a firm, fair hand within the agency organization and with the outside world. Many of his decisions regarded the significant but often unnoticed regulations that make up everyday environmental policy. Others were more controversial and changed the way environmental policy is conducted, such as banning of the general use of the pesticide DDT and the establishment of the Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1970, which required the EPA to establish national air quality standards as well as national standards for significant new pollution sources and for all facilities emitting hazardous substances. It forced states, cities, corporations, and even government to address long-standing air and water pollution problems that impacted human health and the environment. Ruckleshaus's willingness to confront compliance failures on their practices and to find workable solutions has come to define federal–state environmental relations.

Ruckelshaus was appointed as the director of the EPA for 1983–85, following the resignation of the then EPA administrator because of conflicts of [Page 768]interest. President Ronald Reagan wanted to restore confidence in the agency, which had lost some of its transparency. Ruckelshaus would initiate the “Tacoma Process” for participatory democracy, which was at the time highly controversial to many environmental groups and government officials but is standard practice in the early 21st century for many environmental issues. At the time, Tacoma, Washington, housed the only copper smelter in the nation to use ore with high arsenic content, which accounted for 25 percent of inorganic arsenic emissions nationwide. However, the community itself was polarized over the need for environmental compliance and the need for jobs. Ruckelshaus saw it as being representative of the type of issues that the EPA was going to face in the future. He felt that to effectively manage environmental risk, the people impacted by the issue involved must be part of the decision-making process or vested in a meaningful way. The EPA held public workshops so that stakeholders could deliberate about acceptable risk and to ask the public to contribute to the decision of what pollution control technologies the EPA should require. While critics said that it was the job of the EPA to protect public health and not to require the public to make difficult decisions that gambled with their health and safety, Ruckelshaus believed that it would be arrogant of himself or any other Washington elite to tell citizens what was an acceptable risk.

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