Challenges ahead for the EPA's new earth mother - Carol Browner - Cover Story

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 8, 1993 | by Richard Miniter

When Bill Clinton talked about change, he must have had Carol Browner in mind. He was so proud of his surprise choice for Environmental Protection Agency administrator that he blundered and announced that the 37-year-old lawyer would be the first woman to head the EPA (that distinction belonged to Anne Gorsuch Burford, a Reagan appointee).

But his excitement was understandable, in a sense. Despite all the advance billing of a historic changing of the guard in Washington, a generational shift of seismic proportions, the transition produced a Clinton Cabinet notable for its number of Washington insiders, elder statesmen and retooled members of Congress.

Browner, a Miami native who has headed Florida's Department of Environmental Regulation for the past two years, is by contrast pure baby boomer. She didn't take the name of her husband, Michael Podhorzer. She is an avid jogger. She enjoys health food. She is a career woman, combining work and motherhood, who breast-fed her infant son, Zachary, in the offices of then-Sen. Lawton Chiles when she was a legislative assistant there.

In fact, Browner still occasionally brings her 5-year-old son to work. At the Little Rock news conference where Clinton announced her appointment, she held Zachary aloft. "I want my son to be able to grow up and enjoy the natural wonders of the United States in the same way that I have," she said as cameras flashed and reporters scribbled furiously.

With an activist leading what may be the most activist agency of the new government, there will be change, make no mistake, at the EPA. Behind her mentor, Vice President Al Gore, Browner will be the most powerful environmentalist in an administration pledged to sweeping change (Clinton has promised Cabinet rank for the agency).

Though outgoing EPA chief William Reilly was often seen by environmental activists as a covert ally in an unfriendly administration, Browner is a soul mate to them. Reilly's generation is full of patrician regulators who came to their trade via pursuits such as bird-watching, people who called themselves conservationists rather than activists. Browner, on the other hand, was 14 when the first Earth Day was staged in 1970. Hers is a generation of environmentalists who often loved Ralph Nader before they loved nature and who are more likely to have hunted corporate polluters rather than wild ducks.

Even for a state regulator, heading the Clinton EPA will be a major challenge. As the world's foremost ecodiplomat, Browner will meet with United Nations officials and ambassadors from around the world. Major environmental treaties already on the table include a global climate change agreement that could change the world economic order and require billions of dollars in payments to the Third World, and a biodiversity pact that threatens to cripple the incipient biotechnology industry, in which the U.S. is the world leader. And Browner may get caught in the cross fire of the Clinton administration's dueling factions on the pending North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. Opponents of the pact, dubbed "environmental protectionists" by its supporters, hope to kill the deal over pollution by Mexican industry.

At home, Browner will have final word on environmental regulations of staggering complexity, which already cost the U.S. more than $130 billion a year, more than any other nation spends on environmental protection. How she decides to balance economic growth and environmental protection will affect the American economy's competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Browner will be supervising a staff of almost 20,000; she supervised 1,500 in Florida. She will be in charge of a budget of at least $7 billion -- almost 11 times her $640 million budget in Florida.

One of her thorniest problems may be living up to expectations, which are running high after 12 years of Republican rule. The New York Times, in a recent editorial describing what it sees as Browner's opportunity, laid down daunting criteria for success: "It means ending bureaucratic turf wars, thereby enabling government to fulfill its historic role as custodian of the nation's natural resources. It means setting priorities that reflect real, not imagined risks. It means sticking to well-articulated goals."

The eldest daughter of two college professors now divorced, Browner was an avid reader as a child. Her father, Michael Browner, an immigrant from Ireland, is a professor of English and her mother, Isabella Harty-Hugues, teaches a course on "social environment" at Miami-Dade Community College. Both parents accompanied her to her first round of Senate hearings.

Browner's two sisters both pursued ivory tower careers. Michelle Browner is a biochemist at the University of California at San Francisco, and Stephanie Browner, the youngest, is completing her doctorate in American literature at Indiana University.

Browner's entire professional life has been spent in or around government. Fresh from the University of Florida law school, she went to work as general counsel to the Florida House of Representatives Committee on Governmental Operations in March 1980, passing the bar six months later. While with the committee she helped draft legislation to facilitate land acquisition by the state.