EPA Draft Report on the Environment 2003

EPA Draft Report on the Environment 2003 EPA-26-R-02-006, Office of Environmental Information, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC 2003. 168 pages, paperback, no cost

This EPA report on the state of the environment is a comprehensive collection of current information in chapters on quality of air, water, land, human health, and the overall environment in the U.S. It is laudable for a project to seek environmental indicators that can be used first as a benchmark for assessing the present situation with regard to critical components of our natural, farming, and urbanized areas. In an age when all environments have been drastically altered by people and their activities, it is essential to take stock of resources and monitor changes over time. The human consumption of fossil fuels and other material resources now appropriates over 40% of primary productivity on the planet. It is only by recognizing our effects on the environment and ecosystem services that we can increase general awareness of the long-term impacts of this dominance and what it will mean for the future of other species and a healthy total ecosystem.

Although this is a worthy project, one is immediately challenged by the tenor of the writing and even the titles of key chapters in the book. The EPA Administrator states in the foreword that the past three decades have demonstrated a high level of success in dealing with environmental problems. Three chapters are titled, Cleaner Air, Purer Water, and Better Protected Land. To be sure, we have cleaned up the Love Canal, some salmon have returned to spawn in the tributaries of the San Joaquin River in California, and the worst of the industrial stack emissions are now carefully regulated by EPA. However, it appears that the current administration is intent on undoing what several decades of legislation have put in place to protect wilderness, national forests and wildlife reserves, and untouched desert habitat. The very positive titles on these chapters suggest that we may be reading a political statement rather than an objective report on the state of the environment. Any serious review of this draft report must be done in the current political context.

As with most government documents, this report lists no authors and can only be attributed to the Agency, thus we have no clues to the credibility of the people who accomplished the research and developed the indicators. We can assume that they were Agency personnel, since there is no mention of an outside contract or consultants used on the project. Fortunately, we have another recent report, The State of the Nation's Ecosystems, that was published in 2002 by the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment [Cambridge Univ. Press, New York]. In contrast to the EPA document, the Heinz Center report includes a list of over 150 experts who represent academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector and who contributed to the extensive study of environmental indicators. The Heinz Center report clearly explains which areas have adequate data to allow credible assessment and which do not. They present an explicit plan to update the report every five years. The report is comprehensive, appears to be accurate, and has a better chance of being unbiased than the new report from EPA.

While admitting that there is much more information needed to adequately set up a complete set of indicators, the EPA report provides an optimistic assessment of how we are progressing in solving the most difficult of air, water, and land pollution questions. Although one must question the political motives of the report, it is very positive that the EPA is undertaking such a task. It is especially valuable to have the Heinz Center report for comparison, and to know that overall interest in the environment is receiving more attention from both the public and the private sectors. The EPA report is recommended reading for those interested in the current state of the environment, and the entire report plus more of the data that went into development of the indicators is available on line at: http://epa.gov/indicators/roe/html/tsd/index.htm. For a more objective and in-depth assessment, it is worth spending the $25.00 to get a copy of the Heinz Center Report that was published by Cambridge University Press.

Charles Francis

University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Copyright North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture Dec 2004
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