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Administrator Jackson's Remarks in a PBS Frontline Panel
On April 8, 2009, Administrator Jackson gave the following remarks at PBS FRONTLINE's panel discussion based on their upcoming film "Poisoned Waters." The report focuses on new forms of pollution contaminating the nation's major waterways and airs on April 21st. View the video of the panel
Hedrick Smith: Ms. Jackson, I was wondering if would share with us, in concrete terms, how you plan to raise the bar on the Chesapeake Bay and other waters across the country, specifically addressing unregulated pollution such as what you’ve just seen from large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), storm water runoff, emerging contaminants. Do we need policies, do we need new strategies, do we need to change any of our laws?
Lisa Jackson: Well, thank you. And I absolutely will answer the question because if I don’t he’ll come back with a follow-up. I’ve already been warned. I have to take just a second to first thank Hedrick for this amazing opportunity. It is not only – I’ve seen little pieces of it and I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing – but it’s extraordinarily timely. For reasons that I’m sure will come up out the discussion today. I’m also honored to be here with my fellow panelists and have to say how extraordinary it is to sit next to administrator Ruckelshaus who I think raised the bar for many – in many ways at EPA. First as its first administrator and then at a time when it needed, it needed a little bit of tender loving care. He made the EPA relevant to millions of Americans. He made them understand how extraordinarily important our work is and he was able to do that by contrasting what happened when EPA is not on the job to what happens when it is. All that I can aspire to do is something very similar. So it is timely first and foremost because it gives us an opportunity to once again show Americans what happens when we don’t have clean water and we don’t have EPA doing its job. So I’ve spent a lot of time saying, in addition to raising bars for the Chesapeake, that EPA is back on the job. And I hope that this web cast helps us to further that message: that EPA must be on the job for the American people. That something as simple as clean water – something we would tend to take for granted, especially in the year 2009 in this country – is anything but assured and is actually far from having been attained at any point.
Being back on the job means that we certainly have some extraordinary challenges and we’ve just seen a clip of one of them. When it comes to agricultural operations, obviously ‘manure happens’ – that’s my kids…sorry (laughs). And I think one of the things that is extraordinarily important is to make sure that people understand that. Not just the joke of it but the reality of it. And as we just saw, it isn’t a matter of…that it happens…but that in concentrating the operations we end up with fairly concentrated and huge volumes of material, that when we try to manage we’ve learned that the land is basically reached capacity in it’s ability to absorb what are essentially nutrients. I mean, the good thing about the agricultural cycle is that those nutrients came from somewhere. They’re moved to an area as part of feedstock and usually could be absorbed, but now we’ve reached a point where that can no longer happen.
And so, the question, I believe, was “Do we need to change?” Yes. We need change. We need a change in everything, in my mind, from policy to enforcement to an understanding of the last piece of the problem, which is that – for better or for worse – the hardest part of the issue is in front of us. There, in some cases we are suffering from the success of administrator Ruckelshaus and the folks who do this work every day. Which is that some of the low hanging fruit has been plucked, when it comes to water quality. That is not to say that point sources -- and it’s arguable whether large agricultural operations… I think one of the policy questions is are they a point source or are they a non-point source. And should they be regulated? And if they’re regulated as one or the other, how do we ensure that they are regulated appropriately? And I think very fair question: how do we ensure that we are enforcing the regulations that we have?
EPA has brand new regulations for CAFOs and those of you who have read the paper in the last few days and weeks know that we’ve been criticized by many of the chicken farmers for the fact that they are going to be regulated. And that they now…maybe we would see a permit universe that’s much, much larger than anything we’ve ever seen before. And we don’t take those regulations lightly. But I think it goes to one of the old adages is that regulation without enforcement is actually fairly meaningless. And we really would be subject to criticism if all that happens at the end of the day is that a lot more people fill out a lot more paperwork. But they keep doing things exactly as they’re doing them, and we keep seeing the same results that we’ve seen already. So, you know, in terms of indicators I think there could’ve been no better setting of stage. And the media helps with this all the time.
The questions that came out in the series of articles on the Chesapeake Bay: basically -- that was done I think by the Washington Post – basically said, listen, For whatever set of reasons we’re not being truthful about how hard this problem really was to define, and more importantly to solve. We haven’t reached that point yet. There are still things that we can do on point sources, but there is tremendous work out there with respect to CAFOs and with respect to non-point sources. And the minute we digest that… and the minute we accept it, I think, the better off we’ll be.
Now, I did something a little smart. I hired the opposition. Over here, in the person of Chuck Fox, who has gracefully decided to become my senior advisor on Chesapeake Bay issues. Part of what he brings to the table, quite frankly, is an understanding that there’s also a political side to this. The Bay is ‘owned’, if you will, by – is it, 6 states? -- and several jurisdictions, and several federal agencies. Including the USDA, who must bring their resources to bear to see the next quantum leap forward in terms of the health of the Bay. And I’m really excited that the President just announced his nomination of Pete Silva to be head of… assistant administrator for the Office of Water at EPA. Pete’s a 30-plus year civil engineer… professional engineer who has a strong wastewater background and an ability to deal with boundary water issues. Which just goes to show, the only water is not…you know, boundary water isn’t just between two countries. In the case of the Bay it’s between a number of jurisdictions.
So, we need an integrated approach. We need an approach that is geared towards the problems that we see today. And we need to also recognize that we have one other tremendous factor on our side, and that is the President. President Obama has already said some important things about the importance of EPA. The Recovery Act from the President and Congress includes almost $6 billion for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. That’s money that I would bet many of you in this room have either fought for or written or opined about. And the President’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year includes another four or five billion, I think, for wastewater and drinking water SRF. An incredible statement about the importance of reinvesting in, sort of, the meat and potatoes of water protection. What I promise you in the years ahead is a series of incredible statements, I hope, about what it will actually take for this country to see another huge leap – as we saw in the 70s after the passage of the Clean Water Act. As we saw after the passage of the Clean Air Act. There is still work to be done and it isn’t easy, but there are still gains to be had in the next few years. Not in 10 or 15 or 20 years. So, I think with that I will allow you to move on to the next speaker.
Hedrick Smith: I want to ask you a question while you’re still standing there. I’m going to exercise that moderator’s right. I did ask, “Do we need to change regulations? Do we need to change laws?” In our reporting we had a number of people who said to us that they really thought that the Clean Water Act, fine as it was, is 30-35 years out of date. It needs to be update to take into account regulation of new forms of pollution. Particularly storm water run-off and maybe even those CAFO’s.
Lisa Jackson: I think that most people when they first talk about Clean Water Act reform talk about the fact that right now, because of a series of Supreme Court decisions, there is “murkiness” -- maybe that’s a bad pun – about the jurisdiction that any regulator… EPA and the states that implement it, have. I think there was some alarming figure during the transition that EPA staff spend upwards of 40%, sometimes upwards of 50%, 60% of their time working with states to determine whether they have jurisdiction to issue a permit or to take an enforcement action. They can see an impact to water quality. They can actually see it, but because the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act has been narrowed to navigable waters and to a series of tests, there is anything but clarity on whether or not water means water and what wetlands are or are not regulated. So, I have already said that I do believe we need a legislative fix to clarify the jurisdictional issue.
Hedrick Smith: So that means the legislative fix will make clear your power at EPA and at other agencies to enforce the law – or to expand the powers of the law?
Lisa Jackson: I think right now there’s…. folks approach a particular wetland or a particular stream and say “Do I need a permit?” And a lot of time is spent… because of the issue of whether there’s a connection to navigable waterways. And so, I think that first, “Yes” and second “Maybe so.” We need to know what are jurisdictions are and I believe that the country benefits from something broader rather than narrower. And I’ll tell you why: because I think from a scientific perspective the other thing we’ve learned since 1972 is that no one does it better than Mother Nature. It always takes a woman, right? And women….Mother Nature understood that the thing that does the best job for waters is a vegetative buffer. A place for all that runoff to pass through so that solids can get slowed down and knocked out. And so, when we say that we don’t have jurisdiction over wetlands that may seem a trivial decision but that lack of jurisdiction results in the one place where we probably get more natural capital return on our investment than any place else, and we’re losing those at an alarming rate. The Chesapeake is a great example. Probably as important as agricultural operations and their impact. Or close to important, correct me if I’m wrong Chuck, is the fact that there’s been a huge rise in development over the last decade, just astronomical, and the non-point source implications of that are huge. I think you need both. I do think we need legislation. You got me to say it. Congratulations. But I also think we need to look at tomorrow’s solutions and to return back to not-necessarily always believing that we can engineer things through the end of the pipe. Because, what we’re finding – CAFOs are a great example of that – just by volume the controls to do that are actually tremendous.