Everybody wants clean, healthy air to breathe. Right? But nobody wants to turn off the electricity or get out of our automobiles. Right! The result follows: air pollution creates a threat to our own health and the environment. We also create some real ugliness in terms of smoke and an enveloping gray haze.

In my last column I addressed some implications of September 11 for environmental professionals (Environmental Practice, Volume 3, Number 4, December 2001). My concern was that government facilities would deprive surrounding communities of information. It turns out, however, that the problem may be of a different sort: the right-to-know provisions of several major federal laws. Under these laws, private companies must report emissions of toxic chemicals to state and federal authorities.

How will another 220,000,000 Americans affect you? Professionally? Personally? How about the environment? These are the preliminary questions raised by a recent article in The Economist. In this editorial I will try to sketch a way to look at the issues. The gist of The Economist's article is that America and Europe show strong signs of diverging demographically, after many years of moving in tandem. Before 1980, both were dropping so far in fertility rates (the number of children born to each woman) that both were below the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman.

Budget time is never for the faint of heart. After all, when you've set the budget, you have made manifest what you really intend to do. Thus, the unveiling of President Bush's budget for Fiscal Year 2003 generated some serious gnashing of teeth. It should not be a surprise that a very important environmental law was, once again, at stake. The particular law in question was the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, usually called CERCLA or Superfund. This law, passed in 1980, has been an object of vigorous debate for twenty-two years. President Bush has now made it clear that he, too, is happy to engage the game: Super-fund Superbowl XXII.

By the time you're reading this, the planning for the 2002 NAEP Conference in Dearborn is almost complete and registrations are coming in. The committee has worked many hours to prepare a program and associated activities that will provide participants with a most enriching and enjoyable occasion. This year's Co-Chairs are Ron Deverman of Parsons Transportation Group in Chicago and Robert Anderson of CTI & Associates in Brighton, Michigan. Ron is working on the technical side of the conference, and Robert is handling the logistical issues. The Michigan Chapter is providing a lot of support, as is our Conference Coordinator, Donna Carter. Numerous others have contributed to the effort, and I encourage you to visit our Web site to see their results. I look forward to another outstanding conference.

As environmental professionals we see more and more efforts within the regulatory community to be "user friendly."I recently attended a meeting of environmental professionals in Michigan and learned how the Department of Environmental Quality is being reorganized to better serve the professional and the citizen. Such programs as Pollution Prevention and Technical Assistance, and The Clean Corporate Citizen (which among other things provides recognition of corporate responsibility) were exhibited. Other programs discussed were units within Education and Outreach that included Operator Training certification for hazardous materials. From Wisconsin, I learned of a regulatory office of grants and contracts, just as we have here at Michigan State University. This unit is charged with supporting individuals who are applying for grants and loans to support environmental restoration projects. In some cases across the country, there are state-supported bonds that are administered through the Departments of Natural Resources and Environmental Quality.

I am honored to have been chosen to lead the National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP), succeeding Bruce Hasbrouck, who devoted himself to the Association for the past two years and who leaves the Association in excellent condition. We all thank him for the hours (both on the ground and flying) spent visiting NAEP chapter locations to tell them the national story and support them as they grow.

This will be my last message as President of NAEP. The last two years have been extremely rewarding for me professionally to see the growth we have experienced. As I look through the various issues of Environmental Practice, the quality of the journal is quite evident. Furthermore, the future issues will prove to be consistent with the level of quality that has been provided to you as a member of the organization.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn shook the scientific establishment when he published his momentous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Prior to Kuhn, the scientific community commonly believed that scientific and technical progress was generally achieved through the steady unceasing march of small progressive developments. In other words, progress generally builds slowly upon continuous and gradual developments; this belief, or perhaps myth, is still widely accepted by much of the general public, as well as a large segment of the scientific community.

Most of us think of the consulting ecologist or consulting engineer and imagine a person who works developing malls, marinas, and of.ce parks. But there are those who will accept other clients. There are those who will work for the people. The people are homeowners associations, condominium groups, and a variety of environmental activist groups. There are many times when a consulting .rm may work for a developer on one project, and a citizens group on the next. In past essays, I have highlighted many of the ethical con.icts associated with development and regulation. What can happen when our client now wants us to help them halt development?

I heard a news item recently that suggested that the United States was in the middle of a minor time capsule crisis. It seems that the Bicentennial year of 1976 encouraged a flurry of activity to place time capsules. The earliest of these were generally scheduled to be exhumed in 25 years, or the year 2001. The minor crisis arose when one of several things happened. First, the capsules simply couldn't be found because the directions to locate the capsule were wrong. Second, the capsules were placed in inappropriate locations, or had been made of materials that could not withstand burial for 25 years, and the capsules had disintegrated or were useless. Third, some capsules were located and made of appropriate materials, but they had not been sealed adequately, and the contents inside were spoiled.

The following article was taken from a Keynote Talk given by Dr. James A. Roberts at the 4th Conference on Protected Areas of East Asia and the Working Session of the World Conservation Union, World Commission on Protected Areas, in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 19, 2002, and is part of the proceedings of the conference. The theme of the congress was “Benefits Beyond Boundaries in East Asia.”

In my last foray into ethical brain teasers (“The Environmental Professional in Public Office: Putting Schizophrenia to Work for You,” Issue 4(1) of Environmental Practice), I painted a picture of rampant schizophrenia within the ranks of the government regulatory corps, at one point in the day being expected to uphold the ethics of blind justice enforcing legislation over which the Environmental Professional had no control, and then minutes later being expected to be the consummate scientist.

Suddenly, the path from here to there seems as wide open as you can dream it. Imagine, within a decade, metro Detroit transformed into a region known as much for its natural landscape---its riverfronts, parks, bike paths, and greenbelts---as for being a worldclass industrial and auto center. That's the vision of the GreenWays Initiative, a five-year effort by the Community Foundation for Southeastern Michigan.

In his famous essay on “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Hardin (1968) derived predictions of environmental disaster from the proposition that people are entirely selfish by nature. The article has had two important effects. In regard to public policy, it has lent intellectual support to approaches based on Hardin's idea that natural resources can be sustained only if management responsibilities lie in a single place. Policymakers in many countries took this advice in one of two directions—giving responsibility to government agencies to act on behalf of all, or devolving responsibility to individual resource users in campaigns of privatization intended to empower markets.

The Environmental Professional who happens to be employed by the government is in a peculiar position. For this situation, let us presume that the public employee has achieved an advanced level of education as a forest ecologist. The job held, however, is broadly regulatory and the employee is responsible for controlling public activities such as development, mining, and road construction wherever they may occur within the political jurisdiction. The political jurisdiction extends well beyond forest ecology and includes lakes, streams, marshes, and perhaps even the airshed, soils, and groundwaters.

Ecologists are charged with understanding and communicating the ecological values of the natural world from the standpoint of science. They are trained to bring the tools of science—observation, experimentation,modeling—to document patterns, understand processes, and make predictions following disturbance. Ecologists are also trained to communicate their research findings to other scientists in language that is efficient, technical, and targeted toward our closest peers.

There is nothing wrong with this mode of understanding or communication. However, it is growing increasingly clear that scientists—at least some scientists—must go beyond the typical modes of scientific communication if they are to be effective in motivating the large pool of non-scientists to understand, conserve, and sustainably use the natural world.

Gaps often exist between scientific findings and the actions taken by policy makers. In the case of global climate change, the United States has chosen not to act to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. This is despite warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that “most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities,” and that these forces are expected to cause an additional 1.4–5.8°C rise in temperature by 2100.

As people around the globe pay increasing attention to environmental issues, the controversial topic of pesticide use resurfaces again and again. Scientists and policy makers continue to pour money into researching possible ill effects of pesticides, and, as a result, many dangerous pesticides have already been banned. These days, very few pesticides even make it onto the market; one reason is that they must undergo approximately 100 health and environmental tests.

In the war of 1812, Oliver Hazard Perry pronounced, "We have seen the enemy, and they are us." In recent years, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has come under increasing scrutiny and criticism as many agencies have experienced delays and inefficiencies in this process. I personally believe that much of this problem stems not from inefficiencies inherent in NEPA's regulatory requirements, but instead from the way in which the planning process is implemented.