The New Mail: Letters on Scott Pruitt at EPA

There are 1344 Superfund Sites in the U.S.

From The New Yorker Magazine, April 16, 2018 Issue, Page 5.

TITLE: Pruitt vs. the E.P.A.

Margaret Talbot’s article about Scott Pruitt paints a scathing picture of his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (“Dirty Politics,” April 2nd). I was the first, and then the fifth, administrator of the agency. The environment is far healthier today than it was forty-seven years ago, when the E.P.A. was created, precisely because of the science-based standards that the agency implemented. Pruitt is systematically attacking both the E.P.A.’s budget and its scientific framework. If he is successful, the very reason for the E.P.A.’s creation—illness and disease from pollution—will reëmerge, and we will have to start from square one. The country must challenge the Trump Administration’s war on science. Otherwise, as a result of actions taken by Pruitt and this Administration, the uncontrolled pollution that we have greatly reduced in the past five decades will return.

William D. Ruckelshaus, Seattle, Wash.

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Pruitt is not, as he claims, an E.P.A. originalist. He is merely a servant to wealthy corporate interests. He is not there to protect the country’s clean air. He does not care about the long-term damage that a mountaintop mining operation can do to our drinking-water supplies and to our fishing habitats. He is not looking out for the well-being of future generations. Science is knowledge, and Pruitt’s denial of knowledge makes him unfit for government service. It is also the reason that career scientists are overwhelmingly abandoning the E.P.A. under his leadership. Pruitt did not fight Trump’s proposed twenty-five-per-cent cut to the E.P.A.’s budget. He says that he is sticking to “traditional” priorities, such as cleaning up Superfund sites, but he has been co-opted by the very industries that he is responsible for regulating. This cleanup uses current taxpayer money to remedy past damage that should have been corrected by the offending private industries. Essentially, Pruitt wants to privatize profits from businesses while socializing their expenses. Unfortunately, that attitude will only produce new Superfund sites for future taxpayers to deal with.

Richard Dickinson, Richmond Hill, Ga.

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I wept after reading Talbot’s article about Pruitt’s dismemberment of the E.P.A. My life’s work has been environmental protection. In the nineteen-sixties, I helped Interior Secretary Stewart Udall define the scope of a new approach to conservation, which included both cities and wild places. Then, as the White House assistant for conservation and beautification, I helped the Johnson Administration create new national parks, like the North Cascades and Redwood, and bring more trees and parks to neighborhoods in cities like Washington, D.C. In the eighties, I worked with the E.P.A. to develop a policy that required the agency to solicit balanced participation from industries, environmental organizations, and local citizens. For many years since, my work has focussed on how citizens and officials alike can be good neighbors to great rivers. Now, at the age of eighty-one, I have neither the strength nor the years ahead to fight against the mindless damage that is being done to our country—and to our planet—by Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and their colleagues in the Trump Administration. Many of the hard-won achievements of my life are in tatters. Although I am distraught, I know that thousands of well-educated, committed individuals will pick up the pieces and rebuild. Because they have to.

Sharon F. Francis, Charlestown, N.H.

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Margaret Talbot’s Article “Scott Pruitt’s Dirty Politics” | The New Yorker