Nineteen eighty-eight marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment in 1963 of the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution. In the 1960s our effort was to learn as much as we could about environmental problems and the options for dealing with them. We undertook to arouse public awareness of the problems in order to generate political support for the policies and programs we were equipping ourselves to recommend. Our legislative initiatives, from today's perspective, evolved slowly, but they picked up momentum as we developed confidence in our perceptions of what was required.