Completing the Loop: Panel Discussion

WILLIAM DRAYTON, President, ASHOKA Innovators for the PublicDAVID MORELL, Ph.D., President, EPICS InternationalJOHN STOKES, Director, The Tracking Project

[20 ELR 10541]

WILLIAM DRAYTON: How do we solve the problems society faces? We are not going to solve them with capital. The cost of capital has been rising gradually over the last several decades as we have moved into a world capital market. Capital is seeking higher returns elsewhere, and we are saving less. Nor will solutions come through further, more aggressive exploitation of natural resources. Our per unit cost of the natural resources we use is also gradually rising — as the very need for environmental protections demonstrates.

One growth area remains: the use of labor and human capital. We know that we are not using 45 percent of the potential, healthy, available labor force in this society. If we were to put that force to work, we would increase productivity while decreasing dependency. It can be done: let me cite just one example.

If we were to remove the roughly 30 percent tax we now impose on the employment of labor, along with all the bureaucratic difficulties, and were to impose gradually an equal revenue burden on resources, we would achieve a massive change in the relative price of labor to resources. Anyone who has studied introductory economics can tell you what that would accomplish: we would conserve natural resources; we would use more labor and more human capital. The economy would be more efficient — although productivity, as we currently define it, would appear worse because we now define productivity as the removal of more people from the economy.

The environmental community has not considered this approach.

A secondary factor is politics — again, something with which lawyers aren't supposed to deal — but that I think goes to the core of what is happening in our field.

Much of the uncertainty making our lives difficult as lawyers trying to create and interpret a system of law is that the policy direction keeps shifting. We don't have a stable political consensus.

Building a center is critical. Let me draw a contrast with financial regulations. Only two regulatory systems in the country are even remotely on the same scale — financial and environmental regulation. These affect every single business and therefore are incredibly complex. The two systems are, however, organized in fundamentally different ways.

In the environmental field, we began with a simple notion — that we had a few pollutants that were manageable with a straightforward government system moving in to take care of them. But with each passing year we have more and more pollutants and more and more people to regulate, and the system has grown increasingly complicated. The system now is not working well.

What the financial regulators have done is created an in-between group — the accountants, lawyers, and others who fill out the tax forms and certify the prospectuses to the SEC. I don't think it is the least bit coincidental that when the era of deregulation came up in 1980, no one talked about "regulatory relief" in the financial area. Instead, this thrust was heavily focused on the environmental area.

It is not a matter of which system causes the most irritation or imposes the greatest costs. The big difference, I think, is that the financial area has a large group of people committed to a stable, rational, centrist management of that system.

This roomful of people seeking rationality in environmental regulation is the exception in the environmental field. There are not enough of us. I want to beware of saying that the answer [20 ELR 10542] is to have more people like us. But that is, in effect, what I believe is necessary.

There are a number of ways to reach this desired end. We could follow the example of the financial arena and rapidly increase the use of environmental auditors. This is already occurring out of necessity.

We could deploy private (but liable to the public) environmental auditors for both the measurement and certification of ambient effects and of whether or not a firm is using generally accepted procedures in its handling of environmental matters. We could do so both for major facilities with technically complex problems and for simple, small scale, however. In fact, we have been using such auditors for years in the states' almost universal requirement that well be tested for biological contamination at the point of sale. Why not do it for toxics and chemicals as well?

Pennsylvania has applied the auditor model to radon testing. We could deploy them as well in large oil refineries. The Union Oil Company has a wonderful computer system that they would love to sell to other companies. This is the sort of thinking that we need.

Another area I'd like to address is implementation. Here the discussion so far has already been concrete and specific, but I would like to add a few points.

The damage that was done during the Reagan years was very real. The original Reagan budget proposal for EPA was a two-thirds cut, in real terms, in two years. It was paralleled by a personnel program that, according to the Administration's own figures, would have meant retaining in their jobs only 200 to 300 of the 5,400 EPA staff at Headquarters by June of 1982. The rest would have quit, been fired, or involuntarily moved ("bumped") and downgraded. The intent was radical. This is what I referred to as a very unstable political base. If this can happen, we have a problem.

The ultimate effects weren't quite that bad. But EPA is now functioning with the same level of real resources it had in 1975 — before any of the new toxics statutes were enacted. The water program budget has declined 43 percent in real purchasing power since 1981, although during that period the number of pollutants to be regulated jumped from five to several hundred, and the number of people subject to regulation has risen roughly from 45,000 to 120,000.

There is a tendency to dismiss complaints about the budget as mere complaints of bureaucrats. But this is a real problem. The chairs of six major chemical companies were so shocked when they reviewed what happened to the EPA research and development budget that they went to the Appropriations Committee and testified for a 35 percent increase in one year. I suggest that the ABA committee could help put a spotlight on this issue. The field's center must help ensure that EPA and the state institutions are being treated in a way that allows them to do their jobs.

Roger Strelow pointed earlier to the problem of voluntary compliance we now have. No regulatory system can work without it. There is a terrific debate about how much voluntary compliance actually exists, but I think, most of us know that it is not what it should be, and it is far worse than shat it used to be.

According to the Commerce Department, in the early 1980s the level of real investment by industry in pollution abatement decreased by 38 percent — just as all the new statutes requiring control of toxic as well as the conventional pollutants addressed by the earlier Earth Day wave of legislation should have begun to be implemented. That has profound implications for the government's work.

When we move from 98 percent voluntary compliance to 96 percent,we have twice as many people out of compliance, and we have many other people, as Mr. Strelow said, wondering whether their competitors are being made to comply. That has serious implications for everyone's morale. And it leads to the question to which a number of us have referred: are we doing enough to make the job possible for the public servants we ask to do these jobs?

We are asking a lot of people to do impossible jobs with inadequate resources, under difficult statutes. We are making them the scapegoats, which is destructive for everyone.

Let me make one final comment, about global issues. In Mexico City, which has a population less than one-tenth the U.S. population, one million children have measurable learning loss because of lead poisoning, while in the U.S. we have three million cases. This is chiefly a "cost" of leaded gasoline. Unless we somehow feel that people across the border are different from us, we should be worried about that.

Beyond the ethical issues, a new Harris poll for the United Nations Environment Programme, taken in 21 countries of all sorts across the globe, displayed astonishing results. Public opinion was almost identical on each of the questions in all the countries polled. And on all but one of the 21 questions asked, the governments lagged behind the population. I suspect that for our individual planning as well as for our values we should be thinking more about not only what the global environmental is doing to us, but what can we contribute globally as well.

DAVID MORRELL: I was struck by much of what Mr. Drayton said. For some time, I have used the comparison of the financial system to make several additional points.

For example, the Internal Revenue Service has roughly 77,000 employees, versus roughly 11,000 or 12,000 in all of EPA, including the regions and the labs — making EPA one-seventh the size of IRS. Then there are 14,000 or so personnel at the Bureau of Land Management, which, of course, also has an important job to do, but I find it hard to equate the BLM with the scale and social significance of the Environmental Protection Agency.

There also are a set of financial institutions, called banks, for which we have no equivalents in the waste management area. As good and as big as Chemical Waste Management, Inc. may be, it can't compare with banks and their broad scale role in the financial area. We may want to speculate about ways to move in that direction.

Mr. Anderson earlier proposed three fallacies. I would like to return to them. The first fallacy is that we have a system of some rationality, comprehensiveness, and comprehensibility. There is a great deal of documentation suggesting that we don't have such a system.

The second fallacy is that compliance is feasible. With the contradictions and the confusion that we see, it clearly isn't feasible. In fact, nobody is fully in compliance with all the statutes. In terms of legitimacy of the regulatory programs, this creates a situation akin to Prohibition and the non-compliance of the large number of people still consuming alcohol. All of us who are out of compliance undermine the credibility of a compliance-dependent system.

The third fallacy is that compliance would advance our social objectives. One wonders as you look at this, "Compliance for what?" I suspect that is the single mega-question facing us. We assume that the system we see before us must serve someone's interest or it wouldn't be there. But it is striking, [20 ELR 10543] Mr. Drayton, how far ahead the public opinion polls are from the enforcement of all these laws.

Public pressures produce the law. I see this not just in this country but in my work in Thailand and elsewhere. We are seeing tremendous public pressure for rhetorical response, if you like — for legislative bodies or military-dominated systems to respond by setting up a new national environment board or a new Clean Air Act. But the public pressure ends there — it doesn't go on to pressure institutions for enforcement. In some ways, the regulated community has itself to blame for this; they are able to palliate the citizenry by the passage of laws which everyone knows will not be enforced.

In 1972 we saw the passage of water acts that were going to ban all discharge of pollutants by 1985. What did we find in the 1984 period? HSWA, which says we will ban land disposal — leaving us wondering where the liquid wastes will go. They are, in fact, going through a pretreatment equivalent, with the effluent treated and then disposed of into navigable waters.

In ten years we have come full circle. We have seen the system graft the toxics regulation of the last decade onto earlier laws and onto existing agencies without coming to terms with the difficulties pre-existing institutions and regulatory systems have in fully coping with new and expanded responsibilities. This phenomenon is evidenced in fire departments across the land expected to cope with hazardous materials storage and emergency response — particularly post-Bhopal; in air agencies expected to deal with benzene and airborne metals; and in water agencies expected to deal with pretreatment rules.

Frankly, it often boils down to an unwillingness to spend money, both taxpayers' money and corporate money. So we pass laws promising a lot, but actually intended to deliver little. This is especially apparent in Superfund — our unwillingness to commit large sums of money, either private or public, but also to admit that this is what we are doing.

Let me end on a somewhat more positive note, by offering some suggestions about where we might go in the future. It seems to me that some large themes emerge from our discussions.

One is that we must decide how to motivate people and institutions toward self-compliance. The model of the IRS system presents itself. Nobody fully follows 100 percent of the tax code. But very few violate beyond five to ten percent off true deductions and Schedule C accounting — because people are aware of the chances of enforcement, including random audits and envelopes of performance within the big IRS computers. If I were making $ 60,000 a year and were to have a sudden large increase in my church contributions every Sunday, the computer would take note. We have nothing of the sort in the environmental arena. It is not difficult to create those systems, but we have lacked the courage to do so.

The answer to the question of how to motivate people and institutions toward compliance also lies locally and individually, with individual corporations, individual citizens, and individual local communities. That brings us to the single word, "responsibility." People need to be treated with respect and given responsibility. They need to be expected to perform, given a chance to comply, and then penalized if they fail to do so. But instead, we have assumed non-compliance, set up systems presumptive of distrust, and then failed to enforce them.

Responsibility is followed by another simple single word: "equity." We must begin incorporating some kind of equity into the system and expect geographic areas to take care of their portion of a waste stream.

We are going to be fascinated and very disturbed by the results of the October 1989 SARA 104 reporting from the states in this regard. And we are going to continue to see fifty states at civil war with one another over these issues until we build some sense of equity into the system, without autarchy. This is a thin but important line that, again, has to do with the responsibility of each local, state, and regional agency or government to carry its share of the load and not push the costs onto somebody else, from acid rain to benzene to toxic metals. The Dickensian practice of throwing your wastes out your window on to the sidewalk won't work anymore — and that, of course, is what we have been doing with hazardous waste management.

We must develop clear expectations followed by strong enforcement of something worth enforcing, supported by education and public information, particularly geared to the small and medium-sized businesses.

In conclusion, let me review a few specifics. For toxics today we need to be reminded of where we were in the 1960s and early 1970s in water quality management: enforcement conferences, the gross failures of the pre-1972 Clean Water Act, and the tremendously important lesson of developing technology-based standards. Despite some economic deficiencies, the 1972 Water Act concept of secondary treatment for sewage plants and BAT (best available technology) for industry was terribly important for waste management, waste minimization, and recycling. The scrubber is there or it isn't. The reduction unit is there or it isn't. We can have a sense of how well things are working.

We need technology-based standards applicable nationally in the toxics arena, supplemented locally by some sort of risk-based approaches allowing for more flexibility so that localities that want to can be more stringent than the minimums. Why should Palo Alto, for instance, live at the same level of toxic environment as a dirtier city if it doesn't have to? It won't want to, but who pays the piper in this case? Palo Alto taxes itself or precludes the next electronics firm from coming into the Stanford Industrial Park in exchange for more ground water protection and tighter standards.

It makes sense to combine a national program of technology-based standards with clear guidance and approaches for locals that want to employ a more stringent risk-based approach.

In addition, cross-media training should be encouraged. We should be able to say that perhaps we won't eliminate all air pollutants, but we'll have the world's best ground water control, or all of our water will be cleaned of trihalomethanes, but we'll breathe a little more dirty air. These kinds of cross-media, area-wide offset programs, administered locally, that go beyond the national technology-based standards, also make sense to me.

To return to one of Mr. Drayton's insights, we might begin thinking about waste minimization in terms of people as well as resources. Hazardous waste is waste. Unproductive people are wasted people. We see a lot of both in this society. There aretremendous advantages in moving us more aggressively toward greater efficiency in both areas.

We need greater amounts of economic incentives in the system. The regulated community is too large to police, even if we double or triple the resources of EPA. We need a series of economic incentives for compliance, probably associated with taxes and rebates. You can call it a fee if that makes you more comfortable. I would rather call it what it is: a tax.

[20 ELR 10544]

We should tax waste generation and rebate those taxes for waste minimization programs, or use the income for off-site treatment subsidies. One deleterious aspect of waste minimization or reduction is that it undercuts the market for hazardous waste treatement, rendering it more likely that the treatment facilities needed to support the smaller companies won't be built.

Dow, DuPont, and General Electric will take care of themselves. But the thousands of little companies can't and won't. How do we meet their needs? With treatment subsidized by taxes on waste generation, perhaps. We might also use this revenue for up-front loans to the small firms. Many small companies can install cost-effective waste reduction technologies and techniques, but they may not have the financial resources to do so. Subsidized loans for small firms are essential to my sense of the system.

In addition, we need more flexibility through permitting by rule. The permitting system is a nightmare. Those who should have permits don't. We need to decide how to make a permit the right thing to have. How many of us would drive without a driver's license? How hard is it to get a driver's license? Anyone can get one. We need a system in which everyone has a license. Then we can improve things. Anything is better than the permitting situation we have now.

Finally, we must involve the public much more, and more aggressively, than we have thus far. We must begin to recognize that there are a lot of intelligent people out there, but they behave like "Not In My Backyard" types. I am working on a paper in this field in which I consciously use the phrase, "Just Say No" to describe how communities generally respond to hazardous waste siting proposals because they have no power to say anything else about meaningful issues anymore. Bring them a hazardous waste incinerator to say something about. They will just say no.

All of what I am suggesting might begin to turn that around so that we can begin to give the system some credibility based on local responsibility.

JOHN STOKES: I was going to call my final comments "Beyond Compliance." I thought that companies could tell the government, "This is a mess. We can't agree with any of it, and there is no way we can comply. We would like to go beyond compliance. We can do better than what you are seeking and still turn a profit." But now I am going beyond "Beyond Compliance."

I have never been called idealistic as many times as during the course of this conference. I don't believe I am idealistic. On the contrary, I am quite realistic. I live in the world of survival, and I am realistic about the things that I see. I didn't think caringabout other people was idealistic. I thought it was just the way we are supposed to be.

We are at the point in the story where we say that the emperor has no clothes. But if you remember the story, everyone agreed they would not tell the emperor that he had on no clothes. In the end, it was an unsophisticated child, without guile, who spoke out. The child simply spoke the truth: "The emperor is naked." That is what we need to do — speak the truth.

We are at the point in the story where the hero goes under the ocean or to another world to recover some object to come back and revitalize his country, because nothing seems to work anymore.

I don't think money is the answer to all of our problems. We need help from nature. We can't do it ourselves. Perhaps the trees can help us purify some of the pollution we've created. Maybe the ocean — salt — has the power to eat up radioactivity.

The world I live in with the native people taught me that if I take a plant, I must give something back. Nature is a balance. There is night; there is day. There is female; there is male. How can we take from the world and never give back? What do companies give back to the earth when they take out valuable chemicals?

There is a balance to the earth. Striking a balance begins with a concrete act. I would suggest that we need to open ourselves more to nature if we are going to expect any help from nature.

In the world in which I live when I go out tracking, shelter, water, fire, and food are the things that all human beings need. (We assume you have air or you wouldn't be bothering to look for shelter, water, fire and food. So I don't list air, but we all know it is necessary.)

First you look for shelter, because if you have a good shelter, you can live without the other needs for a little while. You can go without water for a couple of days. You can do without fire if you build a good shelter, and you don't need food for about 28 days. This is called prioritizing.

As you are building your shelter, you have your eyes out for water. When your shelter is built, you look for water, and as you do this you are also looking for the things that will make fire. Because you have a complete vision of what you need, you are able to look for the things you need, in order, all at the same time.

I might call that a macro/micro vision. When I get on the track of an animal, the first thing I do is look where I am. Am I in the desert? On the side of a slope? On the top of a mountain? In a wash? That all affects the way the animal was moving. Then I look closely at the track at hand. After I have analyzed that track very closely — including up to about three inches out from the track because every action has an equal and opposite reaction — I take that micro information and plug it back into the macro landscape.

Tracking is an exact science. It is not magic, but observation. I would propose that a strategy employing a broad global view and a narrow local view, returning to a global outlook with a prioritized strategy, might be a useful approach in the environmental arena.

There was a man called the Great Peacemaker among the Iroquois. He came at a time of great destruction. The Iroquois people were killing one another. No one was free to wander without fear of being killed. As the Great Peacemaker wandered from village to village, he found that all men wanted peace, but each was afraid to lay down his weapons for fear that that the others wouldn't. That is what I hear from the corporate people: "The little companies will get away with murder if we big firms comply first." So who is going to be the first?

I find that the American people are very moral people. They want to be moral and want to be perceived as good people. So when they hear that we are exporting our banned insecticides to the Third World, they don't like it. If we were to export some sound ecological strategies, people would feel good again. The American people want to be doing the right thing as much as they want to be on the winning side. Perhaps prevailing over Japan in a trade war isn't the right approach. Maybe the best path is to show the Japanese that there is a different way to treat the earth. Maybe that would be our victory.

[20 ELR 10545]

DISCUSSION

PARTICIPANT: Moving from the macro to the micro: it seems to me that one of the micro things that we need to do in our agencies, perhaps in our law firms as well, and certainly at EPA, is to look at the personnel evaluation system and see whether creativity and common sense are valued in career development. I have the feeling that at EPA it is not. We recently adopted a new personnel evaluation in my agency, and as we completed the forms I realized that this recognition appeared nowhere in our forms. I made it clear that in my division these qualities would be valued at evaluation time. I think that is a "micro" that would produce a lot of positive results.

MORELL: Within EPA, in Region IX in San Francisco, there is a fairly explicit system of expectations for each professional employee, spelled out and checked in the annual evaluation. It is deeply grounded in the national system of strategic planning and management within the bean-counting system, however, and I have been vocal in criticizing it. In some ways such evaluation demands a bigger picture. At least at that level, we aren't going to be able to change the personnel evaluation system until we change something more broadly — which is where we are heading.

DRAYTON: I would like to add that encouraging people anywhere to be creative requires an environment where failure is rewarded. That is difficult in the typical workings of government. The more frustrated people become and the more we are driven to extremes, the more the center loses strength and people in government are subject to irrational and unfair attacks.

It is hard to ask people to serve in the environmental field at the moment, given what they have to face. Given the fact that so many people here have served in government and are now serving outside, we all know that people in the corporate environmental offices have a hard time too; it is not just in government agencies that the work is difficult and thankless.

Corporate environmental officers are often less than enthusiastically supported by plant managers. EPA and the state agencies should understand that when setting up incentives in the system.

I suggested earlier that perhaps this ABA committee might want to look at what we are doing to make the environmental field an attractive, viable career path. I would suggest that this would be helpful not just in government, and certainly not just in EPA, but also in the corporate sector, and even more importantly, in the research sector. The center in our field is small, far too small. Nonetheless, perhaps we can improve the situation if we work together to protect the broader professional community of which we are a part.

We need creativity at all levels, not just because of our problems but because of the nature of the field in which we operate. We are riding a learning curve. We know so little about the impacts we have on the environment. Every year we learn more, and what we learn is not always very encouraging.

To take some examples: we know that we are not creating one pollutant at a time. We live in random mixes of thousands of God knows what. Our scientific methodology is based upon taking one substance, painting the back of a rat with it, seeing if a bump develops, and then regulating that substance for that mode of delivery. But we know that frequently there are synergistic effects that are far more important.

When you stop to think about the implications of that one insight for our regulatory system, anyone who says we do not need creativity at every point in the system does not understand the situation facing us. And if we don't do something to make it viable for people to be creative in this field, we won't see any creativity.

STOKES: I agree. Part of the Great Peacemaker story was that he took the weapons of war and buried them underneath the roots of a white pine tree. That is the root of the expression, to bury the hatchet, by the way. He took one arrow and said, "This is like one tribe or nation. Break this." A warrior took it and broke it easily. The Great Peacemaker then took five arrows and bundled them together. He handed them to the same man, and said, "Now see if you can break them." The man could not break the five arrows. "If we all band together, you see how five are much stronger than one." The expression that he used is still used today in the Iroquois Confederacy: "Let us put our minds together as one mind." The people here today can do the same.

JOAN BERTNSTEIN: Mr Drayton, would you comment on the political dynamics that have surrounded this movement? Earlier, you referred to the radical response of the Reagan Administration, with which I think I would agree. I would like you to comment, however, on how much you think the possible perception of the American people that the government had gone overboard — that there was over-regulation, over-intrusiveness — through the 1970s was the basis for the Reagan radicalism. If that is the case, do you see the pendulum swinging towards the center or moving back?

DRAYTON: The basic problem is that we have too weak a center. We had too weak a center in the 1970s as well. All of us have been working to find better ways of getting things done, to try to make people work together. But there are too few of us, so the dynamic of the situation has been great swings from one side to the other.

Until we solve that core political problem, instability will continue to plague us, with swings back and forth. My fear is that each new swing will contribute to the destruction of the center. In the last few years, profound damage has been done to state agencies, to EPA, and to the environmental management positions of many companies.

Lou Harris and I were reviewing some figures on the environment a couple of years ago, and he commented that if the public came to believe that they were not being protected against toxics as all these statutes promise, we would see the largest single net vote switch that he could measure. He estimated that, on the national average (assuming no major issue like war suddenly emerging to cut across it), it would be worth a 14 percent net vote swing.

The possibility does exist, politically, for another swing, which would lead to insistent demands for quick solutions to our problems.

What if that were to happen now — after eight years of the other extreme? To whom do we turn to meet the demands? What sort of sophistication do we have? What sort of experiments — methodologies that work at the state level — are going forward? If we don't have a practical, better way of doing things, when that pressure comes upon us it will be too late. We will have only another swing of intense and inefficient regulation that, typically, will victimize the larger and better companies. Then we will see a swing back the other way. And with each one of those swings, the center — us — grows weaker.

MORRELL: That swing already may be evident in California, as seen in the passage of Proposition 65 by a vote of two-to-one statewide, which reinforces the 14-point swing projection. Proposition 65 passed by a plurality in everyone of the 58 counties. That includes Alpine County, where some ski resorts [20 ELR 10546] are the only real employers, with 25,000 people, and Los Angeles County with more people (over 8 million) than in all of New Jersey. It passed in Republican strongholds like Orange County and in Democratic strongholds like San Francisco County.

Proposition 65 is an extraordinarily strong, misunderstood, poorly written document, reflecting revulsion at ten years of mismanagement and failure.

At the same time, we saw Mr. Deukmejian eliminate California OSHA — he fired all of its employees. But a ballot initiative has passed, forcing him, by vote of the people, to reinstitute the department. His argument was that the federal OSHA would fill California's needs, even while the Reagan Administration was slashing federal OSHA's budget.

WILLIAM F. PEDERSEN, JR.: I am a little distressed by the turn of the discussion. It does not make sense to make toxics the centerpiece of concern. If you look at the statistics, the American people are physically healthier, living longer, and suffering less from chronic diseases than ever before. If you look at the state of the natural world, however, you will find that it is deteriorating at about the same rate that public health is improving.

I fully agree with the great emotional charge — the swing of the pendulum — to which you refer. But it puzzles me that the discussion has become fixed on toxics. Why is this?

MORELL: I think it has very little to do with public health. It has to do with outrage and anger, with a sense of a lack of power to make decisions, a sense that substances are dumped against the will of the community, or without its knowledge.

Some of the anger arises from concern over acid rain and global warming. But people haven't been given as open an opportunity to act politically on those issues. Toxics are on the political agenda for a variety of reasons and, therefore, become the focus of the anger.

DRAYTON: The Harris Poll of which I spoke earlier covers the full array of global environmental issues. The intensity of feeling on some of these ecological issues is great, and universal. In fact, the most striking thing about the poll is the fact that the Hungarians, the Nigerians, the Chinese, and the Canadians all feel the same thing.

* * *

MICHAEL P. LAST: Allow me to conclude the program by saying that our discussions reflect agreement that a number of problems exist. Of course, part of our function here was to identify such problems. I hope, however, that people will not be depressed into inaction. While we face numerous problems, we also offered many opportunites for action. "Problem" should be seen as "challenge."

It is fair to say that many of the ideas that were shared today offer a truly valuable opportunity for thought. Particularly interesting to me was the concept of developing a new paradigm, a new way of looking at things, trying to break out of our old patterns of thought. Within corporate America, there are new ways of looking at waste reduction and at product design with environmental considerations in mind. There is an intensity of activity which I think bodes well for us.

The question is how to capture and convert these good ideas, this energy, into a broader form of activity — one that is more effective and organized than than what we have discussed today. Obviously, no absolute answers were offered today. But I hope that our discussions will stimulate creativity and action, and I thank you all for sharing your thoughts, and for participating.