Air Quality

From 1966 to 1978, in my capacity as environmental staff director for Senator Edmund S. Muskie’s pollution subcommittee, I was the principal staff person in the United States Senate responsible for drafting most of our landmark environmental laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, oil and hazardous waste liability legislation which sired Superfund, and the critical “environmental impact statement” amendment to the National Environmental Policy Act.

In that role I helped establish, in law, the currently much maligned “precautionary principle”.  While that is a term applied to US environmental laws by right-wing commentators, it also correctly describes the primary reason for the steps we took more than 35 years ago.

We were admittedly ignorant on the scope of risk posed by pollution.  Our science was rudimentary at best.  We knew the air was dirty and that, under certain conditions people were being killed. We knew that rivers caught fire from time to time; Lake Erie was dying and industrial and municipal wastes were destroying estuaries, rivers and lakes.  

The plain fact was that a few courageous Senators and Congressmen decided that it was better to launch a massive assault on pollution of our air water and land, than to wait for demonstrable scientific evidence of the specific impact of that pollution.

LEON G. BILLINGS
Board of Advisors, Green Tech Foundation