Thirty years after Rachel Carson warned us in Silent Spring to reduce our dependence on pesticides, we have doubled our pesticide use. In 1993, people in Milwaukee, New York, and Washington, DC, were ordered to boil their drinking water. Twenty years after passage of the Clean Air Act, two in five Americans still live in areas where the air is dangerous to breathe. Fourteen years after Love Canal, one in four Americans lives within four miles of a toxic dumpsite. Asthma is on the rise.
Breast cancer is on the rise.
And the past 25 years have left us with a complex and unwieldy system of laws and regulations and increasing conflict over how we achieve environmental protection. An adversarial system of environmental policy. A system built on distrust. And too little environmental protection at too high a cost. In the next 25 years, we must maintain the progress we have made, and we must build on that progress.