The Agency is in a unique position to function as the conceptual cockpit for environmental leadership not just in the United States but in the whole world. It tends to respect the mission but has a fairly uninformed view of what's involved. It's remarkable how little the public understands about the Environmental Protection Agency. It's not like the Park Service where the mission is obvious. Anybody who visits a park will run into a Service that interacts regularly and directly with people.
Education is a large and important part of the job.
It required a great deal of outreach, a lot of attention to the message, a lot of effort to cultivate the press and television, and simply to explain. The public needs constantly to be reminded of the fact that we all do make choices, and many individual choices have consequences for the environment that people don't fully appreciate. I used to talk about things like inspection and maintenance of automobiles, something the public resists and that is very badly run in most states. The nature of wetlands is a subject I used to talk a lot about. It constantly amazes me that for 25 years at least American conservation groups have tried to publicize the very important contribution of this diminishing, rich resource we have, its importance to commercial fisheries and ducks and for filtering pollutants.