I saw my role at EPA as involving a large amount of education. I believed that the environment was not a widely understood area of public policy. There was a tendency to present it in primitive ways that seemed to me no longer conformed to the realities. The characterizations so often in the press are of white hats and black hats, that's the only way to make the issues come alive and be interesting. This approach neglects the critical contribution of science in helping us understand the nature of threats, risks, of the proportion of problems, some of which are more serious and enduring than others.
Money is limited.
Those kinds of disciplines have never been acknowledged in the national debate about the environment. So, we had two major reports that we conducted. One was the Science Advisory Board Report that resulted in the document Reducing Risk that characterized the threats to the environment, ranked them, and then evaluated EPA's programs in response to them. It concluded that while EPA's money was largely going for oil spills and hazardous waste, major threats to the environment were in the nature of climate change, species losses, forest fragmentation, ozone depletion, indoor air pollution, pesticide risk to the applicators of the chemicals. I thought that was an extremely important debate.