Everybody wants clean, healthy air to breathe. Right? But nobody wants to turn off the electricity or get out of our automobiles. Right! The result follows: air pollution creates a threat to our own health and the environment. We also create some real ugliness in terms of smoke and an enveloping gray haze.

I am honored to have been chosen to lead the National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP), succeeding Bruce Hasbrouck, who devoted himself to the Association for the past two years and who leaves the Association in excellent condition. We all thank him for the hours (both on the ground and flying) spent visiting NAEP chapter locations to tell them the national story and support them as they grow.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn shook the scientific establishment when he published his momentous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Prior to Kuhn, the scientific community commonly believed that scientific and technical progress was generally achieved through the steady unceasing march of small progressive developments. In other words, progress generally builds slowly upon continuous and gradual developments; this belief, or perhaps myth, is still widely accepted by much of the general public, as well as a large segment of the scientific community.

In my last foray into ethical brain teasers (“The Environmental Professional in Public Office: Putting Schizophrenia to Work for You,” Issue 4(1) of Environmental Practice), I painted a picture of rampant schizophrenia within the ranks of the government regulatory corps, at one point in the day being expected to uphold the ethics of blind justice enforcing legislation over which the Environmental Professional had no control, and then minutes later being expected to be the consummate scientist.

As people around the globe pay increasing attention to environmental issues, the controversial topic of pesticide use resurfaces again and again. Scientists and policy makers continue to pour money into researching possible ill effects of pesticides, and, as a result, many dangerous pesticides have already been banned. These days, very few pesticides even make it onto the market; one reason is that they must undergo approximately 100 health and environmental tests.

The Army has recently published a final regulation that now will serve as the vehicle to guide implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This rule is a revision of former implementation guidance issued in December 1988. Army leadership issued the revision to both clarify and update the current regulation. Policy initiatives such as the National Performance Review have streamlined the federal government through decentralization, reduction and simplification of regulations, and management of risks. This revised rule strives to meet the spirit of the National Performance Review and other executive policy expressions issued over the last decade.

“What ever happened when CEQA was first passed?” This question has been asked of me many times. Certainly different people will have different answers, but let me respond from my experience.

Does it “significantly affect the quality of the human environment” to bulldoze an Indian cemetery? To knock down a fine old building? To allow development that changes the character of a low-income or ethnic neighborhood? If a project subject to review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) may do any of these things, should an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) be prepared? If not, why not? Cemeteries, old buildings, and neighborhoods are among the environmental components sometimes called “cultural resources.” Impacts on them must be considered in judging impact intensity in an Environmental Assessment (EA) under NEPA. According to the NEPA regulations, an EA needs to establish—among many other things—whether “cultural,” “historical,” or “scientific” resources are likely to be affected, and if so, how serious the effect will be. How can NEPA analysts most efficiently do this? The first problem is to establish what to consider. “Historic resources” as defined in the National Historic Preservation Act certainly need to be addressed, but the NEPA regulations refer separately to “cultural” and “scientific” resources; several federal legal requirements besides NEPA and the National Historic Preservation Act identify classes of other-than-historic cultural resources for consideration. The next problem is to identify cultural resources and decide if they may be affected. This requires doing something that makes some NEPA analysts uncomfortable—talking with concerned people. Finally, determining impact intensity seems simple, at least with historic resources, because the regulations implementing Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act discriminate clearly between effects that are “adverse” and those that are “not adverse.” However, equating “adverse effect” under Section 106 with “significant impact” under NEPA would have disastrous practical consequences. The other types of cultural resources are not burdened with the definitional oddities of Section 106, but measuring impact potential on each of them presents its own challenges. A defensible methodology is proposed—again, based on consultation with concerned parties.

To reduce the potential risks posed by pesticides used in operations, the City of Seattle is implementing a comprehensive pesticide reduction strategy. The strategy calls for eliminating the most hazardous products and reducing overall pesticide use. This paper describes health and environmental criteria that were used by the city to evaluate pesticide products. These criteria included acute toxicity; presence of carcinogens, reproductive or developmental toxicants, or endocrine disruptors; persistence and mobility in soil; and hazards to off-target species. A checklist system was developed to place pesticides into three tiers according to potential hazards. Pesticides (except fungicides) that fall into Tier 1 cannot be used unless an exception request is granted. Results of the pesticide screening process are presented, including tier assignments by pesticide group and active ingredient, and a breakdown of which criteria were triggered most frequently. Excluding golf courses, pesticide use by the city declined by 36% the year after the policy went into effect. Including golf courses, the decline was 26%.

Emission and effluent trading programs are increasingly being advocated for the nation's air and water quality programs. However, important distinctions must be drawn between credit and allowance trading, based on how much decision-making authority is transferred from regulators to dischargers. Credit trading programs are extensions of command-and-control regulation. Allowance trading programs, like markets, decentralize decisions on the means to control discharges and the location of that control. A review of existing trading programs finds allowance trading programs stimulate more aggressive pollution prevention behavior and result in lower compliance costs than credit trading.

In December of 2000, Environmental Practice published an article by Robin Shoal in which she concluded that ISO 14001's ability to reduce negative environmental impacts depended largely upon the strength and sincerity of the environmental commitments of those firms choosing to adopt an ISO 14001 environmental management system (EMS). According to Shoal, the jury was still out on whether ISO 14001 would move beyond hype and offer true hope for improved environmental performance of firms worldwide. Building on the work of Shoal and others, this article draws a more definitive conclusion about the ability of ISO 14001 to actually improve the environmental performance of American firms and the motivation of those firms seeking certification. Data from a mailed survey of randomly selected ISO 14001 certified companies in the US reveals that the majority of firms became certified out of a desire to “be a good neighbor” and to establish themselves as environmental leaders within their industries. While managers hope that ISO 14001 will help them increase profitability, they generally say that they care even more about ISO 14001's ability to improve environmental performance. Data from this study show that the vast majority of respondents reported environmental improvements related to the implementation of an ISO 14001 EMS, regardless of their reasons for becoming certified.