Good evening. I want to thank Eva for that introduction and for inviting me here to kick off this semester-long series of lectures on the environment.

I've been asked to talk to you tonight about how the Environmental Protection Agency goes about its business.

Actually, it's rather simple. We use the best available science--both from inside and outside the agency--to evaluate potential dangers that lurk in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat.

And, under President Clinton, we evaluate these dangers based on their potential to harm children. This is a change for EPA. But it is a common-sense change. We used to evaluate potential health risks by their effects on the average, healthy male. But children--because their systems are still growing--cannot tolerate the same level of risk as an adult.

And by protecting our most vulnerable, we are creating greater protections for all.

So there you have it. The best available science is used to nurture the healthiest environment for our children.

Of course, if that's all there was to it I could now say: "Thank you very much for coming. I hope you enjoyed my speech. And now I'm ready for a few questions."

Complicating the situation is that all of our work is open to interpretation, and on any given day someone is mad at us for something. Depending on the issue, you'll hear some environmental group say we're moving too slowly. Business says we're moving too quickly. And last May, a couple of federal judges said we shouldn't be moving at all.

Tonight I'd like to walk you through the process we used to create just one new rule regarding air quality. A rule, by the way, that is very important for the air quality here in Massachusetts and throughout New England.

I think you'll see that our science and procedures are rigorous. That the process is open to public scrutiny. And that once we identify a problem, we try to come up with sensible, flexible, cost-effective solutions.

The promise of a cool, clean breeze doesn't mean we throw caution to the wind.

But first, let me give you a quick history of the agency, because I think it will put my discussion on our standards and procedures into context.

Sometimes it's hard to believe what things were like just 30 years ago. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio--choked with sludge and sewage--actually caught fire. Sunsets in communities around the nation took on eerie glows as the light was filtered through the haze and smog of polluted skies.

The public demanded action, and on April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day was held. Millions of people from around the nation--of all ages and backgrounds--participated in events designed to heighten awareness of our fragile environment and of our duties to become better stewards of this legacy we pass from generation to generation.

Congress and then President Nixon responded to this national movement, and the Environmental Protection Agency was established on December 2, 1970.

Shortly after creating EPA, Congress passed three important environmental laws and gave EPA the power to enforce them. They were the Clean Air Act, the Safe Water Drinking Act and the Clean Water Act.

Later, another important law--the Superfund Act--was passed in 1980 in response to an environmental disaster called Love Canal in upstate New York. The new law gave us the power to clean up dangerously polluted sites and recover the costs from the polluter.

You may recall that in that case, schools and houses had been built over the site of an abandoned toxic chemical dump. Contaminated water started seeping into the drinking water supply.

The water had even started rising to the surface. Children were splashing around in polluted puddles, and 952 families had to be evacuated.

The progress we've made since EPA was founded is remarkable.

in 1972, only 85 million people were served by sewage treatment plants of any type. Raw sewage was routinely being dumped into our rivers and lakes. EPA set up a loan fund that communities could use to build modern treatment plants on terms they could afford.

Today, more than 180 million people are being served by modern wastewater treatment facilities and our waters are spared millions of gallons of pollution.

We also set the first national standards that limited industrial water pollution--a program that today prevents a billion pounds of toxic chemicals from reaching our rivers, lakes and streams each year.

The Cuyahoga River is even making a comeback. Fish and plant life have returned to large parts of the river. And the portion of the river that caught fire has been cleaned up enough that it is now a center for restaurants and nightlife.

Before the Safe Water Drinking Act--which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year--there were no binding national standards for treating or testing our drinking water. You just couldn't trust your tap water and outbreaks of waterborne diseases were common in many of our major cities and communities.

Now 92 percent of our nation's water systems--which serve 88 percent of the population--meet all federal health standards.

And by regulating emissions from both our smokestacks and tailpipes, we have made the air dramatically cleaner. In fact, in just this past decade, two-thirds or our metropolitan arm that had unhealthy air now meet federal air quality standards. That means 50 million people are now breathing easier in cities and communities around the nation.

We've cleaned up almost 600 Superfund sites and we expect to have finished 1,180 by the year 2005. In fact, at the Love Canal site, new families are moving into rehabilitated homes.

We've made a lot of progress. But problems still remain. Although now they are sometimes more subtle, more difficult to solve. When a river is catching fire, it's pretty clear what you have to do. When the air is so thick with pollution that you can barely see a city from an airplane overhead, you know you have to act.

But nowadays the problems can be more complex. And as our science improves, we also find health threats--especially threats to children--that we were previously unaware of.

Let me walk you through a real example of a new standard that we began working on almost 10 years ago and will likely be fought out in the Supreme Court in the next century.

At issue are two distinct but related actions: First, what are appropriate health standards for air quality? And--having set those standards--how do we protect states from being thrown out of compliance with the standards by neighboring states whose pollution is being carried downwind?

First, let's look at how we set health standards. The Clean Air Act of 1970--and as amended in 1977 and 1990--requires EPA to review every five years the health risks posed by different chemicals or compounds commonly emitted by industry, power generation or automobiles. These reviews are to be based on the best available science and--if the evidence calls for it--new standards are to be set.

And the law says that those standards are to be set without regard to cost. Cost is only to be considered at the implementation stage.

As part of our periodic review of smog and soot--technically referred to as ozone and particulate matter--EPA scientists and experts pored over thousands and thousands of relevant, peer-reviewed scientific studies published in reputable scientific journals. Some of these studies themselves had taken years to perform.

In all, we reviewed 3,000 studies on ozone and 2,000 on soot. And based on our review of the data, it seemed that more stringent standards were needed for both.

We believed that tightening the standards for smog and soot would save about 15,000 people a year from premature death, reduce by thousands the number of hospital visits for breathing problems and lung damage, and greatly reduce the onset of severe asthma attacks and other breathing disorders in children.

But the review didn't stop there. As required by the Clean Air Act, EPA turned the data over to an independent group of scientific and technical experts called the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee.

Between 1994 and 1996, this committee--which we call CASAC--met 11 times in public meetings that lasted about 125 hours and were based on about 250 of the most relevant studies.

And their advice was unanimous. New standards were needed.

But the review still didn't stop there. Next, we held public meetings around the country on the proposed standards. About 400 people testified. Overall, we received 57,000 public comments, including 14,000 calls on a special toll-free number we had set up and another 4,000 via e-mail.

Congress weighed in as well, holding 24 hearings on the new smog and soot standards, with hours and hours of questions and answers. And after that extensive review, no member of Congress offered legislation to weaken or set aside the tougher standards.

After all this scientific review, Congressional oversight and public input--and a court order telling us we had to act, following a suit by the American Lung Association--in July 1997, President Clinton announced the new standards.

But we're still not quite done yet. For these new health standards to be fair, we had to address the problem of pollution blowing across state lines.

In 1999, as part of the amended Clean Air Act, Congress told the states that they must submit to EPA their plans detailing how they were going to make their skies clearer by reducing smog. But for many states--Massachusetts being one of them--compliance was going to be difficult because some of their smog was being generated by states upwind.

This could mean that a community near a coal-burning power plant in the Midwest could be in compliance with the Clean Air Act because the smog it was generating was drifting into the mid-Atlantic or New England states.

Clearly, this wasn't fair.

So we formed the Ozone Transport Assessment Group, or OTAG. This group, which was composed of state and local environmental officials, industry representatives and groups of concerned citizens from 37 of the easternmost states, met from May 1995 to June 1997 to try and hammer out a sensible and cooperative strategy for reducing pollution region wide, rather than on a state by state, or polluter by polluter basis.

In the end, the group voted 32-5 for a strategy that would have reduced ozone-causing emissions by 85 percent regionwide.

It was decided that 15 states that contributed little to the problem did not have to participate in the regional plan. The remaining 22 states and the District of Columbia were to be give emission targets by EPA that they would need to reach by September 2002.

Notice, I said that the states were given targets, rather than ordered to pursue specific remedies. We thought this regional plan would work best if the states had the flexibility to create solutions that were best suited for their businesses and communities.

We also created for them a market-based emission trading program. This would allows states that exceeded their goals to sell credits to states who were having trouble. We felt this would serve as an incentive for states to not only get into compliance--but exceed it.

Now let's review for a moment. Over a seven-year period, we put in place both a new health standard that will protect children, the elderly, people with lung disease and breathing disorders--a standard that will protect all of us. And we also put in place a new plan to reduce these emissions on a regional basis so that all the states are treated fairly.

And we did all this with scientific rigor, public openness and great flexibility.

You're probably thinking to yourself, "This must be an EPA success story."

Wrong. As the saying goes: "No good deed goes unpunished."

There are two constants at EPA. One is that someone is always mad at us. And the other is that whoever is mad at us is also going to sue us.

In this case, special interest groups representing the polluters sued. And they won in a federal district appeals court on a 2-to-1 decision that we regard as illogical and bizarre.

The court ruled that when Congress gave EPA the power to set these health standards it had unconstitutionally delegated away its own authority.

This Administration strongly--strongly--disagrees with this ruling. It wipes out 64 years of Supreme Court precedent regarding Congress's constitutional right to direct agencies to do the work of setting public health standards

It also ignores the past 29 years of legal rulings that have specifically upheld EPA's power, under the Clean Air Act, to set standards and enforce them.

We strongly believe this decision must be overturned. If not, the complicated, scientific work of setting not just public air standards, but also standards for water, food safety and toxic waste cleanup, will be left to an already overworked Congress. A Congress that has failed to even reauthorize some of the nation's most important environmental laws for the better part of a decade.

What makes the ruling even more bizarre is that the judges essentially agreed that what we were doing was good public health policy. They found the science we used compelling.

This ruling is not only unprecedented--it is literally breathtaking.

This court ruling--which relies on legal theory not seen since the 1930s--means that on the cusp of a new century, we find ourselves marching backward into time. Back to a time when polluters told us how much--or little protection--they would deign to give.

This cannot stand. It will not stand. We must move forward.

I'm sure eventually this is going to wind up in the Supreme Court. But--with these kind of proven risks to public health at stake--we are moving forward anyway. It won't be as simple as our first solution. It won't be as effective. And it might not be as fair. But we will move forward.

Under the law, states can petition EPA to grant them relief from another state's pollution, and we have several of these petitions before us now. This is not our preferred solution because it forces us to handle things not just on a state-by-state basis, but on a polluter-by-polluter basis. This is time-consuming and not the best way to solve the problem.

We have also been trying to work with the states on a voluntary basis, although the results so far have been disappointing.

So that's what the process at EPA is like. On this and so many other issues--water quality, pesticides, cleaner cars and cleaner fuels--I could tell you similar stories. Environmental groups think we're not moving quickly enough. Business groups say we're moving too quickly and will destroy the economy. And the courts are coming down on both sides of these issues.

You know, sometimes I think that when groups on both sides of an issue think EPA is not doing its job, it probably means we're actually doing the right thing for the American people.

Because my job at EPA--and the job of my 18,000 colleagues--is not to represent any particular interest group, but to represent the interests of the environment on behalf of all of our families.

And at EPA we will continue to do that by using the best available science, in a public and open process with the clear goal of ensuring a healthy environment for our children now--and in the generations to come.

Thank you.