President Obama's new EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, has placed responsibility for the federal effort to restore a very sick Chesapeake Bay to some semblance of health in the hands of one J. Charles "Chuck" Fox, naming him to the position of Senior Advisor on the Chesapeake Bay restoration and protection efforts. Chuck's appointment has been well-received in environmental circles, and understandably so, since Chuck is a veteran of each of the three major Bay-related environmental players: the EPA, state regulatory agencies and public-interest non-profit entities.
While we're waiting for the new order of things with respect to the Chesapeake to take shape at EPA, a process I hope to track here as it unfolds, I thought it might be worthwhile to get better acquainted with the man who has been asked to find creative ways to use the federal clean water powers and to do so in a manner that, for the first time, has the threat of some real federal enforcement muscle behind it. If you like eating Chesapeake blue crabs, or you're just partial to drinking clean water (as opposed to the other kind), you may be interested in the prospects for the new approach and the man heading it up.
As I described in my last Chesapeake Bay diary, the Obama administration made a clean break with 26 years of futility in the management of the Chesapeake Bay when he transferred power away
from the so-called Chesapeake Bay Program, a coalition of the states in the Bay watershed, loosely coordinated by the federal EPA. This deregulatory Frankenstein was (of course) the creation of the Reagan administration, and effectively made a dead letter of the Clean Water Act and other federal environmental laws that were intended by Congress to protect the Bay and other national waterways.
From my standpoint, the good news is that Chuck Fox is on record as regarding the Chesapeake as his life's mission; now, that's the attitude we need! It is also encouraging that he has the depth of experience he does in each of the major entities involved in the cleanup effort over the last quarter century -- the EPA, the state regulatory agencies, and the public interest not-for-profit organizations. At this stage of his career, he has to know where the pitfalls are, where he'll run into opposition for each proposal he might advance, and (one hopes) how to defeat or reasonably accommodate that opposition and still achieve something meaningful.
So who, exactly, is J. Charles "Chuck" Fox? According to a recent profile, he's 48 years old, and came to the Bay area (specifically, Annapolis, MD) right after graduation from the University of Wisconsin in the early 80s.
To hear him tell it, he arrived in Annapolis in 1983 a wide-eyed, naive Midwesterner whose passion for the environment grew from family forays into the woods of Wisconsin with a canoe strapped to the car roof.
"I remember coming out here looking to find lakes, and I found the bay instead," he said. "I've been in love with it ever since."
He has reportedly personally explored most of the nooks and crannies of the Bay's tributaries, much of it by kayak. He has a wife and two young sons, for whom he would like to help create an improved watershed area. So far as attitude goes, what more could you ask?
He is (apparently) a Democrat, a statement I base on the facts that he was formerly Asst. Administrator for Water at EPA during the Clinton administration, where he was responsible for the national water quality management program, including implementation of the President’s Clean Water Action Plan and the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act Amendments. He left EPA when Bush was elected to work for the Gov. Parris Glendening administration in Annapolis, Maryland; then left that job when Ehrlich was elected to go to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Oh yes, and I base my conclusion also on this statement he made in a Frontline interview, regarding what has gone wrong, environmentally, over the past quarter century:
Can you look at trends, can you look at events, can you look at particular administrations or particular leaders who had an impact on this? ...
... there's no question that the Reagan administration, in fact, brought to Washington a deregulatory agenda that in fact became part of the theme for the Republican Party for many years and generations to come. ... I remember back in the Reagan days of seeing memos that would come out from the White House to the Chamber of Commerce and other big businesses, asking them for a list of regulations from which they would want relief. ... We had to do a much more extensive job of documenting potential costs of regulation, potential benefits of regulation. The internal procedures within the administration were changed dramatically. A lot of agencies could then weigh in and offer their comments on it. ...
Environmentalism was never a partisan issue, really. ... It became really a partisan issue in a very strong way under Newt Gingrich's leadership in the House of Representatives. ...
Now, he's back at EPA, in a job that makes him the point man for the Bay restoration effort. All of his prior employers, as well as some extraneous others, like Virginia Gov. Kaine, and Sen. Ben Cardin (chair of the Water and Wildlife Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works) are big fans. Indeed, given the dominance of the Democratic party amongst the ranks of the Bay area Senators (well, ok, there is that issue as to Spector), and Governors (stay tuned for the election results from VA later this year), things really do seem to have shaped up as a once in a generation opportunity to do something positive about the Bay.
In the earlier years of his career at EPA, Fox distinguished himself as a person who could fight hard for a position without losing the respect of his opponents or the ability to work with them.
Those who recall Fox's debut 25 years ago as an operative for the Environmental Policy Institute remember the skill with which he engineered the legislative fight to get polluting phosphate detergents banned in Maryland....
Fox and his allies faced off against detergent industry lobbyists who had a war chest of $300,000 to help persuade entrenched legislators to vote against the ban.
"We were both very new at it and had to simultaneously learn the complexities of the issue along with the complexities of the political system and landscape," recalled Ann Swanson, now the executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, which includes the governmental leaders of the three states in the bay's watershed. "Chuck was always tenacious, always ready to make a good argument and always ready to laugh along the way."
After cajoling, coalition building, horse trading votes and arm twisting, they got the phosphate ban passed. And from that fight there emerged a hallmark of Fox's character, noted by Swanson and others who know him: "He maintained his popularity even while frustrating his opponents," Swanson said.
Well -- good God almighty -- what more could you want? This is politics right out of the Obama mold. This man is the savior of the Bay, right?
Maybe. As I see it, the bad news is that if Chuck Fox proves unable to rise above the reasons for the past shortcomings of the many institutions in which he has played such a prominent role for the past 26 years, we'll be looking, at the end of his current gig, at more of the same, i.e., another extension of the past 26 years of little if any progress in cleaning up the Bay. Chuck Fox is undoubtedly well-intentioned; he is capable, smart, articulate. But his past 26 years of labor in the Chesapeake vineyard has produced nothing, and that's not not just my assessment -- it's his:
What kind of a report card would you give American environmental protections over the last 30, 35 years?
...here we are today, 30, 40 years after the birth of modern water pollution control, and I can tell you that the overall quality of waters in our country is really not all that different than it was 30 or 40 years ago.
I testified in the year 2000 that in fact roughly 40 percent of the waters in the United States did not meet our goals for fishing and swimming. While we do not have the data going back in time, I would roughly estimate that that number has been virtually unchanged for 30 years.
And you've been on the case 26 of those 30 years. Why is there nothing to show for those years, Chuck?
... If you step back and take a look at the American environmental protection regime and the sense of momentum that had built in the '70s and '80s,... why aren't we further? ...
My sense is today's world is very, very complicated, and it's becoming increasingly complicated.
When I first came to Washington, D.C., to do this work in the early 1980s, there was a very rigorous reauthorization of environmental laws that happened every five or 10 years. We haven't seen a major reauthorization of a law in this country in more than a decade. And this is in large part because the political dynamics in Washington, D.C., and in state legislatures around the country are much more polarized today. In many cases, they're very partisan. In some cases, we have seen the growth of various interest groups in their political sophistication. In some ways, we've seen people get a whole range of interests and concerns in their lives, whether it's the price of gasoline, the price of their kids' education. I think today, compared to 20 years ago, we're dealing with a society that is vastly more complicated and today probably a lot more polarized. ...
Bottom line, according to Fox himself?
Why hasn't the [Clean Water] act been implemented? Is it lack of political will? Is it money? Is it politics?
I think there's a large number of factors that have ultimately contributed to our failures under the Clean Water Act. At some basic level, the economic benefits analysis that is often done by government agencies, the math doesn't always add up as good for water control as it does for air pollution control. This is a simple result of the fact that bad air results in an increase in hospital admissions and very clear increases in premature deaths, lung disease and some other public health problems. We don't have some of those economic drivers on the water side, although there certainly are some of them. ...
But there's also a clear lack of political will. There's no question in my mind that the single biggest source of water pollution in this country is a very far range of agricultural activities. ... Agriculture dominates our landscape in this country, and we have not yet done a very good job of controlling pollution from agricultural sources.
I hear you, Chuck. It's a tough world out there, and undoubtedly it's been getting tougher and more complicated since you arrived on the scene in 1983. But are you, and Lisa Jackson, and the Obama administration, up to it or not? Predictably, the new Chesapeake Crab Czar says he is:
"One thing I've heard loud and clear is a desire for more EPA leadership," he said. "In this field, stars align only periodically, and on the Chesapeake, we're at a critical moment. And I feel the stars really have aligned."
Sounds a bit Nancy Reagan-esque, but if it works, it works. Hell, if it'll get a cleaner Bay, I'll go get the magic 8-ball and the ouija board as well.
Good luck, Chuck, and we'll all be watching those stars for signs of progress.