Water Resources People and Issues
I don't think it had anything to do with the National Water Commission report.
In fact, I never got any real recognition about this report from the House side
except that I got a very nice letter from Wayne Aspinall saying, in effect, "You
did a great job." Actually, I got a couple of letters like that from members and
staff people on the Hill who knew me. But they never had a hearing on the
House side as far as I know.
But the staff read it and quoted it in committee reports on bills from time to
time.
I don't like to ignore the report, but I'm just trying to get things up-to-date here
for a second. By this time, the Water Resources Council's talking about these
two principal accounts, national economic development and environmental
quality, and it has been argued to me by people who are still in government
that Congress was not happy with that emphasis, that continued emphasis on
those two areas, and that there were people in Congress who felt very strongly
that there had to be much more of a regional focus in water resources and also
more emphasis on this social enhancement value. Some of this was in the
Appalachian Region project in 1960s. Do you have any response to that?
Environmental Studies Board, National Academy of Sciences
A: No, because I was no longer involved with the Congress. After I left the
commission, I went to the National Academy of Sciences working as executive
secretary of the Environmental Studies Board, of which Gilbert White was the
chairman at that time. Later, I became deputy executive director of the
Commission on Natural Resources of which he had become chairman. So my
orientation at that time was completely different. We were not strictly geared
to the Congress so much, but more to federal agencies that ask you to make
studies. The project for which the academy had hired me was to provide
assistance to the Rockefeller Commission. The name of it was the National
Commission on Water Quality. It was set up by the Water Pollution Control
Act amendments of 1972.
That was my first principal substantive staff project at the National Academy
of Sciences, but then I also was given administrative responsibility for a major
study financed by EPA on the use of scientific and technical information in
environmental decisionmaking. This was a big project, another million
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