The University of Idaho College of Law hosted a lecture, titled “No Surprises: EPA’s Perilous Future in the Trump/Pruitt Era,” Tuesday with former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Karl Brooks.
UI law student and Environmental Law Society representative Stetson Holman created and organized the event.
Holman said Brooks served as a former Idaho state senator and as the Region 7 EPA administrator before being nominated to the Obama administration in 2015. He directed the provision of core support services to agency operations throughout the U.S. Now, he is a professor at the University of Texas.
Brooks said his love for nature as a child led him to enter into environmental work as an adult.
“The natural world on which we depend is every Idahoan’s birthright, it is every American’s responsibility, and it is the indispensable condition that all of our lives depend upon — that’s why we should take it so seriously,” Brooks said.
Brooks said working on behalf of the “natural world” first motivated him to get into politics more than 25 years ago, and has sustained him through the teaching of environmental law and history, as well as through the work he has done enforcing and creating environmental law.
He said how people relate to the natural world says a lot about the way they relate to one another as neighbors, citizens and inhabitants of the planet, and by developing laws of relating to one another, people are also defining how they think about the earth.
Brooks said these beliefs eventually led him to the EPA in 2010, where he stayed until the Trump administration took office.
He said the future of the EPA is highly debatable, and he predicts the agency will depend less on science and law, but more on its earned reputation among the American people for fair enforcement of the law and continued existence.
“Public confidence always has and ultimately will sustain the Environmental Protection Agency or it won’t — that’s the simple choice,” Brooks said. “I believe it has earned (America’s) trust and I believe that our actions have justified that.”
Brooks said he acknowledges that mistakes have been made, but overall, he believes the EPA has made strides toward improving the U.S. and the Earth.
Brooks said the Republican majority of the House of Representatives, along with some key senators and the EPA’s new administrator Scott Pruitt, have expressed their desire to substantially cut back or completely eliminate the EPA.
“It’s pretty clear that the man who holds the trust of the American people, the president of the U.S. himself, believes the EPA is an agency whose time has come and gone,” Brooks said. “I think he’d prefer to see the EPA thrown on the ash heaps of other agencies that outlive their usefulness.”
Brooks said the EPA is necessary to protect citizens, and ensure that future generations enjoy a similar, if not better, life than the ones Americans possess today.
He said if the draft budget the president proposed to Congress — which cuts the EPA by 31 percent — is passed, it would have severe consequences, and will drastically hurt states that primarily depend on EPA funding for things like clean water, air and waste management.
“We who share the civic obligation to live and to act responsibly need to contemplate having someone running the EPA who appears to define the rule of law as not much different than the law of the ruler,” Brooks said. “If we fail to appreciate the magnitude of this crisis and to defend the EPA’s legacy, I believe that our children will pay the price for our timidity and our ignorance.”
Olivia Heersink can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @heersinkolivia