Friday, March 18, 1983
4
Daily Nebraskan
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Anne (Gorsuch) Burford's gone, but
that doesn't solve anything at the Environ
mental Protection Agency. She only pre
sided over or directed an agency with wide
evasion of responsibility.
President Reagan defended both
Burford and his administration's environ
mental policy last week, saying environ
mentalists wouldn't "be happy until the
White House looks like a bird's nest."
With typical Reagan clairvoyance, he
went on to assess the motives of her
critics. "I don't think the people who were
attacking her were concerned about the
environment. I think this administration
and its policies were their target. I don't
see how they can look at themselves in the
mirror in the morning."
The case against the Reagan environ
mental policy is simple enough to make.
Agency personnel has dropped by about
a third, from 14,075 when Reagan got in,
to 10,396. In the last year of Carter's
presidency, about 200 lawsuits against
air and water polluters were referred by
EPA to the Justice Department; last year
there were about 100. Anne Burford
called this doing more with less.
In efforts to get rid of the stink, Bur
ford fired the administrator in charge of
toxic waste dump cleanup, Rita Lavelle,
for being too close to the chemical boys.
("Yes, pot, I am black. Kettle.") Then
Burford flew to St. Louis to announce
that EPA was buying one of its very small
suburbs called Times Beach, contaminated
with poisonous dioxin and she took on
five new deputies who actually had
experience in the field.
These were last ditch efforts to shift the
blame for the mess at the EPA and make
Anne Burford look like a Save the Whales
true believer. But few people were fooled
by these actions from a woman who was
facing a contempt of court citation for
refusing to send documents to Congress.
Even Burford's own resignation seems
most likely another attempt to get the
heat off EPA, one that won't work.
"Anne Gorsuch is not the issue," said
Oklahoma representative Mike Synar. "The
issue is the operation of the Environmental
Protection Agency and the implementation
of our environmental laws."
The most crucial single task which the
EPA is charged with right now is the
administration of the Superfund, a fund
used to clean up chemical dumps for
which no single corporate polluter can be
Dim deep
blamed, or for which the culpiil can't be
identified. The Superfund, since its
creation in 1980, has reached SI. 6 billion,
raised by a tax on the chemical and oil
companies. Most waste sites have a clear
corporate culprit that is responsible for
taking care of its mess, and even here
Burford has been unusually lenient, prefer
ring to settle cozy agreements out of court
with the companies rather than subject
them to the expense and unfavorable
judgments of court.
Superfund work itself has gone relative
ly slowly; and many critics charged Lavelle
with a heavy business bias. She did attack
one of the agency lawyers in an unsigned
memo for "systematically alienating the
primary constituents of this administrat
ion, the business community," and her
appointment calendars show that quite
a lot of chemical lobbyists took her out
to lunch.
Much of the Superfund issue has a
greasy Watergate feel or smell to it, com
plete with charges of perjury and claims of
executive privilege, changed testimony and
unexplained erasures in agency documen
tation. Perhaps the most ridiculous point
in the scandal was reached when it was
discovered that Rita Lavelle had two paper
shredders moved just outside of her office.
"It seemed like a good idea," she whim
sically explained; the agency had mis
takenly ordered two extra paper shredders
and a "helpful clerk" offered them to
Lavelle's office, in case she should need
them.
Some liberals have said the only way
to handle the EPA mess is to put the
agency into an independent status, where
the president can't get to it, and run the
EPA by a five-member, bipartisan com
mission. This, said Rep. James Scheuer, "would
remove the EPA from the extreme ideol
ological swings of policy and practice
that have degraded and politicized the
agency's work product."
This probably wouldn't be any solut
ion - the president has more or less
control over all the administrative work
in the government; even the Federal
Reserve System, for example, generally
does in the end what the president wants
it to. If you want to change the kind of
enforcement done by a presidential ad
ministration, you've got to change the
president. -
The waves aren't the same'
SYDNEY, Australia - I made it to the
beach Saturday, somewhere 1 had never
been before. Oh, I had been to Peony
Park in Omaha, which has sand, but the
waves just aren't the same.
It was a beach north of Sydney called
Gikola. It's in a cove, with high clitts on
either side of it. Someone said the clitts
make the waves that are coming into
shore higher than they would be without
the cliffs.
Three kids and I went out there, and we
sat down on the sand. The two girls who
were with us just sat and sunned
themselves, making it to the vvatertwice
Bob
Glissmann
the whole time we were there, tor a granu
total of five minutes.
That's what most people were doing -sunbathing.
Apparently it's considered
OK to sunbathe topless on the beaches
here. I must have seen "14 . . . no, make
that 12 females sunning themselves with
out tops on. (I know, 1 know. Cheap,
sexist joke.) Not to mention all the males
with no shirts. Tsk. tsk.
But I made it to the water. You just
kind of walk into the ocean and when a big
wave comes at you, yon turn around and
let it push you back. 'lh:s gets old after
about a half an hour, however, when you
decide to walk straight into the waves.
But then you get racked, and that's no
good.
After you sturt breathing again, you
start swimming out to sea. There are
helicopters and small planes flying over
head looking for sharks and drowning
people, so you feel relatively safe, espec
ially when you wear a life preserver. Ho
ho ho.
Then, you can't swim, really, because
you have to keep watching for the waves
coming in. You are out about 100 yards
from the shore and this 10-foot high wall
of water comes at you. Do you wait for
it to crush you or do you swim into it?
I swam into' it. Right after it started to
break.
(For those of you who have never
been to the beach, a "breaking" wave is
a wave that is falling down after it has
peaked. When the wave falls to the level
of the rest of the water, it splashes all
over. If you are caught at the bottom of
the breaking wave, you get turned upside
down and pushed back toward shore.
Most of you probably know this, after
swimming down in Miami before or after
the Orange Bowl or whatever, but please
bear with me and your other fellow Ne
braskans who haven't experienced this sort
of thing. Thanks.)
When the wave hit, I was hurled
backward and couldn't do anything. It
was a feeling of total helplessness I hadn't
experienced since the Chem. 109 final
my freshman year. And I swallowed a lot
of water. A lot of water. Hie water . . .
it . . . it . . . tasted like SALT! Sick. It's
like that concoction your mom used to
give you when you had a sore throat.
Salt water. That's it.
When I returned to the beach, all the
grains of sand within five feet of me
jumped on me before I could dry off.
The only reason my legs didn't get sun
burned (the skin on my cheek just under
my eye began peeling today) was because
they were coated with sand. My sand
covered hands looked like cinnamon toast,
except with little hairs sticking through.
The backs of my hands looked like that as
well.
Today is t lie Wednesday after the
Saturday at the beach, and I stopped
finding sand in my clothes sometime
yesterday. It's hotter than heck today,
about 95, accompanied by the hotter
wind I've ever felt before.
There's always somebody around here
going to the beach so I'll probably go back
tomorrow. But first, I'm going to learn
how to play squash. Oh yeah, and I've got
homework.
I have to exchange my money, too.
Prime Minister-elect Hawke devalued the
Australian dollar 10 percent. That means
if I cash in S500, I get $50 now that I
wouldn't have had if I had exchanged the
traveler's cheques last week. What a deal.
Well, I think I'll write about gambling
in New South Wales next week. Until then,
Bob Glissmann
Spring break the true story?
Spring break starts tomorrow, and I
still don't know what I'm going to do. It
seems that everyone else has plans, even
the campus bigwigs. So today I'm speculat
ing as to what next week's "What I Did
Brian
Stoneciph
er
During Spring Break" reports will say.
Daily Nebraskan Editor Margie Honz
would write:
I stayed in Lincoln and kept producing
newspapers - it was so much fun! I wrote
all of the stories just the way I wanted
them to be written and I made the editorial
section 14 pages long! I finally had the
opportunity to write bad things about
everyone that wrote bad things about me
and wrote what I really think about the
ASUN elections, the NU Board of Regents
the Publications Board and anyone else
that has inherent problems with a student
newspaper. But do you know what the
best part was? There were no letters to
the editor - a sure sign of editorial perfec
tion. I just wish there were more spring
breaks in a semester. The UNL Police
Department Chief of Police would write-
I finally cleared this campus of all of
those law jading, irresponsible, unreliable
disrespectful, untrustworthy spoiled
rotten, bleeding-heart communist students
It s been a struggle all year long- 1 mean
they'd just keep coming back for more
even after we taught them those lessons
with the tow trucks. But we finally caught
up with them. On Monday of break, I
towed every one of those cars that either
didn't comply with official UNL parking
policies or didn't have a genuine UNL
parking permit. And it worked. None of
those cars returned to give us any trouble
and we didn't have any violations for the
rest of the week. Except one. My own
mother came to visit me over break and
and parked her car for two hours and one
minute in a two-hour zone. Well, I had her
car towed faster than she could say, "But
sonny, I was only there two hours and now
it's dark and I don't have any money in
my checking account and IM YOUR
MOTHER!" Well, she left Lincoln vowing
to never speak to me again, but that didn't
really bother me, since it's part of my job.
I mean, the law is the law.
The people at the registration office
would write:
The damdest thing happened last week
during spring break, and we just can't
figure it out. Apparently someone broke
into the office and found the boxes of
pre-registration packets that the students
have just filled out. They tore into each
envelope and cashed all the S25 checks and
then tossed all of the packets into the
paper shredder. Now our job is impossible!
I mean, we have tons of little strips of
paper which have either student names on
them or course numbers, but not both.
So we spent the rest of spiirg break
guessing which students wanted which
classes.
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