Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 14, 1993 TAG: 9309100204
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William E. Gibson Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
\ Late one evening during the midst of the Washington budget frenzy, Carol Browner looked over her staff at the Environmental Protection Agency and noticed the mounting desperation of one working mother.
"The meeting was running late, and I could just see the panic coming over this one woman while the clock ticked," says Browner, the EPA's administrator. "I knew she had a son down in the child-care center. I told her, `Look, why don't you just bring him up here? We'll put him in the corner with some crayons.'
"I mean, I certainly don't care. We've had other kids up here."
Browner, who raises a 5-year-old son while running a major federal agency, has made a point of bringing children into the national debate on the environment, in all sorts of ways.
She reflects a generation of women in government who reject the traditional practice of distancing family lives from work lives, as though children were merely a distraction. She keeps children in mind when making public policy, and her speeches are laced with anecdotes about her own son.
Browner, 37, says she has been shaped by her family and her own upbringing in Florida. Now she is applying those lessons to shape environmental policy.
While Attorney General Janet Reno has become the nation's symbolic Mother Justice, Browner is emerging as a regulatory working-mom version of Mother Nature.
"I think it's hard not to care about the environment if you grow up in South Florida," she says. Her words flow swiftly and her hands keep churning, animated by nervous energy.
"And having a kid made it imperative," she says. "I really wonder what kind of place we're going to leave our children. I really believe if we don't make the right decisions now, their quality of life will be radically different from ours. So I have a responsibility not just as a mother but as the head of the country's environmental agency to protect the children."
The EPA chief has ordered studies of what children eat to develop safeguards against pesticide residue.
She has issued advisories to protect children from exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke, advising adults, if they must smoke, to do so outdoors and away from other people.
She is developing a toxic-cleanup program to protect vulnerable city neighborhoods.
"It's a matter of looking at the people who are most at risk and designing your protections for them," Browner says, "as opposed to what we've tended to do, which is to focus on middle-class, middle-aged white males, whose lifestyle is very different from senior citizens, from children, from low-income minority communities."
Browner, former secretary of the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation, took command in January of EPA's 17,000 employees and $6 billion-a-year budget. If the House votes to elevate her job this fall, as the Senate did in May, she will become a member of President Clinton's Cabinet.
Browner must balance the heady responsibility of regulating the nation's environment with raising Zachary. Like all working parents, she faces tough choices.
"The first day I got here, I said, `Who has children?' because it was 9 o'clock at night and we're all still here. It turns out several of them have children, so I said we're going to a rotation system so parents could go home to their children at least one evening of the week."
Browner says finding the right balance sometimes means kissing the job goodbye.
"On the Friday before Mother's Day, Zach's school was doing a little thing," she says. "There was some big meeting on my schedule, but I said, `I've got to go. This is my kid's day for moms to be at school, and my kid is not going to be the only one without his mom there."'
At school, Zach's mom discovered that 5-year-olds have a remarkable knowledge of environmental issues. All of Zach's classmates knew about recycling, and many knew something about endangered species.
"Kids fundamentally get it," Browner says. "Why would you hurt your environment? Why would you hurt the place that you live in? Just in conversations with my kid, I find that he just doesn't understand why you wouldn't take care of what's around you."
Browner walks Zach to his public school each morning with her husband, Michael Podhorzer, who works for Citizen Action, a public-interest advocacy group. (The couple met while advocating Superfund legislation to clean up toxic waste. "That old Superfund," Browner jokes. "It's amazing what it can do.")
Then Zach's parents board a subway train in Takoma Park, their multiethnic neighborhood on the edge of the city, to ride to their workplaces. "This is like our 20 minutes together, on the Metro," Browner says.
The EPA chief developed her simmering activism while growing up on the southern edge of Miami - a few miles from Reno's home - and later working as a Legal Aid attorney for the poor around Gainesville.
Her father, Michael Browner, who emigrated from Ireland with nearly nothing in his pockets, and her mother, Isabella Harty-Hugues, taught Browner and her two sisters the value of public service. Both parents teach at Miami-Dade Community College.
As a young attorney for the poor, Browner found she could solve only small problems for her clients, not change a social system that left them disadvantaged.
"I had one client, a young woman, who had been battered by her husband in public," she says. "We couldn't get him out of her house. There weren't laws to protect her. She couldn't get a job. There was a whole societal breakdown.
"In the end, she went back to him, after pulling a gun on me. Not because she was mad at me, because she was mad at the system. She didn't have a choice. The services available to others were not available to her."
Browner abandoned her law career and went to Tallahassee and then to Washington as a legislative aide, drafting laws designed to reform a system she found unfair.
Returning to Florida in 1991 to become the state's chief environmental regulator, she was known for her fervent desire to preserve the Everglades and other wetlands, coupled with a willingness to seek consensus with state officials, developers and sugar growers to clean up pollution.
Browner's work in Florida put her in the middle of some of the most difficult environmental challenges in the nation. She emerged from bruising controversies with remarkably few detractors.
For the EPA, she points to an ambitious agenda, including tougher incineration standards, control over indirect sources of pollution, development of environmental technology and expansion of the Superfund.
All of which, Browner envisions, will serve her son's generation as much as her own.
"Once you have that kid," she says, "if you've been given the opportunity that I've had in Florida and now here to give him and other children a better future, it would be downright criminal not to use it."
by CNB