Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 20, 1995 TAG: 9504200069
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
At this point, anyone who answers with a definite yes, including from an Allen administration that is pushing the idea, is not being candid. But precisely the same could be said of anyone, including environmentalists suspicious of the administration's motives, who answers with a definite no.
In the final analysis, what counts is what works. In the case of the aspen poplars, this can't be known until the idea is put to a fair and valid test. But if it does work, and it's cheaper, that means it's better. And environmentalists should be the first to celebrate. They too often ignore a basic inference from economics: that if you reduce the cost of environmental protection, it's more likely to get done.
Purpose of the clay caps, required by state and federal regulations, is to keep rainwater and snowmelt from seeping through the soil, getting contaminated by the buried trash, and then draining out. The poplar theory, developed by Louis A. Licht, a professor at the State University of Iowa, is that the roots of the fast-growing trees can soak up water quickly enough to keep it from ever reaching the contaminants, thereby eliminating the need for the more expensive caps.
At the instigation of Patricia Katzen, Gov. George Allen's environmental troubleshooter, and with the approval of Becky Norton Dunlop, Allen's secretary of natural resources, the theory is to be tested at four Virginia landfills, two in Chesterfield County and one each in Charles City County and in Hampton. Though Licht's firm, Ecolotree, has run demonstration projects in Oregon and Iowa, the Virginia studies will be the first east of the Mississippi.
The research projects are funded by a consortium of five waste companies and one paper company. For credibility's sake, particularly if the results are positive, state funding might have been preferable - especially since landfills tend to be public-sector operations. Funding by parties with special interests in the success of the experiments makes it all the more critical that the data be disseminated to other environmental scientists, and that the results can be replicated by other investigators. Some questions, such as the durability of poplar protection vs. clay-cap covers, may take a while to answer.
To say that, however, is to do no more than call for the application of sound and careful science to the problem - an approach sometimes scorned not only by self-interested polluters but also by environmental alarmists. At times, it seems, the goal for some is regulation and expense for their own sake. Too often, the counterproductive result is public skepticism about the efficacy of any regulation whatever.
So far, neither the administration nor environmentalists have fallen into the definite-yes or definite-no trap. But there's at least a hint of it in observations like that of Paul Schwartz, public-policy analyst for Clean Water Action in Washington: "You have to wonder if there is politics at play: How little can you get away with in terms of remediation [of a landfill site]?" You have to wonder, too, why some environmentalists make the perfect an enemy of the good.
To ask how little you can get away with in protecting the environment is to ask the wrong question. But to ignore the cost of compliance is to fail the cause of environmentalism.
by CNB