003 Former Head of EPA Gina McCarthy

Gina McCarthy discusses what it was like to be in charge of 15,000 people at the EPA and shares why she remains hopeful about our nation and our world.

 

 

Transcript

Lee Ball: Well, thanks so much for being with me here today with Gina McCarthy, the former Head of the Environmental Protection Agency. I'm so excited to have a conversation with you about your work and your history. I've got some prepared questions. I'm just going to go ahead and launch into it. I'm really interested in people's stories and I'd love to hear a little bit about your story that kind of lead you to value sustainability and kind of get on the career path that you chose.

Gina McCarthy: Well, Lee, let me try to explain. Before I do, just let me thank you for inviting me. It's really exciting to be part of the energy summit. I can't tell you how impressed I am with the sustainability program here. The commitment of this university. This is just about one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. All in all, invite me back again-

Lee Ball: Okay.

Gina McCarthy: -because it is quite amazing. I don't know, my story may be a little bit simplistic for folks. I grew up at a time when pollution was everywhere. It was not something that anticipated 30 years in the future. We were just inundated. When I grew up, I lived in the Boston area, where I still live. Boston Harbor was just where all the sewer went. The sewage water went. It was not a place that you could swim. Frankly, as a kid, I did, but that's because my family was pretty limited in means and that was where we went; but you shouldn't have. After a period of time, they'd tell you, you'd better get some shots if you fell in. We had smokestacks spewing black smoke, we had Love Canal happening, we had the Cuyahoga River on fire. It was at a time when people were outside all the time. There were very few attractions inside and so I had a natural connection to the outside world and visual clues that we were messing it up.

I really started my journey after undergraduate school where I did a degree in social anthropology and loved it. I always tell people that learning about primitive cultures has been most helpful in the work in government. That's always helpful, especially with legislators and Congress. Most importantly, I started to discover my interest in public. I went to school in Public Health and Environmental Protection. I ended up getting a local job in my own home town to be the Health Agent there. At that point in time, we discovered a couple of hazardous waste sights, we had some TCE contamination in a well. All of the things that were playing out at the federal level, started to play out at the local level. I just got engaged, involved and eventually was asked whether I wanted to work at the state and I did.

I kept getting asked to do different and interesting things. I think I always treated this as a very human story. A very fundamental core need and value that everybody in the United States would share if you just took the time to explain what the risk was. What you see and if you had solutions to offer that people could embrace. Over time, I think, that's been the key to, at least, my success is to never forget to explain what I do and why it's important and to get all voices to the table to participate in what the solutions are that they can embrace and how quickly. That's what government does. That's what this country has always does as we've built the strongest economy in the world on a foundation of the strongest sets of environmental protections in the world. I'm pretty proud of that. At least for being part of it.

Lee Ball: Did you find that with your work when you connected these issues with people that it really helped how decision makers, maybe give them a chance to understand maybe more deeply instead of trying to make an argument for the environment?

Gina McCarthy: What I found was that how I came into this was through a public health lens and I see agencies like EPA as being a public health agency. We sort of measure ourselves not in birds and bunnies, which I love. I love birds, I love bunnies, so nobody think otherwise.

Lee Ball: Yeah.

Gina McCarthy: It's just not what EPA does. We do public health protections like clean air and clean water.

Lee Ball: Right.

Gina McCarthy: We measure ourselves in lives asthma attacks prevented. Contamination that didn't cause health impacts in kids when they drink the water. That's my measures of success. They're very visceral to people. You can make them understand that by explaining what you do. The further you get away, the more difficult the challenge is. What I mean by farther away is less able to clearly articulate the risk to people and why it matters to them and their families. The interesting thing is, as I think we all know as people, we don't like to embrace challenges that we can't fix. We would rather deny the