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Dr. Ford. All of us need to work on population issues. 



There is, however, a concurrent trend that has significant envi- 

 ronmental impact. The world is getting more democratic. More soci- 

 eties are coming to have some say in determining their quality of 

 life. Movement to democracy in countries from Argentina to Russia 

 has allowed more voters to impact their own quality of life. In addi- 

 tion, improvement in communications world-wide have allowed peo- 

 ple in countries without elected government to view more progres- 

 sive societies. This has caused non-elected governments to likewise 

 exhibit an intent to improve the quality of life for their people. 



When I talk about quality of life, I talk about things that are 

 manufactured. I talk about foodstuffs. Certainly, the environment 

 figures into that, too. But there are a multitude of things within 

 the quality of life. In this kind of atmosphere, few governments are 

 going to be able to accept a lower quality of life — or lower standard 

 of living, however you want to put it — for their citizenry. But if we 

 are to have a long-term future, we must be able to provide some 

 quality of life that is acceptable to the public without unduly dam- 

 aging the environment. 



Certainly, a clean environment is a component, but just a compo- 

 nent. There is little evidence of any general rule that the produc- 

 tion of goods and services needs to entail high risk to the environ- 

 ment. I say that with emphasis. On the contrary, agricultural 

 chemicals are less toxic and less persistent than they were a gen- 

 eration ago. But with this big increase in population, we need to 

 go much further. Few manufacturing operations in the United 

 States have not developed a technology for drastically reducing en- 

 vironmental risk from their operations. The lowering of environ- 

 mental risk is truly a success story for both EPA and American in- 

 dustry. It is done through research and development — R&D — with 

 regulatory incentives. 



I want to say just a word about the utility of EPA's R&D facili- 

 ties as an industrial R&D director. Technology developed at EPA 

 laboratories are available to industry in a variety of ways — through 

 publications, cooperative agreements, and various contracts. While 

 I was the director of Monsanto Company's Environmental Sciences 

 Center, I had a number of interactions with EPA's R&D facilities, 

 which I would like to describe for you. 



For example, I used to visit EPA's Las Vegas lab. Dr. Ronald 

 Mitchum ran part of that facility at that time during the dioxin cri- 

 sis of the middle 1980s. Much of the analytical work we did within 

 Monsanto was done with interaction with the EPA's Las Vegas lab- 

 oratory. It saved us tremendous amounts of money and hopefully 

 it helped EPA out, too, since they better understood our problems. 



When we were trying to develop better effluent guidelines inter- 

 nal to our company, I was able to have one of my staff, Dr. John 

 Doy, do a sabbatical in EPA's Duluth laboratory. He came back un- 

 derstanding enough to give Monsanto Company a program. 



At one time, we felt our waste site remediation program would 

 benefit from an understanding of bioremediation. So I spent a lot 

 of time at Dr. Robert Mentzer's Gulf Breeze, Florida laboratory try- 

 ing to understand that. We did a lot of life cycle work with EPA's 

 Cincinnati laboratory. Finally, several years ago I started work 

 with a colleague in EPA, Dr. Joseph Breen, in putting together a 



