Interview: Christine Todd Whitman

Because the issue here is not – I keep hearing it: "Well what battles do you win and what battles do you lose?" and that is so often the case with policymaking but particularly with the environment, that there's an attitude that it's a zero-sum game. Somebody's got to lose for somebody to win, and it just isn't. It is possible, in fact necessary, to have a strong economy to have a healthy environment, because you need the money that the economy throws off to invest in protecting the environment.

MONITOR: But do you think there are certain victories that you've had where you thought, you made the difference and other ones where you thought you've had to compromise or not been quite the way you wanted things to go?

WHITMAN: I think everything has been. It's all an evolutionary process. I am not the only one who speaks for the environment. There are others who have envrionmental concerns, too. They are taken into consideration. There are some times when there are things I think should be done. It's never usually about the end policy, or rarely about the end policy. It's more on how do you get there, where we have the backings and the forthings more, the compromises.

MONITOR: You just mentioned something I wanted to ask about, which is you're not the only voice. Other agencies deal with things whether it's wetlands, or CAFE (fuel efficiency standards), or snowmobiling. Could you give me a sense of how much you interact with the other agency and department heads in the administration on these issues that you feel touch you?

WHITMAN: Ann Veneman, Gale Norton, and I meet regularly. Once a month we have an informal lunch. Just the three of us. And we sit down and talk about issues that are cross cutting. And in fact we're going to go a little bit further than that and have an additional policy lunch to look at the areas where we are each impacting the environment –where there are these good things that are going on, but because they're done in different areas people don't always see the whole. And you lose the forest for the trees.

I've worked very closely with Mel Martinez (secretary for Housing and Urban Development) and we've done something now with housing and Habitat for Humanity and "energy star" and brownfields. We started talking, and we finally got the brownfields legislation up there and we were presuming that we were going to get this thing done, darn it.

We talked about the need to, that this was a perfect opportunity to work closely with housing, with affordable housing, and the department of environmental protection, looking at these brownfield sites, where would they be appropriate for low-income housing and how do we integrate the energy star, the energy efficiency component into these homes, both for the benefit of the environment and for the people who are living there, because often times, and I saw it as a governor, some of the biggest problems, obstacles to people staying in their homes is that they've never had to budget before for the operating costs. And one of the hardest things to control is energy use. So if you're giving people energy efficient homes, good R factor in the walls, the best in windows, that helps them stay in these homes, which is what we want.

We do a lot of talking together. Spence and I talk a lot.

MONITOR: Can I ask you your position on some of the things that are being dealt with in other agencies – specifically CAFE, snowmobiles in Yellowstone, and what you thought about wetlands and the Army Corps of Engineers position on that?

WHITMAN: We have, as you know, gone back and forth with them on that, on the wetlands. We stand committed to protection of the wetlands and we're working our way through. That hasn't even been finalized with the Army Corps. We do feel that there needs to be protective measures and we're working with them on it.

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