Toxic Utah: Mending toxic Utah

Ignore the suffocating winter inversions for a moment, take a deep breath and consider what may seem improbable: The air in Utah is cleaner than it has been in decades.

Not only that, the water is safer to drink and the lands are less polluted.

As toxic as Utah's environment is, scientists are quick to point out that today's environment is better, in some cases far better, than it was two or three decades ago.

And they point to myriad environmental laws, most passed in the mid-1970s over the objections of industry, that established then-unprecedented limits on pollution. Those laws have been tweaked over the years, but they remain hallmarks of a radical shift in policy toward the environment.

"Personally, I believe most of the environmental legislation that passed, though I had concerns at the time, have proven workable," said U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, who participated in those environmental debates as a novice lawmaker in the early 1970s. "The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act are clear successes, and wilderness, too."

But there have been failures, too.

Superfund, the program designed to clean up the nation's worst environmental disasters, has helped lawyers more than the envi- ronment, insisted Hatch, R-Utah. And he's no fan of how the Endangered Species Act has been used to bludgeon private property owners.

"By and large, I think our environmental legislation has been on the plus side," he said.

Conservationists, while unified in their belief Congress hasn't done enough for the environment and has moved too slowly when it has, admit things are better than they were before passage of the 1970s laws.

But many conservationists wonder what the future holds. They are suspicious a new Republican administration may be too sympathetic to industry, and those fears are heightened by conservatives in Congress pledging major revisions to laws that have been hallmarks of environmental protection.

Voluntary compliance

The administration of environmental laws generally falls to state regulators under cooperative "primacy" agreements that allow for local enforcement. Those agreements mandate that states must have laws at least as stringent as the federal laws, but they can have tougher laws if they so choose.

Utah's approach has been simply to follow the letter of the federal law. "We don't have any indication there is a need (for stricter standards)," said Dianne Nielson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.

In recent years, Utah has taken a decidedly different approach to enforcement of environmental laws, one based largely on incentives that foster voluntary compliance.