Pivotal EPA Leader William Ruckelshaus Remembered
December 2, 2019
William D. Ruckelshaus, the government official who shaped the Environmental Protection Agency in the early 1970s and restored its vigor a decade later after its regulatory powers had been muzzled, died in late November. Issues particularly remembers him as the author of one of its most enduring articles—“Risk, Science, and Democracy”—in which he surveyed the challenges facing environmental policy-makers, concluding that “Our statutes should reflect the reality that environmental protection in an imperfect world means the assessment of risks and the ability to manage them as particular situations warrant.”