Karen Morrison

Karen Morrison

CalRecycle, Senior Environmental Scientist

SK: Hello I’m Suzy Kim. I’m a junior chemistry major at Mudd.

 

RY: And I’m Robin Yoon, a computer science major at Harvey Mudd. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. As we’ve mentioned before, we’ll be recording the interview and typing up the transcript that we’ll send to you for reviews with any further questions. Could you give us a brief background of what you’re currently doing and how you ended up at your job?

 

KM: I’m currently a senior environment scientist with the California department of Resources, Recycling, and Recovery, also known as CalRecycle; it’s one of the departments under the California Environmental Protection Agency. The mission of CalRecycle is to look at the management of solid waste within the state of California, so anything you throw in the trash, anything you recycle, compost, that would all fall under auspices of the department I work for. The major mission of the department right now is to look at getting towards California’s new 75% recycling goal by 2020. So a large part of the work that I’m doing at the policy office is to identify how to get to 75% recycling in California.

 

My background is that for last year, before this position, I was working in the California state senate, in the Senate Environmental Quality Committee. I focused on legislation pertaining to issues related to air quality, water quality, waste management, the California Environmental Quality Act, and pretty much anything that deals with the environment interfacing with how people use the environment would be the area that the committee covered. Prior to that, I was working on my PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. So it’s a backwards direction but as I’ve said, I’m currently working as an environmental scientist trying to implement policies within the state department for our waste management.

 

SK: Thank you. So we have a list of questions that we would like to ask you. What would you identify as some of the most important initiatives, or projects that you have been involved in?

 

KM: Most important is tough because “most important” varies depending on what group you’re looking at. For me personally, some of the projects that I’ve worked on that I’ve gotten really involved in was with how we manage pharmaceutical waste. This is a really narrow topic in terms of the broad range of waste issues that California deals with, but for me it has a personal touch to it because I did pharmaceutical research as a grad student within the state, so that’s my personal favorite issue. In terms of major projects that I have worked on, that I think are really important issues are water quality issues. Right now California is entering its fourth year of a major drought and although we’re in a better place to handle it now than we were for the drought in the 70s, there are still a lot of challenges that the drought brings. There’s a lot of communities in California that don’t have a consistent water supply, that don’t have the money to bring in bottled water, and the water that they do have doesn’t meet drinking water standards and it’s not safe to drink but that’s all that they have. I think that’s a huge issue. In some ways the drought is good for bringing that to light but it amplifies the problem so it’s like a double-edged sword.

 

The other issue I’m working on right now is how we handle recycling. Solid waste and trash is an issue that is really easy to not talk about in terms of environmental issues. Climate change, droughts, and water usage get a lot of publicity but the reality is that we generate a lot of trash and it has to go somewhere. There’s very much this sense of “out of sight, out of mind.” You put it in the trashcan, someone picks it up, it goes on a truck and then it’s gone. You don’t have to worry about it. That’s something we’ve done a very good job of in California, of creating these systems to handle waste but it also means that you have to think about it. People don’t want landfills in their backyard, so how do you handle that, how do you change people’s behaviors to accommodate that. That’s an issue that I’m really excited to be working on right now.

 

SK: Out of all the projects that you’ve worked on, are there any specific policy changes that you’ve helped create?

 

KM: I’ll caveat this with some of the biggest impacts that I’ve had on legislation are on the bills that died. One of the challenges working in state legislature is that you do a lot of work in increments and topics can take a long time to move through the legislature. So the work that I’ve done on, for example, pharmaceutical waste will come back, and the work that I’ve put in this will eventually show some motion but it hasn’t yet.

 

In terms of policies that I have worked on that have been signed and that I think I had a major role in, one of them was looking at how we use pesticides in nature conservation areas. There was a bill I was working on that would prohibit the use of certain kinds of rodenticides, these are pesticides that kill mice and rats, in wild life conservation areas. Part of the motivation of this is the bobcat population in San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California that will eat rats and mice that have been poisoned by this rodenticide but haven’t died yet. This chemical will build up in the mountain lions and eventually they get sick. The point of this bill was to try to prevent this from happening, which seems all well and good but what happened was that when preparing for the hearings there was another environmental group that came in and said “no, we need this so that if we ever have a rat infestation on an island, we can treat the rats and get them off the island.” The issue is in island populations, you have flightless birds and other species that have developed on the island without predators or evolved to a point where there’s a symbiosis between the two groups, so if you have this new invasive species coming in, you want a way to treat it. It was very interesting to work on this issue where you have environmental groups that don’t see eye to eye on how to adjust this problem. I was able to help work on bringing solution for this and in creating different ways of handling rodenticide depending on where you are applying it, whether it was on islands or on the mainland.

 

SK: How was this issue resolved?

 

KM: The bill was signed into a law. In some ways, it’s a really good end result. That’s a great example of how the legislative process can bring people together on an issue and create solutions to problems and address concerns that come up along the way. Having this very slow deliberate process eventually gets you to a place where you can make compromise and get to a place where people are happy on it. Brokering solutions can be very challenging and sometimes it’s easy. This one was a case where it was actually pretty easy. Because typically when you’re on the same side of an issue 99% of the time, you want to work together to make it so that it’s 100% of the time that you’re on the same side of the issue.

 

In some cases, I worked on a bill that would have banned fracking in the state of California and that was a bill that we didn’t have everyone in the same room at the same time. It was hard to have a productive conversation with everyone at the same time because the groups were so far apart. The bill would have established a moratorium on fracking until shown to be safe. We had a long discussion about what safe meant, and for the purposes of this interview, it doesn’t really matter but we were establishing a threshold for what safety looked like. On one side, they wanted it very stringent for safe; no risk was the original goal. For a group that’s very concerned about the environment and the potential impacts and wanting to make sure that you stop something bad from happening before it starts, no risk is a very reasonable standard from their standpoint. From the standpoint of oil and gas industry and wanting to have new jobs and to be able to be oil independent and not have to worry about getting oil from North Dakota or overseas or wherever the source may be that’s a little more volatile, no risk does not make sense. It’s not economically viable; it doesn’t make sense in terms of how do you get oil to the state using oil for applications like cars.

 

That was a case where I would have a conversation with one side and we would move more toward the middle, and I’d have a conversation with the other side and have them move more toward the middle. Then I’d work with the author’s office and talk to her about “here’s the feedback I’m getting from both sides, this is the way I’m leaning towards, does this work for you, and is there a compromise that we can make on this.” Nine times out of ten, we would get to a place where we agree on an issue and then we can move forward on that. Sometimes you’re just not going to get to a middle ground. There are some places that some companies or groups aren’t willing to go to and it makes sense based on their bottom line or what their goals are. I like to get to the point where everyone’s compromised on an issue but sometimes there’s a line you can’t go past. There’s some value or priority that you have that you have to hold on to. That’s where it can get challenging and that’s where you have bills that don’t go through because there’s just no compromise point this year. Maybe next year, there’s a compromise point or maybe you don’t need to get to a compromise point; you have enough political willpower or pressure to get it all the way through.

 

RY: You’ve said that compromising or trying to get stuff done in general has been challenging. Could you elaborate on that? Do you have other struggles that you’ve encountered?

 

KM: Trying to get stuff done is always a challenge. The reality of working in the political institution is that sometime politics overrides good policy. My goal was very much to try to get the best policy possible to move forward. Also in California we like to be first for environmental regulations by in large, but doesn’t always happen.

 

There was a bill that I was working on, on plastic micro-beads. In a lot of personal care products, like body scrubs, shampoo, or face washes, manufacturers are putting in small plastic micro-beads to serve as exfoliants. Prior to 1990, 1995, personal care product manufacturers would use natural exfoliants like salts, walnut shells, and other such materials. But some people are allergic to these products and they tend to be variable in size. Starting in the mid 90s, personal care product manufacturers were moving towards using regular uniform plastic micro-beads. This was great for having uniform, hypoallergenic components of your products. But it also means that you’re manufacturing a product that is designed to wash plastic down the drain. One of the consequences of this is that you’re starting to see these micro-beads entering the environment and adding to the general plastic pollution that’s in water. You’ll have cases where fish will come up, eat the plastic products that are absorbing all the hydrophobic compounds, pesticides, and other chemicals that these fish shouldn’t be ingesting. So there were concerns about impacts to higher organisms that eat the fish.

 

There was this bill that would ban the use of plastic micro-beads in personal care products. Now this particular solution was a little bit weird because a lot of the personal care product manufacturers have been getting so much flak from groups for having these plastic in their products they were voluntarily removing the plastic micro-beads from their products. Their big complaint was that they didn’t like the timeline that California was trying to push and they didn’t like some of the definitions. So I had a meeting where the personal care product industry wanted a very clear definition of “plastic” and “biodegradable” in the bill. This was to model off of a legislation that passed in Illinois sometime in the summer.

 

Although I understood why they were rooting for this, there were two problems. One is that plastic isn’t defined in the California statue anywhere and I didn’t know if this was the bill that we want to set the precedent of what the definition of plastic is.

 

Second is that there’s a law passed in California that says you can’t use the term “biodegradable” unless a very stringent criteria are met. This was because everyone was labeling everything “biodegradable” and it got to the point where the term didn’t mean anything. This was very upsetting to the industry; they didn’t like that response. It was an interesting situation for me because each state has its own body of laws and you can’t pass the same bill through every state because the body of laws is different. I got 90% of the way there in meeting compromise but this is one of those cases where we didn’t get all the way there and the end result was that political capital was not in place for this bill to go through. What I felt was a very good bill, a very reasonable bill died because the political capital wasn’t there. That’s happened on a few other cases and that’s frustrating. It’s tough to see a bill that I’ve worked on, that I think is a very modest step to addressing plastic pollution to hold manufacturers accountable for what they’re already doing voluntarily, die. But that’s how it works sometimes; comes with the job territory.

 

SK: What do you mean by when you say that the political capital wasn’t there?

 

KM: There weren’t enough votes to pass it out of the senate. Some of it’s the way the bill is lobbied towards or lobbied against. If on one end you have a group saying “this bill limits us, it’s going to prevent us from having reasonable alternatives, and it’s going to ruin jobs” and if you don’t have a very clear argument from the other side, enough money, political influence, or whatever the set of criteria is to combat that, the bill is not going to get enough votes, which is what happened in this case. The arguments weren’t convincing enough to overwhelm the voice of the personal care product industry and some other groups that were very opposed to the bill. This happens; there are a lot of bills that die within the process because there are groups that are opposed to them, worrying about impacts this bill might have. This is why you have this legislative process: to have a voice of consumerism, the voice of residents, the voice of industries, and businesses. Is this going to hurt us or is it going to help? In this case, in my opinion, I thought this bill was good and had gotten to a very reasonable place, but the industry felt that it went too far. There’s a lot of money that goes into politics, more than I care to admit sometimes. I don’t know if it always sways people, but it does at least get a foot in the door where you have the chance to at least make your case.

 

SK: So in making these kind of changes, what would you say is your biggest weapon?

 

KM: For every bill that I would analyze in the Environmental Quality Committee, we would write public analysis about the bill and the chair that we had was a great advocate of having the best policy to move forward. His main line was “Make it work and fix it. If it’s not getting where it needs to go, do what you need to do to fix it.” So in the course of doing the analysis, we could propose amendments to the bill. These aren’t amendments that the author has to take but normally if you have amendments that the substituents don’t take, committee members get a little bit concerned as to why you’re not taking those amendments, which makes it a really good tool for trying to get the changes that needs to be done. The longer that you’re there and the stronger reputation that you have, easier it is to present big asks for amendments. A lot of what happens in politics is based on reputation. If you have a reputation of being fair but firm on things, that can get you a lot in terms of getting policies that you’re advocating for that are good policies.

 

RY: Do you think that your views on change differ in any significant way from the view of someone who has been in politics all their life?

 

KM: I think in some ways, sure, but I still pretty firmly maintain the attitude that you can make change and that you can make good change, which is by in large the direction we’re going. There are some people who have been in the policy game for a long time who are maybe a little more skeptical on some of these issues. I think the other advantage for being pretty new working in policy is that I don’t know all of the backgrounds on some topics. Generally it makes a good thing. It means I can walk into situations and not be concerned about past baggage. It’s much easier for me to get in and say “I would like to meet with this former senator” that I have no relationship with, which is fine because we’re going to meet and it’ll be a blank slate. I’ll be able to go and make my case or get additional information out of them without thinking about reputations. For me, being new creates more of an equal playing field with everyone I meet. It’s a new meeting, a new opportunity to hear what people have to say and to view it all on a holistic level. It can absolutely be a liability and there’s a huge amount of work in institutional knowledge, but I view it as a way to say that I’m not burdened by concerns about stepping on toes, because I haven’t stepped on any toes yet. So it can be a really good opportunity or a bad one, and it’s ok but I’ll make that on my own.

 

SK: In the beginning of the interview, you talked about how the current mission is to get to the 75% recycling goal by 2020. What is the current rate of recycling in California then?

 

KM: Let me give a little bit of background, which might answer your question. California first really got into the recycling business in 1989 with a bill called AB 939, and it established what was called the 50% diversion rate in California, and this was to divert 50% of waste from landfills. There’s a pretty broad definition of what diversion meant, which is different from recycling. For example, burning tires as fuel would be considered diversion, but it’s not recycling, so it’s keeping it out of the landfills, but not necessarily recycling in the pure sense of what recycling is under the 50% diversion mandate that had been going forward 25 years.

 

Under AB 959, the 50% diversion mandate, the state has gotten to 65% diversion overall, which is pretty good. But, like I said, there are some practices that are maybe a little bit questionable in terms of whether it’s actually diversion, or whether or not it’s actually recycling in the pure definition of it. With the 75% recycling mandate, which was created under AB 341, around 2011, we were at 50% recycling. So the typical practices that go into this are source reduction—creating less trash in the first place—and composting—such as taking food waste, organic waste like trimmings from landscaping, and composting those for mulching and such behavior.

 

And then recycling; this is the bottles and cans recycling bin, metal, foods—pretty much anything you can think of to recycle, put it in the recycling. There are certain jurisdictions that are pretty close to 75%, if not above: San Francisco, Berkeley, and that’s through a lot of effort at the local level. But as a state, we’re only at 50%, and we’ve been at 50% since the goal was put into effect, so we still have a ways to go. And that’s the work that I’m doing, to try to identify, how will we know when we get to 75%? What is the data we need to collect to be able to know we’ve gotten there, and know we’ve gotten there in a meaningful way based on the programs that we want to try to support?

 

SK: So with all these kinds of changes, where would you say the change really starts? Is it with an individual who comes up with these ideas, or is it when the bill is passed and it’s in effect?

 

KM: I would say there are very, very few policies at the state level that come from one person. There are a couple of cases where there’s one person who spearheads the issue; the one that comes to mind is with flame retardants in furniture, and Arlene Blum is by far the advocate for getting flame retardants out of furniture. But the vast majority of subjects have been percolating for so long, I think it’s hard to attribute one person to the genesis of the idea.

 

That being said, it takes time to implement policies, so you can find landmarks for how policies come to be and where you see their efficacy. The source is in people identifying the problem, and which is at the local level, the national level, wherever the first few people who notice a problem and come up with an initial solution. Getting a bill passed, on the state level, is the next big step, so for the case of the 75% recycling goal, in 2011 [Assembly Member Wesley] Chesbro introduced AB 341. That’s the next goal.

 

You can pass a bill, but then you have to implement the bill, so that’s what we’re doing right now: how do you, as a state department, implement these measures? There’s been a number of steps along the way to try to have better implementation. There was a mandatory full recycling component of that bill that’s just starting to come up, and it’s a factor that the department’s been doing a lot to encourage businesses to recycle. That wasn’t done before two years ago, so there are some new components there. There’s a new mandatory organics recycling law that’s going to effect in 2016.

 

There are a lot of incremental steps, once you start looking at the broad picture. I think that achieving any one of those steps is very meaningful, in getting policies enacted—you can’t get to a bill unless there’s someone that has an idea, or a group of people that has an idea and identifies a problem. You can’t implement a bill that hasn’t passed; you can’t have feedback and have better implementation until you’ve started to do it. So there are a lot of steps in the process. Change happens all the time. I was meeting with my boss over coffee earlier today. He actually made the comment that, before he worked for the state, he was promoting policies he is now working to implement, so he goes, “You know, I don’t really know at what point I’m doing old policy or new policy or maybe all of the above,” because it takes so much time to really get policies fully going; there’s so many components to it.

 

And that’s not to be discouraging; I think in some ways it’s exciting there’s a lot of chance for flexibility. I think if there was only one point of change, if you made that change and it was going to be good for the first six months, and something changes, there’s an unintended consequence of that, and there’s no way to correct the course and get to a better solution at the end. So having a lot of these steps, even though it can be frustrating, I think is really good for the process as a whole.

 

SK: So it sounds like you’ve been working at the state level for a really long time; have you ever worked in the local government?

 

KM: [laughs] So, I’ve been working at the state level for 13 months. The reason I call you on that is because—I look at how little I’ve worked here and I think about how much more impact I could have two years from now, or ten years from now. The other reason I call you out on that is, I think that last time I was doing state work I had this impression that you had to be there for a really long time to be fluent enough on an issue to make a difference. And I think you can make a difference in a much shorter period of time than what you might think. A lot of it is learning the overall infrastructure: how do you get a bill through? How do you get a bill to the governor to be signed, and to be implemented? And I think in some ways it’s great to know that you can do that in a short amount of time. You might be more effective five years from now because you have more connections and you know the system a little bit better, but you can start doing that very quickly, which I think is cool.

 

To answer your actual question about working in the local government, I have not done a lot with local governments. But I do feel more empowered to do work with local governments than I did before, because I understand how it works at the state. For example, I just moved to a new place, and it’s near a railroad crossing. I don’t know if you’ve lived near railroad crossings, but in many parts of the state, the train has to blow their horn to warn cars and pedestrians when trains are coming, and they do this all hours of the day. So my first night of staying in my new apartment, it was two in the morning and I had a train blowing its horn; it’s so annoying! So, the next day I went and looked up what the local laws were, and I looked up the federal laws, I looked up what I would need to do to petition the city council of West Sacramento to change the designation of this particular spot to a quiet zone so that the trains do not have to blow their horns at all hours of the day. But I got used to it and decided this was not the point I wanted to make my stand on. But the point I’m trying to make with this story is that, it’s empowering at all levels to know how a small set of the government works, and I think that getting past that initial learning curve of knowing what the players look like and how do I look up information is really powerful in being able to go and make a change at any level.

 

SK: Okay, the reason I said “really long time” is because you listed out so many projects and it seems like you’ve worked on literally everything! You’ve worked on water, pesticides, pharmaceuticals; how long do you usually work on one project, or are there multiple projects going on at the same time?

 

KM: Generally, there are multiple projects going on at the same time. The length of time on a project has ranged from 72 hours to six months, sometimes longer in some cases. The average amount of time that you have to analyze a bill is maybe two to four weeks, but there are a lot of people who work at it along the way for lots of chances to catch unintended consequences or to adjust and improve the bill. But there are some cases where things go through very quickly. And, you know, you learn what you have to when you go from there.

 

SK: So, when you analyze a bill, what do you look for in particular?

 

KM: Lots of things, everything. The words of the bill are really important. It sounds really simplistic, but the words are really important. The intention is great, but the words on the page are what become law, and so it’s important that the words be right. So I spend a lot of time reading bills. And yeah, this sounds really simplistic, but it’s not. There’s a lot of pieces where you have bills that—phrasing is such that you have unintended consequences because of the bill. Or, the difference between a “may” versus a “shall.” Is it permissive, or is it a requirement? It seems like minutiae when you’re looking at it, but it’s important.

 

So I look a lot at the words on the page: do the words on the page match the intent of the bill? Do they match all of the things the bill is supposed to do? I would look at, how does this bill interact with current law? Is it contradictory with current law? Does it overwrite current law? Is it going to mesh well with the existing statutes that we have? So one case of that is when you define something; if you define plastic in one way, and you defined it somewhere else differently, is that a problem? Does that create some sort of weird precedence for new bills that are coming through? So trying to look for those consequences based on current statute, I would meet with as many stakeholders as I could to try to get a sense for, how do you interpret this bill of impacting your industry, your business, your residence, whoever it is you represent? How do you interpret it, because they’re going to come at it with a different lens than what I am, so that can be helpful for getting a sense for how this bill would actually be implemented. When I was working in the legislature, I would talk with the state departments, “How are you going to implement this bill? How hard is it going to be? How many people is it going to take? Is this meshing with your current program, or not? Do you have suggestions on how to improve it?”

 

That’s what I look for. Those are probably kind of the big things, but really, the words on the page—it’s tough to vote against a bill that you support the principle of, it’s really tough to do that. But sometimes you have to because the words on the page just don’t get there or create more problems than they should, in some cases. And one of my big goals is to try to suggest amendments and to work with authors to get it to the point where the intent of the bill matches the words on the page as best as possible. I think that’s a lot of what happens when you’re analyzing bills: you’re getting the words on the page to match what the bill is trying to do.

 

RY: What sort of things could we, as students or individuals, do to help change policies?

 

KM: I think there’s a lot of different things you could do, and a lot of it depends on what level of involvement you want to get. One option is to come to Sacramento and to participate in a hearing, and people do this. We have them at a public building and there are topics where we would have over a hundred people cramming into the hearing room, trying to say, “I support this program because of this.” You know, our battery recycling plant in Vernon, California, called Exide, caused lots of controversy surrounding that particular site. A lot of residents were concerned about health effects there, and we had a lot of people drive up from L.A. to Sacramento—it’s a six, seven, eight hour drive, depending on what traffic you hit—to talk about how, “My aunt died, and I think it’s because she lived next to this plant.” “I’m a grandfather, and I’m concerned that my grandchildren are living in this area and they’re breathing this air and they’re going to have all of these problems because I see that in my community.” And the voices matter. It matters when you have someone who says, “No, I am one of the people that you represent, and I am concerned about this because x, y, and z.” Legislators really like hearing from young people. They’re always very complimentary, “Well, there’s this young person who’s come up, who cares about these issues!” So that’s one way.

 

There’s the state level and local level of writing to your legislator, calling them, expressing why you’re concerned about things. And I think sometimes just getting out on the ground and actually doing something—volunteering with a group, doing ocean clean-up days, where people go and pick up trash along the ocean. This makes a difference for what kind of solid waste is in the environment, and it’s easy. Maybe it’s not making a big change policy-wise, but it’s making big practical change in terms of what environmental consequences we’re looking at.

 

For me, wanting to do environmental policy, it was important to actually get in a place where I could make changes, and getting involved with the agency and with the state legislator was a really big part of that. I don’t know if everyone necessarily needs to go that particular route, but it is certainly one way for getting on the ground level for what’s happening with policy. I think running for government is a good way to do this. I get this question a lot when people ask me: am I running for office? I think I’d be a terrible politician, basically! But there are people who are very well-suited to be politicians, and we make the comment that I can write as many recommendations as I want, and I’ll consult with the Environmental Quality Committee, but I don’t vote, I’m not the one who’s actually voting on bills that become law.

 

For getting involved in making a change, I think it’s just using your voice to state what you want that change to be, and there are a lot of different venues for that. There’s local government, state government, federal government, local planning projects, local talks or symposiums. Once you start looking for them—and I’ve been astonished, seeing this for myself—there’s a lot of places to be able to go and say, “This is my opinion, and this is why I think it needs to be changed,” and having people who are eloquent, smart, excited, and committed to an issue is really important. I can’t overstate how much of an impact it makes to have someone who can come up and eloquently speak as to why they think an issue is important, for people who are either making a change or maybe inspiring someone to take that next step. So, use your voice!

 

SK: So, I don’t have a clear image of how the government works, but it seems like your job is mainly to convince the politicians who are actually voting on a bill to vote in a certain way. Is it usually very hard to convince them, or—is scientific fact that this bill is a good bill enough to convince these politicians?

 

KM: I’m going to treat that question in a couple of ways. With my job in the Senate, it was to write as balanced analyses as possible. Not necessarily writing to convince one way or the other, to lay out all of the different facts, as much as possible, of the bill with somebody who makes the bills. Now I’m working with agencies in the executive branch, helping out implement bills, it’s a slightly different position.

 

In terms of using science in bills, it is very unusual for science to be the deciding factor on a bill. And part of that’s because, I work in California, and the really nice thing about California is that, there is general consensus on a lot of scientific issue, and what the implications are. For example, at the federal level, there is some debate about what’s happening with climate change and whether or not climate change is a real thing. That is not an issue in California. People are pretty on board with the fact that climate change is happening. Now, people do not agree on how to address climate change and what the impacts are to current jobs versus new jobs, versus old technologies to new technologies, how progressive you need to be about combatting climate change, how aggressive you need to be about carbon emissions, how strongly you need to legislate, to what extent local government could handle, versus the state, versus counties, versus—all of these different players that come in. That’s where the debate happens.

 

Now, the Environmental Quality Committee met last year and there’s going to be some change because of the election. We had some of the most environmentally active senators in the state legislature. For them, you don’t have to do a lot of convincing. Say, “This is good for the environment,” and they’re like, “Yes!” If it’s not good for the environment, they’re like, “No!” You know, it’s very easy. But, that’s what the focus of the Committee is: looking over the environmental impacts. You take the same bill and you run it through the Business Professions Committee, and they’re going to have some very different perspectives on what the priorities are, and that’s the nature of the different committees that we’re looking at. Who is this impacting? What are the results?

 

The bills that I’ve worked on where science has been a component—in some cases, there’s not enough consistent science to make a clear determination. So, for example, the pharmaceuticals issue, there are a number of reports showing that pharmaceuticals exist in the waterways. There are no clear reports on how they get there. That creates a lot of space for bringing in, “Well, my report shows this.” “And my report shows that.” So you wind up with battling sides where science doesn’t help. And the nature of scientific discourse is that you have hypothesis, theory, new hypothesis and more theory. And slight differences in experimental design can have very different results. You wind up with this no-man’s-land of, “Well, we know that they’re there. We can’t agree on how they get there.” And there’s no science to back that up really one way or the other, so that’s where sometimes you get into scientific debate. And in that issue, there are enough hotter topics of disagreeing that there’s lots of stuff to cover.

 

SK: So, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. We’ll type up the transcript and then send it to you with any further questions.

 

KM: Sure! I’ll just close by saying that, in terms of making change at the local level, California’s doing a really going job of trying to implement progressive environmental policies and, you know, it’s not perfect, but there are a lot of people who are motivated to try to get good policies through and to do what they can and I’m trying to be one of those people.