Hendrick Smith speaking at UW

Free public address on water pollution titled: Who Are the NEW Polluters. Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent, is one of America's most distinguished journalists.  He will discuss how in 1970 with the passage of the  Clean Water Act, the focus of the Environmental Protection Agency and the public was on big industrial polluters - chemical plants, steel mills, copper smelters, wastewater treatment plants. The enemy was “Them”, with a capital T - Big Industry. Today, the problem and the villains have changed, thanks largely to economic development and the sprawl that surrounds American cities, large, medium and small. Scientists now point to the ecologically damaging runoff from highways, parking lots, malls, suburban developments, any and all of the hard surfaces used in development as the largest single source of toxic waste flowing into Puget Sound and other iconic American waterways. In short, we're all the New Polluters. This poses a new and daunting challenge for policy-makers and ordinary citizens.