Loud applause greeted the Environmental Protection Agency’s Lisa Jackson as the agency administrator addressed a packed Varsity Hall Thursday on the importance of the EPA’s economic role.
President Barack Obama appointed Jackson in 2008 as the EPA’s first African-American administrator. Her career has been characterized by a push for conservation-based economic innovation and environmental justice.
“It’s good for me as EPA administrator to come into Wisconsin,” Jackson said Tuesday. “It’s really like coming back to home to the source of everything we do.”
Jackson praised UW-Madison for its past leadership in the environmental movement and called upon faculty and students to continue to “drive the environmental movement.”
“We need that same nationwide concern mobilized to pull these issues out of the political gridlock of today,” Jackson said.
That drive is especially crucial now, as Republican lawmakers vote to “undermine” the EPA and national environmental law, she said.
Jackson attributed anti-environmental legislation to “misinformation” spread by lobbyists, corporations and news organizations, and she sought to dispel common misconceptions. Chief among those, Jackson said, is the misconception that EPA spending and regulation harm the national economy.
Jackson credited Obama for continuing to fund the EPA in the face of economic recession, because the president “knows the choice between the environment and the economy is a false choice.”
In the face of “a new generation of environmental challenges,” Jackson emphasized tying environmental innovation, like hybrid transportation and green energy, to growing the economy.
“It is clear we could have a clean environment and a good economy,” Jackson said.
