JOHN HEINZ ENVIRONMENTALIST

Timothy E. Wirth

Thomas E. Lovejoy
Washington Post, April 12, 1991; Page a19

John Heinz, as was widely reported in the media, exhaustively and nobly represented his state, the elderly and U.S. trade interests. Overlooked, unfortunately, was perhaps his greatest legacy of all: his service on behalf of the environment, in his state, his country and the world.

He was the author of the Pennsylvania Wilderness Act, helped craft the Clean Water Act and Superfund programs and was a primary force behind the resolution of the decade-long conflict over controlling acid rain. His beloved and dynamic wife, Teresa, has served on the Environmental Defense Fund's Board of Trustees since 1987 and was recently elected vice chair of that leading nonprofit environmental organization.

In Pennsylvania, John could often be found at environmental trouble spots. He relentlessly worked to clean up the Butler mine tunnel, where huge quantities of used oil had been dumped. In Paoli, he put on a "moon suit" to trudge through the local rail yard, which was heavily polluted by PCBs. 

On behalf of environmental protection, John Heinz was both our friend and colleague. This man of more than sufficient means—one so closely identified with the private sector —was one of the nation's most prominent, articulate and forward-looking protectors of the public good through his environmentalism.

We traveled with him two years ago to the Amazon basin to see firsthand the damage wrought by deforestation in the tropics, where an area the size of his home state of Pennsylvania was being destroyed each year. Sen. Heinz came back with a deep commitment to dealing with issues involving the loss of biological diversity and forest destruction at home and abroad. He was instrumental in scuttling an ill-conceived plan to build a road from the Amazon rain forests over the Andes mountains through Peru to the Pacific. The history of such roads has generally been one of wilderness destruction, and John knew it.

He was committed as well to leveraging massive Latin American debt -- the bulk of which will never be repaid—in service of forest preservation. He was author of an amendment in 1989 that directed the U.S. directors of the multilateral development banks to promote these ''debt-for-nature'' swaps and push for strict new environmental guidelines at the banks.

The commitment to using the marketplace to achieve our environmental goals was not a new concept for John Heinz. He helped conceive the idea of changing the terms of environmental protection. A veteran of environmental policy-making for almost two decades—with a truly unique environmental and private-sector perspective—John knew well the limits of traditional command and control, predominantly regulatory attempts to achieve our environmental goals.

Courageously, he helped develop a study on a new set of environmental strategies to promote incentives for environmental protection and to unleash the powers of the marketplace to that end. ''Project 88,'' the public policy study conceived with Sen. Heinz, ''may turn out to have a greater positive impact on our planet's future than all of the scare stories that have dominated the news,'' wrote an Environmental Defense Fund attorney in 1989.

Another of our joint projects was developed to establish a dialogue and better understanding between the fields of journalism and science. Before our 1989 conference, we noted that each viewed the other with great skepticism and considerable hostility. To scientists, the media often appeared unfocused, unfair and unfounded. To the media, the scientific community often seemed self-serving, pedantic and acerbic. A gathering of people from both worlds was convened at the Smithsonian to discuss these issues, share insights and learn one another’s perspective. This was the sort of dialogue John felt was essential to meaningful progress. He hoped—and we all felt—that this conference made a contribution.

Just before his death, Sen. Heinz helped write major legislation to help prevent global warming and to create incentives for recycling used oil, newsprint, tires and lead-acid batteries, and he was playing a prominent role in the development of legislation to address the nation's solid waste crisis. Soon, the second round of Project 88 will be released—the fruit of his work and a memorial to his contribution to environmental protection.

Timothy E. Wirth is a Democratic senator from Colorado. Thomas E. Lovejoy is the assistant secretary for external affairs at the Smithsonian Institution.

[Timothy E. Wirth is now president of the United Nations Foundation, and Thomas E. Lovejoy is president of The Heinz Center.]