Nation's Cities - January 30, 2012

January 30, 2012
NATION’S CITIES WEEKLY 7
COLUMNIST
Veteran GOP Appointee Asserts ‘Science Has Left the Building’

by Neal Peirce
The words are harsh:
Clean-air regulations are
under “demagogic assaults.”
House Republicans are dan-
gerously “advocating abandon-
ment of toxic regulations” that
have demonstrably protected
Americans’ health. They’re
“ignoring climate change.” In
fact, “for some of the most
prominent leaders of the
Republican Party, science has
left the building.”
The speaker, William
K. Reilly, has gilt-edged
Republican credentials. He
was a senior staff member of
President Richard Nixon’s
Council on Environmental
Quality. For four years, he
served as President George
H.W. Bush’s administrator of
the Environmental Protection
Agency.

What I’ve always found
fascinating about Bill Reilly,
whom I’ve known since the
1970s, is not just the political
candor he brings to big issues.
Nor just his array of top public
service posts including head-
ing the U.S. delegation to the
United Nations Earth Summit
in Rio in 1992, directing the
Global Water Challenge, and
co-chairing the recent National
Commission on the BP
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill
and Offshore Drilling.
What I’ve found striking is
his equal interest in creating
better places — communities,
neighborhoods, in which we
live. It’s a connection the main-
stream environmental commu-
nity ignored for many of its
early years, focused overwhelm-
ingly on issues such as saving
the wilderness.
But not Reilly. He was an
urbanist before it ever became
fashionable — indeed start-
ing in his college days, he
explained in a recent lecture
at Washington’s National
Building Museum on receiving
the prestigious Vincent Scully
Prize for “exemplary” leader-
ship in urban design.
He had learned from dis-
tinguished conservationists,
said Reilly, that it’s possible
to breathe life and beauty
even into the dullest land-
scape or cityscape. And from
Holly Whyte, author of “The
Organization Man,” that den-
sity is the secret, not the bane,
of urban life — that “pedes-
trians choose the most heavily
crowded and trafficked inter-
sections to stop, chat, exchange
reciprocal gestures.”
James Rouse, famed devel-
oper of festival marketplaces,
took Reilly for a tour of his first
big hit, Boston’s Faneuil Hall
Marketplace. As they passed
the low-revenue fruit, vegetable
and flower market that had
taken up the entire ground
floor of the building, Rouse
remarked that big developers
were mocking him for ignoring
“the bottom line.” But Rouse
explained what critics missed:
“The market is the magnet, it’s
what draws the crowds.”
As president of the
Conservation Fund, then
merged with the World
Wildlife Fund, Reilly focused
in the ’70s both on protection
of “exquisite, unspoiled, wild
and beautiful places” around
the world and creating friend-
lier, more inviting and inclusive
neighborhoods in U.S. cities.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is
nrp@citistates.com.
© 2012, The Washington
Post Writers Group
The opinions expressed in this
column are not necessarily those of
the National League of Cities or
Nation’s Cities Weekly.
CLASSIFIEDS AND PROFESSIONAL DIRECTORY
Positions
CITY MANAGER: The Mayor
and Town Council of Ocean City,
Maryland, one of the East Coast’s
premier seashore resort communi-
ties, invite applications from qualified
candidates for this position. Please see
full ad at www.springsted.com.
Did you know you can read a digital version of the print edition of
Nation’s Cities Weekly online each Monday?
Go to: www.nationscities-digital.org
From there you can read, download and search issues.