David Paylor: Environmental needs and societal needs coming together for a single solution require a lot of hard work and commitment. We’ve made huge progress in the last 30 years, and we continue to make our environmental and scientific standards higher. But we expect more—and we should expect more. We’ve got new challenges in front of us. I hope that people’s ingenuity will continue to rise to the task, and we’ll do what needs to be done to make progress. It will require new tools and new ways of doing things, but I know we’ll pull together and keep making things better.

 

Alan Pollock: A lot of things begin and end with the pocketbook, and it surely would be a benefit if environmental protection and enhancement could be linked to also being a benefit economically for people. When they see that benefit, they realize they are making the right choices.

 

Brad Chewning: I think toxic controls are still going to be a challenge, and other things we haven’t even had time to think about, like pharmaceuticals and other things that are going through the wastewater treatment plants without being treated.

 

Carol Wampler: To me, the next great challenge at DEQ is to not just tweak the permittees, not just tweak environmental groups, but also to tweak government and Virginia’s environmental industry to provide the motivation to each individual to change how he or she lives. To be successful, this will require working cooperatively at a level we are now not even able to dream about. I think it can be done; however, it’s a huge challenge that can’t be met until we, as individuals, change the way we live.

 

Young man studying a Bluegill at the 2003 World Water Monitoring Day

Charles Hawkins: When I was a child, milk came in glass containers you put back out on your steps, Cokes came in bottles that you put a deposit on, you didn’t throw away anything because it was always brought back. Now everything we have is disposable. That’s got to go someplace. We need to figure out what we can do to get back to where we were at one point because a totally disposable society is nothing but wasted resources, and we can’t continue to waste the resources we’re wasting.

 

David Evans: What is the state’s role going to be? More and more, the biggest sources of pollution that we are going to face in the future are going to be development-related. That’s not something that the state historically had a big role in. You’ve got local government competing for economic development. They have a built-in incentive to defeat anything that is going to discourage development.

 

Dennis Treacy: I think you will see an increasing attention to agriculture. For years and years farmers have been viewed as pillars of the community. But farmers are exempt from everything. Now people are beginning to wonder about it. What I hope happens is that while we attempt to deal with agriculture we do it in a sensitive way that makes sense for farmers.

 

Durwood Willis: There’s going to be a lot of competition for resources, stemming from population growth and the growth of the economy. We’re all going to be competing for the same water, the same soil or the same cubic meter of air. There’s got to be willingness on the private or public side to put up the money to buy your stake in that resource, to set your parcel aside. We’ll see more citizens being willing to set their land up in trust so it isn’t being sold for a number of years, or maybe never sold, never developed.

 

Harry Gregori: I think it’s probably the issue of nanotechnology, nano-scale technology. We’re looking at chemicals used in products or materials where the technology is just fantastic, because the nano-scale (which is less than 14 microns—very, very small) is an area that is currently unregulated. The federal government and other governments internationally are looking at what the impact of this nano-scale technology is in terms of materials and chemicals. What are the impacts on the environment, on the use of various products?

 

Jim Sydnor: Greenhouse gases … how is that going to play out, since we don’t have the control technology for carbon dioxide? The state may sell allowances to reduce emissions and use that money and help people reduce the demand for electricity. It’s going to be a number of years before we have some sense of controlling greenhouse gases and how much we need to control them and whether there will be technology to do it.

 

John Daniel: I think the future is good, but it gets harder and harder. Now it’s more complicated. Like an onion, there are so many layers. People are just starting to understand climate change. You really have to get your arms around it, and it takes a while to understand and figure out how to best deal with it. When you’re in the middle of something it’s not the time to do the planning for it. You have to plan for it when it’s not a crisis situation.

Bill Lichter and another U.S. Geological Survey scientist record information about sediment samples from the Virginia coastal area. These sediment samples were from water monitoring wells that were drilled mostly during the 1960s and 1970s as the result of a partnership by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the USGS. These same wells are still part of Virginia’s observation well network. Information from these wells reveals information ground water, including ground water levels which are used to assess the effects of drought.

 

Pam Faggert: I think most of us agree that we need to spend more time focusing on being better stewards of our energy. At a national level there’s also obviously an interest in becoming more energy independent, and also in the Commonwealth so that we can be the masters of our own destiny. There are a lot of exciting things happening that are really going to affect all of us in terms of energy use, in terms of the types of energy that we buy.

 

Tayloe Murphy: We need to build new constituencies for environmental protection, we need to engage the public generally in the effort to obtain additional funding. One of the major constituencies within the general public that is a potential ally of the environment is the faith-based community. I have become an advocate of reaching out to churches and organizations within the faith community to obtain their support. Because most of these faith-based organizations, churches, religious organizations themselves—whether they be Christian, Muslim or Jewish—they all have a fundamental belief in the fact that God created the world that we enjoy. So with that belief, it follows very logically that therefore we are stewards of creation, and as stewards we have an obligation to protect it.

 

Tim Hayes: I really think we need to look now at how we can move forward at more of a local and personal level to reduce transportation-related impacts to really think ahead about how we can help people working and living closer together. How can we reduce impacts of local development? Ultimately we need to be looking at things like getting rid of the internal combustion engine. We need to be looking at non-fossil fuel sources of electric power generation. We need to have a much more integrated approach towards energy development than we do, and that’s got to be done at all levels.