GORILLA IN THE CLOSET
An eye-opening memoir for those interested in government service, politics, academia, environmental history, and environmental engineering.
Eric Eidsness, an environmental engineer and former EPA Assistant Administrator for Water appointed by President Ronald Reagan, diagnoses the EPA’s missteps over the decades leading up to today’s crisis of confidence. He proposes a solution that will reconfigure the EPA into the agency it was meant to be.
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ERIC EIDSNESS
Environmentalist, Engineer, Public Servant, Entrepreneur
Over the past 10 years, author Eric Eidsness has compiled Gorilla in the Closet, a raw and unflinching historical account of the politically charged Environmental Protection Agency under the Reagan Administration. If you want to know why the EPA remains so polarized today, this is a must-read.
Advance Praise
“Gorilla In The Closet is a page-turner with searing intensity in the terse descriptions of EPA Administrators William D. Ruckelshaus and Anne Gorsuch, each trying in their own way to establish and develop a major new federal agency through trial and error, learning through success and failure while navigating the tricky political shoals, and serving their own political ambitions.
There is no absence of drama in its telling — in part it’s a whodunit, carefully telling of steps and missteps and motives of his colleagues and the witch hunt that forced all of them out of office, including Eric, the last to go. In other respects, the book is a tutorial on environmental law, particularly the sweeping Clean Water Act, its main regulatory features, the ambiguities, impossible deadlines and unfamiliar mandates that upended industry, states, municipalities and the engineering profession for over a decade and a half before alignment of interests began to take root and enforcement became more effective.”
~ Claude E. Terry, Ph.D., microbiologist, molecular biologist, biophysicist, conservationist, environmentalist, board-certified toxicologist, founder of American Rivers, co-founder of Friends of the River
Academia
The Gorilla in the Closet is an extensive primer on governance, oversight, and “the way things work” in Washington, D.C. — an excellent resource for students and faculty who wish to study the EPA’s backstory.
Media
Enjoy interviews and articles about Eric’s long career on C-SPAN, the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, his papers at the Colorado State University Water Resources Archive, and more.
Blog
Eric shares observations, anecdotes and lively backstories about his own journey, the lessons learned, the environment, the EPA, colleagues, and other notable topics — interesting reading based on an interesting life.
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