And whether the Environmental Protection Agency is up to the task. It’s toxic chemicals seeping into the soil. But to Caroline Isber, the stakes are really high. Now Turtle Park is not exactly a place where democracy rises and falls with the teeter totters. There’s a basement garage near Georgetown where Deep Throat met Woodward and Bernstein during Watergate. And as you can imagine, this town is full of these spots: There’s a footbridge in the Virginia suburbs where an American double agent dropped classified papers and disks for the Soviets. You know, one of those prearranged locations where brown packages manila envelopes with secret information gets passed. Tong: A strategy that requires Turtle Park as a handoff site. And so the question was, how to defend it? And so we evolved a strategy. Isber: We thought that the environment was very much under attack. And Save EPA is meant to stop efforts by the Reagan administration to shrink the agency, or, in her view, to destroy it. And in the early ‘80s, she helps to start this insurgent group. See, Caroline worked environment issues in the Carter White House. Tong: 'Meet me in the playground' - to plot. They wanted to get together and I'd say, 'Meet me in the playground.' Tong: And so sometimes who would come to visit you? In some cases, was it people from the EPA, which is pretty far from here? Back then, she says Turtle Park was a good spot for playdates - and a good rendez-vous point to get inside information. She’s a retired environmental policy expert. Isber: And he was jumping off the turtles and building sand castles and running around and meeting other children. It’s a big upgrade from 1981, when an unassuming looking mom would come with her 4-year-old boy.Ĭaroline Isber: The playground had sand and there were concrete turtles. Mini-slide, swings, monkey bars, playhouse with a mailbox. And as playgrounds go, I give it an eight, maybe maybe a nine. It’s been around forever in this nice, leafy neighborhood by American University. Scott Tong: If you know Washington, D.C., you may have stumbled across this playground: Turtle Park. The second episode of “Captured” looks at how critics both in and outside of the agency plotted to turn up the political heat on Gorsuch and the Reagan administration - and how the serious business of environmental regulation even ended up in the funny pages. So they worked with other Washington insiders to leak documents and stir up controversy. But many on her staff thought her approach undermined the mission of the agency: to protect the environment and public health.
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