Hedrick Smith, creator of the Frontline documentary "Poisoned Waters" at UW

Hedrick Smith will deliver a free public address on water pollution titled: Who Are the NEW Polluters on November 3, 2009 at 6:30 pm, on the UW Seattle campus in Kane Hall, room 130. To reserve a seat please register at: www.grad.washington.edu/lectures or https://go.washington.edu/uwaa/events/nextcity_smith/details.tcl

Hedrick Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and editor and Emmy Award-winning producer/correspondent, is one of America's most distinguished journalists.  He will discuss how in 1970 with the passage of the  Clean Water Act, the focus of the Environmental Protection Agency and the public was on big industrial polluters - chemical plants, steel mills, copper smelters, wastewater treatment plants. The enemy was "Them", with a capital T - Big Industry. Today, the problem and the villains have changed, thanks largely to economic development and the sprawl that surrounds American cities, large, medium and small. Scientists now point to the ecologically damaging runoff from highways, parking lots, malls, suburban developments, any and all of the hard surfaces used in development as the largest single source of toxic waste flowing into Puget Sound and other iconic American waterways. In short, we're all the New Polluters. This poses a new and daunting challenge for policy-makers and ordinary citizens.

Mr. Smith is the second speaker in a five part series titled NEXT CITY: Urban Sustainability. Smith's visit is sponsored by the Jessie and John Danz Endowment. He is a guest of the UW's Friday Harbor Laboratories, Department of Communication, Department of Biology and the Graduate School.

Future NEXT CITY speakers include: Robert Fishman, professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan; and Geoffrey Canada, president and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone. More information about the series is at: http://www.washington.edu/alumni/learn/graduate/nextcity.html.