Every year for twenty years, the Council on Environmental Quality has labored to report to the governor and public on the status of our environment and the adequacy of state environmental programs. Such was the charge given to this Council by the Genera l Assembly in 1971. Looking back at some of those reports, I can see that it has never been easy to determine what is adequate and what is not. To know if you're getting closer to where you want to be, you have to know where you've been and where you're going. It's difficult enough, I've learned in my position, to make sufficient sense of environmental data to figure out where you are now!

Environment/2000 was an attempt to add a little firm ground to the swamp of environmental statistics. In 1987, with the assistance of a large advisory committee and hundreds of citizens, the DEP produced a comprehensive set of objectives. The Council w as given the additional job of reporting on progress toward those objectives. The Council relished the new job; for the first time, it had a clear statement of where the state was trying to go. Now, progress could be measured.

There were still some problems, however, which the Council was not shy about bringing to the DEP's attention. The ground was still too mushy; that is, some of the objectives just could not be measured, either because they were too vague or because no on e was collecting the data necessary to find out if we had reached the objective.

This year, the Council is excited about the effort that the DEP and many citizens put forth to revise the Environment/2000 plan, particularly because more of the issues have firm targets. This will make it easier to do our job, to state each year how fa r we have come and how far we have to go. And this is exactly what we intend to do. The target date is but eight years away. If we are not yet close to our goals, we as a state will have to pick up the pace. If a whole new approach is involved, we had better know that soon so we can get started. As an example, the Council concluded last year that traditional open space programs were not getting the state to its objectives fast enough, so we recommended that the state embark on an ambitious Greenways program, and do it right away. Well, there are other things we should probably start doing right away, and Environment/2000 will tell us what they are.

I hope you will join the Council and me in using this plan as a road map to figure out where we are going and how we might get there. Along the way, the Council will be your information center, telling you whether we all need to speed up, slow down, or take another direction.

John A. Millington, a long-time conservationist who resides in Washington Depot, was appointed Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality by Governor Lowell P. Weicker, Jr. in 1991.