Coming Clean : EcoAnalysis, an environmental consulting firm in Ojai, prepares to export its services to the former Soviet Union.

By RICHARD KAHLENBERG

Nov. 12, 1992 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

David Guggenheim, vice president of EcoAnalysis, an environmental consulting firm in Ojai, was clearly happy about the recent presidential election.

Paraphrasing Gen. George Patton, he said: “We have taken Washington--now it’s on to Moscow.”

I was interviewing Guggenheim immediately following his recent trip to the former Soviet Union to drum up business for the company he co-founded 10 years ago.

“Clinton and Gore’s election and the reaction of the business community have proven the environment’s a legitimate issue,” he said. “As they said in the campaign, protecting and cleaning up the environment can create new jobs on a large scale. I even read that in your paper last week,” he added with a grin.

“We see now that the whole way of thinking about it has changed. There’s money to be made. Moscow figures into that. Environmental expertise is going to be one of America’s great exports--like engineering skills in past decades.”

Guggenheim led a delegation of business people, which included representatives of Xerox, AT&T; and other U. S. firms that also had the goal of garnering business. For AT&T; and Xerox, that meant selling manufactured goods and manufacturing expertise. For Guggenheim, it meant selling environmental consulting services.

Why sell to the Russians now, especially when they are broke?

“We can’t ignore a country four times the size of the U. S. as a potential customer,” he said. “We have to begin (trying to sell our services) now to be well-situated when they’re ready financially.”

And when they are ready financially, Guggenheim said, there will be plenty of work to be done. In the new Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia, it was the environmentally oriented dissident groups that spearheaded the independence movements, Guggenheim said. After independence, however, these new leaders found themselves the “owners” of all the former U.S.S.R.’s inefficient, polluting, unsafe factories. These facilities need to be modernized.

“If they shut down the polluting factories, they’ll have nothing. And yet they have all these potential Chernobyls--environmental trans-border problems,” he said.

One example of the consulting services EcoAnalysis could provide concerns electric power conservation, which lowers air pollution.

“Modern techniques are almost unknown there,” Guggenheim said. “They don’t even have residential meters in Moscow.”

But there are other areas in need of environmental consultation services as well. Guggenheim said things are so bad that the former Soviet Navy is known to have dumped nuclear reactors from decommissioned warships into the North Sea. And those are cases we know about.

“It’s in (America’s) interest to have environmentally healthy neighbors. I’m in the Perot camp there,” said Guggenheim, referring to independent presidential candidate Ross Perot’s statement about cleaning up Russia: “Ten cents now will save us having to spend a dollar later.”

In point of fact--frightening fact--the U.S.A. and Russia are separated by a body of water so narrow that a woman recently swam the distance. And, he pointed out, there are Siberian and Alaskan islands closer together than Key West and Cuba.

Guggenheim used to teach marine biology in the Florida Keys and he knows such pollution has no respect for territorial waters. “We want to do business there because of the scale of the problems.”

He showed me a photo of just one example, a landfill in Latvia. When it rains, the toxic items ooze out of it and back down the road into the ground water around the capital of the country. That’s the specter every NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) in America raises when officials want to put a landfill nearby.

In Ventura County, we have environmental protection that, so far, has kept such things from happening. But in the former Soviet Union, Guggenheim learned, it always happens.

Their newest sewage treatment facility in Latvia, built near the Baltic Sea during the ‘80s, is only 25% efficient, according to Guggenheim.

Guggenheim’s company is not going to be alone in its efforts. In a recent Times editorial, President-elect Bill Clinton wrote of the need to get more U. S. companies involved in global environmental cleanups: “Will U. S. firms meet this demand?” he asked. “Not if our businesses are told that concern for the environment is a fad. . . .”

Guggenheim, however, could tell I was still appalled by his report about conditions in Russia. He turned philosophical.

“We’re very lucky to be living here. I was deeply touched by the peoples’ stories over there. It really hits you--the comparison with a place like Ojai.

“They watch CNN and the TV series ‘Santa Barbara.’ They got really excited when I said I lived near there.”

He said he tried to explain to them that life in our part of California isn’t exactly the way it’s depicted on the TV show. But then he gave up.

Because, compared to current conditions over there, it is.