HEINZ TRUST GIVES $20 MILLION ENDOWMENT TO OPEN ENVIRONMENTAL CENTER

The widow of Sen. John Heinz yesterday announced an addition to the ranks of Washington's environmental community: an organization that will devote itself to economical, science-based solutions to such long-term problems as how to make cars more ecologically friendly.

The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, named after the Pennsylvania senator, was established with a $20 million gift -- one of the largest ever presented to an environmental organization -- by the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, a family philanthropic trust.

Backers said the center will be distinguished from the Sierra Club, Greenpeace and other such organizations in that it will bring together representatives of industry, academia, government and environmental organizations, encouraging each to devote its best resources to addressing the nation's major environmental woes.

The new center is envisioned as a "middle ground where the major stakeholders in environmental policy can be jointly challenged to think long term and to forge a durable consensus for action," Teresa Heinz, the senator's widow, said yesterday.

The center, operating out of temporary quarters in downtown Washington, will be permanently based somewhere in the Washington area. It has a staff of five that will eventually grow to about 15, a spokesman said.

The bulk of the organization's work will be done by teams of academic specialists and environmental experts from corporations, Congress and existing environmental groups. The teams, which will be selected by the center's directors and staff, will focus on a single long-term environmental problem. They will seek to answer questions about the science and economics of that problem and make some recommendations for what policy options the government should pursue to address it.

Topics that have been proposed range from developing a "green car" to determining what to do about the decline of the nation's fisheries, according to William Merrill, the center's president and former vice chancellor of the Texas A&M University system. No decision has been made yet on what topics will be pursued, he added.

The center expects to draw from major universities to help lead the teams. Already, Princeton, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford have signed on to support the center's efforts. "We think that we'll have access to the best minds in the country," Merrill said.

The center will also be distinguished from existing groups in that it will focus on issues that will be problematic five to 10 years from now rather than legislation currently before Congress, a spokesman said.

The center is "key to the new architecture needed to solve environmental problems as we move into the next century," said Fred Krupp, executive director of the Environmental Defense Fund and a board member of the new organization.

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