http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0916-22.htm
Published on Friday, September 16, 2005 by TomDispatch.com
Left Behind: Bush's Holy War on Nature
by Chip Ward
Hurricane Katrina showed us how difficult it has become to distinguish
between natural disasters and man-made ones. First, the Army Corp of
Engineers decides it can build a better river than Mother Nature and
in the process deprives the delta of storm-absorbing wetlands and
barrier islands while allowing the ground under New Orleans to subside
into a suicidal bowl. Then a storm hits and... well, you know the rest
of the story. The lesson is simple: we are embedded in natural systems
and whether we acknowledge that or not can be a matter of life and
death.
What follows next you've heard a hundred times: the Bush
administration's environmental record is lousy. More than lousy, it is
potentially disastrous. But why? At first glance, it's easy enough to
understand. Philosophically, Republicans believe in the power of the
marketplace to shape behavior. Their animosity toward government
regulation is long-standing. They emphasize the rights of private-
property owners over any notion of the commons, and so are comfortable
letting corporations pursue profit at the expense of air or water
quality. Obviously, a Texas oilman like George W. Bush and a former
Halliburton CEO like ***** Cheney aren't about to object to opening the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. Caribou, they certainly
believe, are expendable if they get in the way of our urge for faster-
bigger-more.
The Bush administration's assault on environmental quality has,
however, been so deliberate, destructive, and hostile that the usual
explanations -- while not wrong -- are hardly adequate. During their
time in power, Bush's officials have worked systematically and
energetically to undo half a century of environmental law and policy
based on hard-learned lessons about how to sustain healthy
environments. Strikingly, they have failed to protect the environment
even when they could have done so without repercussions from special-
interest campaign contributors. Something more is going on.
The notion that the environment matters is ingrained in Americans,
even those of us who do not think of ourselves as environmentally
inclined or sympathetic. Democrats and Republican alike have learned
the hard way that the decisions we make about what we allow into our
air, water, and soil get translated into our blood and bones. As polls
regularly indicate, most Americans agree that it is wise and prudent
to collectively practice restraint and precaution when making
environmental decisions. This is one of the great accomplishments of
the environmental movement. We are no more likely to hear someone
question the importance of a healthy and functioning environment than
we are to hear someone question the wisdom of child labor laws or the
ending of racial segregation. The environmental policies of the Bush
administration are hard to fathom exactly because they fly in the face
of these shared values and beliefs.
To Hell with Public Health
Just consider the Bush record. Take toxins, for instance. Most of us
already carry "body burdens" of mercury, dioxins, and lead that are
close to or above what sound science considers safe. Today, one in six
American women has so much mercury in her womb that a child she
carries is at risk for a grim inventory of afflictions, including
blindness, mental retardation, kidney disease, and possibly even
autism. These are expensive problems to treat and we all share the
costs.
All fish in 19 states are now unsafe to eat because of mercury
contamination and at least some fish in 48 states are unsafe. We know
where most of the mercury comes from -- coal-fired power plants -- and
we know how to clean it up. The technology is available and
affordable. But the first thing Bush did when he entered office was to
dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency's mercury-emissions
rules.
As with mercury, so it goes with a long list of other environmental
toxins. Bush-appointed bureaucrats now allow into our drinking water:
higher levels of arsenic; 20 times the levels of perchlorates that the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends using the best
science available; and 12 times the levels of contamination allowed by
law for the herbicide atrazine. The chemical captan, which is
typically found in household pesticides and fungicides, has been
downgraded from a "probable" human carcinogen to "not likely" --
without any new evidence being produced. Standards have been relaxed
for the release of selenium, which we know causes massive deformities
and deaths in waterfowl. Fertilizers that grow our food can now
contain much higher levels of toxic residues. Likewise, the EPA has
used a 3-fold safety standard rather than the typical 10-fold test to
determine that organophosphorous pesticides pose no danger for
children. By rewriting the New Source Review provision of the Clean
Air Act, the Bush administration has permitted industrial polluters to
pump additional ozone and particulates into the air that aggravate
millions of cases of asthma and cause thousands of deaths each year.
Creative environmental regulators have become an endangered species
under this President. Federal watchdogs have turned into lapdogs, so
superfund sites -- lands contaminated by enough hazardous waste to
pose a risk to human health -- no longer get cleaned up; old coal-
fired power plants are not fixed; SUVs belch smog; and polluters
cheat. New environmental problems are not identified, researched, or
targeted. The best example of this is global climate disruption. In
the West, erratic, quick melting snowpack results in record spring
floods that are becoming as common as the massive wildfires we now
expect during our increasingly parched summers.
The Wilderness Goes to Hell
Human health isn't the only vital asset to suffer under the onslaught.
In my home state of Utah, whole landscapes and ecosystems have been
attacked and degraded by oil and gas speculators, road builders,
lumber and mining companies, hordes of off-road vehicle drivers, and
nuclear utilities that want to dump their wastes in America's deserts.
All of this is being done under a regime of Orwellian labels: Policies
that invite havoc into our lungs are shamelessly labeled the Clear
Skies Initiative; policies that degrade the land, protecting trees
from the ravages of nature by sending them to lumber yards and paper
mills, go under the rubric of "healthy forests."
Under Bush, the Bureau of Land Management, charged with the management
of millions of acres of public land, has been told that issuing new
leases for oil and gas exploration is its highest -- often its only --
priority. A boom of damaging speculation is underway from which even
rare wilderness study areas and national parks are not exempt. In
western Colorado, ranchers have had their gates bulldozed away by oil
drillers for corporations that own surface mining rights and now feel
free to take their heavy equipment into privately operated ranches
without permission or notification. Many of our last untouched
landscapes will soon be covered with a patchwork of crude roads
leading to dry holes and temporary wells -- none of which will
significantly affect our increasing dependency on foreign oil.
Bush's "leave no road-builder behind" policy is especially evident in
the Forest Service's 2005 rescission of its "roadless rule," a
Clinton-era regulation that protected federally owned forests not --
like most of our public forests -- already crisscrossed by more miles
of roads than are included in the Interstate highway system. When
enacted by Clinton, the roadless rule got more public support -- over
a million supportive messages came in to the Forest Service -- than
any regulation in history. Now it's gone and, in Utah at least, 4
million acres of roadless forest are open to road-building, clearing
the way for lumber, energy, and mining corporations to get in and take
what they want. The impact is even greater in the wilds of the
Northwest where new roads are sure to aggravate the silting up of
streams and rivers in which depleted stocks of salmon are struggling
to hang on.
Everywhere you look, the Bush administration's war on the environment
defies public opinion. Utah is home to such beloved national treasures
as the Bryce, Zion, Arches, Canyonlands, and Capitol Reef national
parks and the new Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Its
southern half, arid and isolated country with little potential for
energy resources, mining, timber, or grazing, is nonetheless a redrock
wonderland. Nine million acres of publicly owned land there have been
identified as meeting the legal criteria for formal wilderness
designation and protection; and it already draws millions of awed
visitors each year. The recreational dollars generated are more of an
economic engine than its extractive industries ever were, yet its
status is now in play and hotly contested.
The Road to Hell is Paved with Interventions
Under cover of the weekend in March, 2003 when we invaded Iraq, Bush's
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton signed a Memorandum of
Understanding with Utah's then-Governor Mike Leavitt (who went on to
head the EPA and is now Secretary of Health). It allowed the state to
claim that thousands of dirt tracks and paths through public lands
were actually "highways" under an obscure law -- RS2477 -- designed in
the nineteenth century to allow prospectors access to mining claims.
The agreement validates delusional maps drawn up by Utah's rural
county commissioners that show roads running up cliff faces and down
the middle of rivers. Any faint rut where a jeep so much as backfired
or a horse farted is now imagined as a future paved road by rural
politicians who fantasize a world where mines, oil wells, and pastures
of lowing cattle replace "useless" redrock wildlands.
The out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit, signed that same weekend by
Norton and Leavitt, stripped millions of acres of public lands
throughout the West of safeguards that helped maintain their pristine
character pending congressional action to designate them wilderness
areas. In Utah alone, 6 million acres of land that meet all the
criteria for wilderness designation and protection can no longer be
managed that way. Established by the Wilderness Act of 1964, the very
concept of "wilderness," the most popular and important conservation
tool ever created, has now been stripped of its meaning and power.
The acts of Norton and Leavitt proved typical of Bush-era strategies
meant to skirt otherwise unpopular decisions that could not stand up
to public scrutiny or involvement -- or survive legal challenges, even
in courts packed with Bush-friendly judges. Industry has learned that
if you bring a suit, however legally laughable, you can count on
Bush's bureaucratic facilitators to settle quickly out of court for
whatever you want; or you can just get your lobbyists to write a
memorandum that will be signed on a Friday night when the public isn't
watching the television news. The latest move: The administration is
working hard to eliminate provisions of the National Environmental
Policy Act that facilitate public participation in environmental
decisions.
It was no surprise, then, that the Bush administration opened public
lands to a frenzy of oil and gas drilling that respects no limits. Its
willingness to turn public lands into Off Road Vehicle theme parks has
been a bit harder to understand. Although the emerging ORV threat is
far below the radar screen of most Americans, many conservationists
now consider the detrimental impacts of ORVs to be equal to the more
traditional threats of resource-extracting industries.
ORV ownership in Utah alone, for instance, has grown from under 10,000
vehicles in 1979 to more than 150,000 today -- and the ORVs are
bigger, ever more supercharged, and often driven by aggressive, barely
regulated drivers unmindful of the destruction they wreak in the
remote corners of our public lands they can now reach. Their vehicles
cause erosion, destroy delicate nitrogen-fixing soils, and spread
invasive species like cheat grass that crowd out native plants and
fuel wildfires. The scarring they have caused to pristine landscapes
has rightly been called the public-land equivalent of covering the
Statue of Liberty with gang graffiti.
The ORV lobby, made up of manufacturers, retailers, and riders, is
nowhere near as powerful as the hired guns of oil and gas. Bush is not
beholden to them. The conservation of public lands as parks and
wilderness is very popular. (Even in Utah, notorious for its
conservatism, polls show overwhelming support.) Yet the critical
Resource Management Plans that the federal Bureau of Land Management
use to govern our wild landscapes are being revised in ways that allow
the ORV hordes to inflict their wounds at will.
Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Bush administration will be its
undermining of environmental and conservation science itself. Cases of
silenced government scientists and experts, censored reports,
disbanded scientific advisory panels, and withheld evidence abound.
(The National Resources Defense Council has listed dozens of examples
on its website.) No administration has ever shown such levels of
contempt for science as a means for informing and guiding policy and
law.
And You Can Go to Hell, Too
Elected on the premise that government is ineffective, incompetent,
and wasteful, the Bush administration has devoted its time in office
to proving its own point -- something Hurricane Katrina brought home
to Americans with a resounding bang. But the Bush record on the
environment is in a category all its own. Only when we begin to grasp
that those who are driving Bush environmental policies do not share
the most basic values and beliefs that have guided such policy-making
for over half a century, does their behavior start to make sense.
This much is clear: The Bush administration does not respect a broad
American consensus that the quality of our lives is directly linked to
the integrity and health of the environment. Differences in philosophy
about property rights, the role of government, and the best means to
change self-destructive behaviors will translate into different
approaches to environmental policy -- for example, whether to curb
pollution by creating market incentives or by passing tough laws. But
until now Republicans did not reject the need for environmental policy
altogether. What happened?
The answer is a familiar one: Bush's righteous base, the rightwing
fundamentalist Christians, are having their way -- the zealots who
think Revelations is the only guide to foreign policy and that Nature
is a mere stage for their personal salvation drama -- men like
Majority Leader Tom DeLay who have publicly proclaimed that they do
not believe in evolution, or other Republican congressional leaders
who got 100% ratings from the powerful Christian Coalition, including
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, presidential hopeful Bill Frist, Policy
Chair Christopher Cox, National Leadership Chair Rob Portman, powerful
senators like Mitch McConnell, Kay Hutchinson, Rick Santorum, George
Allen, and many more who are, environmentally speaking, the American
Taliban.
Our President himself recently declared "the jury is still out" on
evolution. The administration's push to satisfy its base by devaluing
and discrediting evolutionary theory has profound implications for
environmental policy and law. If you don't believe in the evolutionary
sciences, chances are you also don't heed or trust the ecological
sciences that underlie environmental law and policy. When conservation
biologists talk about keystone (or endangered) species,
fundamentalists are far more likely than most Americans to listen
skeptically. The value of biodiversity as a measure of ecosystem
health is going to be of little concern to those who do not understand
or accept the critical role that species interaction plays in keeping
ecosystems resilient in the face of disturbance and stress.
In fact, fundamentalist Christians often have only contempt for
ecological science, which they view as nothing more than the cover
Pagans use to push a godless, nature-worshiping agenda. To many
fundamentalists, enviros are the new commies. Utah's righteous
patriarchal politicians cannot even utter the term "environmentalist"
(usually pronounced environ-MENTAL-ist, as if it were a psychological
disorder) without attaching the adjective "extreme" to the term.
If you believe that God made the world for you and instructed you to
dominate it and be fruitful, then you are likely to see yourself as
above and beyond the natural world. If you are God's chosen, then how
can you fear that he will not provide for you no matter how large your
numbers grow or what you do to your surroundings? God, after all, can
change nature's laws, which are part of his "intelligent design" in
the first place. So you are unlikely to fret about practicing
environmental restraint or worry about environmental toxins --
righteousness being the best prophylactic against disease in a world
where God's will is done.
If you believe that the world's end is imminent, then why not use it
before you lose it? If you believe that when the world-ending moment
arrives, you will be "raptured" away and Christ will return to rule at
last, then, hey, bring it on! Those who are "left behind," as
fundamentalist Tim Lehaye describes it in his bestselling novels,
deserve to suffer because they failed to accept Christ as their
personal savior. So the President's fundamentalist base favors the
present over a future they disown.
Perhaps the greatest gap between the belief systems of fundamentalists
and environmentalists is the difference between hubris and humility.
Fundamentalists have a death grip on truth and do not entertain doubt;
while one of the key insights of the ecological sciences is that
nature may not only be more complex than we thought, but more complex
than we can think. Conservation biologists respect the intricate and
reciprocal nature of living systems and realize that even the most
seemingly insignificant species may turn out to play an unexpected and
important role in them. Such insights underlie precautionary
approaches.
According to Bush's political base, the future is theirs; nature was
put here for us to use as we please; God will provide; and foolish
unbelievers will be abandoned, like those desperate refugees at the
New Orleans Super Dome, in a trashed and shredded world. We had our
chance, but decided to listen to scientists, believe in dinosaurs, hug
trees, and wring our hands over pupfish, spotted owls, and the odd
centipede or two. While our jaws drop at their arrogant and reckless
behaviors, they just shake their heads and chuckle condescendingly at
all of our "liberal whining." It's a holy war, after all, and they are
most righteous.
Bush's assault on the environment makes perfect sense once you see the
bargains that drive it. The fundamentalists give Bush political power;
his corporate cronies get free reign to plunder the land for their
profit; and the fundamentalists get the heads of nature-worshipping
enviros on an arsenic platter. The rest of us, of course, get left
behind.
Chip Ward, assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library
System, is a political activist and leader in the struggle to keep the
Great Basin Desert from becoming a nuclear waste dumping ground. He is
the author of Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American
Land (Island Press).
© 2005 Tom Dispatch
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-Mencken
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