[Shadow_Group] Exploiting The Environment

[shadowgroup-l at lists.resist.ca]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/exploiting_the_environment.phpExploiting The EnvironmentDavid Helvarg October 29, 2004


Since the Bush administration took over four years ago, a sweeping anti-environmental agenda termed "Wise Use" has become law—though it was once considered a laughable industry wish list. Now Yellowstone is open to off-road vehicles, public lands are open for development and the Endangered Species act is foundering. Environmentalist David Helvarg says these environmental regressions were helped along by the lack of education and outcry—by both the public and the Kerry campaign.

David Helvarg is the author of The War Against the Greens (updated and revised, Johnson Books, 2004).

A hundred years from now, people may look back at this campaign season and wonder about health, education and security. What they’ll wonder is how the health of the planet failed to be a significant topic of debate, why people weren’t educated to the cascading disasters of climate change, mass extinction and burgeoning population, and how anyone could fail to see sustainable use of resources as essential to global security.

Whether their reflections are made in a spirit of tolerant bemusement or bitter reproach may also hinge on the outcome of this election, now less than a week away.

With Russian ratification about to bring the Kyoto Climate Change Treaty into force, John Kerry speaks of the need to reform it, rather than reject it. He talks of establishing a new energy regime based on non-carbon renewable technologies, while President Bush advocates expanding coal, oil and gas production, questions the established science on fossil-fuel driven climate change and argues that the cost of taking action now is too great.

Their differences on the environment are not merely ones of approach, of how best to achieve common goals. They are, as George W. Bush is fond of saying, differences in basic philosophy.

While John Kerry is considered an informed, if cautious, supporter of many environmental initiatives (he’s endorsed by the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters and other greens), George W. takes his cues from an industry-created backlash of the 1980s and ‘90s.

The anti-environmental ‘Wise Use’ movement came into being in 1988, combining timber, mining, oil and off-road-vehicle industries, some hunters and ranchers, veterans of the Reagan administration, and followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. What united them was the perceived threat that George Bush Sr. would follow through on his campaign pledge to be “the environmental president.”

Wise Use activists went on to confront the Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club and local environmental activists, sometimes with vigilante-style tactics. By the 1990s, a number of Wise Use groups in Washington, Idaho, Montana and New Mexico had graduated from the ‘timber wars’ to ally with armed militias. Following the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City by militia associates Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, these ties lost Wise Use much of its industry backing, and it went into decline.

Today Wise Use veterans, their lawyers and their lobbyists are back, setting environmental policy for the son of the president they reviled. Secretary of the Interior Gail Norton was lead litigator at the Mountain States Legal Foundation when it billed itself as the “litigation arm of Wise Use.” As a lawyer, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman represented Wise Use activists opposed to federal conservation plans for the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Former timber lobbyist and Wise Use speaker Mark Rey today runs the U.S. Forest Service. And Vice President Dick Cheney, before becoming CEO of Halliburton, was the “go-to” guy in Congress for Wise Use, as well as a board member of several Wise Use groups including the Center for Defense of Free Enterprise that issued the 25-point Wise Use Agenda.

The Wise Use Agenda, when published more than 15 years ago, was dismissed as an extractive industry wish list. Today it is Bush administration policy. The Agenda called for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, logging Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, gutting the Endangered Species Act, opening public lands to motorized recreation, opening wilderness to energy development, and privatizing the National Parks, handing them over to people “with expertise in people-moving such as Walt Disney.”

Today the administration is fighting to open the Arctic to drilling, has approved logging in the Tongass, is allowing 1,000 snowmobiles a day in Yellowstone, has worked to undermine the Endangered Species Act, has ordered 250 million acres of public lands be opened to coal, oil and gas development, and claims the Wilderness Act no longer has legal standing. Secretary Norton has also promoted “outsourcing” of thousands of National Park jobs to the private sector to provide, “better delivery of services to the public.”

In recent decades, environmental protection and stewardship has been a bipartisan presidential issue, something George W. Bush's father understood when he was in office, as did the Clinton administration, which condemned “extremist anti-environmental groups financed by large polluters.”

Unfortunately, the Wise Use veterans in this Bush administration have effectively advanced their clear-cutting agenda without being strongly challenged by the Kerry campaign.

Still, the choice is ours. Between the backlash anger and despair that says, “Take what you can get while you can get it,” and the faith that we can still leave future generations a good life in a good land lies only the understanding, the heart and the will of the American people.





++++++++++++++++++++++++++STOP THE WALL++++++++++++++++++++++++++

www.stopthewall.org www.nad-plo.org www.hrw.org www.pal-arc.org www.endtheoccupation.org www.sustaincampaign.org






			
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