Crimes Against Nature

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arlier this year I was invited to speak at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. If Greenwich is the Republicans’ Mecca, then the Round Hill Club is the Kaaba. In the foyer I passed beneath an oversized photograph of Senator Prescott Bush, a former Greenwich resident and the current president’s grandfather. Somebody pointed to an anteroom and commented: “That’s where George met Barbara,” referring to the president’s mom and dad. It was the club’s annual meeting — always well attended — and as I stepped to the podium I looked out over a sea of skeptical faces, the faces of affluent conservatism. I spoke for an hour — about why the environment is so important to the physical and spiritual health of our nation and its people, about how a wholesome environment and a healthy democracy are intertwined, and about the way that President Bush is allowing certain corporations to destroy our country’s most central values. I pulled no punches, and I got a standing ovation.

A month before, I got a similar response at the Woman’s Club of Richmond, Virginia, where someone boasted that no member had voted for a Democrat since Jefferson Davis. They told me it was the first standing ovation there in 38 years.

Earlier that week I had spoken at an oil-industry association meeting in the Northwest, and I received an equally enthusiastic response.

I got those reactions not because I’m a great speaker (I’m not), but because I talked about the values that define our community and make us proud to be Americans — shared values that are being stolen from us. Those oil executives, Richmond Republicans, and Round Hill Club members have the same aspirations for their children as I have for mine: clean air and water, robust health, beautiful landscapes in which to play and grow and be inspired, and a community that stands for something good and noble.

I want to be very clear here: This book is not about a Democrat attacking a Republican administration. During my two decades as an advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeeper, and the Waterkeeper Alliance, I’ve worked hard to be nonpartisan. The fishermen and farmers whom I represent as an attorney run the political spectrum, and I’ve supported both Democratic and Republican leaders with sound environmental agendas.

Moreover, I don’t believe there are Republican or Democratic children. Nor do I think that it benefits our country when the environment becomes the province of one party, and most national environmental leaders agree with me. But today, if you ask those leaders to name the greatest threat to the global environment, the answer wouldn’t be overpopulation, or global warming, or sprawl. The nearly unanimous response would be George W. Bush.

You simply can’t talk honestly about the environment today without criticizing this president. George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in our nation’s history. In a ferocious three-year attack, his administration has launched over 300 major rollbacks of U.S. environmental laws, rollbacks that are weakening the protection of our country’s air, water, public lands, and wildlife.

Such attacks, of course, are hardly popular. National polls consistently show that over 80 percent of the American public — with little difference between Republican and Democratic rank and file — want our environmental laws strengthened and strictly enforced. In a March 2003 memo to party leadership, Republican pollster Frank Luntz noted: “The environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general and President Bush in particular are most vulnerable.” He cautioned that the public is inclined to view Republicans as being “in the pockets of corporate fat cats who rub their hands together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute America for fun and profit.” If that view were to take hold, Luntz warned, “not only do we risk losing the swing vote, but our suburban female base could abandon us as well.” In essence, he recommended that Republicans don the sheep’s clothing of environmental rhetoric while continuing to wolf down our environmental laws.
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White House strategists grasped that lesson long before the Luntz memo. The administration has gone to great lengths to keep the president’s agenda under wraps, orchestrating the legislative rollbacks almost entirely outside of public scrutiny. It has manipulated and suppressed scientific data, intimidated enforcement officials and other civil servants, and masked its agenda with Orwellian doublespeak. Bush’s “Healthy Forests” initiative promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His “Clear Skies” program suggests repealing key provisions of the Clean Air Act. The administration talks about “streamlining” and “reforming” regulations when it means weakening them, and “thinning” when it means logging or clear-cutting. Cloaked in this meticulously crafted language that is designed to deceive the public, the administration — often unwittingly abetted by a toothless and negligent press — intends to effectively eliminate the nation’s most important environmental laws by the end of its term.

But this book is ultimately about more than the environment. It’s about the corrosive effect of corporate cronyism on free-market capitalism and democracy — core American values that I cherish. There are, of course, good and even exemplary corporations in every sector. Even in the oil business, companies like BP, Shell, and Hess have acted aggressively to deal with global warming and have behaved responsibly toward the environment. But corporations, no matter how well intentioned, should not be running the government.

This administration, however, in its headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, has sacrificed respect for the law, private property rights, scientific integrity, public health, long-term economic vitality, and commonsense governance on the altar of corporate greed.

Our government has abandoned its duty to safeguard our health and steward our national treasures, eroding not just our land, but our nation’s moral authority and capacity to fulfill its historic mission — to create communities that are models for the rest of humankind. After all, we protect nature not (as Rush Limbaugh likes to say) for the sake of the trees and the fishes and the birds, but because it is the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to provide our children with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as those ourparents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting the air, water, wildlife, and landscapes that connect us to our national values and character. It’s that simple.

The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. During his tenure in Texas, George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor in the country: the Lone Star State ranked number one in both air and water pollution. In his six years in Austin, Governor Bush championed a short-term, pollution-based prosperity that enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is doing the same thing to the citizens in the other 49 states.

The present cabinet boasts more CEOs than any in history. Most come from the energy, extractive, and manufacturing sectors that rely on giant subsidies and create the worst pollution. Almost all the top positions at the agencies that protect our environment and oversee our resources have been filled by former lobbyists for the biggest polluters in the very businesses that these ministries oversee. These men and women seem to have entered government service with the express purpose of subverting the agencies they now command. The administration is systematically muzzling, purging, and punishing scientists and other professionals whose work impedes corporate profit taking. The immediate beneficiaries of this corrupt largesse have been the nation’s most irresponsible mining, chemical, energy, agribusiness, and automobile companies. The American people have been the losers.

Environmental injury is deficit spending — loading the costs of pollution-based prosperity onto the backs of the next generation. In 2003 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that for the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed 30 years ago, American waterways are getting dirtier. In Lake Erie, painstakingly resurrected by the Clean Water Act, the infamous dead zone is expanding once again. More raw sewage is flowing into our rivers, lakes, and streams as the White House throws out rules designed to end sewer-system overflows. Bush’s policies promote greater use of dangerous pesticides, deadly chemicals, and greenhouse gases, and encourage the filling of wetlands and streams. The administration has removed protections from millions of acres of public lands and wetlands and thousands of miles of creeks, rivers, and coastal areas.

I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and on bad-air days I watch them struggle to breathe. And they’re comparatively lucky: One in four African American children in New York City shares this affliction, and many lack the insurance and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive and active.
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Sadly, too, few children today can enjoy that quintessential American experience, going fishing with Dad and eating their catch. Most bodies of water in New York — and all freshwater bodies in 17 other states — are so tainted with mercury that one cannot eat the fish with any regularity. Forty-five states advise the public against regular consumption of at least some local fish due to mercury contamination.

I often take my children to hike, fish, and canoe in the nearby Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on Earth. Since the area was declared “forever wild” in 1885, generations of Americans might reasonably have expected to enjoy its unspoiled rivers and streams. But 500 lakes and pools (out of 2,800) in the Adirondacks have now been rendered sterile by acid rain.