Earthling's Progress
PEDERSEN, WILLIAM F.
Earthling's Progress One man's journey through the environmental movement. by William F. Pedersen Between 1970 and 1977, Congress passed a major environmental law every year, and environmental...
...On one side, 1970s-style environmental regulation was bound to produce a backlash...
...He made news most recently in 2004 when, age 84, he campaigned for John Kerry out of disagreement with the Bush administration's environmental policies...
...He then joined the World Wildlife Fund, retiring in 1994...
...Today's thinking also recognizes that some problems are best dealt with at state or local levels, or by voluntary action, or simply by publicizing bad conduct and relying on the marketplace of ideas to correct it...
...This biography tells its story well, but misses the opportunity to cast light on such broader issues as how to succeed in government, or the changing political fortunes of environmental protection...
...Russell Train's life would have provided a good platform for analyzing such a mindset...
...In fairness, during the time of Train's government service, such a grasp was not required: The flaws of many development projects, then newly subjected to environmental analysis, were pretty self-evident, while the regulatory task consisted more in getting the control structure up and running than in refining its operations...
...The author clearly likes and admires Train, and shares his old-school positions...
...Not every able and personable Capitol Hill aide enjoys anything like Train's success...
...But the book would have needed to engage those issues to probe the biggest and most interesting topic raised by Train's career: the transformation (perhaps temporary) of environmen-talism from a consensus issue into one split between greens on the left and browns on the right...
...This book, unfortunately, barely names it...
...by William F. Pedersen Between 1970 and 1977, Congress passed a major environmental law every year, and environmental stories regularly led the news...
...Though Russell Train was hardly apolitical, J. Brooks Flippen continually stresses his preference for bipartisan approaches and solutions based on a greener version of the conventional wisdom of post-New Deal Washington...
...What made the difference...
...Russell Train served during that period as Richard Nixon's chief environmental adviser and as head of the Environmental Protection Agency...
...No one reading it would know that the Bush administration has used this new thinking to require a reduction by two-thirds of the most damaging air pollutants...
...Russell Train was born into the world of East Coast/WASP privilege...
...Alban's School, like the children of other prominent Washingtonians, then and now...
...Russell Train's grandfather was an admiral, and his father served as naval aide to Herbert Hoover...
...Russell attended St...
...The first Train arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1635...
...Then the power of the market is harnessed to reduce it by allowing polluters to trade the rights to emit this amount among themselves, as long as they do not exceed the total...
...They worshiped at Saint John's— the Episcopal church on Lafayette Square—and the Train children were President Hoover's overnight guests at the White House...
...Hunting safaris in Africa changed his life...
...The family had two full-time servants...
...Today's far more sophisticated methods rely on detailed policy analysis to help decide how much pollution to allow...
...His wife, who brought him a fortune and much else, was a bridesmaid at Jackie Kennedy's first wedding...
...This book could have used a more detailed description and analysis of these skills...
...Through good performance, connections, and political skill and diligence, he rose by the age of 37 to a judgeship on the United States Tax Court...
...Once the most immediate and obvious problems had been successfully attacked, this approach proved cumbersome, intrusive on private and state autonomy, unduly expensive, and politically unpopular...
...Why else would President Reagan have appointed Train to the Base Closing and Realignment Commission—a most sensitive assignment—even though Train had publicly criticized Reagan's environmental policies...
...It relied pretty exclusively on detailed regulatory commands issued by the federal government, often without much analytical justification, to tell industry what to do...
...By 1965 he had become one of America's few full-time environmentalists, and one of the very few Republicans among them...
...Grasping the formidable details of environmental regulation was not Train's strength, and it is not a strength of this book...
...Train was born in Washington in 1920...
...path by taking a job at the House Ways and Means Committee, which writes tax legislation, rather than at a law firm...
...On the other side, the book does not isolate—and therefore cannot probe—a conservative impulse to oppose not just the means used to pursue environmental protection, but the legitimacy of environmental goals themselves...
...An instinctive centrist, Train had no sympathy with anti-environmentalist conservative Republicanism, and broke with it decisively in opposing the reelection of George W. Bush...
...When, a few years later, the environment exploded as a political issue, his path to appointed office lay clear...
...After law school, he stepped off the hereditary William F. Pedersen, a lawyer in Washington, worked at the EPA when Russell Train was administrator...
...It seems to have been Train's unfailing and widely recognized ability to work with all kinds of people to solve problems...
...Trains suffered at Valley Forge, and fought at Concord, Saratoga, and Antietam...
...Conservative Conservationist does not recognize that much of the conservative backlash can be defended as the political side of an effort to put this new framework into place...
...But by not addressing this conflict analytically, the book does justice to neither side...
...As a student at Princeton and Columbia Law School, Train proved universally popular, and academically able but not outstanding...
...They fired a desire to preserve African wildlife and its habitat, and led him to found the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation and then work full time for the Conservation Foundation...
...But in some ways he does not give Train enough credit...
...Three decades of experience have taught us how to correct most of these defects...
Vol. 12 • April 2007 • No. 30
