Green Politics in the Bush Era: Anti-environmentalism's Second Wave
Conca, Ken
FROM CABINET appointments to policy initiatives, much about environmental politics in George Bush the Younger's administration is depressingly familiar. We've seen this show before, when...
...As the United States has aggressively promoted trade liberalization, privatization, and a global regulatory climate friendly to DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 31 GREEN POLITICS transnational corporations, its support for effective global environmental governance has dwindled...
...Some straw-grasping environmentalists looked to the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Christine Whitman, as a moderating influence, pointing to her suburbanite-pleasing efforts as governor to protect New Jersey's dwindling open spaces and tout "smart growth...
...THE FAMILIARITY Of this pattern notwithstanding, there are some critical differences this time around, suggesting both promise and peril...
...Yet much has changed in the ensuing two decades...
...Although Big Energy likes to caricature the IPCC as nothing more than political science, it is in fact a typically cautious body of international scientific officialdom, which, after more than a decade of carefully nudging its risk assessments upward, now regards the climate issue as clearly a question of "how much" and "how bad" rather than "whether...
...With its team in place, the new administration has made its goals clear: to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, expand market rights to pollute, and reverse Bill Clinton's eleventh-hour actions on everything from public lands to air and water quality...
...In a few decades, mainstream American environmentalism has gone from being one of the most effective and wellgrounded lobbies on Capitol Hill to a shadowy presence, applauding quietly from the wings as Clinton sneaked through several measures during the dying days of his administration...
...It made barely a ripple in the U.S...
...Nevertheless, concern remains deep...
...The conference is unlikely to produce much in the way of governmental action, but it should be an opportunity to puncture the persistent public myth that America is leading the way in the push for global environmental protection...
...Rio-plus-10 will also be an opportunity for some much needed bridge-building for American groups mobilizing against the corporate version of globalization...
...A recent policy forum of the well-heeled Aspen Institute, chaired by former Stanford University president Donald Kennedy, produced a public memorandum to the president pointing to "an array of historic and urgent challenges" because "human actions are radically reshaping the global environment...
...GROWING ALARM over America's official disregard for the health of the planet is hardly limited to progressive environmentalists and techno naysayers...
...Nor are the courts, the other great tool of administrative environmentalism, likely to be the answer...
...IF THERE IS good news in this story, it is that new forms of advocacy are emerging even as the traditional tools of mainstream environmentalism have grown unreliable or unused...
...Along with the traditional preoccupation with endangered species, conservationists must now grapple with the problem of trade-induced "bioinvasions," in which species hitching a ride on global trade flows are disrupting the stability and functioning of ecosystems...
...stance was at worst hit-ormiss— supporting stronger global rules on ozone even as it resisted global action on biodiversity at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro...
...The event was important enough to earn a full-page rebuttal from the British Financial Times, where it was bizarrely caricatured as an homage to Che Guevara...
...But Whitman slashed her state's environmental protection budget by almost one-third, cut back on enforcement, cozied up to business by pushing the idea of "voluntary compliance," removed a thousand chemicals from New Jersey's right-to-know list of toxic substances, and abolished the state's environmental prosecutor...
...He reversed a last-minute Clinton decision tightening the limits on arsenic in drinking water— overturning the level recommended by the World Health Organization and reinstating indefinitely a U.S...
...Even when the courts do affirm the power of public-interest environmental regulation, most of the existing framework laws allow plenty of room for inaction on implementation and enforcement...
...The American approach to the climate talks is well known: demand concessions and loopholes that gut the possibility of a strong agreement, and then fail to honor even the weaker agreement that results...
...Economic globalization has also blurred the boundaries between domestic and international environmental problems, confirming the old saw among environmentalists that everything is connected to everything else...
...Congress may fight back on such battle-tested public concerns as toxic waste and national parks...
...The irony—that Gore was mostly silent on the issue for eight years as vice president—is hard to miss...
...This grassroots explosion in the search for sustainable communities faces several challenges: It must avoid being neutered by "smart-growth" sloganeering...
...But with the volume of new environmental legislation dwindling and the courts having grown more conservative, litigation is mostly a defensive action...
...Despite momentum created by the Battle in Seattle, international linkages remain narrow and sometimes tenuous...
...Mainstream environmental organizations, liberal Democrats, and America's now sizable environmentalindustrial complex are not the chief culprits in this process...
...The Supreme Court recently upheld the EPA's statutory power to set clean air standards without considering the economic impact on polluters...
...For much of the rest of the world, America's unwillingness to lead, follow, or get out of the way on a host of global environmental challenges will come to a head next year in Johannesburg...
...media and drew little in the way of American activist participation...
...An independent poll funded by the League of Conservation Voters after the 2000 election showed clean air and water to be a top-three public concern (along with education and health care, and well above Bush's touted issue of tax cuts...
...ExxonMobil may have the administration's ear on global warming, but its stance of know-nothing opposition leaves it increasingly isolated from its nonAmerican brethren, Shell and British Petroleum...
...Seventy-two percent were successful...
...pressure...
...Norton spoke cautiously to the evenly divided Senate and became the chief steward of American public lands by a vote of seventyfive to twenty-four...
...Signs are mounting that the world is tiring of American obstruction and unilateralism, in the corporate and activist domains as well as in the governmental sphere...
...Bush has blamed California's electricity crisis on environmental regulations and made it clear that a campaign promise to combat global warming by treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant was, well, a campaign promise...
...At the same time, the usefulness of the state will not be neglected: A wave of new subsidies will appear for Big Energy's agenda on oil, coal, and nuclear power, and all talk of raising fees set in the nineteenth century for resource extraction on public lands will disappear...
...Democrats may even try to use broad public concern about the environment as a wedge issue against Bush, much as Clinton exploited the public's environmental concerns to stall the Contract with America...
...Indeed, the courts can be an effective tool of regulatory rollback...
...As recently as the administration of Bush the Elder, the U.S...
...To be sure, other governments North and South are hardly innocents on these matters...
...Today, in contrast, the U.S...
...Perhaps most important, the boundaries between public and private will be pushed in whatever direction serves corporate interests...
...The American presence was almost nonexistent, for example, at the recent World So32...
...Unable or unwilling to build a movement by fighting these battles in the media and the Congress, too many environmental advocates 30 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 GREEN POLITICS in the Clinton years traded access for action and grew comfortable with environmental protection by administrative fiat...
...The report called for aggressive American leadership in promoting global action "to reduce the human footprint on the planet" (although tiptoeing around the delicate matter of America's own outsized ecological footprint...
...On the one hand, we will see a strong effort to curtail public interventions: More entry points will be established for "market-based" approaches...
...In January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its starkest warning to date on the possible consequences of global warming...
...Many of the traditional channels for achieving environmental protection have frayed, and hyper-globalization pushes downward on both standards and aspirations...
...WHETHER IT comes packaged in Bush's mangled syntax or Reagan's folksy delusions, the right's assault on environmental protection is at heart a program to reconfigure the boundary between what is public and what is private—strerching here, contracting there, consistent only in its pursuit of power and profit...
...The Rio-plus-10 conference will examine progress toward the goals set out at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit...
...Less well known is that this has become the standard American negotiating tactic on international environmental treaties, whether the issue is persistent organic pollutants, international trafficking in hazardous waste, or protection of biological diversity...
...To be sure, throwaway lifestyles and robust sales of sport-utility vehicles suggest more than a bit of contradiction in these attitudes...
...To some extent, we can expect a replay of the political dramas of the Reagan-Watt era...
...A recent study of ballot measures in last November's elections identified more than five hundred measures in thirty-eight states on sprawl, growth, and open spaces...
...Its chief instruments are regulatory rollback, administrative non-enforcement, opening access to the public lands and the public trough, shifting the burden of proof onto those who preach caution, and invoking "market" responses to problems that lie mostly in the failure of markets and the actions of marketers...
...some didn't even try...
...Stung by public reaction to some of its early anti-environmental decisions, the new administration used the run-up to Earth Day 2001 to trumpet the fact that it would allow a few last-minute Clinton regulations to stand—safe in the knowledge that legal challenges from polluters and developers would create opportunities for rollback in the form of "compromise" settlements outside the media glare...
...The central problem is that the usual links for translating these strong but somewhat inchoate public concerns into law and policy have frayed badly...
...As negotiators prepare for the next round of climate talks (scheduled for Bonn in July), governments in Europe and Japan are forced to at least contemplate the unthinkable—moving forward on a global climate regime that does not include the United States...
...n DISSENT / Summer 2001 GREEN POLITICS cial Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil...
...Perhaps the greatest opportunity of the second Bush era will be the chance to reclaim the spirit of opposition that has always been part of environmentalism's better nature—in a word, to dissent...
...Eighty-three percent rejected the idea of a trade-off between the environment and the economy, with only 14 percent agreeing that "sometimes...
...A long-awaited ban on new road building in nearly sixty million acres of national forest was slipped through by executive order in early January...
...Bush's appointments offer a clear sign of where the new administration is headed...
...The EPA announced tough new rules on diesel emissions a few days before Christmas...
...The struggles may be the same—resisting regulatory rollback, preventing the plunder of the public trust, expanding the right to know and participate...
...Uncertainty will become the mantra of those seeking inaction or rollback...
...In response, the big Washington-based environmental groups will probably see their coffers swell as they market the threat of climate change and oil drilling in wilderness areas— just as they did with rainforests and the ozone hole in the Reagan era...
...Public access to information will be curtailed in the interests of "streamlining" the regulatory process...
...In the domestic sphere, public concern and grassroots mobilization on environmental matters is strong and growing— but the traditional channels to translate those sentiments into public policy have eroded badly since Reagan tested their limits in the early 1980s...
...But more telling is the fact that the national environmental organizations increasingly cannot carry their own message to the public...
...We've seen this show before, when Ronald Reagan, his secretary of the interior James Watt, and company rode into Washington intent on rolling back the federal apparatus for environmental protection...
...But on the less glamorous matters— holding the line on funding, enforcement, and implementation—it is all too likely that enough Democrats will defect or just disappear...
...But as the world prepares to confront its lack of progress at a follow-up "Rio-plus10" meeting next year in Johannesburg, South Africa, the United States is more isolated than ever in anti-environmental stance...
...This time around, things promise to be more difficult...
...The EPA announced a strict new standard on arsenic levels in drinking water on January 22, literally as the trappings of the inauguration were going up around Washington...
...When Bush announced that the United States considered the Kyoto climate agreement dead, a spate of op-ed pieces and cartoons in the establishment press wondered whether former vice president Al Gore would speak out...
...Two decades of economic globalization—begun in the 1980s and accelerated under Clinton—have transnationalized ecological as well as economic life in America...
...stance varies only in the narrow range from inaction to outright hostility...
...The last set of climate talks, in the Hague last November, fell apart because the European Union for the first time refused to cave in to U.S...
...funding will be cut for market-correcting environmental enforcement and criminal prosecution...
...The burden of scientific proof will be pushed even further onto those seeking sensible precaution in the face of potential disasters, be it on climate change, toxic substances, genetically modified organisms, or mad cows...
...Given the message from media, government, and too many Clinton-style environmentalists, the American public could be forgiven for not worrying about environmental problems...
...Interior Secretary Gale Norton once argued before the Supreme Court that "land use control is beyond the regulatory power of Congress because it is outside the scope of interstate commerce...
...This back-door approach is both cause and symptom of dwindling political effectiveness...
...But the terrain on which they occur has shifted substantially...
...standard set almost sixty years ago...
...As comfortable pro-environment tactics of lobbying and litigation have grown less effective, new forms of citizen environmental activism are emerging...
...The point is less that Americans will say one thing and do another than that broad public support for strong action remains an unexploited resource in American national politics...
...Efforts to deal with local issues of toxic dumping and the siting of hazardous facilities cannot be decoupled from the ongoing struggle to regulate international trafficking in hazardous waste...
...Short-term fluctuations such as gasoline price spikes or electricity shortages will be used to justify an agenda of offshore oil drilling, expanded resource exDISSENT / Summer 2001 n 2q GREEN POLITICS traction on public lands, and the rehabilitation of nuclear power as a "clean" energy source...
...Following the administration's lead, Congress has rushed in with a wave of bills to do everything from lowering clean-up standards at toxic sites to boosting coal use by weakening air-quality standards...
...The United States was the first country to create a national environmental protection agency, produced landmark legislation on clean air and water in the 1970s, and was a leader in the push to protect the ozone layer and stop the trafficking in endangered species...
...it must avoid polarization between its separate strands responding to urban toxification and suburban sprawl...
...and it must find the abundant common ground that lies in citizen rights to information and participation and in the defense of public spaces against enclosure, be it wild lands or town centers...
...Environmentalists outside the United States bemoan the inability of America's environmental movement to sway its own government...
...DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 33...
...The political terrain has changed on the international scene as well...
...His energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, was targeted by the League of Conservation Voters as one of its "dirty dozen" in the 2000 election (with the voters of Michigan apparently agreeing...
...Staged parallel to the Davos World Economic Forum, Porto Alegre brought together thousands of environmentalists, human rights activists, public health advocates, trade unionists, and others in an effort to articulate alternatives to corporatedominated economic globalization...
...But why should this surprise us, given media inattention to the issues, the enduring myth that Clinton was an environmental president for more than his last few weeks, and the failure of the national environmental organizations to draw a different picture sharply and forcefully in public debate...
...They have learned, perhaps too well, how to manage in that Orwellian world where trees cause pollution, where unfettered growth and limitless consumption are sustainable, and where chemical companies are the stewards of nature...
...Indeed, one of the biggest shifts is the blurring of the traditional notion that domestic and international policy are separate spheres...
...and emphasis on "voluntary compliance" will give new meaning to the idea of faith-based public policy...
...They proved unable to mobilize either citizens or senators...
...The poll showed a five-to-one preference for candidates who support "strong environmental laws" over those who favor "reduced regulation on business...
...we must choose one over the other...
...Eighty-one percent of those surveyed thought that we need either tougher laws or tougher enforcement of existing laws...
...KEN CONCA is associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland...
...But they bear a growing responsibility for allowing it to occur and sometimes even benefiting from it—in fundraising appeals, at the polls, or in the vast sums spent to clean up the mess or ship it somewhere else...
...Those seeking to derail Norton's appointment as secretary of the interior apparently lacked evidence that she had employed an illegal alien or rented the wrong videos...
...Many communities and local activist groups have made good use of Clinton measures that expanded community "right to know" rules on toxics and created at least limited entry points for claims of environmental injustice and environmental racism...
...But they were armed with her remarkable career record of hostility to all things environmental: as a Watt protégé, as an advocate for the infamous Mountain States Legal Foundation, and as a Colorado attorney general who gutted environmental enforcement...
Vol. 48 • July 2001 • No. 3
