As Democrats rode a multidimensional wave of voter
anger to congressional dominance last week, I began to worry. After
all, I was the new guy in the editor’s chair; I’d
barely had time to find my computer, much less write any of the
nuanced election analysis you expect from High Country
News. Then I relaxed, because I remembered something: We
have Ray Ring.
As you’ll see when you flip to our
cover story, Ray — our Northern Rockies editor and a
time-tested authority on Western politics — has offered up a
top 10 list on the election’s results. But it’s less a
lineup of political facts than an interpretive guide to them, a
suggestion as to how one might reasonably think about the election,
if one cared about the West’s future, had no political axes
to grind and possessed the deep and broad experience of Ray Ring.
I’ll be surprised if you don’t take at least a few
fresh political thoughts away from Ray’s list.
One
of his points deserves emphasis, just because it’s so true
and easily overlooked. With the change in congressional control,
several bêtes noires of the environmental
movement will lose committee chairmanships and be replaced by
greener Democrats. But as Ray reminds us, Democratic control of
Congress does not necessarily mean that Democrats will control
environmental policy.
Even with a Democratic House and
Senate, Bush political appointees still head the executive agencies
— the departments of Agriculture and Interior and the
Environmental Protection Agency, primarily — that interpret
and enforce environmental law. Over the last six years, those
agencies have been, in even a charitable analysis, corrupted. Time
and again, environmental science has been disregarded or “edited”
to follow the administration’s ideology and reward its
political supporters.
As you’ll come to see,
I’m no knee-jerk lefty in matters green (or any other color).
To my mind, decisions about the use of Western resources absolutely
should come down on the side of mining, drilling and other
extractive industries — when such use can be proven, in the
broadest sense, wise. But to be accepted as wise, environmental
choices must be underpinned by hard science, not greed and dogma
thinly disguised with pseudoscience.
Since the election,
Democratic congressional leaders have expressed hope for bipartisan
cooperation; when they mention conflict with the administration,
it’s usually in the context of oversight hearings on Iraq.
Certainly, the war is important. But so is the West.
In
September, Earl Devaney, the respected inspector general for the
Interior Department, told Congress that “simply stated, short of a
crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of
Interior.”
Well-publicized hearings to determine the
precise definition of “anything” — at Interior and other
federal environmental agencies — might be a reasonable way
for congressional Democrats to challenge the executive branch
portion of the “culture of corruption” that they have claimed,
these many months past, to be running against.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Doing something about ‘anything’.
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