Without enthusiastic support from most
of America’s 50 million hunters and anglers, George W. Bush
and his appointees would still be employed by oil, gas and coal
companies. I still see bumper stickers that say: “Another Sportsman
for Bush.” Yet as a lifelong sportsman myself, I wonder why even
one sportsman, let alone “another,” would want Bush running the
country.
On the eve of Interior Secretary Gale
Norton’s nomination, the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance
called her a “veteran conservation leader,” proclaimed that she was
“very smart and has a good background in sportsmen’s issues”
and scolded “the nation’s most extreme environmental groups”
for opposing her. Today, the more enlightened sportsmen’s
organizations feel betrayed by the administration and are trying to
get the word out, but the rank-and-file still love Bush.
One problem with sportsmen is that they tend not to read. So they
don’t understand that Bush is systematically dismantling,
neutralizing or defunding virtually every meaningful law,
regulation and program that protects or restores fish and wildlife.
For example, in the Rocky Mountain West, Bush’s Bureau of
Land Management has abandoned multiple-use management, mandated by
law, and ordered field offices to favor oil and gas extraction over
all else.
Exemptions to rules protecting wildlife,
including game species such as elk, pronghorn, deer and sage
grouse, are being granted whenever industry asks. Damage to
wildlife is horrendous. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department has
found that for every acre of winter range covered by oil and gas
wells and drilling pads in the Upper Green River basin, elk abandon
97 acres.
I don’t know a sportsman who favors dirty
water. Yet on Jan. 10, 2003, the Bush administration issued a
“guidance document” instructing its field agents not to bust
parties who filled or fouled “isolated waters” that are
non-navigable and “intrastate” (completely in one state) because
migratory birds are present. No definition of “isolated waters” was
provided, but the administration has since proclaimed them to be
streams that flow intermittently or dip underground, and wetlands
that don’t have visible links to larger waters.
Additionally, the document ordered agents to get “headquarters
approval” before citing a polluter, thereby dooming enforcement by
initiating an endlessly ascending chain reaction of butt-covering
permission requests. In issuing the guidance document, Bush
rejected warnings from top wetlands experts, including 43 senior
scientists from organizations such as the National Academy of
Sciences, the Wildlife Society and the American Fisheries
Society.
Concurrently, the administration announced a
proposed rule, suggesting that isolated waters don’t count anymore
and inviting comment on how to define the word “isolated” so as to
make the Clean Water Act more palatable to those it inconveniences.
If the rule goes through, it could degrade 80 percent of the stream
miles in the United States.
The enforcement ban —
designed by such interests as the National Association of Home
Builders, state farm bureaus, the American Forest and Paper
Association, Dow Chemical, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef
Association — derives from a bizarre interpretation of a 2001
Supreme Court decision. The court held that water-filled gravel
pits in Illinois can’t be protected by the Clean Water Act
just because they’re used by migratory birds. There was
nothing in the decision remotely connected to the
administration’s broad and creative definition of the word
“isolated.” Most courts and even Bush’s own Justice
Department find the guidance document patently illegal.
Isolated wetlands — prairie potholes, for instance — are critical
to waterfowl. And in many cases intermittent streams are more
important to fish than main stems because they provide refuge from
heat in summer, refuge from ice in winter, and refuge from floods
year round.
When Jim Martin, former fisheries chief for
the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, was a young biologist,
one of his first projects was to research the steelhead of the
Rogue River. He found spawners seeking out intermittent
streams.
“They’d move into them for refuge during winter
rains when the mainstems were raging,” he reports. “At that time,
developers were diverting and damming these streams, cutting down
their riparian forests, building houses next to them, all because
they were thought to be inconsequential.”
Martin and his
colleagues learned all this in the 1970s. But these are facts the
Bush administration doesn’t want to know. Now, lakes,
reservoirs, even municipal water supplies can be fouled by, say,
factory feedlots discharging into feeder streams. It makes as much
sense as screening human blood for HIV and hepatitis, then freezing
it in unwashed milk cartons.
Recently, a few of the
hook-and-bullet magazines that helped put Bush in power are
criticizing him. But I still see those bumper stickers, and not
just because the drivers are too lazy to peel them off.
It’s baffling.
Ted Williams is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News
in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is a columnist for several
outdoor magazines and writes from Grafton,
Massachusetts.
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