If you care about the
environment, and you survived the presidential debates without
running out into the backyard to scream at the heavens,
you’re a bigger person than I. For those of you who missed
them, the three debates included just one question on that “fringe
issue” of what’s in the air we breathe and whether we like
trees in our national forests or just stumps. It came during the
second debate, when a member of the audience asked George Bush how
he would rate himself as an environmentalist.
Bush did a
little verbal two-step about “off-road diesel engines,” building a
“hydrogen-generated automobile,” and his “Healthy Forests”
initiative: “What happens in those forests, because of lousy
federal policy, is they grow to be — they are no —
they’re not harvested.”
If Bush was being coached
through a hidden earpiece, as some Internet chat rooms claim, he
must have been having reception problems.
But anyone who
saw an easy opportunity for a comeback from John Kerry was
disappointed. Though Kerry has earned a 92 percent lifetime rating
from the League of Conservation Voters, you wouldn’t have
guessed it from his muddled response. He mocked the smiley-face
names the Bush administration has given its environmental
rollbacks, but then came up with a Bushism of his own: “They pulled
out of the global warming, declared it dead.”
So much for
making any sense of environmental issues for the folks who watch
television.
In that second debate, Kerry hinted at the
environmental damage Bush has done. You might ask, “How much could
happen in four short years?” You’d be surprised.
During
his first term, the president appointed a timber industry lobbyist
to oversee the Forest Service, an energy company lobbyist as a top
dog in the Interior department, among others, and they went quickly
— and quietly — to work. They reneged on
Clinton’s “Roadless Area Conservation Rule,” which would have
protected 58 million acres of national forest. They signed a deal
with the state of Utah, stripping protection from 4.4 million acres
of proposed wilderness. They pulled the guts out of the Northwest
Forest Plan, which had put more than three-quarters of the
region’s woods off limits to logging to protect salmon and
spotted owls. And they bailed out on a plan to ban snowmobiles from
Yellowstone National Park.
All this has helped earn Bush
an “F” from the League of Conservation Voters — the first
time ever for a president — but the president’s
spin-meisters are a savvy bunch. Bush’s plan to allow more
air pollution is dubbed “Clear Skies,” his plan to allow more
old-growth logging, “Healthy Forests.” Interior Secretary Gale
Norton touts her “Four C’s” credo — “communication,
consultation and cooperation, all in the service of conservation”
— but goes out of her way to stoke the rancor and mistrust
surrounding public-lands management.
The problem with
Bush’s strategy is that the say-one-thing-and-do-another
routine only works if no one is paying attention. Out here on the
ground, it’s obvious that Bush is earning points with his
industry supporters but doing little to help the rural West.
Packwood, Wash., firewood cutter John Squires sees the neglect
clearly: “The left says (to its campaign contributors), “We need to
save the trees, give us money,” and the right says, “They’re
going to destroy jobs, give us money. Every party has said
they’re going to help our communities, and no party has.”
In this election, Squires isn’t counting on either
presidential candidate to save the day. Instead, he’s joined
with local environmentalists, union members and Native Americans to
promote a plan to thin second-growth forest plantations while
steering clear of the last old growth — even though the Bush
administration has tried mightily to open that old growth to
logging.
“Let’s not let the people in Washington,
D.C, or the courts, decide,” he adds. “I hope we can decide what it
is that we’re going to do, and then go as a united front to
our politicians and ask them to help out.”
That, it
seems, is the challenge facing Westerners today — to take our
collective vision for the region to Washington, a vision that
includes landscape-scale conservation and an economy based on
restoration. We need to get our politicians following us, for a
change. That will be hard to do if the White House continues to be
run by the logging and mining and oil industries, rather than by
someone who has the good of the West’s publicly owned lands
and communities at heart.
Greg Hanscom is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is the editor of the paper in
Paonia, Colorado.
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