San Francisco Chronicle

August 26, 2002

For more information, contact:

Bradley Angel Greenaction

(415) 248-5010

Timber policy reflects president's world view

Editorial

WITH characteristic disregard for the environment, President Bush last week announced a controversial plan to allow the timber industry to log millions of acres of national forest land. The ostensible reason? To prevent catastrophic fires. Rather than pursue a policy of thinning undergrowth and small trees, Bush prefers to give the timber industry a windfall by logging larger, more commercially valuable trees.

The Bush plan opens the possibility of a replay of the notorious 1995 "salvage rider," in which Congress suspended environmental regulations under the pretext of fire prevention. The loosened laws led to a frenzy of logging --and damage to forests and streams. No surprise here.

President Bush has arguably racked up the worst environmental record since our most important environmental regulations became law during Richard Nixon's administration. Paying off the timber industry is just one of many gifts this president has bestowed upon friends who profit from the commercial extraction or exploitation of natural resources.

Nor is it surprising that President Bush -- unlike 60 other heads of state - - refuses to attend the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development that is taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa, from Aug. 26 to Sept. 4. His administration, moreover, has already announced that it will only accept voluntary, rather than obligatory, agreements reached by the summit.

The Johannesburg meeting will assess how much progress has been made since the nations of the world gathered at the first Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. At that time, delegates pledged to promote sustainable development -- to use resources only at the pace we can replace them, to embrace "the precautionary principle," and to adopt preventive rather than remedial policies.
Since that historic meeting, the degradation of the global environment has accelerated rapidly in many respects. Emissions of carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming, have increased by 18 percent in the United States. But President Bush apparently would rather go to war to protect American strategic oil interests or drill in an Alaska wildlife refuge than promote conservation and require better gas mileage from new automobiles.

Devastation of forests and the pollution of water has also proceeded with devastating speed. In just the last decade, 13 percent of all bird species, 25 percent of mammals and 34 percent of fish have become extinct. Yet the Bush administration has turned its back on the Convention on Biodiversity. In Antarctica, a huge ice shelf has broken off the continent. In Alaska, the tundra has started to thaw. In the Arctic Ocean, sea ice now covers 15 percent less water than it did 20 years ago. Yet Bush refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

At the 2002 Earth Summit, environmental activists will try to challenge some of the assumptions about growth and conservation that have contributed to the pollution of the soil, air, and water and increased the illness and poverty suffered by millions of the Earth's inhabitants.

These are not popular ideas, however, to a president who has worked tirelessly to suspend or reverse our environmental regulations. In his first year of office, Bush shocked public health officials when he tried to roll back protections against arsenic in drinking water -- a foolish policy that his administration eventually reversed. He began his second year in office by launching a relentless campaign to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

While the nation mourned the events of Sept 11, the Bush administration has been quietly undermining environmental protections. During the last year, for example, his administration has weakened protection for endangered species in California; exempted the Pentagon from environmental laws; refused to improve automobile efficiency; ended environmental research funding; rolled back air conditioner energy efficiency standards; sent conflicting and confusing signals on enforcement of the Clean Air Act; lifted a ban on mining in the Oregon national forest; revoked habitat protection for the California frog; and, most recently, tried to roll back ocean protection.

That's just the short list. Even more outrageous was his attempt to conceal the fact that industry leaders actually authored his energy policy, his eventual admission that global warming is a problem (for which he offered no policy recommendations), and his public effort to blame environmentalists for wildfires.

This week, the nations of the world will try to find a just and equitable way to reverse environmental degradation and to promote sustainable development. It won't happen this year, probably not within the next decade, but eventually the entire global community will agree that protecting the environment is necessary to sustain life -- and commerce -- on this planet.

When that distant future arrives, the world may look back and cast a harsh judgement on Bush's environmental record. By then, the protection of the environment may be a definitive test of statesmanship, and if so, it will be one that President Bush clearly failed.