Earth Night
Local Activists Shed Light On a Bleak Three-Year Record
By Coby Skye, Envronment Reporter

     The consensus on the current Administration’s environmental record can be summed up with one word: disastrous so say environmental groups of every focus, size and stripe. They have been aghast at the Bush Administration’s policies and actions with regard to environmental protection, or more appropriately, environmental destruction. 
     Because Bush’s legislative proposals remain stalled in Congress, media coverage has significantly underplayed the extent of Bush’s impact. Recently, Outside magazine contributing editor, Bruce Barcott, in a New York Times Magazine article explained that “while its legislative initiatives have languished on Capitol Hill, the Administration has managed to effect a radical transformation of the nation’s environmental laws, quietly and subtly, by means of regulatory changes and bureaucratic directives.”
     A sampling of local activists is indicative of how thoroughly hostile Bush has been to the environment, in ways the corporate media generally fails to recognize.
     Diana Mann is the Chair of ECO~Link, a Long Beach-based network for environmental groups to communicate and collaborate, said “the ‘Toxic Texan’ took office on a platform pledging to turn his gubernatorial principles into national policy— to make America a greater Texas. Texas is one of the most polluted states in the United States, and if Bush’s policies continue, the U.S. will be the most polluted country in the world. Defying his European allies and many Third World countries, Bush in effect killed off the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.” Although Californians are especially Earth-conscience, Mann feels the President has managed to circumvent the will of the residents of this State simply to benefit a small handful of his supporters at the expense of the majority. Just look at what is happening to the price of gasoline. “Energy conservation goes against his grain. If you begin conserving energy in Los Angeles, his oil cronies may become mere billionaires, instead of multi-billionaires.” 
      Gordon LaBedz, Conservation Chair of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, feels “the greatest assault on the environment this year has been Bush’s $ 200 billion unprovoked attack on Iraq. The human and wildlife devastation and the huge waste of resources is the number one reason we need to get rid of Bush and his oil cowboys.”
      Last year, during the war, LaBedz pointed to the waste of money, “$1,000 million dollars just to kill people” with 1,000 Tomahawk missiles on the first day. “I’m an environmentalist in L.A. and I’m trying to buy wetlands. I need 50 Tomahawk missiles to buy the Bolsa Chica wetlands, I need 76 Tomahawk missiles to buy the Ballona wetlands. The contrast is just dramatic. Probably this war would cost $200 billion. And that money could be used to protect the environment. If it’s all used for killing people, it won’t be.” 
     Don May, President of California Earth Corps, was in total agreement with LaBedz. “My outrage could not be stated clearer–this war has not only devastated natural environments, it has sucked resources away from all other would-be priorities, including the preservation of the environment here at home.” 
     “You will find virtually every environmentalist is opposed to war in general, and this war in particular,” May told Random Lengths last year. “We have transformed the Garden of Eden— around where Basra is—to an uninhabitable desert…The impact on the environment is just horrendous, far beyond what happened ten years ago…It’s like the Romans salting Carthage, leaving a legacy of depleted uranium and landmines and unexploded bombs,” which will make the land “uninhabitable for a long, long time.”
      Jess Morton, President of the Palos Verdes/South Bay Audubon Society, felt the Bush Administration’s environmental policies were not different from others in spirit, just in magnitude and process. “There is no one action of the Bush Administration that sets it apart from other recent administrations. From the Reagan years on, none has had a good environmental record. What does set the current White House occupants apart, though, is an utter disregard for the health of our environment, a hypocritical rhetoric invariably belied by their actions, and a flagrant subservience to cash-in-hand politics that ignores reality. When we have an administration that won’t talk about global warming, there’s no doubt we are all in hot water.” 
      Gail Ruderman Feuer, the lead attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council on the China Shipping case, focused on the air we breath. “After 30 years of improvement, Southern California’s air is getting dirtier again,” she said. “Instead of helping us clean it up, the Bush administration actually is interfering with local efforts to cut tailpipe emissions.”
      “Over the last four years, thousands of clean, alternative fuel transit and school buses, trash trucks, and street sweepers have replaced dirty diesel vehicles in Southland fleets, thanks to rules adopted by the Air Quality Management District (AQMD). Those clean fleets are helping all of us breathe healthier air.”
     But “oil companies and diesel engine manufactures… have joined forces with the Bush administration to try to stop AQMD’s clean-fuel fleet program,” she explained. “The NRDC is lead council for a coalition of environmental groups helping to defend clean-fuel fleets. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide their fate this year. If the Bush administration gets its way, our children will breathe dirtier air, putting them at higher risk for bronchial irritation, asthma, respiratory disease and cancer.”
     David Sundstrom, an environmental activist living on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, talked about the lost opportunity after 9/11. David felt that “instead of asking Congress for $86 billion for war, Bush could have shown bold leadership by announcing a national goal of energy self-sufficiency by the year 2020. And I’m not talking about drilling in Alaska! We could have done energy retrofits of a million homes in the Northeast and Midwest, added a million solar roofs in the Southwest, and replaced vehicle fleets and industrial equipment with the cleanest, most efficient technology. With the money leftover we could have awarded research grants, reformed policy, and mapped out the future. The mind reels at the possibilities. Also, our people would never have been more eager to help.” 
      “What bothers me most is the complete unwillingness to listen to the citizens of this country or be open to compromise,” said Ananya Mullane, Youth Program Coordinator at the Earth Resource Foundation. “We saw this during the build up to the war on Iraq, where millions of people demonstrated, but this President blew us all off as completely inconsequential. It is a secret, unilateral, unrelenting policy of destruction of the environment that seems incompatible with the most basic notions of decency or common sense.” 
     Christopher Ward, a Naturalist at the El Dorado Nature Center in Long Beach, was most upset with Bush’s under funding and gutting of the Natural Park Service [NPS]. He pointed out that the Bush Administration promotes a right wing ideology that “Government can’t do anything” and wants to prove that ideology right by forcing reality. “The gutting of the National Park Service was intentional – they knew that NPS was a government agency that over the years had accomplished a lot, protecting open space, educating the public, so they had to gut the Park Service to prove what they asserted, in essence to mold reality to suit their needs.”      Reports are that over the past few months, the National Park Service has imposed a hiring freeze, abandoned maintenance projects, cut visitor services and reduced park hours at a number of America’s national parks.
     According to a recent poll by Greenberg Quinlan Research, better than 7 in 10 feel “issues involving clean air, clean water and open space were either the primary consideration or one of several factors when making their voting decisions.” In that case, George W. Bush, like his father, is destined to be a one-term president—if his true record is known.

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Left to right, Don May, Dr. Gordon LaBedz  and Diana Mann enjoy the fruits of preservation efforts past at El Dorado Nature Center.  Putting priorities in order, LaBedz notes, “I need 50 Tomahawk missiles to buy the Bolsa Chica Wetlands. I need 76 Tomahawk missiles to buy the Ballona Wetlands.” Photo: Taso Papadakis.