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WASHINGTON, April 20 — The first major federal assessment of the oceans in a generation endorsed on Tuesday the gloomy scientific view of the nation's deteriorating coastal waters and offered a mosaic of 250 recommendations to reverse the decline, including a call for local and international action to curb the overfishing that has depleted fish stocks worldwide.Alternative Universe:The report, by a commission whose 16 members were appointed by President Bush, also suggested increasingly stringent curbs on nutrient-rich runoff pollution that threatens to strangle the ecosystems of the Chesapeake Bay and creates a huge seasonal "dead zone" where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.
BAL HARBOUR, Fla., April 20 — Senator John Kerry accused the Bush administration Tuesday of "playing dirty" in what he described as its undoing of 30 years of environmental regulation, and declared that ocean pollution was jeopardizing Florida's vital tourism industry.Universe:
Linda Candler, a spokeswoman for the National Fisheries Institute, representing commercial fishing groups, said in an interview: "We are generally pleased with most of the recommendations. We are genuinely pleased that the commission recognizes that fishing is not the only human impact on our oceans."I can't claim to admire either Bush or Kerry as men or politicians, but Kerry and his handlers seem to be unusually unaware of environmental issues, or perhaps assume that the constituency they court is unaware. The Kerry spin is false in the same way as the Bruce Barcott article in NYT Magazine taken apart by Dave Green, among others. Sincere environmentalists object not because the Kerry/Barcott spin is deceitful, politics isn't about honesty, but because it harms the environment and environmentalism.John Adams, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a major environmental group, said in an interview that he welcomed the report and would not dwell on any differences he had with specific recommendations. "The overall message," Mr. Adams said, "is that there's a crisis out there. And it's a very important crisis because we're losing a food supply and a huge economic base for this country."
James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said in an interview that he rejected the idea that joining the international sea compact would be a problem for the White House, even though several conservative senators strongly oppose the move.
"President Bush has put the treaty on the top priority list for ratification [ending the country's 22-year-old refusal to officially join], Mr. Connaughton said, adding, "We're working hard with the Congress to assuage their concerns" on issues of intelligence gathering and national security.
David Sandalow, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution who was assistant secretary of state for oceans, environment and science in the Clinton administration, termed the panel's report "striking."
"This is a Bush-appointed, Republican-leaning commission," Mr. Sandalow said, "that's come out with fairly strong recommendations — for new funding, for focusing federal efforts. And an encyclopedia of strong new ideas."
The politicization of environmentalism was a huge blunder, a Faustian bargain made by immature minds that understood little about ecology or socio-ecological truths. It is telling that the effort was led by politicians. As Senator Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day tells it:
... the idea for Earth Day evolved over a period of seven years starting in 1962. For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political "limelight" once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour...Nelson's idea eventually succeeded in the political sense - environmentalism was politicized and the politicians prospered. But it has been an abject failure in the environmental sense. Society was divided, the environment was captured by politics, and opposition to the politics of Nelson and his fellow travelers became associated with opposition to environmentalism. If his intent had been to obstruct environmental remediation he couldn't have chosen a more effective method. An issue which had no natural opposition, that could have had universal support like apple pie and motherhood, back when pie and motherhood were still PC, was turned into a political wedge issue that alienated half the nation.I was satisfied that if we could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda.
The near over night creation of opposition to environmentalism by these cynical political opportunists wasn't the last or worst insult to the environment. Not only were environmental policies opposed, those that were implemented were created without the useful input of the more effective half of the polity, the part that is most adept in the material world. The movers and shakers made the policies without the practical insight of the builders and growers. The blind led the sighted. It was a double dose of socio-political blundering. Half of society was alienated - and it was the wrong half, the half best positioned to do meaningful and insightful preservation and remediation. Nelson and his partisan cohort blew it by associating environmental issues with the political interests of those most alienated from the environment, with the least amount of involvement and insight, most deeply captured by the ruinous command and control mentalities of elitist ruling classes, and least able to effect meaningful change.
An inevitable consequence of politicization is polarization. One pole was claimed by lunatics predicting the immanent collapse of civilization or even the end of life on the planet, and the other pole was claimed by debunkers. This recent Ronald Bailey essay is a timely retelling of those events. It isn't particularly accurate or well reasoned, but it covers the main points.
Earth Day 1970 provoked a torrent of apocalyptic predictions. "We have about five more years at the outside to do something," ecologist Kenneth Watt declared to a Swarthmore College audience on April 19, 1970. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment. The day after Earth Day, even the staid New York Times editorial page warned, "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." Very Apocalypse Now.Some have wondered how it ended up that quasi-leftist political groups, such as the Democrats in the US, ended up championing conservation and preservation, which some argue are more often conservative issues. In part it was coincidence. As Nelson argued it was a way to leverage the anti-war energy of students though it took him almost 10 years to get it rolling. In part it was another tool to advance the authoritarian economics and politics of Democrats, giving them more control points to dominate society at both the individual and the organizational levels. In part it was an urban strategy, since the most visible aspects of environmental degradation were in cities, especially the old industrial cities of the east and the newly industrialized cities on the west coast. In part it was a demographic accident since youths of the post WWII population boom were just entering the political arena, with youthful energy and immature minds.Three decades later, of course, the world hasn't come to an end; if anything, the planet's ecological future has never looked so promising. With half a billion people suiting up around the globe for Earth Day 2000, now is a good time to look back on the predictions made at the first Earth Day and see how they've held up and what we can learn from them. The short answer: The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong.
More important, many contemporary environmental alarmists are similarly mistaken when they continue to insist that the Earth's future remains an eco-tragedy that has already entered its final act. Such doomsters not only fail to appreciate the huge environmental gains made over the past 30 years, they ignore the simple fact that increased wealth, population, and technological innovation don't degrade and destroy the environment. Rather, such developments preserve and enrich the environment. If it is impossible to predict fully the future, it is nonetheless possible to learn from the past. And the best lesson we can learn from revisiting the discourse surrounding the very first Earth Day is that passionate concern, however sincere, is no substitute for rational analysis.
Environmental care is neither leftist nor conservative, authoritarian or libertarian. Our environment should not be a political issue, something to game and abuse in a foetid scramble for power. It's a universal, non-partisan concern. Each administration, whatever their political affiliation, should be encouraged and supported in their efforts to implement policies that seek to reduce negative environmental impacts while not crashing the ship of state.
It's time for the Democrats to mature, to realize that they lose respect, and votes, when they treat the environment as a pawn in a tawdry game of thrones. It's time for Republicans to assert themselves in environmental initiatives and so regain a natural constituency. There will always be differences in policy, differences in preferred approaches. That's the proper arena for political dispute. Democrats can argue for authoritarian, quasi-socialist command and control approaches they favor. Republicans can argue for liberal, distributed approaches leveraging natural incentives as they have done recently. Both sides should be debunked when they skew the evidence, misstate the situation to conceal their weaknesses or bolster their strengths.