The Destroyer
Page 2
The Guardian
The Clean Water Act, passed by Congress over Nixon's veto,
was established in 1972 not only to regulate the nation's
drinking water, but to protect its rivers and lakes for activities
such as fishing, swimming and other water sports. According to
the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), 30 years later,
75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a polluted river, lake or
coastal water.
With water safety standards declining, the administration, ever
mindful of the next election, was faced with two options: make
water cleaner, or just tell the public its water was cleaner. The
Bush White House being the Bush White House, it chose the
latter. In early 2004, the EPA's own Office of the Inspector
General issued a report that said the agency had repeatedly
made false and misleading statements about the purity of the
nation's drinking water. In 2002, the EPA claimed that 91% of
Americans were drinking safe tapwater. In 2003, it upped the
number to 94%. According to the NRDC, scientists within the
EPA say the percentage of Americans drinking safe tap- water
can be estimated at only 81%.
Much of this pollution is due to insufficiently regulated industrial
activity. By the 1980s, mining interests had pretty much given
up on traditional coalmines, and had come up with a new
technique that involved literally blasting the top off a mountain
and then digging straight down. In the Appalachia region of
Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia, millions of
tons of mountaintop waste has buried 1,200 miles of streams.
A September 2003 EPA report finds nearly 300 Clean Water Act
violations by the mountaintop mining industry. How does the
Bush administration react? It moves to change the law by
establishing the Mountaintop Mining Self-Reporting Programme,
which would allow the industry to police itself and issue small
fines for violations. The mining industry donated $3.3m to the
2000 Bush-Cheney campaign and other Republican candidates.
The despoliation of Appalachia is but a portent of things to come
if the Bush administration gets its way. Three months after
taking office, Bush announced that all public lands, including
wilderness areas and national monuments, would be considered
for oil and gas drilling. The industry, by the way, donated
$46,620,134 to Bush-Cheney, the Republican National
Committee and other Republican candidates in the 2000 and
2002 elections, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics.
In order to prevent hundreds of thousands of acres from being
placed under the protection of the Wilderness Act, the Bush
administration is allowing the gas industry to stockpile leases
and drilling permits on 34m acres of public lands in the Rockies,
even though oil and gas is being produced on less than one-third
of that land. Once an oil and gas company puts a road on a
leased parcel, the land can no longer be protected by the
Wilderness Act.
It is something of a mystery, however, why the administration
has been so fixated on giving up the 19m-acre Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, with its 1.5m-acre coastal plain, to oil interests,
since 95% of Alaska's North Slope is already open to drilling.
Deputy interior secretary Griles has said that opening it up is his
"greatest wish". Naturalists have called the ANWR, which is
teeming with all manner of vegetation and wildlife, "America's
Serengeti". Interior secretary Gale Norton calls it "a flat, white
nothingness".
Proponents of drilling in the ANWR coastal plain claim it "may"
contain between 6bn and 16bn barrels of recoverable oil. The
Geological Survey estimated that the coastal plain could
profitably produce 3.2bn barrels of oil - enough for six months'
worth of US consumption. In the end, even the Republican-led
Senate felt the administration had overreached. It blocked all the
White House's proposals for drilling in the ANWR. Bush vowed
to keep on trying.
Bush's attitude can be seen in the favours he has done to the
logging firms, which donated $6,854,321 to the Bush-Cheney
campaign and the Republicans in 2000, and which gave a further
$3,617,921 in the 2002 election cycle. Almost a third of the US
is covered in forest - some 737m acres. Only around 6% of that
is protected by federal law. According to the NRDC, there are
already over 380,000 miles of roads that cut through national
forests - eight times more than the entire interstate highway
system. The Clinton administration, under the Roadless Area
Conservation Rule, sought to protect a third of the true
wilderness national forest area from further road- building. In its
first month in office, the Bush administration set in motion a
programme to reverse that plan. Henceforth, the industry would
get logging and road-building permits whenever it asked for
them.
And the Bush administration has taken its reckless approach to
the environment far beyond American shores, not only causing
damage to global ecosystems, but also further eroding the US's
already spotty reputation as a responsible superpower. In its
first three years in office, the Bush White House has rejected,
undercut or ignored many of the world's international
environmental treaties.
On February 14 2002, the day Bush announced his Clear Skies
proposal, he laid out his plans for tackling global warming. "My
administration is committed to cutting our nation's greenhouse
gas intensity - how much we emit per unit of economic activity -
by 18% over the next 10 years." In fact, the proposal's wording
and its accounting would allow emissions actually to increase
by 14% over the next decade, according to the NRDC - exactly
the rate of increase for the previous decade.
The Bush White House inherited an environment that had been
all but saved by the Clean Air and Clean Water acts of the
1970s. The administration thus turned its back on more than 30
years' worth of advances in environmental legislation and global
treaties in order to reward its campaign backers from the oil and
gas industries - from whose ranks of executives so many
important government posts have been filled. As with the
environment, so it is for everything else: it is difficult to point to a
single element of American society which comes under federal
jurisdiction that is not worse off than it was an administration
ago. One can only hope that this is not to be the story of our
times, a terrible dream from which we will one day awake only to
realise what we've lost.
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