Men's Journal

Lake Clark National Park, Alaska Photo credit: Corey Rich

Fraud and incompetence on Wall Street have led the news for months, but the financial world doesn’t have a monopoly on corruption. BILL MCKIBBEN argues that our nation’s natural resources were mismanaged under Bush, too, and need serious help from Team Obama.

If you were searching for a metaphor for eight years of the Bush administration’s environmental record, you could do worse than wander the shores of Lake Roosevelt. But be careful where you step.

Lake Roosevelt stretches 154 miles behind Grand Coulee Dam in western Washington. A million people a year go there to recreate, but the problem is that many of them defecate as well. Because the park is so spread out, with campsites all along the shore accessible mostly by rented houseboats, there aren’t lots of bathrooms. Here’s superintendent Debbie Bird, narrating a tour for reporters and state officials. “We’re walking up the beach into the vegetation. And we’re looking at an array here of white tissue with…other objects. I’m not going to look too closely.”

How is Bush implicated? Well, there’s a rule in the park that houseboaters and others need to carry portable toilets with them on their trips. Leave no trace, that kind of thing. And there used to be a group of rangers who enforced the law. “We had a potty boat patrol,” a second ranger explained to the Associated Press. But cutbacks in staffing have forced rangers to shift to other duties, and “over time people began ignoring the rule,” the ranger said.

Now the Park Service has printed up lime-green brochures to reiterate the rules. They’re trying to see if they can find volunteer boaters to patrol “to educate visitors.” And they’re hoping for “a new ethic of stewardship” to materialize.

Writ large, this is the story of the past eight years. The government has looked the other way while everyone has gone about his business. In fact, when it’s businesses going about their business, the government has happily supplied the toilet paper, and if the businesses in question have turned out to be the corporate equivalent of feces-flinging howler monkeys — well, hey, you can’t make an omelet without crapping in the skillet, can you? If anyone complains that things are getting out of hand, the administration has recommended voluntary compliance with whatever rules they’ve left on the books. As a result, the planet is now officially full of shit. Of all kinds, including that foulest gas of all, the CO2 currently melting the ice caps and raising the seas.

Which is to say: Barack Obama — along with saving the banks, fighting off another Depression, and ending the war in Iraq — gets to go on potty boat patrol.

Here’s Greenpeace’s former executive director John Passacantando, who stepped down this winter after eight years of fighting the power: Obama “would do himself and the country a great favor by putting together an independent committee of muckraking journalists and judges to root out the corruption that’s now deep in our fabric.” Otherwise, he says, “let’s say they appoint someone really positive. Someone who says, ‘Let’s just start over.’ But unless you root out all these ideologues who were brought in and groomed to gut these democratic mechanisms to protect the environment and the public, they won’t do it.”

Such a purge won’t be easy, he cautions. “They’ve been burrowing in for years,” Passacantando says, “figuring out how to go from being a political appointee whom the next president could fire to getting career jobs.” Still, he says, it’s the only chance. “They’ve left thousands of soldiers behind, and someone has to deal with them to take this country back.”

Does this sound like some kind of radical partisan rant? Something you’d expect from a radical at Greenpeace? Let’s turn to that most fearsome of raging green organizations, the National Wildlife Federation. They’re the ones that publish Ranger Rick. On their home page you can take the Good Neighbor Pledge. They’re largely concerned about preserving habitat for hunting and fishing. Here’s their president, Larry Schweiger, a dangerous man who has received the Conservation Award from the Christian Environmental Association: “We’re very into getting young people out of doors. They’re not experiencing nature the way past generations have. There’s a combination of factors that produce that, but the lack of rich experiences is a big one.”

When it’s businesses going about their business, the government has happily supplied the toilet paper, and if the businesses in question have turned out to be the corporate equivalent of feces-flinging howler monkeys — well, hey, you can’t make an omelet without crapping in the skillet, can you?

To translate “lack of rich experiences,” let’s turn to Schweiger’s colleague Steve Torbit, who is in charge of the NWF’s Rocky Mountain office. “If I could borrow the new president for a day, I’d like to take him to two areas. I’d start in the upper Green River country in Wyoming, around Sublette County. That’s an area I used to hunt. It’s high desert, where the Oregon Trail crossed, and outside of Yellowstone it’s probably the most productive wildlife habitat around. Now it has, on places like the Jonah fields, a gas well every five acres.” Each one has a road, each one has a pipeline. “Or go to the Piceance basin in northwest Colorado. It’s home to the largest mule deer herd in the country. It used to be 60,000; now it’s 30,000.” Same thing: Out-of-control drilling and mining, all on federal land leased by the Bush administration to pretty much any prospector who asks. “It’s like the gold rush of the 1860s on steroids,” says Torbit. “And we know better — that’s the thing. We can do a better job. But there’s no interest in doing a better job.”

These guys aren’t against drilling for oil and gas. They’d just like it done with a little care to avoid endangering wildlife. They’d like, for instance, to drill one area at a time, and then switch to another, so great herds have a chance to move. But there’s been no appetite for that in the Bush season. The face of the administration wildlife policy for most of the last eight years was a woman named Julie MacDonald, a civil engineer (think bridges) by training who, by virtue of a sterling conservative résumé, ended up as deputy assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior for fishing and wildlife. Once in charge, according to one report, “she personally reversed scientific findings, changed scientific conclusions to prevent endangered species from receiving protection, removed relevant information from a scientific document, and ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to adopt her edits.” Some of this, being the Bush administration, involved simple venality; she eventually resigned shortly before Congress began an investigation of her role in removing the Sacramento split-tail fish from the endangered species list at the same time that she was profiting from the ownership of a farm that lies within the fish’s habitat.

Other animals entrusted to her tender care include the lynx, the bull trout, and the sage grouse. “The sage grouse could be the first game species that ends up endangered,” says Torbit. “This is not some obscure mouse. When I was a kid, Labor Day was opening day of sage grouse season. Everyone would go out to hunt and have a picnic. You’d see hundreds and hundreds of grouse. But there isn’t any regard for that in this administration. If you look at some of the environmental impact statements that talk about oil and gas development, they pretty much say the only place wildlife values will be considered is where there is no retrievable resource. To hell with multiple use, to hell with balance. It’s energy extraction at all costs, even if sage grouse have to go extinct.”

It’s not as if MacDonald was alone in her work. Take J. Steven Griles, fresh off serving time in federal prison. He came to the Interior Department as the deputy secretary, and the department’s top guy on Dick Cheney’s energy task force, after a career heading something called National Environmental Strategies. Which, of course, was about designing strategies to wreck the environment on behalf of various corporations. He promised he would recuse himself from dealing with former clients, but apparently he couldn’t help himself. (One top Washington environmentalist called him “the Energizer Bunny of conflicts of interest.”) Griles eventually pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.

A few bad apples? More like a steady rot, spreading from the top. Tom France, who runs the NWF’s Montana office, likens it to Iraq policy: “If you think about the president’s policy, the disregard for American ideals like freedom from torture,” he says, “well, you’ve seen a cascade come down from the president through the ranks, and you end up with scandals like Abu Ghraib.” The functional equivalent, if you’re a sage grouse, is the wall-to-wall pipelines across the high desert out West. Torbit says that whenever NWF tries to protect some chunk of habitat, they run into the same problems. “We call them the nodding-head bureaucrats,” he says. “They nod their heads like they hear you, they express their concern for balance, and then they go put up another 140,000 acres of land for lease. They pretend to speak to our issues, but it’s pretense only.”

Changing that kind of mind-set means changing the culture of agency after agency, division after division. The heads at the top will roll — but the new heads will not be able to rest on their improved rhetoric. They’ll have to be fighting the entrenched business-as-usual, go-along-get-along, I-know-who-my-friends-are mind-set in all of their underlings.

Ground zero for that fight will be climate and energy policy. For the past eight years the U.S. has done next to nothing about global warming. It’s alone among developed nations in refusing to ratify the Kyoto treaty, and it has routinely tried to sabotage efforts at a follow-up international agreement. Its only efforts at control have been “voluntary agreements” with industry (think lime-green brochure). Oh, and watching as the price of gasoline rose past $4 a gallon, which finally forced some Americans out of their SUVs. The vice-president, notably, dismissed conservation as a “personal virtue,” sort of like using the toilet on your houseboat.

Change will require new people, new policy, new commitment. “Only someone who makes it clear from the beginning that global warming is one of the top three or four issues has a prayer,” says Joe Romm, who served as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewables in the Clinton administration and now runs ClimateProgess.org, one of the most informed (and combative) of environmental blogs. Anything less, and they’ll never take on the key battle: stopping the building of new coal plants and beginning the phase-out of old ones, replacing them at every turn with renewable fuels such as thermal solar power or large-scale wind. It’s a hard road, says Romm, but if the new president starts down it, he’ll find allies as well as enemies. “The world has changed a little bit in the last five years. The venture capital community is now laying out a great deal of money.” If they could count on government backup, he notes, “they’d pour even more in.”

Obama, though not concentrating on environmental issues, has shown a certain amount of moxie already. “I took some heart when he didn’t jump aboard the good ship Gas Tax Holiday,” says Oberlin professor and longtime environmental thinker David Orr, remembering Hillary Clinton’s and John McCain’s preferred solution to last summer’s spike in gas prices.

Still, the new president starts in a deep financial hole that may limit his flexibility to act; at the very least it will require considerably more creativity than in the past. Orr helped gather a team of scholars around the country to prepare a 100-day plan to start dealing with climate change. It’s “a comprehensive plan for the country to end its addiction to carbon,” says Bill Becker, a Clinton administration energy expert who directed the effort. Its 300-plus recommendations can be seen at ClimateActionProject.com, and though they include topics like “Better Manure Management,” the most important steps involve sending a strong price signal through the markets so that fossil fuels, even currently cheap coal, will become progressively more expensive over time. Such a “carbon cap” would persuade utilities to turn away from coal and toward the sun and hasten the already-underway mothballing of SUV plants in favor of new plug-in hybrid technology.

The problem, though, is that such measures will, inevitably, send the price of energy even higher. As Obama himself put it last January, “Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” I mean, say we want Americans to use half as much energy per capita, the way that western Europeans do; well, gas in Europe is nearly $8 a gallon. It’s hard to imagine one Congress after another screwing up the political courage to enforce that kind of discipline, especially with memories of high gas prices still fresh and people staring at retirement accounts half the size they were a year ago.

Which is why Obama’s interest in an upstart idea called cap-and-dividend may prove to be particularly important. Here’s how it works: Washington forces the oil and coal companies to pay ever higher prices for permits to put carbon dioxide into the air, a cost that that they of course pass on to consumers. But instead of Congress collecting the money from the permits and spending it on something fun, they just divide it up equally among every American: You’d get a check in the mail every month for your share of the sky, money that would offset the newfound pain you’re feeling at the pump. Americans like checks, and the higher the price we would charge for the right to pollute (and hence the faster the pollution was coming down), the bigger those checks would be. In recent months both liberal Democrats (Representative Ed Markey, of Massachusetts) and conservative Republicans (Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee) have introduced legislation that would start those checks coming.

There are a host of other policy initiatives for the new president to consider, many of which fall in the stop-hitting-your-head-against-the-wall category. In the months before leaving office, for instance, the Bush administration tried to push new rules that would make “mountaintop removal” mining even easier for big companies. (This is the technique that extracts coal by blowing up the mountains that cover it and then dumping the fill in the valleys between them.) There’s no more obvious environmental folly on the whole continent — except maybe Canada’s tar sands oil project that’s currently destroying northern Alberta to power America’s car fleet, or the ethanol plague now occupying a third of our cornfields (or, in a minor key, the annual idiocy of turning Yellowstone into a snowmobile playground).

But there are also chances for real progress. The local food movement, for instance, is gaining traction in many places; the next step is to start fashioning a new farm bill that, in journalist Michael Pollan’s words, becomes a “food bill,” a vehicle to break the power of corporate agribusiness and help young farmers eager to reinvent a working landscape across much of rural America.

In the end Obama can do only so much without a movement, so the story will largely turn on how angry average Americans become. And on whether their most intense anger is directed at high gas prices or at high levels of environmental destruction.

The answer may seem depressingly obvious, but the environmental policies of the past eight years have been so egregious that they’ve tipped many people in a new direction. Across the West, reports NWF’s Steve Torbit, people are starting to take action. “We’re in the seventh year of a severe drought out here,” he says. “First the habitat gets impacted by cavalier development. Then we burn that carbon in a cavalier way. If you look at the climate models — well, we’re talking about moonscape in places that were verdant and productive, in places where people came from all over the world to see the great American West. The great American West is virtually a thing of the past.”

But maybe not going down without a fight, and in some of the less likely places. Take Pinedale, county seat of Sublette County, state of Wyoming. President Bush carried Wyoming by a margin of 69–29 percent in the 2004 election, one of his widest triumphs, and Sublette County with 78 percent of the vote. This is Dick Cheney’s home state, after all, the place with the highest gun ownership rate in the nation (the place that sued to reverse a federal law that barred wife-beaters from owning guns). But last May there was a sit-in at the huge Pinedale Anticline gas fields by people angry at the endless expansion of drilling and the pollution it creates. Ozone levels as high as Los Angeles’s or Denver’s have been reported regularly. “This isn’t the 1960s — and these folks ain’t rabble rousers,” reported the Casper Star-Tribune. In fact, they were organized by a retired high school science teacher named Elaine Crumpley. “There’s nothing like a group of people with a common voice,” said Crumpley. “We’re just a group of concerned citizens from all walks of life who have had enough.”

Had enough with the haze of pollutants coming off the drill field that blocks views of the Wind River range 20 miles to the east; had enough of kids racked with asthma. The newspaper story quoted another retired educator, Patty Washburn, age 61. “I’ve never been a radical in my entire life. But I do believe in being honest and being ethical and being moral.” And, doubtless, in cleaning up after herself.

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