Nature & Politics: Clinton's Environmental Record
9/25/96
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 17:17:57 -0400 (EDT)
To: grnmt@sover.net
From: grnmt@sover.net (Mathew Jacobson)
Subject: Nature and Politics
If you can stomach it, here is a brilliant expose of Clinton's recent
environmental dealmaking.
Thought y'all should know.
Mat
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Nature and Politics
Dave Foreman's Dream and Bill Clinton's Trail of Tears
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
On Saturday, September 21, Dave Foreman related to his fellow Sierra Club
board members an amazing dream he had allegedly experienced the preceding
night. Dramatically, the former eco-warrior told how the shade of Edward
Abbey had appeared to him as he slept. Abbey, according to Foreman, had
been reincarnated as a vulture. The spectral bird told Foreman that he had
flown over the Kaiparowits Plateau in southern Utah, in the wake of
President Clinton's proclamation that 1.8 million acres on the north side
of the Colorado River would be designated as a National Monument.
"Dave," croaked Abbey, "this is a good thing."
Foreman paused. "If it's good enough for Ed Abbey, it's good enough for me.
I'll vote for the Club to endorse Bill Clinton." For the past two months,
Foreman had been a fierce opponent of a Clinton endorsement by the Club.
Soon after the recounting of his vision, the Sierra Club board ended a
bitter schism and voted to grant Clinton their unqualified support, with
Foreman providing the vital vote.
The Sierra Club endorsement was a prize that the White House had been
pursuing hotly for several months. So seriously was it taken that Al Gore
himself placed no less than four telephone calls to one board member who
had been leaning against the endorsement in the week prior to the vote.
Exactly who informed Gore of the identities of the wavering board members
is unclear. But the tactic worked. In the end, there were only two
passionate dissents-both women, Laura Hoehn of Oregon and Lois Sneddin of
Nevada.
With the administration expanding its lead in the polls and Bob Dole's
campaign turning more environmentally hostile by the day, one might ask why
the administration devoted such time to securing the Sierra Club's public
support. Two reasons stand out. The administration's prime objective was
to extinguish any emerging threat from the Green Party's Ralph Nader and
his running mate Winona LaDuke. Nader, running an almost invisible
campaign, was polling at close to 10 percent in the West, enough to put
those otherwise safe states at risk should a new scandal, or explosive
Whitewater indictment, break close to election day.
Equally important, however, was the need to update the green credentials of
Al Gore, who is using this campaign as a prelude to his inevitable run at
the White House in 2000. At best, Gore has been AWOL on the environment
for the past four years, remaining silent as the administration collapsed
on promised timber, mining, and grazing reforms. At worst, Gore has been an
effective opponent of progressive environmentalists on issues ranging from
NAFTA and GATT to dolphin-safety and whaling to pesticides, incineration
and nuclear power.
It was Al Gore who two months ago approached the Sierra Club's new
president, 23-year old Adam Werbach (who was recently quoted as saying, "I
don't understand why people feel so passionately about trees"). Reportedly,
Gore asked what actions the administration could take to secure the
organization's public support. Werbach huddled with the Club's executive
director Carl Pope, lobbyist Debbie Sease (Foreman's ex-wife), and public
lands director Bruce Hamilton to develop a pre-election wish-list for
Gore's appraisal. Among the topics transmitted to the Vice President:
Yellowstone, Utah wilderness, old-growth timber sales, and the fate of the
Headwaters grove.
Using this same Sierra Club list as an itinerary, the administration
embarked on a dizzying migration across the country, with Bill Clinton
acting like the ecological equivalent of faith healer Benny Hinn. At every
stop, an ecosystem on the brink of destruction was pronounced saved.
It's been a month now since Bill Clinton visited Yellowstone to affirm his
commitment to nature. Mark his fateful progress since that time. As far as
the environment is concerned, it contrasts unfavorably with General
Sherman's march on the sea.
* In Yellowstone, be it recalled, Clinton announced that the oldest park in
the nation had been saved from predations on its northern border by the
Canadian mining giant, Noranda. In exchange for quitting its plan to gouge
out a square mile hole in the Beartooth Mountains in search of flecks of
gold, Clinton offered the company $65 million worth of federal
properties-probably real estate-elsewhere. The national press faithfully
depicted Clinton as the saviour of Yellowstone.
* On the eve of the Democratic Convention Clinton, framed by a clutch of
children, signed into law the Food Quality Protection Act. "I call this the
Peace of Mind Act because parents will know that the fruits, grains and
vegetables children eat are safe," Clinton pronounced. "Chemicals can go a
long way in a small body." The press hailed the new act as particularly
praiseworthy for its successful annulment of the Delaney Clause, portrayed
as a piece of archaic legislation from the 1950s, ridiculed by all
right-thinking scientists.
* The convention safely behind him, the President made his way to Beverly
Hills, for a Barbra Streisand-anchored fundraiser, which featured an
all-star line up of Hollywood green celebrities and netted the Clinton-Gore
reelection campaign $4 million bucks. The press treated the affair as a
society event.
* From Los Angeles the intrepid president sped to the north rim of the
Grand Canyon, there to announce that 1.8 million acres of federal lands in
Utah would now be designated a National Monument, supposedly saving them
from being strip-mined for coal. TV news clips and subsequent new stories
signaled this as an event as momentous in significance as the finest
preservationist acts of Teddy Roosevelt.
* Then it was off to the Pacific Northwest for the White House team,
boarding Greyhound One in Seattle and heading south down Interstate 5 to
Portland. There under the alpenglow of Mt. Hood, Clinton declared that he
was saving the region's old-growth forests, by working out a deal whereby
timber companies would desist from logging in ancient groves inhabited by
marbled murrelets, in exchange for permits to log equivalent volumes of
timber on other national forest lands in Washington and Oregon.
* Finally came a strong White House push for a deal whereby Clinton will be
able to announce before the election that he has protected from destruction
the Headwaters Grove in northern California, the last privately-owned stand
of virgin redwoods in America. With the exception of the ever-vigilant
Business Week, the national press raised no awkward questions about
this impending pay-off to corporate raider Charles Hurwitz, a man accused
by the government of looting a savings and loan in Texas at a cost of $1.6
billion to the taxpayer, now to be given fabulously valuable properties in
the San Francisco Bay Area, such as Treasure Island or the Presidio.
In presidential campaigns the press bus rarely returns to the scene of the
crime. So let us quickly review what Paul Harvey would call the Rest of the
Story.
As far as the salvation of Yellowstone is concerned, it's far from a done
deal. It turns out that Noranda has veto power over any of the properties
on federal lands offered in exchange for its mining claims near
Yellowstone. Moreover, according to the agreement, the deal has to be
finalized by December 31, 1996 or Noranda can back out of it. One of the
White House's problems is that the feds cannot find enough land to
Noranda's taste in Montana. If the search is to be extended outside the
state, it will require congressional approval, which-given the secrecy and
furtive speed with which the deal was hatched-is unlikely to happen soon,
if ever. Indeed, Montana's Republican Senator Conrad Burns has already
vowed to kill any such maneuver.
Second, the proposed exchange has blazed a green light to anyone holding
mining claims on the circumference of Yellowstone or any other national
park: Line up the bulldozers in front of the park gates and wait for the
White House to phone with a lucrative buy-out offer. The new incentive to
take national parks hostage has already attracted the attention of a
Wyoming company which, only days after the presidential ceremony, filed 175
mining claims along the ecologically pristine Rocky Mountain Front east of
Glacier National Park.
But even if the deal finally goes through, claims of having saved
Yellowstone are preposterous. Noranda's planned mining sites account to but
a handful of more than 6,000 gold mining claims in the Yellowstone
ecosystem alone, any one of which could pose an equal threat to the regions
rivers, mountains, and trout.
"After reading the Noranda agreement in detail, I don't know the answer to
even one of my questions about this deal," says Jim Jensen, director of the
Montana Environmental Information Center in Helena, a mining watchdog
group. "But we do know some things. Bill Clinton got his picture taken and
the press got duped into writing the greenwash headlines the White House
wanted."
The Noranda fix is the consequence of an earlier collapse by Clinton in his
first two years in the White House, when the Democrats controlled Congress.
If he'd backed fellow Arkansan Senator Dale Bumpers' effort to overturn the
1872 Mining Act- which gives away mineral-rich public lands for as little
as $2.50 an acre, levies no royalties on the exhumed metals, and imposes no
responsibilities to reclaim the land-Yellowstone could have been protected
without these grotesque hand-outs. Most of the other mining claims could
have also been turned aside.
Even as late as this summer there other ways to stop Noranda: through a
sober interpretation of existing federal environmental laws, such as the
Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act, federal regulators
could have simply denied the company permits for the mine. But in the full
ecstasy of his Republican conversion these powerful weapons, declaring that
he wanted to protect Noranda's property rights. In this way Clinton
succeeded where Bob Dole had tried and failed. The president legitimized
the issue of regulatory takings, requiring corporations to be paid not to
violate federal laws.
The Food Quality Protection Act is perhaps the most outlandishly cynical of
all of these pre-election grandstandings. It does to public health and
environmental protection laws what the Welfare Act did to the New Deal.
Since 1958 the Delaney Clause had imposed an absolute ban on carcinogens in
processed food, a law the food and chemical companies have been trying to
overthrow for almost 40 years. EPA director Carol Browner, a former Gore
staffer, had her sights set on gutting Delaney since day one of the
administration, calling the law unenforceable and an unnecessary economic
impediment.
Now the deed has been done and rationalized, like the welfare bill, in the
name of children. In the future, regulatory interdicts against carcinogens
will be replaced by "cost benefit analyses" and "risk assessments," meaning
that panels of food industry scientists will decide how many people should
die of cancer each year to protect the all-important corporate bottom line.
"This bill is the big lie," said Peter Montague of the Annapolis-based
Environmental Research Foundation. "The administration, working with
Monsanto and Dow, has destroyed the only law committed to pollution
prevention. In its place, they've adopted the corporate friendly approach
of pollution control and cancer management."
The Beverly Hills bash was hosted by Stephen Spielberg and David Geffen,
both of whom are involved in a huge real estate speculation in Los Angeles:
the Playa Vista development, which includes the giant Dreamworks studio,
that will destroy the Ballona wetlands, one of the largest coastal marshes
in southern California. Upon entering the estate for the Clinton
fundraiser, Geffen was confronted by environmental protesters. He dismissed
their pleas to forego development at Ballona in a crude manner. "If you
want to save the frogs," the music mogul advised, "go protest at a French
restaurant."
The tycoons have enlisted Al Gore in their cause. For the past five
months, Gore has been making calls to key Sierra Club members and other LA
greens urging them to support the real estate deal-the largest in the
history of LA-as an environmentally friendly development.
More starpower was on hand in Arizona. There on the north rim of the Grand
Canyon, Robert Redford introduced Clinton, calling his impending
proclamation declaring the Escalante Canyon a National Monument a great act
of spiritual and moral courage. As the president preened before the
cameras, some environmentalists pinched themselves in amazement. Surely
their position had long been that no less than 5.7 million acres should be
designated as wilderness or national park. In fact, the southern Utah
wilderness campaign had been lavishly funded to this end.
The final fallback position of the coal mining companies and ranchers had
been introduced by Utah conservative Rep. James Hansen. His bill would have
designated no more than 2 million acres as wilderness. Redford and other
environmentalists fought tigerishly and apparently with success earlier
this year to beat back the two million acre deal.
There were a couple of tenacious press interrogators that day beside the
Grand Canyon, though it appears their perceptive probings never saw print,
drowned out by the wild cheers for Clinton from the leaders of the big
environmental organizations, one of whom-Michael Maatz of the Southern Utah
Wilderness Alliance-exclaimed that the national monument designation
catapults Clinton "to the ranks of the greatest conservationists ever."
But Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt confessed later that afternoon that
the designation of the Escalante Canyon was "mainly a name thing" and that
National Monument status (unlike park or wilderness status) does not
preclude cattle grazing, off-road vehicle use, hunting and kindred
activities. When pressed, Babbitt also admitted that nothing in the
proclamation prevented the coal mining companies from pressing forward with
their claims, although he said he hoped they would be willing to work a
Noranda-type deal elsewhere on public lands in Utah.
But there's a big problem here. The largest coal claim on the Kaiparowits
Plateau is owned by the Andalex Company, a Dutch consortium. Andalex's coal
reserves have an estimated value of nearly a trillion dollars. Babbitt
blithely said that might seem like a staggering amount, but he was
confident that the company could get land of equivalent value elsewhere in
the state: "There's a lot of federal in Utah and there are a lot of
minerals on those lands." A trillion dollars worth? At that rate a Dutch
company could end up owning nearly half the federal land in the Beehive
State. Moreover, the whole land swap scenario (in tandem with the
administration's anemic energy policy) ignores one of the biggest threats
to the Grand Canyon: the coal-fired power plants whose endless plumes of
acidic smoke now make it nearly impossible to see across the mighty
sandstone chasm.
In any event, if the Interior Department tries to offer up lands outside
the state of Utah it will again require congressional approval. But the
Utah delegation, like Montana's, is livid at the high-handed behavior of
the White House. In a display of political cowardice that has become
typical of this administration, Utah's lone Democrat, Rep. Bill Orton,
received a Clinton call about the impending proclamation at 1:30 am the
night before it happened. It will be noted that Clinton made his
announcement about creating a national monument in Utah from the safe haven
of northern Arizona.
The environmentalists have rationalized the proclamation by saying Clinton
in his second term will come back and shift the designation from National
Monument to wilderness or park and also include the missing 4 million
acres. But Babbitt dashed those hopes by telling reporters that "this won't
happen for generations."
Every time Clinton comes to Portland he promises to save the old-growth
forests, but more ancient trees always fall in his wake. Usually, a Clinton
visit prompts at least a token demonstration from the timber industry. But
this time the timber companies were ecstatic over the deal they had just
brokered with the administration. In exchange for giving back their
contracts to log ancient forests in nesting habitat of the marbled
murrelet, the timber industry was given the rights to cut an equivalent
amount of volume from less controversial tracts of forest. As a result, the
timber companies get the logs they want without pesky contentions over the
murrelet, and with the active support and encouragement of the White House.
The timber will still be old growth, but because it will be on less
productive sites it will require perhaps twice as many acres of forest to
be clearcut to get the "equivalent volume" promised the timber companies.
Clinton claimed to have saved the old-growth from the chainsaws, but he
failed to mention the reason for their plight: a bill he signed into law
last July called the salvage logging rider, which doomed old growth on the
national forests and exempted the timber companies from compliance with
federal environmental laws. This extraordinary duplicity prompted Michael
Donnelly, an environmentalist from Salem, Oregon, to proclaim, "Clinton
saved the old growth the way Reagan balanced the budget."
As exultant as the timber companies in Oregon is Maxxam's CEO Charles
Hurwitz, owner of Headwaters. On the eve of the splendid anti-Hurwitz
demonstration in northern California mill town of Carlotta, the speculator
holed up in a San Francisco office building with Senator Dianne Feinstein
and deputy Interior Security John Garamendi, who assured the corporate
raider that a favorable deal would go forward after a tactful moratorium
designed to deflate the protest in Carlotta. Indeed, Feinstein emerged
from her meeting with Hurwitz to tell the protesters to stay at home.
"Threats and intimidation and that kind of thing isn't going to solve this
problem," Feinstein declared.
Nearly 8,000 people ignored Feinstein's advice, showing up in Carlotta to
demand that all 60,000 acres of the Headwaters forest complex be taken into
public ownership, more than 1,000 were arrested, including singers Bonnie
Raitt, Don Henley and former Rep. Dan Hamburg.
It looks like the administration is prepared to offer Hurwitz the Presidio
and a settlement of the claims pending against him for the looting of the
United Savings of Texas. In exchange, Hurwitz would turn over only the
core Headwaters grove and a small buffer area, probably no more than 5,200
acres. But Hurwitz, emboldened by the spinelessness of the Clinton crowd,
is now asking for even more, including Treasure Island and hundreds of
acres of state lands. He'll probably get what he wants-he always has.
Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club certainly isn't ready to
stand up to Hurwitz. Pope is ready to sign off on the Presidio and more
federal properties: "We would be delighted to see some of those assets
which are truly surplus traded for something as precious and wonderful as
the Headwaters."
Most of this dealmaking shares a common feature: the right to loot high
profile public assests is being exchanged for the right to loot other less
visible public assets. But the right to pollute or destroy natural areas
remains unchallenged. In fact, it is memorialized.
All this makes David Brower, the arch-druid of American environmentalism
cringe. Brower knows all about such dealmaking. He once signed off on a
deal to stop damns in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon by
approving the construction of one in exquisite Glen Canyon. In the wake of
that disaster, Brower instructed environmentalists to "never trade a place
you know for one you don't."
Then again, it was Brower who urged the Sierra Club's board to endorse
Clinton two months ago, arguing that the Club, being a mainstream group,
needed to maintain its political leverage by supporting Clinton/Gore. But
he said the endorsement should be a qualified one, noting in strong terms
the serious retreats on NAFTA, forests, dolphin protection, energy,
pesticides and toxics.
A couple of weeks after making his pitch to the Sierra Club, Brower-much to
his credit-sat down and wrote an excoriating attack on Clinton's
environmental record for the LA Times. In that piece, he said that Clinton
had done more damage to the environment than Reagan or Bush and urged all
true greens to back Ralph Nader's presidential campaign.
Now, Brower is deeply discouraged by the Sierra Club's unapologetic
greenwashing Clinton on the eve of the election. "This is a sad case of
fiddling, while the environment is being burned."
Mathew Jacobson
Green Mountain Forest Watch
48 Elliot St *Brattleboro, VT 05301 * (802) 257-4878 * (FAX) 257-8529
VISIT THE Green Mountain Forest Watch HOMEPAGE
http://www.sover.net/~grnmt/