G.W. Bush and the environment
Copyright 2001 The Tampa Tribune
January 16, 2001
President-elect Bush has expressed interest in reversing some of President Clinton's steps to protect more than 60 million acres of forests. Clinton recently announced a ban on road building and most commercial logging on about 30 percent of U.S. Forest Service land.
Despite the claims of the logging, mining and ranching interests and their allies in Congress, this was no land grab.
Public hearings were held for more than a year and Forest Service officials reviewed more than 1.5 million comments in recommending the decision. The overwhelming majority of Americans favor preserving these pristine areas.
REMEMBER, THESE LANDS belong to all Americans, not to private individuals or even to the states. Further, many of the private operations on public lands are heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
One study found timber operations cost taxpayers about $ 1 billion from 1992 through 1994 alone. And the Forest Service had built nearly 400,000 miles of roads to benefit private logging operations. This is essentially corporate welfare, hardly the sort of government activism a conservative president should endorse.
And while opponents argue Clinton's actions will eliminate hundreds of jobs, that's not entirely true. Logging and other operations often eliminate a wide variety of recreation-related jobs.
Further, it is not as if the timber industry has been shut down. Clinton's order affects less than one-third of the national forest, so there will still be plenty of public land open to private operations. And, of course, private land is unaffected.
For too long the national forests were run for the benefit of a few select industries rather than for the American people. The results were the ruin of woodlands, the erosion of mountains and the pollution of streams. Hunters, fishermen, hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts, as well as the
many businesses that cater to them, too often were left out of the national forest equation.
Bush might want to move slowly in this area. Certainly he has plenty of better things to do.
Too, we are uncertain about the nomination of Gale Norton to head the Department of Interior. While friends say she is not the earth-wrecker her enemies allege, she has argued that any regulation affecting a landowner is a "taking." And she has defended the controversial concept that
government should be forced to compensate affected industries when it adopts antipollution rules.
Property rights have a central place in the fabric of American capitalism. Properly understood, a property right is a kind of human right - an idea disagreeable to many environmentalists.
Nevertheless, property rights are not boundless. The royalist idea that landowners can always do as they wish - without concern for the consequences on others - is repugnant and, as the courts have found countless times, illegal.
Norton's supporters say she will be more moderate than her rhetoric. The nation will listen closely to the evidence against her, as well as to her explanations.
The appointment is causing anxiety in Florida because the interior secretary oversees federal offshore drilling, and the oil industry desperately wants to drill off the state's coast.
That would be simply inviting disaster. Oil operations would ruin the state's coast and its tourist-based economy.
SO FAR, THANKS to Sens. Bob Graham and Connie Mack and other members of the Florida congressional delegation, the state has managed to ward off the threat, but the petroleum industry has not given up. In this regard, Norton's ideology is very worrisome.
That the president-elect's brother serves as Florida's governor may give it a temporary reprieve. But we wonder how committed a Norton Interior Department would be to the long-term protection of Florida's coast.
Perhaps Norton will prove a responsible interior secretary. But her pre-appointment statements and her record elicit little confidence that she is prepared to safeguard Americans' natural heritage.