Congress Wielding An Ax On Ecology Laws

Bruce Babbitt begins the day, appropriately enough, at Walden Pond, communing with a television crew and with the spirit of Henry David Thoreau.

Only a handful of people are swimming, fishing and rowing at this early hour. So the pond bears some resemblance to the place that Thoreau chose when he “went to the woods to live deliberately.”

For Babbitt, secretary of the interior, it may be more congenial to commune with the philosopher’s spirit than with the man himself - an eloquent advocate of the simple life but also a cranky believer in self-reliance who brought his laundry home to mom. But it is, after all, a glorious day to don a short-sleeved plaid shirt, khaki pants and loafers and beat it out of Washington.

“It’s not just a good day to be out of Washington,” Babbitt agrees with blustery good cheer. “In fact, it’s a good season, a good year to be out of Washington.”

Babbitt has taken his fifth road trip to drum up some belated sense of alarm - or even awareness - about the congressional tanks rolling over 25 years of environmental work. “Congress,” he says, “is on a predetermined course, and the only way to stop it is to build up public resistance.”

With an air of incredulity, he adds, “The environment wasn’t even an issue in the last campaign. It’s not even mentioned in the (Republicans’) ‘Contract With America.”’ The idea of gutting the Clean Water Act or cutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s funds by 34 percent? “Can you imagine campaigning on these issues? No.”

Indeed, until January, environmentalism was largely a bipartisan cause. Even now, House Speaker Newt Gingrich will pop out of the office that he’s decorated with an extinct species - a dinosaur head - and declare himself a friend of the elephant.

But after the last election, in as crass a way as Washington has seen, business interests have called in their chits. They literally have begun to rewrite policy in three directions at once: by specifically targeting budget cuts to weaken environmental enforcement; by trying to repeal laws, one by one; and by laying out new, outlandish principles of law such as one that, in essence, would force taxpayers to compensate people for not polluting.

Yet, for all the rhetoric of environmental concern, for all the polling data that show public support, there has been less outcry about proposals to dilute environmental regulations than about proposals to dilute meat inspection.

So, from Walden, Babbitt heads north to the banks of the Merrimack River in New Hampshire, where kayakers provide photo opportunities on the formerly dead and deadly river once colored by a factory’s chemical of the day. There, Babbitt celebrates this success story and reminds people that protecting the environment is “a work in progress.”

Later, in the harbor at Portland, Maine, at a shipboard round table, residents of Maine share stories about the return of the striped bass and the waterways that remain polluted.

For the most part, the interior secretary is talking today to the converted. But the converted in Portland include the chamber of commerce as well as the Nature Conservancy.

And the message they share - one Babbitt says he would like to “bottle and sprinkle across the country” - is that the economy and the environment are not necessarily at odds, that communities can resist becoming polarized, that some laws may need fixing - but not eliminating.

Babbitt tends to ruminate in an era when sound bites trump thoughtfulness. If he could set the terms of the environmental debate in this country, he says he’d pose the question this way: “How do Americans find a lasting equilibrium with the natural landscapes?”

But the sorry reality of the moment is that instead, we are fighting rear-guard actions. The “debate” is a struggle over whether we’ll eliminate the national surveys of species and close down the newest national park.

These legislative threats are hidden from public view in a morass of other “reforms” spilling down the halls of Congress daily.

Opponents of environmental laws also have tarred those laws with the brush of big government, bad bureaucracy. Incidents of ham-handed EPA behavior and examples of dumb over-regulation provide a cover story for the attack. The need to update laws has become an excuse for trashing them altogether.

Back in the steamy capital, President Clinton delivered a speech about affirmative action, saying that it’s been good for America, that “we should mend it, not end it.” The same is true for environmental policies.

But this is a Congress that’s behaving, in Babbitt’s wonderfully impolitic phrase, “like an ax murderer.”

Even on a picture-perfect New England day, traveling the waterways from a pond to a river to a bay, it’s not always easy to remember that long after the next election, we’ll be judged by how we have left the water, the air and the land. We’ll be judged by the real meaning of the word “conservative.”

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