Crimes Against Nature (6 page)

She seems intent on turning some of the most beautiful landscapes in the country into oil fields, including parts of Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in Colorado, the Dome Plateau near Arches National Park in southern Utah’s Redrock Canyon Country, the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in Montana, and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. She also proposed redrawing the boundaries of America’s national monuments to allow energy development.

Her record protecting wildlife is equally dismal. Hers is the first administration since passage of the Endangered Species Act to not voluntarily list a single species as threatened or endangered. In March 2003, just when gray wolves were beginning to recover out West, Norton’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed stripping federal protection to make them easier to kill. She shelved the 10-year Federal Salmon Recovery Plan adopted in 2000 and denied endangered status to imperiled species such as the California spotted owl and the cutthroat trout in Washington and the lower Columbia Basin along its border with Oregon. She moved to strip protection for the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreational Area near San Diego, as well as hundreds of thousands of acres in the Southwest that are home to the arroyo toad, the fairy shrimp, the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly, and dozens of rare desert plants. Norton recommended that the Justice Department not appeal an Idaho court’s ruling that denies water allocations to the Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge on the Snake River in Idaho, depriving the river of water to support its booming trout fishery.

In April 2003, Gale Norton imperiled millions of acres of wilderness by signing a sweetheart deal with then-Governor Mike Leavitt of Utah that will make it easier for state and local officials to claim ownership of thousands of miles of dirt roads, trails, and fence lines under an obscure provision of federal law. That year, she also petitioned the United Nations to remove Yellowstone from a list of endangered World Heritage sites. And the list goes on.

Norton brooks no dissent. The Department of Interior, like every other federal agency, comprises long-term employees supervised by the current administration’s appointees. The former provide continuity and support to each new administration and are often experts in the issues at hand. Norton, however, has transferred, fired, or demoralized many of them, and she has suppressed the findings of scientists in her own department. Her conduct has precipitated an epidemic of resignations, retirements, and whistle-blower lawsuits by high-level scientists, civil servants, and technical staffers.

She demands total obedience and resorts to brutal tactics when crossed. In December 2003, for example, National Parks Police Chief Theresa Chambers said, in a rather innocuous interview with the
Washington Post,
that increased security requirements are causing the park police to cut back on patrols. Chambers’ job demands that she speak to the press, the public, and Congress, but the Interior Department hierarchy wanted to require that she speak only with prior approval. After refusing to agree to a permanent gag order, Chambers was stripped of her badge and firearm with the recommendation that she be fired. As of this writing, she is still in legal limbo.
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I’ve had many brushes with Norton’s crew of hardheaded ideologues. They are convinced that our government and its laws are illegitimate and that the illegitimacy makes it permissible for them to violate all the rules. I have seen them subvert the law, corrupt our democracy, and distort science. I have witnessed their willingness to break promises and deceive those they are appointed to serve.

In the summer of 2003, my cousin Maria Shriver’s husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, approached me out on Cape Cod. He was determined, he said, to be “the best environmental governor in California history.” I agreed to help him and worked with a group of sympathetic Republicans and Democrats in California to draft Arnold’s environmental platform. Among the key provisions was support for the Sierra Nevada Framework. The plan was the product of a decade of grueling work by government, the timber industry, and environmental groups to manage the Sierra Nevada forests. But Wise Use radicals at Interior opposed
any
restrictions on the exploitation of public lands.

Immediately after the election, David Drier, a conservative Republican congressman from California, asked Schwarzenegger, at the behest of the White House, to abandon support for the Framework. Schwarzenegger refused, but noted that if changes to the Framework were warranted by new information or science, the Framework should be modified by the same thoughtful, inclusive stakeholder process that had resulted in the original plan. This seemed to appease the White House. Karl Rove promised that no federal action would be taken on Framework protections, especially logging, without extensive discussions with the state and all stakeholders.

And yet, late in the afternoon of January 21, 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger received word that the U.S. Forest Service would announce a new plan for the Sierra Nevada, tripling logging levels over the Framework agreement. Schwarzenegger’s office and California EPA commissioner Terry Tamminen tried frantically to reach administration officials, but all calls went unanswered. As if to emphasize its contempt for the process, the Forest Service held a press conference in the Sacramento Hyatt, directly across the street from the governor’s office, to announce its plan. Republicans and Democrats alike in the Schwarzenegger administration were furious at the betrayal and astounded by such hardheaded arrogance. So much for states’ rights.

There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of a democracy. One is to look at how much the public is included in community decision making. Another is to evaluate access to justice. The most telling aspect of a government, however, is how it distributes the goods of the land. Does it safeguard the commonwealth — the public trust assets — on behalf of the public? Or does it allow the shared wealth of our communities to be stolen from the public by corporate power? The environmental laws passed after Earth Day 1970 were designed to protect the commons. Since then, life has dramatically improved in America. Children have measurably less lead in their blood and higher IQs as a result. We breathe cleaner air in our cities and parks and swim in cleaner water in our lakes and rivers. These laws have protected the stratospheric ozone layer, reduced acid rain, saved threatened wildlife such as the bald eagle, and preserved some of the last remaining wild places that make this country so beautiful. In other words, they protect the America that we all hold in common.

But George W. Bush’s policy advisers somehow don’t see the benefits we’ve received from our investments in our country’s environmental infrastructure. All they see is the cost of compliance for their campaign contributors — a group that is led by the nation’s most egregious polluters. This myopic vision has led the White House to abandon its responsibility to protect the public trust.

Former Interior Secretary James Watt once promised, “We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.”
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In April 2001, a retired James Watt told the
Denver Post,
“Everything Cheney’s saying, everything the President’s saying, they’re saying exactly what we were saying twenty years ago, precisely. Twenty years later, it sounds like they’ve just dusted off the old work.”

D
uring his presidential campaign, Bush threw a bone to environmentally conscious soccer moms and centrist Republicans. Global warming, he said in his second debate with Al Gore, “needs to be taken very seriously.”
¹
While he opposed the Kyoto Protocol,
²
the international agreement to slow down global warming, he proclaimed that under his leadership the United States would tackle the problem by strictly regulating CO
₂
, the principal greenhouse gas, projecting the image of a man determined to take a thoughtful approach to the environment.
³
As it turns out, he left this campaign promise on the stump.

Barely three months into office, Bush walked away from his pledge. It was, quite possibly, an unprecedented turnaround — I can’t remember a president who’s violated a major campaign promise so soon after his election, scorning the mandate that put him in office.
⁴
The move revealed the depth of industry clout at the White House. But as Bush and his advisers would learn, backpedaling on the environment doesn’t play well in Peoria.

The “greenhouse effect” was first predicted in 1896, in a paper written by a Nobel Prize–winning Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius.
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In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen riveted the world when he testified before Congress that greenhouse gases were warming our climate with dire consequences for the future.
⁶
Since then we have developed better computer modeling and collected reams of scientific evidence — and seen 10 of the warmest years on record.
⁷
The ranks of the skeptics have thinned to a small army of industry-funded charlatans whose voices are amplified through the bullhorn of Rush Limbaugh and the shills at the Heritage Foundation.

Scientists agree that we are now pumping out vastly more CO
₂
than the Earth’s system can safely assimilate. The surplus gases create an invisible blanket in the atmosphere that prevents heat from being released to outer space, and as that heat builds up it changes the energy balance in the world, and that changes everything. During the Senate floor debate on the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act in October 2003, Senator John McCain held up satellite photographs of the North Pole showing a dramatic 20 percent shrinkage of the Arctic Sea ice over the previous twenty-five years.
⁸
But you don’t need a satellite to know the world is changing.

Glaciers are shrinking worldwide, except at the very highest altitudes. The mountain ranges from the Alps to the Rockies, the Himalayas to the Andes, are losing their snow pack, a trend already seriously impairing regional water supplies. The fringes of Antarctica’s ice are melting. The 20,000-year-old permafrost of the northern tundra is softening. Ironically, Alaska’s North Slope oil industry is being impeded by shortened operating seasons.
⁹
During the summer of 2003, 19,000 people died in Europe due to the hottest temperatures in at least 500 years.
¹⁰

Temperatures are higher everywhere: in both hemispheres, on the earth’s surface, within the soils, in the depths of the ocean, in the upper atmosphere, and within the ice sheets. Despite fluctuations, intense winter cold is less common in places like New York. Higher temperatures have increased evaporation from the ocean surface and intensified precipitation; gully-washer rainstorms, floods, and heavy blizzards are more frequent and destructive.
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In North Carolina, the entire hog industry was built on the assumption that hundred-year floods came only once each century. But in the last ten years, three hundred-year floods have caused enormous economic and environmental woes. Warmer water is beginning to eradicate coral reefs worldwide — most of them may be gone by 2050.
¹²
Sea levels are rising, and coastal erosion is a growing crisis.

Even the timing of the seasons has begun to change. Ecosystems are starting to shift. Plants, animals, and insects are appearing in places they didn’t before.
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I regularly see black vultures now in upstate New York, but all my bird books describe its northern range as Virginia. Birds are laying their eggs at different times.

There is growing evidence that dramatic climate change may occur suddenly, a development that has even gotten the Pentagon’s attention.
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A report commissioned by Andrew Marshall, the father of Star Wars and the military’s graybeard expert on future strategic threats, describes the human disasters that would occur if the climate shifted abruptly in a decade or two, as happened some 12,000 years ago. According to this scenario, most of Holland and Bangladesh would be submerged by violent storms and rising seas. Northern Europe would freeze because of disruptions to the Gulf Stream. Millions of environmental refugees would gather at the frontiers of the developed world, driven by wars, famines, and floods. Nuclear conflict, megadroughts, and widespread rioting would erupt across the world. Nations might be forced to expand their military power to defend dwindling food, water, and energy supplies. The report paints a picture of the United States as a giant gated community insulating itself from the world it helped create, isolated and despised by its angry, jealous neighbors. Although this outcome is presented as a worst-case scenario, climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.”
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The first major international attempt to tackle global warming was the Rio Climate Treaty, signed by the first President Bush in 1992 and ratified by the U.S. Senate that year. The Rio treaty contained plans to return CO
₂
and other greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 level by 2000. In 1997, the Rio participants proposed a more detailed set of actions, the Kyoto Protocol, which requires that developed nations reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases 5 percent below the 1990 level during the period 2008–2012.
¹⁶

President Bush’s campaign promise to regulate CO
₂
would have been a big step toward meeting the pledges that the United States made in the Rio treaty. Thanks to industry lobbying, CO
₂
was not listed as a pollutant in the original Clean Air Act, so by 2000 it was still unregulated. The Clean Air Act, however, authorized the federal government to regulate
all
air pollutants, even those not specifically listed in the original act itself. The EPA had used this authority to develop regulations for toxic pollutants like lead, sulfur dioxides, and particulates that cause respiratory disease. Bush’s promise indicated that he would add CO
₂
to that list.