The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

George Bush's helicopter lifted high in Washington's 86 degrees winter heat last Wednesday and churned down the Potomac River valley as the President studied the water for signs of bass running in the shallows. Within minutes he was at his destination, the Potomac Electric Power Co.'s Chalk Point generating station, a plant that produces electricity for the White House. Under Bush's proposed clean-air program, the facility would have to cut half its sulfur dioxide emissions within ten years, a $400 million undertaking. "Megabucks," acknowledged Bush. "But I am determined to clean up the air."

Storm rising -- political and natural. Bush can smell it and view it on every horizon. The old planet is sagging more than ever from its burdens of people and pollution, and it no longer takes a hydrologist or climatologist to detect it. Every American can see it in the air. You can stand with Nancy Reagan on the lawn of her sun-drenched Bel Air home above Beverly Hills and see a sinister tongue of smog lick out and engulf the office where her husband works just three miles below. Or you can walk along the low hills of North Dakota and scuff through the shifting soil that still blows against the stubble in the dry fields. Same message.

Les Brown, head of Worldwatch Institute, warns again this year of the globe's diminishing ability to produce enough food to keep up with population growth because of erosion, deforestation and air pollution. His annual State of the World report has sold out -- 100,000 copies -- and the presses are being readied for a new run. There are scoffers, principally in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who say we can release millions of acres of cropland from the soil banks, pour on the fertilizer and meet any food demand. But Brown, with his soft voice and his inevitable bow tie, holds firm. Grain stocks are low; air pollution has reduced U.S. crop production 5% or 10%. Major weather aberrations around the globe could easily produce food scarcities and political unrest.

Statistical arguments aside, the U.S. tells its own story of concern on the front pages of papers and on local newscasts. Solid wastes, pesticides, oil spills, chemical fertilizers. Ask editors from Kalamazoo, Mich., to Boulder, and they will tell you no story plays so steadily as the devastations of the natural world. And almost anyone who wanders through the country hears it, from coffee shop to filling station.

Bill Kastner of the U.S. Geological Survey office in Denver monitors the monstrous Ogallala Aquifer, that famous underground sponge that reaches from South Dakota to the high plains of Texas, touches eight states and embraces 174,000 sq. mi. In some places the water level has fallen 200 ft., leaving the balance between use and recharge from rainfall in precarious condition. Given a little hot dry weather and good farm prices that encourage increased grain planting, the irrigation pumps will begin to whir, in all likelihood sucking up more water than will be replaced.

In southern Iowa, where they don't need irrigation water and where the black loam used to stretch like a carpet from horizon to horizon, you top a hill and find the brown claw marks of a monster that has scoured off the land's precious mantle, leaving the gummy, less productive clay showing in streaks. The monster is erosion, brought on by poor farming.

Five hundred miles south, you can stand on the banks of the Mississippi and watch that topsoil roll by, going down to the Gulf of Mexico. The 34 million acres of fragile cropland taken out of production over the past few years have helped stem this wash, but farmers are still losing to erosion four tons of topsoil for every ton of grain produced.

In Florida, just 200 miles below man's imaginative creation, Disney World, nature's great act, the Everglades, is on the edge of collapse because of dry weather and the demands for water. The National Park Service is seeking money so that the Army Corps of Engineers can uproot some of their canals and dams that have routed water to commercial use. It is a new experience for the Army engineers, who rarely undo their majestic alterations of Mother Nature. But suddenly the thirsty residents of Miami realize that if the Everglades aquifers languish, so does the city. Here again, some good wet weather would help. With more than half the U.S. population jammed into strips 50 miles wide on the coasts and around the Great Lakes, even small changes in weather produce noticeable stress.

With the Berlin Wall down, the cold war over, the drug battle stuck in stalemate, almost everybody in the political world is waking up to the fact that the preservation and care of the land, air and water may rise and dominate all other issues. It links hearts and minds across continents, obliterates old barriers that kept people apart, banishes ideology. Eighty- seven-year-old Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina turned a deaf ear for years, but now he has listed the improvement of the environment as one of his top goals before he is called up yonder. The environmental political flood is about to break over us all.

On April 22, Earth Day 1990 may produce a demonstration of 100 million people in 133 countries, united in a plea to the globe's leaders to get on with the great cleanup. Already there are 1,500 separate programs and demonstrations planned in the U.S., and the harried staff of Earth Day, encamped in a small office in Palo Alto, Calif., receives notification of at least 100 new events each day. They expect crowds of hundreds of thousands of people in New York City and Washington, and out in Tennessee the good green thumbs are expecting to plant 4 million tulip poplar seedlings. The quiet celebrations of kids and oldsters in backyards and nursing homes will be as dense as the stars in the heavens -- the ones we used to see.