EARTH DAY BLUES

By John Skow

A QUARTER-CENTURY AFTER THE FIRST EARTH DAY caught our imagination, 23 years after passage of the Clean Water Act, 22 years after the Endangered Species Act promised fair treatment for wild creatures, how fares our sad old planet's health?

Obviously there have been huge improvements. Lead, for instance, slows mental and physical development in children. The increasing use of lead-free gasoline around the world vastly reduces these ills. But banning leaded gas is a regulation, and REGULATION, as conservatives know, is what the Devil has printed on his T shirt. So lawmakers clamor for a risk-assessment bill that could be used (among other mischief) to end the phase-out of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Dollar benefits of regulations must justify dollar costs. Fine. Sounds good. But how do you measure the dollar benefit of brighter first-graders and an ozone layer that blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet rays?

No one has proposed, so far, to topple the federal tyranny of lead-free gas. But a distinctly raunchy odor arises from the cynical proposed gutting of the 1972 Clean Water Act--gutting decreed on order, to precise stipulations of industry lobbyists--by Republicans who run the House Subcommittee on Water and the Environment.

Really? Here a thoughtful Martian might wonder, "These must be the children. Where are the adults?" As he knows, the Clean Water Act has been a visible, undeniable success. Everyone benefits every day. Streams that were murky with mill waste and untreated sewage now are clear and swimmable. No matter; because oil, gas and real estate interests pleaded inconvenience, water-quality standards are to be lowered. Protection of wetlands, which nourish marine life, is to be cut at a time when fish-producing U.S. coastal ecosystems are nearly barren.

If such measures are mostly conservative grandstanding, as some say, and if sponsor Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican, counts on the Senate to moderate his don't-drink-the-water bill, there's an interesting question: Grandstanding for whom? A TIME/CNN poll in January reported that 55% of those asked would increase government spending on the environment, 16% would decrease it and 27% would keep spending the same. Other polls show strong environmental support among suburban Republicans and blue-collar white males, who are furious that business is pushing environmental cuts.

Are bills dismantling protection of air and water simply right-wing truculence? If not, are they badly aimed populism? The answer is not deeply buried: corporate America, generous with PAC contributions, is the clear and highly appreciative beneficiary. One spitball of a bill, written for Republican Congressman Slade Gorton of Washington by lawyers for logging, mining, grazing and utility corporations, would junk large sections of the Endangered Species Act. Gorton told the New York Times that he did not consult environmentalists about the bill because "I already know what their views are."

Large corporations roam Washington these days like grazing beasts--not good, not evil, just hungry. They form green-sounding lobbying groups and contribute millions to lawmakers. Something called the "National Wetlands Coalition" raised $7.8 million from British Petroleum, Georgia Pacific, Kerr-McGee and Occidental. The "Clean Water Industry Coalition" raised $15.8 million from Caterpillar, Dow, Du Pont and Union Carbide. Al Meyerhoff, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, "Industry lobbyists are writing laws and legislative history. They're doing everything but voting, but maybe that's next."

At the 130-nation U.N. World Climate Conference that ended last week in Berlin, a lobbyist for the "Global Climate Coalition," a consortium of U.S. coal, gas and oil producers, bustled about confidently, warning against "dramatic, excessive" carbon dioxide controls and against "stifling" economic growth with "irrational new emission caps." The conference saw global warming differently, perhaps influenced by the Rhode Island-size hunk of shelf ice that broke off Antarctica recently. Jokers outside the conference peddled cans of Official Heisse Luft, or hot air, but the nations gathered wits and courage, and voted to begin negotiating precise CO2 limits.

But how long can environmentalism survive the heisse luft from industry lobbyists? Theresa Woody, a Miami-based representative of the Sierra Club, thinks that the movement isn't dying, just lazy; people thought environmental laws were established and permanent, and they weren't paying attention. She guesses Newt Gingrich will turn out to be the best membership raiser the green brigade has had since James Watt's alarming career as Interior Secretary. These days, she says, people like to see wading herons, but they really care about clean water in the aquifer when they understand that their own bodies need it every bit as much as birds do.

In the Florida Keys, where coral is dying from pollution and waters are all but fished out, concern is rising that a vital Marine Sanctuary Act passed by Congress will never be fully implemented. It could preserve marine life, resurrect fishing and save tourism, but it depends on imposing-and funding-new regulations, and these may have been frozen by a sweeping congressional moratorium. Without the marine sanctuary, says Wayne Hoffman of the Florida Audubon Society, the future for the Keys is theme parks and casino boats.

But even reasonable regulations itch like wool long johns. Take the predicament of 122,000 year-round residents of New York State's 6 million-acre Adirondack Park. The park was to be "forever wild," and the state's 22-year-old Adirondack Park Agency regulates growth. But it also generates fury--expressed by barn burning, tire slashing and vehicle shooting, in addition to much heated talk. One of the angriest is Richard Schoenstadt, 44, a surveyor's assistant who bought 54 riverfront acres, intending to subdivide. The apa insisted on an exhaustive biological inventory. Then, says Schoenstadt, who between fighting and complying lost the property and his $50,000 savings, the agency wanted assurance that his picnic tables would not float away during floods.

Are regulations ridiculous, or are complainers whining obsessives who see any authority as infuriatingly parental? The man who founded Earth Day, former Senator Gaylord Nelson, says emphatically that "there are good environmentalists who see too much red tape and too many mandates, and they think it can be improved and they're right. The environmentalists have failed on this. They haven't fought to ensure environmental laws were effective without being excessive. They haven't done a damn thing about that."

Given the unsettled state of the environmental movement and the vengeful mood of its adversaries, a party thrown last weekend at Chico Hot Springs, Montana, was a good bet not to happen. But it did. The Wolf Fund, a tiny activist group set up in 1986 by wildlife biologist Renee Askins, 27, declared victory, gave a few cheers and disbanded. Askins had moved to Moose, Wyoming, in 1981 with the idea of helping get gray wolves re-established in Yellowstone National Park. The process, she thought, might take two or three years. It took a decade more than that of gentle persuasion, spit-flying argument, rear-guard lawsuits by wolf opponents, and 83 public hearings, "alternative-scoping open houses" and the like conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But in early April, three widely separated pens were opened. The radio-collared wolves, three distinct packs trapped in Alberta, Canada, stayed put for nearly a week. Then at last they began to range. One of the packs killed an elk. Biologists uncrossed their fingers.

Dug-in opposition remains. A wolf released in February in central Idaho was shot last month, supposedly because it had killed a calf. Not true; investigation showed, as Askins says without much surprise, "the wolf was framed." She and other wolf activists realized the most likely cause of death for Yellowstone wolves would be gunfire from die-hard wolf haters. So they took a risk, listing the Yellowstone and Idaho wolves not as fully protected endangered animals, which would have provoked retaliation, but as an experimental population that can be controlled if it is troublesome. Some ranchers were reassured, and the plan went forward.

The fact is, the Endangered Species Act has been used as a weapon in too many bitter environmental battles. It was the only legal artillery greens had, and it saved the bald eagle, now off the endangered list. Thus far, the spotted owl has saved remnants of old-growth forest. Earlier this year the endangered marbled murrelet, a seabird that nests in Northern California's old redwoods, won a lawsuit against the Pacific Lumber Co., with help from activists of the Environmental Protection Information Center. A federal judge granted a permanent injunction against logging Owl Creek. He rejected a claim that this was a "taking" for which the Constitution requires payment. That didn't stop what became a classic angry standoff in 1986, when Charles Hurwitz, a Houston financier, bought Pacific Lumber largely with junk bonds and cranked up the chopping down of redwoods to pay off his debt. Three days after the Owl Creek decision, Pacific Lumber announced plans to log the redwoods of the 3,000-acre Headwaters Forest, another murrelet nesting place.

Whether the Endangered Species Act can survive depends on how well officials such as Mollie Beattie, the new chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, articulate a principle not widely understood. "The level of biodiversity is an indicator of ecological health," she insists. "Endangered species are ecology's smoke alarms." Vice President Al Gore cites species loss, ozone depletion and climate change, and points out that soaring population growth is a primary cause of the collision between industrial civilization and earth's ecological system. Contrarian scholars have taken to pooh-poohing such concerns, but their logic is lunar: the more consumers, the more riches. Whether the Clinton Administration can be counted on to fight environmental backlash is anyone's guess. President Clinton has said bad environmental laws will not pass his desk. But any vetoes would be the first in two years of passionate temporizing.

The battered U.S. green movement thus faces the legendary Chinese curse: interesting times. For encouragement, retired wolf activist Askins offers words credited to Chief Seattle, which she recited recently in testimony before Congress: "If all the beasts were gone, we would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beast, happens to us. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the children of earth."