A recent editorial in The New York Times paid just and overdue tribute to those, in particular the federal courts, who have stymied the efforts of the Bush administration to gut America’s environmental laws and weaken the regulatory authority of federal agencies charged with enforcing them.
States led by California and New York deserve enormous credit for their willingness to fill the void left by a feckless and disinterested federal government and to push the latter to fulfil its environmental responsibilities. And the federal courts have, for the most part, foiled the Bush administration’s efforts to reverse years of progress in making our air and water cleaner and to protect what remains of our wilderness.
Much credit, however, belongs to a plethora of environmental organizations, such as Earthjustice, Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Natural Resources Defense League and others too numerous to mention. They have fearlessly challenged the administration at every turn as it sought to open heretofore undeveloped federal lands to oil and gas drilling, withdraw protections from endangered species, help the heaviest industrial polluters avoid the requirements of the Clean Air Act and ignore their responsibility to combat global warming by, for example, regulating carbon dioxide emissions.
In surveying the damage inflicted on our nation domestically and internationally in the Bush era, it is easy to overlook the titanic and largely successful struggle that has been waged in the courts to save our natural treasures. Almost without exception these fights have been waged in the first instance by lawyers from the various environmental organizations. They have fought to keep the Clinton era rule that protected 58 million acres of roadless national forest land from development, and resist a Bush administration version that would give states more say over the fate of these forests - fig leaf that barely conceals their intention to open some of them to logging and other industries. They challenged the Bush administration in its attempt to open up the Front Range of the Rocky Mountain West to unprecedented oil and gas drilling; they have fought to compel the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Agency and other agencies to enforce the law whether it’s to clean our air and water, or to protect our Pacific Northwest salmon and Rocky Mountain gray wolves.
I must confess I have never understood why these organizations are depicted, as they often are in the media, as just another “special interest”. How can protecting our planet so that we hand it off to future generations in better, or at least no worse, shape than we found it be a “special interest”? Isn’t it in all of our interests? Even of so-called conservatives who these days seem to ignore the “conserve” part of their ideology?
Without the devotion of these organizations to the idea that no responsibility is more critical than the stewardship of our natural world, and that our children and grandchildren deserve an opportunity to see what we have seen, to know that there exist, in the words of the Wilderness Act, areas:
“…where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
I shudder to think where we would be today, with the polluters and developers largely controlling the federal environmental agenda.
Sure the environmental organizations and lobbyists can be a pain in the butt as sympathetic Democrats in particular will ruefully acknowledge. During the Clinton administration, they had a reputation for a “what have you done for me lately” quality to their remonstrations.
Nevertheless we owe Earthjustice and the rest of them a debt beyond measure. The struggle is not over to be sure; but their rearguard action to thwart the pernicious efforts of the Bush administration to unravel our environmental laws, and maintain the status quo until a more environmentally friendly president takes office, has already succeeded in a way few could have expected in 2001.
God bless them and all who have supported them, and may their efforts continue to bear fruit.
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