As those of you who have read these dispatches over the last months know, the inability of the mainstream press to cover the Bush administration’s assault on the environment as more than a series of discrete events or individual horrors constantly amazes me. In the February 3 issue of the Nation, Mark Hertsgaard has a fine piece on the subject, “Trashing the Environment” (not available on line), but I have yet to see a single summary article in the press on our national environmental welfare, no less a series on the Bush environmental agenda, or rather the plundering that passes for an agenda. Unfortunately, as a distinctly one-guy operation I can’t exactly call on a crack team of reporters to fan out nationally and correct this.
My solution then was to call on Naomi Schalit, a reporter for Maine Public Radio, who covers environmental issues (among other matters), for a more modest piece on the Bush environmental assault on one state. I assume that the rest of you can then multiply by fifty, though there can be little question that this administration’s environmental assault adds up to far more than the sum of its fifty parts. Tom
The Bush Environmental Assault on a Single State
By Naomi SchalitFed up with the urban headaches associated with life in the San Francisco Bay Area — far too many waking hours spent in my little Honda alongside expensive imported cars crawling across the Golden Gate Bridge — I decamped almost a decade ago for the wilds of Maine. Here, I thought, along this state’s craggy coastline, inside its spruce-scented forests, on its roiling rivers, I could live the life I wanted. I could canoe and hike and sail in the company of a minimum of people but a maximum of wildlife, and my children could grow up with memories of falling asleep to loons trilling mournfully across the lake near our house.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s environmental agenda could soon turn many of the things my family and I love about Maine into little more than memories. From the skies to the seas, the forests to the lakes, it seems that what is sacred about this place could be changed forever by people in Washington who evidently believe that nature is what you walk by to get from your house to your car; what you churn through in your all terrain vehicle to provide thrills in your life; or what you cut down and build over because, after all, God gave us those trees so that we could have shelter.
You’d need a file cabinet to hold every aspect of the Bush assault on the Maine environment, but here is my modest list, from sky to water, of potentially damaging initiatives. Let’s start with the sky: While Maine tourism officials have done an outstanding job of promoting the “pristine” nature of the state’s natural resources, reality these days often proves another matter, and nowhere more so than with respect to our air. Climb to the summit of Acadia National Park’s legendary Cadillac Mountain, and you’re greeted by a bizarre sight. There, where the view used to include a dazzling panorama of brilliant blue ocean, sharply defined islands, and hard-edged Downeast coastline, what you now get is haze…..oh, yes, and a permanently mounted, laminated Park Service poster of what the view used to look like when you could still see dozens of miles down the coast. Tourists are to be forgiven if, once back in Iowa, they demand a refund — the view’s better in the brochures.
But the situation’s far worse for those of us who actually live here, at the “end of the tailpipe,” as we like to say, where emissions from outdated coal-burning power plants and other industrial sources to the west and south collect and poison our air. Wild, natural, rural Maine has the highest asthma rate in the nation. Ten percent of our population has chronic lung disease. And air pollution doesn’t just wreck our air and lungs. Power plant emissions also bring with them the ingredients for acid rain, which kills fish and trees, as well as mercury, which, having made it into lakes and streams, ends up accumulating in the tissue and organs of fish and other wildlife.
Fed up with the urban headaches associated with life in the San Francisco Bay Area — far too many waking hours spent in my little Honda alongside expensive imported cars crawling across the Golden Gate Bridge — I decamped almost a decade ago for the wilds of Maine. Here, I thought, along this state’s craggy coastline, inside its spruce-scented forests, on its roiling rivers, I could live the life I wanted. I could canoe and hike and sail in the company of a minimum of people but a maximum of wildlife, and my children could grow up with memories of falling asleep to loons trilling mournfully across the lake near our house.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration’s environmental agenda could soon turn many of the things my family and I love about Maine into little more than memories. From the skies to the seas, the forests to the lakes, it seems that what is sacred about this place could be changed forever by people in Washington who evidently believe that nature is what you walk by to get from your house to your car; what you churn through in your all terrain vehicle to provide thrills in your life; or what you cut down and build over because, after all, God gave us those trees so that we could have shelter.
You’d need a file cabinet to hold every aspect of the Bush assault on the Maine environment, but here is my modest list, from sky to water, of potentially damaging initiatives. Let’s start with the sky: While Maine tourism officials have done an outstanding job of promoting the “pristine” nature of the state’s natural resources, reality these days often proves another matter, and nowhere more so than with respect to our air. Climb to the summit of Acadia National Park’s legendary Cadillac Mountain, and you’re greeted by a bizarre sight. There, where the view used to include a dazzling panorama of brilliant blue ocean, sharply defined islands, and hard-edged Downeast coastline, what you now get is haze…..oh, yes, and a permanently mounted, laminated Park Service poster of what the view used to look like when you could still see dozens of miles down the coast. Tourists are to be forgiven if, once back in Iowa, they demand a refund — the view’s better in the brochures.
But the situation’s far worse for those of us who actually live here, at the “end of the tailpipe,” as we like to say, where emissions from outdated coal-burning power plants and other industrial sources to the west and south collect and poison our air. Wild, natural, rural Maine has the highest asthma rate in the nation. Ten percent of our population has chronic lung disease. And air pollution doesn’t just wreck our air and lungs. Power plant emissions also bring with them the ingredients for acid rain, which kills fish and trees, as well as mercury, which, having made it into lakes and streams, ends up accumulating in the tissue and organs of fish and other wildlife.
So when the Bush Administration gave a Thanksgiving gift to its corporate campaign donors last year, proposing a significant weakening of the Clean Air Act, even Maine’s normally soft-spoken and sweet-tempered Attorney General was moved to sarcasm. The Bush proposal would exempt thousands of coal-burning power plants and other industrial pollution sources from federal requirements to clean up their pollution when they upgrade their plants. In the wake of the announcement, Attorney General Steven Rowe declared that our national government should be looking out for the health interests of Americans, not the financial interests of corporations that run dirty power plants. Not only will people die prematurely from asthma and emphysema because of such regulatory rollbacks, but the essential voice of the north, the common loon — the top of the food chain in our mercury-poisoned lakes — could be stilled as well. As mercury builds up in loons, we know now, their ability to reproduce diminishes. So the increased air pollution the President will so thoughtfully send our way could displace something precious from our air — the thrilling cry of the loon.
Let’s take trees next. There’s not a whole lot of national forest here in Maine — the kindly, but stiff-necked and anarchic collective personality up here has largely kept the Feds out — but what national forest there is, a stunning few sections edged up against the New Hampshire border, could be at risk. The Bush administration has recently proposed — in that charming, Humpty-Dumptyish way where ‘words mean what I want them to mean’ — a “Healthy Forests Initiative.” It includes legislation to curtail or eliminate administrative appeals and lawsuits challenging the kinds of projects that would allow loggers to do wholesale cutting and let the government conduct salvage timber sales in the name of forest maintenance and diminishing fire danger. You might as well put up a new sign: “Public Keep Out — These Forests Belong to the Loggers.”
But more than just Maine’s National Forest acreage is at risk. There’s a vast amount of Maine that’s forested, ten million acres, which comprise the greatest undeveloped region east of the Rockies. And while many of the dangers coming from Washington are in the form of initiatives, in this case it’s the lack of initiative that poses the greatest peril. Take global warming, which to most people conjures up images of rising sea levels. The most mild-mannered regulators here in Maine have been compelled to speak out against this administration’s willful and reckless disregard of solid scientific evidence that global warming could also encourage pests and diseases to march northward and colonize our forests, eventually killing them.
And of course, greenhouse gases could indeed raise sea levels and so drown our three thousand miles of coastline — you’d think that with George Bush’s ancestral Kennebunkport summer home surrounded on three sides by water, at least this Administration might be sensitive to that. Global warming, scientists warn us, could also force populations of saltwater fish species to migrate elsewhere, or introduce exotic diseases that could devastate what’s left of their populations; and wreck what remains of our agricultural sector through pestilence, prolonged drought or its opposite, torrential rains.
The long-awaited announcement earlier this month of proposed changes to federal regulations that would pave the way for development on millions of acres of previously off-limits wetlands could also change life as we know it here. After the hardships of a northern winter, there is no more welcome sound than spring peepers, the tiny frogs whose ringing mating calls fill the night air sometime around April. Spring peepers and any number of other amphibians — spotted salamanders, wood frogs — use vernal pools, the seasonal collections of water that flood each spring and summer. Many of these species can only reproduce in the relative safety of vernal pools, where they cannot fall prey to fish. But the Administration’s desire to jettison protections for a huge portion of this country’s wetlands threatens the inhabitants of Maine’s incredibly productive vernal pools. So long, peepers; ‘bye-‘bye, “Big Night,” that wonderful spectacle of salamander sex in which the slithery creatures cross roads and forests to get to pools of water where they can ball up in one huge mass of hormonal longing and procreative frenzy.
Administration proposals to cut back funding to states desirous of upgrading wastewater and sewer projects, as well the withdrawal of a Clinton administration rule imposing federal oversight on state efforts to cleanse waterways, could set back clean-up efforts that have accomplished a lot here — but still have a long way to go. The rivers of Maine used to be so polluted that their fumes would peel the paint off homes on their banks. But there’s been extraordinary progress over the last quarter century.
In the old days, the Kennebec River, just down the hill from my office in the Augusta statehouse complex, boiled with fish. Agricultural workers on its banks used to specify in their contracts that they not be fed salmon by their farmer employers. But with damming and industrialization, the Kennebec came to be known as a sewer. It was said that if you cast a line into the river, you’d be more likely to catch a piece of wet toilet paper than a fish. More recently, as with other industrially polluted rivers here, the Kennebec is being restored. Paper mills and other industrial and municipal polluters, like wastewater treatment plants, have been forced to clean up their act. State workers these days haul on hip waders and angle for stripers on their summer lunch breaks. But if the Bush administration gets its way, the momentum could ebb, and our rivers become unfit for swimming and fishing again.
Then there’s a new proposal to push back the deadline for rebuilding our once majestic – and now pathetic – fisheries stocks. The Administration’s lack of action on auto fuel efficiency standards means more smog headed our way, and more days of ‘unhealthful air’ warnings during the summer. The oddly-named Clean Skies Initiative turns out to be a pollution credit-trading scheme which will actually leave our air even more polluted. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Bush administration’s assault on the environment, stopping anywhere is an arbitrary matter.
At its most basic level, what’s clear from even this short list is that these are rules made by people who care little for what sustains life — water, air, diversity of species, and even beauty. It will be sad for me personally if my daughter’s asthma gets worse because some industrial polluter in the Midwest donated lots of money to the Republican Party. It will be sad if I can no longer paddle down a clean river where golden sturgeon breech six feet in the air; hike the spongy overburden of an old-growth forest; or eat a potato freshly dug from the stony soil of Aroostook county. But this isn’t just my loss — or Maine’s. The Bush environmental agenda will cost residents in every state something precious, even the occupants of those fashionable imported cars I used to idle next to in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, between the dazzling San Francisco skyline and the bold Marin Headlands. When the Clean Air Act actually meant something, at least we had a gorgeous view.
Naomi Schalit is a Public Radio reporter and producer in Maine.
Copyright Naomi Schalit