Movement Politics

Review and Outlook
Copyright 2000 Wall Street Journal
July 25, 2000

The Sierra Club's endorsement of Al Gore yesterday wasn't quite the equivalent of a tree falling in an empty forest, but it wasn't far off. Still, Mr. Gore badly needed this endorsement to prevent further defections by enviro- voters to Ralph Nader's candidacy. The softness at the environmental margins of the Gore candidacy has to be troubling, given his efforts to claim full title to this voting constituency. If nothing else, all this activity suggests the extent to which this subject -- the protection of the environment -- may now be regarded as totally political.

This, too, is a legacy of the Clinton (and now Gore) notion of the Presidency as a "permanent political campaign." Environmental policy has been all but separated from scientific evidence and is now achieved through administrative fiat to sate activists who themselves can no longer be bothered with letting science get in the way of what they want. Mr. Gore is willing to be their kind of leader, and recent actions by the Administration have certainly enhanced his credentials as a do-what-I-tell-you environmentalist.

Most recently the EPA, in defiance of Congress, pushed through stringent new clean water rules that will affect about 20,000 bodies of water. The new rules, which greatly expand the EPA's regulatory authority, are being hailed by the Administration as "the single most important action in a generation." It was battered through despite an act of Congress.

When Congress tried to kill the new rules in an appropriations rider, Mr. Clinton delayed signing the bill and ordered his aides to first finalize the rules. Showing some extra flare and bravado, EPA head Carol Browner added a provision that gives Congress 60 days from the rules' adoption to pass a resolution rejecting them. Ms. Browner, a former Gore aide, twice challenged Congress to "a debate which we welcome." Of course she knows that "clean water" is a subject long departed to demogoguery heaven.

Earlier in the summer the EPA restricted a useful chemical that has never been proved harmful in humans -- the pesticide chlorpyrifos. Sold under the trade names Dursban and Lorsban, the chemical is used to guard against termites, and is found in roughly 800 products.

The chemical escaped an outright ban; its producers reached a "voluntary" agreement with the EPA to halt its use in households or anywhere a child might play. But it will be barred from its most useful commercial applications. To reach this point, the EPA had to disregard three separate human tests of the chemical, which validated the product as safe, dubbing them unethical.

Perhaps the crudest politicization of the environment has been the immense land grab undertaken by the Clinton-Gore Administration. Using the 1906 Antiquities Act, Mr. Clinton has set aside more federal land than any other President. The law, which allows the President to unilaterally designate federal lands as national monuments, was used effectively in 1996 against Bob Dole to help secure Arizona by creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The famous Clinton-Gore photo-op at the Grand Canyon provided a perfect backdrop against which to marginalize Republicans on environmental issues.

So of course this gambit is back. In January, with the Vice President headed into the primary season, Mr. Clinton locked up large new monuments in California and Arizona. In recent months Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has proposed a menu of new recommendations to set aside hundreds of thousands of acres of Western lands as national monuments.

Still, if history has taught us anything about the left it is that giving it what it wants is never enough. Environmentalists more or less in the mainstream, such as the Sierra Club or the League of Conservation Voters, not surprisingly are going to support the Vice President. But movement solidarity is fraying. David Brower, a prominent environmental activist, resigned from the board of directors of the Sierra Club over that group's decision to support Mr. Gore. Radicals, such as members of Earth First!, are also unwilling to compromise; members of that famously radical environmental group stormed Mr. Gore's Knoxville headquarters, dancing in his foyer and calling him a "corporate whore."

To be sure, there are serious-minded environmentalists in the electorate, but the ones we know tend to regard the private sector as part of the solution and not anathema. Here, however, is Sierra Club head Robert Cox yesterday on Governor Bush: "We could face what the people in Texas are facing now, air pollution, water pollution, toxic waste, a record number of violations of our clean air and clean water standards, environmental laws unenforced and corporate polluters unchecked and out of control."

This is the voice of a political organizer. It's the voice of a movement that tries to get what it wants, not with argument, but with political muscle. Serious environmentalists have always claimed to be about goals more noble than this, but this is what their movement in the Clinton-Gore years has become. The Administration has done a lot lately to appease them. We'll find out in the fall whether it was enough.