Burning Bushes

The new administration's environmental policy is all wet.

By Robert David Sullivan

George W. Bush certainly deserves to be called the Environmental President if the honor is based on the amount of newspaper ink devoted to the subject since January. In the absence of much other news coming out of the White House, reporters have seized on any bit of information with a green angle and offered up countless minor variations on the theme of How Dubya Is Ruining the Planet. The Bush team’s decision not to impose stricter standards on arsenic levels in our drinking water has probably been the most widely repeated story so far. Journalists can’t resist using it one more time to lead off articles about Bush’s environmental record, the way a cook can’t resist using the same ham bone for yet another pot of soup.

Yet the arsenic story doesn’t offer a very good example of how humans have assaulted the environment or put our health and safety at risk. As it turns out, trace levels of the poison are found in only a few parts of the country — primarily in areas where it occurs naturally. But the loosening of Clinton’s proposed arsenic regulations is a safe story: it doesn’t require reporters to sift through conflicting scientific claims (no one argues that arsenic is good for you, only that it might not be worth the expense to get rid of it all), and it doesn’t seem to involve the risk of angering a major industry equipped with a posse of libel lawyers. Trace amounts of arsenic can ever-so-slightly raise the risk of cancer, which gets people’s attention, but it does so over the course of decades.

The Bush administration’s decision on arsenic may not be as important as, say, global warming or diesel-fuel pollutants, but it has helped get the ball rolling. For the past month, environmental issues have been on the front page of the Press Herald almost every day. Most of these stories are in the “blame George” vein. Bush has been sharply criticized for opposing the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming. Higher gasoline prices and recent blackouts in California have led to broader stories about energy policy. But in this spate of environmental coverage, few writers emphasize the wasteful habits of average American citizens. In the case of the Kyoto flap, for example, there was little discussion about how the treaty would have affected American consumers, or how, by scrapping the treaty — which wouldn’t have been ratified by the Senate anyway — Bush did our dirty work and saved us from such a discussion, in one fell swoop.

If anything, we are constantly fed the subtle message that it’s our patriotic duty to buy more junk and help improve the soft economy. Making matters worse, the media — television in particular — find all kinds of ways to stoke public fears, telling us we’re victims of invisible menacing forces, rather than perpetrators of environmental misdeeds ourselves. A few years back, for instance, there was much ado about icky-looking micro-organisms on our pillows and bed sheets — which, like some of the trace chemicals in our drinking water, are naturally occurring and impossible to eliminate completely. The scare story fed into a national craze for carrying around dispensers of antibacterial soap and scrubbing down household surfaces that already looked clean. Still thriving, this obsession with personal hygiene uses up excessive amounts of water, produces tons of extra waste paper, and gradually lowers the population’s resistance to common viruses. All in all, a good example of missing the big picture. And television coverage isn’t likely to change soon: a couple of weeks ago, one TV station teased viewers with a story about the dangers of dry cleaning.

Just as the arsenic story began to fade, the White House handed reporters a new lead for Bush-bashing stories. The occasion was a May 7 press conference on the subject of rising gas prices. Presidential spokesperson Ari Fleischer was asked whether Bush would call on Americans to reduce their high energy consumption, and he answered this way: “That’s a big no. The president believes that it’s an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policymakers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.” It was a silly statement (was the last sentence a kiss-up to the religious right?) , but it was an accurate reading of the public mood. Americans are still buying bigger and less efficient cars, and they’re still putting more and more distance between their homes and workplaces. Fleischer was merely stating the obvious.

Still, Bush and Big Oil will make convenient scapegoats for the next four years, which will let the rest of us off the hook.

The slogan “Think globally, act locally” was already losing its appeal long before Bush entered the White House. Many thought the position echoed the militia movement’s attitude toward government, and that it undercut national efforts to defang large polluters. It also left too many questions unanswered. Should we use paper or plastic bags at the supermarket? Is it worse to fill up landfills with disposable diapers or to use up water to clean cloth ones? We want to make the right choices, but we may have too many choices to make informed decisions. As a result, some of the most important decisions we make affecting the environment are often arbitrary and driven by nonenvironmental considerations. For example, there’s our desire to make a “personal statement” through the cars we drive. A few years ago, auto companies got the bright idea to sell sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) as sexy alternatives to mini-vans, and consumers forgot all about fuel efficiency. SUVs became controversial only after it was discovered that they had a tendency to roll over on sharp corners.

We also encourage overdevelopment and urban sprawl by demanding more choices in shopping and entertainment. We drive to four or five shopping malls looking for the best deal on a DVD player, or we drive past a huge cineplex on our way to another one 10 miles further down the highway because the movie we want to see is playing there 20 minutes later. In last year’s presidential campaign, Al Gore periodically aired the evils of urban sprawl, but we’ll never know whether a President Gore would have done anything to fight it. A real effort to stop the spread of asphalt would inconvenience too many people, by requiring them to accept smaller house lots and fewer fast-food options. In other words, most Americans lack the political will to make the hard “lifestyle” choices that meaningful environmental reform would require.

My hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, a blue-collar suburb of Boston, has evolved into an upside-down version of Thoreau’s Walden: increasingly cluttered and complicated. The city once had a compact downtown area, with a large department store (Jordan Marsh), a two-screen movie theater, and three supermarkets within walking distance of various neighborhoods. In the mid 1970s, the city began to build “bypass” roads, encouraged by federally funded highway programs, that whisked motorists past downtown on their way to a growing assortment of shopping malls. Eventually, most of the downtown businesses disappeared, and now there are little strip malls along the bypass roads themselves. Instead of walking from the movie theater to the soda fountain on the same block, people now drive a few hundred feet from the video store’s parking lot to the Super Stop & Shop’s parking lot. More land is wasted, more fuel is burned, and the bypass road is now as congested as the street full of intersections it replaced years ago. Oil-company executives may be happy with this turn of events, but they’re not the ones who made such boneheaded zoning decisions; local government officials, developers, and a host of other players did — and we went along with it.

“Alternative” institutions aren’t off the hook either, so eager are they to accommodate us consumers. All too often, organic supermarkets have the most spacious parking lots, the better to attract customers who don’t want to muddy their feet at grocery stores in their own neighborhoods. Shopping at one of these markets recently, I hit upon the idea of using tofu instead of meat for dinner. The biggest surprise was the packaging: tofu spoils quickly, so it’s packed in water and sealed with more plastic than you’ll find in a dozen McDonald’s Happy Meals. According to the instructions, the tofu’s water must be changed daily, and the whole mess should be tossed three days after the package is opened. As I dumped most of my purchase into a plastic garbage bag, I wondered whether taking care of my body was the best way to take care of the environment. My doubts continued as I filled another plastic bag with overripe fruit and moldy vegetables, which I had purchased in lieu of the processed snack foods that could have sat quietly in my cabinet for months. (By the way, food poisoning is more often caused by raw fruits and vegetables than by cooked or undercooked meats. But mad-cow disease and E. coli make for better headlines.)

We have many more choices — and many more ways to waste energy — than we did 25 years ago. So when the Bush administration recently announced its energy plan, it wasn’t surprising that it placed such little emphasis on conservation. Last week, the New York Times called the plan “a clear effort to separate Mr. Bush’s approach from President Jimmy Carter’s politically disastrous calls for household austerity during the energy crises of the late 1970s.” The official summary of the Bush proposal reassures gas-guzzling Americans with the following statement: “Our country has met many great tests. Some have imposed extreme hardship and sacrifice. Others have demanded only resolve, ingenuity and clarity of purpose [emphasis added]. Such is the case with energy today.” Note the implication: any kind of sacrifice should be dismissed as “extreme.” And the word “only” in the next sentence is far more ominous than Bush’s decision to leave the allowable amount of arsenic in our drinking water at 50 parts per billion.

Maybe the worst thing about having a Republican in the White House is that progressives now believe the best thing they can do for the environment is to defeat Bush in the next election. I expect to get a lot of junk mail over the next few years asking for donations to support this worthy goal. But we can’t put off conservation efforts until we get a new president.

Robert David Sullivan can be reached at robt555@aol.com..