Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004230201
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT WINTERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The first Earth Day - remember the "Ecology Now" T-shirts? - helped shape the modern environmental movement and produced, among other things, the Environmental Protection Agency, which soon may become a Cabinet-level department.
What Earth Day 1990 will spawn is anybody's guess. The one thing we can be sure of, however, is this: The environment will be one of the most highly politicized issues facing America in the 1990s. The environmental lobby will make it so.
The Sierra Club, for example, was established by a group of mountaineers in 1892 to "explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast." In other words, its purpose was to help others enjoy America's beauty.
Today, the Sierra Club wants to restrict access to America's mountains. The organization has deleted any mention of "accessibility" from its bylaws, and in 1988 its directors banned any club-sponsored mountain-climbing expeditions that require ropes or ice axes. This effectively terminated the organization's original purpose.
Similarly, the National Audubon Society has been transformed from its original purpose into a political lobby. Founded in 1905 to protect wild birds and animals, the organization now is involved in everything from U.S. energy policy to global-population issues. Its unofficial theme: "Get political."
More dramatic has been the transformation of the National Wildlife Federation. In 1975, Dr. Claude Moore, honorary president of the federation, donated a 357-acre tract to the organization for use as a conservation center. In 1988, very much against Moore's wishes, the federation sold the property to a housing developer, whose plans called for building 1,300 new housing units.
With a $40-million office building and 17 staff lawyers doing advocacy work, the Wildlife Federation's motives were clear: It valued money more than its original mandate - "conserving the vanishing wildlife resources of a continent."
All these organizations - and many more like them - claim they are acting in the public interest. But that's an elusive term. In a nation of 250 million people with widely varying personal and economic interests, what's good for you may not be good for me.
In the Pacific Northwest, for example, where many jobs depend on the timber industry, environmental activists have lobbied hard to prevent the cutting of "old growth" forests.
Since there is no law preventing the cutting of trees, environmental organizations invented a reason: the spotted owl. By pressuring the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to add the unendangered spotted owl to its list of endangered species, the environmentalists in effect blocked the timber industry from doing anything, such as cutting trees, that might disrupt the owls' environment. As the Sierra Club's Andy Stahl acknowledged, the northern spotted owl became "a surrogate" for the trees.
While this may have made some old trees happy, it was not good news for Northwest loggers, many of whom faced the unemployment lines.
The point here is that environmental activists are hardly tribunes of the people. And their goals - to achieve some pristine ideal that exists not even in nature - often conflict with the economic interests of ordinary Americans who work for a living, and their employers.
Amazingly, many corporations financially support the environmental lobby, even as it attempts to restrict their economic activity and to slow economic growth. Among the Audubon Society's recent contributors were Stroh's and Turner Broadcasting, each of which donated $50,000; Waste Management, Inc., and the Times Mirror Foundation (which company publishes the Los Angeles Times), which gave $25,000 each; and GTE, General Electric and Morgan Stanley, which gave $10,000 each.
Both the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council - progenitor of last year's Alar scare - draw support from major banks.
The National Wildlife Federation counts among its recent benefactors ARCO, Mobil, Monsanto, Waste Management and even Exxon, the villain of Valdez. All of them would suffer economically from many of the policies pushed by the federation.
It's not just policy that should concern these corporations. It's also attitude. Talking of the Valdez oil spill, federation President Jay D. Hair said, "This is the classic example of the disease of corporate greed. Big oil; big lies."
Earth Day will be replete with such anti-business rhetoric. And the policy proposals that will follow will be even worse. The cornerstone of the environmental movement today is politics.
Earth Day is the first round of a battle that is sure to become more bitter, and more brutal, with time. The American economy, and the American wage-earner, can expect to pay a heavy price.
by CNB