Bush: chainsaw commander in chief

President Bush, who with his minions has trashed the environment for six years, suddenly has the chuztpah to call himself commander in chief of the Greens.

For those unfamiliar with “The Joys of Yiddish” by Leo Rosten, chutzpah means gall, brazen nerve. Rosten’s wonderful example: a Jewish youth kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of a court because he is an orphan.

Bush, seeking a noble legacy rather than the ignoble legacy he has, has been trying to join Teddy Roosevelt in the Environmental Hall of Fame. Doubtless by Earth Day, April 22, Bush will have invoked other members of that hall such as Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey.

Photo ops are everything with Bush. The reality behind the imagery is quite different.

Bush and his acolytes sought to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; let snowmobiles desecrate Yellowstone National Park; woefully underfunded the Forest Service; tried to torpedo the roadless rule in remote areas of national forests; had what the New York Times called a “callous disregard for the country’s natural resources”; tore apart wilderness protections; and, in the words of the San Francisco Chronicle, was the Chainsaw in Chief.

Bush loaned that chainsaw to Gale Norton, the worst secretary of the interior since James Watt in the Reagan administration. Former secretary Norton enthusiastically adopted Watt’s program: rape, ruin and rapine.

She scuttled environmental rules for mining. She exposed 2.6 million acres of supposedly protected lands to commercial development. She presided over an influence-peddling scandal involving megalobbyist Jack Abramoff. She replaced the conservation ethic with commercial exploitation.

Not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties? Don’t believe it. Stewart Udall, interior secretary appointed by Democratic President Kennedy, was an exemplar of the modern conservation movement.

Bush is the only one in the world who debunks global warming. But he sure believes in Business. He favors industrial polluters who are resistant to installation of new pollution controls. (Even his butler, Prime Minister Tony Blair, has a plan to make Britain the first nation to sharply cut carbon emissions.)

Bush refuses to pressure American auto companies and Congress into forcing a real change in fuel economy standards. Ten years ago Dick Bryan, then Nevada U.S. senator, urged a fuel standard of 40 miles per gallon. The mpg is still mired at 27.5.

But even uglier than disbelieving in global warming is placing a gag order on scientists who tell the truth. The Bush administration never lets science get in the way of ideology. The Environmental Protection Agency ignores the advice of its own science committee and spurns the wise counsel of environmental and health groups.

Let no one be deceived by Bush creating a marine reserve in the northwest Hawaiian Islands. His new budget calls for cuts in environmental protection. Those cuts are nearly invisible. In contrast, the marine reserve is highly visible and is easy to create because it offends no one.

Bush has his heart and head with the monied interests not the people’s conservation and ecological interests. As the Chronicle points out, if the Bushies see a tree worth chopping down, they will do it. They have even targeted Sequoia National Monument in Calfornia for timber cuts.

The National Park Service has a maintenance backlog of $5 billion. Many of its 380 parks are deteriorating. Jim Hightower writes in his newsletter:

“Visitors arrive to find such unpleasant surprises as reduced hours, discontinued tours and talks, closed trails, unrepaired storm damage, boarded-up historic structures, leaky lodges, shuttered visitor centers, curtailed education programs, crumbling boardwalks, neglected campgrounds and eroded roads.”

Mark Hertsgaard, in a Nation article, made the point: “No administration since the dawn of the modern environmental era 40 years ago has done more to facilitate degradation of the ecosystems that make life on Earth possible.” To be fair, Bush did back off his ignominious plan to raise the allowable level of arsenic in drinking water.

Justice William O. Douglas, dissenting in a 1972 environmental case, quoted from Aldo Leopold’s wise book, “A Sand County Almanac”: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals or, collectively, the land.”

Bush, with the crassness of the frat boy he is, has no understanding of the land ethic. He has no feel for the sacredness of the environment. No sense that national parks are cathedrals. To him, they are nothing more than beautiful backdrops for photo ops. He’s a blasphemer.