California Greenin'

By Jordan Bonfante

As cleanup crews in yellow slickers blotted globs of petroleum from the discolored sands of Huntington Beach last week, California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, a Democratic candidate for Governor, turned the occasion into an I-told-you-so press conference. "Here you have birds that are dying," he lamented. "You have fish that are dying. And so we're going to the people in November with an initiative that will provide for an inspections program and a $500 million fund to respond to spills. This," he said with a wave at the beach, "is a helluva warning."

By then Van de Kamp's rivals had issued their own lamentations about the Feb. 7 accident aboard a British Petroleum tanker that dumped 349,000 gal. of crude oil into an area once known as Surf City, U.S.A. Complained the other Democratic candidate for Governor, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein: "California has ignored the lessons of Alaska." She reiterated / her proposal to create a new department of ocean resources to protect the sea, bays and estuaries. For his part, Republican candidate Pete Wilson reminded a partisan crowd in Los Angeles, "As your U.S. Senator, I have stood up to two Presidents of my own party to oppose oil drilling off the California coast."

The spill, just 35 miles from Long Beach, guaranteed that the environment would be the overriding issue in the campaign to lead the nation's biggest state. Wherever they went as they began stumping in earnest last week, Van de Kamp, Feinstein and Wilson made California reverberate to a can-you-top-this of environmental concern. Debate about conservation vs. development is not exactly new in a state that has long sought to reconcile its feverish growth with the desire for a healthy, outdoor way of life. In a classic, cyclical conflict between the "smokestack" of job-creating development and the "geranium" of quality of life, public opinion today is clearly on the side of the geranium. "Environment, growth and crime are the big issues in this race," says Feinstein's chief strategist William Carrick. "In a way they are all rolled up into one: losing control of the California dream."

California's politicians are merely in the vanguard of a broadening national trend. The Bush Administration is increasingly perceived to be lagging behind the public mood. The President two weeks ago disappointed many members of an international conference on climate change in Washington with a cautious, no- action speech. He disillusioned environmentalists again last week by defending offshore oil drilling, even if he had yet to rule on the question of new leases off the California and Florida coasts.

To environmentalists, the prime suspect in the White House's go-slow approach is chief of staff John Sununu, whose free-market principles put industrial growth ahead of Government regulation.

Other Republicans, though, are scrambling to get aboard the environmental bandwagon. Florida Governor Bob Martinez, expecting a difficult re-election campaign next fall, last month unveiled a ten-year, $3.2 billion initiative to acquire land for environmental and recreational purposes; he also endorsed a plan to undo the work of the Army Corps of Engineers and restore much of the natural flow of South Florida's Kissimmee River. Maine Governor John McKernan, facing a challenge from Democrat Joe Brennan, a strong environmentalist, startled the audience at his state-of-the-state address last month by , proposing to breach the 3,500-kW Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River. That would allow free passage of Atlantic salmon, shad and other fish for the first time since 1836.

Like abortion, environmentalism cuts across party lines. A national recycling bill is winding its way through Congress. California and Connecticut have recently passed laws requiring the use of recycled newsprint, and similar legislation has been proposed in at least a dozen other states. In New York the environment may be one of the few areas where Democrat Mario Cuomo proves vulnerable: activists consider him indifferent to the issue and specifically fault him for favoring trash incineration over recycling. Yet Cuomo too has proposed an environmental bond issue, mostly to acquire land in the Adirondacks. The $1.9 billion issue would be the biggest of its kind in the state's history.

In the California race, Republican candidate Wilson, 56, has seized every opportunity to remind voters not only of his long opposition to offshore drilling but also of his long attachment to conservation-minded "growth management" as mayor of San Diego from 1971 to 1983. On the campaign trail he has ridden a trolley to show his support for fume-free mass transit and visited a motor vehicle factory to admire the prototype of a methanol-powered bus. At a country club in Santa Barbara -- as Republican a setting as any to be found in Southern California -- he assured a matronly audience, "An environmental ethic will pervade the administration of Governor Wilson from Day One." Obviously, Wilson was trying to distance himself on the environment from California's outgoing Republican Governor George Deukmejian and to lay at least some conservative claim to the issue. Insists Wilson strategist Otto Bos, with etymological aplomb: "The words conservation and conservative, after all, stem from the same root."

The centerpiece of California's campaign is a grass-roots ballot measure to enact the most ambitious package of environmental protection of any state in the country. Its liberal supporters like Van de Kamp, who has been strongly identified with the initiative, describe it as an "environmental bill of rights." Other enthusiasts know it simply as the Big Green. It aims at nothing less than protecting all food, air and water from chemical contamination. If passed in November, it would authorize a $500 million oil- spill contingency fund. It would also create a new elective office, that of an "environmental advocate" to police compliance.

The voter initiative, which has a good chance of passage, is sponsored by an alliance of environmental groups headed by Democrat Tom Hayden, the 1960s radical leader who mellowed into a mainstream liberal, married actress Jane Fonda -- from whom he was recently estranged -- and has served eight years in the California state assembly. For Hayden, 50, the measure could be a ticket to political stardom, especially if he gets himself elected the state's first environmental czar.

Critics of the cleanup initiative argue that it is overreaching and vulnerable to legal challenges, that its technical prescriptions demand too much of the voters and that like many of the initiatives that proliferate on California ballots, it represents an abdication of the legislature's responsibility. Yet Van de Kamp's opponents give the cleanup measure their grudging respect. Neither Feinstein nor Wilson seriously challenges most of its provisions, except for the creation of an environmental advocate. Feinstein says she wants to be "my own environmental advocate." Wilson similarly complains that the move would Balkanize the Governor's office. Taunts a Wilson adviser: "Why not a health advocate, an education advocate and an everything-else advocate?"

But in a race in which the candidates' differences are minimal on issues such as crime, abortion rights, education reform and no new taxes, Van de Kamp, 54, has a strong card in his identification with the Big Green. "The cleverest thing he's done," acknowledged a Feinstein adviser. Being against environmental causes in 1990, Van de Kamp told a conservationist audience in Sacramento, "is like being a communist in Eastern Europe."

Still, Feinstein, 56, has the edge in personal magnetism and the advantage of being the first woman to run for Governor in a state that counts 700,000 more women than men among its 13.4 million registered voters. A Mervin Field poll last week showed that Feinstein, who has already been advertising heavily on television, had shot ahead of Van de Camp, 42% to 38%, and Wilson as well, 46% to 43%, after trailing both by as much as 18 points in October. Concluded Los Angeles political columnist Joe Scott: "Before, it looked like an easy slam dunk for Van de Kamp in the primary, to be followed by a showdown between two gents in blue suits. Now it's been transformed into a close and volatile, totally unpredictable three-way race."

Why is Wilson risking his political reputation -- and more than $16 million / in expected campaign costs -- just two years after winning re-election to the Senate? The answer lies in California's increasing national political clout. In the 1992 presidential race, the state will account for 10% of the nation's electoral votes. The next Governor will also strongly influence a reapportionment process that could produce 14 contestable congressional seats in the 1992 election -- a boon for the Republican minority in the House. Moreover, the Governor's mansion in Sacramento served as a powerful presidential launching pad for Ronald Reagan, who once declared that trees cause pollution. Conceivably, Pete Wilson's political career may represent not just the greening of California but also the greening of the G.O.P.

With reporting by David Seidman/New York