Endangered Earth Update Is the Planet on the Back Burner?

By EUGENE LINDEN

This could be the winter of discontent for environmentalists. As the threat of war rumbles in the Middle East and the U.S. economy tumbles into recession, preserving the planet's air, land and water is in danger of losing its place among the most pressing issues of the day. It's not that last April's Earth Day has been forgotten already: more and more people are recycling household waste, toting reusable shopping bags to stores and planting trees in their backyards. And after more than a decade of debate, Congress finally overhauled the Clean Air Act this fall. But these encouraging steps hardly begin to attack the most ominous threats to the environment, such as deforestation and ! global warming. For the most part, the populist fervor for preservation has not generated effective government action at a national or international level. Both the people and their leaders seem totally bewildered about how to tackle global problems. Too often they mistakenly see a conflict between a healthy environment and healthy economies. As a result, the ecology movement has entered a twilight zone in which everybody claims to be an environmentalist, but few people know what to do about it.

That uncertainty showed up clearly in a poll of U.S. households taken for TIME late last month by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Fully 94% of those surveyed considered protecting the environment a very important issue, and 63% supported stronger laws and regulations to get the job done. But when it comes to financing preservation, the public is sharply divided. Of the people polled, 48% were willing to "go full speed ahead" in "spending money to clean up the environment," but 47% said that, given other national problems, it would be better to "go slow." Despite their desire for a cleaner environment, 64% admitted that they personally "should be doing more" to achieve that goal. Perhaps the most revealing finding in the survey was that 80% agreed with the statement "There are so many contradictory things said about the environment that it is sometimes confusing to know what to do."

Amid the confusion, the U.S. environmental movement is stumbling badly. In November voters turned down a passel of overly ambitious environmental initiatives at the state level, throwing the responsibility for policy back to elected officials, with whom it belongs. There is little hope, however, that either Congress or the White House will offer an environmental agenda in the near future. Exhausted by debate over the Clean Air Act and distracted by the twin threats of recession and war, Congress has no major environmental initiatives pending. The Bush Administration, all but abandoning the President's promise to be an "environmentalist" in the Oval Office, has not followed up on its decision to elevate the Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet-level status, nor has it come through with an adequate plan to protect the threatened spotted owl. Regarding global issues, the Administration temporizes on threats to the atmosphere and lags in, rather than leads, efforts to deal with dangers to the land and oceans. Says Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee: "1990 was a year of decision for the environment, but no & decisions were made."

The story is no better outside the U.S. Efforts to come to grips with global climate change amount to a desultory drift from conference to conference, without international leadership or any agreement about what should be done. The destruction of tropical rain forests continues unabated. All around the world, the expectations of Earth Day have given way to enervating debate and procrastination.

Environmentalists must share part of the blame: they have not offered a coherent plan of action either domestically or internationally. Admits Lester Brown, president of the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute: "The agenda is fairly confused. A number of environmental groups have grown up independently, with their own memberships, their own budgets and their own objectives." Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution is worried that the cacophony of environmental lobbying is beginning to be counterproductive. Says he: "I sense a real frustration among the more concerned and active members of Congress about enough being enough. If you wear out your best friends, you've got a problem."

Unfortunately, ecological ills do not go into remission simply because environmentalists cannot get their act together or because congressional attention is focused elsewhere. As time passes without meaningful action, options disappear, and the costs to present and future generations continue to rise. The urgency of the problems is too easily forgotten. "To some people, the whole concept ((of environmentalism)) is a luxury," says Madeline Albright, professor of international relations at Georgetown University. "In the future, as the economy tightens up, it is conceivable that people will think we can't afford environmental improvements."

But failing to protect the environment is ultimately more costly than preserving it. Consider the case of Eastern Europe. For decades, the communist-bloc countries stoked their industrial production without regard for the environmental consequences. Only this year was the scope of the resulting ecocatastrophe revealed to the world. Zoltan Illes, Hungary's Deputy State Secretary for Environment and Nature Protection, estimates that health problems and loss of production because of air and water pollution reduce his nation's gross domestic product more than 6%.

The fall of the Iron Curtain could spur a cleanup. West Europeans lead the world in environmental consciousness because they have suffered egregious homegrown pollution as well as grime floating in from the east. Expenditures on environmental protection in Western Europe have increased from $46 billion in 1987 to $73 billion this year, and are expected to rise 75% more by the year 2000. Additional funds and technology will undoubtedly go to help neighbors to the east modernize their industries and fight pollution. Both Sweden and the Netherlands, for example, have offered to help Poland cleanse its air. Klaus Matthiesen, environment minister of the German state North Rhine-Westphalia, notes that spending on environmental preservation "must be regarded as an important motor of economic change."

Financial pressures have led many developing nations to continue shortsighted policies that squander natural resources. In Brazil the appointment by President Fernando Collor de Mello of outspoken conservationist Jose Lutzenberger as Secretary of the Environment raised hopes that the burning of the Amazon rain forest would be halted. But environmentalists are still waiting for Collor to prove that his commitment to saving the Amazon is more than public relations. "Lutzenberger has not presented one significant change in internal policy," says Fabio Feldmann, the only Brazilian congressman elected on a green platform.

Throughout the world, environmentalists look to America to provide leadership, but instead the nation sits on its hands like a perplexed giant. Both individually and at the policy level, Americans seem to be all for environmental protection, so long as it does not disrupt business as usual. Though the U.S. is the world's biggest contributor to the industrial and automobile emissions that threaten to wreak havoc with the global climate, none of the past three Administrations have delivered a national energy policy.

Attempts by several states to fill the policy vacuum floundered this year, and the tactics of the environmental lobby were at least partly responsible. The contest over California's "Big Green," Proposition 128, for instance, was marked by overstatement on both sides of the issue. Prominent environmentalists, including EPA Administrator William Reilly, were troubled by the sweep of some of Big Green's provisions, like the pesticide curbs that would have banned any chemical found to cause cancer in any rat. Given the legitimate debate over many of the provisions in the proposition's 16,000 words, it was entirely possible for a Californian to vote against the measure and still feel that he or she was an environmentalist.

People have long distrusted industry assertions, but they expect better from environmentalists, who have enjoyed great credibility. The debate over Big Green's pesticide provisions left many voters wondering whether environmental interest groups exaggerate for effect. Congressman Al Swift of Washington State says the environmental lobby in Congress has grown from a David into a Goliath without exercising the restraint that should come with its greatly expanded influence.

The defeat of the environmental ballot initiatives provides an opportunity for interest groups to rethink their approach to environmental issues. Many citizens are tired of being asked to become lawmakers when they enter voting booths and decide on the merits of intricate policy questions that are supposed to be the province of Congress and state legislatures. Environmentalists might also reconsider their tendency to favor more government regulation as the answer to most ecological problems. In Washington State voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have put curbs on development, partly because they feared it would mean new government intrusions into their lives. Regulations that lead to the creation of new bureaucracies are not attractive to citizens who are fed up with the inefficiency of government red tape. "People want to be more certain and careful about how their money is spent to clean up the environment," says Sheldon Kamieniecki, an associate professor at the University of Southern California.

Adjustments of the tax codes are usually better than regulations as a way to discourage polluting or wasteful practices and to reward efficiency. If a person wants to drive a gas guzzler, it makes sense for him to pay higher gas and sales taxes. Farmers would quickly look for alternatives to chemical pesticides if they were taxed according to the cost of cleaning them out of the environment. Regulations are most useful as a last resort for dealing with problems, such as nuclear waste, that are too dangerous to be left to the marketplace.

If environmentalists must accept part of the blame for the present policy paralysis, they also deserve credit for some noteworthy victories this year. In a remarkably swift turnabout, Japan agreed to phase out its large-scale drift-net operations in the Pacific. Under pressure, Taiwan and South Korea have also agreed to curb the use of the giant nets, which indiscriminately trap turtles and marine mammals along with fish. In the U.S. the Interior Department banned offshore drilling in a number of sensitive areas for 10 years, buying time to understand better the interaction of oil and delicate marine ecosystems.

Among the most significant developments has been a major shift in attitude by several international corporations. Companies that in the past had an adversative relationship with conservation groups have begun to take actions that are more than public relations. Following the lead of H.J. Heinz's StarKist Seafood Co., major American tuna canners voluntarily decided to stop buying fish from fleets that carelessly kill dolphins and other marine mammals. McDonald's addressed a major solid-waste problem by switching from polystyrene to paper wrappings for its fast foods. Conoco decided to use double-hulled tankers in an effort to reduce the risk of oil spills, and it has made a commitment to lessen the impact of its exploration operations on rain forests and other sensitive ecosystems. The Houston-based oil company made the happy discovery in Gabon that shrinking the size of drilling areas and roads to minimize damage to forests saved money as well as trees.

The realization that preserving the biosphere can also save money might be the salvation of the environmental movement if the industrial world should enter a deep recession. It is true that war or an economic downturn might divert resources that could otherwise be used for such projects as restoring wetlands and rivers. But Denis Hayes, the leading organizer of Earth Day, argues that hard times might have the positive benefit of causing people and businesses to change their throwaway mentalities and adopt a more conserving approach.

The global environmental awakening has been a true populist movement, a broad-based eruption of concern noteworthy for the absence of charismatic leaders. Ordinary citizens have begun to see the connection between environmental issues and their own welfare. Now it is time for political leaders to translate public concern into effective global action. Eventually deeds must catch up with environmental rhetoric, or humanity will learn the hard way that a healthy planet is not a luxury but a necessity.