Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 14, 1991 TAG: 9104140024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL RAEBURN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
And, environmentalists point out, George Bush went fishing.
The president is not a popular man among the eco-conscious these days. A year after the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, polls show a sharp jump in concern about the environment. But environmental activists say the message hasn't reached the White House.
"Looking at President Bush's environmental record overall, the president's grade is once again a `D,' " said the midterm presidential report card of the League of Conservation Voters.
Bush's environmental policy "is moving away from the promises of the '88 campaign and the progress of the first year toward the neglect and indifference that characterized White House environmental policy from 1981-88," said the league, a 20-year-old, non-partisan group that also grades the performance of members of Congress and supports pro-environment candidates.
"Yes, there's more to do," said Michael Deland, chairman of the President's Council on Environmental Quality. But Deland said the report reflected "political partisanship at its worst."
"I obviously am biased, as I clearly think the league is," he said. But "trying to look at it with some detachment, I'd give a good solid B."
No one disputes that public concern for the environment is higher than ever.
"You see it in poll after poll after poll," said Denis Hayes, former director of Earth Day 1990, who planned many of last year's events. "Over the past two years, there's been a detailed shift. Now a huge number of people think that what they do matters."
The Earth Day anniversary festivities last April 22 symbolized the shift. Recycling and global warming were the watchwords. Despite the ritual invocation of the rain forests, endangered species and the ozone hole, most of Earth Day seemed to be about recycling, toxic wastes and the greenhouse effect.
This year's 21st anniversary of Earth Day on Monday will be noted in passing, but without the publicity that attended last year's.
Many politicians seized last year's Earth Day as a painless opportunity to demonstrate concern for the environment. Bush ignored it.
"I am an environmentalist," candidate Bush declared during the 1988 presidential campaign. A centerpiece of that campaign was a television ad that featured film of debris swirling in the polluted waters of Boston Harbor.
But in a recent poll, 53 percent of adults questioned by CBS News and The New York Times said Bush "mainly just talked about" the environment, while 35 percent said he has "really made progress in protecting the environment."
Deland, not surprisingly, sides with the latter. He pointed to Bush's support for the Clean Air Act, legislation to control oil pollution and ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, an environmentally sensitive farm bill and the president's tree-planting initiatives.
The administration's soon-to-be-released annual report on environmental quality will include a detailed agenda that focuses on pollution prevention, rather than cleanup, and on "harnessing the power of the marketplace in the service of the environment," Deland said.
But critics insist Bush and his administration have become increasingly hostile to environmental concerns in their statements and their actions.
Last year, for example, Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, dismissed environmentalists with a flip remark in a speech at Harvard University. "Americans did not fight and win the wars of the 20th century to make the world safe for green vegetables," he said.
The Wilderness Society charged this month that the White House was conspiring with timber interests to override the Endangered Species Act. "The Bush administration has a secret plan," said George Frampton Jr., the society's president. A timber industry official said the plan was being developed without formal White House backing.
Bush's national energy plan, released in February, initially included conservation measures put there by Energy Secretary James Watkins. But virtually all the conservation measures were stripped from the policy when it reached the White House.
Though Deland described the plan as merely a good starting point for congressional deliberations, Susan Merrow, president of the Sierra Club, called it "scandalous."
In its report card criticizing Bush's performance on the environment, the League of Conservation Voters criticized the energy plan.
by CNB