The Green Wave to Meet a World of Poison

Besides fouling coastal waters off south Alaska, Exxon’s massive March oil spill has stirred up an important political cur rent--the U.S. equivalent of the “green” wave now washing over Europe. Few developments could have greater implications for the 1990s.

The issues constituting the green wave--the global warming or greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and other gases trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere, the threat to the ozone layer, the worldwide atmospheric perils of deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere and the dangers of acid rain, nuclear power, toxic waste, ocean dumping and even atomic weapons lost at sea by U.S. and Soviet ships--are now transcending the American environmental community, stirring fears among the public at large that human maltreatment of the planet may have finally gone too far.

But without the Alaska oil spill, public awareness would not have been catalyzed. Some Western leaders--particularly Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, who was educated as a scientist and has lined the walls of the prime minister’s residence with portraits of Britain’s most eminent scientists--have looked into the political future and perceived environmentalism. But with a few exceptions, such as Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), that has not been true of U.S. politicians. President Bush, in particular, has drawn fire--for slowness in putting together an acid rain program and for reluctance to have the United States take the lead for an international convention to curb activities contributing to the greenhouse effect.

Reading between the lines of public opinion surveys, pollster Louis Harris has gone so far as to suggest that by 1992 or 1996, the United States may have a President “chosen and elected with a pro-environment stance as his primary identification.” Until March, that seemed premature. But then came the spill, its mishandling and its symbolism--sometimes exaggerated--of dying, oil-coated birds and sea otters on the evening news.

Since that time, popular frustration with the Alaska disaster has taken three politically significant dimensions. First, fairly or not, reaction against Exxon has undercut public amenability to the mild environmental regulation, based on market incentives, favored by business and conservatives. Not only did mid-April NBC polling find three-quarters of those sampled saying Exxon should have done more to clean up, but a second April survey, by Time, found a 79% to 14% majority saying the government too often gives into business interests when it comes to protecting the environment. Crisis management consultant Gerald Meyers, former chief executive of American Motors, went as far as to say: “Exxon. It’s a word for Satan today everywhere you go.”

Second, there’s no doubt the oil spill moved voters to endorse tougher environmental regulation. After Valdez, CBS News pollsters again asked their recurring survey question--whether environmental protection was so important as to warrant high standards and continuing improvements regardless of cost. April’s respondents said “yes” by a record 74% to 18%. In 1986, support had been 66% to 27%; in 1983, 58% to 34%, and back in 1981, just 45% to 42%. Other polls have charted the steady rise in public backing for a more active federal role in environmental protection and for spending more money on the environment, but the oil spill may have provided a rare defining moment.

The third critical public reaction lay in the near-collapse of George Bush’s environmental credentials. April’s national surveys gave Bush negative grades not just on handling the actual oil disaster--a lopsided 52% disapproval versus 25% approval in the Los Angeles Times poll--but on environmental matters in general. The oil spill was the catalyst--as revealed by Harris polls charting the new President’s environmental ratings debacle, from 60% to 32% favorble in February to 49% to 39% negative in March.

The abstract greenhouse and ozone layer controversies could never have played a similar political role yet they, too, have gained added attention. While Bush will recover some credibility, the odds are he has lost any chance to be taken seriously as “the environmental President”--his dreams of becoming the “second Teddy Roosevelt” have become Johnny Carson material.

For these reasons, conservatism and the national Republican Party will be hard put to profit from the growing ecological movement of the 1990s--and this should benefit the Democrats. After Alaska, environmental regulation of a pro-business variety is going to be a tough sell, and the notion of Republican management skills died a little each night on the TV news. But there may also be a more fundamental problem because, almost by definition, the environmental movement embraces communitarian values rather than market and economic-individualism views, and ecological group lobbying in most countries has been tied to the left or center-left.

Foreign parallels are relevant, because early 1989 has been a period of worldwide environmental political breakthrough--in places where the oil mess in Prince William Sound is only an occasional item on Page 8 of the Glasgow Herald or Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. European political leaders are obliged to pay attention as small green parties, fringe players for a decade, knock on the doors of big-time politics.

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, by contrast, the rise of the greens helped conservatives --by draining 2%, 3% or 4% of the vote from rival social democratic parties. Yet at the same time, the greens were too irresponsible for moderate left acceptance into potential government coalitions. That’s changing now, partly because of the Soviet nuclear disaster two years ago at Chernobyl, which sent a radioactive cloud over Western Europe. But local events have also contributed--from toxic spills in the North Sea to chemical factory accidents on the Rhine and Loire Rivers--along with European voters’ mounting preoccupations with the ozone layer, global warming and deforestation.

Greens have won national parliamentary seats in nine European countries, and the real key is whether they are about to reach political critical mass and help form center-left governments in Europe’s major nations--France, West Germany and Britain. That could happen in West Germany, where the Greens Party and Social Democrats just went into coalition running the local governments of Berlin and Frankfurt; few observers rule out such a coalition controlling the West German federal government after 1990.

In France, the Greens Party captured 1,800 city council seats in March’s elections, a sixfold increase over the previous elections in 1983; commentators believe they could take 10% in the next national elections. In Britain, winter polls showed 14% of the electorate calling the environment the top issue. The Greens Party did better than expected in May local elections, winning 6%-10% of the vote in yuppie and historic-preservationist strongholds such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bath and York.

Such developments pose a dual threat to Europe’s predominant conservatives: First, that as green parties are growing, they are getting more respectable--French and West German Greens could emerge as important building blocs of 1990s’ center-left governing coalitions. By contrast, late 1980s conservative support is splintered by the rise of right-wing parties that Establishment conservatives find unacceptable as coalition partners--for example France’s Jean Le Pen movement, West Germany’s far-right National Democrats.

Challenge No. 2 is that growth in Europe’s environmentalist sentiment, involving moderate constituencies, is now drawing centrist or conservative voters--not least in picture-postcard areas like Italy’s Trentino-Alto Adige, France’s Alsace and Brittany and England’s Bath and York. Center-right politicians such as Thatcher and former French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac have already begun embracing environmental concerns to staunch the potential flow.

Just as the environmentalist surge could signal an important political shift in 1990s Europe, a similar possibility exists in the United States. Conducive circumstances exist at the national level, where former Texas oilman Bush is having much less luck establishing his credentials than former research chemist Thatcher. But there is also a little noticed grass-roots dimension--namely how right-wing or religious fundamentalist forces influence, and even control, the Republican Party in a number of environmentally oriented states--Maine, Minnesota, Arizona, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii. Local conservatives’ ability to develop environmental themes may be limited accordingly. In short, some of the divisions that plague European conservatives have parallels on this side of the Atlantic.

The possibility, then, is that the environmental surge in the industrial West will go beyond ecology and shape a new 21st Century politics--even if some of the reasons and mechanics are less grandiose than environmentalists would like.