Environment Is a Natural Issue for Politicians

In a 30-second sales pitch beamed into the living rooms of California voters, John K. Van de Kamp gazes over a panoramic view of the golden state: Parklands. Waterfalls. The Big Sur coast.

“He’s sponsoring Big Green--the environmental initiative to protect our coastline and outlaw cancer-causing pesticides,” intones the campaign ad’s unseen announcer.

Yet only weeks ago on Earth Day, the biggest environmental celebration in 20 years, it was not Van de Kamp who dominated television screens in Southern California. It was Dianne Feinstein.

For weeks, she had refused to take a position on the initiative. But with an eye carefully cast to political advantage, she chose two successive Earth Day celebrations in voter-rich Southern California to embrace the most sweeping environmental initiative ever proposed.

This year in California, politicians are rushing like lemmings to stress their commitment to what is left of California’s natural resources.

“Everyone today is an environmentalist,” Atty. Gen. Van de Kamp said recently, with more than a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

Indeed, as much as anything else, the environment has become the motherhood-and-apple-pie issue during Van de Kamp and Feinstein’s months-long tussle for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. On hot-button topics, there is even bipartisan unity, with Republican Pete Wilson as well as the two Democrats opposing offshore oil drilling. And all three have taken pains to tout their environmental stripes in television ads.

To some environmentalists, that similarity defines the problem this year for voters. Between deeply felt positions and political expediency, the three major candidates for governor have all crafted records that--if not perfect--at least inoculate them against a full-scale attack against their environmental credentials.

“The voters could be confused readily by the barrage of inputs that they could be getting,” said Patricia Schifferly, regional director for the Wilderness Society. “It’s going to be very difficult.”

Much of the difficulty centers on merging a complex issue such as environmental preservation with the quick-hit sound bites and television ads that define politics in California.

“Environmental issues in the ‘90s don’t lend themselves to explanations in 30 seconds,” Schifferly said. “Many of them are interdependent. On the line is the desert ecosystem. On the line are the wetlands. On the line are the ancient forests.”

Statewide, leaders of environmental organizations are preparing to issue reports on the records and positions of the three gubernatorial candidates. Because their conclusions are pending, many declined to be interviewed for this story.

When Van de Kamp and a host of environmental leaders last August unveiled the “Big Green” initiative, which is expected to be on the November ballot, it quickly became the marker against which other environmental platforms were measured. For months, while Feinstein decided whether to support it, Van de Kamp questioned her level of commitment.

Feinstein, meanwhile, has used specific environmental issues as wedges to separate Van de Kamp from his environmental supporters. Weeks ago, she began what has become a persistent criticism of the attorney general by arguing that he has been lax in tracking down toxic dumpers.

Earlier this month, trying to regain the offensive after a rocky few days following their first debate, she announced her opposition to the state’s malathion spraying program, and rebuked Van de Kamp for his role in defending the Deukmejian Administration effort. Hours later, he responded by joining her in opposing urban spraying.

Environment issues mirror the candidates’ approaches to many of the pressing issues of this campaign--Van de Kamp more specific and lawyerly, Feinstein more centrist and conciliatory.

Van de Kamp’s environmental platform is, pure and simple, Big Green. It would ban 24 pesticides known to cause cancer in humans within 5 years, with a three-year extension allowable if there was no alternative. It would ban imported food grown with pesticides, outlaw offshore oil drilling, rule out clear-cutting of redwood forests and prompt deep cuts--a 40% decline in 20 years--in the gases that affect the earth’s ozone layer. It also calls for the election of an independent environmental advocate and the establishment of a $500-million fund to finance the cleanup of oil spills.

The attorney general has traveled throughout the state for Big Green, sometimes at a loss to his own campaign: When surrounded by environmentalists from organizations which are nonpartisan, Van de Kamp has had to carefully avoid mentioning his own aspirations.

But the collision of his candidacy, the environmental initiative and the rise in voter interest in the subject undoubtedly has helped Van de Kamp. In an April trip through the Central Valley, he carefully surrounded himself with human symbols of environmentally related suffering, a rare personal touch for the attorney general’s campaign. The mother of an 11-year-old boy who blames her son’s death from leukemia on the pesticides that were sprayed near their home stood next to him in Bakersfield; up California 99 in Fresno, a farmer whose ill health forced him to turn to pesticide-free agriculture was at Van de Kamp’s side.

Van de Kamp and his campaign aides say, however, that until they recently began running ads connecting the attorney general and the initiative, he had not benefited as much as he hoped.

“Am I satisfied with the connection up to now? No,” said campaign consultant Bob Shrum, who is helping run the Van de Kamp campaign. “But starting a week to 10 days ago, I think people are getting the point.”

However strongly Feinstein can ally herself with Big Green now, the environmental platform she unveiled in the week before her endorsement of the initiative was more moderate.

Rather than ban pesticides outright, for example, the former San Francisco mayor vowed to accelerate University of California research into integrated pest management, or natural ways of ridding farmlands of pests. Rather than set a specific timetable for reducing gases that contribute to global warming, she called on the state to “pursue standards to reduce atmospheric emissions.”

Trying to escape from the Big Green shadow, she also has proposed environmental education for California schoolchildren and reorganization of the state’s toxic strike force into a high-activity “swat team”.

Some of Feinstein’s environmental plans are tentative. Questioned a week ago about a mandatory state recycling program she suggested in April, Feinstein said she was still studying a range of options.

“The details need to be worked out and they will be,” she said. “But what I’m saying is that this is what I stand for. I’ll get lawyers and staff to draft the stuff once I get there.”

Big Green and Van de Kamp also skip over some details--it is never explained, for example, how global warming gases would be cut by 40% in 20 years.

While her endorsement of Big Green has taken the edge off criticism by environmentalists, Feinstein remains dogged by the image of not being a forceful ally in the past. According to many of those involved the 1986 anti-toxics initiative Proposition 65, Feinstein’s support for the measure was tempered after opponents pressured her.

“She’s been so middle of the road--on anything,” said Van de Kamp supporter Tom Epstein, the initiative’s campaign manager. “Sort of Wilsonesque on how careful she is in following a middle course.”

Wilson--in the background for months, with no major opposition in the primary--is likely to be in the news again soon, when President Bush announces his long-awaited decision on oil drilling off the California coast.

“Wilson has been careful enough that it’s going to be difficult for a Democrat to make the environment a dividing issue,” said Epstein.

The senator is the only one of the three candidates not endorsing the initiative. Yet he, too, has earned some kudos from the environmental community.

“Sierra Club is extremely grateful for your consistent support of strong legislation for clean air as well as other environmental protection measures,” the club’s president, Richard Cellerius, said in a letter commending Wilson as one of 18 senators in the ‘Clean Air Honor Roll.’ “Your votes for strong clean air legislation . . . did not go unnoticed in the environmental community.”

Wilson has benefited from comparisons with other Republicans who are less moderate on environmental issues.

“He is . . . one of the better Republican candidates,” said the Wilderness Society’s Schifferly, who has disagreed with Wilson on several issues. “He is definitely a real step above (Republican Gov. George) Deukmejian.”

Wilson’s strong suit has been his opposition to offshore oil drilling, a stand he has maintained since the Carter Administration. He is credited with spurring President Bush’s 1988 campaign change of heart on offshore drilling, and of pressing for a moratorium on the leasing of offshore tracts.

“I am not an election year convert to these causes,” he told the environmental group Heal the Bay earlier this year.

Wilson also has proposed a Cabinet-level Environmental Protection Agency for the state, and has vowed to use the governorship as a “bully pulpit” to persuade Californians to do their part for the environment.

But Wilson has been at odds with environmental groups as well, angering them in 1988 when he opposed a bill giving wilderness protection to 8 million acres in the Mojave Desert and in 1986, when he did not endorse the anti-toxics initiative. And he remains distanced from activists this year because of his refusal to endorse the sweeping Big Green initiative.

“The environmental litmus test for all the gubernatorial candidates is their support for the environmental initiative,” Al Meyerhoff of the Natural Resources Defense Council said recently.

“Rhetoric is running freely now. Everyone is claiming to be an environmentalist. So we need a little truth in advertising.”