The Big Green Monster : Can’t See Forest for the Monument

When explorer and surveyor Clarence King first saw California’s giant sequoias in 1864, he called them “monuments of living antiquity.” As if these trees were indeed a kind of monument, sequoias were cut down, debarked and the bark reconstructed in the shape of the tree at the Great Exposition in London’s Crystal Palace. Today, we seem of two minds about the environment.

We talk about spaceship Earth and imagine ourselves to be pilot, crew and passengers. And we often treat trees, fish, wildlife and all the environment like monuments in the Crystal Palace--structures to be set apart and preserved in a fixed condition.

There is little doubt about how central a concern the environment has become. A new survey by Environmental Opinion Study Inc., indicates that 82% of voters place it among the top three or four issues. If required, 72% would sacrifice economic growth to environmental quality. But 82% believe creating a cleaner environment will increase jobs and income levels.

The question no longer seems to be whether we should save the environment, but how we should go about it. This year, California voters will weigh the approach embodied in the Environmental Protection Act of 1990, Proposition 128, more commonly known as “Big Green.”

With a name like that, and with such major environmental organizations as the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, California League of Conservation Voters, Pesticide Watch and the National Toxics Campaign supporting it, who could be against Big Green?

The goal of a good environment is certainly praiseworthy. And there are useful goals in Big Green, including reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and those of gases that can damage the ozone layer.

But Big Green tries to cover far too much. Food safety, pesticides, agricul tural worker safety, ancient redwood forests, reforestation, recycling, a marine resources sanctuary, water-quality protection and oil-spill prevention and cleanup are among its many concerns.

With such complex and poorly understood problems, it is easy to make serious mistakes. With complex ecological systems, it is almost impossible to fix all the details of management from a distance. In many instances, Big Green is wrong scientifically, and its applied approaches might work against natural ecological systems. The initiative states that “if the loss of trees in the State continues, global warming could have substantial adverse impacts on the State.”

But global warming isn’t an on-off switch in the sky over California. Increases in greenhouse gases emitted all over the world will change the entire atmosphere, and this could change climate. California can contribute to the effect, but we can’t take local actions that result in total control of the greenhouse effect over our own state.

So what if the initiative gets a little science wrong?

Well, if the people who wrote the initiative don’t understand what causes global warming, how can we trust them to write laws that will solve the problem? Too much of the initiative is undefined, poorly defined or wrongly defined to serve as a major foundation for the way we guide California’s environment into the next century.

Consider Big Green’s approach to conservation of the sequoia’s sister trees, the ancient redwoods. The initiative would set up a $300-million bond fund, two-thirds of which would be used to buy ancient redwood stands, the remainder going for urban-forestry projects, rural reforestation and new forest plantings. It would also establish a Wildlife Conservation Board--whose role beyond buying the stands is unclear--and an Ancient Redwood Forest and Reforestation Finance Committee.

We need a way to ensure that functioning units of redwood forests can be managed so that the risk of their demise, either from on-site or off-site effects, is kept at a minimum. Big Green focuses on the spectacular--buying the land. It says little about the next, hard step--managing what has been bought.

What the initiative does say raises questions. Clear-cutting could never be used. Only cutting by the “selection method” would be permitted. Selection logging is said to mean that a continuous forest cover would remain following completion, and in which the stands must contain all ages and sizes of trees.

Is such detail in an initiative the way to manage the environment? Is a clearing of any size never important to the conservation of any animal or plant that lives within the groves? Would limited clear-cutting, by opening the canopy, induce more young redwood growth? What if a natural stand lacks all sizes and ages? Here’s an example of Big Green’s problem: too much detail and too little flexibility.

Big Green would also make all estuaries, bays and ocean waters into marine sanctuaries. But it does not define what a marine sanctuary is or what can be done within it. The measure only asserts that no leases for oil or gas extraction shall be permitted unless the President of the United States has found a severe energy supply disruption.

If the point is to stop petroleum extraction, why create an undefined kind of sanctuary? Is the best way to ensure the persistence of marine resources to set up such an ill-defined entity and make all the coast part of it? Big Green doesn’t say, and without more information, there is no way to judge the environmental impact of this part of the initiative.

Elsewhere, Big Green specifies too many details of operation whose benefits or harm cannot be judged in the abstract. For example, by Jan. 1, 1992, government must spend at least 35% of its total paper-product budget on recycled paper, 40% by Jan. 1, 1994; 50% by Jan. 1, 1996.

This sounds good, but who arrived at these quantities? Are they practical? Are they enough to help? Why does it start at 35% and stop at 50%? In the measure’s 39 pages, there is no explanation, no rationale. We must accept these details on faith.

The proposition raises a larger question: Whether the best and only way to save the environment is through government fiat, through new bureaucracies, large bond funds and detailed statements of specific policies and criteria for action--a rigid system imposed by a mechanism open only to occasional and slow modification. Big Green treats the environment much the way explorer King saw the sequoia--as a monument to be handled by rigid, fixed policies engraved in great detail through the initiative process.

Perhaps this is what the public wants. The opinion survey suggests that two-thirds of American voters believe there is not enough government regulation of the environment. Friends who favor Big Green tell me that they are fed up with the failure of politicians and bureaucrats to save the environment, and that they want to send them a message that is loud, clear, tough and specific. “Let the SOB’s figure out how to get out of this one” is their attitude.

But if we really are on spaceship Earth, and if we are changing the settings on the dials of our life-support system, maybe there is a better way. When we board a commercial airplane we, the passengers, don’t vote on the compass direction the plane will fly and require that the plane never deviate from that direction. We ask for a flight to a destination, and we set up a system so that we can trust that the pilot knows how to get us there. We have set up a variety of flexible social mechanisms to ensure a high level of safety.

This is the way to manage the environment--set up a system of experts who work to achieve clearly defined goals and are subject to the people’s will.

In its rigidity, Big Green is the wrong approach to manage the complex, idiosyncratic and un-understood natural ecological systems of our planet. I suggest instead a series of short initiatives that would bring into existence a flexible system of environmental management, taking the best from Big Green--its Wildlife Conservation Board might be the basis for flexible management by environmental experts--and presenting it in a manner that voters can evaluate and that will not freeze details, which may later backfire, into place.

In the end, each voter will have to decide whether the right way to guide spaceship Earth is by casting details of policy in a rigid, monument-like framework, relying on big government with ill-stated ideas to muddle through. Or whether, with this important issue, we had better step back for a little while and make sure we know who is in the pilot seat, what his skills are, who is the air-traffic controller, and what are the meanings of the rules and regulations. Only when we have a government that operates from this flexible perspective will we be able to deal successfully with our environmental problems.