Why ‘Big Green’ Is Such a Big Disappointment : Regrettably, this well-intentioned environmental initiative is lost in the clouds

It’s hard to imagine anyone not wanting to improve our environment. We all drink the same water, breathe the same air, eat the same food. So who could be against Proposition 128--”Big Green”?

After all, our environment is troubled: Even by the 1950s, Californians could see how easily nature bruises and how much damage had been inflicted on their air, water wells, rich soil and coastline by more than a century of intensive farming (much of it with intensively deadly chemicals) and by the explosion of growth and industrial development.

Since then, often over bitter opposition from polluters, California has adopted the nation’s most ambitious clean-air plans. It has imposed strict but scientifically respectable controls over a range of cancer-causing chemicals, from pesticides to industrial solvents. It has cracked down on toxic dumping and even--slowly--on sewage outfalls into its coastal waters.

The threat to the California environment seems to come from every direction. But while official inertia is by no means gone, it is going. After decades of both watching and lending support to the environmental effort, California is gaining on the threat and not about to slow down.

So it is a bit baffling to observe some of the state’s most ardent environmental activists, many of whom taught us and other Californians much of what we know about protecting the environment, suggest that without passage of Big Green--formally known on the Nov. 6 ballot as Proposition 128--all that has come before is of much-diminished significance.

We have analyzed their case and our conclusion is that even if California’s life depended on heroic, life-saving measures, Big Green is not what the doctor would order. It goes overboard on some problems and ignores others entirely. It is splendid environmental symbolism but bad environmental science.

Big Green is a reaction to 1980s politics that seemed in the pockets of the pesticide and timber industries, public utilities and other polluters. But Proposition 128 did not invent the premise that, with the environment as with medicine, prevention is easier on the system than cure. As a result, the crucial elements of Big Green are already in place, many set in motion by its framers. Some programs work well, others struggle against problems like scrawny budgets. But Big Green could not do better in any field of environmental protection than anything it would replace. Let’s look at it.

Rationally.

1. WATER:

Big Green would prohibit oil exploration in California’s coastal waters, require urban areas to “minimize” storm-drain runoff and block extensions of the January, 2000, deadline for high-level treatment of all sewage before it can be pumped offshore.

These are admirable goals. But the state Lands Commission already has banned offshore oil exploration, the initiative is silent on what minimizing storm drain runoff means, and Big Green simply co-opts federal standards for sewage treatment. These programs do not work perfectly, but they do work, and it’s not clear how Big Green would improve them. In addition, Big Green’s central water concerns are swimming and surfing water, not drinking water. Fresh water quality is mentioned only in passing. Fresh water supply is not mentioned at all.

2. PESTICIDES:

California has operated since 1986 under toxic-chemical controls that continue to push harmful chemicals, some of them not even governed by Big Green, off the shelves. Voters imposed the controls, by a 2-to-1 margin, with Proposition 65. Having survived every legal challenge, the control program has persuaded most manufacturers and users of toxic chemicals that they are better off finding benign substitutes.

Big Green rejects the scientific argument that dose determines risk--as between, for example, a single tablet of aspirin and a case of the stuff. Big Green sometimes seems to imply that the only environment free of risk is an environment free of chemicals, a judgment that the National Academy of Science, among others, disputes.

Big Green’s approach also promises to revive endless legal fights over what pesticides are acceptable. Under existing law, those fights have virtually ended because the way the law was written, farmers and industry have nothing to gain arguing over whether a substance is carcinogenic.

The chemical industry put Proposition 135 on the ballot to neutralize Proposition 128. It is a hoax. It would add nothing to the state’s efforts to rid its food and rural wells of traces of carcinogens. But it would require that taxpayers, rather than farmers who pollute, pay the bill for disposing of banned pesticides. Reason enough to vote no on 135, too.

3. FORESTS:

Big Green’s goal of saving old-growth forests has our wholehearted support, but Proposition 130, which we endorsed enthusiastically in an earlier editorial, goes well beyond Big Green with its call for sustainable yield forestry.

4. GLOBAL WARMING:

For at least 20 years, scientists have warned that accumulations of carbon dioxide--a byproduct of burning anything from trees to natural gas--have formed a blanket around the Earth that acts like a greenhouse, trapping heat. Few argue with that fact. Big Green limits the carbon dioxide that California could produce, without saying how to go about it. Even if California met its limits, the world would go on producing some 98.5% of the CO2 that now floats into outer space. The greenhouse effect cannot be ignored, but it requires an international effort. Would a commitment by California to shatter the greenhouse rally the world to the cause? California would do more good by fiercely waging the environmental crusade already under way, which is the strictest air-pollution control program in this nation and perhaps in any industrial nation.

5. THE ADVOCATE:

Proposition 128 would create an elected Office of Environmental Advocate. But the office could be effectively abolished by the Legislature after six months. This office may very well be a good idea, but this proposal doesn’t develop it adequately. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

NO ON 128 AND 135:

Proposition 128 in some ways is a throwback to Earth Day, when environmental activism consisted largely of a demand that somebody do something about the environment. Somebody has. Lots. And while nobody who cares about the quality of air, land, sea and human life can take any pleasure in this, Big Green--in a curious way--offers rank-and-file environmentalists another way to come of age. They can vote against an environmental measure without feeling that they are voting against the environment. We recommend a no on 128 and 135, the chemical industry’s puerile initiative.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Voting no on Big Green because it is a clumsy approach is not the same as voting that California has licked its environmental challenges. In our view, the most urgent battles in California are those over the state’s air, the quality of its water and the effort to preserve its special forest resources. We have applauded and will continue to carefully watch the efforts of the state Air Resources Board to reduce smog. We call for more attention to the quality of California’s drinking water and, as we’ve noted in a previous editorial, think that Proposition 141 is an overdue step in that direction. But as sewage leakages into bays and beaches occur with alarming frequency, the quality of the state’s coastal waters is also of growing concern.

Proposition 148 begins to address the infrastructure deficiencies that underlie this problem by providing funds to update or extend sewage-treatment facilities.

Finally, California’s old-growth forests are an essential but endangered part of this state’s natural resources. Proposition 130 would go far toward protecting ancient trees and the habitats they provide for a variety of species. Should this important measure fail, we urge the Legislature to act in its place.

One glaring flaw in existing state environmental law is a lack of coordination among programs to prevent air, land and water pollution. Each is treated as a separate problem, when in fact all are inseparable parts of the same Mother Earth. Monitoring of water and food quality is spotty. The governor’s office of planning and research has not produced a new progress report on the environment for about four years and the last one before that was trivial. Big Green does not correct this flaw, and the new governor and the Legislature should put creation of an environmental agency high on their list of jobs next January.

The Coastal Commission could be given responsibility not only for managing growth along the coast, but also for monitoring environmental quality and reporting to a state equivalent of the Environmental Protection Agency. Air and drinking-water agencies could do the same, as would toxic waste-management authorities.

If Sacramento refuses to respond, then the need for restructuring state government to monitor and improve environmental quality should be put on the ballot, but on a far more reasoned basis than what 128 offers.