After Big Green, You Can’t Trust Legislators, Scientists--and Citizens : Election: The danger from the initiative’s campaign is that it re-politicized the environment, returning the issue to ‘60s emotionalism.

The defeat of two initiatives sponsored by environmental groups does not signify, as their supporters seem to believe, the demise of environmentalism or increasing voter hostility toward the environment. More important, their campaigns revealed a surprising and disturbing lack of faith in democracy among proponents of a good environment.

Before Tuesday’s election, champions of Big Green, Proposition 128, arrogantly claimed that the fate of the environment lay with the measure’s success, that its defeat would signal to the rest of the nation that environmentalism was losing its political potency.

But Big Green was never the whole of the environment nor all of environmentalism.

Environmentalism became a popular political issue in the 1960s, its chief impetus Rachel Carlson’s 1962 “Silent Spring,” which warned of the dangers of pesticides. In California, the environmental movement got a major push from the 1970 Santa Barbara oil spill.

The 1960s was a decade of confrontation, of good guys (environmentalists) vs. bad guys (industrialists), of environmentalists having to prove that the environment presented a serious set of unresolved issues. Confrontation helped to establish public awareness of the problems, setting the stage for the 1970s, when a series of landmark environmental laws were enacted, among them the National Environmental Policy Act, establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Contrary to the emotional rhetoric swirling in the wake of Big Green’s and Forests Forever’s defeat--as well as losing Propositions 135 and 138, both industry antidotes--some aspects of the environment have gotten better.

The air is cleaner. Sulphur-dioxide emissions, for example, declined from 26 million metric tons, in 1973-75, to 21 million, in 1982-84, according to the World Resources Institute, a nongovernmental organization with a solid reputation on the side of the environment.

By the 1980s, we seemed to be making great progress. But in the second half of the decade, we discovered that many environmental problems transcended boundaries--global warming, the ozone hole, deforestation and the worldwide loss of biological diversity. Alarms went off.

Unlike the ‘60s, environmentalists did not have to persuade the public of the importance of these concerns. Eighty-two percent of all voters rate the environment as one of the top three or four issues, according to an August, 1990, study.

But environmentalists have yet to win the battle of individual action. Although 81% of the respondents said they would be willing to make some inconvenient adjustments, only 17% reported they would be ready to make major sacrifices to clean up the environment. Only 41% said they had reduced or would reduce driving.

The 1990s, then, should be the decade when environmentalism completes its rise from the emotionalism of the ‘60s to become thoroughly professional; a time when we begin to understand the roles of citizen, politician and expert in environmental issues; a time when we manage the environment, not just emote over it.

The central question is not: Do we have the technical and scientific expertise to solve environmental problems?

We lack answers to many specific environmental problems, of course, and we know little about ecological systems our survival depends on. But there is much we can do to formulate practical and safe policies.

Instead, the key question is: Can we solve environmental problems within a democratic form of government?

The environmental initiatives on last Tuesday’s ballot raised some issues about democracy and environmentalism in America. They surfaced during the campaign, but nobody talked about them directly.

They are: a surprisingly cynical distrust of democracy among some environmentalists; confusion about the role of science and expertise in environmental law, and a willingness to substitute rhetoric for progress. This is ironic, because information flowing from a more open Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has shown non-democratic governments more likely to despoil the environment.

The residual danger from the Big Green campaign is that it re-politicized the environment, unnecessarily returning the issue to the confrontational emotionalism of the 1960s. The initiative itself--39 single-spaced pages of complex and confusing assertions--was certainly not something voters would avidly read. Filling the intellectual vacuum was the old emotionalism revived by advertising that embraced the Bogey Man theory of politics--vote against the person or industry you love to hate.

Accordingly, Big Green and the other environmental initiatives, though about means, were advertised as if they were only about ends. The worst example of this was the use of a cancer-stricken child in a pro-Big Green commercial to hype the badness of chemicals. The image of a hairless child served to frighten the viewer away from the real issues about how to solve environmental problems.

Another example of this throwback to ‘60s-style confrontation was a complaint I heard recently. It seems an article about Big Green was “irresponsible” for drawing attention to the initiative’s problems, even though they were real, because by doing so you merely confuse the public and make them vote the wrong way.

If you can’t trust the voters, who can you trust? Nobody seems to trust the legislators--everybody says they don’t do anything, and that’s why the ballot was initiative-heavy. You also supposedly can’t trust the experts, including scientists. People tell me scientific opinions can be bought and sold, that you can get an expert to say anything you want if your checking account is large enough.

Besides cynicism, the initiative process seems to foster antagonism. Another friend repeated something heard over and over--that he really didn’t care what Big Green said as long as its passage would send a strong message to those do-nothing SOB legislators.

So who can you trust? The initiative process implies we should trust small, self-appointed groups who go into a room and write an agenda they want us to vote for--without having to worry about the checks and balances our Founding Fathers embedded into the workings of our government.

It is facile for the defenders of Big Green to say, as one did, that the people “simply got fooled” by the big chemical companies. But the same voters who rejected, by 2-1, Big Green and the industry-sponsored alternatives passed a well-crafted initiative prohibiting the use of gill nets. In the end, the people did not give up on democracy.

The lesson coming out of last week’s election is that we cannot fall back on confrontation as a substitute for problem-solving; cannot fall back on propaganda, emotionalism and personalities as substitutes for logic and knowledge. The path to a better environment is through cooperative problem-solving, through the democratic process, with courts and confrontations as methods of last resort.