Can War-Ready Environmentalists Deal With Wilson? : Ecopolitics: The governor-elect has long been receptive to environmental concerns, but he’s unlikely to respond to bully-boy tactics.

It might seem that the arrival in the governor’s office of a leader with Pete Wilson’s credentials as a supporter of coastal protection, clean air and comprehensive land-use planning bodes well for environmental interests, particularly after an administration whose record on the environment would make almost any gesture in the direction of environmental sensitivity look good. But are environmentalists in any mood for accommodation, mitigation and compromise? Or have they been on a war footing for so long that they’ve forgotten how to take advantage of the opportunities Wilson’s moderation presents?

If George Bush’s experience is any guide, Wilson may never enjoy the benefits of his good intentions. Bush, after all, seemed to have a good chance of earning a reputation as an environmental President, succeeding as he did the prince of environmental darkness. Instead, he has been confronted by an environmental community in which no good deed ever seems to go unpunished. Bush’s positive steps on ozone depletion, clean air and coastal protection, for example, have generally been met with a sneer and dismissed as inadequate or insincere by the very organizations whose appeals he is answering.

These buffets so far haven’t dampened Bush’s determination to keep right on pitching for his own environmental objectives. But there’s ample evidence to suggest that Wilson is somewhat less tolerant and forgiving of his critics and that, with him, the same bully-boy tactics by environmentalists could backfire.

The most recent evidence came in the closing hours of Congress, when Wilson balked at supporting a reclamation reform plan that would have changed the way the federal government provides cheap water for Western farmers. The bill’s principal proponents, Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez.) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, were counting on Wilson’s support. When he initially expressed some reluctance, they responded with a furious attack, trying to force Wilson to negotiate by charging that he was bowing to pressure from agribusiness. But those charges misstated the situation, and the attack only seems to have stiffened Wilson’s resolve against the bill.

What was surprising about the confrontation wasn’t the outcome--Congress has been frustrating reclamation reform for generations--but rather Wilson’s refusal to play the game. Instead of being goaded into some last-minute wheeling and dealing, as Miller and the environmentalists hoped, Wilson simply maneuvered to prevent the bill from coming to a vote--a result that infuriated the reformers only slightly more than it did all the Western agricultural interests who had been looking forward to the $1.5 billion in new water projects that the bill would have funded.

Wilson did the same with important environmental legislation for California when he refused, two years ago, despite intense environmental pressure, to support Sen. Alan Cranston’s proposed desert wilderness bill. Here, too, Wilson did not oppose desert protection any more than he came out against reclamation reform in the confrontation with Miller. But he refused to go as far as the environmentalists wanted. And when they attempted to step up the political heat, he broke off discussions altogether. The results were both losses for the environmentalists.

A change of tactics by the defenders of nature doesn’t just make sense as smart politics. The confrontational approach of the last 10 years is starting to eat away at some of the principles that were once a basic part of the environmentalists’ own view of themselves and their responsibility to the public.

Whatever else they may have accomplished in this century, for example, environmentalists have always stood for the advancement of knowledge. All the critical battles in the 1930s about cost-benefit analyses and the modern court battles to generate ever more comprehensive environmental analyses have been aimed at improving public understanding. Sometimes, all that additional information has turned out to be irrelevant, ignored, slanted or incomplete. But the effort was always predicated on the assumption that public decision-making would be improved if we knew more about the possible environmental consequences of our actions.

Little of that impulse was evident, however, in the recent debates over Proposition 128, the unsuccessful Big Green initiative on the November ballot. Both sides campaigned largely on a theme of guilt by association. In the ballot pamphlet as well as the advertising campaigns, this was the Tom Hayden initiative as far as the opponents were concerned; the promoters of Big Green worked just as hard to convince the public that anyone on the other side had to be a tool of the chemical companies. That may be politics-as-usual for most people, but it’s a lower standard than environmentalists once insisted the public should demand from its leaders.

That’s not the worst of it, either. In a recent column for the San Francisco Examiner, former state resources secretary Huey D. Johnson described how the promoters of Big Green manipulated its contents to benefit their supporters in the Democratic Party and to exclude other environmental groups and Republicans. Ultimately, Johnson claims, the initiative was “put out for bid”--$250,000 cash on the barrelhead got you a place in “the back room” where the whole thing was written. Johnson wasn’t actually in that room, although, as a long-time environmental insider, he claims to have been in close touch with those who were.

Big Green campaign director Bob Mulholland concedes that membership on the steering committee was limited to those groups that pledged tangible support of that kind, although Mulholland points out that some were allowed to pay for their seats by promising to gather signatures for the petition drive instead of raising money.

The process hit bottom with Collette Chuda, the 4-year-old stricken with cancer who was featured in a television ad appealing for votes for Big Green in the last two weeks before the election. Exploiting a child’s sickness for political purposes is bad enough. What makes Chuda’s case worse is the fact that she’s suffering from a form of kidney cancer, Wilms’ Tumor, that “seems to be unrelated to environmental exposure” according to the National Cancer Institute.

Campaign California’s Mulholland insists now that “(Chuda) was meant as a symbol for all children with cancer.” That may be good enough for Mulholland, who operates in an exclusively political and partisan realm in which almost anything is fair that works.

But the situation is somewhat different for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which shared top billing with the Sierra Club as the environmental spokesmen for Big Green. The NRDC’s influence until now has depended on the substantial scientific expertise that it brought to bear on environmental questions. In defending the organization’s credibility now, a spokesman for NRDC contends that it wasn’t formally a part of the campaign steering committee when the Chuda ad was created. NRDC’s attorney had advised the group to withdraw from the committee several weeks earlier to protect the organization’s tax status.

On the other hand, NRDC didn’t complain about the ad, insist that its accuracy be checked or do anything to disassociate itself from the ad after it appeared. In fact, even though not formally on the steering committee, NRDC’s Al Meyerhoff continued to act as one of Big Green’s spokesmen right up to Election Day. In all that, however, the NRDC says he was acting “independently.” Such fancy dancing through the tax and fair political practice laws may be perfectly legal. But it wasn’t so many years ago that political leaders were talking about the need to instill in government an “environmental ethic” that now turns out to be not so ethical.

Chuda was not an isolated case. Environmentalists have been pitching cancer for years as a way of building popular support for their legislative proposals. Once you start trying to create the impression that large numbers are coming down with cancer from drinking water or eating apples, it’s not much of a stretch to reach some of the equally exaggerated claims that are being made on behalf of global warming and nuclear winter. A commitment to scientific objectivity is all very well, it seems, but it’s fear that sells books and gets attention for the cause.

All these efforts start with the best of purposes. Pesticides should be safe. Nuclear war isn’t a good idea. Air pollution needs to be controlled. To some extent, a little hysterical advocacy was not only unavoidable but probably necessary as long as environmentalists had to contend with a President who believed that trees cause cancer and a governor in California whose only major environmental initiative in eight years has been trying to strangle the coastal commission. But those wars are over. Bush isn’t Ronald Reagan and Wilson isn’t George Deukmejian. It remains to be seen whether environmentalists can remember how to tell the difference.