Remember George Bush, ‘Mr. Green’? : In Montana and the Pacific Northwest, Democrats give in to the environmental pillagers.

Back at the start of his term, George Bush boasted, “I’m going to be the environmental President.”

Given what came after him, he was right.

His were the years, after the pillage of the Reagan era, when the chain saws in the Pacific Northwest slowed almost to a murmur. A Reagan-appointed judge, William Dwyer, ruled in federal court in Seattle in favor of environmentalists in the spotted owl suit. This splendid jurist has been tougher than the mainstream “greens” ever since.

In Congress and the courts, in those halcyon years, there was gridlock, otherwise known as holding the bad guys at bay, which is about the best we can hope for.

In came the Clinton crowd and promptly began sellouts to industry the Republicans hadn’t dared dream of. Democrats in Congress who’d said “No” to Bush fell into line. The major environmental groups boasted of “access” to the White House.

Take the nation’s forests on federally-owned public lands. For them, April has been the cruelest of months.

The Montana wilderness bill, sponsored by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), has cleared the Natural Resources Committee and awaits a vote in the House. The bill is the climax of a 16-year fight by the timber industry to open up about 4 million acres of roadless wilderness in the northern Rockies, the last U.S. stronghold of the wolf and grizzly outside Alaska.

Under a deal approved by the major environmental groups--Sierra Club, Audubon, Wilderness Society, National Wildlife Federation--1.7 million acres of rocks and ice will be preserved as wilderness while the timber companies stand to get everything else. To put it another way, with this bill the corporate timber industry and log exporters get 96% of the productive public forest land in Montana and roughly $60 million a year in timber subsidies.

Resistance to this surrender by the big environmental groups has been led by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and dissident local Sierra Club chapters, which have fought gallantly against vast odds.

On Thursday, the Clinton gang went before Dwyer in Seattle with its final formulation for the Pacific Northwest forest. The Clinton plan permits logging of up to 40% of the remaining unprotected native and ancient forest in the Pacific Northwest. Have the months of protest brought any mitigation? The government gave the environmentalists a small chip in the form of increased protection for salmon (though another federal judge has just ruled that the Clinton plan for the Columbia Basin salmon is a cosmetic fraud; it was designed to benefit the aluminum industry). On the other hand, the timber industry won diminished owl protection on private lands and on national forest lands in Northern California.

At the very last minute, the Administration amended the plan to excise any compulsory requirement to assess watersheds before logging. This will permit timber sales to move up by a matter of about two years. Diminishing even further the protection of ancient stands of redwood and Douglas fir, the plan now permits “thinning” and “salvage timber” sales (in and of itself an enormous loophole) without prior environmental review. Yet these were the old-growth stands that the Clinton plan, known as Option 9, pretended to protect. In southern Oregon, 225,000 acres originally protected as habitat for a threatened bird, the marbled murrelet, has been released for clear-cutting.

Once again, the Option 9 story has been one of appeasement and surrender by the big environmental organizations. And if these organizations choose not to press their suit against the government, then there’s nothing Dwyer can do, and new timber sales in the last remnant of the native and ancient Northwest Forest could begin in June.

So much for forests. Rangelands fare scarcely better, with utter collapse by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in the face of the ranching lobby and the big water users in the West. There’s been weakening of Superfund and the Clean Water Act, weakening of pesticide standards and of the Endangered Species Act, and--across the board--the erosion of strict regulation in favor of “compromises” (actually abject surrenders to the rape-and-pillage crowd).

Meanwhile, the press has mostly been asleep and the major environmental organizations are frolicking happily on the White House lawn, objects of derision and contempt to grass-roots environmental organizers across the country.

This is what a Democrat in the White House has brought us. Yes, indeed. Where are you, George, now that we need you?