GOP Clouds the Future of Environmental Protections : Regulation: Conservatives see a chance to ease tough antipollution rules. But they risk a popular backlash.

The mercury at 2 p.m. one recent day reads 12 below zero, and the gloom of a cloudy, wintry northern dusk has already settled in. The only sound in Lincoln Park is the snow-muffled murmur of Miller Creek, tumbling beneath a crust of ice toward Lake Superior.

The creek begins in the wetlands behind the ridge that overlooks this old port city, where corporate steel and paper once spewed their detritus into the largest of the Great Lakes. Now the mills and mining are mostly gone, and those industrial operations that remain have largely cleaned up their acts.

The federal Clean Water Act, widely credited with restoring America’s waterways to their best condition in decades, is the chief reason.

Now the House of Representatives has passed a bill that would soften many of the act’s provisions. Of particular consequence here, the bill would ease protections from the silt and industrial pollutants carried in storm water from rooftops, parking lots and construction sites.

The ultimate shape of the legislation when it emerges from the Senate, probably next year, is in question. Advocates of tough environmental standards hope that Sen. John H. Chafee (R-R.I.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, will oppose some of the more sweeping steps approved by the House.

The Clean Water Act is following the same course through which the Republican-led Congress is taking much of the nation’s environmental policy. That has left the future of environmental protection in the United States as murky as the silt-threatened streams of northern Minnesota after a storm.

This much is apparent: In 1995, with the modern environmental movement in its third decade in the United States, there has been a sea change in the public debate.

Although pollution is still considered an evil, Congress now finds it acceptable to question whether it can be eliminated and to challenge whether a clean environment is worth the considerable economic sacrifice that environmental regulations impose.

“Regulations are a hidden tax on every American, and they must be brought under control,” said Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.).

Carol Browner, Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said of Congress’ Republican leadership: “Their intent is to roll back the progress of the last 25 years.”

Former EPA Administrator William D. Ruckelshaus, now chief executive of Browning-Ferris Industries Inc., said the last year had been “characterized by the most violent antienvironmental rhetoric in recent memory coming from Congress.”

He was referring to statements such as this one by Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the House majority whip and a former exterminator: “The EPA, the Gestapo of government, pure and simply has been one of the major claw-hooks that the government has maintained on the backs of our constituents.”

Closing National Parks

The Republicans who are leading the campaign to soften the environmental movement’s impact on business have set their sights on a variety of targets.

National parks? Let’s think about closing some, a vociferous minority in Congress has said.

Oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness? Go for it.

Cutting timber in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, one of the few temperate rain forests in North America? You bet.

Roll back the EPA’s authority to crack down on toxic emissions from oil refineries? By all means.

None of this has happened yet, with each proposal having run into protest.

“They went too far,” said Bob Neuman, a Democratic political and public relations consultant. “When it gets to safe water and clean air, they . . . don’t have public support.”

Even in the House, a coalition of Democrats and conservation-minded Republicans has blunted GOP efforts to scale back protections for endangered and threatened species. Likewise, the coalition has rescued the Superfund program for cleaning up toxic waste dumps.

At the same time, those who favor environmental rollbacks have:

* Slashed funds for the EPA.

* Increased highway speed limits, leading to greater use of air-polluting gasoline.

* Frozen vehicle energy-efficiency standards.

* Slapped a moratorium on additions to the list of species considered threatened or endangered.

* Cut the federal money devoted to protecting the Mojave Desert.

On top of that, Congress is considering whether to:

* Increase opportunities for industry to challenge health and safety regulations and to escape payment for pollution damages.

* Reduce funds for clean drinking water, relax limits on the amount of cancer-causing radon in water and delay enforcement of standards governing the allowable amount of arsenic.

* Wipe out the National Biological Service, established in 1993 to consolidate Interior Department research operations.

Republicans have distributed a memo listing ways in which they can inoculate themselves against charges that they are hostile to the environment. The memo urges Republicans to “get involved in your districts on the side of a cleaner environment.” It recommends planting a tree in a public place, “adopting” a highway or walking trail, becoming active in local conservation groups or handing out saplings on door-to-door tours.

“In order to build credibility,” the memo says, “you must engage this agenda before your opponents can label your efforts ‘craven election-year gimmicks.’ ”

Regrets by Clinton

Eighty miles northwest of Duluth, near tiny Nushka Lake and the town of Deer River, ice has tinted Mike Doty’s blond beard gray, hanging in mini-icicles from his mustache and clinging to the bottom of his aviator glasses.

He has spent all morning in a storm-damaged grove of red pines. He tackles them with a chain saw and then, dragging them behind his aging tractor like carcasses of big game, hauls them to a clearing for pickup by a lumber mill.

Doty is working alone this morning in knee-deep snow, clear-cutting barely 10 acres under a law passed by Congress last summer and signed by President Clinton. The measure allows the harvesting of trees on public property managed by the U.S. Forest Service that have been damaged or felled by storm, fire or disease.

It has galvanized the environmental movement like no other legislation this year. In the wake of the public outcry, Clinton has said he regrets signing the legislation. The measure allows loggers to gain low-cost access to forests across the country under streamlined rules that prohibit appeals except in expensive court proceedings. Critics say it has allowed timber companies to cut healthy green trees, some of them 500 years old.

“There are no environmental laws that apply,” said David Zaber, a resource ecologist and visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan.

It is perhaps the clearest example of Congress’ shifting approach to the environment.

Logging in Minnesota’s Chippewa National Forest is twigs compared to what is taking place in the majestic old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. But, says Judy Johnson, a local critic of the policy, “this becomes an opportunity to open the door” to much greater logging.

“If roads are built and they do this thinning, you might as well kiss it all goodbye,” Johnson said. “You could probably go to every other national forest in the country and get the same story.”

Not so, says Eric Brunner, a Forest Service officer responsible for timber sales in the Chippewa and Superior National forests.

Brunner, using his teeth to shred a toothpick with the intensity of a chain saw attacking a white pine, says that regardless of the legislation, “we’d be in there salvaging right now.”

But what about the contributions dying trees make to the forest--the minerals they restore to the soil and the habitat they offer small critters, the mice and the woodpeckers that make their homes in the hollows of dying or dead trees?

The harvest, says Doug Cornett, a biologist in Marquette, Mich., “will continue to degrade the habitat of threatened and endangered plants and animals.”

Miller Creek

“Everyone you talk to says, ‘Oh, yeah, I used to fish in Miller Creek.’ Today, it’s not that way anymore. It’s just plain sickening what they did to the stream. It goes to show how things can be destroyed without protection.”

Harry Munger, a 68-year-old lawyer, has monitored the changes in Miller Creek since he moved to Duluth when he was 16. He fears the city, which depends on Lake Superior for its drinking water, recreation and shipping-linked jobs, could someday face the aquatic equivalent of clear-cutting.

Current federal rules require developers to obtain various environmental permits before beginning construction on any project covering five acres or more. The process makes sure, for example, that when a shopping center is built, provisions are made to control the rainwater that runs off roofs and parking lots, carrying silt, oil drippings and metals into trout streams and eventually into Lake Superior.

The House-approved amendments to the Clean Water Act would remove this blanket coverage and replace it with a program that would apply only to construction that would contribute significantly to existing water pollution.

At first blush this sounds fair, said a senior EPA official in Washington who asked not to be identified. But, she said, “what you’re talking about is tens of thousands of [pollution] sources, going through them site by site. It weighs down into a huge bureaucratic nightmare. The state would have to figure out which waterways have a problem, and is it due to storm water? And if it is, you must ask if the [construction] site would contribute to that.”

Take, for example, the case of the proposed expansion of the Miller Hill Shopping Mall, and Miller Creek, “a valued resource and a perfect example of urbanization and storm-water problems,” said Carl Richards, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Minnesota in Duluth.

Without the Clean Water Act, says John Thomas, a Minnesota Pollution Control Agency official, the mall’s developers would not be obliged to install an expensive system--drainage ditches, pipes and ponds lined with gravel and sand--intended to trap sediment before it runs off into the Miller Creek watershed.

Last spring, erosion from construction of the St. Louis County Jail sent silt oozing toward Miller Creek a few hundred yards away. The work was begun before the current permit system--the program the House measure would undo--was implemented. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, acting as the EPA’s delegated representative, was helpless to impose restrictions and order contractors to halt the runoff.

Under the winter ice, Miller Creek is not much more than a depression along the roadside on the outskirts of Duluth. But in the spring, its population of brook trout still brings fishing enthusiasts to its chill waters. Children try their luck snagging trout from backyards.

How much longer the stream will provide a habitat for the brook trout is uncertain. The fish cannot tolerate summer water temperatures above the mid-70s. A big part of the reason their habitat is at risk is an upstream parking lot.

Trees filter sunlight, keeping the waters cool. Remove the trees, as happened here, and the water warms up. Pave the woods and summer rainwater running toward the stream heats up on flat shopping-center roofs and on steamy parking lots. And sunlight reflecting off suspended sediment heats the stream water directly.

The sediment--silt from the soil and residue of backyard pesticides and herbicides and parking lot drippings of grease and oil--settles on the stream bed. It clogs gills, suffocating fish. Those that survive find the gravel in which they would spawn covered with the polluted silt, leaving them no place to deposit their eggs.

The result, said Brian Fredrickson, another state water pollution official, is “a creek under siege.”

Political Minefield

As a rancher and a member of the City Council in Tracy, Calif., Richard W. Pombo became more familiar than he might have wanted with EPA standards on the release of waste water into the San Joaquin River.

He discovered that federal rules that “try to come out with one overall standard that fits the entire country . . . don’t make sense.”

Now Pombo is a member of Congress. Whether he and his Republican colleagues will be able to set the nation on a new environmental course will depend on the popularity of House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and whether the Republicans learn to handle one of the most sensitive issues on the political agenda.

“It takes sophisticated political leadership to make sure you get through the minefield in this political debate,” said former Vice President Dan Quayle, who has had his own run-ins with environmentalists. “You can’t get into the perception, which is reality in politics, that we are insensitive to the environment.”

Opinion polls surveying popular thinking about the environment often produce conflicting results, depending on the wording of questions. But polls regularly find general support for the environment.

A Times Poll two months ago asked 1,426 men and women whether they favored protecting the environment even if that meant some people would lose their jobs and the government would spend great sums of money. Or would they prefer economic expansion and more jobs, even if that put the environment at risk? Half favored environmental protection, and a third supported economic expansion, with the rest unable to choose.

As a political issue, the environment is unlike most others. It is “the one issue of the past 25 years that has managed to bridge the ideology gap,” said Ross Baker, a Rutgers University political scientist. Over the last year, he said, “the Republicans misjudged the environment” as a typical issue about overzealous regulation.

‘Pollution Is Evil’

“The public has a strong feeling about virtually everything having to do with the environment,” Baker said. And the bottom line is this: “Pollution is evil. To be a polluter is to have a moral taint.”

That message is sinking in. Since spring, the number of Republicans abandoning their party’s position has grown steadily, from the eight who voted in March against legislation that made it more difficult to impose toughened restrictions on pollution, to the 63 who voted in November against legislation restricting the EPA’s authority.

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, an upstate New York Republican who is often at odds with the party leadership on environmental issues, reports that his fellow Republicans are “getting scared.” When they return to their home districts, he said, “they’re getting an earful about what the environment means to their constituents.”

Boehlert said Gingrich frequently expresses concern about the Republican position.

“We clearly are strategically out of position on the environment,” Gingrich was quoted as telling the Assn. of Opinion Page Editors last month. “We have to relaunch that and do it by January. We approached it the wrong way, with the wrong language.”

Gingrich’s statement was revealing. It dealt not with the substance of the debate over the environment, but with the political approach. And it offered no suggestion of retreat.