Earth Day Fails to Paper Over Differences

Congressional Republicans learned on Monday, the nation’s 26th Earth Day, a lesson well-known to Kermit the Frog: It’s not easy being green.

After the Republican congressional majority pushed parts of its “contract with America” through the House and Senate, it has turned to environmental issues. And the Republicans are being battered by criticism that their recent interest in antipollution measures is but an attempt to mask a record that would end bipartisan cooperation in fighting pollution and protecting the wilderness.

Drawing attention to a campaign issue that Democrats hope to exploit, Vice President Al Gore said of the Republicans: “They’ll be announcing some pro-environment legislation. They’ll be going to zoos, putting snakes around their necks, planting trees. And while I welcome the change, I also issue this warning: Don’t be fooled by the same old song and dance. This is the most anti-environment Congress in 220 years of American history.”

It was a day when Democrats in Congress and myriad environmental groups blanketed Washington offices in a tree-killing onslaught of paper faxes deriding Republican attacks on the environment.

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For their part, the Republicans played it low-key. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) toured the city zoo in Atlanta. “I believe deeply in preserving the environment,” he said.

Rep. Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-Va.), chairman of the House Commerce Committee, complained that Earth Day was no longer “a nonpartisan celebration, but rather a political event aimed at election day.”

Republican congressional leaders have held off immediate consideration of two of the most contentious environmental issues this year: Revision of legislation authorizing the cleanup of Superfund sites, the nation’s most polluted toxic waste dumps, and of the Endangered Species Act.

Instead, they put on the initial agenda for the week beginning with Earth Day a measure encouraging battery recycling and another involving the reduction of paperwork.

They and many Democrats, including President Clinton, remain far apart on such issues as logging in old-growth forests and in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, a moratorium imposed by Congress on adding species to the list of endangered plants and wildlife, and limits on the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency to protect wetlands.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration’s own proposals unveiled on Monday were relatively limited: In addition to a plan to restrict commercial sightseeing flights over the Grand Canyon and Rocky Mountain National Parks, the White House said the Interior Department would consider, under the heading of “fee reform,” increases in charges for admission to some national parks, monuments and recreation areas to help meet their budgets.

Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt also said the administration wanted within “a few years” to eliminate all private vehicular traffic at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The administration’s plan would also expand by 38,000 acres the roughly 64,000-acre Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco.