The Tainting of the Green Movement

Nowhere has the Clinton-Gore campaign drawn a deeper rhetorical line in the sand than over the question of the environment. Understandably so. Poll after poll shows that the voters take green issues very seriously and adjust their support of candidates and parties accordingly. No one knew this better than the now-exiled Clinton strategist Dick Morris. Back at the start of this year, he began telling his boss that environmental issues were political dynamite, particularly with the all-important swing contingent, Republican women.

So Bill Clinton and Al Gore have been pounding home the message that a vote for Republicans is a vote for environmental pillage. Rallying to the support of the White House have been all the major environmental organizations.

The League of Conservation Voters, formerly headed by the current secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, has sounded the keynote, with the ringing declaration that “Bill Clinton’s environmental record in office is one of the best of any president.” Clinton’s running mate prompted even greater exuberance from the League: “Al Gore is without question the most committed environmentalist ever to hold the office of vice president.”

The league, an influential organization, issued its Dirty Dozen list of nature’s enemies up for reelection this year. All are Republicans and the League is committing money to campaigns against them.

Nothing better illustrates the political corruption of the national environmental movement than these frenetic endorsements of Democrats, starting with Clinton and Gore. The big green groups have become nothing more than a PR operation of the Democratic National Committee.

To cite Clinton as a committed environmentalist is, by any objective standard, a sick joke. We need to go no further than the founder of the League of Conservation Voters, America’s senior green crusader, David Brower. In June, Brower stated categorically that the Clinton-Gore record on the environment “is worse than the Reagan-Bush record.”

It’s a startling assertion, but a valid one. The 1993-94 Congress, with Democrats controlling both chambers as well as the White House, produced fewer pro-environment laws than any Congress since Eisenhower’s time. Within months of taking office, the Clinton administration backed off campaign promises to reform mining, grazing and logging practices on federal lands. Directly betraying specific pledges made in Ohio, Gore announced that the toxic waste incinerator outside East Liverpool, Ohio, would be fired up.

By the end of that congressional session, before the Gingrich takeover, the Clinton team had engineered the resumption of logging in ancient forests, sold out the Everglades and forced through the North American Free Trade Agreement, without doubt the most destructive environmental legislation since the Green Revolution began in the Nixon era.

The League of Conservation Voters makes a particular point of citing Clinton’s “excellent appointments of champions for the environment.” These supposed paragons include Carol Browner (head of the EPA), Tim Wirth (undersecretary of state) and Babbitt himself. The common feature of these appointees is that they have used their environmental credentials to shove vile legislation and executive orders down the throats of their former colleagues in the green movement.

From her first day in office, Browner targeted for extinction the Delaney Clause, a piece of legislation dating from 1958, much hated by the food and chemical industries because it banned known carcinogens from processed foods. Four years later, in alliance with the Republicans, she had her way. Wirth has been point man in free trade matters, and thus has supervised the annulment of U.S. environmental laws on dirty gas, dolphin-safe tuna and the import of deadly PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) from Canada and Mexico. As secretary of the Interior, Babbitt has overseen the administrative dismantling of the Endangered Species Act. In a series of Munich-type concessions, mining companies, real estate developers and timber companies can now legally destroy previously protected habitat.

One final disaster: As the national green movement abandons itself to political hucksterism, it loses all pretense to objectivity and all claims on popular trust. The League of Conservation Voters never mentions one independent candidate, Ralph Nader. With good reason. In any comparison with Nader and his organization, both Clinton and Gore would not survive scrutiny for a moment.