Candidates Do Battle in a Climate That Favors the Environment : In Colorado, other key races, both parties recognize that air and water quality issues are a concern to a broad spectrum of voters, not just ‘tree-huggers.’

At Archery Adventure, next to the Pizza Hut in the shadow of the Interstate 225 embankment, Hugh May is getting worked up over what’s happening to the once-wooded foothills near his home.

“They’re putting in shopping centers and building houses left and right and cutting down 100-year-old Ponderosa pines,” he said. His complaint is punctuated by the quiet thump, thump, thump of arrows striking life-size plastic-foam deer at the indoor archery range behind him.

To 39-year-old May, who repairs surgical equipment for a living, this is what the nation’s never-ending debate over the environment should be all about: the loss of habitat for the wildlife he hunts with bow and arrow.

He lives between the communities of Elizabeth and Parker, 20 miles south of this busy suburb east of Denver. There, where encroaching exurban America meets the prairie, “we got deer, antelope, rolling hills and clear creek bottoms. It’s beautiful country,” he said.

The politician who can solve the problem of growth versus conservation will get May’s vote.

On the other side of Denver, in the suburb of Kittredge, Tom Haller, a machinist, says he is known as “the resident liberal tree-hugger” at Sundstrand Corp. He has worked there 19 years making gears and shafts for pumps and compressors.

“I’ve been camping and fishing in this state since I was 18 months old,” he said. “It’s not happening as much as it used to, but the degrading of the scenic beauty by mining interests has always bothered me. Obviously the environment is important to me.”

Just as a light snowfall has already dusted the still-green lawns of Denver and its suburbs, environmental concerns are coloring the U.S. Senate race here. That’s also the case in Oregon and New Hampshire, where two other hotly contested Senate races are too close to call.

Two years ago, many Republicans campaigned on a platform that called for rolling back what conservatives called environmental over-regulation. Once elected, congressional Republicans pushed for sweeping changes in the country’s basic environmental legislation--the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Superfund law for cleanup of toxic waste sites.

But those moves brought about a sharp backlash.

“What has really hurt Republicans in this election cycle was the rhetoric they used--cutting funding, rolling back regulations. Strong words like that really turned people off,” said Peter Snyder, senior program director of the Luntz Research Co., which conducts polls for Republican candidates.

Indeed, poll-takers have found a confluence of opinion when it comes to the environment--a trend that Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin considers important because “the Republicans in 1994 tried to use the environment as a cultural wedge issue in which people protecting the environment were described in elitist terms.”

It is represented by two often disparate groups finding common ground:

On one front are May and Haller, men who work with their hands, voicing concerns about access to public lands, and non-college-educated women concerned about such public health threats as toxic waste sites and factories polluting air and water near their homes.

On the other are the more traditional environmentalists, highly educated and financially well-off, whose encounters with the environment begin when they walk out of an Eddie Bauer store and step into their Range Rovers.

David Nickum, regional conservation director of Trout Unlimited, notes that many of his group’s 95,000 members are “fairly conservative compared with other environmental groups.”

But, he said, “folks are making more of a connection between things they value and environmental quality. It doesn’t take too often to go out and see a stream being clouded up by a dam or a river with great fishing wiped out by mining pollution to realize environmental quality affects them in their lives.”

Across the country, environmental groups are doing their best to drive home that connection, taking a high-profile role in several political contests.

The Sierra Club, for example, is spending $7.5 million during the current election cycle on the presidential and congressional races.

“Environment is up on top as an important issue, for the first time an unprecedented, salient issue,” said the organization’s Washington spokesman, Roni Lieberman.

The ambivalence toward anti-regulation fever can be seen about a mile away from Archery Adventure in another strip-mall storefront, where Firing Line bills itself as the largest gun store in Colorado. Don Campbell is preparing for a weekend elk-hunting trip in the Medicine Bow range several hours to the northwest.

At first he is reluctant to talk politics--a topic better suited for the evening hours at the elk camp “after the Jack Daniels comes out and the cigars are lit up,” says his hunting companion Tim Gerhardt, a gunsmith.

But Campbell, a 55-year-old investment broker, acknowledges after some prompting that he is not uncomfortable with the current environmental picture.

“I think basically we’re being well-served. I don’t think anybody wants to go backwards, but do we need more controls? More legislation? Things are working. Commercial interests can be met, and environmental issues are being taken care of,” he said.

He and Gerhardt have purchased ammunition for the .338 Winchester Magnum he plans to use to hunt elk.

“It drops ‘em fast,” he said, “and that is environmentally a neat thing to do.”

As a result of that sort of shift, both parties are trying to claim the green mantle.

In Colorado, as Republican Rep. Wayne Allard and Democrat Tom Strickland battle for a Senate seat left open by the retirement of Republican Hank Brown, each has accused the other of environmental sins.

Allard has hammered on Strickland as “a lobbyist [who] represented the largest polluter in the history of Colorado,” based on the representation of Louisiana-Pacific Corp., a logging and wood products company, by Strickland’s law firm.

Strickland gladly reviews Allard’s voting record, which has earned a place on the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” list of members of Congress targeted for defeat.

Strickland is bringing actor and environmental activist Robert Redford from neighboring Utah to campaign for him this weekend. Allard, meeting privately with local elected officials, recently spent much of the hourlong conference listening to complaints about the impact federal environmental regulations have on their community budgets.

Similar issues have surfaced in Oregon, where state Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican, is given a slight edge over Tom Bruggere, a Democrat and high-tech entrepreneur in the race to replace retiring Republican Sen. Mark O. Hatfield.

Bruggere has sought to make the environment an issue by focusing criticism on past pollution problems at Smith’s family-owned factory, which freezes and cans sweet peas and carrots.

“If I had to bet, I think Smith’s going to win it,” said John Kapsch, a political scientist at Reed College in Portland.

The pollution issue worked earlier this year when then-Rep. Ron Wyden defeated Smith in a special election for the Senate seat vacated when Bob Packwood resigned. But Smith’s acknowledgment of previous waste spills and his self-portrait as an Oregonian with a lifelong appreciation of the outdoors seems to be muting the issue this time, Kapsch said.

In New Hampshire, where Republican Sen. Robert C. Smith is widely considered to be among his party’s most vulnerable incumbents, environmental concerns have been a key issue for his challenger, former Rep. Dick Swett.

Smith’s unsuccessful attempts last year to rewrite the law regulating the troubled Superfund program generated great wariness among environmentalists, who then scoffed at his effort to ease their concerns with campaign literature depicting him fly-fishing.

“You’d think that in New Hampshire, where taxes are a perennial issue, that the environment would take a back seat, but it’s a very powerful issue,” said Mike Casey, director of the Environmental Information Center in Washington.

And that power, Democratic analysts assert, may be one of the key factors in this year’s elections. If it weren’t for the environmental concerns raised by the most recent session of Congress, says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, “we wouldn’t be in the running.”