Negotiating Away the Environment

Americans overwhelmingly support a number of environmental protections, according to a Los Angeles Times Poll last spring. Never mind, the Bush administration is quietly selling out the environment by “negotiating” settlement of lawsuits brought by business and industry.

The Department of the Interior is using this procedure as a way to reverse the ban on snowmobiles from Yellowstone National Park and the prohibition on further road building in 60million unspoiled acres of the national forest. It’s an underhanded way of gutting needed environmental measures taken after years of study and strong popular support. This practice should be stopped.

When rules were challenged in the past, the federal government went to court to defend them. Now they are “negotiated” before any talks are even held, a de facto victory for the commercial exploiters of the nation’s parks and forests.

In Yellowstone, the administration claimed it was reconsidering the snowmobile ban to collect more information that might shed a different light on the issue. This is a subterfuge foisted on us by the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Assn., which sued the Park Service and forced a new study and a new decision just as the phaseout of the noisy, polluting machines was to begin. In fact, the ban was adopted by the Park Service after 10 years of study and the comments of thousands of Americans, including affected industry and commercial interests and local agencies as well as conservation groups and ordinary citizens.

The subterfuge of “negotiations” is also at work in the Department of Agriculture for logging interests seeking to overturn the ban on roads and for opponents of re-introducing grizzly bears into parts of Montana and Idaho. Secretary of the Interior Gale A. Norton canceled the bear program after Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne challenged the plan in court and denounced the bears as “massive, flesh-eating carnivores.”

Norton was more open in her outright cancellation of a rule allowing the Interior Department to deny a permit for a proposed mining operation that would result in “substantial irreparable harm” to the environment. The mining industry called the rule too broad and vague. The law governing mining on federal lands is virtually unchanged from 1879 and is in desperate need of reform.

President Bush also is touting a plan, developed by Vice President Dick Cheney, that would benefit the big energy companies while offering the false hope of energy security and despoiling the unique Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Americans are focused on the awful toll of terrorism and the slumping economy. But those who would exploit our natural resources continue their quest for commercial gain. Even in this awful time, the U.S. cannot relax the vigil over the nation’s environment.