Without Good Laws, a Cesspool

Here’s what we’re supposed to accept: that conservationists have led us astray and 30 years of environmental law is wrong.

We’re supposed to believe that our country’s progress has been impeded because of stifling environmental regulations. That in the struggle between growth and preservation the deck has been stacked against the economy. That the United States would be so much better off if environmentalists would pipe down and get out of the way.

I’m exaggerating the views of George W. Bush, but not by much. In no area of public policy has this administration so energetically and single-mindedly crusaded against regulation.

With the notable exception of diesel emissions, the Bush team has yet to identify a significant environmental law or standard that it doesn’t want rolled back, challenged or reconsidered, supposedly in the name of growth and the economy.

So a pair of news reports caught my eye last week. One came from here on the West Coast. The other from Washington.

The first was a comprehensive look at the seaport complex of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s busiest. This ever-expanding spigot of globalism has become an anchor of the economy of Southern California. Through this maze of docks, forests of cranes and webs of rail and trucking yards, $200 billion a year in international commerce now flows.

For decades, this complex has been growing and booming. In the next 20 years, ship traffic is projected to double, even triple, enough to challenge the world’s biggest ports, Hong Kong and Singapore.

While the old-fashioned industrialism of a working harbor will never achieve the glamour of, say, high-tech, there is really nothing to equal it in terms of putting meat and potatoes on the tables of our residents. About 260,000 people owe their jobs to the port.

And guess what? Amid all this growth and commercial enterprise, the sheltered waters of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port have blossomed in recent years.

Once a biological dead zone and a toxic sump, there is more life thriving in these waters than has been seen in half a century. In an eye-opening account, my Times colleague Louis Sahagun described a cleaner, clearer harbor that is home to thriving populations of 67 species of fish and increasingly diversified bird life, as well as lobsters so big they must be cradled in two arms to carry.

How could this be?

Sahagun’s research found that the harbor “started getting cleaner almost immediately after passage of the federal Clean Water Act and the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act in 1972.”

The lesson: Regulation succeeds. Jobs, growth, prosperity and mega-industrialism can occur in our biggest cities, hand in hand with nature and conservation and a more livable world.

Proof is in the steely green waters around the port of Los Angeles-Long Beach.

No inflammatory, environmentalist-bashing rhetoric can dispel this happy turn of events: A generation ago, owners of small boats used to drop by the harbor on occasion. There was so little life-giving dissolved oxygen in the water that just anchoring there for a few days would kill the barnacles clinging to hulls. Today, this shallow water habitat, with 5,500 commercial ships moving in and out each year, is a favorite of urban fishermen.

The second story that caught my attention takes us from the present into the future. At issue is the 1970 Clean Air Act, a twin of the Clean Water Act and one of the foundations of the nation’s environmental laws. (Both acts bear the signature of a Republican president, by the way.)

In Washington, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) and former EPA Administrator Carol Browner teamed up to call for the defeat of a Bush administration proposal to roll back the Clean Air Act’s controls on older, high-polluting power plants.

The deregulation crusaders of the administration have proposed and are awaiting White House approval of a plan to give electricity companies stalling time and loopholes before having to update these belching, poisonous facilities. Never mind that these are the worst polluters in an industry that is the No. 1 producer of fine-particulate emissions, which kill 30,000 people prematurely every year and cause the misery of asthma in hundreds of thousands more.

We should wish Edwards and Browner luck. If the anti-regulatory ideology of this administration had reigned 30 years ago, there would be no monster lobsters at the edge of our community, no mackerel, no marsh birds, nothing but a dead and lethal cesspool.