| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Habitats Homeland Insecurity
Many Californians assume that the Bush administration's hands have been too full with its Mid-East adventures to make good on the threats of anti-environmental maneuvers here in the "Homeland." An understandable misperception, given the long, dark news shadow cast first by the attacks of September 11 and the hunt for Al Queda, then the war in Iraq. Environmental stories that would normally be on the front page have been shelved or buried deep within newspapers. But make no mistake, the federal government is gutting domestic environment protections with almost equal verve. Nowhere is this more true than here in California. At risk are decades of hard-won protections and the integrity of the state's forests, wetlands, air quality, climate, and endangered species. The campaign could be said to have three prongs of attack: by water, land, and air. And many assaults come in the form of rollbacks to previous legislation and their interpretation. Let's start with the attack by water. In his campaign for the presidency in 1988, George Bush the elder recognized the seriousness of the country's shrinking reserve of wetlands and promised to create a "no net loss" wetlands policy. While "net loss" has occurred, that objective had at least been a target for federal water policy. Until now. Bush the younger has weighed in heavily on the side of developers, proposing a redefinition of "waters of the United States" that would exclude up to 20 percent of existing wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act nationwide. Nowhere in the nation have wetlands been more radically reduced, and put under so much stress, than here in California. Last year the Department of Interior overruled the advice of its own scientists and decided, under pressure from agriculture, to divert extra water from the Klamath River to Klamath basin megafarms. In September, the diversions left 33,000 fish, most of them endangered fall-run salmon, high and dry in the largest fish kill on record in the West. An investigation by the California Department of Fish and Game faulted the Bush administration's decision to ignore the needs of endangered salmon. This will be another dry year for the Klamath, yet the federal administration appears determined to make the same mistake. Its policies flirt with ecological catastrophe, but there are grave economic considerations as well. In November 2002, the Wall Street Journal reported that an economic analysis (completed but not published) by the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the recreation and tourism supported by the Klamath River is worth $800 million a year, while the annual revenue generated by the same water going to agriculture is only about $100 million. And farming supports far fewer jobs. The Bush administration also appears to be flopping federal policy on CalFed, the decade-long effort to restructure the way the state uses water coming from its two largest river systems, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. The 20 participating agencies have worked for years to loosen the tangled knots in California water policy. The plan, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to hammer out, goes far to preserve Delta ecosystems, to keep salmon, delta smelt, and other ailing, water-dependent wildlife wet, and still serve the interests of the California Water Project's municipal customers. The switch in presidential administrations marked a radical change, says Barry Nelson, a water expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The feds are dragging their feet in the Delta when it comes to the plan's environmental restoration aspects. For instance, senior federal staff have stopped showing up at CalFed meetings and the feds have stopped promoting legislation that would strengthen and enforce the CalFed agreements already reached. Worse, says Nelson, the Bush administration has capitulated without a fight to Central Valley water districts suing CalFed over water that the agreement says should go to habitat protection and restoration. The air campaign has been bloody, too. In the past, the signficant expansion of a factory, power plant, or other big polluter would require an updating of that facility's air-cleaning technology. Under this administration's absurdly named Clear Skies Initiative, major polluters may expand their operations without upgrading. The new policy hits hardest those predominantly low-income communities already living in pollution zones. Perhaps more surprising is the federal administration's effort to disable California's own attempts to address air quality problems. One attack came against the California Air Resources Board's zero-emissions vehicle legislation. The feds backed a Daimler-Chrysler suit against California for establishing incentives for manufacturers to promote cleaner, higher-mileage vehicles like hybrids. It was a stunning betrayal and the first time in 30 years that the feds have actively sided with major polluters against California's clean air standards. Those standards have long been a model for states around the country and are responsible for unleaded gas and catalytic converters, among other innovations. In early March, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan opined that global warming poses a greater threat to humanity than bio-terror or weapons of mass destruction. Here in California, where water is in short supply and the biggest cities are coastal, that danger is especially acute. It was bad enough that the administration refused to join the international effort to slow climate change, but squashing California's own greenhouse gas initiatives is obdurate to an extreme. On land, the Bush Administration is supporting its air and aquatic attacks with an assault on the state's wilderness, forests, and deserts. The "Healthy Forests Initiative" is designed to minimize the inconvenience federal laws and regulations now present to loggers. It proposes to save forests from fire by cutting them down, Nationwide, the new policies will expose millions of formerly safe acres to possible logging. In California, home to ten percent of the country's national forests, the Forest Service has already put old growth in the Giant Sequoia National Monument on the chopping block. The Clinton administration instructed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to evaluate federal lands for their wilderness potential before allowing them to be developed for other uses. The practice kept pristine areas intact until Congress had a chance to evaluate their eligibility for permanent protection. On April 11, the Bush administration reversed that approach and threw out all lands that had been designated as potential wilderness since 1991, when it says a congressional mandate to evaluate federal lands expired. The change drops 33,000 acres of "wilderness study area" in California from protection and disqualifies another 113,000 acres from proposed consideration. All 144,000 acres of undeveloped, wilderness-quality land will now be open to road building, mining, oil drilling, and logging. An example of this administration's approach to endangered species is found in the Mojave Desert, where this spring it lifted protection from a 50,000-acre section of the Algodones Sand Dunes containing the endangered Pierson's milk vetch and the California desert tortoise. The decision disregards a biological opinion issued during the Clinton administration and more than doubles the area open to destruction by off-road vehicles. The threat of terrorism was justification for the military invasion of Iraq, the abrogation of civil rights in the United States, ballooning military spending, giant tax cuts, and the proposed opening of national forests and wildlife refuges to drilling and mining. Now it is cited as sufficient cause for the suspension of basic environmental laws on millions of acres of federal land. The Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative, as the exemptions are called, would give the military immunity to provisions in the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Superfund laws. Although this bill died in the House last year, it is being reintroduced to a new, more conservative congress. If the exemptions are passed, the Navy could test, without review, underwater sonar devices even though the Department of Defense acknowledges that the tests pose a threat to marine life. They diminish the ability of cetaceans to communicate and orient themselves and have led to internal hemorrhaging, mass strandings, and death. If the Army wants to drop bombs on critical desert tortoise habitat, so be it. If the Navy chooses to contaminate the Tijuana estuary with toxic runoff from its Imperial Beach airfield, so be it. The state has held its ground in some battles launched by the federal government; for instance, the Bush administration's attempt to reopen the California coast to offshore drilling. Since 1969, when an oil rig accident coated 30 miles of California's beaches with sticky crude, offshore drilling has been politically untouchable here. Even conservative Republicans such as 2002 gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon have bent over backwards to let voters know that they wouldn't risk eco-political disasters by drilling off California's shores. Yet, emboldened by federal support, early in 2002 oil companies resuscitated 36 moribund offshore drilling leases over 324 square miles near Santa Barbara without the consent of state officials. California sued to stop them, claiming that the leases should not have been resurrected without state approval. When a court upheld California's position, the Bush administration appealed. A federal appeals court again sided with California. Although the administration threatened to appeal a third time, it finally capitulated this April. Another close call began last September, when the Interior Department revived a plan to excavate an 880-foot-deep, mile-wide open-pit gold mine out of 1,600 acres of a desert ecosystem in Imperial County that is sacred to the Quechan people. The Clinton administration had rejected the mine proposal because of the impact it would have on fragile ecosystems and on the 55 registered archaeological sites, the Quechans' ancestral grounds, and a network of ancient trails. These trails are an integral part of the culture of the Quechan, 3,000 of whom still live in the area. Citing the 1872 Mining Law, the Bush administration reversed the rejection, thereby handing the keys back to the Canadian-owned Glamis Gold Ltd. Governor Gray Davis intervened in mid-April, passing a law requiring the refilling of open-pit mines. This requirement would more than devour any profit Glamis could pull from the ground. Glamis may sue, but for now the sacred land is safe from the miners...and the federal government. The Bush administration owes no political debt to California - the president was overwhelmingly defeated here in 2000, and his party, which dominated in most of the country, was trounced here in 2002. Environmental protection has never been a priority for Bush. But would it be too much to ask that the president at least remain true to the core conservative values of protecting local and state authority on such issues as clean air, water, forest, and coastal management and fiscal prudence? Gordy Slack is a freelance writer and a contributing editor of California Wild. |
