Bush had just made appearances at two huge Oregon wildfire sites and had announced he would propose a forest policy that encouraged cutting the brush and thinning the trees that provide fuel for wildfires. He also wanted to cut and thin the environmental regulations that have slowed the process of logging in the national forests.

The administration explained that private companies would do some of the thinning, and that to make the process commercially attractive to them, the companies would also be allowed to harvest some large, marketable trees.

Environmentalists see the proposed "Healthy Forest" policy as a Trojan horse that will let the timber companies into the woods. They're sure that Bush is simply using last summer's wildfires as a pretext to increase logging in the national forests, which his administration has wanted to do, anyway.

Many Americans had probably assumed that three decades of debate and legislation had settled at least some environmental issues once and for all, and that environmental policy was developing on a historical ratchet that let it tighten up but not slip back. If they thought so, they were wrong. In politics, virtually nothing is settled once and for all, and the ratchet can easily be reversed.

Whether or not Bush's forest initiatives represent a reversal can obviously be argued either way. But there's no question that many environmentalists see it as one - or that they see it as only the tip of a menacing policy iceberg. From the beginning, the Bush administration has been widely perceived as friendly to extractive industries and developers, and hostile to preservation. Although this perception goes far beyond forest policy, the administration's forest policy initiatives have clearly helped to form it.

There has never been any question about where the Bush administration stands on logging. After an interview last April, the Vancouver, Washington Columbian reported that "Regional Forester Harv Forsgren said freeing up federal timber in the Northwest is one of the Bush administration's highest land-management priorities."

The administration didn't improve its credibility by talking in the Healthy Forest proposal about letting loggers cut more timber in forests governed by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. The plan was designed to protect the northern spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, and other old-growth-associated species, while allowing some logging to continue. It persuaded U.S. District Court Judge William Dwyer to lift the injunction that had prevented virtually all logging in the national forests of western Oregon, western Washington, and northwestern California.

The Bush administration argues that when the plan was adopted, Clinton "promised" the forest products industry a billion board feet of timber a year. In fiscal year 2001, the administration says, the cut was only 308 million board feet. "We're trying to go back to those original promises," Undersecretary of Agriculture for Resources and the Environment Mark Rey, a former forest products lobbyist who has worked for the American Paper Institute/American Forest Products Association and other industry groups, as well as for a Senate committee, told The Seattle Times. "We're not ready to walk away from the communities in the Northwest to which promises were made." Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth, told the Columbian that he was "looking for solutions to the legal and procedural entanglements that have all but halted federal timber sales on the 24.5 million acres of so-called spotted owl forests in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. "When I say 'fix it,' I'm really saying we're not doing what we told the public we would do when we made the decision.'" Bosworth has told regional administrators to recommend changes in the forest plan. In the real world, there was no chance of cutting a billion board feet a year and still protecting vital habitat. Jack Ward Thomas, who led the scientific committees that recommended spotted owl protection and laid out the basic options that were incorporated into the forest plan - and who later served as chief of the Forest Service - says that even at the time, he was "stunned that they had projected 1.1 billion board feet." Rey says he is aware of such "revisionist" comments and "I'm not saying that these people were wrong," but "the public record at the time doesn't support any of these assertions." The record does support the administration's memory of Clinton's rhetoric. "I went back and reviewed the record to make sure I wasn't misreading" Clinton's comments, Rey says. He read the transcripts and listened to the tapes, and Clinton has not been misquoted. Now, Rey says, "what I've been ordered to do is redeem a commitment, an unambiguous and unequivocal commitment, by the Clinton administration." In other words, the Clinton administration's pie-in-the-sky statements give the Bush administration an opportunity to talk about restoring the balance.

Some environmentalists doubt that Bush really plans to make a kamikaze attack on the forest plan. That would antagonize a lot of voters, win over very few, and invite the kind of judicial gridlock that the plan was designed to end. The scientific rationale for saving old growth is stronger than it was eight years ago, and the economic rationale for cutting old growth is much weaker. The public rhetoric is hard-line and very much in sync with the administration's philosophy of opening public lands to more resource exploitation. But privately, the administration may be willing to make a deal. In fact, there is some reason to believe that in exchange for increased thinning and, perhaps, more leeway in eastside forests, the administration may acquiesce in, if not embrace, a plan to put old growth west of the Cascade Mountains permanently off limits.

Last year, some environmentalists thought there might be a chance of compromising on the future of the Northwest's remaining old and mature forests: in exchange for protecting old growth on the west side of the cascades, accept some additional thinning in younger forests and, basically, give up some trees you'd rather save on the east side. Senator Ron Wyden (D. OR), Chairman of the Public Lands and Forest Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and the senior republican on the committee, Senator Larry Craig (R. ID) came up with a compromise proposal. The environmental groups that had been pushing a compromise weren't comfortable with this proposal, though, and they tried to get a bill they could support. Some environmental groups hadn't bought into the compromise strategy in the first place. The environmental community was deeply divided. The push for compromise legislation bogged down in Congress, where most people's minds were on Iraq, and the wildfires of 2002 led to sharp disagreements about forest policy. The last Congress expired without compromise legislation even being introduced. There is no compromise on the table now. But Rey suggests that the time may still be ripe to work one out.

Bush might find little support for an attack on the Forest Plan, but virtually no one will argue with his statement that our old national policy of preventing forest fires has failed. Of course it has. Smokey the Bear has become a pariah. No one believes you should try to suppress all forest fires. Actually, no one believes you can suppress all fires indefinitely. Many people face the threat of being burned out, if not burned up. Now that the houses are there, creating what is known as the "wildland urban interface," no one seriously suggests letting them burn. Rey acknowledges that some people believe "every time we intervene, we screw things up worse than they were before."

In this case, he says, "we're simply not in a position to agree on that.... Even if we were willing to accept the economic consequences, there is a substantial risk to human life and property that I don't think the body politic is willing to accept." Some 190 million acres of federal land are ready to ignite in catastrophic fires, Rey says, and we are currently reducing the fuel load on only about 2.5 million acres a year. "At that rate," he says, "we will never catch up." Most environmentalists agree that it makes sense to reduce the "fire load" near communities and homes by getting rid of brush and forest debris, either through controlled burning or, more likely, by removing the brush and branches by machine or hand. But critics suggest that letting loggers deep into the back country has nothing to do with saving those poorly sited homes.

Bush didn't alleviate their suspicions when he said, "There's nothing wrong with people being able to earn a living off of effective forest management." Of course, there's not. There may not even be anything wrong with subsidizing some loggers, their employers and their communities with public resources, just as we subsidize a host of other occupations, companies and regions. But it probably violates our international trade agreements. It has nothing to do with the free market. And it should be discussed frankly for what it is. Jobs aside, one does not have to run a forest products company to think the nation should allow more thinning and even more commercial logging in at least some national forests. Jim Lyons, who served as Undersecretary of Agriculture for Resources and the Environment under Clinton and is now a professor at the Yale College of Forestry and Environmental Studies, says "there's general agreement about the need to thin" in certain areas, particularly along the Wildland Urban Interface.

And it's not just a question of reducing fire hazards. Thomas suggests that we should cut more timber in our national forests than the roughly 2 billion board feet a year that we currently do. He doesn't advocate a return to the 13.5 billion board feet that was cut in the Reagan years - "that was way too much, and I said so" - but he does think the forests could support several times the annual cut that they now produce. We have not reduced our use of wood or paper. We continue building grandiose houses, sending junk mail and throwing away food wrappers. Those trees have to come from somewhere. If they don't come from our national forests, they'll come from somewhere else. The real-world alternative to taking them from the national forests, Thomas argues, is importing the wood from - and therefore exporting our environmental problems to - Canada. "When we get it someplace else, we export the environmental impact, and we export the economic opportunities," he says. "I think there's an ethical question involved there."

But Bush doesn't claim to be weighing the ethics of logging at home versus logging in Canada. And environmentalists believe that he wants to reward campaign contributors in the forest products industry by letting them take more publicly owned timber, subsidizing the process with public funds. "[T]he government doesn't make money when it sells timber rights to loggers," New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman wrote on August 27. "According to the General Accounting Office, the Forest Service consistently spends more money arranging timber sales than it actually gets from the sales. How much money? Funny you should ask: last year, the Bush administration stopped releasing that information. In any case, the measured costs of timber sales capture only a fraction of the true budgetary costs of logging in the national forests, which is supported by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal subsidies, especially for road-building."

The measured costs are high enough. The GAO has reported that from 1992 to 1997, Forest Service timber sales lost $2 billion. (The most expensive part of preparing a federal timber sale is building roads into the forests. The Forest Service already has 385,000 miles of roads. To reach some of the areas covered by Healthy Forest, it would have to build miles more.)

Krugman wrote that "beneath the free-market rhetoric is a plan for increased subsidies to favored corporations. Surprise.... Wouldn't it be nice if just once... the Bush administration came up with a plan that didn't involve weakened environmental protection, financial breaks for wealthy individuals and corporations, and reduced public oversight?"

A Lack of Trust

"These decisions are all about trust," Rey says. "Many of the major environmental groups have spent tens of millions of dollars to demonize this administration. But I still trust it." Needless to say, a lot of environmentalists don't.

Realistically, most environmentalists probably wouldn't take a forest health proposal at face value no matter which administration had made it. There is a long history of using public forests for the benefit of special interests and specifically of using fire prevention or forest health as a ruse for cutting more commercially valuable trees. In 1999, when Bill Clinton still occupied the White House, the General Accounting Office reported that "most of the trees that need to be removed to reduce accumulated fuels are small in diameter and have little or no commercial value." Nevertheless, "forest officials told us they tend to (1) focus on areas with high-value commercial timber rather than on areas with high fire hazards or (2) include more large, commercially valuable trees in a timber sale than are necessary to reduce accumulated fuels."

In 1995, a Republican Congress passed - and a Democratic President signed - the infamous "Salvage Rider," which for 18 months exempted certain timber sales from environmental reviews, administrative appeals and court injunctions. The pretense was reducing fire risk by removing dead or damaged trees, but in fact, commercially valuable trees were cut, too. And a special provision allowed companies whose timber contracts had been cancelled because of the Northwest Forest Plan to replace the timber volume from other sites. Sound familiar? Healthy Forest is "son of salvage rider," Lyons says. "What's being proposed is a process that's all too reminiscent" of what happened in 1995. It's "the same game plan," he says, and "the same people, ironically, are in positions" to make it happen. He alludes to his successor, Rey - whom he describes as "a very bright guy, very competent" - who had left the forest products industry and joined the staff of the Senate Interior and Natural Resources Committee in time to mastermind the salvage rider.

Logging under false pretenses certainly didn't start with George W. Bush. Clinton signed the salvage rider, after all. And although he later claimed he hadn't known what he was signing, the White House had been fully informed before the law was passed and the Forest Service had urged him to veto it. But most environmental groups do not trust the Bush administration's policies or intentions on any major issue. When the Natural Resources Defense Council released a voluminous report entitled Rewriting the Rules earlier this year, it proclaimed that "federal agencies have quietly launched the worst attack on key environmental safeguards in modern history." An NRDC official called the current administration "the most anti- environmental presidential administration ever."

Now, the administration has announced that it is contemplating a revision of the National Environmental Policy Act, the cornerstone of modern environmental legislation, which was sponsored by the late Senator Henry M. Jackson and signed into law by Richard M. Nixon on New Year's Day, 1970. Of course, the environmental impact statements that NEPA requires can be cumbersome and expensive - and they are more elaborate than anyone envisioned when the law was passed. (Despite a widespread misconception to the contrary, NEPA was not the law under which William Dwyer enjoined logging in the national forests where spotted owls lived. Dwyer based his ruling on the National Forest Management Act of 1976 - or, rather, on the federal forest-management agencies' egregious violations of that act. Dwyer wrote that the agencies had shown a "systematic and deliberate refusal to comply with the nation's environmental laws.") But the essence of NEPA is looking before you leap. Inevitably, looking takes time. The Bush administration wants the freedom to leap a little sooner - and environmentalists think they know which way it wants to go. (The exhaustive environmental impact statement was born after a federal district court ruled in 1972 that the Interior Department had not adequately considered alternatives to a proposed sale of oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The battles that have been fought over impact statements in the intervening 30 years have been lengthy, expensive, and sometimes wasteful - but they haven't kept U.S. economic output from more than doubling, or kept U.S. gasoline prices from sinking, in constant dollars, below their levels of 1972.)

The environmental groups' hostility to the Bush administration comes as no surprise. Rob Perks, a principal author of Rewriting the Rules, says "it was clear before Bush was elected, based on his record as governor of Texas, that he was anti-environmental." In the election campaign of 2000, he deliberately staked out a position far from the green end of America's cultural/political spectrum when he advocated drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and insisted that global warming wasn't real.

ANWR: An Enviromental Litmus Test

It would have been hard to find a more symbolic, litmus-test issue than ANWR - and the administration hasn't let it drop. Since the Presidential election, of 2000 in fact, this administration's eagerness to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has become almost a comedy routine. Just as the administration has seized on the wildfires of 2002 as a pretext for expanded logging, so it has seized on other recent events as new pretexts for drilling in ANWR. When California electricity prices went through the roof, the California power crisis became a justification to drill in ANWR. After 9/11, when dependence on Middle Eastern oil became an issue, that was advanced as a reason to drill.

Never mind that oil from ANWR probably wouldn't be available for 10 years and would therefore be totally irrelevant to any current crisis. And never mind that the administration has not tried to significantly increase the so-called CAFE standards for light trucks or any other vehicles - even though in August, The New York Times reported that increasing the CAFE standard to 40 mpg would save enough oil each year to supply the total annual energy use of Mexico. For whatever reason, the administration has treated the desirability of opening ANWR as an article of faith.

(ANWR was created in 1960, under the Eisenhower administration. The first attempt to open it came in 1987, under Ronald Reagan - when oil prices were low and supplies were high, but production from Prudhoe Bay had peaked. The first Bush administration tried again to open ANWR in the early 1990s. That was a cornerstone of a national energy plan - which also included no increase in CAFE standards - that the administration made public right before it launched the war in Kuwait.)

Bush's stand on ANWR fits into a broader policy of encouraging energy exploration on public lands and in waters under federal jurisdiction. This has produced some ironic moments of its own. Originally, the administration backed oil and gas development in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, near the Florida coast. Among the many Floridians who objected was the President's own brother, Governor Jeb Bush. The federal government subsequently bought back oil and gas rights in the eastern Gulf, and explained that the administration favored drilling only in places where the residents wanted it - places like Alaska. This did not sit well with residents of California, many of whom do not favor increased oil drilling off their own scenic coast. There, a federal judge had halted the extension of offshore leases on the grounds that the government hadn't gotten approval from local authorities. Instead of buying out those leases, the administration has appealed the ruling to a higher court.

The administration also has been very selective about defending federal decisions or rules. When courts have ruled against or interest groups have challenged rules or decisions designed to protect natural resources, the administration has tended to back away.

The Bush administration inherited its predecessor's designation of 58.5 million acres more roadless area in the national forests. At first, the Bush administration talked about repealing the new rule. That provoked a lot of vocal opposition - and clearly would have provoked a lot of litigation - so the administration backed off. Instead, when opponents have challenged roadless designations in court, the administration has not defended the rule. (Environmental groups have intervened, and in the latest court decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court has upheld the roadless rule.)

This is part of a pattern. When a federal judge in Oregon ruled that the endangered species designation of coastal coho salmon had to include fish raised in hatcheries, the administration did not appeal.

University of Washington fisheries and zoology professor James Karr, the last director of the university's Institute for Environmental Studies, calls the Bush administration's refusal to defend the environmental rules it inherited "a transcendent issue." In general, he says, "they're far worse than the last administration - and that was pretty bad."

Off The Radar Screen: Playing By New Rules

A lot has been happening off the nation's radar screen. As the University of Washington's Bullitt professor of environmental law, William Rodgers, puts it, "there are 100 ways to achieve" a goal of undercutting environmental protection "without standing up and being counted." Rodgers describes a case involving the aerial spraying of pesticides to control the ghost shrimp that undermine oyster beds in Washington's Willapa Bay. The bay is probably "the last place in the U.S." where aerial spraying of wetlands is allowed, Rodgers says. The state has issued a permit. Under the Clean Water Act, the EPA is supposed to review the permit. Opponents of the spraying asked the EPA to basically veto the state decision. Rodgers says the EPA eventually replied that by law, it had only 90 days in which to review the permit, and the 90 days had already elapsed, so there was nothing the agency could do. "What are we paying them for?" he asks. But he isn't sure that things are any worse under Bush than they have been under his predecessors.

Other people have no doubt. In Rewriting the Rules, the NRDC claims that "the Bush administration is moving to quietly subvert the federal agency rules that translate congressional [environmental] mandates into specific regulations." Environmental statutes, by themselves, tend to be little more than ringing declarations of principle or intent. Without rules, money to enforce them, and a willingness to defend them in court, the statutes have little practical effect. (Relying on most environmental statutes by themselves would be kind of like relying on the 10 commandments, rather than on a modern criminal code backed by a police force and prosecutors.)

Actually, the administration's under-the-radar approach isn't under the radar any more. The press has noticed. But in general, the changing of administrative rules has still not produced the kind of political backlash that might follow a more frontal assault on the nation's environmental laws.

Many people seem to view environmental laws and rules as almost Constitutional protection of the natural world, as immutable as, say, the Bill of Rights. They aren't, of course. The environmental laws are merely statutes that Congress passed and Congress can suspend, amend or repeal whenever it chooses. Any administration willing to jump through the necessary procedural hoops is free to alter the rules. This administration has chosen to do so.

Many critics point out that it has also chosen to appoint former industry lobbyists and employees, such as Rey, to important federal jobs below the cabinet level. (Rey himself argues that a person should be judged on the basis of what he is doing right now, not what he did in the past or may do in the future. Who knows, he says; his critics may wind up working for government or industry, and he himself may wind up on the board of the Wilderness Society.) Actually, if one assumes that there is a dichotomy on most environmental issues between industry and the environmental movement, and if one assumes that the administration wants people familiar with the issues, then it has to pick people who have been associated with one camp or the other.

Some critics concede this point, but suggest that the real problem is people who ignore science and make decisions on a purely political basis. Science-based decision-making has been a kind of mantra for years. By cutting out a certain amount of environmental review, the administration seems to be pushing science into the back seat. Asked point blank about that, Rey sidesteps, saying that the scientists he has heard address the issue of fire danger agree that it's a major problem and that it demands a quick response. He says that figuring out how to deal with the mess left by a century of fire suppression will be the central question of forest management for at least 20 years. But "I don't think this is a science question. It's a political question. It's a policy question."

No one who has given the issues much thought believes that science can provide all the answers. "We shouldn't be slaves to science," Karr says. "It doesn't make decisions. But it informs us about consequences. I don't see any thoughtful evaluation of consequences."

The current administration has not exactly emphasized the importance of scientific evaluation. It has proposed a budget that would cut funds for fellowships given to graduate students in environmental science.

It has also sought to exempt the military - which owns huge amounts of land in the continental United States - from all major environmental laws. It has delayed the Clinton plan to ban snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. It has transferred or dismissed long-term employees who have simply tried to do their jobs. "They're conducting a purge," says Dennis McKinney of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. PEER's executive director, Jeff Ruch, says that his organization has heard from EPA employees responsible for enforcing the environmental laws, and "for the most part, they're dispirited and confused and don't know what they can proceed with." The cumulative effect of these and other changes is significant but Perks says, "I don't think people really get it."

Occasionally, somebody does notice. It made headlines when the Environmental Protection Agency's director of regulatory enforcement, Eric Schaeffer, quit after 12 years with the agency, stating publicly that the administration had encouraged utilities that the EPA had sued for violating the Clean Air Act to back out of settlements with the agency. When the U.S. Geological Survey terminated the contract employment of a mapmaker who had posted on a government web site a map of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that showed caribou calving where the government wanted to let oil companies drill, the incident provided fodder for six days' worth of Doonesbury cartoons.

Not-So-Clean Air

The attorneys general of nine northeastern states - all of New England plus New York, New Jersey and Connecticut - have noticed rule changes, too. They have sued the federal government over its decision to change the rule on "new source review," which required a utility - or other corporation - that operated a plant old enough to have been grandfathered in under the Clean Air Act to install best available control technology when it expanded or modernized the plant. Among other things, the rule change enables a company to use its two consecutive most-heavily-polluting years in the past 10, rather than its current pollution level, as a baseline for calculating new emissions; to exclude from the calculations any emissions attributable to increased demand for its product; to cap overall emissions from a whole industrial complex without capping or reducing them at each individual plant. When the administration proposed the rule change last fall, the states said they would sue, so in effect, the New Year's Eve announcement of the suit was old news. One can argue, of course, that a remodeled plant will probably produce less pollution than the old plant did, so that if you put fewer financial barriers in the path of remodeling, everyone gains. But the attorneys general - who are almost all Democrats - don't see it that way. In announcing the suit, Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal - who had earlier called the proposed rule change a declaration that "the Northeast can drop dead" - noted that not only were local industries and old coal burning plants depositing acid rain and other pollutants on residents of those states, but also "citizens of the North East... receive all of the pollution but none of the power from ... coal burning plants in the Midwest."

Mountaintop Removal

If the administration has showed limited zeal for enforcing some rules, it has changed others to legalize practices that began well before it took office. What had been accomplished through the back door can now be accomplished through the front. Under the nation's commitment to "no net loss of wetlands" the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers required developers who destroyed natural wetlands to "mitigate" the damage by creating new wetlands (or restoring damaged wetlands) in exchange for the old. Often, they didn't. Even if they did, the new wetlands seldom replicated the ecological functions of the wetlands they replaced. And often, no one bothered checking to see if mitigation projects worked - or even if they had been done. Now, the Corps has changed the rules so that developers who destroy wetlands do not even have to try - or pretend - to replace them. Through that rule change, the "no net loss" policy has disappeared.

In January, the administration announced it was considering other rule changes that might remove federal protection from up to 20 percent of the nation's wetlands. The administration says it is trying to make the rules conform to a 2001 Supreme Court ruling. The court shot down an effort to keep Illinois cities and villages from dumping refuse in an abandoned gravel pit where trenches had filled with water that attracted migratory birds. The federal government clearly has power to regulate navigable waters. The government has stretched the definition of "navigable" to include streams and wetlands that are tributaries of or adjacent to waters that can truly be navigated. It had also stretched the definition to include totally isolated wetlands that were used by migratory birds. An earlier Supreme Court decision upheld the regulation of adjacent wetlands. But in this most recent case, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. Army Corps of Engineers, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote for a five-vote majority that the so-called Migratory Bird Rule did not give the Army Corps of Engineers power to regulate the disposal site in question. In the ruling that allowed the Corps to regulate adjacent wetlands, the Court had said "that the word 'navigable' in the statute was of 'limited effect' ...," Rehnquist wrote. "But it is one thing to give a word limited effect and quite another to give it no effect whatever." The chief justice also said that "[p]ermitting [the Corps] to claim federal jurisdiction over ponds and mudflats falling within the 'Migratory Bird Rule' would result in a significant impingement of the States' traditional and primary power over land and water use." The ruling itself was very narrow: Congress had not clearly given the Corps power to use the Migratory Bird Rule to regulate this particular disposal site - and environmental groups have argued that it doesn't force the federal government to back off its regulation of wetlands at all. There are other bases on which to regulate. The administration is frankly asking for public comment on a revision of the rules that would be much broader than the Supreme Court has required.

The administration has already changed the rules under the Clean Water Act to permit so-called mountaintop removal mining. This practice, employed in the Appalachians, involves blasting away the tops of mountains to reach underlying seams of coal. The wastes are dumped into valleys and streams. Under the Clean Water Act - which Congress passed by an overwhelming majority in 1972, three years after Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire - it is illegal to dump wastes into streams. This did not stop the EPA from letting the Corps issue permits for doing just that or, ultimately, stop the mining companies from blasting away mountaintops and depositing the tailings in Appalachian streams. As a political sop to Senator Robert Byrd, the Clinton administration proposed changing the rules to formally allow the EPA to OK the permits. When enough people protested, the Clinton administration backed off. Now, the Bush administration has gone ahead with the rule change. But in May, U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II ruled against the Corps, saying that the federal "agencies' attempt to legalize their longstanding illegal regulatory practice must fail."

James Karr calls the exemption for strip mine tailings "absolutely unbelievable." Karr was unimpressed - to put it mildly - with the last administration's enthusiasm for enforcing the Clean Water Act, but he says the current administration has been even less enthusiastic. He is particularly disturbed by the fact that it seems to be "deserting national standards" and turning decisions on water quality over to the states. Karr makes it clear that he is "not arguing against allowing creativity in the states." He does object to "the federal government not having broad oversight."

National oversight does little good without the will or the money to enforce national standards. Government at every level makes choices about enforcement. Those choices reflect its priorities. Patti Goldman, managing attorney of the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund's Seattle office, says there is a widespread sense that this administration won't enforce the environmental laws, and that there seems to be "a whole new philosophy of 'live and let live.'" The administration's budget proposals both this year and last would have cut funding for enforcement, although Congress maintained funding at its previous levels.

No Money for the Superfund

The administration also has not asked Congress to revive the so-called "polluters' tax" that had funded the Superfund to clean up "orphan" waste sites where the people responsible for creating them either couldn't be found or weren't sufficiently solvent. With money in the trust fund, the EPA could also tell a polluting company that if it didn't clean up a site itself, the agency would do it and send the company the bill. The tax was actually a bundle of three taxes levied on domestic crude oil and imported petroleum products, chemicals, and the income of any corporation showing a profit of more than $2 million a year.

It's not as if Bush had repealed the Superfund tax himself. In 1995, a conservative Congress let the tax die. The Clinton administration tried unsuccessfully to revive it. Now, the Bush administration has said that it will not ask Congress to reinstate the tax.

Critics point out that the situation has changed fundamentally since 1995. Then, the fund held some $ 3.5 billion. By the end of 2003, it is expected to hold only $28 million. If the earmarked taxes are not revived, the EPA will have no money to either coerce polluters or clean up orphan sites unless Congress provides it from general tax revenues.

Critics also argue that by not trying to reimpose the tax, the administration is shifting the financial burden from polluting industries to the rest of us. A counter-argument is that the tax was forcing corporations to pay for pollution they did not cause.

That can in turn be countered with a little history: When the Superfund law was passed in 1980, the companies basically made a deal: they would be shielded from liability for cleaning up oil contamination; in return, they would pay the tax. Letting the tax go without otherwise changing the law would enable them to have their cake and eat it, too.

Playing to a Sterotype

Letting the Superfund tax expire plays to the stereotype that Republicans like big business and try to weaken environmental laws. Reality is more complicated than that. The Bush proposal to exempt logging in national forests from some environmental constraints mirrors the special interest legislation that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle pushed through for national forests in his home state of South Dakota.

Still, the current Bush administration did a lot for the stereotype by the way it put together its national energy policy: bringing in a string of energy company executives for private talks; giving environmental groups an opportunity to comment only at the last minute-and then only in writing; and finally by refusing to tell the public who was in the room. "In addition to [Energy Secretary Spencer] Abraham's meetings with three dozen industry representatives," The Washington Post reported in March, lobbyists and executives - several of them large campaign contributors - worked extensively with administration officials at various levels as they assembled Bush's energy policy. Representatives of the Edison Electric Institute, American Gas Association, the National Petrochemical and refiners Association collaborated with those developing the policy recommendations."

Fleeing From Kyoto

The administration has not tried to reduce our use of the fossil fuels that those energy companies sell and that produce the carbon dioxide emissions responsible for most of the human contribution to global warming. At first, Bush basically denied that global warming was real. "From the start," the Christian Science Monitor reported in June, "and in line with energy and oil interests that are among his biggest supporters, the president has expressed skepticism about the scientific basis for reported climate change." ("If you don't even buy into global warming, it's surreal," Rodgers says. "They're making up their own world.") But last summer, a report by the EPA and other federal departments - which was required by a treaty that the first President Bush signed in 1992 - announced that global warming "is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years ... due mostly to human activities." Asked about this finding, Bush replied, "I have read the report put out by the bureaucracy."

(He may have also have read that in its first issue of the new year, Nature published two studies that show species moving north and laying eggs or blooming earlier, as average temperatures increase. The ranges of some European butterfly species have moved 30 to 60 miles north. On average, species have been moving toward the poles at a rate of 4 miles a decade. Spring events, such as egg laying and flowering, have been happening an average of 2.4 days each decade. At about the same time, an article in Science reported that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has evidently been melting at a steady rate for the past 10,000 years, although the study's principal author said in an interview that global warming caused by human activities could certainly accelerate the rate of melting in the future.)

Before Bush read the report put out by the bureaucracy, he rejected the Kyoto protocol, which commits industrialized nations to reducing greenhouse emissions, and he has rejected the whole Kyoto approach. The Kyoto agreement calls for actual reduction of carbon emissions. Bush has proposed instead to reduce the "intensity" of carbon emissions - that is, the amount of carbon emitted per unit of gross national product. This means, basically, that he wants the U.S. economy to become more efficient. The administration has proposed reducing carbon intensity 18 percent by 2012. Critics point out that the economy's carbon intensity has already been cut by more than 17 percent - so that actually, the Bush plan would require virtually no increase in efficiency, and therefore no net reduction in carbon emissions. They say that instead of rolling back carbon emissions to their 1990 levels by 2010, as the Kyoto agreement calls for, the U.S. would actually increase its total emissions.

The Bush plan on global warming proposes significant spending on research and tax credits for purchasers of hybrid and fuel cell vehicles. And it includes tax credits for voluntary emission reductions by industry. The administration has conceded that the nation can't trust corporations to comply voluntarily with accounting and financial disclosure rules, yet it wants to rely heavily on voluntary compliance with rules and statutes written to protect the environment. In February, the Christian Science Monitor reported that "John Reilly, a climate expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... calls the administrations CO2 targets a reasonable first step. But he adds that the plan provides nothing to ensure that the targets will be reached. Voluntary tax credits, for example, merely would attract "people who would have installed a new furnace or shut down an inefficient plant anyway,' he says."

What We Say Isn't What We Do

Bush says that he rejects Kyoto because it would cripple the U.S. economy. One can argue that Bush's rhetoric and actions conflict with what most Americans say they value but coincide closely with the ways most Americans really act. In poll after poll, people say they value a healthy environment, lower carbon emissions, wildlife in Alaska - you name it - but in fact, what most people actually do implies quite different values.

They buy and drive SUVs. (Schizophrenically, a 21st-century American can drive an SUV with a trailer hitch and a bumper sticker that says, "live simply that others may simply live.") They avoid public transportation. They buy or build large wooden houses, which they air condition in the summer and keep T-shirt warm all winter. When the price of gasoline goes up a few cents a gallon, they are outraged.

Surely Bush and his strategists noticed the negative public reaction to the petroleum price spike during the 2000 Presidential campaign, and noticed green Al Gore's quick move to release supplies from the nation's strategic petroleum reserve to bring the price back down.

The Voters Didn't Care

More recently, everyone has noticed that the voters in the 2002 off-year election didn't hold Bush environmental policies against Republican candidates for the House and Senate, giving the Republicans majorities in both houses. The handwriting was on the wall before the voters even went to the polls. On November 2, The New York Times observed that "[e]nvironmental issues are not resonating with voters in this midterm election the way they usually do." The Times attributed the voters' attitude to the nation's preoccupation with Iraq, to the Democrats' failure to take a stand on environmental issues, and, finally, "to the clever way Mr. Bush has pursued his anti-environmental agenda." Except for his open opposition to Kyoto, "the president has stayed in the shadows - leaving it to his cabinet officers to chip away, administratively and in the courts, at the various rules and regulations that his allies and political contributors in the oil, gas, mining, timber and other extractive industries find so annoying."

No matter why the voters didn't care - or didn't vote as if they cared - companies and industrial groups that have wanted environmental laws and rules changed have seen the November election results as an opportunity to get what they've been hoping for. "Around the country, businesses and industries that donated millions of dollars to elect Republicans are mapping out strategies to take advantage of the party's sweep," the New York Times reported in December. But some of those businesses may overestimate what Bush can accomplish with a narrow Senate majority - and a public that still thinks it is committed to protecting forests, species, air and water. "Privately," the Times reported, "White House officials say, they realize that the newly strengthened Republicans in Congress and their business allies may be inclined to overreach."

The Times explained that "moves perceived as aggressively anti-environmental might make the president appear to be a captive of business. That could hurt him when he seeks re-election in 2004."

Indeed it might, but in so far as environmental issues are a front in America's ongoing culture wars, the tide of battle has turned against the greens. Bush and his strategists have deliberately played to one side in the culture wars. The open insistence on drilling in ANWR has been, among things, a statement of values.

So was the appearance of the secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior last March in Klamath Falls, Oregon, where they ceremonially opened the headgates of the Klamath irrigation project and let water flow to farmers whose water had been cut off the year before to save endangered fish. Environmentalists and Indian tribes with treaty fishing rights protested, but the values of the old west had at least temporarily triumphed. (The triumph may indeed be temporary. An estimated 25 percent of the Klamath River's fall chinook salmon run died last year, swept by disease while the big fish were crammed into the lower river, waiting for enough water to get upstream. The California Department of Fish and Game has laid the blame for the massive fish kill squarely on last year's diversion of irrigation water.)

Nothing makes the conflict of values - or the fact that the environment really is a battlefield in America's culture wars - clearer than Senator Larry Craig's response to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' December ruling in favor of the Clinton roadless rule: "If the 9th Circuit Court were playing baseball," Craig said, "this decision on the roadless rule would be their third strike. The first strike was ruling that America's school children cannot say 'under God' during the Pledge of Allegiance; [the] second strike is the recent ruling that the right to bear arms is not meant for private citizens...."

A Fundamental Difference

Of course, beneath the symbols and the rhetoric lies a granite core of reality: temperatures will rise or they won't; fish in the Klamath River will survive or they won't; Alaskan caribou will continue to prosper in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or they won't. But how one defines an environmental problem and how - or if - one deals with it generally reflect one's assumptions and values.

Thoughtful environmentalists concede that what we say about environmental values doesn't reflect the ways we really spend our time or money. But, they say, it is government's business to create incentives for people to act in accordance with their stated values and their real long-term interests.

The issue of incentives is where the administration and its environmental critics converge in one sense and diverge fundamentally in another. Everyone wants to jigger the market to alter corporate or individual behavior. The Bush administration wants to supply carrots, rather than sticks, to encourage corporate compliance with environmental laws and goals. Environmentalists are reluctant to abandon the sticks. And they are more interested than the administration in changing consumer choices - by, for example, increasing gasoline prices enough to get the attention of anyone who contemplates buying or driving an SUV. Bush is willing to offer tax incentives for the purchase of hybrid cars but shows little interest in basically coercing consumer choice.

Some of Bush's critics believe that it is the business of government to create incentives - real, hard, economic incentives - for people to do the right thing. Bush evidently does not. That is a fundamental political difference. Beyond all the technicalities, beyond all the seamy considerations of paying off supporters or paying back opponents, it means that Bush and the environmental movement will never see the world the same way. This may be a legitimate difference in political philosophy but Bush's environmental critics won't see it that way; instead, they will see the shadows of the same corporate executives who were invited behind closed doors to help shape an energy policy for the new millennium.