Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hija

Had it not been for the war, the environment might well be one of the central issues going into this presidential election. Without actually changing much in the way of law, the Bush administration has almost reversed the charter of the EPA through executive actions such as selective issuing of agency reports and appointing individuals to head departments that they explicitly want shut down. Its new directives were summed up by Gale Norton, Secretary of the Interior, as “There can be no environmental progress without economic progress.” Given that we’re still waiting for this economic progress to come flying out from around the corner, this may explain why the EPA has completed less than a tenth of the rules that they did under the first four years of the Clinton and Bush Senior terms.

Bush is officially “for” the environment, as a president would need to be in a nation where 80% of us believe in strengthening and enforcing environmental protection laws. So these changes have come as under-the-radar as possible, often through disingenuous guises such as calling legislation allowing clear cutting of forests the “Healthy Forests” bill. But the perpetual deaths in Iraq have not only exploded civic discourse in their country; they’ve also stolen any focus we had on our own nation’s problems.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Crimes Against Nature details the extraordinarily close ties between Bush’s environmental policies and the energy interests which have helped him raise unprecedented amounts of money for his campaigns. Kennedy further provides a history of the anti-environmental movement, which carries much more green-friendly names such as Citizens for the Environment or the Evergreen Foundation, that he claims have provided a front of questionable industry-funded studies to counter the more sound science that environmentalists have built to support their case for stricter regulation of pollutants.

Kennedy begins with Bush’s record as governor of Texas, during which the state “ranked first in toxic releases to the environment, first in total toxic air emissions from industrial facilities, first in toxic chemical accidents, and first in cancer-causing pollution.” A study he quotes by the city of Houston estimated an annual average of 430 deaths were attributable to air pollution in the Houston area alone.

Too overwhelmingly apparent of a problem to ignore, and too politically vulnerable of an issue to oppose, Bush set out to reduce air pollution through voluntary emission reductions, a policy Kennedy states “works about as well as ‘voluntary taxation’.” In Texas a thousand industrial facilities, releasing “as much nitrogen oxide as 18 million cars,” were excused from Clean Air Act regulations under infamous grandfathering exemptions and then asked to police themselves under the 1999 Voluntary Emissions Reduction Permit Program. The result, according to a University of Texas study, was vast under-reporting of emissions and, predictably, little, if any, actual reductions. Kennedy claims that “at least nine of Texas’s grandfathered polluters ponied up a minimum of $100,000” for Bush’s presidential campaign.

Bush’s White House term began with an Inauguration Day freezing of Clinton’s pending EPA regulations, all of which had been in development for years and included a tighter restriction on the amount of arsenic allowable in our drinking water. Bush then moved almost as quickly to address our nation’s energy problems with Cheney’s notorious energy task force, the secretive, closed-door meetings in which top energy executives, many of them heavy donors to their campaign, allegedly dictated the administration’s energy policies.

While the subsequent energy bill that sought to codify these policies in law didn’t pass through Congress, despite an overwhelming push by the Republican majority, many of these policies have already been in practice by way of the executive control a president has over the EPA.

Under Bush, Kennedy cites the dozens of Clinton-initiated lawsuits against major polluters the EPA has since dropped and claims they’ve given nearly carte blanche approvals for activities such as strip mining that are supposed to require careful consideration before being given go-ahead. In addition to omitting long-awaited results of EPA studies on the greenhouse effect in their annual reports, the administration had, until this September, maintained that human-created emissions were only “one possibility” for recent accelerations in global warming — something even Bill O’Reilly stated you’d have to be an “idiot” to ignore.

Some of the most dismaying accusations in the book involve an almost 19th century disregard for the dangers of chemicals such as carcinogens, carbon dioxide, or PCB’s, such as the charge that the White House Office of Science and Technology delayed for nine months release of a report which stated “the bloodstreams of 1 in 12 American women are coursing with enough mercury to cause neurological damage [and] permanent IQ damage” in their unborn children. Kennedy states the administration later muted their own advisory committee’s warnings over mercury due to lobbying from the albacore tuna industry.

The charges stack up so thickly that Kennedy wisely seeks to escape being dismissed as merely one-sided by taking pains to distinguish his cause from strictly left associations. “I want to be very clear here,” he writes in the introduction, “this book is not about a Democrat attacking a Republican administration” — though he’s certainly not a Democrat attacking Democrats either, who get off with only a few lines of criticism. But, with some notable exceptions (as when he accuses the Bush administration of the worst suppression of science “since the Inquisition”), the book restrains its use of hyperbole or partisan-laden language, at least compared to the tirade this book could have been.

Kennedy seeks to place protection of the environment as a very basic civic tenet, a more everyday, every person form of national defense, and emphasizes the long-standing history of the public trust, the idea that you can do as you like with your private property or with common lands, water, and air until you infringe upon the rights of others. “The truth is,” Kennedy writes, “I don’t even think of myself as an environmentalist anymore. I consider myself a free-marketeer. … Every one of our federal environmental laws is intended to restore true free-market capitalism so that the price of bringing a product to market reflects the costs that it imposes on the public.”

Within its scope, which is the tie between political donations and Bush’s environmental policies, Crimes Against Nature presents a worrisome case. But that scope doesn’t include the broader reaches of environmental and energy issues. Kennedy only cursorily addresses just how critical energy availability is to our country. We’d obviously shut down without it, as California periodically had during their rolling blackouts, but where does the balance reside between ensuring we can meet our electric and automotive needs and, on the other hand, making sure an even more critical need is met: the need to breathe and not die of a spoiled environment?

Kennedy would undoubtedly respond that it’s heartless to let economics trump human health — and it is. But without seriously addressing energy shortages and jobs — which are at least ostensibly Bush’s justification for his policies — he either cuts short the range of his argument or leaves himself wide open to an entire array of responses that he didn’t anticipate in his book.

But of course the full debate over the current state of our nation’s environmental policies won’t occur until we’re done in Iraq.