New York Times Editorial
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/29/opinion/29MON2.html?searchpv=nytToday
from [email protected]
While the nation's attention is focused on the war
against terrorism, the Bush administration is moving, both overtly and
covertly, to dismantle major elements of Bill Clinton's environmental
legacy. It is difficult at a moment of crisis to devote much thought to
things like mining rules or snowmobile bans. But if the president's top
officials have time to undermine environmental regulations, the public
needs to pay attention as well.
The war against the Clinton rules goes back to
Inauguration Day, when the new administration suspended a half-dozen
directives approved in Mr. Clinton's final weeks. Among these was a rule
reducing the arsenic content in drinking water. The arsenic blunder came
to symbolize the administration's fecklessness on environmental issues
generally, and only when Christie Whitman, administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency, promised to review the matter did the
issue recede. But as Interior Secretary Gale Norton now reminds us, the
demolition effort proceeds.
On Thursday, Ms. Norton wheeled out her subordinates at
the Bureau of Land
Management to announce the reversal of Clinton-era regulations involving
hard-rock mining for minerals like gold, copper and lead. The Clinton
rules would have imposed stricter environmental standards on mining
operations and, for the first time, would have given federal officials
the power to block mines likely to cause "substantial irreparable harm"
to water quality and other natural resources. The department claimed
that the rules had been concocted at the "eleventh hour" and were unduly
onerous. They had in fact been in the works for years, and did little
more than impose on the hard-rock mining industry some of the same
standards that apply to other extractive industries.
At least Ms. Norton was up front about it. Much of the
assault on the Clinton rules is occurring under the radar, in obscure
courtrooms where industry is challenging them, and in closed-door
negotiations that shield the administration from public accountability.
Industry lawsuits against government rules are hardly unusual. What is
unusual is the administration's decision to use this litigation as an
excuse to weaken, through settlement talks, popular rules that it would
prefer not to attack directly.
A small but telling case in point is the
administration's sneaky effort to reverse a Clinton rule phasing out
snowmobiles from Yellowstone National Park - a rule buttressed by
overwhelming public approval and years of conscientious science. Under
pressure from various industry lawsuits, however, the administration has
agreed to review the matter and issue what is widely expected to be a
more industry-friendly proposal next year.
In like fashion, the administration has signaled a
retreat from Mr. Clinton's most ambitious land conservation measure - a
Forest Service rule protecting 60 million largely untouched acres of
national forest from new road building, new oil and gas leasing and most
new logging. Nine separate lawsuits have been filed against the plan, by
private companies and state governments. In each case, the Justice
Department has failed to defend the conservation rule in court. Nor,
from the look of things, does it intend to. The sad truth is that the
Bush administration would like nothing better than a court-ordered
excuse to rewrite the plan so as to accommodate the very commercial
activity Mr. Clinton had hoped to prevent.
Another possible rollback that has received virtually no
public attention involves the nation's diminishing wetlands. After a
decade of struggle, environmentalists finally persuaded the Clinton
administration to close a loophole in the clean water laws that had
exposed many thousands of acres of valuable wetlands to commercial
development. In the week before Earth Day last April, when Mr. Bush was
trying to atone for the arsenic fiasco, Mrs. Whitman promised to keep
the loophole closed. Within days, however, the Justice Department began
talks with the home builders and other industry groups - talks from
which the environmentalists say they have been excluded. Mrs. Whitman's
resolve may again be tested.
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