Eighty-one percent of Dane county turned out on Election Day. While a sense of elation and celebration should have prevailed after such an exemplary show of citizen participation, the mood instead was sullen, somber, angry, depressed and frustrated. America had re-elected George W. Bush, a man who had started a war on faulty intelligence, changed a $10 trillion plus surplus into a $5.6 trillion deficit, encroached upon civil liberties and the list goes on.

The future seemed dim at the very least. Most frightening to some was a pressing fear for the environment and the ominous future another four years of the same administration would portend. Even if the president's last name shared the same letters as a plant, it was no secret that the Bush administration had a poor environmental record — probably the worst of any president ever.

An overriding preoccupation with the environment probably seemed pretty crazy to much of the United States. Half of these skeptics, comprised of Bush supporters, were pondering why these radical greenies had such a problem with George W., while another faction brushed the environment off as a minor concern on the long list of others. Either way, the environment was glossed over by much of the United States.

This had not always been the case. Much of America's character, values, traditions and prosperity are derived from, and still hinge on, the bounty of nature. This was historically appreciated. From the Aldo Leopolds to the Theodore Roosevelts and even the Richard Nixons, Republicans and Democrats alike fought to conserve the environment. Indeed, it is only a recent phenomenon that the conservation story of the American environment, our country's legacy, has been subtly wrestled out of a leading protagonist role.

This fundamental shift has come with the rise of a corporate power within the government. The line of logic is pretty easy to follow: as corporations expanded in power and replaced local business ventures, the easiest way for them to profit and out-compete small scale ventures in the free market was to externalize some of their production costs into a common area (i.e. sulfuric acid from a large plant into the air or manure from a factory farm dumped into a lake). It was smart to tell a tale that suited their interests and not those of the environment that it exploited.

The best way to do so was to get their fingers entrenched into the government and media in order to control the images people saw. When opposition responded to environmental destruction, these corporate entities began to strategically typecast a universal image of a rebellious environmental heretic who was extreme, not credible and too far out in an unrealistic world to fit into most people's norms.

As these "radical" people became embedded within the lens through which most people perceived environmental efforts, the environment itself became a minor character put on the back burner and inextricably linked with an exclusive type of people — those crazy tree huggers. Essentially, environmentalism became synonymous with an exclusive, radical identity that ostracized mainstream society from taking part in a protection movement precisely because of its radical nature.

Lacking an ability to mobilize strongly around conservation issues, the environment today is left in sorry straights with a general apathy towards environmental protection, an administration that puts American wilderness on the auction block and a corporate media (six corporations own almost all of the T.V. stations, 99 percent of the radio waves and 80 percent of the journals and periodicals) that does little to hold anyone accountable for environmental degradation.

While a host of conservation employees have resigned during the Bush reign because, in the words of former head of the EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement Eric Schaeffer, they are constantly "fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules that [EPA employees] are trying to enforce." They have instead been replaced in almost every major position by people with conflicting interests. Gale Norton, Secretary of Interior in charge of public lands, for example, previously lobbied and litigated for major corporate polluters.

Perhaps a conclusion might be reached from the fact President Bush and company received over $100 million in contributions from coal industries in the 2000 election. He has since lowered pollution standards to let over 120 different companies embroiled in pollution lawsuits off the hook.

The people pay the price, but certainly rarely hear about it in the media. The EPA recently released figures that show that 24,000 Americans die each year because of Bush's euphemistic Clean Air Act that rolls back pollution restrictions on industry. Detailing other health, economic and aesthetic consequences that are quickly undermining American society could go on for hundreds of pages. Yet this just doesn't make headline news.

Few know of the drastic ramifications of failing to protect the environment and even less work to do so. While the corporate sponsored government keeps destroying decades of protective legislation, the general public is blinded from seeing this assault on its country because the media avoids coverage of environmentalism only "radicals" are interested in. It simply wouldn't be in the interests of their now-corporate ownership.

I ask, though, what is more radical: trying to save the roots of America's past, protecting its citizens and its future or repealing a legacy of environmental laws that benefit a few corporate entities at the expense of the public and America? I would say the environmental path President Bush has chosen is the abnormal one. Maybe we need to redefine "radical" and shed the misconceptions fed to us by the corporate media.

Kate Flick ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in sociology.