This winter break I participated in environmental conservation work at Everglades National Park in South Florida, the largest remaining sub-tropical wilderness in the continental United States.
Although 85-degree temperatures will make anything seem surreal, the natural beauty of the Everglades epitomizes the underappreciated simplicity of nature and its vitalness to the quality of human life. Its restoration has become the largest environmental initiative in the history of the planet, but, through new legislation enhancing officials’ abilities to manipulate restoration laws, Florida politicians have jeopardized the preservation of the Everglades.
Gov. Jeb Bush signed a controversial bill in 2003 that could deprive the Everglades of $4.2 billion in federal aid by lowering water and chemical-level standards. The bill moved a 2006 deadline to reduce phosphorus levels in the Everglades back to 2026, delaying restoration and pollution cleanup, and included an amendment making it harder for citizens to challenge bad permitting decisions by state and local officials.
The systematic destruction of our environment is taking place all over the country — a thorough assault led by greedy industrial polluters and their puppets in the White House. With four out of the six most powerful people in Washington being former energy industry executives and allies, the anti-conservation crusade is destroying the purity of our lakes, rivers, streams, mountains and forests in the name of economic prosperity and advancements in technology and energy efficiency.
While slashing the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bush Administration has been silently chipping away at key provisions in the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act. Federal bureaucracies meant to preserve the environment have been corrupted by corporate interest; most are currently made up of former employees of the world’s worst polluters — the same polluters that these people are now supposed to be regulating.
In Wisconsin, outdoor recreation activities — in which 50 percent of adults directly participate — generate more than $8 billion in state economic output, support almost 111,000 jobs, attract 400,000 tourists annually and provide millions to local communities. Yet, its wildernesses are eroding due to the most environmentally irresponsible state legislature in the nation’s history.
Led by negligent Assembly Speaker John Gard, who dubbed environmentalists “a bunch of girly-girl alarmists” and embraces global warming due to the prospect of Florida-like winters in Wisconsin, and lobbyist sell-out Governor Jim Doyle, state leaders have ceded to big polluters through multiple tax breaks and dismal pollution fees, in addition to cutting back air and water standards disguised in legislation promoting “job creation.”
The apathy directed towards environmental issues can be mainly attributed to a lack of public knowledge due to a drastic breakdown in the democratic process. According to the Tyndall Report, which analyzes television content, of the 15,000 minutes of network news that aired in 2002, only 4 percent focused on the environment.
When asked about networks’ inadequate environmental coverage, Fox News president Roger Ailes credited it to the fact that “environmental stories are not fast-breaking.” The destruction of our earth not only threatens the sanctity and purity of nature, it presents imminent health hazards. Yet coal-burning utilities poisoning our waterways and killing 30,000 people annually is not as “exciting” as a tsunami wiping out hundreds of thousands of people — thus, it’s not as newsworthy.
As we are reminded daily of the precise death toll in Southeast Asia, we are not notified when the EPA reduces allowable amounts of arsenic in public water supplies or when new legislation permits chemical plants to dump toxins into public waterways. Yet, there were practically no reports when the Bush Administration removed carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that causes global warming, from the pollutant list under the Clean Air Act — even as his own military expert on strategic threats, Andrew Marshall, pledged that climate change is “a primary U.S. national security concern.”
You will not hear about the new environmentally-destructive method of strip mining through mountaintop removal, which has coal companies blowing hundreds of feet off the top of the Appalachian Mountains and sending choking dust into the air.
You will not be told about the lax security that makes chemical plants an alluring and open target to terrorists, which, if exploited, would dwarf 9/11’s death toll, or the rapid expansion of chemical tank farms, which FBI WMD specialists refer to as the “poor man’s atomic bomb.” You probably won’t find out how mercury spewing from power plant smokestacks puts 630,000 fetuses (anti-abortionists, take note) annually at risk for permanent IQ loss, blindness and autism once out of the womb.
When citizens fail to hear the stories, they are ill-equipped to direct leaders to prioritize the preservation of our ecosystem. But with corporate America taking control of government agencies, defending the raping of the land by preaching free-enterprise, this nation needs environmentalism to protect itself from fascism.
Adam Lichtenheld ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and international studies.
