TheMillerCircle.org

Not long after the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was passed by Congress in 1973, the Republicans began to oppose the act and reduce its impact: ESA became  part of the Republican deregulatory mania. The ESA requires that Federal agencies must consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, before proposing regulations that could affect the environment or further threaten identified species. Fish, wildlife and plants are specifically listed for protection  in the ESA. In some cases, like the Spotted Owl controversy, which played out under the Reagan administration, the ESA  led to hardened opinions over things like  logging rights and land development vs animal and environmental protection.

When Newt Gingrich took control of Congress in the 1990s, he tried to gut the ESA, but the popularity of the law insured its survival. G.W. Bush used his self-appointed executive powers to make the ESA irrelevant by eliminating the normal consultative process between Federal agencies. His elimination of the ESA was one reason why he was able to put vast land tracts in Utah up for oil and gas leases in December 2008, without any environmental or species impact studies. That process would normally have taken years to complete and seems ideally suited for environmental protection by preventing impulsive, destructive behavior: who was more impulsive than G.W. Bush?

Obama’s executive memorandum to restore the ESA has delighted environmentalists throughout the world, since the United States had once established itself as the international leader in environmental protection, going back to the 1960s and 1970s. An increased public awareness of environmental issues was first stimulated by Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring, which pointed out the dangers of excessive application of the insecticide DDT (You can read a more detailed, prior comment on this early history here).  The aroused public and sensitized Congress passed many environmental protection laws such as the ESA and the Clean Air Act, while Richard Nixon was president. He and Gerald Ford were the last Republicans that were willing Republican participants in  support of environmental protection laws. Ronald Reagan began the Republican opposition to these Federal regulations through his “starve the beast” policies and Bush as “the decider” effectively gutted them through an administrative regulatory fiat. Thus, Obama has applied another erasure to some of the Bush legacy on environmental policy changes. What’s next–the Clean Air Act?
In retrospect, the Spotted Owl controversy of the 1970s and 1980s seems like an nice little fairy tale compared to what confronts us today. The Spotted Owl represented a simple decision about two opposing forces, competing for a decision that could determine the survival of a single threatened species, the outcome of which was entirely under our control. But today’s threat to the environment through global climate change is not under our immediate control and it represents an unpredictable range of changes on the environment while potentially rendering all species as being endangered, including all of us featherless bipeds. While we could save the Spotted Owl from habitat destruction, no one is sure we can save the Polar Bears from their habitat loss, as the sea ice continues to melt and gliaciers continue to recede. New reports have indicated that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been greatly accelerated over the past decade by the industrial developments in China and India, where coal-fired power plants are common and serve as the highest carbon dioxide generators of all carbon fuel sources. Unfortunately, the predictive models currently available that form the substance of our contemporary conversation on this issue, have not taken the new, more accelerated realities into account. We can expect new models and analysis to put an even more dire set of consequences in front of us if we don’t begin immediately to put the brakes on  expansion of carbon into the atmosphere. Hopefully, under an Obama presidency, we can begin to seriously address this critical issue and, in the process, develop a new, green collar economy.

RFM