LATELY it seems like the apocalypse is coming: Mad cow disease is killing cows in Europe. Hoof and mouth disease is killing off livestock everywhere else. Agricultural cultures are threatened and food supplies are being depleted. All we need now is for it to start raining toads. All in all, it seems like someone is trying to send a message. It's Mother Nature, and boy is she angry.
She has every right to be. She's getting second class treatment, especially now that George W. Bush has moved into the presidential office. Bush's environmental policies illustrate a refusal to take action in the face of an obvious problem as well as priorities that are strangely out of whack.
If Bush were a bird, he'd be an ostrich sticking his head in the sand. He's taking the "If I ignore them, maybe they'll go away" approach to environmental issues. He's especially adamant about ignoring scientific evidence when it comes to the link between global warming and human activities that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, like burning fossil fuels. The increasing levels of carbon dioxide trap heat into the atmosphere that otherwise would escape, leading to global warming. Unfortunately, Bush ignores the opinion of the majority of the scientific community.
The link between human activity and global warming is something that only a few naysayers in the scientific community still doubt. On top of the huge amount of research that already has been published on the subject, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released a report on global warming that contains the strongest scientific evidence to date linking climate change to human activities (www.ipcc.ch/). The report states that most of the warming, especially over the last 50 years, is attributable to human activity and not natural events like normal climate variations. The report also says that the 1990s were the warmest decade in the last 140 years and predicts that Earth's temperature could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.
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Yet Bush keeps up his ostrich act. During the second presidential debate, he asked, "Haven't they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming?" Talk about wishful thinking. Acid rain, the extinction of thousands of species, destruction of the ozone layer, deforestation, global warming - all of these things are nasty and, unfortunately, very real.
On top of not doing anything about problems that already exist, Bush also is going about creating a few more. He plans to open up more national forests to logging and supports making the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - the only piece of Alaska's Northern Slope that has remained untouched - open for oil drilling. Introducing oil companies to the area would threaten the many endangered species that live there, thus further obliterating the naive and silly idea that wildlife refuges should actually be refuges for wildlife.
The people he's surrounded himself with aren't much better than he is. His choice of former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to head the Environmental Protection Agency is ironic, given that she had a notoriously bad environmental record in her home state. Among other actions, she cut the state's environmental budget and reduced fines against polluters and generally tended to be more pro-business than pro-environment.
Bush's attitude on the environment is part of a great and unfathomable paradox. It's interesting that he's made saving Social Security such a major focus at the same time that he is perfectly content with not protecting the environment.
Ensuring the survival of Social Security is all about making sure that something is saved for future generations. It's about preventing a situation where today's children are burdened with the fallout of their predecessors failing to change things. It's strange that Bush is in favor of that, but he's not in favor of saving the environment, which revolves around the same principle, namely, "Save something for your kids." The only difference is that Social Security revolves around children having money when they're old and protecting the environment revolves around their having water to drink and air to breathe.
The people in Washington have to realize that environmental issues aren't just real; they're also pressing. Though environmental problems develop relatively slowly in comparison to other kinds of problems, the key thing is that they still develop. If they aren't given proper attention and stopped when they're in early stages, someone - probably today's children - will have to try to deal with them a hundred years down the road when they become so overwhelming that they finally can't be ignored anymore.
The government keeps blowing off the environment to concentrate on problems that seem more pertinent to our lives today, like a stock market crash or a Social Security system. If they keep doing that, however, they'll wake up one morning, take their heads out of the sand and realize that the environmental problems are the pressing issues. That's when they'll find that a ravaged environment isn't quite as manageable or reversible as a downturning economy.
(Laura Sahramaa is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. She can be reached at lsahramaa@cavalierdaily.com.)
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