By
Sheila Bapat
Big Daddy Bush was right. Bill Clinton is an ozone man.
Dubya's father called Clinton and his veep "ozone men" way back during their 1992 race for the White House. While environmental activists probably would not herald Clinton as one of the leaders of their movement, they'll soon be building him a shrine, once the next president and his secretary of the interior start making environmental policy.
Meet Gale Norton. The former Colorado attorney general, and defender of lead paint manufacturing companies, has the environmental lobby, well, pissed.
Unlike Clinton's environmentalist interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, Norton's priority seems to be giving land rights back to the states, instead of using federal regulation to protect them.
Environmental policy was not at the forefront of the 2000 presidential election. But as President-elect Bush's new policies begin to emerge, it is obvious that one of the biggest ideological differences between the Clinton and W. Bush administrations is a genuine concern for the environment.
The former is concerned. The latter is not.
With about a week left of his eight-year Washington reign, President Clinton is attempting to fill in the ozone holes, right before Bush opens them up wide again.
Clinton, the very lame duck president who is still clinging to that lovely power called an executive order, recently declared that one-third of the nation's national parks will be protected from logging and new road construction. The executive order is probably the sole reason why Clinton might leave the White House with a legacy of protecting the environment, for Congress has proven to be consistently against federal regulation of state lands.
In fact, the states have already begun to retaliate Clinton's newest action. A pro-development coalition in Idaho announced on Tuesday that it would sue the administration for its decision.
Idaho is the first state to sue Clinton for this measure.
Bush has been critical of Clinton's tendency to protect national lands by declaring that no oil rigs, logging or mining may take place on them. But during the campaign, Bush was hesitant to actually discuss his thoughts on environmental policy.
Bush is a godsend for the anti-environmentalists in Congress who were chagrined by Clinton's circumvention of them. As Babbitt pointed out, Clinton still pushed through environmental policy despite Congress's opposition to them. He expanded and declared thirteen national monuments, most of which are in Western states.
Back in the day when Norton was defending the Mountain States Legal Foundation, Norton sued Babbitt in an attempt to reverse his agency's environmental regulations. Now she is his successor. Small world, isn't it?
In a recent interview, current Secretary of the Interior Babbitt discussed the problems-the political kind, mainly-that poor environmental policy would cost Bush and the GOP as a whole.
"I think the effort to undo the [environmental policy] gains of the past eight years would be very costly, because there is a tremendous amount of public support," Babbitt told the Washington Post.
In order to be upset about it, the public has to know about it. That's one smart move Bush made during the campaign: nobody knew details about his position on the environment, among other issues. His true colors were replaced by his "all-American boy" image.
While dialogue about the environment took a back seat to big talk on the military and public education, it's proving to be a big deal. So Clinton sort of secretly created an environmental legacy for himself. And if Bush doesn't pay attention, it could bite him in the ass.
Sheila Bapat is a political science junior. She can be reached at editor@wildcat.arizona.edu.
