"Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped."
- Treebeard from Lord Of The Rings

This is by John Ed Pearce as submitted to me by Pageturner111. This was outstandingly exquisite in the quality of its stupidity. Mr. Pearce's commentary is in blue.

Posted on Sun, Sep. 01, 2002
ENVIRONMENT CAN'T TAKE MUCH MORE OF BUSH'S PROTECTION
By John Ed Pearce
HERALD-LEADER CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST

For generations, Smokey the Bear has been telling us: "Only you can prevent forest fires." Well, you can forget that. You are no longer alone. President Bush, this year's surprise environmentalist, is with you.

While in Oregon, collecting something like $100 million for needy Republican candidates, W. just happened to come across a dandy new way to prevent forest fires. He would withdraw the ban on cutting trees in some national forests and write new regulations allowing loggers to build new roads through the forest, the easier to get at the trees. It is the old Vietnam strategy of protecting the village from the Viet Cong by destroying it. Save the trees by cutting them down.

The plan has not met with approval and rejoicing on the part of environmental groups. This is not too surprising. W. has not written a very impressive record on conservation since sliding into Washington. Indeed, the major portion of the current issue of the Sierra Club's magazine is devoted to a plea for efforts to stop the administration from polluting the country's air, land and water.

This was not supposed to happen. But after assuring voters that he would be "the Conservation President," Bush seems to have adopted poison ivy as his favorite flower.

After failing in his attempt to open the Alaskan wilderness to oil drillers, he made headlines with his rejection of tighter controls over arsenic in our drinking water. Then it took a federal judge to stop strip miners from removing mountain tops and dumping the overburden into nearby streams, an unseemly practice given the green light by the new, improved Environmental Protection Agency.

After beating back efforts to force SUVs to meet the same air-polluting standards imposed on other vehicles, and firing troublesome Interior Department employees for protesting eased restrictions on timbering and grazing on public lands, W. was finally forced to recognize a report by his own scientists declaring that global warming was real and already having a disastrous effect on the environment. But, again, he came up with a unique recipe for progress.

Not to worry about increasing amounts of carbon dioxide being poured into the air by industry, he said. There's nothing we can do about global warming; it's already here. The best thing to do is get together and figure out ways to live with it. If you can't beat it, stay indoors.

Environmentalists have complained that the administration was failing to enforce the roadless rules for forest protection, the snowmobile ban for Yellowstone, endangered-species laws and water rights. In the meantime, W. justified opening two dozen new Western sites, including vast acreage on national monuments, to drilling and mining:

"There are some monuments where the land is so widespread they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part of the precious part, so to speak, I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil will not be despoiled."

OK. That explains that.

And this W'ism: "The California crunch is really the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plans." Clear?

The Sierra Club magazine lists numerous steps the administration has taken to gut protective law enforcement:

• Suspension of regulations minimizing raw sewage discharges and requiring public notice of overflows.
• Suspension of a rule prohibiting the government from awarding contracts to companies violating federal laws, including environmental rules.
• Suspension of Forest Service rules giving watershed health, wildlife and recreation priority over timber sales.
• Revocation of a rule allowing the interior secretary to stop new mines on federal lands if they would irreparably harm people or the environment.
• Revocation of requirements that mining companies protect waterways and clean up mine-related pollution.
• Suspension of a part of the Endangered Species Act that requires the Fish and Wildlife Service to respond to private lawsuits seeking to add new species to the list.
• Revocation of Army Corps of Engineers regulations demanding replacement of destroyed wetlands and banning destruction of seasonal steams.

That's our Conservation President.