http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0828-15.htm

Published on Tuesday, August 26, 2003 by Grist Magazine
(http://www.gristmagazine.com/)

Bill Moyers Speaks his Mind on Bush-Brand Environmental Destruction and More
by Amanda Griscom

Bill Moyers is best known as the broadcast journalist who, for more
than 20 years, has brought the public frank, soul-searching, and
sometimes frightening examinations of -- well, of almost everything
under the sun. On air, he's equally comfortable discussing politics
or poetry, scriptures or science.

Born in Oklahoma in 1934 and raised in Texas, Moyers has had a
highly celebrated and peripatetic career that has included stints
as a Baptist minister, deputy director of the Peace Corps in the
Kennedy administration, and press secretary to President Johnson.
Moyers later became publisher of the New York daily Newsday,
an analyst and commentator on CBS and NBC news, and a cofounder,
with his wife Judith Davidson, of Public Affairs Television,
where he produced series ranging from "God and Politics" to
"Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth."

Having racked up more than 30 Emmy Awards during his television
career, Moyers is now the host and producer of the Friday night
PBS series "NOW with Bill Moyers." He is also one of the few
TV news and culture journalists who believe that there are still
plenty of viewers who want to think and learn. At "NOW," Moyers
has focused with increasing intensity on the Bush administration's
environmental record. Since his show launched in January 2002,
Moyers has produced more than 20 reports on environmental
subjects ranging from mountaintop-removal mining to the industry
backgrounds of Bush's key political appointees. This Friday
at 9 p.m. EST, he'll put the Bush record in a larger context,
airing an interview with award-winning scientist David Suzuki,
who believes the global environment is in its final moments of
sustainability.

Grist tracked Moyers down at his office to discuss environmental
policy rollbacks, the ecological concerns that he says "burn
in his consciousness," and the world he wants to leave for his
grandchildren.

Grist: In the year and a half since the launch of your PBS program
"NOW," you have done extensive reporting on the Bush administration's
environmental record. At a time when most news outlets have focused
on war and recession, you and your team have been among the few
journalists who've consistently taken a hard look at these policy
rollbacks. What has been motivating you?

Bill Moyers: The facts on the ground. I'm a journalist, reporting
the evidence, not an environmentalist pressing an agenda. The Earth
is sending us a message and you don't have to be an environmentalist
to read it. The Arctic ice is melting. The Arctic winds are balmy.
The Arctic Ocean is rising. Scientists say that in the year 2002
-- the second-hottest on record -- they saw the Arctic ice coverage
shrink more than at any time since they started measuring it.
Every credible scientific study in the world says human activity
is creating global warming. In the face of this evidence,
the government in Washington has declared war on nature.
They have placed religious and political dogma over the facts.

Grist: Can you elaborate on their religious and political dogma?

Moyers: They are practically the same. Their god is the market
-- every human problem, every human need, will be solved
by the market. Their dogma is the literal reading of the
creation story in Genesis where humans are to have "dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every
creeping thing ..." The administration has married that
conservative dogma of the religious right to the corporate
ethos of profits at any price. And the result is the politics
of exploitation with a religious impulse.

Meanwhile, over a billion people have no safe drinking water.
We're dumping 500 million tons of hazardous waste into the
Earth every year. In the last hundred years alone we've lost
over 2 billion hectares of forest, our fisheries are collapsing,
our coral reefs are dying because of human activity. These are
facts. So what are the administration and Congress doing?
They're attacking the cornerstones of environmental law:
the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, NEPA [the National
Environmental Policy Act]. They are allowing l7,000 power
plants to create more pollution. They are opening public
lands to exploitation. They're even trying to conceal threats
to public health: Just look at the stories this past week
about how the White House pressured the EPA not to tell the
public about the toxic materials that were released by the
September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center.

Grist: I'm interested in your explanation of why -- I haven't
heard this dogma-based argument before. More often, critics
interpret the White House environmental agenda as political
pragmatism, as simply an effort to stay in power and pay back
corporate contributors.

Moyers: This is stealth war on the environment in the name of
ideology. But you're right -- there is a very powerful political
process at work here, too. It's payback time for their rich donors.
In the 2000 elections, the Republicans outspent the Democrats
by $200 million. Bush and Cheney -- who, needless to say,
are oilmen who made their fortunes in the energy business
-- received over $44 million from the oil, gas, and energy
industries. It spills over into Congress too: In the 2002
congressional elections, Republican candidates received
almost $15 million from the energy industries, while the
Democrats got around $3.7 million. In our democracy,
voters can vote but donors decide.

Grist: Add to that the fact that in every key appointment
at every environmental agency you find someone from industry
-- a lawyer, a lobbyist, a former executive.

Moyers: The list is shocking. The Interior Department is the
biggest scandal of all. Current Secretary Gale Norton and
her No. 2 man, J. Steven Griles, head a fifth column that
is trying to sabotage environmental protection at every level.
Griles has more conflicts of interest than a dog has fleas.
The giveaway of public resources at Interior is the biggest
scandal of its kind since the Teapot Dome corruption.
You have to go all the way back to the crony capitalism
of the Harding administration to find a president who invited
such open and crass exploitation of the common wealth.

Grist: Protecting the environment has become an increasingly
partisan issue under the Bush administration. The GOP has
decidedly become the anti-environment party, causing
pro-environment Republicans like Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont
to defect. And yet historically, there has been a deeply
entrenched ethos of conservation in the Republican Party.

Moyers: Absolutely. But that was before the radical right
and the corporations took over the party. Your generation
is too young to remember that back in the l970s, when the
world began to wake up to the global environmental crisis,
the U.S. became the undisputed leader in environmental
policy. Richard Nixon signed some of the pioneering measures
of the time, including the very Clean Water Act that Bush
is now hollowing out. And before that, of course, Teddy
Roosevelt put the Republican Party in the vanguard of
conservation. This idea of protecting and passing along
our resources to future generations was a deeply entrenched
ideal among those who were known as conservatives. But
this is not a conservative mentality in power today.
It's a new political order.

Grist: How do you define that new political order?

Moyers: I'll give an example that says it all: Jim Jeffords,
the former chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works
Committee, is an environmental champion. He made his priority
efforts to curb global warming and protect the environment
while advancing the economy. His successor is [Republican Sen.]
James Inhofe of Oklahoma. He's the man who once characterized
the Environmental Protection Agency as "gestapo." That's
the new political order.

Grist: Can you describe any instances where you or your
colleagues were shut out by the administration in your
effort to report a rollback story?

Moyers: A press officer at the Interior Department told
one of our producers no one there would appear on or speak
to "NOW." We get [that response] all over town -- "We're
not talking to 'NOW.'"

Grist: Has the Bush administration been more effective
at pushing their environmental agenda than the Reagan
and Bush I administrations before it?

Moyers: Ronald Reagan came to power with the same agenda,
but made a mistake when he appointed James Watt head of
the wrecking crew at the Department of Interior. Watt made
no attempt to disguise his fanaticism. He was outspokenly
anti-environment and he inflamed the public against him
with his flagrant remarks. But he took over a bureaucracy
of civil servants who had come of age in the first great
environmental wave of the l970s -- people who believed
they had a public charge to do the right thing. When Watt
stormed into office, these civil servants resisted.
Now, 20 years later -- after eight years of Reagan,
four years of Bush the First, and three years of Bush
the Second -- that generation of civil servants is gone.
The executive branch is a wholly owned subsidiary of the
conservative/corporate coalition.

Grist: And surely their public-relations strategies have
become far more sophisticated.

Moyers: Absolutely. They learned a big lesson from the
Watt era. Not to inflame the situation. Use stealth.
If you corrupt the language and talk a good line even
as you are doing the very opposite, you won't awaken
the public. Gale Norton will be purring like a kitten
when she's cutting down the last redwood in the forest
with a buzz saw.

Grist: Doesn't it seem inevitable that this tremendous
discrepancy between the Bush administration's actions
and words will be exposed?

Moyers: There is always a backlash when any administration,
liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican, goes too far.
In this case, all the scientists that I respect and all the
environmentalists that I listen to say to me, "What's
different this time, Moyers, is that it could happen
too late." Let's say by 2008 the consequences of all
these policies become clear and the public rises up
in protest. We don't have between now and 2008 to
reverse the trends; it will be too late then.

Grist: What do you mean by "too late"?

Moyers: Every policy of government that is bad or goes
wrong can ultimately be reversed. The environment is
the one exception to the rule of politics, which is
that to every action there is a reaction. By the time
we all wake up, by the time the media starts doing their
job and by the time the public sees what is happening,
it may be too late to reverse it. That's what science
is telling us. That's what the Earth is telling us.
That's what burns in my consciousness.

Consider the example of Iraq. Once upon a time it was
such a lush, fertile, and verdant land that the authors
of Genesis located the Garden of Eden there. Now look at it:
stretches upon stretches of desert, of arid lands inhospitable
to human beings, empty of trees and clean water and rolling
green grasses. That's a message from the Earth about what
happens when people don't take care of it. No matter what
we do to Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains a wasteland compared
to what it was. American policy makers see only the black
oil in the ground and not the message that all the years
of despoliation have left.

Grist: The irony is that despoliation doesn't just wipe
out the verdant land, it makes it impossible to have
a healthy, diverse economy.

Moyers: It stuns me that the people in power can't see
that the source of our wealth is the Earth. I'm an
entrepreneur, I'm a capitalist. I don't want to destroy
the system on which my livelihood and my journalism rest.
I am strongly on behalf of saving the environment
[in no small part] because it is the source of our
wealth. Destroy it and the pooh-bahs of Wall Street
will have to book an expedition to Mars to enjoy their
riches. I don't understand why they don't see it.
I honestly don't. This absence of vision as to what
happens when you foul your nest puzzles me.

Grist: Do you consider yourself a pessimist?

Moyers: I once asked a friend on Wall Street about
the market. "I'm optimistic," he said. "Then why do you
look so worried?" I asked. And he answered: "Because
I'm not sure my optimism is justified." I feel that way.
But I don't know how to be in the world except to expect
a confident future and then get up every morning and
try in some way to bring it about.

Grist: It sounds like for you the environment is a very
personal issue, an emotional issue.

Moyers: For me it comes down to our most cherished values.
To our ethics. You're asking, rightly, questions about
science and economics, but this is a deeply moral issue.
Economics and politics are a poor excuse for the moral
imperative that we need to follow to save what is not
our own so others that come after us can have a life.

A couple years ago, I took my then eight-year-old grandson
to Central Park for a walk and we were on the rocks there
looking out on the park and the skyline of the city and
he said, "Pa, how old are you?" And I said, "I'm 66."
And he said, "What do you think the world will look like
when I'm as old as you are?" And for the first time
I could imagine a concrete future. The future wasn't
abstract anymore -- my grandson would be a real person
living in a real place, the future. In some ways, what
worries me the most is that Laura and George Bush don't
have any grandkids. The president would see the world
differently if he just had grandkids.

Grist: Yes, it seems as though on some level Bush is
lacking some kind of emotional intelligence on these
matters -- as though he's sort of tone deaf to the
environment.

Moyers: We had Devra Davis, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon,
on the show recently. She described how Laura and George
Bush designed their ranch at Crawford to be environmentally
efficient, with solar paneling and lots of new technology.
She pointed out that they seem to understand these issues
somewhat on an individual level, and yet they don't
understand that the personal is not enough. It takes
policy to translate. There is a disconnect between how
they live privately and how they act publicly.

Grist: What, on a public level, do you want to see happen?

Moyers: The same thing that should happen with the war
against terrorists. Terrorists want to kill us, they want
to bring democracy down. The environment will kill us,
it will bring us down. Why not appoint an emergency panel
of Democrats and Republicans to recommend a course on
global warning? I really do believe that if George Bush
announced that saving the environment was more urgent
than everything at the moment except the war on terrorism,
if he were to call a global conference at the White House
on how we can create a new vision and a new process for
addressing this, the world's greatest challenge -- then
I believe they'd change the Constitution to elect him
to a third term.

Amanda Griscom is a freelance writer based in New York City.
Her articles on energy, technology, and the environment
have appeared in publications ranging from Rolling Stone
to the New York Times Magazine.

© 2003, Grist Magazine, Inc.

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