http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1024-02.htm

Published on Friday, October 24, 2003 by the Guardian/UK

Road to Ruin:
How America is Ravaging the Planet

America produces a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions,
the population has risen by 100 million since 1970 and when an area
three times the size of Britain was recently opened up for mining,
drilling, logging and road building, no one took much notice.

What does the Bush administration do?
It ignores all attempts to curb environmental damage

by Matthew Engel

[ Picture from original article... ]
CAPTION:
"A dead fish lies on salt sediment at the edge of the Salton sea,
in southern California, where salinity levels are 25% higher than
those of ocean water." Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP

On the map of the United States, just below halfway down the
east coast, you can see a series of islets, in the shape of
a hooked nose. These are the Outer Banks, barrier islands
- sun-kissed in summer, storm-tossed in winter - that stretch
for 100 miles and more, protecting the main coastline of the
state of North Carolina. They are built, quite literally,
on shifting sands.

Twenty years ago, these were, by all accounts, magical places,
hard to reach and discovered only by the adventurous and discerning.
They are still fairly magical, at least the seemingly endless stretch
of unspoiled beach is. It is the lure of that which causes the
traffic jams on the only two bridges every Saturday throughout
the summer. The narrow strip of land behind the beach, however,
has been built up with enormous holiday homes, costing up to $2m
(£1.2m) each. And prices rose by 15-20% (25% for those on the
ocean front) in 2002 alone, according to one agent.

This is what local agents call "a very nice market", and
last month their area had a week of free worldwide publicity.
Hurricane Isabel swept in, washing out much of the islands'
only road and picking up motels from their foundations and
tossing them, according to one report, "like cigarette butts".
One island was turned into several islets, with a whole town,
Hatteras Village, being cut off from the rest of the US
- for ever, if nature has its way.

Residents, journalists reported, were in shock. Many scientists
were not. Speaking well before Isabel, Dr Orrin Pilkey, professor
emeritus of geology at Duke University in North Carolina,
described the Outer Banks property boom to me as "a form of
societal madness". "I wouldn't buy a house on the front row
of the Outer Banks. Or the second," agreed Dr Stephen Leatherman,
who is such a connoisseur of American coastlines that he is
known as Dr Beach.

For the market is not the only thing that has been rising
round here. Like other experts, Pilkey expects the Atlantic
to inundate the existing beaches "within two to four generations".
Normally, that would be no problem for the sands, which would
simply regroup and re-form further back. Unfortunately, that
is no longer possible: the $2m houses are in the way. According
to Pilkey, the government will either have to build millions
of dollars worth of seawall, which will destroy the beach anyway,
or demolish the houses. "Coastal scientists from abroad come here
and just shake their heads in disbelief," he says.

The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and
a metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial
about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most
dangerous enemy. While millions of words have been written
every day for the past two years about the threat from vengeful
Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature has been
almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks
in the future is far more certain.

Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment
minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying:
"There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad
as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats
to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction
of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural
resources and the continuing rise in the population. What
Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more
quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each
of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the
business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not
talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed
environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject
when chasing the presidency in 2000.

Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible
opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that
the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately.
Yet in America the subject has become politicized, with rightwing
commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They
gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter
(failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska). When the
dissident "good news" scientist Bjorn Lomborg spoke to a
conservative Washington thinktank he was applauded not merely
rapturously, but fawningly.

While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting
and Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has
been telling its scientific advisers to do more research before
it can consider any action to restrict greenhouse gases;
the scientists reported back that they had done all the
research. The attitude of the White House to global warming
was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as:
"It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything
about it!" What terrifies all American politicians, deep down,
is that it is true and that they could do something about it,
but at horrendous cost to American industry and lifestyle.

In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do
is to buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring
that a portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming
initiatives". Wow!

Potential Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination
have been testing environmental issues a little in the past
few weeks. Some activists are hopeful that the newly elected
Governor Schwarzenegger of California is genuinely interested.
But, in truth, despite the Soviet-style politicization of science,
serious national debate on the issue ceased years ago.

Of course, nimbyism is alive and well. And, sure, there are
localized battles between greens and their corporate enemies:
towns in Alabama try to resist corporate poisoning; contests
go on to preserve the habitats of everything from the grizzly
bear to rare types of fly; Californians hug trees to stop new
housing estates. Sometimes the greenies win, though they have
been losing with increasing frequency, especially if Washington
happens to be involved. These fights, even in agglomeration,
are not the real issue. Day after day across America the green
agenda is being lost - and then, usually, being buried under
concrete.

"We're waging a war on the environment, a very successful one,"
says Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford
University. "This nation is devouring itself," according to
Phil Clapp of the National Environmental Trust. These are voices
that have almost ceased to be heard in the US. Yet with each
passing day, the gap between the US and the rest of the planet
widens. To take the figure most often trotted out: Americans
contribute a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions.
To meet the seemingly modest Kyoto objective of reducing emissions
to 7% below their 1990 levels by 2012, they would actually
(due to growth) have to cut back by a third. For the Bush
White House, this is not even on the horizon, never mind
the agenda.

Why has the leader of the free world opted out? The first
reason lies deep in the national psyche. The old world developed
on the basis of a coalition - uneasy but understood - between
humanity and its surroundings. The settlement of the US was based
on conquest, not just of the indigenous peoples, but also of the
terrain. It appears to be, thus far, one of the great success
stories of modern history.

"Remember, this country is built very heavily on the frontier
ethic," says Clapp. "How America moved west was to exhaust the
land and move on. The original settlers, such as the Jefferson
family, moved westward because families like theirs planted
tobacco in tidewater Virginia and exhausted the soil. My own
ancestors did the same in Indiana."

Americans made crops grow in places that are entirely arid.
They built dams - about 250,000 of them. They built great cities,
with skyscrapers and symphony orchestras, in places that appeared
barely habitable. They shifted rivers, even reversed their flow.
"It's the American belief that with enough hard work and perseverance
anything - be it a force of nature, a country or a disease - can
be vanquished," says Clapp. "It's a country founded on the idea
of no limits. The essence of environmentalism is that there are
indeed limits. It's one of the reasons environmentalism is a
stronger ethic in Europe than in the US."

There is a second reason: the staggering population growth
of the US. It is approaching 300 million, having gone up from
200 million in 1970, which was around the time President Nixon
set up a commission to consider the issue, the last time any
US administration has dared think about it. A million new legal
migrants are coming in every year (never mind illegals), and
the US Census Bureau projections for 2050, merely half a lifetime
away, is 420 million. This is a rate of increase far beyond
anything else in the developed world, and not far behind Brazil,
India, or indeed Mexico.

This issue is political dynamite, although not for quite the
same reasons as in Britain. Almost every political group is
split on the issue, including the far right (torn between overt
xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan and the free marketeers), the
labor movement and the environmentalists. The belief that the
US is the best country in the world is a cornerstone of national
self-belief, and many Americans still, wholeheartedly, want
others to share it. They also want cheap labor to cut the sugar
cane, pluck the chickens, pick the oranges, mow the lawns and
make the beds.

But the dynamite is most potent among the Hispanic community,
the group who will probably decide the destiny of future
presidential elections and who do not wish to be told their
relatives will not be allowed in or, if illegal, seriously
harassed. "Neither party wants to say we should change
immigration policy," says John Haaga of the independent
Population Reference Bureau. "The phrase being used is
'Hispandering'". Yet extra Americans are not just a problem
for the US: they are, in the eyes of many environmentalists,
a problem for the world because migrants, in a short span
of time, take on American consumption patterns. "Not only
don't we have a population policy," says Ehrlich, "we don't
have a consumption policy either. We are the most overpopulated
country in the world. It's not the number of people. It's
their consumption." Ehrlich may be wrong. It is, though.
somewhat surprising that the federal government's four million
employees do not appear to include anyone charged with even
thinking about this issue.

This brings us to the third factor: the Bush administration,
the first government in modern history which has systematically
disavowed the systems of checks and controls that have governed
environmental policy since it burst into western political
consciousness a generation ago. It would be ludicrous to suggest
that Bush is responsible for what is happening to the American
environment. The crisis is far more deep-seated than that, and
the federal government is too far removed from the minutiae of
daily life.

But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing
regular edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling
back environmental control, usually while pretending to do
the opposite. Morale among civil servants at the Environmental
Protection Agency in Washington was already close to
rock-bottom even before its moderate leader, Christine
Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip
round town was that she had endured two years of private
humiliation at the hands of the White House. Few
environmentalists have great hopes for her announced
successor, the governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt.

What is really alarming is the intellectual atmosphere in
Washington. You can attend seminars debunking scientific
eco-orthodoxy almost every week. Early in the year, there
was much favorable publicity for a new work Global Warming
and Other Eco-myths, produced by the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, an organization reputedly funded by multinational
corporations. Outside Washington, it can be far nastier.
"I've never threatened anyone in my life," a conservation
activist in Montana complained to the Guardian. "I do know,
though, that I have gotten very ugly threats left on my
telephone answering machine over the past year, and twice
had to scour my sidewalk in front of the building to erase
the dead body chalk outlines."

Out in the west, words such as enviro-whackos are popularized
by rightwing radio hosts such as the ex-Watergate conspirator
Gordon Liddy, who passes on to his millions of listeners the
message that global warming is a lie. "I commute in a
three-quarter-tonne capacity Chevrolet Silverado HD,"
he swanked in his latest book. "Four-wheel drive, off-road
equipped, extended curb pickup truck, powered by a 300hp,
overhead valve, turbo supercharged diesel engine with
520lb-feet of torque... It has lights all over it so
everyone can see me coming and get out of the way.
If someone in a little government-mandated car hits me,
it is all over - for him." Fuel economy in American vehicles
hit a 22-year low in 2002.

In this country, green-minded people can't even trust the
good guys. The Nature Conservancy, the US's largest environmental
group with a million members - with a role not unlike Britain's
National Trust - was the subject of an exhaustive exposé in the
Washington Post in May, accusing it of sanctioning deals to
build "opulent houses on fragile grasslands" and drilling for
gas under the last breeding ground of the Attwater's Prairie
Chicken, whose numbers have dwindled to just dozens.

On April 22, 1970 more than 20 million people attended the
first-ever Earth Day. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed
to traffic and 100,000 people attended an ecology fair in
Central Park. The Republican governor of New York wore a
Save the Earth button, and Senator John Tower, another
Republican, told an audience of Texan oilmen: "Recent efforts
on the part of the private sector show promise for pollution
abatement and control. Such efforts are in our own best
interests..."

So what happened next? The problem for the green movement
was not what went wrong, but what went right. Ehrlich's book,
The Population Bomb, said: "In the 1970s, the world will
undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going
to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked
on now." The famine never came. And after the oil crisis came
and went, and Americans began to tire of the gloom-filled,
eco-oriented presidency of Jimmy Carter, they turned instead
to Ronald Reagan, who proposed simple solutions of tax cuts
and deregulation and, lo, the world got more cheerful.
With doomsday postponed indefinitely, the politics of the
Reagan years have lingered.

Some activists remain bitter about the Clinton White House,
which was only patchily interested in green issues. "It left
a bad taste in the mouth of the environmental community,"
says Tim Wirth, a former senator and one-time Clinton official.
"They trimmed their sails over and over again. The old House
speaker, Tip O'Neill, had a very important political aphorism:
'Yer dance with the person who brung yer.' They never did."
This bitterness was one of the factors that led to the hefty
third-party vote for Ralph Nader in 2000, which proved
disastrous for Al Gore, the inhibited environmentalist.

In the three years since then, Bush has danced like a dervish
with the folks who brung him. Yet, even now, no one dare say
out loud that they are against environmentalism: the political
wisdom is that the subject can be a voting issue among the
suburban moms, ferrying the kids around to baseball practice
in their own Chevrolet Silverados. Instead, the big corporations
and their political allies have - brilliantly - manipulated
the forces that the eco-warriors themselves unleashed and
turned them back on their creators. "In the 80s they took
all the techniques of citizen advocacy groups and
professionalized them," explains Phil Clapp. "That's
when you saw the proliferation of lobbyists in Washington.
The environmental community never retooled to meet the
challenge. They had developed the techniques, but were
still doing them in a PTA bake-sale kind of way."

Thus every new measure passed to favor business interests
and ease up on pollution regulations is presented in an
eco-friendly, sugar-coated, summer's morning kind of way,
such as Clear Skies, the weakening of the Clean Air Act.
The House of Representatives has just passed the Healthy
Forests Restoration Act, presented by the president as
an anti-forest fire measure. Opponents say it is simply
a gift to the timber industry that will make it extremely
difficult to stop the felling of old-growth trees. Another
technique is to announce, with great fanfare, initiatives
that everyone can applaud, such as a recent one for
hydrogen-based cars. We can expect more of these as
November 2004 draws closer. When they are scaled back,
or delayed, or dropped, there is less publicity. It is
a habit that runs in the family. Governor Jeb Bush's
grand scheme to save the Florida Everglades was much
applauded; the delay from 2006 to 2016 was little noticed.

Even now the White House does not win all its battles.
In the Senate, where a small group of greenish New England
Republicans has a potential blocking veto, there are moves
to compromise on the forests bill. The New England Republicans
were largely responsible for Bush's inability to push through
his plan to allow oil drilling in the Alaskan wildlife reserve.
Occasionally, there is good news: some of the small dams that
have impeded the life-cycle of Pacific salmon and steelhead
trout are being demolished; there are reports of a new alliance
between the old enemies, ranchers and greenies, in New Mexico;
renewable energy is under discussion. But some of their policies
are already having their effect. Carol Browner, Clinton's head
of the EPA, claims the Bush administration has set back the
campaign to cut industrial pollution in ways that will last
for decades.

"This administration has sent a signal to the polluting
community, 'You can get away with bad habits'," says Browner.
"State governments in the north-east were much tougher,
so the north-eastern power stations upgraded their emissions
standards in the 90s whereas the mid-west guys, who are their
competitors, didn't. Now they're not enforcing the law."

"So what they're saying to the companies is: 'Don't go early,
don't comply with the law first. The rules might change.'
Even a company that wants to do the right thing has to look
at its bottom line. If they get into a situation like this,
they think: 'We spent $1bn to meet the requirements and our
competitors didn't. Yeah, great. We're not going to do that
again.'"

Under Bush, the lack of interest at every level has at last
come into balance. The US is equally unconcerned globally,
federally, statewide and locally. The environmentalists'
macro-gloom has been off-beam before, of course. Perhaps
global warming is a myth; perhaps the CEI is right and there
will be a blue revolution in water use to complement the green
revolution. There is probably just as much as chance that
the next big surprise will be a thrilling one - the arrival
of nuclear cold fusion to solve the energy dilemma, say
- as a disaster. Maybe biotechnology, pesticides, natural gas
and American ingenuity and optimism will indeed see everything
right. It does seem like a curiously reckless gamble for
the US to be taking, though, staking the future of the planet
on the spin of nature's roulette wheel.

But it is only a bigger version of the bet being taken
by the home-buyers of North Carolina. In a country supposedly
distrustful of government, the Outer Bankers have remarkable
faith in their leaders' ability to see them seem right.
Post-Isabel, a group of residents there wrote a letter
demanding government action so they can protect their
livelihoods and families "without the fear of every hurricane
or nor 'easter cutting us off from the rest of the world".
Quite. Who would imagine that in the 21st century the most
powerful empire the world has ever known could still be
threatened by enemies as pathetically old-fashioned as
wind and tide?

Orrin Pilkey thinks it quite possible that sea levels might
rise to the point where the Outer Banks will be a minor detail.
"We're not going to be worried about North Carolina. We're
going to be worrying about Manhattan." Still, macro-catastrophe
may never happen. The micro-catastrophe, however, already has:
the US is an aesthetic disaster area.

If you fly from Washington to Boston, there are now almost
no open spaces below. This is increasingly true in a big U
covering both coasts and the sunbelt. In the south-west,
the main growth area, bungalows spread for miles over what
a decade ago was virgin desert. The population of Arizona
increased 40% in the 1990s, that of next-door Nevada 66%.
That's, as Natalie Merchant sang, "...the sprawl that keeps
crawling its way, 'bout a thousand miles a day", which is
not much of an exaggeration.

Every day 5,000 new houses go up in America. Many of these
fit the American appetite for size, however small the plot:
"McMansions", as they are known. The very word suburb is now
old-hat. The reality of life for many people now is the
"exurb", which can be dozens of miles from the city on
which it depends. In places such as California, exurban
life is the only affordable option for most young couples
and recent migrants.

These communities are rarely gated but often walled, creating
a vague illusion of security and ensuring that the residents
have to drive to a shop, even if there happens to be one
50 yards away. Naturally, they have to drive everywhere else.
In August it was announced that the number of cars in
the US (1.9 per household) now actually exceeded the
number of drivers (1.75).

In many places - especially those growing the fastest
- developers have to deal only with the little councils
in the towns they are taking over. There are often minimal
requirements to provide any kind of infrastructure, such as
sewage or schools, to service these new communities. The rules
for building houses in the computer game Sim City are stricter
than those that apply in most areas of the Sun Belt. Too late,
some parts of the country have concluded that this is untenable.
The buzz-phrase is "smart growth", which means no more than
the kind of forethought before building that has been routine
in Europe for half a century. Even the Environmental Protection
Agency is not above being helpful: its policies for making
use of brownfield sites have seen people moving, improbably,
back into the center of cities such as Pittsburgh.

But where it matters, no one is talking strategy. "In the
really fast-growing states, the pace of development is such
that they can build huge numbers of houses without anyone
considering what it means for the infrastructure," says
Marya Morris of the American Planning Association.
In California, more than perhaps any other state, there
is a debate. But while people talk, developers act:
a city catering for up to 70,000 people will soon arise
at the foot of the Tehachapi Mountains. According to
the Los Angeles Times, it would effectively close the
gap between Los Angeles and Bakersfield, theoretically
111 miles away. "Southern California is coming over the
hill," said one resident.

Americans still have a presumption of infinite space.
But I have made a curious and mildly embarrassing discovery.
In states such as Maryland and Ohio, the pattern of settlement
in supposedly rural areas is such that it can actually be
quite difficult to find a discreet spot away from housing
to stop the car and have a pee. Amid the wide-open spaces
of Texas, it can be worse: the gap between Dallas and Waco
is a 100-mile strip mall. The concepts of townscape and
landscape seem non-existent: there is land that has been
developed and land that hasn't - yet.

And yet. Time and again, around the US, one is struck
by the stunning beauty of the landscape, not in the obvious
places, but in corners that few Americans will have heard of:
amazing rivers such as the Pearl in Louisiana, or the Choptank
in Maryland or the Lost River in West Virginia; the Chocolate
Mountains and the San Diego back country in California;
the bits that are left of the Outer Banks...

And equally one is struck by the sheer horrendousness of
what man has done in the century or so since he seriously
got to work over here. In the context of ages, the white
man is merely a hotel guest in this continent: he has smashed
the furniture and smeared excrement on the walls. He appears
to be looking forward to his next night's stay with relish.

Of course, there are still huge tracts of untouched and
largely unpopulated land: in the Great Plains, where people
are leaving, in the mountains, deserts and Arctic tundra.
But last spring, in another of Washington's Friday night
announcements, the Department of the Interior announced
- no, whispered - that it was removing more than 200m acres
that it owned from "further wilderness study", enabling
those areas to be opened for mining, drilling, logging or
road-building. That's an area three times the size of Britain.
The New York Times did write a trenchant editorial;
otherwise the response was minimal.

Not long ago I went for a walk in the Vallecito Mountains
in California. After a while, I got myself into a position
where the contours of the land blotted out everything and,
after the noise of a plane had died away, there was no sight
or sound at all that was not produced by nature. This lasted
about a minute. Then, from somewhere, a motorcycle roared
into earshot.

Sure, there are still places in this vast country where
it is possible to escape, but they get harder and harder
to find except for the fit, the adventurous and those
unencumbered by children or jobs. Most Americans don't
live that way. And nowhere now is entirely safe from being
ravaged, sometimes in ways that prejudice the future of
the whole planet. Al-Qaida and the Iraqi bombers have
no need to bother. America is destroying itself.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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