Crimes Against Nature

by Kennedy, Jr. Robert F.

  35 The assistant administrator at Air and Radiation is Jeffrey Holmstead, who had been a lobbyist for the utility industry and a leader of a Wise Use industry front group. The director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, James Connaughton, was a lawyer for asbestos polluters.

  Using the stealth tactics originally devised by Gingrich and company, Bush’s dream team, in a coordinated effort to implement the Wise Use agenda, has enlisted every federal agency that oversees environmental programs. They have given quick permit approvals and doled out waivers that exempt campaign contributors and polluters from rules or regulations. They have critically reduced funding for implementing environmental laws — for example, defunding the program that lists new endangered or threatened species. They have reinterpreted long-standing policies to limit government authority and to facilitate polluter projects. In May 2004, for instance, the Commerce Department, which oversees U.S. fisheries policy, reinterpreted the Endangered Species Act to allow farm-bred fish to be counted in order to remove salmon from the Endangered Species List and to rid logging companies of restrictions designed to protect wild stocks.

  Predictably, the administration has also put the brakes on new rules to protect the environment. In its first three years, Bush’s EPA completed just three major rules — two were required under court order and the other rolled back restrictions on power-plant emissions. Compare this to over 30 completed by the Clinton administration and 21 by the former president Bush’s administration in their first three years.

  36

  As might be expected from a government determined to promote a wildly unpopular agenda, the Bush administration is obsessed with secrecy. In September 2003, the White House moved to weaken the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — the first and most important environmental law — which requires environmental analysis and public participation in major regulatory decisions. And in June 2003 the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) expanded its use of so-called categorical exclusions, which allows the agency to avoid environmental analysis and public scrutiny. In my own experience, the White House has made it dramatically more difficult to obtain material under the Freedom of Information Act or to have unguarded conversations with government officials than at any time in my 20 years as an advocate.

  Most galling is the fact that the very agencies entrusted to protect Americans from polluters have simply stopped enforcing the law. Penalties imposed for environmental violations have plummeted under Bush, who has pushed to eliminate 210 enforcement positions.

  37 Violation notices have fallen 58 percent, and administrative fines have dropped 28 percent.

  38

  In 2001, the White House instructed the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance to stop filing new cases against giant factory farms without approval from upper-echelon political appointees in the EPA.

  39 These meat factories release deadly gases such as sulfide, ammonia, methyl mercaptan, methyl sulfides, particulate matter, and airborne animal allergens that cause a range of illnesses, including severe respiratory problems, gastrointestinal diseases, eye infections, nosebleeds, nausea, miscarriage, and psychological problems.

  40 Many of these emissions are illegal, and prior to Bush taking office the EPA had been prosecuting these companies under the Clean Air Act and Superfund.

  But the Bush administration’s order now leaves communities exposed to foul air. “The EPA is no longer a public health agency,” says its former chief prosecutor Eric Schaeffer. “It’s become a country club for America’s polluters.”

  41

  President Bush is not just letting the multinational meat barons off the legal hook. The White House dropped dozens of Clinton-era prosecutions against its big oil and big coal contributors. One example is the 97-count felony indictment the Clinton administration brought in September 2000 against Koch Industries, the country’s largest privately held oil company, owned by Wise Use funder and Bush megadonor Charles Koch. The government said Koch knowingly discharged 90 metric tons of carcinogenic benzene at a refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, and concealed the releases from federal regulators. The charges could have brought fines of up to $352 million, but after Bush’s Department of Justice took over, the counts were reduced from 97 to 9, and the case was settled for $20 million.

  42 Bush has turned down repeated requests by consumer groups for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by oil and gas companies, despite a March 2001 FTC finding that companies hoarded gasoline to drive up prices and boost profits, costing consumers billions of dollars.

  43

  The Justice Department also refused to prosecute half a dozen oil companies involved in a scam to cheat the government out of $100 million a year in royalty payments through price-fixing and other scams. Under White House pressure, the Justice Department dropped most Clinton-era investigations of coal-fired power plants that were violating air quality standards. And in January 2003, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers sent out a memo forbidding enforcement personnel from ticketing polluters who fill or foul isolated wetlands without first clearing each case with Washington, D.C., headquarters — a policy designed to impede prosecution of law breakers.

  Two days after Christmas 2001, with President Bush at his Texas ranch and most of official Washington on vacation, the White House announced that it was killing regulations that barred companies that repeatedly violate environmental and workplace standards from receiving government contracts. Up to $138 billion in federal contracts are awarded each year to companies violating environmental and labor safety statutes.

  Ironically, despite its reluctance to enforce laws against polluters, the administration is still enthusiastic — even ingenious — about enforcing the law against environmentalists. In July 2003, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department sought and obtained an indictment against Greenpeace for violating an obscure 1872 “sailor mongering” law designed to discourage flophouse owners from boarding ships to recruit sailors to drink at their taverns. The law had not been enforced in 132 years. The organization faced substantial fines, five years of federal probation, a criminal record, and enhanced punishment for future activities. In May 2004, a federal judge dismissed the case without even hearing the defense, recognizing it as a political prosecution aimed at injuring — and possibly shutting down — an organization that has been a thorn in the side of the administration’s corporate paymasters.

  Consistent with its twisted enforcement priorities, the Justice Department has awarded Wise Use founder Ron Arnold part of a $325,000 grant to study and report on environmental terrorism,

  44 which Ashcroft has designated the country’s top domestic terrorist threat,

  45 ignoring the anti-abortion and right-wing terrorists who have killed hundreds of Americans.

  46 No single action on the part of the Bush administration, however, has done more to advance the Wise Use agenda than the appointment of Gale Norton as secretary of the Interior. The Department of the Interior manages the richest treasure trove of all — 450 million acres of public lands and 3 billion acres of coastal waterways. Turning Interior over to Norton was like handing the keys of the kingdom to the Wise Use camp. Norton, a champion of corporate welfare for three decades, is the very embodiment of Wise Use. One of the movement’s most effective and fanatical leaders, as radical as James Watt, she is far more dangerous because she is attractive, charming, and diabolically clever.

  Norton has gone to bat for polluters her entire career. In 1979, the year after she graduated from law school, Norton went to work for the Mountain States Legal Foundation as an attorney under the tutelage of then-director James Watt. Norton helped file lawsuits to dispute federal grazing limits, to impede EPA clean air rules,

  47 and to support oil and gas drilling offshore, in wilderness areas, and in wildlife refuges.

  48 Each of these lawsuits promoted the interests of the MSLF’s major funders, including Exxon, Burlington Northern, the Independent Petroleum Association, and the Rocky
Mountain Oil & Gas Association.

  49

  In 1984, after a two-year stint at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University’s right-wing think tank, Norton used her connections to gain positions first at the Department of Agriculture, then in the Interior Department, and finally on Reagan’s Council on Environmental Quality. While working for the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in 1989, she acknowledged that her advocacy of “takings” legislation would mean the end of environmental enforcement. “I view that as something positive,” she said. She served as Colorado attorney general from 1991 to 1999 and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 1996.

  50

  She has served as an adviser to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), the junk-science think tank led by Monsanto lobbyist Steven Milloy. TASSC receives funding from Philip Morris (to bless the safety of secondhand smoke) and from Exxon (to nay-say global warming), as well as from Procter & Gamble, Dow, and 3M.

  51 She was a board member of the Wise Use group Defenders of Property Rights (DPR) and a Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), both recipients of funding from the right-wing Gang of Five. Among other things, PERC promotes views that are critical of recycling and skeptical of acid rain.

  In 1998, Norton gained national prominence by founding her own organization, the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy. She stacked its advisory board with power-house corporate crusaders like Newt Gingrich and got funding from Coors, Amoco, ARCO, the American Forest and Paper Association, and the Chemical Manufacturers Association.

  52

  When she lets her hair down in front of Wise Use constituents, it becomes immediately clear that Norton is a genuine radical who despises not just government but the very idea of community. In a 1996 speech Norton bitterly shellacked federal incursions into what she considered the private domain. She listed the atrocities: the wheelchair ramp in the state capitol mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act, the EPA’s automobile emissions inspection program, federal requirements forcing schools to remove asbestos, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Violence Against Women Act.

  53

  When Norton was appointed chief steward of America’s natural resources, the Bush administration quickly placed a rapacious crew of Wise Use pirates in the key posts in her department. Deputy secretary and former mining industry lobbyist J. Steven Griles was joined by James E. Cason, whose position of associate deputy secretary was created to spare him the embarrassment of a Senate confirmation process. As an assistant secretary under James Watt, Cason had been condemned for giving millions of taxpayer dollars to the mining industry in a sweetheart deal. He had authorized a rule making national parks and wildlife areas vulnerable to strip-mining, and had claimed that the spotted owl would go on the endangered species list “over my dead body.”

  54

  The department solicitor was William G. Myers, executive director of a Wise Use group, Public Lands Council, an arm of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association that advocates grazing rights on government land for minimal fees.

  55 H. Craig Manson became assistant secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. When he was chief counsel to California governor Pete Wilson’s Fish and Game Department, Manson sought to allow state officials to suspend California’s Endangered Species Act under certain circumstances. His efforts were overturned by the California Appellate Court.

  56

  Mining lobbyist Rebecca W. Watson became assistant secretary of Land and Minerals Management.

  57 Mining lawyer and Wise Use leader Bennett Raley was named assistant secretary of Water and Science. Raley, who is in charge of ensuring the conservation of the nation’s water supply, lobbied against the 1994 Clean Water Act reauthorization.

  58

  Other appointees have shown similar contempt for the environment. Lynn Scarlett, now Interior’s assistant secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget, was formerly president of the Reason Foundation, an industry-funded libertarian think tank that downplays the risks of global warming and air pollution. Scarlett opposes even the most innocuous initiatives, such as curbside recycling and nutrition labels on food.

  59

  Jeffrey D. Jarrett, director of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, is an ex–coal company executive. In the early 1990s, as a midlevel manager for the office that he now runs, he was the subject of a criminal probe for obstructing justice.

  60

  With this lineup in place, Norton opened up our public treasures to industry plunder. The list of environmental outrages already committed by Norton and her team is lengthy. She approved construction of the nation’s largest pit mine in the foothills of Arizona’s Gila Mountains, even issuing a statement claiming that the 3,360-acre copper mine would have no ecological impact. She has pushed several other catastrophic mine projects, including one on federal land a few miles from downtown Reno, another beneath the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness of northwest Montana, and a 1,571-acre strip mine on public land in California that is considered sacred by Native Americans. She canceled a ban on new mining claims on roughly 1.2 million acres in and around southwestern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. She overturned a Clinton-era regulation limiting the amount of public land that could be used for waste disposal of hardrock mining debris and announced new regulations that reverse environmental restrictions on mining for gold, copper, and other metals on federal lands.

  Norton signed off on a plan to open nearly 9 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope to oil and gas development, put the kibosh on a citizens’ panel to oversee the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, brushed aside a record 25,000 opposing comments to approve a Houston company’s request to embark on the largest oil and gas exploration project in Utah’s history, and pushed for oil and gas drilling in Wyoming’s Jack Morrow Hills.

  She seems intent on turning some of the most beautiful landscapes in the country into oil fields, including parts of Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in Colorado, the Dome Plateau near Arches National Park in southern Utah’s Redrock Canyon Country, the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in Montana, and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. She also proposed redrawing the boundaries of America’s national monuments to allow energy development.

  Her record protecting wildlife is equally dismal. Hers is the first administration since passage of the Endangered Species Act to not voluntarily list a single species as threatened or endangered. In March 2003, just when gray wolves were beginning to recover out West, Norton’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed stripping federal protection to make them easier to kill. She shelved the 10-year Federal Salmon Recovery Plan adopted in 2000 and denied endangered status to imperiled species such as the California spotted owl and the cutthroat trout in Washington and the lower Columbia Basin along its border with Oregon. She moved to strip protection for the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreational Area near San Diego, as well as hundreds of thousands of acres in the Southwest that are home to the arroyo toad, the fairy shrimp, the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly, and dozens of rare desert plants. Norton recommended that the Justice Department not appeal an Idaho court’s ruling that denies water allocations to the Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge on the Snake River in Idaho, depriving the river of water to support its booming trout fishery.

  In April 2003, Gale Norton imperiled millions of acres of wilderness by signing a sweetheart deal with then-Governor Mike Leavitt of Utah that will make it easier for state and local officials to claim ownership of thousands of miles of dirt roads, trails, and fence lines under an obscure provision of federal law. That year, she also petitioned the United Nations to remove Yellowstone from a list of endangered World Heritage sites. And the list goes on.

  Norton brooks no dissent. The Department of Interior, like every other federal agency, comprises long-term employees supervised by the current administration’s appointees. The former provide contin
uity and support to each new administration and are often experts in the issues at hand. Norton, however, has transferred, fired, or demoralized many of them, and she has suppressed the findings of scientists in her own department. Her conduct has precipitated an epidemic of resignations, retirements, and whistle-blower lawsuits by high-level scientists, civil servants, and technical staffers.

  She demands total obedience and resorts to brutal tactics when crossed. In December 2003, for example, National Parks Police Chief Theresa Chambers said, in a rather innocuous interview with the Washington Post, that increased security requirements are causing the park police to cut back on patrols. Chambers’ job demands that she speak to the press, the public, and Congress, but the Interior Department hierarchy wanted to require that she speak only with prior approval. After refusing to agree to a permanent gag order, Chambers was stripped of her badge and firearm with the recommendation that she be fired. As of this writing, she is still in legal limbo.