Crimes Against Nature Read online

  Statutes like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act were designed to both protect the environment and strengthen our democracy. They made government and industry more transparent on the local level. Powerful corporate polluters would finally be held accountable: Those planning to use the commons would have to deal with environmental impacts and submit to public hearings; citizens were given the power to prosecute environmental crimes. Even the most vulnerable Americans could now participate in the dialogue that determines the destinies of their communities. The passage of these statutes marked the return of ancient rights recognized since the dawn of civilization.

  The victory was short-lived. Earth Day 1970 caught polluters off guard, but over the next 30 years they mounted an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive counterattack to undermine these laws. The environmental reversals of the Bush administration are the triumphant outcome of their three-decade campaign.

  Their success has been largely the result of an unholy marriage between polluting industries and the radical right — an alliance conceived by Colorado brewer Joseph Coors. In 1976, Coors, owner of one of Colorado’s biggest polluters, founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) to challenge environmental laws.

  2 The MSLF mimicked the work of public interest organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been fighting frontline legal battles for the environmental movement since 1970. Funded by multinational polluters such as Phillips Petroleum, Exxon, Texaco, Amoco, Shell, Ford Motor Company, and Chevron, the MSLF filed suits intended to block efforts by environmentalists, unions, minorities, and handicapped Americans that might cut into corporate profit taking.

  3

  Coors also founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has provided the philosophical underpinning of the anti-environmental movement.

  4 The Heritage Foundation’s function is to produce short, concise policy analyses of fast-breaking issues. These simple position papers go out to thousands of news directors and journalists, congressional offices, public officials, and hate-radio jocks. Through clever invocations of patriotism, Christianity, and laissez-faire capitalism, Heritage offers pithy philosophical justifications for national policies that promote the narrow interests of a wealthy few.

  From its inception, the Heritage Foundation urged its followers “to strangle the environmental movement,” which it declared “the greatest single threat to the American economy,” dismissing global warming, acid rain, and other environmental crises as “henny pennyism.”

  5 Its prominence as the leading voice for pollution-based prosperity helped it attract enormous donations from the automobile, coal, oil, and chemical companies. Heritage became a top beneficiary of five right-wing foundations established by major corporate polluters: the John M. Olin Foundation, funded by a leading manufacturer of ammunition and toxic chemicals; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, funded by the Mellon industrial, oil, and banking fortune and run by the arch-conservative American Spectator financier Richard Mellon Scaife; the Castle Rock Foundation, funded by Coors; the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, headed up by Charles G. Koch, chairman of Koch Industries, Inc., the largest independent oil company in the United States and one of the biggest polluters in Texas; and the Bradley Foundation, funded by the electronics fortune.

  6

  This “Gang of Five” has helped keep Heritage in business, providing it with close to $40 million since 1985. It and a gaggle of corporate polluters, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and DuPont, continue to provide a large portion of Heritage’s $34 million annual budget.

  7 They have also helped to create an array of Heritage look-alikes: the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Federalist Society, the Marshall Institute, and the secretive Mercatus Center, all of which get additional funding from the filthiest players in the oil, chemical, timber, mining, and agribusiness sectors.

  The purpose of these so-called think tanks is to run interference for their corporate funders and provide a counter-weight to the public interest groups shining a spotlight on their antisocial activities. They fight to exempt industry from toxic waste laws, to open wilderness areas and national parks to clear-cutting and mineral extraction, and to lift wetland protections. At the same time, they provide industry and politicians with the cover they need to pretend that there is a genuine debate over the objectives of the environmental movement.

  Around 1980, Coors and Co. spearheaded the Sagebrush Rebellion, a coalition of industrial heavyweights and right-wing ideologues that set out to turn their think-tank policies into political power. When candidate Ronald Reagan declared, “I am a Sagebrush rebel,” the big polluters were elated. Reagan’s victory gave the Heritage Foundation and the MSLF a national arena for their radical agenda. Heritage became known as Reagan’s “shadow government,”

  8 and its 2,000-page manifesto, Mandate for Change, became the blueprint for his administration. Joe Coors headed the cabal of right-wing millionaires that formed Reagan’s kitchen cabinet, which set up shop in the Executive Office Building directly across from the White House.

  9

  Coors handpicked his Colorado associate Anne Gorsuch to administer the EPA. He chose her husband-to-be, Robert Burford, a subsidy-dependent cattle baron who had vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land Management, to head up that very agency.

  10 Coors chose James Watt, president of the MSLF, as the secretary of the Department of the Interior. Watt was a proponent of “dominion theology,” an authoritarian Christian heresy that advocates man’s duty to “subdue” nature. His deep faith in laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic Christianity led Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his department and distributing its assets, selling off public lands and water and mineral rights at what the General Accounting Office called “fire-sale prices.”

  11 During a Senate hearing, Mr. Watt cited the approaching Apocalypse to explain why he was giving away America’s sacred places rather than preserving them for future generations: “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns,” he explained.

  12 Watt believed that environmentalism was a plot to delay energy development and “weaken America,” and dismissed environmentalists as “a left-wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe in.”

  13

  Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted the EPA’s budget by 30 percent, crippling the agency’s ability to write regulations or enforce the law. She purposely destroyed the Superfund program at its birth, turning it into a welfare program for industry lawyers. She appointed lobbyists fresh from their hitches with paper, asbestos, chemical, and oil companies to run each of the principal agency departments.

  14 Her chief of staff was a timber-industry lawyer; her enforcement chief was from Exxon.

  15

  These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt. By October 1981, 1.1 million Americans had signed a petition demanding Watt’s removal.

  16 After being forced out of office, he was indicted on 25 felony counts of perjury, unlawful concealment, and obstruction of justice.

  17 Gorsuch and 23 of her cronies were forced to resign following a congressional investigation of sweetheart deals with polluters, including Coors.

  18 Her first deputy, Rita LaVelle, was jailed for perjury and obstruction of justice.

  19

  The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper on the Sagebrush Rebels, but they quickly regrouped. During an August 1988 conference at the Nugget Hotel in Reno, Nevada, they adopted a new moniker, “Wise Use,” cynically chosen to imply a thoughtful approach to the environment.

  20 As Wise Use founder and timber industry flack Ron Arnold put it, “Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement. We want you to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely.”

  21

  By using its vast financial resources, Ar
nold urged, industry could control its destiny in the courts and Congress, actually dictating favorable legislation through its grassroots arms “guided by signals from…industry’s professional lobbyists.”

  Following the meeting in Reno, hundreds of small Wise Use groups began to pop up across the United States. Usually they focused on some local issue — development, lumber, mining, or grazing. While a few had genuine grassroots support, most were industry front groups organized by public relations consultants who specialize in “greenwashing” — deceiving the public on environmental issues — now a half-billion-dollar industry. These groups adopted environmentally friendly names to mask their purpose. The Citizens For the Environment (CFE), for example, has no citizen membership and gets its support from a long list of corporate sponsors who use the organization to lobby against the Clean Air Act and other environmental regulations. The Environmental Conservation Organization is a front group for land developers and other businesses opposed to wetlands regulations. The Evergreen Foundation is a timber-industry mouthpiece that promotes the idea that clear-cut logging is beneficial to the environment. Citizens for Sensible Control of Acid Rain is a front for the oil and electric industries that is opposed to all controls of acid rain.

  Though small in number, these phony grassroots, or “Astro-Turf,” groups had a disproportionate impact due to their access to nearly unlimited industry resources, the right wing’s network of think tanks, and the voices of sympathetic hate-radio jocks like Bob Grant and Rush Limbaugh.

  But the most important vector for hammering the Wise Use agenda into the Republican Party’s platform was the Christian right.

  From the start, the Wise Use movement was closely linked to a handful of powerful, authoritarian, right-wing Christian leaders. For instance, the convicted tax felon Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church, which owns the right-wing Washington Times, underwrote the costs of the Reno conference and provided seed money for dozens of Wise Use groups. Ron Arnold is head of the Washington State chapter of the American Freedom Coalition, the political arm of the Unification Church.

  22

  But when the Wise Use allies hooked up with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, they hit a home run. Robertson’s special contribution to right-wing theology was to substitute environmentalists for communists as the new threat to democracy and Christianity. In his 1991 best-seller, The New World Order, he vilifies the federal government as an alien nation waging war on the family and disarming America through gun control laws. Environmentalists are the evil priests of a new paganism that will become the official state religion of the New World Order. These ravings would hardly be worth mentioning had they not played such an important role in forming the ideological underpinnings of the anti-environmental movement and fueling the zealotry of its followers, which now include many high-ranking officials in the Bush White House and in Congress.

  23 Robertson’s aggressive anti-environmental proselytizing has opened the door for Christian extremists, militia aficionados, and white supremacists from the fringe who enthusiastically adopted the issue for their own purposes.

  24

  But Robertson has also helped make anti-environmentalism acceptable within the ranks of the fundamentalist clergy and the mainstream of the Republican Party. Beginning in 1991, Robertson and the Christian Coalition’s then–executive director Ralph Reed, now an official with the Bush campaign, put their media and organizational clout at the disposal of the Wise Use agenda. While Robertson made anti-environmentalism a principal theme on his Christian Broadcasting Network talk shows, news hours, and documentaries, Reed gave seminars to corporate public relations executives, coaching them on how to use electronic technologies and grassroots organizing to foil environmentalists who interfere with polluter profits.

  25

  Robertson’s brand of paranoia has always had a place in American politics, from the populist movement to Father Coughlin to the John Birch Society. But until 1994, it was never able to achieve the kind of power that only comes from money. Suddenly the extractive and chemical industries, their profits threatened by new environmental laws, saw the Christian right’s anti-environmentalism as a ticket to continued prosperity and donated the funds that sent its candidates to Congress.

  In 1994, industry’s greenwashing and its years of investment in political organizations, front groups, think tanks, and phony science paid off in the most pro-pollution Congress in our nation’s history. Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the Speaker’s chair of the U.S. Congress, where he began a dangerous and partially successful effort to enact his anti-environmental manifesto, Contract With America. Gingrich’s consigliore was Congressman Tom DeLay, the former bug exterminator who was determined to rid the world of pesky pesticide regulations and to promote a “biblical worldview.”

  26 DeLay considers DDT “safe as aspirin”

  27 and the Endangered Species Act the greatest threat to Texas after illegal aliens.

  28 He attributed the Columbine massacre to the teaching of evolution in schools.

  29 In January 1995, Congressman DeLay invited a group of 350 lobbyists representing some of the nation’s biggest polluters to collaborate in drafting legislation that would dismantle federal health, safety, and environmental laws.

  30

  The followers of Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle that they had to conceal their radical agenda. Under the tutelage of Republican pollster Frank Luntz — who drafted the Contract With America — they attended tree-planting ceremonies and greenwashed their language to attack big government and excessive regulations and to laud property rights and free markets.

  Carefully eschewing public debate, they mounted a stealth attack on America’s environmental laws. Rather than a frontal assault against popular statutes like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act, they tried to undermine these laws by silently attaching riders to must-pass budget bills or by promoting “supermandates” with seductive names claiming to support “regulatory reform” or “property rights” and to oppose “unfunded mandates.” Each was designed to eviscerate whole bodies of environmental law without debate.

  But the public got wise. The NRDC, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) helped direct more than a million letters to Congress, and moderate Republicans teamed with the Clinton administration to block the worst of it. When President Clinton shut down the government in December 1995 rather than pass a budget bill spangled with anti-environmental riders, the American public turned against Gingrich, DeLay, and their accomplices. By the end of that month, even conservatives publicly disavowed the attack. Tom DeLay openly admitted that the Republican leadership had miscalculated. “I’ll be real straight with you,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “We have lost the debate on the environment. I can count votes.”

  31

  It was only a temporary setback. With seemingly unlimited industry money, the Wise Use movement hardly paused before mounting its most audacious effort yet: installing George W. Bush in the White House. When Bush picked Dick Cheney as his running mate, he all but guaranteed support from the key interests that created Wise Use — oil, coal, mining, timber, chemical, pharmaceutical companies, and agribusiness — and from the Christian right.

  As a congressman from Wyoming during the 1980s, “Cheney was the go-to guy for oil and for the Wise Use people,” says former Montana congressman Pat Williams, who was elected to the House the same year as Cheney. In 1988, Cheney orchestrated the first veto of a wilderness bill in American history by then-president Ronald Reagan. According to Williams, the bill’s sponsor, that veto “served as a rallying point for Wise Use people all up and down the Rocky Mountains. The industry and Wise Use coalition are still fueled by that success.”

  32 From 1992 until he assumed his current office, Cheney served as a “distinguished adviser” to the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, which was the launching pad for the Wise Use
movement.

  33 The CDFE’s executive vice president is Ron Arnold, the movement’s founder. During this time Cheney was also on the board of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest, a Wise Use think tank.

  34

  Bush’s victory was the crowning achievement of the Wise Use coalition, and he wasted no time rewarding his benefactors. The assault on the environment began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush’s chief of staff and former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card froze all pending Clinton regulations. Recognizing that policy is personnel, the Bush team installed Wise Use sympathizers in key administration posts. First prize went to Wise Use radical Gale Norton, who got the top post at the Department of the Interior. Her second in command is J. Steven Griles, a notorious former lobbyist for the mining industry. The head of the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service is Mark Rey, a former timber-industry lobbyist. At the Justice Department, the assistant attorney general for Environment and Natural Resources is former mining-industry lobbyist and Wise Use leader Thomas Sansonetti. Until last year, the EPA’s deputy administrator was Linda Fisher, a former lobbyist for Monsanto, and Superfund was run by Marianne Horinko, a lobbyist and consultant to polluters, including the Koch Petroleum Group and Koch Industries.