The state of environmental politics in America is well summed up by an episode that occurred last week here in Madison: state Rep. Spencer Black, D-Madison, proposed to re-establish the Office of the Public Intervenor.
The office was established in 1969 by Gov. Warren Knowles during the heyday of the environmental movement and mandated to protect Wisconsin's rivers, lakes and wetlands. Gov. Tommy Thompson axed the position in 1995 during the heyday of the free-market movement, That yin and yang depicts the ecological maladies and ideologies that invariably clog solutions. If we can see past market rhetoric we might move from environmental neglect to a series of social and economic opportunities.
The environmental issues facing Wisconsin and the nation range from mundane to shocking. On the mundane side, Illinois dumped 1.4 million tons of trash in Wisconsin last year, an increase of nearly half a million tons from 2003. Landfills near the border, such as Pheasant Run, are growing larger, mainly because Wisconsin has cheap dumping rates.
On the shocking side, the weekend storms in Milwaukee led to a sewage discharge into Lake Michigan. This comes even as post-Katrina New Orleans and the Gulf Coast attempt to deal with an unfathomable volume of polluted mud and floodwater-the Environmental Protection Agency has found fecal coliform bacteria, arsenic and industrial solvents in the oil-slicked agglutination sliming the Gulf Coast.
If some of these problems seem intractable, others seem manageable. Whatever the problem, market dogma presents the largest political obstacle to solutions. In the strange view of these market dogmatists, an invisible hand, provident and partial to free enterprise, will guide us to an ecologically acceptable future-or at least to massive profits. Therefore, environmental regulation can only hamper the divine movements of the invisible hand.
Gov. Thompson eliminated the Office of the Public Intervenor precisely because his administration subscribed to that market ideology. That office interfered with the free exercise of industry, notably in the issue concerning Kennecott Copper Corporation's decade-long struggle in the 1970s to dig a potentially pollution-causing open pit mine in Rusk County. In the eyes of market ideology, the Public Intervenor was not preventing a problem, but creating one.
Of course, Thompson is not the only market ideologue. These dogmatists currently govern the country. President Bush and his allies in Congress seek to either abolish regulatory offices, or to fill those positions with like-minded cronies who work to wreck their own regulatory mandate. The consequences are radical.
Environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wrote in a 2003 \Rolling Stone"" article that the EPA has ""halted work"" on 62 environmental standards and simply stopped enforcing all the others. Accordingly, in a 2004 report, Knight-Ridder compiled statistics showing that Bush Administration EPA directors Christine Todd Whitman and Michael Leavitt supervised a drastic decrease of in the number of citations issued to polluters from 2001-'04-down 57 percent in three years.
Currently, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson's principal priority is to withhold data documenting the pollution that followed Hurricane Katrina. Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the agency with the courage to speak out, relates that EPA leadership does not want the public to see ""the full magnitude of how much toxic material they are being exposed to in that region of the country."" Presumably, finding large amounts of pollutants in the Gulf Coast waters might prompt public opinion to turn against the current EPA's industry-friendly management style of not doing its job.
This is not to say that market ideology is all bad. But when ideology leads us to distort or dismiss reality, such as when Philip Cooney, chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, fudged climate change documents in 2003, then it becomes a problem.
It is one thing to realize that market ideology cannot deal with environmental problems and often exacerbates those problems. But it is another to come up with solutions. What might solutions look like?
We could heed Rep. Black's call to restore the Public Intervenor. We could also use our imaginations and see that cleaning up and protecting the environment will not necessarily cost jobs. Conservation could be a new, radical industry in its own right, creating jobs and business opportunities. It comes down to this: a healthy environment is our nation's largest economic asset and we need to devote the resources necessary to protect it.
If the blind ideologues of market dogma and their hirelings in D.C. cannot see that, then it is time to elect someone a little greener. Which really means someone a little more pragmatic.
