Environmentalists’ lies fuel more disaster

Kahrl is a third-year political science and history student.

By Justin Kahrl

I recently heard someone indignantly assert that conservatives
had convinced the country the environmental movement has gone
berserk.

But why would any conservative have to undermine the
environmental movement when it is quite capable of doing so on its
own?

It only takes one look at the environmental movement’s
history to prove this point.

One great example is the environmental issue that fertilized our
generation: the spotted owls. Supposedly an earnest issue of
conservation, but the whole issue was a hoax. It turned out that
researchers deliberately hedged their counts to create a problem.
They would wait for the far-ranging owls to leave the census
sector, then take the count and move on to the next precinct,
repeating the same process. The target was the logging industry,and
abusing the Endangered Species Act was only a means to an end.

And the list goes on. A set of Fish and Wildlife officials
apparently planted Canadian lynx hair during their endangered
species survey of an unprotected area. Several environmental
lobbies deliberately lied about the presence of threatened species
to obtain funds for a conservation project in Mexico because they
felt American checkbooks wouldn’t open to save a Mexican
national park from its own government.

The most immediate effect of environmental lies like these is
bad policy. Because of such distorted truths, the California
mountain lion remains on the endangered species list even as its
booming population wanders into river valleys, decimating the deer
population and endangering citizens. Under such protection, a
livestock owner cannot even shoot a lion if it attacks his animals.
He has to call the government and hope someone shows up on the same
day. On the East Coast, similar protection has caused the deer
population to explode. This overpopulation threatens denizens
because the deer carry lime-diseased ticks.

Also, the dangerous fire seasons of recent years are directly
related to poorly thought-out environmental legislation.
Legislation imposed by the Clinton administration placed huge
swaths of forests off-limits and closed roads that provided
firefighters access to the fires. Aerial fire-retardant was also
made illegal because it threatened endangered fish that were
boiling to death in the fire anyway.

In other cases, the policy choices are intentionally malignant.
Environmentalists successfully lobbied to have the production of
diesel trucks stopped in California, arguing that diesel produces
more chemical byproducts than other fuels. Of course,
deisel’s byproducts also have no observable effect on the
environment ““ but such information is trivial to the
environmental lobbies. The auto industry is a target; it makes no
difference to these lobbies how they’re hit. And the
legislation itself merely exports the diesel industry, necessary
for trucking goods, to another state, taking jobs from Californians
for a chemical that hasn’t even done anything wrong yet.

Even worse than this was the effort to federalize the state
water industry in the last administration. The environmentalists
convinced Clinton to pressure California to cede control of the
state’s environmental management to the federal government.
The thought was that the federal government would have nobler
ideals in mind; however, it lacked any experience in environmental
management.

California handed the keys to the feds given that the feds
agreed not to touch the state water system, among other things. The
environmentalists took the deal, got the power, then went back on
all their promises. They tore down the state’s water
infrastructure in a simpleminded crusade to return us to some
non-existent era when water management wasn’t necessary for
human life. As it stands, California cannot stomach a drought like
the one we endured as children without importing water at huge
costs from another state.

In lieu of moral standing, the environmental movement has
embraced publicity to the point of being ludicrous. A noted
protester now popular on the enviro-lecture circuit, famed for
stopping a logging operation by barricading herself in a mini tree
house in the middle of a forest, claims she communed with the
tree’s spirit, which audibly spoke to her. She and others
have embraced a nature cult, a perversion of a perversion of an
idealized form of late Native American tribal religion. Where is
the naturalism of John Muir or Teddy Roosevelt in all of this?

More bizarre are reports that the Clinton administration, in its
frenzied final days, seriously considered reintroducing the grizzly
bear to parts of the western United States. Though I’m
touched on a romantic side, this just isn’t sane policy.
Allegedly, one of the hang-ups was the $80 million the government
would have to set aside for the families of victims-to-be when they
sued the government for negligent policy making.

In light of all these deliberate falsehoods and efforts to
mislead the government and public, there are still those
who’d say that environmentalists are simply playing the
political game. But I say conservationism cannot resort to normal
politics in this situation because there are no rational,
self-interested actors on the other side. Scientific honesty and
social conscience are and should be as basic to the
movement’s existence as water and sunlight are to flora.