Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Yet another Bush administration official has been forced to resign over improper activities, this time at the Interior Department, that all-important agency charged with care, or not, of our natural resources. Once again, we see evidence of this administration’s willingness to deliberately alter science for the sake of its friends in the oil and gas industries. Endangered species? Who cares?

Once again we see evidence that crucial agencies intended to safeguard the environment (along with many other important issues from Social Security to health care to civil rights), were put in the hands of people whose intent was to undermine the very mission of those agencies.

Julie A. MacDonald was charged with oversight of the US Fish and Wildlife Service [read more about her dubious background here]. In that role, she had reports of biologists on endangered species altered, put pressure on scientists to alter their findings on things like nesting ranges of endangered birds, and passed on internal agency documents to lawyers representing the oil and gas industries. [For more on her shenanigans, go here.]

One case of pressure was her effort to get scientists to reduce the nesting range of the willow flycatcher so that its boundaries would not cross the border into California where her husband owns a ranch [cited in today's NY Times].

MacDonald’s resignation comes the week before a House committee is set to hold hearings on the political interference with scientists at the agency.

Environmentalists expressed pleasure at the resignation, while cautioning that MacDonald may be the fall-person for a bigger more widespread problem. Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity told the Times:

Endangered species and scientists everywhere are breathing a sigh of relief. But MacDonald was the administration’s attack dog, not its general.

MacDonald is a mere manifestation of this administration’s anti-environment, anti-government regulation ideological orientation. Under the leadership of Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, whose nomination back in 2006 outraged environmentalists, the agency has taken a more pro-corporate orientation, as in pro-drilling, pro-oil and gas industry, pro-timber industry, undermining many of the regulations put in place over a generation.

This has to stop — one reason to do our homework for next year’s election. And another reason for Congress, now in the hands of the Democrats, to use their executive branch oversight powers as aggressively as they can right now — so that more of these problems see the light of day.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the Times:

We cannot continue to have government scientists whose work is manipulated and conclusions rewritten by political appointees. We cannot continue to have federal officials working secretly with groups challenging their own agencies.

Should be a no-brainer, but such are the political times in which we live.

I mention the elections because it is critical, given the time already wasted in the past 6 years and the increasingly dire ecological situation we’re in, that we choose leaders in both branches of government that care about these things. It is critical that we find leaders not connected by financial and political umbilical cords to the fossil fuel industries that are going to do their best to steer the environmental issues debates to their favor.

In that regard, don’t miss this front page article in the Times about Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani and a Texas law firm that has one of the worst environmental records in the country. The long article outlines Giuliani’s support from former Enron officials, among others in the oil and gas industry. The law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani, “is perhaps the nation’s most aggressive lobbyist for coal-fired power plants, heavy emitters of air pollutants and carbon dioxide.”

This is not small stuff; this is huge. And we need the media, and us, to do our research, to get the facts, and to press candidates very hard on these issues. We need to be clear about where their money comes from, both Republicans and Democrats, presidential candidates and candidates for Congress. I am pretty sure that we do not want to see representatives of the nation’s biggest carbon-emitters determining our global warming policies.

This is what happened in 2000 and 2001. Dick Cheney and his cohorts in the energy industry got together — secretly, you may remember — to write energy policies for their benefit, and the environment be damned. Six years later, we are reaping the rewards of those decisions.

This is NOT the way to go about the business of tackling our biggest ecological crises, from global warming to environmental destruction at the point of production to contamination of natural habitats that contribute to species extinction.

It is a matter of life and death — you know, for the planet.

[tags] Julie A. MacDonald, Dirk Kempthorne, Interior Department, endangered species, Fish and Wildlife Service, Sen. Ron Wyden, Rudy Giuliani, Bracewell & Giuliani, Dick Cheney, energy policy, oil & gas industry[/tags]