Charley and the Redwoods

FROM SAVE THE REDWOODS TO SAVE THE PLANET

This blog started last month with an inspiration from John Steinbeck's book TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, based on a trip the Nobel Prize winner made 50 years ago. He said he had been writing about the country but had lost touch with it, so he and his French poodle Charley set off on a three-month journey around the country to personally rediscover America. In his book, published in l962, he made observations about many things. Previous blogs had tapped some of his observations to take a 50-years-later look at the emergence of today's toxic political atmosphere (July 13), and the evolution of racism (July 17) and immigration (July 24) issues and policies. This blog takes a similar half-century perspective on environmental policy, using Steinbeck's tree hugging experience on the west coast as a starting point.

About halfway through his circumnavigation of the country Steinbeck visited a grove of redwood trees in southern Oregon and commented, "The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under the spell of wonder and respect." He recalled that a number of years earlier a newcomer to his home country near Monterey, California, cut down a grove of redwoods. "This was not only a murder but a sacrilege. We looked on that man with loathing and he was marked to the day of his death."

His stop among the redwoods in l960 came on the threshold of major expansions in environmental issues and policies. At the time of his TRAVELS preservation was the core of environmental policy with its early beginnings in the creation of the first national park, Yellowstone in l872. This was followed by the efforts of many in government and private groups to create more parks, establish national forests to protect them against encroaching lumber interests, and preserve various threatened wildlife species such as the bison and the whooping crane.

Preservation policy remains a major part of the environmental agenda but was joined in the early l960s by a pressing set of new issues--anti-pollution. In l962, the same year that TRAVELS was published, Rachel Carson's SILENT SPRING hit the bookstores relating the devastating effects of DDT and other pesticides on the environment. The book contributed importantly to a subsequent ban on DDT and some other chemicals widely used to kill bugs and weeds.

Soon Congress was dealing with other parts of an anti-pollution agenda with enactment of the Clean Air Act (CAA). In l970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established, the same year that the CAA was extended and strengthened. Major federal legislation to deal with water pollution came a few years later with further amendments in later years. Preservation was not forgotten. In l973, the Endangered Species Act was passed protecting numerous species of wildlife and fish that were in danger of extinction.

While there were and remain sharp disagreements over particular parts of these laws as they were enacted, implemented, and amended, there was a national consensus that the problems were both real and sometimes disastrous. The severity of the problem was particularly dramatized in chemical pollution of waterways and drinking water, illustrated by the poisoning of the Love Canal in New York, and the movie ERIN BROCKOVICH about industrial pollution of drinking water and cancer-caused deaths in an area of southern California. Less dramatic but no less intense has been the long running battle over auto exhaust emissions and increasing gasoline mileage in gas guzzling cars.

The initiation and evolution of such policies over 50 years would probably have been seen by Steinbeck as the inevitable result of a doubling of the population, the increasing industrialization of the economy, growing demands for more energy, and the accompanying increased threat to air and water quality. Within a political context, he would probably see policies to resolve issues evolving out of what in his time was the civility of a traditional political process--negotiation and compromise between a multitude of diverse political, economic, and environmental interests. Indeed that is generally the process through which these policies have emerged over the past half century.

But what would be unexpected and troubling to Steinbeck would be the hostility surrounding the foremost environmental issue today--climate change aka global warming. This issue has not emerged within that customary process of conflict resolution, but as part of a great and growing ideological and increasingly partisan political confrontation. As such, the issue defies consensus building as left-of-center adherents (including this blogger) on one side argue the coming of a global apocalypse while opponents from the right charge the scientific case for global warming is underwritten by scientific fraud.

Proponents say global warming threatens the long term survival of earth's population and the need to greatly cut back on man-made greenhouse emissions must be solved now before it is too late. Opponents, beyond citing counter findings of some scientists that global warming isn't even occurring, say the remedies being proposed, such as cap and trade policy, endanger the economy and will lead to further job losses. The job loss argument hits on a particularly sensitive point in an economy where job loss/creation is a central political issue.

So for now the global warming issue is stalemated. The battle is certain to be renewed next year with a new Congress and as President Obama seeks an administrative solution through new EPA regulations to control greenhouse gas emissions factory by factory, power plant by power plant. But for those making the case for global warming and its cataclysmic consequences, the issue has probably become too ideological and political to produce a satisfactory policy outcome. If this fall's elections shows that voters are shifting toward the more conservative right (think Tea Party), resolution of the conflict will be even more difficult. So for proponents, a depressing quote used in previous blogs on other issues may also apply here, "the existence of a problem does not presume the existence of a solution."