Columnist Susan Snyder: Ignorance is unsettling environment

Monday, Oct. 18, 2004 | 8:26 a.m.

Maybe I went to the bathroom or fell asleep or something.

But was discussion of the environment virtually absent from the three presidential debates?

What with all that liberating going on over in Iraq, I can understand it not coming up first.

With 43 million Americans without health insurance, senior citizens forced to choose between buying food or blood-pressure medicine, and an increase in the number of people out of work for the first time in 75 years, I can understand the environment not coming up even second or third.

But over the course of three debates, it seems someone could have asked:

Why has the Bush administration spent only $600 million of the $5 billion the president promised to spend on the national park system's backlog of overdue maintenance projects?

Why are proposals booming for building new air-polluting coal-fired power plants across the interior West, including areas in Nevada and Arizona?

Where does either candidate stand on creating domestic energy sources, either through renewable sources or drilling in public lands (located mostly in the West)?

What was the scientific justification for the Bush administration's reversal of the previous administration's plan to phase-out snowmobile use in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks?

These issues do hit close to home. While Bush and Kerry gave speeches in Las Vegas on Thursday, Death Valley National Park officials were helping the park's seasonal employees obtain housing in Beatty because they finally had to condemn the 40- to 50-year-old trailers near Scotty's Castle in which seasonal employees lived. There is no money to make repairs or build new housing.

Whether you prefer to see Yellowstone from the seat of a snowmobile or from a pair of cross-country skis isn't the point.

Whether you protect fish or eat them, hug trees or feed your family by cutting them down, favor telecommuting or drive an hour to work in an SUV, where these two men stand on the environment matters.

You consume energy, breath the air and visit parks such as Yellowstone. And if you are among those who only get a chance to see the Grand Canyon once in a lifetime, will it bother you if the view is obscured by haze from the coal-fired plant that provides your electricity at home?

We all pay for environmental decisions one way or another, just as we pay for health-care costs, unemployment and wars in faraway countries.

And what Bush's administration has done with the environment, and what Kerry's administration would do if he is elected, matters. Both of them have plans, and the answers to the above questions exist.

But unless you are a member of a special interest group that has hard opinions one way or the other, you likely don't know what those answers are because they haven't been aired in the only seemingly objective, public forum we have left -- the debates.

Those plans matter to you.

They matter to me.

They matter to members of future generations, who are relying on us to ask all of the right questions, right now.

And we didn't ask them.