Editorial: This space for sale

Saturday, April 22, 2006 | 7:26 a.m.

A recently released national survey shows a majority of Americans are pessimistic about the state of the environment and are calling on lawmakers, private industry and individuals to do more about preserving it.

"America's Report Card on the Environment," conducted by the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University in conjunction with ABC News and Time magazine, shows that 55 percent of Americans expect the global environment to be in worse shape 10 years from now.

Figure after bleak figure shows that Americans are gloomy about the environment and have little faith in President Bush's policies. While Democrats were more likely than Republicans to blame Bush for nature's deterioration, 66 percent of Republicans polled held the president responsible for at least some damage.

As the nation commemorates its 37th annual Earth Day today, it is interesting that a majority of Americans believe the environment is in peril. Global warming was a strong factor, as nearly 70 percent believe it is happening. And 73 percent of Americans want Bush to do a great deal more to help save the environment.

The Bush administration's environmental policies and decisions have been so remarkably bad that nearly any kind of improvement would be noticeable. Bush's industry-loving policies threaten to unravel decades of species habitat protections, dismantle the national park system and open hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands to road development, old-growth logging and drilling for oil and natural gas.

Under Bush's orders, the National Park Service, already facing a $5 billion maintenance backlog, is cutting visitors' services this summer. And Bush proposes to pare another $100.5 million from the Park Service's budget next year.

While offering tax breaks to big industry, Bush has proposed selling national forest land to pay for rural schools and slashing funding for water and land conservation grants. He opposes policies to substantially curtail emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming - even though the United States produces 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases.

If it can be cleared, paved, drilled, sold or rented, Bush is all for it. More than half of Americans polled disapprove of the way he is handling environmental issues, but that doesn't seem to matter. For Bush, Earth Day seems to be a day for celebrating all that America has to sell.