Editorial: Environment takes a hit

Friday, Nov. 3, 2006 | 7:22 a.m.

Public opinion polls show that concerns over the Iraq war, health care costs and the economy eclipse environmental issues when it comes to choosing candidates.

A recent story by Reuters news service says that a public opinion poll by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, shows that only about 3 percent of voters said that the environment was their top issue.

Karlyn Bowman, the poll's analyst, told Reuters that such apathy may exist because Americans figure that the issue of protecting the environment was settled in the 1960s and '70s. That era gave rise to Earth Day, recycling, the Endangered Species Act and many of the other laws that continue to protect wildlife and the quality of our water, air and land.

Despite Bowman's suggestion that apathy may be the reason for the environment not rating as voters' top concern, a University of Wisconsin environmental sociologist told Reuters that politicians fail to make the environment their top issue, so voters are not likely to list the issue as their reason for casting ballots. In fact, he said, polls conducted since the mid-1980s show consistently high levels of public support for environmental issues.

Of course, such a similar concern for the environment can't be said for Congress and the federal agencies that manage natural resources under the Bush administration.

The Republican-led Congress has stood by and allowed President Bush to ignore or steamroll environmental protections, while a United Nations report released Monday shows that levels of greenhouse gas emissions, which had fallen during the 1990s, are again rising.

The United States emits a quarter of the globe's greenhouse gases, yet Bush repeatedly has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, a climate-change treaty that is designed to limit such emissions on a worldwide scale. Bush claims he'd rather spend federal money on investigating cleaner technologies. But scientists attending an energy conference in Colorado earlier this week said that federal spending for such research has dropped to $3 billion annually - less than half of the $7.7 billion that was spent in 1979.

This lack of action by Congress has resulted in states, with the public's support, acting instead. California's leaders, for example, have called for strict vehicle emissions standards and reductions in greenhouse gases. But states individually can only do so much - their actions don't cover an entire nation. We need protections enacted by Congress, and we aren't getting them.

All the while, Bush and his far-right supporters in Congress have made several concerted efforts to dismantle or dilute the protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act and other laws in order to open more forests and other habitat to development.

This week The Washington Post reported that the Interior Department's inspector general is investigating complaints from Interior staffers that a senior Bush political appointee within the department has, over the past three years, routinely rejected scientists' recommendations to protect animals and plants that are threatened or endangered.

Certainly, war and adequate health care should head the list of voters' top concerns. But Americans who say that they are concerned about the future of the environment also should be willing to show that concern with their votes as they head to the polls.