The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Tuesday 26 June 2007
Mount Hood, Oregon - Most Americans don't own a summer home on Cape Cod, or a McMansion in the Rockies, but they have this birthright: an area more than four times the size of France. If you're a citizen, you own it - about 565 million acres.
The deed on a big part of this public land inheritance dates to a pair of Republican class warriors from a hundred years ago: President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the Forest Service.
Both were rich. Both were well educated. Both were headstrong and quirky. Pinchot slept on a wooden pillow and had his valet wake him with ice water to the face. Teddy and G.P., as they were known, sometimes wrestled with each other, or swam naked in the Potomac.
In establishing the people's estate, they fought Gilded Age titans - railroads, timber barons, mine owners - and their enablers in the Senate. And make no mistake: Those acts may have been cast as the founding deeds of the environmental movement, but they were as much about class as conservation.
Pinchot had studied forestry in France, where a peasant couldn't make a campfire without being subject to penalties. In England, he had seen how the lords of privilege had their way over the outdoors. In the United States, he and T.R. envisioned the ultimate expression of Progressive-era values: a place where a tired factory hand could be renewed - lord for a day.
"In the national forests, big money was not king," wrote Pinchot. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because "it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before."
A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.
In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line - the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.
Remember the scene from "It's a Wonderful Life," when Jimmy Stewart's character sees what would happen to Bedford Falls if the richest man in town took over? All those honky-tonks, strip joints and tenement dwellings in Pottersville?
If Roosevelt roamed the West today, he'd find some of the same thing in the land he entrusted to future presidents. The national wildlife system, started by T.R., has been emasculated. President Bush has systematically pared the budget to the point where, this year, more than 200 refuges could be without any staff at all.
The Bureau of Land Management, which oversees some of the finest open range, desert canyons and high-alpine valleys in the world, was told early on in the Bush years to make drilling for oil and gas their top priority. A demoralized staff has followed through, but many describe their jobs the way a cowboy talks about having to shoot his horse.
In Colorado, the bureau just gave the green light to industrial development on the aspen-forested high mountain paradise called the Roan Plateau. In typical fashion, the administration made a charade of listening to the public about what to do with the land. More than 75,000 people wrote them - 98 percent opposed to drilling.
For most of the Bush years, the Interior Department was nominally run by a Stepford secretary, Gale Norton, while industry insiders such as J. Steven Griles - the former coal lobbyist who pleaded guilty this year to obstruction of justice - ran the department.
Same in the Forest Service, where an ex-timber industry insider, Mark Rey, guides administration policy.
They don't take care of those lands because they see them as one thing: a cash-out. Thus, in Bush's budget proposal this year, he guts the Forest Service budget yet again, while floating the idea of selling thousands of acres to the highest bidder. The administration says it wants more money for national parks. But the parks are $10 billion behind on needed repairs; the proposal is a pittance.
Roosevelt had his place on Oyster Bay. Pinchot had a family estate in Pennsylvania. Bush has the ranch in Crawford. Only one of them has never been able to see beyond the front porch.
House Democrats Boosting Funding for Parks, Environmental Protection
By Andrew Taylor
The Associated Press
Wednesday 27 June 2007
Washington - The House put spending hikes for the environment, national parks and global warming research center stage Tuesday as lawmakers worked through the Interior appropriations bill.
Democrats argue such programs have gotten short shrift for years under President Bush's leadership, but their resulting increases for items such as Environmental Protection Agency clean water grants have incited the White House into threatening to veto the bill as "irresponsible and excessive."
The measure represents the latest skirmish in an ongoing battle between the White House and Democrats over the 12 annual spending bills doling out the approximately one-third of the federal budget passed each year by Congress.
Democrats almost doubled funding for research into climate change and trumpeted an 11 percent increase to operate and maintain national parks in advance of a major 100th-anniversary celebration in 2016.
"Our national parks have been shortchanged for far too long," said Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., as the House opened debate on the Interior appropriations measure. The bill is expected to be completed Wednesday.
In most other accounts, the increases are typically small and are generally focused on run-of-the-mill operating accounts that for years have had to absorb costs from inflation and higher pay for federal workers. But they add up, and the resulting measure is almost 9 percent over Bush's budget request and 4 percent over funding approved last year.
"Between 2001 and 2007 ... funding for the Interior Department fell 16 percent, EPA by 29 percent and the Forest Service non-fire budget by 35 percent, when adjusted for inflation," said the bill's floor manager, Norm Dicks, D-Wash.
But Rep. Jerry Lewis of California, top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, said the funding in the bill "represents exactly the kind of unfettered spending that so closely identifies the differences of philosophies between House Republicans and the Democrat majority."
The measure is also the first of the spending bills to contain so-called earmarks, the back-home projects so eagerly prized by almost every lawmakers. The measure contains 228 projects sought by lawmakers, totaling $119 million.
That's one-half the amount passed by Republicans two years ago, but GOP conservatives forced several votes - losing all by sweeping margins - to cut Democratic projects such as helping renovate a theatre at St. Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Indiana.
The bill also contains a provision by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., to effectively bar oil companies benefiting from controversial offshore oil and gas leases issued in the late 1990s from obtaining new leases. Oil companies pay no royalties on the leases - thanks to a mistake by Clinton administration bureaucrats - even though oil prices have tripled since they were awarded.
By a 233-196 vote, lawmakers rejected a move by Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., to allow new leases for offshore natural gas wells on the Outer Continental Shelf in areas at least 25 miles offshore.
As they did last year, House lawmakers voted to cut off big taxpayer subsidies of logging roads in the Tongass National Forest, a move backed by environmentalists but opposed by Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, as an assault on the few remaining timber jobs in southeast Alaska. Young was on the losing end of a 283-145 tally. The Senate rejected the idea last year.
Separately, two Senate appropriations subcommittees Tuesday approved funding boosts over Bush's requests for anti-crime programs, NASA, Army Corps of Engineers water projects and the Energy Department.
A $54.6 billion bill funding the Justice Department, NASA, as well as Bush's "competitiveness initiative" boosting basic research and improving training and recruitment of math and science teachers, contains budget hikes totaling $3.8 billion above Bush's February budget. That's more than 7 percent and is sure to also attract a veto threat.
Moments later, the panel responsible for energy programs and water projects approved a $32.3 billion measure providing a 16 percent increase for renewable energy research and development and energy efficiency programs.
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