Issue #228
Sept 21, 2007
Pombo Reaches Out from the Grave
Josh Dorner
One of the sweetest wins of the 2006 election was when the environmental community came together to take out Dick Pombo, proving once and for all that it's politically dangerous to take anti-environmental positions -- no matter how safe the prognosticators of record say your seat is. Unfortunately, Pombo's war on the environment is alive and kicking within the Bush administration.
A Senate hearing held yesterday exposed yet another example wrongdoing at the "Interior" Department. The way things are going, the Interior in its name refers to the inside of a jail cell that so many top officials from the department are likely to see sometime soon (if not already). Todd Willens, the deputy assistant secretary for parks and wildlife, claimed that he was acting alone -- without pressure from superiors -- when he had the Everglades removed from UNESCO's list of environmentally threatened World Heritage sites.
A fight over this has been brewing for months, after Floridians were shocked to learn that U.S. officials had persuaded the international body to remove the still very much threatened Everglades from the list at a meeting held in New Zealand in July. It was all the more shocking, since an official position paper made public in May supported retaining the designation. Somehow once Willens found his way to New Zealand, the word "retain" in the document was magically changed to "remove." Perhaps Willens was stricken with the same sort of Down Under Dementia that the President suffered from during his recent trip to Australia? (Or was it Austria?)
It's so easy to see why Willens might have thought the Everglades was doing just fine these days. I mean, the Government Accountability Office reports that a whopping 42 of 222 Everglades restoration projects have been finished. I know an 18 percent is all I needed to get a Ph.D in TV/VCR repair from International Correspondence Schools -- Sally Suthers told me so! What's good enough for Sally Struthers is good enough for the Everglades!
Of course there is an alternate explanation. It could just be that since Willens was the policy director for Dick Pombo during his tenure as Chairman of the House Resources Committee -- some of the darkest days for our lands, air, and water -- that he really just hates the environment.
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