Barbarians within?

IN THE FALL of 1981 Amicus, the official journal of the Natural Resources Defense Council, published a piece titled "Barbarians at the Gate"; it said that the Reagan Administration and its allies were "abusing the environment in so many ways that it is as if the barbarians were swarming through the gates of Rome, burning and looting." And what precisely was it that agitated the author of this piece, one Bartle Bull, to predict the fall of American civilization at the hands of Hunnish Reaganites?

The first offense was the installation as head of the U.S. Forest Service of John Crowell, a man who had actually worked for a timber company once and believed in logging on some federal lands. Ranching too. And oil and gas exploration. Even mining. Crowell clearly deserved the "barbarian" label for the uncivilized thought that it may be possible to combine some resource development with conservation on federal lands. (Not to be confused with national parks, federal lands constitute 30 per cent of the nation's total land area and a majority of the land in many Western states.) The possible revival of policies of using government lands for human benefit that were generally accepted prior to the environmental revolution of the 1970s sent environmentalists into paroxysms of hysteria.

In fact during the Hunnish occupation of Washington, D.C., the environment did pretty well, according to data assembled by the Council for Environmental Quality. Reafforestation shot up from around 2 million acres annually in the 1970s to 3 million--perhaps because of an improved economic climate. Land in wilderness preservation increased from 80 to 91 million acres over the Reagan years. Wetland losses slowed from an average 290,000 acres annually to 120,000. The Great Lakes continued to get cleaner. Lake Michigan, for example, went from a phosphorous loading of 6,600 tons in 1980 to 2,900 tons in 1988. Water quality in rivers and streams showed mixed trends. In terms of dissolved oxygen, fecal bacteria, and suspended nutrients such as phosphorous and potassium, there was general improvement, though in chlorides, sodium, magnesium, and nitrogen and in both alkalinity and acidity there was regress. Oil spills decreased from an average of 14 million gallons in the 1970s to under 9 million in the Reagan years. The air got cleaner according to most measures. Declines were: sulphur oxides 12 per cent, nitrogen oxides 4 per cent, volatile organic compounds (gasoline fumes etc.) 14 per cent, suspended particulates (dust etc.) 12 per cent, carbon monoxide 18 per cent, lead 89 per cent. Use of fertilizers and pesticides declined. Soil erosion was down. Numbers of ducks were down quite sharply, but geese increased. The number of endangered and threatened species increased sharply, though much of this is an artifact of the process of government listing.

Reasonable Standard?

BUT ISSUES like the environment can be argued various ways. Those who want more environmental quality simply frame their discussion in terms of what remains to be done to meet a standard. Some standards are reasonable objectives (though even then, there is legitimate argument about how fast you should go). Some standards are arbitrary. Some keep being tightened so you never meet them. Others are plain ridiculous. A National Academy of Sciences panel on urban air quality recently pointed out that even the elimination of all human activity in some American cities would not allow the EPA's volatile-organic-compound standards to be met because emissions from surrounding trees exceed them! But standards, reasonable or not, provide a constant measure of deficiency used to beat up on any government. And environmentalists used them to the full against the Reagan Administration.

The environmentalists' most odious barbarian was Secretary of the Interior James Watt.

Not that Watt really deserved all the vilification. He never seriously threatened to roll back any of the environmental movement's achievements. He mostly annoyed them by refusing to show them the respect to which they had grown accustomed. And he did for a while threaten their main Washington redoubt by cutting the funding and staff of the EPA. At 10,400 in 1975, it had grown to 13,000 in the Carter Administration. Under Watt the EPA had a short period of decline in numbers to around 12,000 but it quickly recovered, and toward the end of the Reagan Administration and under President Bush has grown rapidly. It is now at 17,500.

Early on Watt initiated a Cabinet review of the Clean Air Act, hoping to reduce some of its inefficiencies for example its extraordinary requirement that power plants install expensive sulphur-collecting scrubbers in their smokestacks even when they burn completely non-sulphurous coal. But according to William Niskanen, who represented the Council of Economic Advisors on the review group, the Reagan EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch (later Burford), was captive to the EPA staff and killed all reform proposals by branding them "radical." Proposals to reform the Clean Water Act met similar opposition and were withdrawn.

The creation of Superfund--aimed at cleaning up toxic wastes--was rushed through the Congress in Jimmy Carter's lame-duck period and has turned out to be a fabulously expensive drain on taxpayers and shareholders. Its main effect seems to be to provide work for EPA inspectors and lawyers, with only a small proportion of funds going for reclaiming toxic materials and disposing of them.

Preoccupied with trying to contain budgetary outlays on Superfund, the Reagan Administration devoted all its intellectual energy to limiting the immediate costs to the federal budget, with sad consequences for industry.

Here was an opportunity to ask some serious questions. Much of the thinking about toxic cleanup is based on the romantic notion that nature is a pristine and benign setting contaminated by mankind. It follows that manmade toxics should be completely reprocessed into benign substances, regardless of the cost of doing this or of the actual risk they pose. Under Superfund, the absurd situation obtains where tens of millions are spent removing a toxic heavy metal from ground water because it is deemed the result of improper human dumping, while other ground water nearby, contaminated by natural deposits of the same metal, is completely untreated.

Instead of seizing the high ground and opening a debate about fundamentals, the Administration left proposals for reform of Superfund to the Environmental Protection Agency-- akin to deputizing the fox to reduce the number of disappearing chickens. The EPA built a constantly growing program and everyone got promoted in the expanding bureaucratic empire needed to administer it.

None of the barbarian rulers of the Reagan era quite worked out how to cope with Washington scaremongering. Mostly they just got panicked into playing along. Take the case of Times Beach, Missouri, a tiny town where high levels of the trace chemical dioxin  were measured and publicized in 1986. Some ten years before, to reduce dust nuisance, the dirt roads in Times Beach had been sprayed with a sealing oil containing the chemical.

Dioxin has never been known to do more than cause skin rash even when people have been soaked in high concentrations of the chemical, as in industrial accidents. But the anti-war crowd had successfully anathematized dioxin because of its presence in Agent Orange, used in Vietnam. Agent Orange air crews who mixed and loaded the chemical and spent hours daily in its spray mist showed no higher incidence of disease than their colleagues who had nothing to do with the chemical. Similarly, despite the hullabaloo about Times Beach's road spraying, there was no evidence of higher disease rates in the little town. No special health problems, and no public health justification for doing anything at all--except perhaps to send in some non-ideological scientists from the American Council on Science and Health to tell residents the facts about dioxin.

Yet Anne Gorsuch played the green scare game to the hilt. People who had lived there all their lives without any sign of trouble were ordered out of their houses. Miss Gorsuch personally traveled to the benighted little town to announce that the EPA would spend $33 million to buy up all the homes and businesses and close the place down permanently. To placate the evil spirits of environmentalism, mankind (via American taxpayers) would pay its penance and be banished forevermore from the scene of this terrible crime against Mother Earth.

On the Plus Side

ONE THING the Reagan Administration did do was scare the bejesus out of the better informed environmentalists by funding a solid scientific study of acid rain. Throughout the 1980s the greens had hustled up scares about acid rain. Typical of the sweeping claims was the statement in the Spring 1986 issue of Amicus that "acid rain is destroying our soil, forests, and lakes--the basis of the earth's life-support system--and damage is occurring coast to coast." The Reagan Administration launched the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (NAPAP) to evaluate these claims. It involved five years of studies and over $500 million in research projects. It was scientifically unimpeachable, and concluded that the environmental zealots were talking through their hats. Lake and stream acidity was overwhelmingly the product of the relative acidity and alkalinity of local soils and rocks through which ground water passed, not precipitation, NAPAP discovered. This explained the presence of highly acid lakes in the pristine non-industrial environment of the South Pacific, and alkaline lakes in areas of "acid rain." The study found no evidence of damage to forests or crops from acid rain. Tree damage that had been attributed by many observers to acid rain was actually the result of pests, diseases, and climatic stress, the report said.

In short, it found that there was no scientific justification for forcing electric utilities to install expensive equipment to cut sulphur-dioxide emissions from their smokestacks, and that SO2 was not the cause of forest dieback, lake acidity, or crop damage.

All of this was simply censored by environmental writers at the Washington Post and the New York Times. And the Reagan Administration, having gotten the NAPAP report, did nothing to break through the wall of silence surrounding it. It was left to incoming President George Bush to take the next step in obeisance to the greens by pushing a new Clean Air Act that incorporated $30-billion worth of anti-SO2 measures. A number of economists have listed the wasteful Clean Air Act as one of a handful of events that ended the economic growth of the Reagan years and precipitated the economic malaise that has taken President Bush down from 80 per cent to 35 per cent public support in public-opinion polls.

Richard Stroup, who was director of the Interior Department's office of policy analysis for several years in the 1980s, says there were some limited accomplishments. He mentions: highlighting the skewed priorities of some existing programs and focusing some public attention on costs; introducing some limited markets in pollution rights; a speed-up of leasing coal-mining rights in federal land; the ending of federal subsidies to development of coastal barrier islands; a beginning in trades in water.

In an article in Regulation magazine Stroup wrote that the basic trouble ever since the rounding of the Environmental Protection Agency under Richard Nixon has been that the government is "trying to provide environmental quality the way the Russians grow wheat--with central political control--and trying to preserve land and wildlife with straight socialism, namely ownership of the means of production."

Stroup says the Reagan Administration never challenged this own-it-or-control-it system, which is the heart of the problem. Under James Watt the environmentalists were teased. Under subsequent leadership the Administration tried to placate the environmentalists. It never did serious battle with them. Mr. Samuel runs Greentrack International, a Washington, D.C., environmental news service.