Earth Day finds environmental gains at risk.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Samantha Rodgers and Jeremy Hall For The Register-Guard

On April 22, 1970, the United States celebrated its first Earth Day, demonstrating a bipartisan national outpouring of concern for cleaning up and protecting the environment. In the decade that followed, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other laws that form the cornerstone of America's commitment to protecting the environment and public health.

While on this Earth Day we can celebrate some progress on environmental protection since 1970, many ecological crises remain unsolved. Despite Oregon's strong environmental reputation, Oregon's last remaining wild places and old growth forests are in peril, our rivers and streams fail to meet Clean Water Act standards, and dangerous toxins such as mercury continue to contaminate our fish and threaten our children's health.

We can do better. We can prevent and clean up water pollution; we can generate more electricity from clean and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar; we can make cars go farther on a gallon of gas using technology available today, and we can preserve our last wild places for current and future generations to enjoy.

In a country that takes great pride in its entrepreneurial spirit, our leaders should embrace innovative solutions to the challenges facing our environment. After all, environmental protection is good for a sustainable economy.

But the Bush administration has taken the opposite course - looking for opportunities to weaken our cornerstone environmental protections, often to the benefit of big oil, timber, mining and chemical interests and to the detriment of the public and more sustainable local businesses.

The administration let the nation's dirtiest power plants off the hook for cutting soot and smog pollution while asthma rates among children are at an all-time high. The administration legalized the coal industry's devastating practice of literally blowing off the tops of mountains and dumping them into streams and valleys below when a national energy conservation effort could reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The administration stripped safeguards to make it easier to log old growth forests while too few resources exist to thin millions of acres of young, dense tree plantations.

A number of decision points in the next few months offer the Bush administration the opportunity to reverse course and protect the interests of the public, not the polluters:

With the Environmental Protection Agency now estimating that one in six babies born each year in the United States has been exposed to enough mercury in the womb to cause serious health problems, and with the entire main stem of the Willamette River under a fish advisory for mercury contamination, the EPA should withdraw its industry-written proposal to reclassify mercury as a nontoxic pollutant. Instead, the administration should reduce mercury emissions by 90 percent by 2008 - as the EPA itself has said is possible.

More than 2.5 million Americans, including more than 58,000 Oregonians, have written comments in support of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, enacted in 2001 to protect the last large patches of wild national forests. Not only has the Bush administration blocked implementation of this widely popular rule, it is pushing an aggressive logging plan that would degrade 57,000 acres of roadless areas in the Siskiyou Mountains, the most botanically diverse forests in all of North America. The administration should implement the entire roadless rule, which would permanently protect 1.9 million acres of these last wild forests throughout Oregon.

Already, 1,207 miles of waterway in Oregon fail to meet Clean Water Act standards. To make matters worse, in January 2003, the EPA instructed its own staff and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to stop using the Clean Water Act to protect so-called `isolated' waterways, allowing polluters to dump more toxic chemicals into streams and developers to drain and fill more wetlands. The Bush administration should rescind this guidance and guarantee all waterways the shelter afforded by the Clean Water Act.

Not just on Earth Day, but every single day, the public should make it our business to send a loud and clear message to the White House, to the Forest Service, to the Environmental Protection Agency, to our elected representatives. Let them know that the environment matters.

Samantha Rodgers is campus organizer for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group at Lane Community College. Jeremy Hall of Eugene is Northwest field representative for the Oregon Natural Resources Council.