Slimed again.

In their article on the environmental groups ("Slime Green," May issue) authors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair overlook some of the environmental community's greatest achievements ever--beating the odds to block a long list of devastating legislative assaults from the 104th Congress--and fail to mention several crucial facts.

The authors suggest that national environmental groups praised President Clinton for signing the budget rescissions bill with the so-called timber-salvage rider last July.

On the contrary, the environmental community hit the President with everything it had for signing this destructive bill.

A coalition of national groups took out full-page advertisements in national newspapers charging the President with "flip-flopping on the environment," ran radio ads against the President in the largest cities of the Northwest, and gathered across the street from the White House to give the President a sarcastic twenty-one-chainsaw salute with real chainsaws, to call attention to the devastation in our forests.

Cockburn and St. Clair neglect to mention that the timber-salvage provision was, unfortunately, only the first in a long series of Congressional attacks on our nation's environment.

They also fail to note that in the year since the timber-salvage rider was signed, President Clinton has repeatedly acted to block environmental attacks by an aggressive and hostile Congress.

Among the many destructive legislative proposals that would have become law had the President not stepped up with crucial vetoes are those that would have:

* opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling;

* denied funding for enforcement of pollution-control laws;

* given away our valuable natural resources to mining companies;

* promoted clear-cutting of Alaska's magnificent Tongass National Forest;

* blocked EPA efforts to issue health standards for drinking water;

* denied the EPA authority to protect the nation's rapidly disappearing wetlands;

* blocked the clean-up of Superfund hazardous waste sites; and,

* in the name of "regulatory reform," handcuffed government officials charged with carrying out environmental laws.

It was in response to the President's intervention to block these dangerous proposals that national environmental groups placed the THANK YOU, MR. PRESIDENT newspaper ad that Cockburn and St. Clair erroneously imply was a response to the salvage-logging bill. The Clinton Administration has not been perfect on the environment. But the President should be given credit where he has earned it.

Amazingly, Cockburn and St. Clair also fail to mention the success of the environmental community over the past year in overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds to derail, before they could reach the President, numerous other Congressional assaults on the environment. The threats beaten back over the past year include insidious back-door attacks through regulatory reform and budget legislation, and sweeping proposals to directly roll back landmark environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Superfund Law, and the Clean Air Act. This success has been the result of coordinated action by members of the national and local environmental groups who made their voices heard in opposition to Congress's destructive agenda.

At times these battles seemed unwinnable. But national and local environmental groups persevered in an ultimately successful effort to convince a skeptical Congress that Americans strongly support our environmental-protection laws, and are offended by special-interest efforts to weaken them. For Cockburn and St. Clair to entirely ignore these vital battles, which continue to this day, is a disservice to all who have worked so hard in defense of the environment during the past year and a half.

Gregory S. Wetstone,

Legislative Director,

National Resources

Defense Council

I long ago stopped expecting fairness from Alexander Cockburn, but I do regret that The Progressive did not trouble to check his facts. His latest attack on the "big environmental groups" is yet another example not just of sloppy thinking--to which Mr. Cockburn has every right--but of sloppy reporting as well.

Cockburn and his co-author, Jeffrey St. Clair, note with self-righteous disparagement an ad taken out by the Sierra Club, among others, thanking President Clinton for his initial veto of last year's rescissions bill, which included the timber industry's salvage rider. We placed that ad, as Cockburn should be aware--and would, had he bothered to check with anyone at the Sierra Club--in the full knowledge that Clinton might cave in to industry pressure.

When he did, we placed another ad with a headline charging MR. PRESIDENT, YOU ARE GIVING WAFFLES A BAD NAME. (Perhaps the authors' newspaper delivery had been interrupted?)

We staged a widely publicized "twenty-one-chainsaw salute" outside the White House, protesting the decision to sign the rider into law, and set about working to have the provision repealed.

In a column that ran prominently in Sierra magazine, I wrote that Clinton had "betrayed the forests...the American people...and the environmental community." All of which, to Cockburn and St. Clair, reflects our "determination to greenwash Clinton."

Sadly, the entire article is riddled with similar omissions, misstatements of fact, and willful skewing of the truth. Cockburn and St. Clair suggest that national green groups, acting as a monolith, "rallied to Clinton in his NAFTA fight"--knowing full well that the Sierra Club opposed NAFTA fervently and publicly.

As for PCBs, far from trying to "cover up" for the Clinton Administration, we've taken it to court. And on and on and on.

It's one thing to have the courage of your convictions. But it's quite another to ignore the facts, and substitute invective for analysis.

If Cockburn and St. Clair deem it more important to attack Teddy Roosevelt than Bob Dole, that's their privilege. But I regret that The Progressive would suspend its standards of integrity by offering up their diatribes as journalism.

Carl Pope,

Executive Director,

The Sierra Club

The authors reply:

Over the past four years, the national environmental groups have made two fundamental political miscalculations. The first was to reckon that with the arrival of Clinton and Gore in 1993, and a Democratic Congress behind them, a new Green Age was at hand. Headed by Bruce Babbitt, former head of the League of Conservation Voters, enviro leaders flocked into government. At Babbitt's side at Interior is George Frampton, former head of the Wilderness Society. In all, twenty-four senior people from national green groups went to work for Clinton.

Giddy with excitement at their proximity to power, these green leaders lost all sense of political reality. In the spring of 1993, Brock Evans--then at National Audubon and long considered the most effective green lobbyist inside the Beltway--exclaimed that it was wonderful to walk through the halls of the Executive Office Building and have people call you by your first name.

Bought from the start, the green leadership lost all capacity for effective criticism. To read Gregory Wetstone's letter, you would think that the years 1993 and 1994 had never been, and that all discussion of the Clinton years begins in 1995, with the capture of Congress by the Republicans.

Thus it's no surprise that the difficult acronym NAFTA occurs nowhere in Wetstone's letter. His own outfit, NRDC, was at the head of those green groups mustered in support of the trade agreement. With the honorable exception of the Sierra Club (as we have noted many times), the national green leadership lent crucial support to Clinton and Gore at a moment when it looked as though the trade agreement might be doomed. After the agreement squeaked through Congress, John Adams, head of NRDC, boasted, "We broke the back of the environmental opposition to NAFTA."

Just as Wetstone skirts the NAFTA outrage, he omits everything else that happened in the two years when Clinton and a Democratic Congress had the opportunity to push a green agenda. In 1993 and 1994, not a single piece of significant environmental legislation emerged. To the contrary, pell-mell retreat was the order of the day. Incinerators? The Delaney clause? Old growth in the Pacific Northwest? The Everglades? Norway's renegade whaling operations? On all of these, the Clinton crowd took a dive, without a bleat from the green leaders, and sometimes with their enthusiastic support.

The second great miscalculation of the green leaders came after Newtsweep in late 1994. Ignoring polling data from the November elections clearly showing there was still overwhelming public support for tough environmental protection, the green leaders wallowed in self-defeat. If they had used the elections as an opportunity to hold the Democrats accountable and to build up a strong position independent of both parties, they would have been strategically poised to launch a major counterattack in the first hours of the new Congress.

Instead, we had people like Jon Roush, then president of the Wilderness Society, proclaiming that the environmental movement had to move towards the center. He could have been speaking for almost all the green executives. The "center" meant the meeting ground between Clinton and what became known as the Republican moderates. The green leadership then eagerly composed the articles of their own surrender.

Wetstone claims that the timber-salvage provision was "only the first in a long series of Congressional attacks." But by then, July 1995, Clinton had already signed a bill placing a moratorium on all new listings under the Endangered Species Act, and he had encouraged the Congress to pass the Unfunded Mandates bill, which--as we wrote in our Progressive article--established the theoretical and legal groundwork for relinquishing federal authority on environmental matters to the states.

Carl Pope of the Sierra Club tries to manufacture a history of sinewy principle for his group. The Sierra Club's fundamental mandate is the protection of public lands. When Clinton promulgated his logging plan for oldgrowth trees on these public lands in the summer of 1993, Pope himself gave it a demure welcome at a time when he should have been chaining himself to the White House fence.

Under his leadership, the club gave the Administration the OK for some logging, thus provoking a rebellion among the club's own members that led, this spring, to an overwhelming vote mandating the club to adopt a "zero-cut-on-public-lands" position (one which Pope has vehemently opposed, although he has mostly himself to blame for its passage).

Pope's moral credibility with his members would have been more robust if he had made conspicuous demonstrations of outrage at the White House.

An ad about waffles is scarcely a serious response to a Presidential betrayal of a solemn promise never to sign a bill exempting logging on public lands from environmental laws.

Who's battling most effectively for nature: Wetstone and Pope, or the Great Satan himself, Newt Gingrich? Gingrich has bottled up efforts to destroy the Endangered Species Act, and thus far sidelined the dolphin-death bill, despite vigorous lobbying in its favor by Clinton's enviro hit team headed by Al Gore and Tim Wirth.

Alexander Cockburn

Jeffrey St. Clair