Wrong way Congress: in two years, President Bill Clinton has signed fewer environmental laws than George Bush.

When the 103rd Congress collapsed its circus tent last October to return home to the embittered voters, it left behind the Clinton administration's environmental agenda like forgotten litter. In the waning hours of its final weekend, Congress finally approved the California Desert Protection Act, which, together with the Colorado Wilderness Preservation Act of 1993, was all that it managed to do after early promises to revise the Clean Water Act, the Superfund program, the Endangered Species Act and other laws that need repairs after the Reagan and Bush years. Congress couldn't even reform the 1872 Mining Law, which lives on as the Rip Van Winkle of government giveaways, allowing private companies to take billions of dollars worth of minerals from public land for free. Daniel Weiss, political director of the Sierra Club, called it "the worst Congress since the first Earth Day in 1970."

The new 104th Congress may not be any better. It will be more conservative, more hostile to Clinton, more removed from the Earth Day fever of 1990. The Senate has lost its green leaders: Al Gore (D-TN) and Tim Wirth (D-CO) left after 1992, and George Mitchell (D-ME) and Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) retired last year. The voter rebellion against House incumbents that knocked off three good legislators in 1992 struck again last September as Mike Synar (D-OK), an early advocate for grazing reform, lost to a retired school teacher who spent $16,900 against him in the primary. "They have not been replaced," says Gene Karpinski, executive director of U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

And many of the new legislators have won races in which the environment wasn't much of an issue. Almost always trained as lawyers, not scientists, they often know little about the complexities of ecology or pollution. "You have to address them as if they were third graders," says one green lobbyist. "And use lots of pictures."

What's the answer? A new disaster, perhaps. In the past, Congress often enacted tougher environmental laws in response to public outrage over events like Love Canal, Bhopal and the Exxon Valdez. Now the public worries more about crime and health care, and it assumes that Vice President Al Gore, the man who wrote the book about saving the planet, must be busy solving the problem. But waiting for disaster is not a political strategy.

The green lobbyists would like to see Bill Clinton do more than give good Earth Day speeches. President George Bush accomplished much more in his first two years of office when he signed the massive Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, leading Republican historians to ask if he wasn't "the environmental president" after all. "Admittedly, Bush wanted to weaken the law, but he kept the process moving," Weiss says. "We blocked the worst and got a number of good things because he kept pushing for something to sign." But Clinton isn't the only one to blame. The Sierra Club and other groups haven't roused their troops to support good bills. On Capitol Hill, sympathetic staffers and legislators keep waiting for "the environmental majority" of the public to speak out. "We have not seen the type of grassroots support for environmental legislation that is required," says Peter Scher, staff director for the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. "If these people were energized, it would make a big difference."

"We need to do a better job of basic local organizing," Karpinski admits. "The Wise Use movement may be a small minority, but it's a minority that's organized. Look at the National Rifle Association. It has stopped gun control for years with 15 percent of the public." Or the mining industry, which has preserved its favorable law since 1872.

Without a major public outcry, Congress keeps deferring to industry Political Action Committees (PACs) that donate millions of dollars to their election campaigns. U.S. PIRG calculates, for instance, that "Dirty Water PACs" contributed $56 million to Congressional candidates from 1987 to 1993, no doubt sowing the obstacles that blocked the proposed Clean Water Act reforms last year. The Green PACs of the League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, on the other hand, gave $2 million in 1994. That money helps, but it hardly competes with industry.

Environmental groups may also need to compromise. "It's their way or nothing," complains Congressman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY), who tried and failed to elevate the EPA to cabinet status in 1994. "That's what they've got in the past two years--nothing." Congress must pass a farm bill in 1995, as it does every five years, so environmentalists will face old issues in a new forum, since farmers are in the thick of debates over pesticides, wetlands and water pollution that runs off their fields. To win their support, Sharon Newsome of the National Wildlife Federation proposes "green payments" for farmers who go organic or let land lie fallow and marshy. "We never objected to this idea before, but we never emphasized it, either," she says.

And if you can't beat the conservatives, why not join them? The last Congress may not have passed many good laws, but it killed several government programs that would have done environmental damage: research into nuclear reactors for space, a solid fuel rocket motor for NASA and a breeder reactor. "We call this 'the green scissors' approach," says Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth. "We saved over $3 billion."

The new Congress may be even harsher slashers, so green groups may join with fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayers Union and Citizens Against Government Waste to lobby for more programs to be killed. They may target further research into a cousin of the breeder reactor called the Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor, a proposed indoor laser machine that would test nuclear bombs and Congressional funding for the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Conservatives hate these foreign aid giants for competing with private enterprise, while environmentalists bemoan their record of financing giant dams and agricultural projects that have destroyed rainforests. "There could be a radical shrinking of the government by this Congress," says Ralph De Gennaro of Friends of the Earth. "So let's use it. Which programs do we want to see killed?"

De Gennaro sees hope in the present slump. It has grown harder to pass better environmental cleanup laws, but environmentalism has also begun influencing the debates over bigger issues like national security and the economy. "It's a big leap forward that will be hard for us," he says, "but when we finish in five or 10 years, our enemies will be sorry they pushed us into it." The Clinton administration's one true environmental triumph in 1994 was its leadership at the United Nations population conference in Cairo. When Jesse Helms rose to protest in the Senate, few people listened. For once, the public and the politicians agreed that some issues are just too important for Congressional stalemates.