Editorial

T.R.? He’s No T.R.

Published: February 11, 2007

Whenever President Bush is being hammered for his environmental policies, as he has been recently for his timid approach to global warming, he heads for a national park to reveal a hidden kinship with nature and, in effect, to promise a new day.

He did so again last week, visiting Shenandoah National Park to announce a sizable increase in the National Park Service’s budget. The photo op elicited suggestions from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that Mr. Bush was somehow channeling Teddy Roosevelt. From Tony Snow, the White House spokesman and resident fantasist, it prompted the incredible claim that Mr. Bush had in fact been “keenly committed both to environmentalism and conservationism from the start.”

From the start? The choice Mr. Bush faced on the day he took office was between two competing Republican approaches to environmental matters — the callous disregard for the country’s natural resources displayed during the Reagan years and the responsible stewardship of those same resources associated with Theodore Roosevelt. Mr. Bush unhesitatingly chose the former.

The result was an across-the-board antiregulatory crusade aimed not only at undoing Bill Clinton’s environmental legacy but also at weakening bedrock economic law stretching back to Richard Nixon. It was orchestrated by the ideologues and industry lobbyists whom Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney installed in nearly every important position where environmental policy is made. The one exception was Christie Whitman, who finally tired of being told to do industry’s bidding and retired to private life after two uncomfortable years as boss of the Environmental Protection Agency.

It is impossible to find Teddy Roosevelt’s ghost in any of this. One suspects, for instance, that Roosevelt would have tried much harder to protect fragile landscapes than the Bush administration has in its frantic drive for more oil and gas resources in the Rocky Mountains. One suspects — knows, even — that Roosevelt, who started the national wildlife refuge system, would not have pushed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Similarly, Roosevelt would not have declared — as Gale Norton, Mr. Kempthorne’s immediate predecessor, did in 2003 — that America had already acquired enough protected wilderness; he would have demanded more. He would not have rolled back, as Ms. Norton did, environmental rules governing mining for gold, copper and lead. He would not have countenanced the demolition job that Mr. Bush’s Forest Service has done on the web of forest protections it inherited from previous administrations. He would not have tried to scuttle one of the most important acts of environmental stewardship in many years, Mr. Clinton’s roadless rule, which made 58.5 million acres of the national forests off limits to new road building and development.

And Roosevelt would certainly have kept his word. Mr. Bush made three big promises in this area in the 2000 campaign. One was to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. He reneged on that one almost immediately. The second was to finance the federal government’s core open space program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, at its annual authorized level of $900 million. He has shortchanged it badly every year and this year he is asking for $85 million.

The third promise was to put more money into the national parks. Here history may give Mr. Bush higher marks, thanks largely to the entreaties of Mr. Kempthorne, who pressed for and received a commitment of $258 million in new spending this year and a guarantee of $1 billion over 10 years. The parks have been starved for years (and not just by this administration), and people who care about them have every reason to be pleased by the prospect of a substantial increase in the budget.

We can also hope, of course, that this represents a turnaround in Mr. Bush’s thinking, and that in the next two years he will offer up an energy policy focused more on new technologies and conservation and less on the old extractive industries; a public lands policy that spares our last wild places; a meaningful strategy for global warming; and on and on into a Rooseveltian future. But neither gratitude for a few extra dollars for the parks nor our stubborn belief in the possibility of redemption should blind us to six years of bad policies.

White House Memo
The President Shows His Environmentalist Colors


By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: February 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — After six years in the Oval Office, George W. Bush may have found his inner Teddy Roosevelt.

At a time when his policies on global warming are under scrutiny from environmentalists, President Bush this week cloaked himself in another environmental issue: conservation. He used his budget, and his bully pulpit, to announce a 10-year, $1 billion commitment in taxpayer money to enhance national parks, which have been limping along with limited money.

Most environmentalists would not say George W. Bush and Theodore Roosevelt in the same sentence, unless making an invidious comparison. Roosevelt, of course, created a collection of national preserves that helped form the foundation of the current park system. Mr. Bush, his detractors say, has let the national parks slide into decline — until now.

“This is real,” said Bill Wade, a former park superintendent and a persistent critic of the administration’s parks policies. “There’s a lot more focus in this budget for the operational funding that parks need.”

The turnaround came at the urging of Dirk Kempthorne, the former Idaho governor who is Mr. Bush’s new secretary of the interior. Two years ago, when Mr. Kempthorne was still governor, he and his wife spent two days with the president and Laura Bush, fishing, hiking and cycling in the Idaho outdoors.

“I saw up close and personal what the outdoors meant to this couple,” the secretary said in an interview Wednesday.

Once he became interior secretary, he said, he told the president that the 90th anniversary of the parks system, in 2006, should prompt planning for the centennial.

“Let’s not just light a candle for the one day of the 90th,” Mr. Kempthorne recalled saying. “The centennial needs to be spectacular.”

On Wednesday, the two men and Mrs. Bush traveled to Shenandoah National Park, 75 miles west of Washington, to talk to private supporters of the parks about the new twist in their initiative: a challenge to the private sector to raise an additional $1 billion for park enhancement, which the government would match dollar for dollar for a maximum $3 billion at the end of 10 years.

With attendance at national parks declining, recreation companies said the initiative makes business sense.

“It’s good business and it’s good policy,” said Gary Kiedaisch, president and chief executive of The Coleman Company, a leading manufacturer of camping equipment. In an interview after appearing with Mr. Bush on Wednesday, Mr. Kiedaisch said his company had not “put actual hard dollars down” but would support the initiative.

The initiative comes less than a year after Mr. Bush offered another gift to environmentalists: creating a marine reserve in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

“We’re quite enthusiastic about it,” Gene Sykes, chairman of the board of the National Parks Conservation Association, who participated in Wednesday’s event, said.

That enthusiasm, however, has yet to infect critics of Mr. Bush’s environmental record. Despite the praise for its effort on parks, the administration found itself on the defensive Wednesday — so much so that the White House felt compelled to issue an “open letter on the president’s position on climate change.”

In the letter, Mr. Bush’s top science and environmental advisers challenged news media reports that suggested that his concern about climate change was new. “Beginning in June 2001,” they wrote, “President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem.”

The letter cited a June 2001 statement in which Mr. Bush quoted the National Academy of Sciences saying an increase in Earth’s temperatures was “due in large part to human activity.” But it failed to finish the quotation, in which he went on to say it was unclear how much “natural fluctuations in climate” played a role, whether further climate change was inevitable and what, if anything, could be done about it.

The issue came up at the daily press briefing, where Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, insisted there was nothing new about the president’s commitment to parks or his recognition of global warming.

“There’s been a lot of misreporting,” Mr. Snow said. “Perhaps folks have not taken notice of the fact that this is an administration that’s been keenly committed, both to environmentalism and conservationism from the start.”

At the suggestion that Mr. Bush was awakening to the environment, Mr. Snow said it was reporters who were waking up. “The long national slumber,” he said, “may be approaching an end.”

But Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a group that has conducted assiduous and unfriendly analyses of the administration’s environmental record, had a slightly different take.

“When presidents come to the end of their terms, they always look for great places to save,” Mr. Clapp said, adding, “As for the rest of President Bush’s environmental record, I’m still snoring.”

One not snoring is Secretary Kempthorne, who has a statue of Teddy Roosevelt in his office, a constant reminder of that president’s commitment to conservation. At the Shenandoah park on Wednesday, he invoked a comparison between the first President Roosevelt and the second President Bush.

Turning to his boss, he said, “I think Theodore Roosevelt would be very proud of you.”