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Environment news (08/11/2002)

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    #2
    Typedef
    Closed Accounts Posts: 5,564 ✭✭✭Typedef


    WASHINGTON, DC, November 7, 2002 (ENS) - Forest protection groups are holding rallies and other events across the country today to protest Bush administration plans for fire management on public lands. The groups fear that Tuesday's elections, which boosted Bush's power to make policy, will lead to the undermining of forest protections - a fear shared by many environmental groups as Congressional power shifts away from some of conservation's strongest advocates.

    Today's demonstrations, planned before Tuesday's elections, challenge the Bush administration's so called Healthy Forests plan, which critics charge would increase logging in national forests and reduce public and scientific oversight of projects intended to reduce wildlife risk. But many environmental groups are concerned that risks to national forest health are just the tip of the iceberg now that the Republican Party controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.

    Fundamentally, I have to say that I agree with this standpoint. The Bush administration is made up of members of the oil lobby to a large extent, a grouping that is not know to be sympathetic to the environment as a rule. From here one can notice the at best flagrant apathy of the Bush administration to the envrionment.

    The process of dismanteling years of careful environmental conservation steps came when Washington attempted to filibuster the Kyoto protocol. As the producer of roughly 70% of the world's green house emissions, the USA has a monumental responsibility in curtailing global warming, yet still the Bush administration has taken a leaf out of the book of the denial that the oil companies who funded the administration's election campaign to a great extent. Denial, downplay and empty rhetoric as a supplicant to negate instigation of actual movement on environmental conservation and protection.

    Drilling for oil in national wildelife reserves is, I think a shining example of the Bush administrations totalitarian lack of understanding or perhaps lack of interest in the realities of environmental conservation and the dangers of ignoring those realities ad infinitum.

    Again the above passage is a sorry testament to the motif the the Bush administration seems to be exponenciating vis-a-vis the environment, namely if the issue is one of ecology, then it is a non-issue.


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