1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - Earth to George

Alexis Simendinger (Email this author)
© National Journal Group, Inc.

During this week, which marked the 35th anniversary of Earth Day, President Bush touted his controversial energy legislation, and visited the ozone-clouded Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee to call attention to his stalled "Clear Skies Initiative."

It's no secret that advocacy groups, and most Americans responding to polls, find plenty to criticize about Bush's environmental approach. With Earth Day in mind, National Journal asked some environmental watchdogs to suggest how the president could walk the talk he used in a 2002 speech on global warming, when he declared: "Wise action now is an insurance policy against future risks."

"This year is a particularly opportune time to do something on the oceans," said Roger Rufe, president and chief executive officer of the Ocean Conservancy. Rufe recently met with White House Chief of Staff Andy Card and Council on Environmental Quality Chairman James Connaughton to encourage the president's advisers to envision a legacy for Bush as "the Teddy Roosevelt for the oceans." Rufe's group wants Bush to transform the remote and uninhabited northwestern Hawaiian Islands from their current status as a marine preserve into a nationalmarine sanctuary, a designation that would protect the islands from future development. By such executive action, Bush could protect 70 percent of the coral found in the United States, Rufe said, and create the second-largest such area in the world, next to Australia's Great Barrier Reef. "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity," he added.

Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, also had the oceans in mind -- specifically, the loss of fish that is jeopardizing the ecosystem. "We're hoping to work with the administration to allow fishermen in communities that want to solve their overfishing problems to use a catch-share approach," he said, setting catch allocations for fishermen so that fish populations can rebound to provide future profit potential. "It's got to be put into place by government, and that's why the president's leadership is important," Krupp said. "The National Marine Fisheries Service and the Department of Commerce should work with the [eight] regional fishery management councils, which are interested in the new market-based approach."

The Teddy Roosevelt model is a favorite of the Wilderness Society, too. "We want to encourage the administration to really think about Teddy Roosevelt and that idea, that legacy: You don't use it all now. You save something for later," said Linda Lance, the group's vice president for public policy.

The Wilderness Society wants Bush to lead the GOP-controlled Congress (not his usual M.O. on this topic) toward enactment of pending legislation to designate federal "wilderness land" under the 1964 Wilderness Act, preserving pristine areas in their natural condition -- meaning no roads or cars. To date, Congress has granted that designation to 105 million acres of public land, and the group wants to see another 200 million acres similarly protected (half of those 200 million acres are in Alaska, particularly in parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Chugach and Tongass national forests). The group also urges the president to break ranks with predecessors George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon, who declined to use their prerogative to preserve federal lands as national monuments under the 1906 American Antiquities Act.

The National Recycling Coalition wants Bush to put his megaphone and dollars behind the Transportation Department, which backs the use of industrial byproducts and consumer recyclables in road-building, in landscaping, and in constructing highway rest stops. "The president could show great leadership and recognition of programs that were in place, but due to budget cuts, have been lost," said Kate Krebs, the coalition's executive director.

Natural Resources Defense Council experts highlighted sewage policy, global warming, and global environmental security among priorities for presidential action. Specifically, they want Bush to drop a proposed Environmental Protection Agency policy that would allow the 20,000 sewage treatment plants in the country to dilute rainwater with fully treated sewage before discharging it during large storms. "We want the administration to enforce the existing regulations that have been in place since Ronald Reagan was president," said Nancy Stoner, NRDC's Clean Water Project director.

David Doniger, director of policy for the NRDC Climate Center, urges the president "to help the business community plan to make a logical move into a carbon-constrained world, and help them do that with mandatory limits, even if they are modest." In tandem, Doniger calls for government incentives to employ new technologies for carbon-free, coal-fired power plants, and for automakers and their suppliers to retool America's vehicle fleets. "Those actions would actually help spur a renaissance for both of those industries," Doniger argued.

Shannon Heyck-Williams, director of NRDC's Earth Legacy Campaign, encourages Bush to work with Congress to create an independent, bipartisan panel to recommend policies on global environmental security. NRDC tells Republican lawmakers that such a commission could help the U.S. lead rather than lag when it comes to threats of petroleum and water scarcity, and to the potential economic and migratory effects on populations sparked by changes to the Earth's climate. "It matters what's happening around the world," Heyck-Williams said, "because, ultimately, everything will affect us."