AR-News: (US AZ) The environment according to Bush

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

By JOHN HEILPRIN

Associated Press Writer
03/08/2004


 On his Texas ranch, President Bush gets back to nature by cutting down cedar 
trees with a chain saw to give the native oaks more water and light. Visiting 
the Santa Monica Mountains, he shovels dirt to fix a trail -- an image the 
White House keeps alive on one of its Web sites. 
The hand tools he favors and the immediate results they produce reflect how 
in just three years Bush has reshaped the debate over environmental 
protections. 
Making life easier for people now gets more priority than protecting an 
endangered salamander. Preventing a wildfire from engulfing a home trumps not 
cutting down a tree. Cheap electricity prevails over cleaner air, at least for the 
time being. 
Bush sells his policies in the simplest of terms, like "healthy forests" and 
"clear skies." 
Environmentalists call those labels deliberate misnomers, intended to mask an 
agenda far different and more complex. They say Bush wants nothing less than 
to restructure a society that he and those around him believe has become too 
soft, and a government that, though well-intentioned, helped make it that way 
by overpromising to protect people from risks in life. 
"They are very careful to present themselves as being in the mode of solving 
the same problems that environmentalists want to solve," said Carl Pope, the 
Sierra Club's executive director. "But when you look at what they do, and what 
they say in the fine print, they don't actually want to solve the same 
problems. They don't think they are problems."




full story:

http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=83353 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/attachments/20040308/710f5fbb/attachment.html