Despite efforts, there's no pleasing environmentalists

Poor George Bush. Though the president has been trying desperately to win favor with one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, Environmental Anxiety, Inc., nothing the president does will win him that shiny green star he can wear on his forehead.

Bush recently established a mammoth new national monument near the Hawaiian Islands. He tossed out a re-write of national park policies, and backed away from a plan to auction off tiny pieces of the federal government’s vast land holdings to pay for a rural county slush fund, all in a bid to earn him the accolades of enviros. But to no avail.

Partly that’s because environmental groups are today wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. Partly it’s because every group of extremists needs an enemy, to rally the faithful, serve as a foil, raise money and perpetuate their existence. Bush serves that purpose for green groups, and nothing he can do will win them over.

One small but telling example is the ridicule heaped on the president last week when it was reported that a fifth “C” was added to the “four Cs” former Interior Secretary Gale Norton used to define the administration’s approach to policy-making. Instead of the same old, Washington-centered, command-and-control approach, Norton placed the emphasis on what she called the “four Cs”; “Communication, consultation and cooperation, all in the service of conservation.” Of late, for reasons unknown, a fifth C was tacked on at the end: “and community.”

That’s taking alliteration to extremes, we know, even for editorial writers. And we often question how well this administration has lived up to the slogan. But we welcomed the new approach, at least in principle.

But the scorn from environmental groups was palpable (and typical) when the fifth C appeared in a draft of Interior’s latest strategic plan.

“Meaningless,” scoffed the Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth (a former Clinton administration official). “I’m surprised the fifth C isn’t carbon,” sniffed the head of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. “They’ve had so many Cs I can’t keep track anymore,” a lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation told Greenwire.

The “five Cs” have consistently been belittled by the leaders of Environmental Anxiety, Inc., not only because they benefit from centralized control, as a powerful Washington lobby, but because they depend for survival on their own list of C words, starting with “conflict,” “crisis” and “courtroom confrontations.” To which a fourth and fifth C might now be added: “cynical” and “counterproductive.”