The `Greening' of Government

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 14, 1998 | by Sean Paige

The environmental lobby has infiltrated the federal land-management establishment with a cadre of budding ecobureaucrats intent on ecologically correct policymaking,

Green Party candidates could not get elected dogcatcher this campaign season, falling on their faces in all but a few marginal races. But then again, they needn't really bother with the niceties of getting votes: As proponents of what may be the most successful sociopolitical (some say religious) movement of the latter half of the 20th century, greens have shown that in the golden age of special interests one need not actually occupy a seat of power to exercise it.

Formerly a guerrilla base on the ideological frontier, populated by a ragtag gaggle of granola-munching, tree-worshipping, tie-dyed druids, environmentalism has grown into one of the most well-financed, media-savvy and politically connected movements in U.S. history. Without ever having elected a Green Party candidate to major public office or putting major components of their agenda on a ballot, environmentalists have succeeded -- through agitation, litigation, indoctrination and cajoling friends in high places -- in seizing the levers of

power and bending the machinery of government to their will, turning the movement outside in.

In Vice President Al Gore, greens have one of their own at the center of power. Members of the tribe hold top positions in the Clinton administration, often at agencies they once sued, vilified and reviled. Formerly poor and proud of it, some groups have grown rich, their coffers fattened by corporations, foundations and federal grantmakers. And although environmental groups continue a tradition of using a purportedly nature-raping government as a bogeyman of first resort, a reliable foil for fund-raising purposes, critics say federal land-management agencies (responsible for stewardship over roughly 650 million acres, or 30 percent of the nation's total land surface) have in fact become putty in their hands, cowed and conditioned by the stings of environmental lawyers that swarm over the beast like bees.

And though the litigation keeps coming-- 262 environmental lawsuits were filed between 1990 and 1996, according to Justice Department statistics, with 184 new cases filed just since June 1997 -- once adversarial, suspicious relations between greens and government land managers today seem more amicable, even chummy. Others -- in the property-rights and "wise-use" movements and, among so-called commodity interests, the mining, timber and grazing groups who traditionally enjoyed access to public lands -- go further and call these connections incestuous, part of an unholy alliance that puts the squeaky wheel above the commonweal.

Environmentalists counter that this is just the sound and fury of an old order making way for the new. Commercial and industrial interests had it their way for too long, they argue, pillaging public lands and resources for profit and personal gain.

In support of the contention that the Clinton administration finally has, perhaps irrevocably, tipped the scales in environmentalism's favor, critics bring a wide-ranging indictment. They point to a revolving door of personnel flowing freely between environmental groups and government agencies, an interchange which is both cause and effect of agencies that are "greening" from top down and bottom up. Even more troubling, they say, is the spectacle of rank-and-file federal employees, like the tail wagging the dog, colluding with outside environmental groups to alter agency policies and practices.

A search for evidence in support of these indictments suggests that while none constitute an open-and-shut case of outright collusion, many seem to have a basis in fact. For instance, a cursory review of Clinton administration political appointees shows that at least two dozen former environmental activists have or now occupy senior policy positions on various rungs of the bureaucratic food chain -- some of whom, such as senior Department of Energy insiders Daniel Reicher and James Werner, sued their current employer in their earlier life on the outside, working for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Of course previous administrations also put their imprint on agencies via political appointments, and similar revolving doors exist everywhere in Washington. But troubling to some is a sense that in the Clinton administration, more than any before it, some of the environmentalists who've come in from the cold haven't checked their activism at the door -- tending to make end runs around congress or take shortcuts through the process when it stands in their way. Also, rank-and-file federal employees themselves are becoming activists, assisted by groups seeking to steer administration policy from the bottom up.

While previous administrations pushed through major components of the environmental agenda working with Congress, "this administration has tended to avoid Congress as a place where their aspirations would be blunted by the compromises that go into the legislative process," says Mark Rey, a senior staffer with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "The Clinton people, many of whom were veterans of legislative wars that didn't give them everything they wanted, came in with the idea that they could get farther faster through executive orders and administrative actions."