As I alluded to in my last post, the effort to push environmentalism into a political corner starts in 1980, with the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. In 1970 he had signed into law the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), an outstanding environmental achievement. Reagan’s appointments to environmental positions as governor, however, were disappointing.[1] Reagan’s environmental record as governor of California was hence something of a mixed bag and, on the face of it, would not have pegged him as an anti-environmentalist.
Things had changed quite a bit by the time he was running for president in 1980, with the differences between him and Carter, as far as the environment was concerned, being quite stark. Carter wanted increased environmental safeguards, such as protecting barrier islands from development, and spoke of “a strong defense of environmental protection legislation in the face of growing pressure to dismantle a decade of environmental progress.”[2] On the other hand, Reagan’s aides told him that American factories had been shut down due to environmental laws.[3] This became a theme of his campaign.[4] In a fox guarding the henhouse scenario, Reagan called for the coal and steel industries to help rewrite the Clean Air Act and promised to appoint to the EPA people “who understand the problems of the coal industry.”[5]
To bolster his argument, Reagan cast environmental regulators as being out of the mainstream. He said of the EPA, “I want clean air and water. But I think we’re in the hands of what I call some environmental extremists.” He used this term again when defending his choice of James Watt to be Interior Secretary. At the time, Watt was a lawyer working to open up more federal wilderness land to mining and oil drilling. He said, "I think he's an environmentalist himself, as I think I am. He is fighting environmental extremists."[6]
Describing someone who worked to allow for the industrial exploitation of federally protected wilderness as an environmentalist is a head spinning “ignorance is strength” Orwellianism, but in his political calculation, with the hostages in Iran and other issues grabbing the big headlines, Reagan knew that this mental sleight of hand would not receive much scrutiny. The same holds true for his description of EPA regulators as extremists. He nonetheless added this rhetoric to the discourse and began the process of politically isolating and weakening the movement to better our air, water, and land.
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| The rhetor who helped get us in this fix |
[1] Kamieniecki, Sheldon, Robert O’Brien, Michael Clarke. Controversies in Environmental Policy. New York: State University of New York Press. 1986. Print p 284
[2] Crutsinger, Martin. “Carter, Reagan Differ Widely on Environmental Policies.” Freelance Star 25 Oct. 1980
[3] Kamieniecki et al
[4] Crutsinger
[5] ibid
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