(excerpt from below:)
"The environment is the one exception to the rule of politics... By the time
we all wake up, by the time the media starts doing their job and by the time
the public sees what is happening, it may be too late to reverse it. That's
what science is telling us. That's what the Earth is telling us. That's what
burns in my consciousness"

"For me it comes down to our most cherished values. To our ethics.
You're asking, rightly, questions about science and economics, but this is a
deeply moral issue. Economics and politics are a poor excuse for the moral
imperative that we need to follow to save what is not our own so others that
come after us can have a life."

Now Hear This

Bill Moyers speaks his mind on Bush-brand environmental destruction and more
by Amanda Griscom
26 Aug 2003

Grist tracked Moyers down at his office to discuss environmental policy
rollbacks, the ecological concerns that he says "burn in his consciousness,"
and the world he wants to leave for his grandchildren.

Grist: In the year and a half since the launch of your PBS program "NOW,"
you have done extensive reporting on the Bush administration's environmental
record. At a time when most news outlets have focused on war and recession,
you and your team have been among the few journalists who've consistently
taken a hard look at these policy rollbacks. What has been motivating you?

Bill Moyers: The facts on the ground. I'm a journalist, reporting the
evidence, not an environmentalist pressing an agenda. The Earth is sending
us a message and you don't have to be an environmentalist to read it. The
Arctic ice is melting. The Arctic winds are balmy. The Arctic Ocean is
rising. Scientists say that in the year 2002 -- the second-hottest on record
-- they saw the Arctic ice coverage shrink more than at any time since they
started measuring it. Every credible scientific study in the world says
human activity is creating global warming. In the face of this evidence, the
government in Washington has declared war on nature. They have placed
religious and political dogma over the facts.

Grist: Can you elaborate on their religious and political dogma?

Moyers: They are practically the same. Their god is the market -- every
human problem, every human need, will be solved by the market. Their dogma
is the literal reading of the creation story in Genesis where humans are to
have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over the cattle, and over all the Earth, and over every creeping thing ..."
The administration has married that conservative dogma of the religious
right to the corporate ethos of profits at any price. And the result is the
politics of exploitation with a religious impulse.

Meanwhile, over a billion people have no safe drinking water. We're dumping
500 million tons of hazardous waste into the Earth every year. In the last
hundred years alone we've lost over 2 billion hectares of forest, our
fisheries are collapsing, our coral reefs are dying because of human
activity. These are facts. So what are the administration and Congress
doing? They're attacking the cornerstones of environmental law: the Clean
Air Act, the Clean Water Act, NEPA [the National Environmental Policy Act].
They are allowing l7,000 power plants to create more pollution. They are
opening public lands to exploitation. They're even trying to conceal threats
to public health: Just look at the stories this past week about how the
White House pressured the EPA not to tell the public about the toxic
materials that were released by the September 11th attacks on the World
Trade Center.

Grist: I'm interested in your explanation of why -- I haven't heard this
dogma-based argument before. More often, critics interpret the White House
environmental agenda as political pragmatism, as simply an effort to stay in
power and pay back corporate contributors.

Moyers: This is stealth war on the environment in the name of ideology. But
you're right -- there is a very powerful political process at work here,
too. It's payback time for their rich donors. In the 2000 elections, the
Republicans outspent the Democrats by $200 million. Bush and Cheney -- who,
needless to say, are oilmen who made their fortunes in the energy business
-- received over $44 million from the oil, gas, and energy industries. It
spills over into Congress too: In the 2002 congressional elections,
Republican candidates received almost $15 million from the energy
industries, while the Democrats got around $3.7 million. In our democracy,
voters can vote but donors decide.

Grist: Add to that the fact that in every key appointment at every
environmental agency you find someone from industry -- a lawyer, a lobbyist,
a former executive.

Moyers: The list is shocking. The Interior Department is the biggest scandal
of all. Current Secretary Gale Norton and her No. 2 man, J. Steven Griles,
head a fifth column that is trying to sabotage environmental protection at
every level. Griles has more conflicts of interest than a dog has fleas. The
giveaway of public resources at Interior is the biggest scandal of its kind
since the Teapot Dome corruption. You have to go all the way back to the
crony capitalism of the Harding administration to find a president who
invited such open and crass exploitation of the common wealth.

Grist: Protecting the environment has become an increasingly partisan issue
under the Bush administration. The GOP has decidedly become the
anti-environment party, causing pro-environment Republicans like Sen. Jim
Jeffords of Vermont to defect. And yet historically, there has been a deeply
entrenched ethos of conservation in the Republican Party.

Moyers: Absolutely. But that was before the radical right and the
corporations took over the party. Your generation is too young to remember
that back in the l970s, when the world began to wake up to the global
environmental crisis, the U.S. became the undisputed leader in environmental
policy. Richard Nixon signed some of the pioneering measures of the time,
including the very Clean Water Act that Bush is now hollowing out. And
before that, of course, Teddy Roosevelt put the Republican Party in the
vanguard of conservation. This idea of protecting and passing along our
resources to future generations was a deeply entrenched ideal among those
who were known as conservatives. But this is not a conservative mentality in
power today. It's a new political order.

Grist: How do you define that new political order?

Moyers: I'll give an example that says it all: Jim Jeffords, the former
chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is an
environmental champion. He made his priority efforts to curb global warming
and protect the environment while advancing the economy. His successor is
[Republican Sen.] James Inhofe of Oklahoma. He's the man who once
characterized the Environmental Protection Agency as "gestapo." That's the
new political order.

Grist: Can you describe any instances where you or your colleagues were shut
out by the administration in your effort to report a rollback story?

Moyers: A press officer at the Interior Department told one of our producers
no one there would appear on or speak to "NOW." We get [that response] all
over town -- "We're not talking to 'NOW.'"

Grist: Has the Bush administration been more effective at pushing their
environmental agenda than the Reagan and Bush I administrations before it?

Moyers: Ronald Reagan came to power with the same agenda, but made a mistake
when he appointed James Watt head of the wrecking crew at the Department of
Interior. Watt made no attempt to disguise his fanaticism. He was
outspokenly anti-environment and he inflamed the public against him with his
flagrant remarks. But he took over a bureaucracy of civil servants who had
come of age in the first great environmental wave of the l970s -- people who
believed they had a public charge to do the right thing. When Watt stormed
into office, these civil servants resisted. Now, 20 years later -- after
eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush the First, and three years of Bush
the Second -- that generation of civil servants is gone. The executive
branch is a wholly owned subsidiary of the conservative/corporate coalition.

Grist: And surely their public-relations strategies have become far more
sophisticated.

Moyers: Absolutely. They learned a big lesson from the Watt era. Not to
inflame the situation. Use stealth. If you corrupt the language and talk a
good line even as you are doing the very opposite, you won't awaken the
public. Gale Norton will be purring like a kitten when she's cutting down
the last redwood in the forest with a buzz saw.

Grist: Doesn't it seem inevitable that this tremendous discrepancy between
the Bush administration's actions and words will be exposed?

Moyers: There is always a backlash when any administration, liberal or
conservative, Democratic or Republican, goes too far. In this case, all the
scientists that I respect and all the environmentalists that I listen to say
to me, "What's different this time, Moyers, is that it could happen too
late." Let's say by 2008 the consequences of all these policies become clear
and the public rises up in protest. We don't have between now and 2008 to
reverse the trends; it will be too late then.

Grist: What do you mean by "too late"?

Moyers: Every policy of government that is bad or goes wrong can ultimately
be reversed. The environment is the one exception to the rule of politics,
which is that to every action there is a reaction. By the time we all wake
up, by the time the media starts doing their job and by the time the public
sees what is happening, it may be too late to reverse it. That's what
science is telling us. That's what the Earth is telling us. That's what
burns in my consciousness.

Consider the example of Iraq. Once upon a time it was such a lush, fertile,
and verdant land that the authors of Genesis located the Garden of Eden
there. Now look at it: stretches upon stretches of desert, of arid lands
inhospitable to human beings, empty of trees and clean water and rolling
green grasses. That's a message from the Earth about what happens when
people don't take care of it. No matter what we do to Saddam Hussein, Iraq
remains a wasteland compared to what it was. American policy makers see only
the black oil in the ground and not the message that all the years of
despoliation have left.

Grist: The irony is that despoliation doesn't just wipe out the verdant
land, it makes it impossible to have a healthy, diverse economy.

Moyers: It stuns me that the people in power can't see that the source of
our wealth is the Earth. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a capitalist. I don't want
to destroy the system on which my livelihood and my journalism rest. I am
strongly on behalf of saving the environment [in no small part] because it
is the source of our wealth. Destroy it and the pooh-bahs of Wall Street
will have to book an expedition to Mars to enjoy their riches. I don't
understand why they don't see it. I honestly don't. This absence of vision
as to what happens when you foul your nest puzzles me.

Grist: Do you consider yourself a pessimist?

Moyers: I once asked a friend on Wall Street about the market. "I'm
optimistic," he said. "Then why do you look so worried?" I asked. And he
answered: "Because I'm not sure my optimism is justified." I feel that way.
But I don't know how to be in the world except to expect a confident future
and then get up every morning and try in some way to bring it about.

Grist: It sounds like for you the environment is a very personal issue, an
emotional issue.

Moyers: For me it comes down to our most cherished values. To our ethics.
You're asking, rightly, questions about science and economics, but this is a
deeply moral issue. Economics and politics are a poor excuse for the moral
imperative that we need to follow to save what is not our own so others that
come after us can have a life.

A couple years ago, I took my then eight-year-old grandson to Central Park
for a walk and we were on the rocks there looking out on the park and the
skyline of the city and he said, "Pa, how old are you?" And I said, "I'm
66." And he said, "What do you think the world will look like when I'm as
old as you are?" And for the first time I could imagine a concrete future.
The future wasn't abstract anymore -- my grandson would be a real person
living in a real place, the future. In some ways, what worries me the most
is that Laura and George Bush don't have any grandkids. The president would
see the world differently if he just had grandkids.

Grist: Yes, it seems as though on some level Bush is lacking some kind of
emotional intelligence on these matters -- as though he's sort of tone deaf
to the environment.

Moyers: We had Devra Davis, a scientist at Carnegie Mellon, on the show
recently. She described how Laura and George Bush designed their ranch at
Crawford to be environmentally efficient, with solar paneling and lots of
new technology. She pointed out that they seem to understand these issues
somewhat on an individual level, and yet they don't understand that the
personal is not enough. It takes policy to translate. There is a disconnect
between how they live privately and how they act publicly.

Grist: What, on a public level, do you want to see happen?

Moyers: The same thing that should happen with the war against terrorists.
Terrorists want to kill us, they want to bring democracy down. The
environment will kill us, it will bring us down. Why not appoint an
emergency panel of Democrats and Republicans to recommend a course on global
warning? I really do believe that if George Bush announced that saving the
environment was more urgent than everything at the moment except the war on
terrorism, if he were to call a global conference at the White House on how
we can create a new vision and a new process for addressing this, the
world's greatest challenge -- then I believe they'd change the Constitution
to elect him to a third term.

- - - - - - - - -

Amanda Griscom is a freelance writer based in New York City. Her articles on
energy, technology, and the environment have appeared in publications
ranging from Rolling Stone to the New York Times Magazine.

Bill Moyers is best known as the broadcast journalist who, for more than 20
years, has brought the public frank, soul-searching, and sometimes
frightening examinations of -- well, of almost everything under the sun. On
air, he's equally comfortable discussing politics or poetry, scriptures or
science.

Born in Oklahoma in 1934 and raised in Texas, Moyers has had a highly
celebrated and peripatetic career that has included stints as a Baptist
minister, deputy director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy administration,
and press secretary to President Johnson. Moyers later became publisher of
the New York daily Newsday, an analyst and commentator on CBS and NBC news,
and a cofounder, with his wife Judith Davidson, of Public Affairs
Television, where he produced series ranging from "God and Politics" to
"Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth."

Having racked up more than 30 Emmy Awards during his television career,
Moyers is now the host and producer of the Friday night PBS series "NOW with
Bill Moyers." He is also one of the few TV news and culture journalists who
believe that there are still plenty of viewers who want to think and learn.
At "NOW," Moyers has focused with increasing intensity on the Bush
administration's environmental record. Since his show launched in January
2002, Moyers has produced more than 20 reports on environmental subjects
ranging from mountaintop-removal mining to the industry backgrounds of
Bush's key political appointees. This Friday at 9 p.m. EST, he'll put the
Bush record in a larger context, airing an interview with award-winning
scientist David Suzuki, who believes the global environment is in its final
moments of sustainability.
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