Elected Representatives

Start by exercising your franchise to vote for people who exhibit an understanding and sensitivity for environmental issues. We have in the White House today the perfect illustration of the harm elected officials can do to the environment. The accidental⁵ election (or appointment by the Supreme Court, if you prefer) of George Bush was an environmental tragedy; he and Al Gore could not be more different on this issue. This matters greatly, because our elected officials have the leverage to make a big difference for the rest of us. Among the environmental outrages committed by his administration thus far, Mr. Bush has turned his back on the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, reneged on his campaign promise to cap CO$_{2}$ emissions from power plants,

``He behaves as if global warming were a figment of someone's imagination'' - Don Henley, President of the Walden Woods Project, and for those of us old enough to remember, an original member of the Eagles.

dragged his feet on implementing the Clinton initiatives to improve our diesel fuel (lower sulfur, higher cetane rating), which would enable enormous improvements in the emissions from truck diesel engines and perhaps greater use of diesels in passenger cars⁶, attempted to drill for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge (prevented by the US Senate, including a significant minority of Republicans), and has never uttered the word ``conservation'' to an American public that consumes twice as much energy per capita as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan. Nor has he used his post-9/11 popularity to explain to the American public that their enormous waste of energy is causing us both environmental and national security problems (I refer here to my previous mention of the sheer folly of sending vast amounts of money to people who either are, or should be considered, our enemies) and ask that they conserve (which could be done without real sacrifice, because we are so wasteful; just eliminating some of that waste would make a big difference).

I have only begun to recite the litany of offenses committed by Mr. Bush and his administration against our environmental health. My point in discussing this is that our elected officials matter. A lot.

Before I leave this topic, I would also like to mention that writing to your Senators and Representative is also important. I have heard it directly from Congressman Martin Meehan that communications from constituents can have a galvanizing effect on where politicians focus their efforts. It can also educate them. Congressman Meehan told me that he frequently first learns of important issues from his constituents (I personally alerted him to a Washington Post story about the Bush Administration's efforts to allow coal-mining operations in West Virginia, which operate by blowing the tops off mountains to gain access to the coal below⁷, to dump the resulting massive amounts of earth and rocks into nearby lakes and streams). Writing to your elected representatives, including the President, is not a waste of time. Yes, they are unlikely to read your letters personally, but they receive summaries of the issues raised by incoming letters from their staffs. If their constituents don't tell them they care about the environment, they aren't likely to care either, except in rare cases (Al Gore being an example of an environmental self-starter).