Yet we're always hearing that American labor opposes fuel standards.
The president of the UAW opposes fuel standards, but 88 percent of its members are in favor of them, because they want to preserve their jobs. [UAW president Steve Yokich's] thing is that the auto industry has said to him, if you sit down and do this, we'll make you have higher profits and we'll be able to give you a better contract next year, and you know, you're retiring this year ...
The short term is a real enemy of doing intelligent things. And one of the things that being in a national crisis ought to do is make us think long term. It's making average Americans think long term, but it's not making their leaders think long term. They're looking at next quarter's reports; they're looking at next year's election. We keep our leaders on a very short leash, and one of the problems with that is that our leaders do tend to think short term.
What about another major defeat: the EPA decision to allow mining companies to dump waste into rivers and lakes?
This is an outrageous example of how essentially the entire state of West Virginia is being turned over to coal companies to be turned into a mining dump. Strip mining was bad enough; this is much worse than strip mining. In the case of strip mining, this was done only when the coal was at the surface. You just took it out of the top, so you'd dig a hole in the ground. This is when coal is very deep and could and should be taken out with the mining, but that costs more and the mining companies are greedy. So what they do is they take the top of the mountain off, they dump it in the river next to it and then they take out the coal, and then they have all this toxic mining waste and toxic drainage that pours into the rivers downstream, polluting peoples' drinking water supplies, destroying fisheries, polluting the environment essentially for maybe a hundred years. This is a devastatingly destructive activity. They're turning West Virginia, the whole state, into a mining dump.
Why would the EPA have OK'd that?
Well, I guess you consult George Bush's campaign contribution list.
I suspect when we finally get all the documents that were submitted by people like Massey Energy and Peabody Coal to Vice President Cheney's task force, we'll find the reason.
Can you imagine a situation in which the Sierra Club would advocate the use of more radical action like civil disobedience, or anything like what EarthFirst! is doing?
We don't under our charter engage in or advocate anything that's illegal. We recognize nonviolent civil disobedience in the form that Julia Butterfly Hill [practiced it], who I think is a more effective example than Earth First! But you know we have tremendous amount of respect for what Julia Butterfly Hill did as an individual. Since we are a nonprofit corporation, and under our charter we are chartered only to do legal things, we can't engage in or advocate any kind of illegal activity.
The late David Brower, a former executive director of the Sierra Club, criticized the organization for not being radical, not aggressive enough. What was your reaction to that?
Well, I think David was perpetually striving to get people to do even more. He was never going to be satisfied. I'm sure it's true, we haven't done enough. But he never said we weren't radical enough. He said we weren't doing enough, and that we were spending too much time on internal process and on being democratic and not enough time in the work, on the ground. And I'm sure there's some truth in that, but you do the best you can.
We know that there are influential people, particularly in the Republican Party, who really believe that environmentalism is not a legitimate ideology, that we should not be worrying about protecting our planet. How do you deal with people like that, particularly under an administration that listens to them?
You try to make sure that people like that don't have too much influence. For example, James Watt, who was Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior, believed that in the next 20 or 30 years, the world was going to come to an end. If somebody believes that, then they aren't going to worry about something that isn't going to be a problem for another 80 years. If you really believe the earth is going to get hit by a meteor or destroyed in the next 20 years, then worrying about something like the rate of depletion of natural resources isn't high on your radar screen.
There aren't very many people like that. I mean, overwhelmingly, Americans have rejected that concept. And so what we have to make sure of is that the institutions in our society respond to the will of the American people. And the American people care about America and they understand that in order to care about America, they have to care for America.
So you do all the things you can do. You sue; you educate the public; you lobby. You spend money on the campaigns to try and make sure they have fewer supporters in Congress, in both the House and the Senate, in both the Republican and Democratic parties. It's not that there's one thing you do. You have to do a million things and then a million more things.
Have the big conservation groups been too civilized in trying to negotiate with anti-environmentalists in government?
I think there are certainly major environmental groups that haven't been very active. I think there are major environmental groups that have been ineffectively shrill. I think there have been environmental groups that have been wonderfully creative. I don't think we all fit into a basket.
What do you think about Gore's potential for 2004?
Well, we haven't begun to survey the field. It's too soon. I'm not sure whether Gore has begun to run and, frankly, we don't start thinking about these things for another year and a half. Senator Lieberman might run. Senator Kerry might run. Senator Edwards might run. They all sided up with us on the Arctic so we might be choosing among a group of friends.
Has Sept. 11 made it more difficult for environmental groups to get the message across?
What Sept. 11 did do was bring Americans together, to raise their expectations that government was actually going to protect them. And it also created a tremendous resurgence of a desire to do stuff. I mean, when we call our members now, twice as many of them turn up. Applications for the Peace Corps are up 50 percent. Volunteer agencies are flooded. Thirty percent more people are going to the national parks than a year ago. Sept. 11 created a sense of "I don't want to live just in my isolated world, I want to connect with my neighbors," which I think is a good thing.
It also created a sense that government matters, which was a very good thing since the reality is that government really does matter. What we haven't yet seen is whether those two things can come together. What we're working for is to try to combine the new sense of community and the new sense of appreciation for democracy, the new patriotism if you will, into a new burst of civic engagement. And I don't know yet if we're going to succeed. We're trying to.
About the writer
Amy Standen is a writer living in Oakland, Calif.
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