Bill Moyers on the Environment
There's a great interview with Bill Moyers over at Grist today. Some excerpts below. The last one made me smack my head against my desk.
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: 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: 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.