Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
to “mine more, drill more, cut more timber,” and from his first day in office,
he made it his mission to relax environmental regulations, promote natural
resource exploitation, and reduce federal landownership to the greatest
extent possible. As incoming secretary of the interior, he vowed to “strike
a balance” between the interests of environmentalists, recreationalists,
business, and industry, but for environmentalists like Russell Peterson of
the Audubon Society, this “balance” was a farce. As Peterson put it, “To
put him in charge of the Interior Department is a crime.”
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the reaction to the reaction
The Reagan antienvironmental revolution represented the most staggering
and comprehensive peacetime rollback of environmental policy in the his-
tory of the conservation movement. But it also helped to unite and energize
a new coalition of liberal, pro-environment, anti-Reagan dissenters— a
coalition that paired professional environmentalists with a wide variety
of scientists, including many climate scientists, and a vocal minority of
congressional Democrats. Already,
Global 2000
and the associated issues
of acid rain, ozone depletion, and deforestation had sparked a hesitant
cooperation between these groups in dealing with global environmental
problems. It was their common response to the Reagan reaction, however,
that brought these groups together to make global warming into a main-
stream, Democratic, environmental issue in the 1980s.
Political dissent in the early 1980s took many forms; but especially
for congressional Democrats, the first line of defense came in the famil-
iar form of congressional hearings.
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In the wake of Reagan's resounding
electoral victory and his subsequent whirlwind of deregulation activity,
Democrats hoped to curb the new administration's political momentum
and set parameters for the president's popular mandate by publicly chal-
lenging Reagan's appointed officials and drawing out the implications of
the administration's budget requests.
For the most part, it was politics as usual. As Senator Paul Tsongas
of Massachusetts noted in Watt's confirmation hearings, few members of
Congress realistically expected to block Reagan's appointments or signifi-
cantly alter his administration's approach to environmental regulation.
“Being confirmed is a piece of cake,” Tsongas told Watt. “You will be
confirmed. . . . That is not my doing.”
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Tsongas and his colleagues simply
