Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when chasing the presidency in 2000.
Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska). When the dissident "good news" scientist Bjorn Lomborg spoke to a conservative Washington thinktank he was applauded not merely rapturously, but fawningly.
While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting and Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has been telling its scientific advisers to do more research before it can consider any action to restrict greenhouse gases; the scientists reported back that they had done all the research. The attitude of the White House to global warming was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as: "It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything about it!" What terrifies all American politicians, deep down, is that it is true and that they could do something about it, but at horrendous cost to American industry and lifestyle.
In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do is to buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring that a portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming initiatives". Wow!
Potential Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination have been testing environmental issues a little in the past few weeks. Some activists are hopeful that the newly elected Governor Schwarzenegger of California is genuinely interested. But, in truth, despite the Soviet-style politicisation of science, serious national debate on the issue ceased years ago.
Of course, nimbyism is alive and well. And, sure, there are localised battles between greens and their corporate enemies: towns in Alabama try to resist corporate poisoning; contests go on to preserve the habitats of everything from the grizzly bear to rare types of fly; Californians hug trees to stop new housing estates. Sometimes the greenies win, though they have been losing with increasing frequency, especially if Washington happens to be involved. These fights, even in agglomeration, are not the real issue. Day after day across America the green agenda is being lost - and then, usually, being buried under concrete.
"We're waging a war on the environment, a very successful one," says Paul Ehrlich, professor of population studies at Stanford University. "This nation is devouring itself," according to Phil Clapp of the National Environmental Trust. These are voices that have almost ceased to be heard in the US. Yet with each passing day, the gap between the US and the rest of the planet widens. To take the figure most often trotted out: Americans contribute a quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. To meet the seemingly modest Kyoto objective of reducing emissions to 7% below their 1990 levels by 2012, they would actually (due to growth) have to cut back by a third. For the Bush White House, this is not even on the horizon, never mind the agenda.
This brings us to the third factor: the Bush administration, the first government in modern history which has systematically disavowed the systems of checks and controls that have governed environmental policy since it burst into western political consciousness a generation ago. It would be ludicrous to suggest that Bush is responsible for what is happening to the American environment. The crisis is far more deep-seated than that, and the federal government is too far removed from the minutiae of daily life.
But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing regular edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling back environmental control, usually while pretending to do the opposite. Morale among civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington was already close to rock-bottom even before its moderate leader, Christine Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip round town was that she had endured two years of private humiliation at the hands of the White House. Few environmentalists have great hopes for her announced successor, the governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt.
What is really alarming is the intellectual atmosphere in Washington. You can attend seminars debunking scientific eco-orthodoxy almost every week. Early in the year, there was much favourable publicity for a new work Global Warming and Other Eco-myths, produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organisation reputedly funded by multinational corporations. Outside Washington, it can be far nastier. "I've never threatened anyone in my life," a conservation activist in Montana complained to the Guardian. "I do know, though, that I have gotten very ugly threats left on my telephone answering machine over the past year, and twice had to scour my sidewalk in front of the building to erase the dead body chalk outlines."
Out in the west, words such as enviro-whackos are popularised by rightwing radio hosts such as the ex-Watergate conspirator Gordon Liddy, who passes on to his millions of listeners the message that global warming is a lie. "I commute in a three-quarter-tonne capacity Chevrolet Silverado HD," he swanked in his latest book. "Four-wheel drive, off-road equipped, extended curb pickup truck, powered by a 300hp, overhead valve, turbo supercharged diesel engine with 520lb-feet of torque... It has lights all over it so everyone can see me coming and get out of the way. If someone in a little government-mandated car hits me, it is all over - for him." Fuel economy in American vehicles hit a 22-year low in 2002.
In this country, green-minded people can't even trust the good guys. The Nature Conservancy, the US's largest environmental group with a million members - with a role not unlike Britain's National Trust - was the subject of an exhaustive expos? in the Washington Post in May, accusing it of sanctioning deals to build "opulent houses on fragile grasslands" and drilling for gas under the last breeding ground of the Attwater's Prairie Chicken, whose numbers have dwindled to just dozens.
In the three years since then, Bush has danced like a dervish with the folks who brung him. Yet, even now, no one dare say out loud that they are against environmentalism: the political wisdom is that the subject can be a voting issue among the suburban moms, ferrying the kids around to baseball practice in their own Chevrolet Silverados. Instead, the big corporations and their political allies have - brilliantly - manipulated the forces that the eco-warriors themselves unleashed and turned them back on their creators. "In the 80s they took all the techniques of citizen advocacy groups and professionalised them," explains Phil Clapp. "That's when you saw the proliferation of lobbyists in Washington. The environmental community never retooled to meet the challenge. They had developed the techniques, but were still doing them in a PTA bake-sale kind of way."
Thus every new measure passed to favour business interests and ease up on pollution regulations is presented in an eco-friendly, sugar-coated, summer's morning kind of way, such as Clear Skies, the weakening of the Clean Air Act. The House of Representatives has just passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, presented by the president as an anti-forest fire measure. Opponents say it is simply a gift to the timber industry that will make it extremely difficult to stop the felling of old-growth trees. Another technique is to announce, with great fanfare, initiatives that everyone can applaud, such as a recent one for hydrogen-based cars. We can expect more of these as November 2004 draws closer. When they are scaled back, or delayed, or dropped, there is less publicity. It is a habit that runs in the family. Governor Jeb Bush's grand scheme to save the Florida Everglades was much applauded; the delay from 2006 to 2016 was little noticed.
"This administration has sent a signal to the polluting community, 'You can get away with bad habits'," says Browner. "State governments in the north-east were much tougher, so the north-eastern power stations upgraded their emissions standards in the 90s whereas the mid-west guys, who are their competitors, didn't. Now they're not enforcing the law."
"So what they're saying to the companies is: 'Don't go early, don't comply with the law first. The rules might change.' Even a company that wants to do the right thing has to look at its bottom line. If they get into a situation like this, they think: 'We spent $1bn to meet the requirements and our competitors didn't. Yeah, great. We're not going to do that again.'"
Under Bush, the lack of interest at every level has at last come into balance. The US is equally unconcerned globally, federally, statewide and locally. The environmentalists' macro-gloom has been off-beam before, of course. Perhaps global warming is a myth; perhaps the CEI is right and there will be a blue revolution in water use to complement the green revolution. There is probably just as much as chance that the next big surprise will be a thrilling one - the arrival of nuclear cold fusion to solve the energy dilemma, say - as a disaster. Maybe biotechnology, pesticides, natural gas and American ingenuity and optimism will indeed see everything right. It does seem like a curiously reckless gamble for the US to be taking, though, staking the future of the planet on the spin of nature's roulette wheel.
If you fly from Washington to Boston, there are now almost no open spaces below. This is increasingly true in a big U covering both coasts and the sunbelt. In the south-west, the main growth area, bungalows spread for miles over what a decade ago was virgin desert. The population of Arizona increased 40% in the 1990s, that of next-door Nevada 66%. That's, as Natalie Merchant sang, "...the sprawl that keeps crawling its way, 'bout a thousand miles a day", which is not much of an exaggeration.
Every day 5,000 new houses go up in America. Many of these fit the American appetite for size, however small the plot: "McMansions", as they are known. The very word suburb is now old-hat. The reality of life for many people now is the "exurb", which can be dozens of miles from the city on which it depends. In places such as California, exurban life is the only affordable option for most young couples and recent migrants.
These communities are rarely gated but often walled, creating a vague illusion of security and ensuring that the residents have to drive to a shop, even if there happens to be one 50 yards away. Naturally, they have to drive everywhere else. In August it was announced that the number of cars in the US (1.9 per household) now actually exceeded the number of drivers (1.75).
And yet. Time and again, around the US, one is struck by the stunning beauty of the landscape, not in the obvious places, but in corners that few Americans will have heard of: amazing rivers such as the Pearl in Louisiana, or the Choptank in Maryland or the Lost River in West Virginia; the Chocolate Mountains and the San Diego back country in California; the bits that are left of the Outer Banks...
And equally one is struck by the sheer horrendousness of what man has done in the century or so since he seriously got to work over here. In the context of ages, the white man is merely a hotel guest in this continent: he has smashed the furniture and smeared excrement on the walls. He appears to be looking forward to his next night's stay with relish.
Of course, there are still huge tracts of untouched and largely unpopulated land: in the Great Plains, where people are leaving, in the mountains, deserts and Arctic tundra. But last spring, in another of Washington's Friday night announcements, the Department of the Interior announced - no, whispered - that it was removing more than 200m acres that it owned from "further wilderness study", enabling those areas to be opened for mining, drilling, logging or road-building. That's an area three times the size of Britain. The New York Times did write a trenchant editorial; otherwise the response was minimal.
Not long ago I went for a walk in the Vallecito Mountains in California. After a while, I got myself into a position where the contours of the land blotted out everything and, after the noise of a plane had died away, there was no sight or sound at all that was not produced by nature. This lasted about a minute. Then, from somewhere, a motorcycle roared into earshot.
Sure, there are still places in this vast country where it is possible to escape, but they get harder and harder to find except for the fit, the adventurous and those unencumbered by children or jobs. Most Americans don't live that way. And nowhere now is entirely safe from being ravaged, sometimes in ways that prejudice the future of the whole planet. Al-Qaida and the Iraqi bombers have no need to bother. America is destroying itself.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/transport/Story/0,2763,1070043,00.html
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