LA Weekly

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While trying to confirm this:

"Environmental groups have accused the Bush administration of pillaging national forests. But logging under Bush has sunk at least 20 percent below levels in the last year of the Clinton administration, which environmentalists saw as friendlier."

(Is it true? That article pissed me off, for a variety of reasons.)

I ran across this -- from 2000:

"A Gallup poll undertaken earlier this year, to pick one example, meas- ured the level of people’s concern about thirteen environmental issues, ranging from the loss of natural habitat for wildlife to pollution of drinking water. The poll found that the level of concern had remained flat or declined in eleven of the categories since 1989 (the only exceptions were loss of tropical rain forests and global warming). . . . After Clinton was elected, people assumed that the White House was in the hands of conservation-minded leaders, and they stopped worrying about the environment. (It’s worth noting that the same Gallup poll that found a decline in concern about environmental issues also showed that an increasing number of people believe significant progress is being made. In 1990, 14 percent of those polled felt “a great deal” of progress had been made in dealing with environmental problems. A decade later, the number stood at 26 percent.)"

The first article talks about the phenomenon of environmentalists "crying wolf," and how people got tired of that. But was it really crying wolf to say that L.A.'s air was toxic in the 1960s and '70s? To ban persistant organic pollutants like DDT because birds were going extinct? To insist that CFCs be banned because there's a hole in the ozone? To pressure the oil industry to operate more safely after the Santa Barbara blowup of 1969?

These weren't false alarms -- they were heeded alarms, and things got better. The world didn't end because we didn't let it; because there was enough urgency behind these issues, and enough evidence in front of our eyes that things needed to change. And it's possible that people put environmental causes on the back burner because they had, and continue to have, bigger worries.

Global warming may be upon us, but it's abstract -- it isn't making anyone's kids cough all night; it isn't contributing to cancer clusters. It isn't real to most people, because they can't see it. Same goes for mercury, I think -- its effects aren't immediate and urgent.

So, anyway, I can find no confirmation of that 20 percent decline. I could be wrong, but I doubt it. Clinton's forest plan actually reduced national forest logging to less than 20 percent of its level in the early 1990s, and timber cut from national forests in the Pacific Northwest rose by more 50 percent in 2004, "the second straight year of increases since logging on federal lands in Washington and Oregon dipped to historically low levels in 2002," says the Seattle Business Journal.

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