Our leaders are losing sight of environmental protection

This past Friday, the Nobel Committee awarded its annual peace prize to a Kenyan woman named Wangari Maathai. She is the first African woman ever tapped for the honor and is perhaps most known for leading an effort to plant 30 million trees in Africa. As such, she is also the first Nobel Peace Prize recipient recognized particularly for her environmental advocacy.

Noting this, the Nobel committee stated, "Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment. Maathai stands at the front of the fight to promote ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa."

The Nobel Committee's recognition of the link between environmental conditions and political stability is laudable and critically important.

It also highlights one of the most glaring failures of the Bush administration that too often gets obscured in a post-9/11 world of elevated terror threat alerts. With Bush at the helm, our nation's air, water and forests are in worse shape now than they were four years ago. With their decline, we too become more vulnerable.

This point loomed large not long ago when I spoke with my friend Chris, who recently became a father. Chris told me he was planning to vote for President Bush this fall because having a child had changed his priorities. He now was considering his daughter's security to be his primary concern.

While he realized that Bush's environmental policies have been atrocious, he believed that national security was more important than protecting the environment.

But as the Nobel Committee wisely suggests, this distinction is based upon a false and dangerous dichotomy between environmental protection and human safety.

Consider the following: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency re-evaluated its estimates on mercury contamination early this year and stated in January that one in six women of childbearing age has mercury levels in her blood high enough to jeopardize a baby's health.

As an expectant father, I find this statistic particularly alarming. I suspect my friend Chris would, too. But according to the Sierra Club, the Bush administration has tried to relax mercury standards for air quality to allow three times the level previously permitted.

Not interested in the well-being of America's kids? OK. How about residents of its largest city? Three days after the fiery collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York, the EPA sent a draft press release to the White House that cautioned about dangerously high asbestos levels in the air of lower Manhattan.

Two days later, on Sept. 16, 2001, the Bush administration released an edited version of the EPA notice that declared, "Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York's financial district."

Maybe you're a Red Sox fan and don't particularly care about New Yorkers. Fine. But if your definition of security includes having access to clean air to breathe, you might pause to consider that Americans are inhaling more smog than ever before.

According to the EPA, U.S. cities broke clean-air standards for a total of 1,535 days and 81 million Americans were breathing unhealthy air in 2000. Two years later, those numbers were up to 2,035 days and 100 million Americans. Feeling safer yet?

If you're like me, all this doom and gloom makes you feel like getting away for a while. Maybe head to the woods for a little respite?

You still can, but no thanks to Bush. Not only has his administration opened more than 58 million acres of national forest to threats from unnecessary road-building, but it also has worked to peel back protections for ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest even as many wildlife populations continue to decline.

We need to acknowledge that environmental problems are also political problems and that efforts to promote peace, to improve public safety and to enhance national security connect in many ways to how we relate to the land, water and air on which we depend.

This past week, we could turn to Wangari Maathai and the Nobel Committee with gratitude for elevating these connections in a very public way. Closer to home, we have an awful lot more work to do before our own national leaders show similar foresight and wisdom.

George W. Bush is now poised to be the first president in a very long while to guide the United States to net losses in both jobs and acres of protected lands. Neither one of these feats leaves us as strong or as well off as we were four years ago.

Contact David Havlick at havlick@email.unc.edu.