This could be the winter of discontent for environmentalists. As the threat of war rumbles in the Middle East and the U.S. economy tumbles into recession, preserving the planet’s air, land and water is in danger of losing its place among the most pressing issues of the day. It’s not that last April’s Earth Day has been forgotten already: more and more people are recycling household waste, toting reusable shopping bags to stores and planting trees in their backyards. And after more than a decade of debate, Congress finally overhauled the Clean Air Act this fall. But these encouraging steps hardly begin to attack the most ominous threats to the environment, such as deforestation and ! global warming. For the most part, the populist fervor for preservation has not generated effective government action at a national or international level. Both the people and their leaders seem totally bewildered about how to tackle global problems. Too often they mistakenly see a conflict between a healthy environment and healthy economies. As a result, the ecology movement has entered a twilight zone in which everybody claims to be an environmentalist, but few people know what to do about it. That uncertainty showed up clearly in a poll of U.S. households taken for TIME late last month by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Fully 94% of those surveyed considered protecting the environment a very important issue, and 63% supported stronger laws and regulations to get the job done. But when it comes to financing preservation, the public is sharply divided. Of the people polled, 48% were willing to “go full speed ahead” in “spending money to clean up the environment,” but 47% said that, given other national problems, it would be better to “go slow.” Despite their desire for a cleaner environment, 64% admitted that they personally “should be doing more” to achieve that goal. Perhaps the most revealing finding in the survey was that 80% agreed with the statement “There are so many contradictory things said about the environment that it is sometimes confusing to know what to do.” Amid the confusion, the U.S. environmental movement is stumbling badly. In November voters turned down a passel of overly ambitious environmental initiatives at the state level, throwing the responsibility for policy back to elected officials, with whom it belongs. There is little hope, however, that either Congress or the White House will offer an environmental agenda in the near future. Exhausted by debate over the Clean Air Act and distracted by the twin threats of recession and war, Congress has no major environmental initiatives pending. The Bush Administration, all but abandoning the President’s promise to be an “environmentalist” in the Oval Office, has not followed up on its decision to elevate the Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet-level status, nor has it come through with an adequate plan to protect the threatened spotted owl. Regarding global issues, the Administration temporizes on threats to the atmosphere and lags in, rather than leads, efforts to deal with dangers to the land and oceans. Says Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee: “1990 was a year of decision for the environment, but no & decisions were made.”
