Abstract

The Once-Green GOP

The author comments on the book "Politics, Pollution, and Pandas," by a former environmental adviser to Richard Nixon, Russell Train, and compares Nixon's environmental policies with those of President George W. Bush. On the environment, it's worth remembering that it was Republicans who led the federal government into the modem environmental era, when Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, signed into law the Clean Air and Clean Water acts (and much other fundamental legislation) and generally launched the nation on a course of environmental protection that, despite recent backsliding, remains the envy of much of the world. Now, this oft-forgotten history has been described by a former Republican insider, Russell Train, in a book that offers implicit lessons to anyone hoping to exploit Bush's vulnerabilities on the environment in 2004. Train was one of Nixon's two point men on the environment. Although Train's book is primarily a memoir of his years in government, he is clearly pained by the current President's environmental policies, which he regards as willfully obtuse, not to mention an invitation to global catastrophe. Nixon never expressed a personal interest in environmental issues, recalls Train; rather, he reacted as "a highly political animal... [whose] instincts told him that he and the Republican Party could not afford to be seen as anti-environment." Bush, on the other hand, seems to have concluded he can get away with a rape-and-pillage approach and still win a second term, and he may be right.