Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Bush Administration will be its undermining of environmental and conservation science itself. Cases of silenced government scientists and experts, censored reports, disbanded scientific advisory panels and withheld evidence abound. (The National Resources Defense Council has listed dozens of examples on its website.) No Administration has ever shown such levels of contempt for science as a means for informing and guiding policy and law.

Elected on the premise that government is ineffective, incompetent and wasteful, the Bush Administration has devoted its time in office to proving its own point--something Hurricane Katrina brought home to Americans with a resounding bang. But the Bush record on the environment is in a category all its own. Only when we begin to grasp that those who are driving Bush environmental policies do not share the most basic values and beliefs that have guided such policy-making for over half a century does their behavior start to make sense. This much is clear: The Bush Administration does not respect a broad American consensus that the quality of our lives is directly linked to the integrity and health of the environment.

Differences in philosophy about property rights, the role of government and the best means to change self-destructive behaviors will translate into different approaches to environmental policy--for example, whether to curb pollution by creating market incentives or by passing tough laws. But until now Republicans did not reject the need for environmental policy altogether. What happened? The answer is a familiar one: Bush's righteous base, the right-wing fundamentalist Christians, are having their way. The zealots who think the Book of Revelations is the only guide to foreign policy and that nature is a mere stage for their personal salvation drama--men like House majority leader Tom DeLay--who have publicly proclaimed that they do not believe in evolution, or other Republican Congressional leaders who got 100 percent ratings from the powerful Christian Coalition, including House speaker Dennis Hastert, presidential hopeful Bill Frist, policy chair Christopher Cox, national leadership chair Rob Portman, powerful senators like Mitch McConnell, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Rick Santorum, George Allen and many more who are, environmentally speaking, the American Taliban.

Bush himself recently declared that "the jury is still out" on evolution. The Administration's push to satisfy its base by devaluing and discrediting evolutionary theory has profound implications for environmental policy and law. If you don't believe in the evolutionary sciences, chances are you also don't heed or trust the ecological sciences that underlie environmental law and policy. When conservation biologists talk about keystone (or endangered) species, fundamentalists are far more likely than most Americans to listen skeptically. The value of biodiversity as a measure of ecosystem health is going to be of little concern to those who do not understand or accept the critical role that species interaction plays in keeping ecosystems resilient in the face of disturbance and stress. In fact, some fundamentalist Christians have only contempt for ecological science, which they view as nothing more than the cover pagans use to push a godless, nature-worshiping agenda.

If you believe that God made the world for you and instructed you to dominate it and be fruitful, then you are likely to see yourself as above and beyond the natural world. If you are God's chosen, then how can you fear that He will not provide for you no matter how large your numbers grow or what you do to your surroundings? God, after all, can change nature's laws, which are part of His "intelligent design" in the first place. So you are unlikely to fret about practicing environmental restraint or worry about environmental toxins--righteousness being the best prophylactic against disease in a world where God's will is done.

If you believe that the world's end is imminent, then why not use it before you lose it? If you believe that when the world-ending moment arrives, you will be "raptured" away and Christ will return to rule at last, then, hey, bring it on! Those who are "left behind," as fundamentalist Tim LaHaye describes it in his bestselling novels, deserve to suffer because they failed to accept Christ as their personal savior. So the President's fundamentalist base favors the present over a future they disown.

According to Bush's political base, the future is theirs; nature was put here for us to use as we please; God will provide; and foolish unbelievers will be abandoned, like those desperate refugees at the New Orleans Superdome, in a trashed and shredded world. We had our chance but decided to listen to scientists, believe in dinosaurs, hug trees and wring our hands over pupfish, spotted owls and the odd centipede or two. While our jaws drop at their arrogant and reckless behaviors, they just shake their heads and chuckle condescendingly at all of our "liberal whining."

It's a holy war, after all, and they are most righteous. Bush's assault on the environment makes perfect sense once you see the bargains that drive it. Fundamentalists give Bush political power, his corporate cronies get free rein to plunder the land for their profit and the fundamentalists get the heads of nature-worshiping enviros on an arsenic platter. The rest of us, of course, get left behind.

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