-- Page 4 RAIN April 1981 REAGAN ERA ENVIRON Reversing the Progress of by Alan S. Miller If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every negative has its positive. -Saul Alinsky While still governor of California, Ronald Reagan once stated, " When you've seen one redwood tree you've seen them all." Whether apocryphal or not, President Reagan, and many of his key colleagues in government, in industry and the Congress are making sounds even more ominous to the ecologically minded. It is perhaps not premature for those concerned for a sound and healthy environment to begin to assess how the outlines of this emergent Reagan program may compare with the officially progressive environmentalism of the Earth Day decade of 1970-1980. The task facing environmentalists is to develop a new strategy for encouraging citizen participation in the formation of social policy. Will the Reagan administration in fact sound the death knell for any further development of a national environmental consciousness? What lessons can the past ten years teach us regarding the politics of ecology? The calls for environmental retreat have been sounding clearly since the Reagan election. The president has aligned himself with the earlier policy recommendations of then President Gerald Ford to severely cut back on the work of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Some of Reagan's ideological counterparts have been more stridently stating the anti-environmentalist case in recent months. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-S. Car.), the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a primary Reagan spokesman on legal issues, recently let the ecological cat out of the bag. Speaking at a press conference in Washington. D.C.. the day after Reagan's election, Thurmond stated that one of the priorities of his chairmanship would be the dismantling of any existing environmental legislation that is in ... . . conflict with the rights of the government or of the people." On November 22, 1980, the Business Roundtable, an association of 200 of the top corporations in the nation and an ardent support group during the Reagan candidacy, released a $600,000 study condemning the Clean Air Act and essentially demanding its repeal. Exactly how these rumblings will be transformed into either legislation or administrative policy remains to be seen. It is important to note, however, that such tendencies are hardly new. Although shading a few degrees to the right of the Carter administration's environmental practice, the comments of Reagan and his friends are simply accelerating an already evident trend in government to relegate environmental quality and public health to the shadows of administrative concern. There is a real sense in which the positive environmentalism of government during the seventies can be seen as an historic anomaly. The decade produced quite a remarkable array of positive programs for both ecological and public health and safety. The Clean Air Act ---,....;-~-:----
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