The environment never has been a top-drawer issue in a presidential campaign. But there’s no doubt environmental issues are more important than they used to be. Here’s a look at the environmental credentials—or lack of them#0151of the four presidential candidates who had emerged as front-runners at the time of publication.

AL GORE

Vice President Al Gore has a green reputation, in part because of his best-selling 1992 book on environmental issues, Earth in the Balance. The League of Conservation Voters said environmentalists consider Gore “the most knowledgeable environmental advocate to reach such high office in the United States.” Steve Holmer of the American Lands Alliance said that of the top four presidential candidates, “Gore would be the best on forest issues. He understands the interconnections, how forests are tied to clean water and the climate. You’ll see far-reaching leadership [with Gore].”

His green leanings were evident well before he penned Earth in the Balance. As a member of the House of Representatives in 1980, Gore played an important role in the passage of the Superfund legislation to pay for cleaning up hazardous waste. And in 1991, after he had moved to the Senate, he filibustered legislation that would have opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

As vice president, he is credited with:

• Playing a key role in persuading Clinton to designate the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase­Escalante National Monument in southern Utah. Clinton issued the executive order in 1996.

• Being a driving force behind the administration’s efforts to restore the Everglades ecosystem in Florida. These efforts have not pleased everyone. The Sierra Club has argued that the complex restoration plan could end up destroying wetlands.

• Supporting the Clinton administration right-to-know initiatives, which allow citizens to access information about toxins in the environment.

• Opposing the planned Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste dump in Nevada, which anti-nuclear activists say would pose an unacceptable risk to the environment.

The vice president’s environmental record is not spotless. Although he has frequently spoken about the need to strengthen the Endangered Species Act, some activists say the Clinton administration has actively weakened the law.

“The Clinton administration has been outright hostile [to the act],” said Heather Weiner of the EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund. Weiner said that the administration has a particularly poor record in fulfilling its responsibility of designating critical habitat to ensure that imperiled species have sufficient habitat available should their numbers rebound.

Another blot on Gore’s greenness is the salvage rider debacle. Environmentalists were furious with Clinton when he signed the 1995 bill that contained the rider, which banned environmental challenges to logging sales. And they were bitterly disappointed when Gore didn’t speak out against the decision. (Later, in 1996, he did say when questioned that he understood environmentalists’ outrage and that “it’s hard to argue with people who say it’s a horrible outcome.”)

Which brings up this question: To what extent can Gore be blamed—or praised—for Clinton administration actions on the environment? The answer: No one knows for sure because it’s not always clear what Gore is doing or not doing behind the scenes to influence the president.

One action that Gore did take behind the scenes has been criticized. In 1998, Gore applied the brakes to an effort by the Environmental Protection Agency to evaluate whether certain pesticides that are used on crops—and that are present on grocery store produce in tiny amounts—pose an unacceptable hazard to children.

Kathleen McNeilly of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a pro-environment organization, had this to say about Gore: “In general, he hasn’t seen through environmental programs as much as we had hoped. We saw him as a champion of environmental causes. I don’t know whether we do anymore. But we realize he’s in a difficult position. He’s waiting to see whether he gets in the White House.”

GEORGE W. BUSH

Of all the candidates for president this election year, Governor George W. Bush of Texas is the one who fills environmentalists with the most dread. “If he gets elected, I’m moving out of the country,” one activist said half-jokingly.

A look at Bush’s environmental record in the Lone Star State helps explain the alarm. Since he was first elected in 1994, he has:

• Failed to support a proposal to boost funding for Texas state parks, the second most poorly funded state parks system in the country.

• Opposed placing species unique to Texas—such as the Barton Springs salamander and the Arkansas River shiner—on the endangered species list.

• Proposed that companies voluntarily reduce harmful industrial emissions rather than being required to do so by law. Bush has taken this tack despite the fact that Texas has some of the dirtiest air in the country—the state ranks first in the nation in the amount of toxins spewed into the atmosphere from industrial facilities, and Houston now has poorer air quality than Los Angeles.

• Advocated private property rights, including takings legislation, which would require the government to compensate landowners for regulations that reduce their property values. (Environmentalists usually oppose takings bills, saying they amount to paying polluters not to pollute.)

• Failed to appoint even one individual with a conservation background to any of the commissions that oversee Texas environmental agencies. The three-member Texas Natural Resources and Conservation Commission, for example, is composed entirely of commissioners with ties to chemical, oil or real estate interests, according to a League of Conservation Voters overview of Bush’s environmental record.

• Opposed the creation of a reserve for the imperiled Texas sea turtle.

In his campaign for the presidency, Bush has done little to alleviate environmentalists’ fears. Speaking in Spokane, Washington, last summer, he rejected the idea of breaching four dams on the Snake River—even if doing so were the only way to prevent salmon species from going extinct.

Bush’s selection of Terry L. Anderson to advise him on public lands issues has also been controversial. Anderson is the principal author of a 1999 Cato Institute report entitled How and Why to Privatize Federal Lands. The report charts a course for auctioning off all public lands to the private sector over the next twenty to forty years.

That an advocate of privatizing public lands is a top Bush adviser has triggered scorn and fear among environmentalists.

“If lands don’t make money, they’re not worth anything to Governor Bush,” Steve Holmer of the American Lands Alliance said.

“It’s disturbing because if [Anderson] became the Interior secretary, he would be James Watt incarnate,” added Steve D’Esposito of the Washington, D.C.­based Mineral Policy Center, referring to the Reagan administration Interior secretary who holds a spot near the top of environmentalists’ all-time enemies list.

Also on Bush’s team of environmental advisers:

• Christopher DeMuth, who headed the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Reagan administration. The office was criticized for blocking implementation of EPA regulations.

• William D. Rucklehaus, a respected moderate Republican. Rucklehaus was the first EPA chief when the agency was created in 1970. He returned in 1983, after the resignation of earlier, more conservative Reagan appointees.

BILL BRADLEY

On the basketball court, Democrat Bill Bradley was famous not only for his skill but also for his fierce competitiveness. That same drive showed through in a high-stakes environmental battle that took place in 1996, his last year in the Senate.

The first shot was fired by Utah’s highly conservative congressional delegation, which came forward with a proposal that amounted to a direct challenge to the former Princeton University and New York Knicks basketball star.

At the time, the delegation was mired in a bitter dispute with environmentalists over how much of the 22 million acres of Bureau of Land Management holdings in Utah to protect as wilderness. In a bid to overcome the stalemate, Republican senators Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett combined their version of a Utah wilderness bill—which contained much less proposed wilderness than the conservation community wanted—with legislation favored by Bradley that protected Sterling Forest, a 17,500-acre undeveloped area on the border of New York and New Jersey.

Bradley had two options. Stand aside and see the Sterling Forest protected but Utah wildlands sacrificed. Or risk the Sterling Forest and filibuster the whole thing. He chose the latter course and won; a bid to overcome his filibuster fell nine votes short of the sixty that were necessary.

Speaking on the Senate floor afterward, Bradley said that his office had been “deluged with calls both from Utah and New Jersey, urging me to defeat the bill before us. If the spectacular lands of Utah can be sacrificed to development, then any federal lands may be at risk.” The former basketball star completed what amounted to an environmental slam-dunk later that year when his Sterling Forest bill—minus any Utah wilderness legislation—was approved by the Senate.

That was far from the only time in his eighteen-year Senate career that Bradley supported environmental protection over other interests. In 1991, as chairman of the Senate Water and Power Subcommittee, Bradley cosponsored legislation that fundamentally shifted water policy in California toward conservation and wildlife protection. In 1995, he opposed a measure that contained several environmentally controversial riders, including one that would have allowed increased logging of Alaska’s 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest. And he has been a supporter of protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cosponsoring the first refuge wilderness bill in 1987 and consistently voting against bills that have called for development of the oil-rich area.

Despite all this, the news on Bradley’s environmental record is not all good. In 1991, he backed a wilderness protection bill for Montana that was opposed by environmentalists. (The bill, while protecting 1.1 million acres, opened up 4 million acres of roadless areas to activities such as logging, mining and oil drilling.)

In addition, Bradley recently did a flip-flop on Clinton’s roadless proposal. During a debate in New Hampshire in early January, Bradley attacked the initiative, saying it would override an ongoing local planning process in the state’s White Mountain National Forest. Pointing out that the forest has long been used for recreation and timber, Bradley said that “mixed-use is the proper way to proceed in the White Mountains.” A few days later, he issued a “clarification” of his position on the roadless proposal, saying that “America’s wild forests deserve and need full protection.” The statement even called for “full protection” of the Tongass—a move the Clinton administration has to date not endorsed.

JOHN MCCAIN

For a western Republican, John McCain is not bad on the environment. This has particularly been the case in his home state of Arizona, where McCain has:

• Strengthened protections for Grand Canyon National Park. McCain has sponsored legislation that placed limits on the number of sightseeing flights over the park; restored—to an extent—the natural flow of the Colorado River, which isn’t what it used to be thanks to Glen Canyon Dam; and cut air pollution from coal-burning power plants in the Four Corners region.

• Helped preserve Arizona wilderness. McCain has twice gone to bat for the rugged wilderness of Arizona’s desert and mountain areas. In 1984, as a first-term member of the House of Representatives, he and his Democratic counterpart, Morris Udall, crafted the 1984 Arizona Wilderness Act, which protected 1 million acres of federal land. Six years later, as a senator, he played a key role in brokering a compromise on the 1990 Arizona Desert Wilderness Act, which protected another 1.1 million acres.

Rob Smith, southwestern staff director of the Sierra Club, said that two giant wildlife refuges in southwestern Arizona would today probably not be part of the nation’s system of wilderness areas were it not for McCain.

The senator helped overcome objections from the Pentagon to the 750,000-acre Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, home to a desert subspecies of pronghorn antelope. And he brought environmentalists and members of a hunting group to the table to work out an agreement that allowed some motorized access to the 500,000-acre Kofa National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for wilderness designation. The refuge is a stronghold of the desert bighorn sheep.

McCain hasn’t always pleased Arizona environmentalists. He has been a proponent of a University of Arizona telescope project that has been opposed by environmentalists who say the project will harm an endangered squirrel (see page 49). Two years later, McCain threatened a Forest Service official’s job after the official halted construction of a road pending a review of a challenge to the work mounted by conservationists.

On issues outside Arizona, McCain’s environmental credentials are less than stellar.

In December, for example, McCain said that if he gained the White House, he would repeal President Clinton’s 1996 executive order creating Utah’s 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase­Escalante National Monument. He also said he would roll back Clinton’s recent directive to protect 54 million acres of pristine national forest from road construction, logging and other activities.

McCain, who spent almost six years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam, is renowned for his courage. But his political bravery on some environmental issues has been questioned. In 1996, he sponsored a bill that included a proposal to cut timber road subsidies—a step consistent with his frequent and vocal criticism of wasteful government spending. Yet the very next year he fell in line with the Republican leadership in the Senate and opposed an amendment that would have cut $20 million from the timber roads budget.

“McCain talks of ending corporate welfare but has never talked once of ending timber subsidies. He talks a mean game but hasn’t delivered,” said Steve Holmer of the American Lands Alliance.

“On the national level, McCain doesn’t stand up to the party leadership” when it comes to environmental issues, added the Sierra Club’s Smith.