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The Sierra Club is muddying the political waters Gregory Fossedal One of Virginia's biggest polluters these days is the Sierra Club, poisoning this year's U.S. Senate race with assertions it must know are false. Consider one of the campaign ads the club has been airing against Sen. Chuck Robb's opponent, George Allen. "As governor, George Allen had a dismal record of enforcing water quality laws," intones a narrator. "He cut funds for the state's water inspection program and staff and derailed EPA's efforts to punish Smithfield Foods, one of the state's largest polluters. . ." Yet both air and water quality in Virginia unproved during Allen's term. An exhaustive study conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University last year measured environmental progress and regression from 1985 to 1998. Researchers, found that the state's environmental condition declined until 1994, the year Allen took office, and then began improving. Detractors say, and with some validity, that the improvement after 1994 is not a credit to Allen, but to the policies of his predecessor. Democrat Doug Wilder. Fine. Then credit Allen with the environmental improvements now occurring on Gov. Jim Gilmore's watch. Allen's secretary of natural resources, Becky Norton Dunlop, clarifies the administration's record in her upcoming book, "Clearing the Air." She demonstrates, for instance, that it is an almost comical corruption of facts for the Sierra Club to blame the Allen administration for allowing Smithfield Foods to dump hog waste into the Pagan River. After all, it was the Wilder administration, responding to threats by Smithfield that it would move its operation to North Carolina unless environmental regulations were relaxed, that negotiated a consent order allowing the company to continue polluting until it could connect to a waste treatment plant. After Allen was in office, Smithfield asked to delay the connection and was told, "No." Far from being soft on Smithfield, Allen cut the company no slack. As to the Sierra Club's beef with staffing cuts in the state's Department of Environmental Quality, the environmentalists should address those complaints to Virginia's General Assembly. It was the Democratic Legislature, not Allen, that eliminated six positions at the DEQ. Among those axed: the DEQ's director of enforcement. The Sierra Club lends support to its claims by referencing the 1996 Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission report on the DEQ. But although JLARC was strongly critical of the DEQ's leadership, it found little fault with the department's results. Indeed, commissioners concluded that the DEQ was doing a good job of enforcing air and water pollution laws, and that air quality in the state was improving. They criticized the method by which water quality was monitored, but not the water quality itself. Moreover, JLARC grudgingly conceded that the majority of focal governments and businesses were pleased with their services from the DEQ. In totality, the report merely revealed a Democrat-controlled commission determined to find fault with a Republican administration. What else but reflexive criticism could explain commissioners disparaging the efforts of one excessively conscientious official, who had indexed, tabbed and written a table of contents for documents he provided, as "attempting to bury JLARC in paper?" Of course, the Sierra Club is not actually disgruntled about Allen's environmental record. What sticks in its craw is that the environment improved without heavy-handed command-and-control. Those who populate organizations such as the Sierra Club conceive of "environmentalism" as what columnist George Will calls "the socialist dream: ascetic lives closely regulated by a vanguard of bossy visionaries, dressed up as a compassion for the planet." They are statists first and environmentalists second, interested more in process than product. Free-market environmentalism threatens the old-guard greens because it diminishes the importance of the federal government. The Allen administration fought that notion, and the environment improved, demonstrating that it is possible to maintain a clean environment without sullying the principles of liberty. The Sierra Club detests that achievement because it was made on terms not of its choosing, and so it resorts to muddying the waters and politicizing the issue. Gregory Fossedal is chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution in Arlington.
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