How Green Became the Color of Money

[Jan Klimkowski]

Jeffrey St Clair nails the false saint of the green movement:

Gore's reputation among the Washington press corps as environmentalist was largely based on his grandstanding at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and his tedious book Earth in the Balance, which stressed environmental discipline for the Third World, while neglecting to mention the corporate plunder of North America's forests, river and mountains. (This is nothing new, of course. Heading the rush to the Amazon to protest deforestation in the late 1980s were many US politicians who would be aghast at the thought of curbing the depredations of timber companies operating in North America.)

Gore was a tireless promoter of free-market environmentalism, and the probable ghost-writer of Clinton's noxious "the invisible hand has a green thumb" line. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Gore argued with increasing stridency that the bracing forces of market capitalism are potent curatives for the ecological entropy bearing down on the American environment. He was a passionate disciple of the gospel of efficiency, suffused with an inchoate technophilia.

Several of Gore's protégés landed top posts in the Clinton administration, led by Carol Browner as EPA administrator. She had served as Gore's legislative director from 1989 through 1991, before leaving to become the head of Florida's Department of Environmental Quality. During her tenure in Florida, Browner took two particularly high profile stands. The first was a capitulation to sugar-growers and developers that allowed continued (though slightly filtered) dumping of pesticide-lace water into the Everglades. Second, Browner allowed the Walt Disney Company to destroy 800 acres of vital wetland habitat in central Florida, in exchange for a pledge from the eco-imagineers at DisneyWorld to "recreate" several thousand acres of wetlands, a feat which remains well beyond the capacities of modern science.

At EPA, Browner wasted little time in promoting ideas such as wetland trading, which during the Bush administration had met with howls of derision from the green lobby. One of her very first actions was to the put the imprimatur of the EPA on the Everglades deal she had brokered a few years earlier in Florida. This was a precedent of sorts: the first time the federal government had officially sanctioned the pollution of a national park.