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chapter 5 Bill Clinton In the 1992 election, the public put into office a president and vice president who had a great deal of support from environmentalists. Environmentalists had been quite frustrated during the twelve years of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush; thus their expectations were very high as they saw Bill Clinton and Al Gore come into office despite Clinton’s rather uncertain record as an environmentalist during his years as governor of Arkansas.1 Clinton was thus seen, in Michael Weisskopf’s words, as the “great green hope.”2 The public seemed to agree with this assessment, and when they were asked in a 1992 Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll to point to Clinton’s future focus, 64 percent indicated that it would be “improving the quality of the environment.”3 After the election, Carl Pope in Sierra magazine described the Clinton-Gore team in even more exaggerated terms, seeing them as the environmentalists’ “best and perhaps last hope to help move the country from devastation to stewardship, from depletion to sustainability.”4 Bill Clinton saw himself as a genuine environmentalist. The environment was important to him. As he once said, “I believe maybe if there’s one thing that unites our fractious, argumentative country across generations and parties and across time, it is the love we have for our lands.”5 Environmentalism was furthered by his promise, during his first term, to use the “presidential pen” to make government “the greenest in history.”6 The euphoria environmentalists felt for the Clinton presidency soon dissipated during Clinton’s first term, due to the high expectations that led to hesitancy to act on his part. A number of environmental interest groups soon became dissatisfied with the president’s lack of effort in that first term, feeling that the president was too willing to give away too much to those opposed to environmental concerns, and was too eager to compromise his position on the environment. Defenders of Wildlife, one of the more active environmental groups, found that the Clinton performance, after one year, was only “fair” and thus gave him a “C–” grade on ancient forest protection, a “B” on endangered species, an “A–” on biodiversity, a “B–” on public lands subsidies , and a “D” on wildlife and trade.7 The League of Conservation Voters, by 102 chapter five contrast, gave Clinton a grade of “C+” with a mild reprimand suggesting that he might not be “living up to his potential.”8 The Sierra Club saw Clinton as weak in the face of special interests and political opposition, while the National Audubon Society indicated in an open letter to Clinton that he and his administration “needed to be charged to produce results”—a reference to the need for a “jump start.”9 Despite what appeared to be a rather mediocre record on the part of the president during his first term, Clinton still retained an interest in having the environment as an issue on his social agenda. In his remarks on Earth Day, April 21, 1993, he talked about three principles that were key to his environmental philosophy: (1) creating a healthy environment dependent on a healthy economy, (2) protecting both the domestic and the global environment , and finally, (3) moving beyond the negative criticisms of the environment expressed by business, government, and individuals.10 Bill Clinton, like FDR before him, had an environmental plan that stressed balance, equalizing the needs of the economy with the needs of the environment. The balancing approach was used to both save the California gnatcatcher in Southern California and to try and resolve the long-lasting conflict between loggers and timber interests and environmentalists in the Northwest. Clinton’s staff made every effort to bring together interested environmentalists , local government persons, and local industries to save the gnatcatcher, an endangered bird. The result was a compromise, as one might expect, where the California gnatcatcher was listed as a “threatened” species, its ecosystem was given some protection, and local developers were given limited access to the area.11 An even more important example of this balance took place in 1993 during the “timber summit” in the Northwest. The summit came about due to the campaign pledge Clinton had made that he would do his best to resolve the conflict that had lasted for five years between the loggers and those attempting to enforce federal laws protecting the forests and endangered species . Clinton asked some sixty persons representing all...

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