White House Politics and the Environment: Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush

Chapter 9 Ronald Reagan

chapter 9 Ronald Reagan Ronald Reagan entered office with an anti-environmental, prodevelopment orientation. Here was a president who could be characterized as acting contrary to bipartisan efforts to support the environment. As Shirley Anne Warshaw informs us, “Reagan had promised business and industry ‘regulatory relief’ during the campaign, asserting that federal regulation permeated every facet of communications, transportation, the workplace, manufacturing, air, water, and noise standards. He promised to eliminate or repeal many of these regulations and therefore reduce the cost of doing business .”1 In contrast to his immediate predecessor, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan came into office with a tightly defined political agenda—one that was hostile to environmental protection. Moreover, he acted in clear opposition to fellow Republican Richard Nixon, who had established the Environmental Protection Agency, signed the landmark National Environmental Policy Act, and declared the 1970s as the “decade of the environment.” Reagan inherited legislation to reauthorize the clean air act, but despite political and public pressure to support it during his term in office, it sat dormant and was ignored. As he concentrated on economic growth and development, he faced public opinion and opposition in both houses of Congress that favored support for environmental protection.2 When Reagan assumed a “pro” environmental stance it was usually when he considered it as having no negative impact on the economy or on business and industry. However, more often than not, the environment was secondary to the economy rather than being seen as an integral part of a healthy economy. According to C. Brant Short, “Reagan presented a powerful vision that countered the conservation consensus of the previous twenty years and offered an alternative ideological paradigm to understand nature, wilderness, natural resources, and public land management. . . . President Reagan and his advisors presented an agenda that challenged the core values that had guided environmental politics in the 1960s and 1970s.”3 As John Palmer and Isabel Sawhill further described Reagan’s political agenda, “the administration’s regulatory policies empha- 174 chapter nine sized productivity over the protection of health, safety, civil rights, and the environment. . . . A similar pattern prevailed in its natural resources policies. Productionofenergyresourcestookprecedenceoverconservation—whether in the Department of Energy’s budget or in the Department of Interior’s management of public lands and wilderness areas.”4 Air quality provided a clear example of Reagan’s position toward the biosphere . Richard Nixon had signed the 1970 Clean Air Act and Carter signed the reauthorization of that act in 1977. However, Reagan inherited the legislation and despite political and public pressure to support reauthorization during his term in office, it was ignored until his successor, George H. W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. Moreover, Reagan complicated efforts to deal with acid rain in collaboration with Canada. Although he discussed the issue with Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, the acid rain problem was not dealt with in a substantive way until George H. W. Bush signed an air quality agreement with Canada in 1991.5 The Reagan administration’s attitude toward the environment involved the development of New Federalism, which had first appeared with Richard Nixon. Unlike the Nixon administration’s conception, which had promoted more authority for states and communities and less federal intrusion into subnational affairs, New Federalism during the Reagan and Bush 41 eras involved fewer resources to carry out state responsibilities. As Robert Dallek describes New Federalism, Reagan “had hoped to transfer some threequarters of the federal government’s . . . domestic responsibilities to state and local governments.”6 In the process of applying this approach to subnational politics during the 1980s, environmental protection activities were decentralized and defunded.7 As James Lester informs us, “During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the states were subject to substantial budgetary cuts in a number of environmental program areas, including air pollution control, water pollution control, hazardous waste management, pesticide enforcement , wastewater treatment, and safe drinking water.”8 As a westerner, Reagan identified with the notion of giving states greater influence to control the environment. However, Samuel Hays described the evolution of a new environmental movement in the West that gave the region the “ability to meet federal agencies on their own ground, combat the old economy in the context of turf, and mobilize those with new ideas about what the environment of their region should be. This is a vastly different place, a region transformed, that can well be described as a ‘new environmental West.’”9 Three decades...