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C  Prudence, Procrastination, or Politics: George Bush and the Earth Summit of    During the  campaign George Bush dubbed himself the “Environmental President.”1 Four years later, in June , Bush was asked to put his environmentalist label on the line at the  United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (also known as UNCED, the Rio Conference, or the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.2 As Time magazine noted in an article entitled “Summit to Save the Earth,” “the so-called Earth Summit, more than two years in the making, will be the largest and most complex conference ever held—bigger than the momentous meetings at Versailles, Yalta, and Potsdam.Those summits carved up empires, drew new borders and settled world wars. The agenda for the Earth Summit is more far reaching: it sets out to confront not only the world’s most pressing environmental problems— from global warming to deforestation—but poverty and underdevelopment as well.”3 Despite these very high global expectations, the conference turned out to be a monumental failure from which the international environmental movement has seemingly yet to recover.4 The worldwide frustration and anger over the failure of the conference were clearly directed at the Americans.The United States, it was frequently reported , not only forced the “watering down” of one major agreement (the climate change convention), but remained the only industrialized nation in the world that refused to sign a second (the biodiversity convention). The denunciation of the United States in general and of President Bush in particular in the national and international press was overwhelming. The negative press actually compounded the damage, because the media focused on the U.S. positions and the reactions to them, rather than on the environmental issues themselves. Adam Rogers, for example, argued that “America-bashing” was considered “one of the few consistent activities during the Earth Summit.”5 A New Republic article even described the media atmosphere as exhibiting a “Satan America spin.”6 The United States was labeled as “the evil empire,” a “party pooper,” the “black knight of the green movement,” “the forces of darkness,” and “the prime villain” of the international environment, while Bush was called “the Antichrist,” “Uncle Grubby,” the “Grinch who stole the eco-summit,” “cranky Uncle Scrooge,” and “eco-wimp.”7 The criticism was not limited to environmentalists and representatives from developing countries, but rather came from all sources: • American allies: Environmental Minister Klaus Topfer of Germany said, “What we see emerging in the United States is something like ‘ecologism’—fear of a new Communism hidden behind ecology.”8 • American citizens: It was reported that “thousands of US citizens in Rio marched in protest carrying signs saying ‘You’re embarrassing U.S.’”9 • American media: A Newsweek article opined that “it is a mark of how far America has drifted from environmental leadership that those ‘extremes’ [which Bush had refused to join] include Britain and Germany.”10 • Political opponents: Senator Al Gore was the leader of a delegation of U.S. senators at the conference, and was highly vocal throughout, while Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Clinton was frequently in the press attacking Bush’s holdout, arguing that he would sign all the documents.11 Bush’s address at the conference worked only to increase the opposition’s ire. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker wrote that “the USA found itself isolated in an unprecedented way, just three years after the collapse of Communism and a little more than a year after the Gulf War. . . . President Bush’s speech at Rio was a masterpiece of environmental pretentiousness; he did not really address any of the global environmental problems caused in large part by his country, but instead boasted about domestic pollution control which had little to do with UNCED’s agenda. Seemingly, the speech did not even impress the electorate at home to which it was, of course, mainly addressed.”12 In the end, it was clear that the entire Rio experience was a public relations disaster for Bush, one that threatened, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, to “undercut his standing in one area where voters still have confidence in him: foreign affairs .”13 A few months later, Bush lost the presidential election to Clinton and Gore, thereby completing one of the fastest falls from popularity in presidential history.14 This chapter examines the situation Bush faced at the Earth Summit and seeks to evaluate both his decisions and his rhetoric surrounding and explaining those decisions. The most...

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