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Defenders Magazine
Defenders View: Out with the Old, in with the New
New years provide an opportunity for new beginnings and fresh starts. Fortunately, after seven years of Bush administration mismanagement and backsliding on national environmental policy, in 2008 we have the opportunity to begin to set things right by selecting a new occupant for the White House.
With the presidential primaries in full swing, voters need to carefully consider the competing candidates' positions on, and their proposed solutions to, the major problems of the day. And it is of the utmost importance that we select candidates whose top priorities as president would include confronting the problem of global warming by drastically reducing our use of fossil fuels and assisting vulnerable human and wildlife populations to adapt to climate change's drastic impacts.
Although there are many environmental problems our next president must address, global warming overshadows all others. Each week that passes seems to bring a new report detailing how millions of people will be at risk, and how perhaps as many as 30 percent of wildlife species could be pushed into extinction. Yet for seven years, we've been faced with denial, obfuscation and foot-dragging by the Bush administration.
This must be reversed in the next administration. The planet is certain to warm significantly in the coming decades no matter what we do, but the experts tell us that if the next president takes swift and decisive action to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and help prepare the most exposed human communities, we can limit the damage.
At the same time, our next president needs to provide leadership to lessen the impacts of global warming on wildlife. Regardless how thoroughly we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, scientists say we will experience a century or more of disruption to the world's ecosystems. If we do nothing, many species of animals and plants—representing a huge portion of the web of life—either will not survive in their altered habitats, or will not have sufficient opportunity to move and adapt due to the limits imposed by human development.
How should a new president address this problem? Fortunately, America has a long history of conserving its precious natural resources. Although our conservation infrastructure has been diminished in the past seven years, we still have the best conservation laws, programs and wildlife reserves anywhere. Our next president must use his or her executive authority to repair much of the damage caused by the current president's use of that authority, and then champion major legislation to retool our conservation infrastructure for the needs of the 21st century. Two examples of administrative actions our next president can take to reverse Bush's damaging actions are to reinstate the 2001 roadless rule to protect the last 58.5 million acres of undisturbed national forest land, and to require forest supervisors to protect native wildlife species' viability while managing our national forests.
Our next president should also champion legislation like the Global Warming Wildlife Survival Act that passed the House of Representatives last summer. This act requires development of a true national strategy to help wildlife and ecosystems adapt to global warming, and it establishes a new national science center on global warming and wildlife. Critically, it also provides substantial new funding for related conservation at all levels (tapping future revenues generated by a carbon allowance trading system), and ties provision of that funding to carefully drawn federal and state plans that implement the national strategy.
I've been fortunate to interview a number of the leading presidential candidates, and I can tell you that several have said that they see the problem of global warming as ranking right beside Iraq and health care in its importance to the nation. Hopefully, by the time elections occur, all candidates will acknowledge this. But whether they do or not, and whether—if they do—they can then enter the White House with a public mandate to make action on global warming a priority, depends on all of us pressing the issue into the presidential debate in the months ahead. Then, of course, we must get out and vote. Together, we can make 2008 a turning point in conservation history.
