TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022690/02261011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10.3 KB | 206 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 32

California Greenin'


The environment is this year's hottest issue, and politicians
on both coasts are scrambling to show their colors

By JORDAN BONFANTE -- With reporting by David Seidman/New York


    As cleanup crews in yellow slickers blotted globs of
petroleum from the discolored sands of Huntington Beach last
week, California Attorney General John Van de Kamp, a Democratic
candidate for Governor, turned the occasion into an
I-told-you-so press conference. "Here you have birds that are
dying," he lamented. "You have fish that are dying. And so we're
going to the people in November with an initiative that will
provide for an inspections program and a $500 million fund to
respond to spills. This," he said with a wave at the beach, "is
a helluva warning."

    By then Van de Kamp's rivals had issued their own
lamentations about the Feb. 7 accident aboard a British
Petroleum tanker that dumped 349,000 gal. of crude oil into an
area once known as Surf City, U.S.A. Complained the other
Democratic candidate for Governor, former San Francisco Mayor
Dianne Feinstein: "California has ignored the lessons of
Alaska." She reiterated her proposal to create a new department
of ocean resources to protect the sea, bays and estuaries. For
his part, Republican candidate Pete Wilson reminded a partisan
crowd in Los Angeles, "As your U.S. Senator, I have stood up to
two Presidents of my own party to oppose oil drilling off the
California coast."

    The spill, just 35 miles from Long Beach, guaranteed that
the environment would be the overriding issue in the campaign
to lead the nation's biggest state. Wherever they went as they
began stumping in earnest last week, Van de Kamp, Feinstein and
Wilson made California reverberate to a can-you-top-this of
environmental concern. Debate about conservation vs. development
is not exactly new in a state that has long sought to reconcile
its feverish growth with the desire for a healthy, outdoor way
of life. In a classic, cyclical conflict between the
"smokestack" of job-creating development and the "geranium" of
quality of life, public opinion today is clearly on the side of
the geranium. "Environment, growth and crime are the big issues
in this race," says Feinstein's chief strategist William
Carrick. "In a way they are all rolled up into one: losing
control of the California dream."

    California's politicians are merely in the vanguard of a
broadening national trend. The Bush Administration is
increasingly perceived to be lagging behind the public mood. The
President two weeks ago disappointed many members of an
international conference on climate change in Washington with
a cautious, no-action speech. He disillusioned environmentalists
again last week by defending offshore oil drilling, even if he
had yet to rule on the question of new leases off the California
and Florida coasts.

    To environmentalists, the prime suspect in the White House's
go-slow approach is chief of staff John Sununu, whose
free-market principles put industrial growth ahead of Government
regulation.

    Other Republicans, though, are scrambling to get aboard the
environmental bandwagon. Florida Governor Bob Martinez,
expecting a difficult re-election campaign next fall, last month
unveiled a ten-year, $3.2 billion initiative to acquire land for
environmental and recreational purposes; he also endorsed a plan
to undo the work of the Army Corps of Engineers and restore much
of the natural flow of South Florida's Kissimmee River. Maine
Governor John McKernan, facing a challenge from Democrat Joe
Brennan, a strong environmentalist, startled the audience at his
state-of-the-state address last month by proposing to breach the
3,500-kW Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River. That would allow
free passage of Atlantic salmon, shad and other fish for the
first time since 1836.

    Like abortion, environmentalism cuts across party lines. A
national recycling bill is winding its way through Congress.
California and Connecticut have recently passed laws requiring
the use of recycled newsprint, and similar legislation has been
proposed in at least a dozen other states. In New York the
environment may be one of the few areas where Democrat Mario
Cuomo proves vulnerable: activists consider him indifferent to
the issue and specifically fault him for favoring trash
incineration over recycling. Yet Cuomo too has proposed an
environmental bond issue, mostly to acquire land in the
Adirondacks. The $1.9 billion issue would be the biggest of its
kind in the state's history.

    In the California race, Republican candidate Wilson, 56, has
seized every opportunity to remind voters not only of his long
opposition to offshore drilling but also of his long attachment
to conservation-minded "growth management" as mayor of San Diego
from 1971 to 1983. On the campaign trail he has ridden a trolley
to show his support for fume-free mass transit and visited a
motor vehicle factory to admire the prototype of a
methanol-powered bus. At a country club in Santa Barbara -- as
Republican a setting as any to be found in Southern California
-- he assured a matronly audience, "An environmental ethic will
pervade the administration of Governor Wilson from Day One."
Obviously, Wilson was trying to distance himself on the
environment from California's outgoing Republican Governor
George Deukmejian and to lay at least some conservative claim
to the issue. Insists Wilson strategist Otto Bos, with
etymological aplomb: "The words conservation and conservative,
after all, stem from the same root."

    The centerpiece of California's campaign is a grass-roots
ballot measure to enact the most ambitious package of
environmental protection of any state in the country. Its
liberal supporters like Van de Kamp, who has been strongly
identified with the initiative, describe it as an "environmental
bill of rights." Other enthusiasts know it simply as the Big
Green. It aims at nothing less than protecting all food, air and
water from chemical contamination. If passed in November, it
would authorize a $500 million oil-spill contingency fund. It
would also create a new elective office, that of an
"environmental advocate" to police compliance.

    The voter initiative, which has a good chance of passage,
is sponsored by an alliance of environmental groups headed by
Democrat Tom Hayden, the 1960s radical leader who mellowed into
a mainstream liberal, married actress Jane Fonda -- from whom
he was recently estranged -- and has served eight years in the
California state assembly. For Hayden, 50, the measure could be
a ticket to political stardom, especially if he gets himself
elected the state's first environmental czar.

    Critics of the cleanup initiative argue that it is
overreaching and vulnerable to legal challenges, that its
technical prescriptions demand too much of the voters and that
like many of the initiatives that proliferate on California
ballots, it represents an abdication of the legislature's
responsibility. Yet Van de Kamp's opponents give the cleanup
measure their grudging respect. Neither Feinstein nor Wilson
seriously challenges most of its provisions, except for the
creation of an environmental advocate. Feinstein says she wants
to be "my own environmental advocate." Wilson similarly
complains that the move would Balkanize the Governor's office.
Taunts a Wilson adviser: "Why not a health advocate, an
education advocate and an everything-else advocate?"

    But in a race in which the candidates' differences are
minimal on issues such as crime, abortion rights, education
reform and no new taxes, Van de Kamp, 54, has a strong card in
his identification with the Big Green. "The cleverest thing he's
done," acknowledged a Feinstein adviser. Being against
environmental causes in 1990, Van de Kamp told a conservationist
audience in Sacramento, "is like being a communist in Eastern
Europe."

    Still, Feinstein, 56, has the edge in personal magnetism and
the advantage of being the first woman to run for Governor in
a state that counts 700,000 more women than men among its 13.4
million registered voters. A Mervin Field poll last week showed
that Feinstein, who has already been advertising heavily on
television, had shot ahead of Van de Camp, 42% to 38%, and
Wilson as well, 46% to 43%, after trailing both by as much as
18 points in October. Concluded Los Angeles political columnist
Joe Scott: "Before, it looked like an easy slam dunk for Van de
Kamp in the primary, to be followed by a showdown between two
gents in blue suits. Now it's been transformed into a close and
volatile, totally unpredictable three-way race."

    Why is Wilson risking his political reputation -- and more
than $16 million in expected campaign costs -- just two years
after winning re-election to the Senate? The answer lies in
California's increasing national political clout. In the 1992
presidential race, the state will account for 10% of the
nation's electoral votes. The next Governor will also strongly
influence a reapportionment process that could produce 14
contestable congressional seats in the 1992 election -- a boon
for the Republican minority in the House. Moreover, the
Governor's mansion in Sacramento served as a powerful
presidential launching pad for Ronald Reagan, who once declared
that trees cause pollution. Conceivably, Pete Wilson's political
career may represent not just the greening of California but
also the greening of the G.O.P.


_________________________________________________________________
CLEANING UP

    Goals of California's proposed Environmental Protection Act
of 1990, which goes to the voters in November:

    -- CLEAN FOOD. Phase out the use of 32 pesticides identified
by the federal EPA as "known or probable carcinogens."

    -- CLEAN AIR. Reduce emissions of pollutant "greenhouse
gases" 20% and phase out chlorofluorocarbons that contribute to
global warming, both by the year 2005.

    -- CLEAN WATER. Ban toxic dumping into coastal waters.
Charge a 25 cents-per-bbl. tax on all transported oil to pay for
a $500 million oil-spill contingency fund.

    -- CLEAN COP. In 1992 elect an "environmental advocate" with
legal powers to police compliance by industry and even to sue
the state.