Politics Trumps Ecology

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"WHAT KIND OF STARTED OUT AS A LOVE AFFAIR quite frankly now is feeling more like a date rape," said Jay Hair of the National Wildlife Federation. The environmental honeymoon ended Tuesday when Clinton accommodated several Western Senators key to the passage of his budget package; he deleted provisions raising the minimal rates farmers and miners pay to use federal lands. Environmentalists see the discounts as a guarantee of despoilment and Clinton's act as political cowardice. They were still nervous days later when he chaired a Portland, Oregon, "forest conference" on logging and the spotted owl, topics viewed by some as mutually exclusive. At the impassioned gathering, which featured concerned conservationists and unemployed lumberjacks, Administration aides chatted of legislation that would protect the owl under the Endangered Species Act but also allow some logging to resume. That might not delight Hair and his colleagues, but it would be an improvement on the week's beginning.