EARTH DAY BLUES

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A QUARTER-CENTURY AFTER THE FIRST EARTH DAY caught our imagination, 23 years after passage of the Clean Water Act, 22 years after the Endangered Species Act promised fair treatment for wild creatures, how fares our sad old planet's health?

Obviously there have been huge improvements. Lead, for instance, slows mental and physical development in children. The increasing use of lead-free gasoline around the world vastly reduces these ills. But banning leaded gas is a regulation, and REGULATION, as conservatives know, is what the Devil has printed on his T shirt. So lawmakers clamor for a risk-assessment bill that could be used (among other mischief) to end the phase-out of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Dollar benefits of regulations must justify dollar costs. Fine. Sounds good. But how do you measure the dollar benefit of brighter first-graders and an ozone layer that blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet rays?

No one has proposed, so far, to topple the federal tyranny of lead-free gas. But a distinctly raunchy odor arises from the cynical proposed gutting of the 1972 Clean Water Act--gutting decreed on order, to precise stipulations of industry lobbyists--by Republicans who run the House Subcommittee on Water and the Environment.

Really? Here a thoughtful Martian might wonder, "These must be the children. Where are the adults?" As he knows, the Clean Water Act has been a visible, undeniable success. Everyone benefits every day. Streams that were murky with mill waste and untreated sewage now are clear and swimmable. No matter; because oil, gas and real estate interests pleaded inconvenience, water-quality standards are to be lowered. Protection of wetlands, which nourish marine life, is to be cut at a time when fish-producing U.S. coastal ecosystems are nearly barren.

If such measures are mostly conservative grandstanding, as some say, and if sponsor Bud Shuster, a Pennsylvania Republican, counts on the Senate to moderate his don't-drink-the-water bill, there's an interesting question: Grandstanding for whom? A TIME/CNN poll in January reported that 55% of those asked would increase government spending on the environment, 16% would decrease it and 27% would keep spending the same. Other polls show strong environmental support among suburban Republicans and blue-collar white males, who are furious that business is pushing environmental cuts.

Are bills dismantling protection of air and water simply right-wing truculence? If not, are they badly aimed populism? The answer is not deeply buried: corporate America, generous with PAC contributions, is the clear and highly appreciative beneficiary. One spitball of a bill, written for Republican Congressman Slade Gorton of Washington by lawyers for logging, mining, grazing and utility corporations, would junk large sections of the Endangered Species Act. Gorton told the New York Times that he did not consult environmentalists about the bill because "I already know what their views are."