Teepen: Even Mother Nature gets no respect from the Bush crowd

The Bush administration is breaking a lot of crockery as it blunders toward its imminent exit. As you might expect, the environment is taking much of the damage.

It is in the nature of administrations in their waning days to get in some last-minute licks, to pay off favored constituencies and pay back bothersome opponents.

Bill Clinton set aside millions of deserving acres for wilderness or other protection – and issued some pardons that, eight years later, it is still best not to stand downwind from.

The Bush people all along have treated Mother Nature as a poor relation to be kept away from the table if at all possible and allowed begrudged crumbs only if enough of the public spots the ill treatment and protests.

The Endangered Species Act, enlightened and effective legislation that has rescued numerous plants and animals from extinction's abyss, has been a special dislike of anti-regulation ideologues and large business interests from its inception.

In such quarters, it is counted an absurdity that mere critters, and often the least of those to boot, can stop a development company from scraping a large swath of the Great Plains bare or a logging giant from clear-cutting into a forest just to make things easy for some damn owl or burrowing creature.

So Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is pushing rule changes that could cut the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Marine Fisheries Service out of the deliberations when projects or programs potentially dangerous to frail species are at issue.

Where cross-agency consultations are now required, they could be scrapped in many future cases. This may seem only a squabble about the fine points of rigamarole, but the effect would be to diminish the role of science in decision making and boost the heft of political and commercial pressure.

The Washington Post has reported as well that maneuvering is afoot to install one F. Chase Hutton III in a top Energy Department position that oversees international energy initiatives — read: climate change — and environmental analyses. As a longtime aide to the real president, Dick Cheney, Hutton reportedly had a big hand in scaling back protection of the right whale, one of the Earth's most endangered species, and has widely been accounted one of the administration's in-house friends for the oil and natural gas industries.

Environmental groups and the Navy have been at loggerheads about the latter's oceanic sonar tests, whose sound waves can disrupt and damage dolphins and other sound-sensitive marine life.

A federal court worked out a compromise that satisfied both sides, but even so the White House continues challenging the very right of the courts to intervene.

This is not only a case of the Bush crew having it in for nature but more importantly another of the White House's many Constitution-rattling assertions that the president can rule single-handedly in any matter he declares to be one of national security, as Bush had by way off letting the Navy do whatever it wished heedlessly.

The Bush administration has five months to run. The commonweal will have to race it to the finish line.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta.