RACHEL #453: CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES

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RACHEL’S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #453
—August 3, 1995—
News and resources for environmental justice.
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CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES

Members of both parties in Congress, calling themselves
“conservatives,” earlier this week managed to gut nearly two
dozen environmental laws and regulations, and to slash 30% from
the $7 billion annual budget of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency. [1] A Presidential veto could still salvage
something from the wreckage, forcing another fight in Congress,
but the drift seems unmistakably clear: this “conservative”
Congress shows little interest in conserving health, safety,
wildlife, forests, rivers or wetlands. The credo of these
“conservatives” seems to be, Whatever corporate polluters want,
corporate polluters get.

Corporations, as we have seen, are not capable of curbing their
own excesses–it is the nature of the corporate institution that
it must seek short-term money gain, no matter who or what has to
be sacrificed. (See REHW #449, #433, and #388.) This is not a
question of evil–it is merely the nature of the corporation as
we, the people, have created it in law. (And it will remain this
way until we, the people, change it.) The INDIVIDUALS within a
corporation are powerless to alter its earth-destroying course no
matter what deeply-felt, unselfish beliefs those individuals may
hold (unless of course a way can be found for the corporation to
profit from the change).

But Congress is not a corporation. As a practical matter, it is
true that most members of Congress owe their souls to the wealthy
few who provide the mountains of cash needed to run an election
campaign. However, when campaign finance reform is proposed, in
an effort to remove the poisonous influence of private money from
the electoral process, members of Congress insist that they only
vote their consciences and the money doesn’t influence them.
Therefore, we must presume that the “conservatives” in Congress
personally believe it is right and good to sacrifice the nation’s
few remaining healthy ecosystems for corporate gain, to
extinguish wildlife wherever and whenever the corporados find it
convenient to do so, and to expose the nation’s children to toxic
and gender-bending chemicals from the moment of conception onward.

This raises the question, What does it mean in the late 20th
century to be a conservative? Do ALL conservatives believe in
sacrificing human health and the environment to maximize
short-term money gain for a few wealthy investors? The behavior
of this Congress certainly points menacingly toward that
conclusion. Yet a new book, THE MAKING OF A CONSERVATIVE
ENVIRONMENTALIST, offers quite a different perspective on how a
modern conservative thinks.

Author Gordon Durnil has spent nearly 30 years as a loyal
Republican, managing election campaigns and steering Indiana
state politics along a traditional conservative path. A friend
and admirer of Dan Quayle, Durnil served from 1981 to 1989 as
Indiana Republican State Chairman and member of the Republican
National Committee. His conservative credentials are impeccable.

When George Bush appointed Durnil to be U.S. Chairman of the
International Joint Commission in 1989, Durnil knew almost
nothing about pollution; he was a lawyer and politician who
admits that he had never thought much about the environment. But
he took his IJC responsibilities seriously and he stayed up
nights reading mounds of esoteric studies to educate himself.
Created by treaty between the U.S. and Canada in 1909, the IJC
has official responsibility for water quality in the Great
Lakes–a vast and badly-polluted ecosystem that contains 20% of
all the fresh water on earth.

Initially, Gordon Durnil did not want to believe that pollution
was a serious problem. “The truth is, in the beginning of my
tenure, I wanted to disbelieve,” he writes. “But being a good
conservative, with the ability to think for myself instead of
being told how to think, I was willing to change my way of
thinking. Evidence is evidence and facts are, indeed, facts.”

Soon the facts convinced Gordon Durnil (and the 5 other
commissioners with whom he served–2 U.S. and 3 Canadian) that
toxic chemicals were very likely harming the children of North
America. As he says, “In the [IJC’s] FIFTH BIENNIAL REPORT [in
1990], …we, by consensus, concluded that there was a threat to
the health of our children emanating from our exposure to
persistent toxic substances, even at very low ambient levels.”
Durnil’s reading convinced him that “The scientific evidence
confirming problems with human reproduction, learning, behavior,
and the ability to ward off disease, is now becoming broadly
accepted.”

He points to such facts as these (among many):

** The U.S. General Accounting Office in October 1991 said, “In
1988, about 250,000 U.S. children were born with birth defects,
600,000 women experienced a miscarriage or fetal death, and many
young children were exposed in their homes and neighborhoods to
chemicals that will reduce their ability to develop the
intellectual skills necessary to function in the 21st century.
There is growing scientific evidence that exposure to
environmental chemicals causes a broad spectrum of adverse
reproductive and developmental outcomes and that they are
preventable if the exposures are better controlled.”

** Somewhere between 10% and 16% of all couples in the U.S. are
infertile.

** The sons of Michigan mothers whose breast milk contained an
industrial flame-retardant chemical had a higher incidence of
testicular abnormalities and smaller penises than the norm.

Durnil –with the help of the IJC’s scientific advisory board,
and a 3-year series of public meetings to gather evidence from
industry, government, and the public –became convinced that
chemical exposures are very likely damaging North American
children in many ways –reducing their ability to pay attention
in school; diminishing their IQs; making them hyperactive,
aggressive, hostile and unruly; harming their immune systems and
thus reducing their ability to fight off common infections and
serious diseases such as cancer; perhaps even predetermining
their sexual characteristics, preferences and behaviors before
they are born.

Durnil’s response, as a conservative, was simply this: putting
our children in harm’s way by exposing them to industrial
chemicals is dangerous and immoral and ought to stop. Durnil,
who says he has “spent a lifetime in support of industry,” has
little sympathy for dangerous polluters. With characteristic
clarity, he says, “Science tells us of bad effects that certain
kinds of discharges can have on our children, born and unborn,
but we don’t seem to see the analogy between a perverted
individual sexually molesting a child and an industrial discharge
affecting the basic sexuality of a child. I wonder why.” It is
a good question. Durnil sees it as a basic conservative tenet
that an invasion of our bodies by toxics is a fundamental
violation of a most basic right.

Durnil’s response was not to fudge, waffle, delay, deny, distort,
deflect, or pass the buck. He saw it as his responsibility, as a
conservative and a political leader, to devise solutions
commensurate with the scope and scale of the problem. Thus he
led the IJC to create (and to borrow from others) a set of
principles that would protect children. In a nutshell they are:

** The principle of “reverse onus.” All chemicals, new and old,
should be considered harmful until proven safe. Chemicals that
cannot be shown to be safe should be sunsetted (eliminated by an
orderly process as rapidly as possible without completely
disrupting industry).

** Because we can never prove the safety of chemicals that
persist for long periods in the environment and enter food
chains, all persistent, bioaccumulative toxics should be
sunsetted.

** The principle of precautionary action, which says that as soon
as there is reason to suspect that a chemical is problematic, it
should be sunsetted–not waiting for scientific certainty.

These principles (and a few others that the IJC adopted), taken
together, provide a blueprint for sustainable industrial
development. In essence, Gordon Durnil and the IJC in 4 years did
what the big environmental groups and 20 years of liberal,
Democratically-controlled Congresses had been unable to do: come
up with environmental-protection ideas that might actually work.

What is a conservative anyway? True conservatives trace their
intellectual roots back to people like Edmund Burke (1721-1797),
the Irish philosopher and statesman. Burke believed that the
current generation holds the present as a patrimony in moral
entail from its ancestors and must pass it on to posterity —
improved, if possible, but at all costs undiminished. Gordon
Durnil says something similar: “The symmetry of nature is loaned
to us for human use over relatively short periods of time,
seventy or eighty years each if we are fortunate. Each of us has
a moral duty not to disrupt that balance.”

Compare this to what’s going on in Washington and you will
quickly see that “conservative” is not a word properly applied to
most of this Congress. Proper terms to describe the self-styled
“conservatives” in this Congress might include opportunistic,
swinish, exploitive, fatuous, boorish, reckless, racist,
pusillanimous, improvident, beggarly, perfidious, amoral,
opprobrious, unprincipled, duplicitous, cruel, petty, malevolent,
mean, grasping, deceptive, deceitful, disingenuous, dishonest,
ignoble, self-seeking, venal, whorish, and corrupt. Not
conservative, definitely not conservative. But don’t get me
started.

Copies of Gordon Durnil’s excellent book should be delivered to
all who call themselves “conservatives” (at all levels of
government) asking them to sign on to its conservative principles
of environmental protection–or to give good ethical reasons for
refusing. For that matter, it should go to all liberal
politicians –and all the mainstream environmental groups, as
well –asking them to do the same. This would quickly separate
the real environmentalists from the apostles of appeasement, the
corporate toadies, and it would engender a worthwhile debate over
fundamentals. In sum, this is an important book.

Descriptor terms: congress; epa; budget; conservatives;
liberals; environmental groups; gordon durnil; ijc; great lakes;
water pollution; wildlife; human health; endocrine disruptors;
international joint commission; canada; birth defects; children;
central nervous system; immune system; infertility;

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