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Anthropology and the Environment
December 1998
Ed Liebow, Contributing Editor
Have you had a close look at the environmental spending included in the 40-pound, 4000-page 1999 federal budget? The budget supports anthropologists' involvement in environmental research, of course, but its influence in the environmental domain extends much further. The budget underwrites the International Monetary Fund and other development banking organizations. It sets priorities for national resource protection, public lands management, and contamination cleanup, and it funds the integrative functions that maintain a balance between the administrative routine and visionary activities undertaken in the name of the public interest.
The 105th Congress will no doubt be remembered as much for what has happened after it adjourned for the November elections as for the work it completed over the summer and into the early fall. The debate over environmental spending concluded in late October is worth revisiting here, however, as it highlights some of the issues, both large-scale and small, where anthropologists' perspectives are sorely needed.
Start with the fractionated basics. The operative word this year has been "compromise," and this year's spending package includes a patchwork of hundreds of specific projects in energy, natural resources and the environment, but few encompassing policy thrusts. This has made it easy for headline editors to overlook the big picture and pick out disagreeable details, expensive-sounding projects in remote locales that appear to benefit few people but enhance the reelection chances of the Representative whose district reaps the windfall.
The omnibus spending package itself is a consolidation of several appropriations bills, encompassing the Interior and Energy Departments, EPA, Transportation; Agriculture; foreign operations; and Commerce, Justice, and State. Defense and Public Health, which certainly have significant environmental programs, have their own appropriations packages.
The initial Clinton Administration proposal for budget year 1999 sought major funding increases to protect national parks, accelerate toxic cleanups, curb water pollution and combat global warming. More specifically, the original budget proposal sought:
Nearly $1 billion over five years to repair deteriorating infrastructure at national parks and other public lands, and to provide a 43 percent increase over five years to acquire scenic and natural areas, many threatened by urban sprawl.
A five-year $6.3 billion program to combat global warming through measures to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. The request included $3.6 billion in tax incentives and $2.7 billion for R&D to spur development and use of energy-efficient products and clean energy technologies.
An additional $2.3 billion over five years to curb polluted runoff and other threats to rivers, lakes and coastal waters. Much of the requested funding was intended to go to states, communities and farmers to help carry out the Council on Environmental Quality's new Clean Water Action Plan.
An additional $600 million in Fiscal Year 1999, a 40 percent increase, to accelerate Superfund cleanups, cleanups that have become notoriously bogged down in preliminary investigations, feasibility studies, and legal hassles.
In committees controlled by the opposition Republican Party, both the House and Senate budget resolutions did not fully fund most of these proposed increases. Also, the summer-long discussion included the practice of attaching anti-environmental riders to unrelated legislation. For example, one of the last issues to be resolved before approving the spending package was a proposal by Alaska Republicans to construct a gravel road through the Izembeck National Wildlife Refuge. The road, sought by the tiny village of King Cove to increase access to medical care, became the unlikely focus of a national debate pitting local needs against the sanctity of a federal protected wilderness. In the end, an agreement was reached to drop demands for the road, in return for $37 million to improve King Cove's airport and medical clinic, and to fund a possible alternative road across private lands.
It is difficult to convey a sense of overall policy implications of such horse-trading without recounting in some detail some specific provisions, each of which no doubt has its own context, constituencies, and local consequences.
For example, big oil companies will not be required to pay more royalties for oil from public lands, and for the second time, a one-year delay was placed on new regulations governing mining on public land. Ranchers will have an easier time renewing grazing permits on public lands without comprehensive environmental reviews. The schedule was delayed for phasing out methyl bromide, a farm pesticide that damages the atmosphere's protective ozone layer.
Logging will be able to increase in national forests in the Sierra Nevada, but Congress ultimately rejected provisions requiring an 18 percent increase in timber harvests on national forests. It also rejected provisions requiring the Forest Service to cut down trees before setting fires to clear underbrush, delayed changes in forest management plans, and also delayed removal of logging roads from forests.
Timber sales in Alaska's Tongass National Forest will be allowed to increase up to 25 percent above established targets. This is significant because it will enable Louisiana-Pacific to build a mill in southeast Alaska.
The final agreement on clean water proposals totals about $1.7 billion, which is $600 million less than the Administration's original request. Spending from the federal trust fund that pays for land acquisition will increase to $325 million, $55 million more than last year, but less than the Administration's original request.
Spending for energy-related research programs intended to stave off global warming by reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning carbon fuels would total slightly more than $1 billion, $120 million more than Congress had proposed but less than the administration's request for $1.3 billion.
Disputes over the management of salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest were resolved mainly in the administration's favor. Work may now proceed on an environmental management plan for the interior basin of the Columbia River, and proposals to block dam removal in the region were stripped from the bill. But plans have been put on hold for removal of a dam on the Elwha River near Washington state's Olympic National Park.
Amendments to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (more commonly known as "Superfund") will exempt from cleanup liability owners of property adjacent to "brownfields" and prospective buyers of contaminated areas. Small contributors of household waste to a landfill later named a Superfund site would also be exempt. Debate over exemptions from Superfund liability for recyclers remains unresolved, but will almost certainly resurface in the next Congress.
Congress eventually provided President Clinton's full funding request for the International Monetary Fund, but not before having to deal with abortion-related language. Readers of this column who have been following the discussion of international development banking reforms will be interested in learning the details, as they emerge, of an IMF advisory panel dealing with environmental, labor and human rights concerns, especially how such a panel could effectively influence the Fund's environmental impacts.
Information for this report was compiled from the New York Times, Washington Post, the Committee for the National Institute on the Environment, the President's Council on Environmental Quality, and the Congressional Budget Office.
Best wishes for the holiday season, and please send your news items to Ed Liebow (liebow@policycenter.com, 206/675-1002; fax: 206/675-1005). Check the Anthropology/Environment web site regularly: http://travel.to/anthenv