Ninety students and professors gathered in the SIS lounge on Tuesday for a discussion centered on different environmental issues, issues that panelists said are increasingly important in the presidential election.
Several columnists criticized the Bush Administration's environmental policies, though the Republican panelist was absent.
The panel included Brent McMilan from the Green Party, Betsy Loyless of the League of Conservation Voters, Shawnta Watson-Walcott of Zogby International and David Watkins, a democrat from the House Resource Committee. Absent from the scheduled panel was Rob Howarth a Republican also on the House Resource Committee who was stuck in a meeting. The School of International Service sponsored the event and AU graduate student Timothy Burroughs organized it.
Regarding the role of the environment in the election, McMilan questioned, "What role? The issue isn't even on the table," he said.
Watkins criticized the role politics plays in the environment, saying, "the anti-environment interests have significant effects on national elections, and there has been no push back from the other side."
The issue of the environment is only 2 percent of what people are talking about in this election, but that number is up from 0.5 percent, according to Watson-Walcott.
"The issue of the environment is going up," Watson-Walcott said. "We believe that the environment could become a swing issue ... We believe that [the election] could come down to a 50/50 split again." She added that the environment "is a critical issue for John Kerry to build an identity on before another candidate defines that for him."
Loyless, the vice president of Lobbying and Policy for the League of Conservation Voters, said that people are committing themselves to this cause.
"People are deferring college education to contribute to this campaign," Loyless said. "I have never seen anything like this before." The LCV has volunteers and workers set out to knock on 1.5 million doors in five swing states.
Loyless started out by saying that her organization "was the second organization to endorse John Kerry" meeting the criteria for "supporting the environment" and for his "reliability."
She called President Bush's impact on the environment "historic" citing his "pro-corporate agenda" and his "dismissal of the Kyoto Protocol," an international effort to reduce high climate change. In a March 31, 2001 press release, the White House stated that the Senate voted 95-0 to ratify Kyoto and that Bush opposes it "because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the U.S. economy. The Senate's vote, 95-0, shows that there is a clear consensus that the Kyoto Protocol is an unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns."
Loyless had other criticisms of Bush, as well.
"The Bush administration is blatantly inconsistent," Loyless said. "They are for off-shore drilling in California but not in Florida because it does not lend to Jeb Bush."
She also added that John Kerry got a lifetime 92 percent rating from the League of Conservative Voters on his environmental record. "That's pretty remarkable," she said.
Some discussion was dedicated to why the environment was not talked about as a national issue, and why the national media has not been dedicating time to covering it.
"The national media is lazy," Watkins said. "If you don't hand them stories, the media isn't going to cover it."
Loyless gave another reason.
"It's a state to state issue," not a national campaign issue, Loyless said. "In California and Florida it's off-shore [oil] drilling. In Wisconsin, its mercury. In New Mexico, it's scarcity of water," Loyless said.
When the discussion was opened up to questions from the audience, the first question was not about the environment but an attack on the Green Party's role in the 2000 presidential election.
"Is there anything your party could do to compensate handing George Bush the election in Florida?" one man asked.
In his defense, Green Party representative McMilan stated a number of factors in what he believes affected the election more than Ralph Nader's run for the White House in 2000, including an accusation that Florida Governor Jeb Bush helped "steal" the election.
However, the audience members were not the only ones taking stabs at his party.
"A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush," Loyless said during the forum.
However, Watkins provided another perspective.
"Gore took a middle road approach on environmental issues and drove people to vote for Nader," Watkins said.
Earlier in the forum, McMilan talked about the Green Party's position on the war in Iraq, saying characterizing the war as "about oil, not Osama." He also claimed that last month, there have been more terrorist attacks on the world than in any other month since 9/11.
Though the scheduled Republican was absent from the panel, Watkins offered his interpretation of the Republican position.
Republicans would go out to communities and ask for a "fair compromise," he said. He gave an example that Republicans will ask to cut down only a small number of trees in a community's old-growth forest. What the communities do not realize, he said, is the greater effect that it has when it happens to many communities.
Watkins also stated another Republican strategy is creating the image that the opposition to their position are environmentalist radicals. "When you paint your opposers as extremists, you're going to win."
Earlier in the discussion, Watkins had talked about his job with the resource committee saying that he fights on a day-to-day basis with the Republicans on the committee.
"And I always lose because there are more of them than there are of us." He also added that they are "better financed and better organized ... There is money to be made on the other side," said Watkins. "But there is no money at the end of the rainbow for us."
Burroughs, the event organizer and a graduate student at AU said that the goal of the conference was hampered by the absence of the Republican panelist. "That said," Burroughs added, "it was a huge success." He also said that it had one of the larger turnouts that they've had for environmental forums.
The next environmental conference organized by Burroughs is scheduled for Oct. 17 in the SIS lounge.
