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Book Review
| George W. Bush's Healthy Forests: Reframing the Environmental Debate. By Jacqueline Vaughn and Hanna J. Cortner. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. xii + 231 pp. Notes, index. Paper $24.95.
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| In August, 2002, President George W. Bush flew to southern Oregon, where the largest wildfire of the year was still smoldering, to announce what he called a "common sense policy" to prevent massive forest fires. His "Healthy Forests Initiative" (HFI) included a number of measures with a single stated objective: to remove the dry dead wood and understory that turns western forests into tinderboxes. It was simple, he insisted: "If you let kindling build up, and there's a lightning strike, you're going to get yourself a big fire." |
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The situation was far more complex, contend J. Vaughn and H. Cortner in their insightful study, George W. Bush's Healthy Forests. The president's solution to forest fires was even more convoluted—intentionally so, claim the authors. The massive thinning project the president had in mind would not take place in the forest but in the federal regulatory process. It is a system that, depending on your politics, protects the environment from rapacious industries, or allows eco-extremists to bring the engines of progress to a halt. What's more, argue Vaughn and Cortner, the president intended to use HFI as an opening to "reframe ... the entire environmental policy agenda" of the nation (p. 2). |
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Most of the book is spent building the case for this thesis, providing historical context and examining the tactics used by the administration. For example, the authors show the unprecedented extent to which Bush has placed industry lobbyists and flacks into policy-making positions. |
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The "fox-guarding-the-henhouse" story has been widely reported, however. The authors provide a far more valuable service, illuminating an obscure tactic, devoting two chapters to the administration's attack on the appeal process. |
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Sound boring? That's precisely why the president has succeeded with this tack. Administrative procedure is about as sexy as a glass of tap water. The authors do some of their best work showing why the public's right to appeal government decisions is as fundamental to the workings of a modern, complex democracy as that glass of water is to life. |
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Vaughn and Cortner demonstrate why it is a mistake to laugh off the president's frequent verbal gaffs, without studying his skillful use of rhetoric. At the HFI rollout in Oregon, Bush presented the debate over forest policy in simple (and simplistic) terms. "There's so many regulations [preventing thinning]," he complained, "and so much red tape that it takes a little bit of effort to ball up the efforts to make the forests healthy." Awkward, yes. But the president had managed to define the problem—frivolous appeals based on excessive regulation—to fit his agenda. "The administration had effectively framed the debate," write Vaughn and Cortner, "environmentalists cause fires" (p. 153). |
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| The authors over-reach a bit in claiming that HFI was the "template" for administration forays into environmental policy (see, for example, the Clear Skies Initiative, introduced in February 2002—six months before the HFI speech—as a "common-sense idea" to "replace a confusing, ineffective maze of regulations ... that has created an endless cycle of litigation"). But this is a quibble. Even if HFI isn't the "template," it is a good example of President Bush's reactionary objectives and the tactics he uses to achieve them. By focusing on HFI, the authors have produced a lucid document of lasting value, one that will appeal equally to students of the environment, history, and politics, inside and outside the classroom. |
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A former environmental reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, Osha Gray Davidson is author of five works of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book about the environmental policies of the GOP from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush, to be published in 2007 by PublicAffairs. |
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