Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome.
Don't let them do it.
This is the slogan of a nationwide campaign being mounted by several environmental organizations
in response to proposed congressional action.
A Sierra Club says 25 years of protection could be lost.
Others say not so.
We're at the dawn of a new age.
Also this time in Chattanooga, it's a vision thing taking them into a new age.
A whole millennium lies before us.
A new hundred years, new decades, new opportunities.
Why shouldn't we spend our time excitedly thinking out what that future might be and then
making it happen?
The Environment Show, a national production made possible by Hemmings Motor News, the monthly
Bible of the Old Car Havi, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
And this is Bruce Robertson.
This is a paid announcement.
It's great to go back to the beach.
Hey, but look what's in the water.
Oh, gross!
Future summers could be a wipe out because Congressman Gary Franks voted with special
interests.
This is one of a series of radio ads that we are running all across the country to try
to wake up the American public and let them know what members of Congress are doing to
the basic safeguards that they have counted on for the last 25 years to protect their
health and safety.
Bruce Hamilton is director of the Sierra Club's conservation program in San Francisco.
Hamilton says action pending in Congress could have the effect of dismantling 25 years
of hard work to protect the environment.
For some reason, Newt King Rich and the rest of the Congressional leadership thinks
that the American public wants less clean water and we just don't believe that's the
case and we need to get this word out to the American people.
Is this a particularly more critical time in congressional legislation and the government
process than we've ever seen in the last 15 to 20 years or so?
Well, you could even go back further than that.
This is the most serious assault we've ever had on the environment.
This is far worse than the days of James Watt and Ronald Reagan, for instance, because
at least then we had a stalemate between what the White House and the administration was
trying to do and what the Congress was trying to do.
In this particular case, there's this real juggernaut moving, but it's a hidden war
on the environment.
So far, the American public hasn't really seen it.
When James Watt was out there back in the Reagan years, it was on the front pages of
all the magazines, on the nightly news, and everybody recognized that here was James Watt,
he was the arch enemy of the environment and the arch enemy was out there doing evil,
and they needed to rise up to take arms against it.
Well, in this case, this is a stealth attack on the environment.
They come in and they use other terms in order to describe what they're doing.
If you look at the contract with America, it never mentions the word environment.
And yet buried in that contract with America is a hidden war on the environment that can
take away all of your health and safety protections.
They never say that they're doing that.
So it really takes radio ads like we just heard and other things like that that get the
American people to understand what's going on.
When they understand they're outraged, we basically have corporate America coming in through
the back door, giving large campaign contributions to Congress, and Congress in turn having them
write the legislation that they want to dismantle the laws that have been in their ways for a long
time, and then adopt something totally new that is not in the public interest.
This from the environmental community, there are other interpretations, as you might expect.
Jonathan Adler is director of environmental studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
a conservative think tank in Washington.
It's certainly not true that the regulatory reform efforts of this Congress will lead to
environmental decimation.
What these reform efforts are, or long overdue attempts to rationalize and set basic ground
rules for regulatory action in the environmental area and other areas.
Furthermore, this Congress will hopefully proceed to re-examining and reforming the basic
underlying environmental statutes, because these statutes were written at a time when
wage and price controls were considered sound economic policy, and we didn't understand
nearly as much as we do today about how best to achieve environmental protection in a
manner that is consistent with economic growth and individual liberty.
While this might be the intention of the new Congress, the Sierra Club's Bruce Hamilton
says, what we read in the papers and hear over the air is true.
Such environmental legislation will be gutted.
A perfect example is the Clean Water Act, one of many, up for revision this year.
The bill that just passed the House of Representatives is a bill that basically re-writes the way that
we propose to keep our waters clean.
We call it the Dirty Water Act as it passed the House, and so does a lot of editorial boards
from the New York Times, the USA, today.
And the reason is because they basically have gone through the polluting industries have
and said, here's all the things that bother us about this law and why we want them changed.
And all those were then incorporated by the committee.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating when the committee met to mark this up.
They allowed the polluting industries in there to write the legislation, and they did not
even invite the US Environmental Protection Agency to come in and comment on the legislation
or to talk about how to improve it.
Again, Jonathan Adler.
This is nothing new.
Well, but it's not real lobbyists and environmental lobbyists and special-induced lobbyists have
written, legislatively, environmental and other legislation, for decades.
This is nothing new in this Congress.
At working in Washington DC, it is amusing to hear people say how shocked they are that
politics happens in politics.
The reality is that Special Interest Lawyers helped write the Clean Air Act amendments of
1990.
Special Interest Lawyers helped write the Clean Air Act amendments of 1977.
Special Interest Lawyers helped write the Clean Water Act.
Special Interest Lawyers helped write the Superfund Reform amendments in the mid-80s.
The fact is that the more we put environmental decision-making in Washington, the more special
interest Lawyers, including industrial lobbyists, will be involved in that process because
mom and pops and individual citizens, individual constituents do not have the money, do not
have the expertise, do not have the time to be actively involved in a political process.
The reality is that industrial lobbyists always will and always have.
And this is nothing new.
They have been doing this for decades.
This has been documented in various books over the years.
And it is almost comical that folks are complaining about it today.
Hamilton says we should remember the Kayohoga River, a flame with petroleum byproducts, the
syringes that washed ashore at many beaches, the great lakes that once were great dead in
land seas.
The cryptosporidium that poisoned Milwaukee, the jack-in-the-box E. coli deaths, these
and more he says we could see again.
You know, the American public, I'm sure will not stand for it and people will start dying
and will start having these kind of outbreaks because they're basically unleashing the polluters.
They're carrying out their wishes.
They aren't carrying out the wishes of the American people.
And it's because the polluters are writing the bills and they're overreaching.
And as soon as the American people find out about this, they're going to be outraged.
Adler says not only will Congress not approve continuing the old style of environmental
management, Adler says we will fail if we insist on preserving that old method.
Washington D.C.'s environmental establishment has made the mistake of complicating centralized
federal environmental regulation with environmental protection.
There are other ways of protecting the environment that rely upon great.
There are other ways of protecting the environment that rely to a greater extent on state and
local governments on private initiative, on private conservation efforts, which have
a proud history in this country and on the marketplace itself.
We need to look more to shoring up protections of private property both against government
actions as well against polluters and privately created nuisances.
We need to do more to base our environmental protection on a conception of protecting
people and their properties from harm, unless upon Washington D.C.
micromanaging all industrial activity.
Hamilton insists that American voters did not vote for the kind of change that is now
underway in Congress.
It is a very radical, anti-environmental majority that is controlling the House.
And so it's really the improper question to say, how come you aren't winning at the
House?
Have you been asleep at the wheel?
You know, the point is that that particular House, we cannot win a vote now.
We cannot win a vote there until the American people wake up and understand what's going
on and get outraged and contact their members of Congress and say, this has got to change.
I voted for change, but I didn't vote for this kind of change.
Who the heck do you think you are representing?
Bruce Hamilton, Director of National Conservation with the Sierra Club in San Francisco.
Jonathan Adler is Director of Environmental Studies with the Competitive Enterprise Institute
in Washington.
The rest of the 104th Congress promises to be interesting, if it is anything, as we
watch the proceedings on the hill, no doubt we will ask, did we get what we wanted or
do we want what we got?
This is Bruce Robertson.
Here's a story.
As we passed an alloplanter round, we broke off one piece and spread its thick viscous
juices on curious hands.
A deer skull cured hides of various western animals, sand and dried flowers, one hand
hand round the circle.
We introduced people to baby mice and to our five-foot gophersnake.
Stories that convey our connection with the natural world extended the discussion.
We were sitting on a rug in a circle of parents and children.
One girl seemed separate, although her mother held her in her lap next to the other children.
Jenny had been born with cerebral palsy and its physical effects meant on her that she
moved to her own rhythm and seemed far away in a world of her own.
We noticed that some of the other children seemed uncomfortable with her abrupt uncontrolled
movements, unaccustomed to a peer-like Jenny.
As the program continued, evoking the experiences of the desert environment, an attentive, respectful
report developed, allowing the wildlife to be brought in.
I brought the Swanson's hawk quietly in on my glove-hand, her pride and dignity palpable
in the room.
Suzanne spoke about the hawk's permanent injury.
Her fractured shoulder prevents her from flying well enough to hunt for her food and
to migrate, yet even with this injury she is whole.
Her spirit is whole.
Jenny's mother looked up at Suzanne, saying proudly, yes, that's how I see my daughter.
That's my daughter, my daughter, the hawk.
Rebecca Reynolds reading from a collection of vignettes in a collected book called Bring
Me the Ocean.
Rebecca Reynolds, the author of this, she's also president of the Seabury School in Concord,
Massachusetts, which is a sort of umbrella organization for the animals intermediaries.
Welcome to the program and that's a very powerful story.
One of a collection of stories in this book, there are all true stories, as I sort of think
of them as vignettes.
And describe more fully what this book is, this collection.
Well, the books been gathered over the years.
It's really come from the stories we see rising up as we do a program.
We'll be bringing nature and the arts and animals, music, plants, all of this into hospital
settings.
And when we do that, bringing the environment indoors, stories just naturally rise up with
the interactions.
And so we've been gathering these over the years and now it's a collection in book form.
The story that you read about truly hands-on experiences with items from nature and the
story of Jenny.
What is the story?
What was going on at that episode?
That story, I think, is kind of a core story almost in a way because what we're often
addressing and bringing the materials into the hospital setting or into any setting is
really touching the human spirit and that nature makes that link that then has almost
inherent metaphors within it where we can recognize something that is a parallel to our
own experience.
Now with Jenny, I think what the mother was really speaking to is that even with cerebral
palsy and that the other children really felt estranged from her and were uncomfortable
with her because of her spasticity and her movements, that really her mother knows that
she's completely whole.
And although on the surface there may seem to be a physical disability that she knows
that her daughter's spirit is intact and that even with injury or with disability or
with emotional difficulties that that is still very true and I think the wildlife speak
to that in a beautiful way.
The title of the collection comes from another of the vignettes, Bring Me The Ocean.
Bring Me The Ocean declared Jim, not the moon, not the stars.
No, he wanted the ocean.
This was the second time Jim had asked for the ocean and we were perplexed.
How could we transport the ocean indoors to a chronic care hospital setting?
And he asked us again, Suzanne, said, how can we possibly bring you the ocean?
In buckets Jim replied, spelling it out letter by letter on his communication board.
Several years before, well in his early 30s, Jim had suffered a head injury.
The accident had left him tripelegic and unable to communicate orally.
Now he used the communication board on the arm rest of his wheelchair to tell us his thoughts.
In our next visit we arrived with sloshing buckets full of salty Atlantic ocean.
Other pales held seaweed, muscles, clams, periwinkles and a lobster all on loan from the sea for
the day.
Along with the hospital staff we discovered that Jim had not yet told any of us.
He had been a lobsterman prior to his injury.
The ocean had been his livelihood.
Every day in bad weather and good he had been out on the ocean pulling up his line of
lobster pots, sorting the catch, rebating the traps.
A path to merged and Jim showed us that anything even the ocean can be brought indoors
to an institution.
Rebecca Reynolds reading from her collection of stories titled Bring Me the Ocean.
It is available from Vanderwick and Burnham in Acton, Massachusetts.
Reynolds says these stories point two ways to the healing power of nature on broken humans
and to the charge healthy humans have to help heal broken nature.
This is Bruce Robertson.
You're listening to the Environment Show yet to come the story of Chattanooga Venture.
For a cassette copy of today's broadcast, phone 1-800-747-7444, ask for the Environment
Show program number 284.
In Chattanooga they are visioning.
It's a verb describing a process by which people, anybody and everybody are taking control
of their lives.
They also call it empowerment.
The process is deliberate, sanctioned by the city government and highly organized.
It even has a name, Revision 2000.
Dr. Jim Cattanzaro is chair of the organization.
Cattanzaro says two things were happening in his community that created a desperate need
for some type of action.
One is that this was a community controlled by negativeism back in the early 80s, late
70s.
The economy was falling apart.
It was a rust belt, but not in the rust belt.
It was part of the rust belt, nevertheless.
And there was a sense that the city perhaps couldn't recover on its own.
And yet, I think when you put people against the wall, amazingly enough, the human spirit
rebounds.
It finds new life, new vitality.
And I think that's in part what happened here, the people were desperate and said, let's
take it into our own hands.
Let's find a way out of this morass that we're in.
Let's see if we can frame a future for ourselves among ourselves.
The other thing that was happening, Cattanzaro, was that everyone was made to feel their
ideas were equally valuable.
There was agreement that something needed to be done, and there was agreement that everyone
could be part of the solution.
When people came to believe that they had the power to change the course of the community,
and that their ideas were going to be acted on, amazingly enough, they were generous
toward other people's ideas.
And a consensus would form around this notion or that notion or this goal or that goal.
And I think most astonishingly, the resources that most folks didn't think existed in this
community somehow appeared almost magically because everyone wanted to be part of the fulfillment
of it, not just part of the framing of the ideas, but part of the achievement of those
ideas.
The year was 1984.
1700 citizens came together and drew up a long wish list of projects needing attention.
The city's school system needed emergency treatment.
The downtown was crumbling.
The waterfront along the Tennessee River was degraded, polluted, and forbidding.
Chattanooga Creek was a prime candidate for superfund site designation, and air pollution
remained a serious threat.
The early meetings soon became organized with a name.
Chattanooga Venture, they called it.
With a mission at first called Vision 2000, and then after a second visioning process launched
in 1993, it became known as ReVision 2000.
Today, it is a 32-member board headed by Cuthinsaro.
He says it is their job to convene meetings, to allow people to come and talk.
He says the energy behind the early meetings continues unabated today.
There's been a multiplier effect to all this.
It's hard to describe in social scientist terms, behavioral scientist terms, but there
is a direct and definite multiplier effect.
Some things occur, people see that they happen, that they're successful, and they risk their
own resources.
So many of the things that have happened in Chattanooga have not happened because of ReVision 2000
or Vision 2000 originally.
They have happened as a result of the secondary effects of those visioning processes.
New ideas, like all these ideas that we're pursuing about sustainability, excitement we
have over permaculture and developing sustainable communities and zero emission industrial parks
in the life.
That was not to be found in ReVision 2000, although there were many environmental initiatives
that were identified.
But I think those are part of just the climate of our community now, which is a can-do climate.
As opposed to the old conditions that existed here and do exist in many parts of America
where people immediately think of those reasons why you shouldn't be able to do it and can't
do it and throw roadblocks up in the way, the opposite kind of thinking by and large
dominates our community now, and that's why I think these things won't cool down, they'll
continue to burn hot.
The visioning process is addressing a wide array of issues in Chattanooga, from inner city
revitalization, to industrial expansion, to environmental protection and restoration.
Cattons Arrow says, no matter the project, there is a common theme, namely, empowerment of
the citizens.
We're always looking for the government or someone to manage us into a fulfillment of an
idea or goal.
But even corporate America has found that making employees stakeholders, empowering them,
building teams, bringing people, information instead of keeping information from them,
ultimately produces the results and produces the support for the goal once it's in operation.
And I believe the same thing as the case here, it's harder to say that it will be done
because we haven't perhaps got a manager who's going to say, yes, I can assure you that
on July so and so it'll be done.
But in fact, I believe the results are more likely to be good results and the support will
be there not only for it to be accomplished on July, whatever it may be, but for years
to come because it's got the community behind it.
It's this risk that has to be involved here.
It's the risk that corporations are now taking of saying, let's form teams and let's empower
employees and let's trust their judgment, even frontline employees about what ought to
be done because we've learned that it doesn't work so well the other way.
And that's what mitigates that risk.
But there is a risk because we don't know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.
We can't go consult the CEO and say, what do you think it'll be in two years because
if he's really doing this authentically, then he's taking the risk with the company and
saying, why don't know?
We'll have to see how this whole strategic process works its way out.
The city of Chattanooga once was labeled the most polluted community in the United States
with air and water pollution threatening not only the natural environment but human health
as well.
Today, after successful cleanup measures, Chattanooga is one of the only cities in the southeast
not to have an air pollution problem.
In fact, for its efforts, Chattanooga has been recognized by President Clinton's Council
on Sustainable Development as a model community.
And the United Nations, too, considers the city a model global community.
Katyn Zaro says this attention has brought more attention.
Communities around the nation want to know more.
He says they welcome this kind of fame.
We certainly don't.
We want a lot of interplay.
This is an exciting venture.
I think it revitalizes the community to be involved in not only these projects, but
the thinking out of our future.
A whole millennium lies before us.
A new hundred years, new decades, new opportunities.
Why shouldn't we spend our time excitedly thinking out what that future might be and then
making it happen?
Dr. Jim Katyn Zaro, chair of Chattanooga Venture and its revision 2000 project.
He is also president of Chattanooga State Technical Community College.
He says the only thing that would make this visioning process fail would be a return
to the top-down city government style.
Right now, there is no interest in doing this.
The vision is only expanding.
This is Bruce Robertson.
Well, that's our report on the Environment Show for another week.
Our glad you joined us.
Make a note tuning in next week for more news on the Environment.
The Environment Show program about the Environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people
of our common habitat are thanks this week to production assistant Wendy Loots.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions solely responsible for
its content, Dr. Ellen Chartock executive producer.
This is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show made possible by himmings motor news the monthly Bible of the old
car hobby, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E.
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