ENVIRONMENT: Corporate Dollars Defeat Environment Hopes

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 10 1996 (IPS) - Environmentalists who poured their dollars and volunteer work hours into the U.S. election campaign did not get far in their lobbying efforts in the face of the powerful multinational corporations that control mining, logging, and sugar industries.

And activists contend activists that the real election losers were the red spruce and hemlock forests of northern Maine, dense pine forests in the Rocky mountains of western Montana, and the saw- grass prairie and mangrove swamps of southern Florida.

Environmentalists from Maine, Montana, and Florida spent millions of dollars in initiatives urging citizens to vote for protection of these endangered habitats, but big business outspent them.

Many states allow citizens to place an initiative on the ballot. If a majority of people vote in favour, the proposal then becomes law, unless it is seen to violate the constitution.

Californians voted overwhelmingly on a proposal last Tuesday to legalise the use of marijuana for medical purposes, and several years ago, another proposal placed a limit on the amount of car insurance companies could charge customers. But political oberservers norted the practice has largely been hijacked by “special interests”, ranging from the tobacco industry to anti-immigration groups.

“The idea of ballot initiatives, when it was made popular 20 or 30 years ago, was a tool for citizen participation,” says Bill Walker of the Californa League of Conservation Voters. “Unfortunately, now it has become a big business, where firms charge money to collect signatures and design advertising for propositions.”

Andrew Dunn of the Montana Environmental Information Centre says that this is precisely what defeated the proposal that his organisation helped put on the ballot.

“We asked voters to require companies to meet existing environmental rules for the discharge of toxic waste from new mines into local rivers,” he told IPS.

Not that these are extremely strict rules. Dunn pointed out that existing standards for the discharge of arsenic have been lowered to a thousandth of previous regulations, and the proposal did not require mines to change their practice.

The mining industry responded swiftly with Asarco, Pegasus, Phelps- Dodge, and Placer Dome ploughing vast amounts of money into television ads, newspaper inserts, and in mailing letters to home owners in Montana.

“The companies spent about 2.2 million dollars — over four times the 360,000 dollars that we spent,” says Dunn. “They did a great job of confusing people.”

The mining initititaive was defeated. The environmentalists mustered only 43 percent percent of the vote.

In northern Maine, Jonathan Carter of the Green Party sponsored a proposal to ban the clear-cutting of forests, a practice conducted mainly by major paper companies. Clear-cutting is carried out by “feller-bunchers”- huge machines that allow a single worker sitting in an air-conditioned cockpit high above the ground to drive through the forests chewing up every tree in its path.

Politicians and industry lined up to attack the ‘greens’.

“(The proposal) is a loaded gun pointed at the head of the Maine economy,” said Maine governor Angus King, who argued that the measure would affect individuals and large companies alike.

The Maine Forest Service estimated the proposal would slash the annual timber harvest by 36 percent. The State Planning Office, in a separate economic analysis, predicted the measure would put 15,600 Mainers out of work and cut the state’s annual economic ouput by 1.3 billion dollars.

“Will any non-paper interests be negatively affected (by the proposal? The answer is maybe,” wrote one supporter of the initiative during an electronic discussion on the Internet. Those who were planning to clearcut their land will need to rethink their management techniques.”

Outspending the environmentalists’ 306,000-dollar budget, Maine logging companies like Boise Cascade, Champion, and Georgia- Pacific contributed the bulk of a 1.3-million-dollar campaign for an alternative proposal that would allow them to police their own logging operations.

Most of the industry money was paid out to Winner, Wagner, and Mandebach, a Los Angeles consulting firm that specialises in referendum campaigns. The campaign also paid for a page on the World Wide Web and neither proposal gained the minimum 50 percent of the vote required for passage into law.

In southern Florida, environmentalists were joined by Paul Tudor Jones, a wealthy commodities broker from Connecticut, in calling for the sugar industry to pay a one-penny tax on every pound (454 grammes) of sugar sold to help save the Everglades national park.

Herons, storks, panthers and other wildlife that once roamed the Everglades prairies and swamps were decimated early this century when the state government drained large areas to make the rich muck suitable for farmland.

Today, water continues to be drained from parts of the Everglades to irrigate sugarcane fields which have expanded by an estimated seven times in the last 25 years. In addition, run-off from fertilisers and pesticides often finds its way back to the swamp.

Jones financed about three-quarters of the 11-million-dollar campaign to raise an estimated one billion dollars for the clean up of the Everglades. But the sugar industry spent at least twice that and succesfully defeated the tax proposal.

“This tax will drastically impact working families and derail the ongoing restoration of the Everglades,” wrote the campaign directors on a World Wide Web page. “Tens of thousands of full- time employees of sugar farmers, their families, and other Floridians whose jobs depend on sugar farming are at risk this election.”

Environmental groups pointed out that, in fact, taxpayers are paying large sums of money to support the sugar industry.

“We have a national park that is dying,” says Jones. “It is going to cost at least two billion dollars to save it. One of the major contributions to its degradation is paying only 15 percent of that. The heart of the issue is, should they pay more. so the taxpayers will not have to?”