The New York Times, August 27, 1995, Book review, p. 17.
The Green Republican: One day, Gordon K. Durnil woke up and
smelled the chlorine.
The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist.
With Reflections on Government, Industry, Scientists,
the Media, Education, Economic Growth, the Public, the
Great Lakes, Activists, and the Sunsetting of Toxic
Chemicals.
By Gordon K. Durnil. 200 pp.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. $19.95.
By Keith Schneider (Keith Schneider, a former national
environmental correspondent for The New York Times, is
executive director of the Michigan Land Use Institute.)
In 1992, an American-Canadian agency charged with
overseeing the health of the Great Lakes surprised the
White House, never mind governors in eight states bordering
the lakes, by making a radical proposal. Convinced that the
toxic byproducts of chlorine-based industrial compounds
were harming wildlife and perhaps poisoning people, the
panel called for phasing out one of the basic chemical
feedstocks of modern manufacturing, straight elemental
chlorine.
One might assume that the man behind such a noble gambit
was a learned statesman and veteran environmentalist.
Hardly. The recommendation's main champion was Gordon K.
Durnil, the panel's American chairman, a Rush
Limbaugh-loving conservative Republican from Indiana.
Here was a plain, middle-aged guy who freely admits that
before being appointed by George Bush in 1989 to the
International Joint Commission, a little-known but
influential oversight agency that watches the Great Lakes,
his closest brush with industrial ravage occurred while
swimming with childhood friends in an abandoned waste pit
they called Acid Lake. In fact, Mr. Durnil acknowledges in
"The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist" that he
possessed absolutely no qualifications for one of the
continent's senior environmental posts, other than having
served as Republican party chairman in Indiana and
cultivating a close political friendship with former Vice
President Dan Quayle.
How could such a naif advance one of the single boldest
environmental policy ideas of the 1990's? The answer, we
are told, is a simple tale of personal discovery. A
Midwestern party operative late in life suddenly awakens to
find truth in the popular concern for the safety of the
earth. The message is that if someone as conventional and
as conservative as Mr. Durnil can latch on to one of the
great social transformations of the American century, then
so can every other Republican in the country.
The fact that they have not, particularly this year when
Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are
desperately trying to unravel 25 years of environmental
regulation, has Mr. Durnil in a gentlemanly lather. Instead
of listening to the drumbeat of broad public support for
clean air and clean water, Mr. Durnil writes, conservative
lawmakers are stoking their campaigns with corporate cash
and adopting the knuckle-headed antiregulatory ideas of
lobbyists.
It is an easy trap to fall into. As a professional party
insider, Mr. Durnil says he watched unquestioningly as
industrial money made his campaigns' wheels turn. But as an
international policy adviser advocating a position at odds
with that of his old lobbyist friends, Mr. Durnil writes,
he saw how insidiously industry wielded its influence. "On
my tour with the International Joint Commission I watched
the chemical industry, through its lobbyists, fight any
potential for change and then try to avoid responsibility
for its actions." He adds, "Rather than join the dialogue
regarding the responsibility we all have to future
generations, their typical tactic was to disrupt such
dialogue."
Such firsthand reporting makes this earnest book both
exasperating and intriguing. Mr. Durnil draws few
substantive conclusions about what he witnessed, other than
the obvious: industry plays by its own rules and ordinary
people are getting hurt. The book also leaves too many
questions unanswered. What, for example was the reaction of
Mr. Quayle -- who spent his tenure as Vice President
advocating that restrictions on industry be reduced -- when
his Indiana political buddy urged a ban on industrial uses
of chlorine, an act tantamount to ending the cutting of
forests for paper and lumber?
Still, Mr. Durnil has some useful observations after five
years in the trenches of the environmental policy wars.
Scientists, he says, are too reticent about recommending
action, despite having enough evidence to do so.
Environmentalists are prone to drifting off into
"dream-world words." The press suffers from a "lack of
preparedness," and most government officials, he says,
behave as though they'd been injected with "a shot of
Novocain."
Given this striking lack of leadership, Mr. Durnil says,
there is ample opportunity for Republicans to reap
long-lasting political benefits by taking a new interest in
safeguarding health and nature. Alas, that is a lesson that
too many conservatives still seem not the least bit
interested in learning.
[End]
