Elizabeth Kolbert has a note in The New Yorker (May 28, 2007) about Rachel Carson, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. The piece starts with a discussion of the USDA's efforts to eradicate red imported fire ants, using pesticides that caused major ecological damage, while denying or ignoring scientific reports. This inevitably segues into a survey of the the home front in Bush's long war:

Six years into the Bush Administration, it's basically the ant wars all over again. At key agencies, a disregard for inconvenient evidence seems to be a prerequisite. A memo prepared by the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in mid-March, for example, revealed that officials of the White House Council on Environmental Quality had made more than a hundred and eighty changes to a status report on global warming, virtually all of which had the effect of exaggerating scientific uncertainties and minimizing certainties. (The official responsible for most of the changes, Philip Cooney, had come to the White House from the American Petroleum Institute and now works for Exxon Mobil.) A report by the Inspector General for the Department of the Interior, also issued in March, chronicled numerous instances in which a high-ranking department official, Julie MacDonald, had pressured government scientists to alter findings on threatened species. MacDonald, the report pointedly noted, had "no formal educational background in natural sciences, such as biology." (She has since resigned.) As it happened, the report on MacDonald was released right around the time that the former second-in-command at the Interior Department, J. Steven Griles, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress.

Meanwhile, the Administration has done its best to gut the safeguards put in place after [Carson's book] Silent Spring. When, for instance, the EPA proposed new rules on mercury emissions from pwoer plants, the proposal turned out to contain several paragraphs lifted, virtually verbatim, from an industry lobbyist's memo. (With minor changes, those regulations are now in effect.) Just last month, the Administration proposed new rules on the retrofitting of old power plants. The more or less expllicit purpose of the rules is to accommodate a power company, Duke Energy, that the EPA had itself sued for violating the Clean Air Act. Also last month, the EPA announced that it would once again delay taking action on two drinking-water contaminants, perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket fuel, and MTBE, a fuel additive.

This kind of thing doesn't get reported much, mostly because with all of Bush's malfeasances the media's triage operations never seem to get past the most acute disasters. But Bush (or Cheney or Rove or whoever pulls the strings behind Incurious George) made sure from inauguration day that every nook and cranny of the federal government was staffed with operatives enforcing the party line. The old knock on Ronald Reagan was that he talked a good game, but didn't actually deliver much. You can't say that about Bush and Cheney: they've made damn sure that their sponsors got their money's worth.

The true costs of Bush's rollback on environmental protections may be impossible to tally up. Degradation is often incremental, its costs only becoming apparent when some "tipping point" is crossed. But one thing that is clearly lost is time. Some problems may be easy enough to recover from, but others, like oil depletion and global warming, look suspiciously like ticking bombs, and things like extinction are by definition permanent, irrecoverable losses. Every bit as troubling is how Bush and company have convinced many that politics trumps everything else, including science and for that matter fact. I don't doubt that overvaluation of science has gotten us into trouble, but swinging to the other extreme leaves us bewildered and helpless. That in general seems to play into the right's political agenda, as long as the accumulation of disaster doesn't shake the faith of the ignorant following the blind. The other side of that equation is that the more Bush succeeds, the worse disasters it will take to steer us back to reality.