By Derrick Z. Jackson, 4/24/2002

PRESIDENT BUSH celebrated Exploit the Earth Day by driving some nails into a new trail bridge in the Adirondacks. This photo-op was meant to convey a deep caring for our planet even as the current oil spill of government records shows the Rose Garden to be our new national park for oil drillers and smokestack belchers. Bush invoked Theodore Roosevelt's protection of public lands by saying: ''Every morning when I go to the Oval Office, I sit at the same desk he used.... It reminds me of what a huge responsibility I have.''

Bush is fooling few people as he abdicates the responsibility passed down to him by Theodore Roosevelt. Under pressure by the courts and environmental groups, the White House has coughed up thousands of pages of documents showing that during the time it formulated its energy policy, it met almost exclusively with executives and lobbyists for petroleum, coal, gas, nuclear, and electric companies and related industries such as freight railroads. Environmental groups were almost completely shut out.

The results are clear. While Bush recently lost his first attempt to let petroleum companies drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he is moving ahead with a massive expansion of oil, gas, and coal exploration on other public lands. He is considering rule changes that would relax standards on the power plant emissions that contribute to the very acid rain that threatens the lakes of the Adirondacks. He has let Superfund cleanups slow to a crawl and wants to shift the costs of future cleanups from the polluting industries to taxpayers.

One of the first major acts of Bush's presidency was to back out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming and renege on his campaign promise to set limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to warming. Bush says he is promoting clean skies, but he may let coal companies cloud the rivers with the waste they slash off mountaintops. 

This is hardly in the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt. In 1908, Roosevelt said, ''In utilizing and conserving the natural resources of the nation, the one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight. Unfortunately, foresight is not usually characteristic of a young and vigorous people, and it is obviously not a marked characteristic of us in the United States.''

Foresight remains uncharacteristic of a United States that holds 4 percent of the world's population but sucks up 25 percent of the world's energy. Roosevelt once said that ''wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked'' instead of being used as ''ornaments for automobiles filled with jovial but ignorant picknickers from cities.'' One wonders what Roosevelt would think of SUVs and a Congress that refuses to increase gas mileage standards even though the technology exists. The automobile itself has become the leading ornament of Americans' ignorance about the environment. 

It was not as if Roosevelt did not support industry. Roosevelt said, ''Conservation means development as much as it does protection.'' But by so clearly letting industry write the nation's energy policy, Bush does not hear the other side of Roosevelt, who said, ''I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land, but I do not recognize the right to waste them or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children.... Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.''

Contrast that with Bush, who asked for no energy sacrifice from Americans either after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 or during the flare-up in the Middle East that we depend upon for oil. Bush can build as many trails in the Adirondacks as he wants. It means nothing if relaxed rules on emissions kill the fish in that region's lakes. Earth Day will have meaning in the Bush White House only when he asks as Roosevelt did 94 years ago:

''The time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, and then the soils have been still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation. These questions do not relate only to the next century or to the next generation. It is time for us now as a nation to exercise the same reasonable foresight in dealing with our great natural resources that would be shown by any prudent man ... for himself and his children.''

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 4/24/2002.
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