It just got a whole lot easier to spray pesticides over rivers and lakes in the United States. Gone are the good old days, when people had to get permits to pump chemicals into our waterways: Now, President Bush has ruled that no permission is necessary—pesticide users can spray where and when they please, we learned from this Gannett article from Friday. The article puts this latest development in its proper context.

Since Bush took office nearly six years ago, he has used his executive power to effectively reinterpret environmental regulations. Among the changes: He made it possible for aging power plants to expand without installing the latest pollution-control equipment; he eased restrictions on mountaintop mining, and he excluded some streams, rivers and wetlands from protection under the Clean Water Act.

These past six years have been a strange time. Were we just to consider Bush’s hit parade of eco-gaffes, this would seem like an environmental dark age. Yet in the same time period, public awareness of global warming has soared, and green politics have gained some serious traction. And you know what? We don’t think these two trends are entirely unrelated.

(For more on Bush’s environmental track record, see Plenty’s Bush and the Environment timeline.) 

Posted by Kiera Butler on Dec 11, 2006 at 10:58 AM
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