Welcome to the 21st century—which so far looks a lot like the end of the last century, if not a little scarier. This is the century when the unpaid environmental bills of the last hundred years of global industrialization come due. Global warming and climate change, air and water pollution, disappearing freshwater resources, deforestation, the unprecedented loss of plant and animal species, and other environmental problems will all become too glaring and immediate for the mass of humanity to ignore.

To some degree, this has already been happening. Certainly, we are reaping the benefits today of an environmental consciousness that blossomed in the 1970s, giving us here in the US institutions like Earth Day, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. But it has become obvious that early environmental victories have resulted in a backlash from threatened industries and private property zealots, and future progress on the environmental front will not come without a struggle. Indeed, the big issues facing us in the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy — mountaintop removal and logging in the Blackwater Canyon — represent a kind of rearguard action, where we’re just trying to hold on to what we’ve got, using decades-old legislation in the process.

Nevertheless, there are signs that we may be headed into another relatively enlightened era, prompted by the immediacy of the problems that confront us. In the past few weeks, two of the three US auto manufacturing firms — Ford and Daimler-Chrysler — have dropped out of the Global Climate Coalition, an industry-funded lobbying group opposed to the Kyoto Treaty on climate change. This happened because the views of their corporate boards had shifted to take into account the genuine danger that global warming represents. Two of the three national "newspapers of record," the New York Times and the Washington Post, have also begun taking a stronger editorial stance on the subject of global warming. The third, the Wall Street Journal, persists in denying that it’s a problem.

This still reflects the majority opinion among corporate leaders. Early last year, when Vice President Al Gore made a pilgrimage to Wall Street to solicit support and funds for his presidential campaign, hoping to capitalize on the chummy relations the Clinton administration has cultivated with corporate America, he was warned to soften his environmental rhetoric. Gore, who throughout his career has been a pro-business, pro-defense centrist (he was one of the founders of the business-friendly Democratic Leadership Council), is still trying to live down the momentary lapse of conscience he suffered when he wrote Earth in the Balance.

Gore’s son had almost been killed in an accident. And in the wake of this affecting personal brush with mortality, Gore wrote a remarkably honest (for a US Senator) analysis of not only the environmental dangers facing the Earth, but also of the cultural under- pinnings — consumerism, patriarchy, blind faith in science and technology, industrial- ization, and the dualism of mind and body, spirit and nature — that lie beneath this environmental assault. Naturally, he was immediately attacked by rightwing troglodytes as a "radical extremist," despite his centrist record in the Congress. He’s been trying to prove he’s not a liberal ever since.

He’s gotten significant help in this effort from the Clinton administration. Despite high- profile environmental initiatives meant to mollify the generally pro-environment Democratic constituency (including the recent rejection of Senator Byrd’s budget rider on mountaintop removal), Bill Clinton’s record on the environment is mixed, at best. It is primarily for this reason that Gore’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, former Senator Bill Bradley, got the early endorsement of the national group Friends of the Earth. An internal Sierra Club memo recently unearthed by a conservative reporter makes the claim that the environmental record of the Clinton administration is worse than that of his Republican predecessor.

That claim may be too subjective to apply to an entire executive branch. If true, it illustrates the degree to which the US presidency has become hostage to the corporate agenda. In his first book on the Clinton administration, The Agenda, reporter Bob Woodward observed that every new president, immediately upon taking office, is "surrounded by a phalanx of CEOs." But in the 2000 presidential race, there’s at least a rhetorical difference between the parties: both Democrats support the Kyoto Treaty, while all six Republicans oppose it. The GOP frontrunner, George W. Bush — Big Oil’s favorite candidate — has referred to concerns about global warming as a "social fad."

Distinctions between the major political parties on environmental issues that may be muddled at the presidential level (and here in West Virginia, at the state level) become crystal clear in the Congress — especially among the Republican leadership, where ultraconservatives rule. In the House of Representatives, the power behind the Speaker’s throne is the majority whip, Tom DeLay, a former pest exterminator who wants to bring back DDT, the toxin whose indiscriminate use almost wiped out the American bald eagle.

Ever since the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, they have worked, with a moderate degree of success, to roll back the environmental protections legislated in the ‘70s. Knowing that an outright assault on the environment would be futile with a Democratic president, the Republicans’ primary anti-environment vehicle has been the legislative rider, attached to bills too important to veto. During the last session of Congress, although Byrd’s rider got the bulk of media attention and was the focus of a successful campaign by national environmental groups to defeat it, a number of the Republican riders made it quietly through the budget process. It is safe to say that as long as the Republicans are the majority in Congress, there will be no new progressive federal environmental laws.

But don’t despair. There is an excellent chance — especially in the House — that Congress will change hands this election year. And the political clout of the environmental movement is growing in tandem with an increasing environmental awareness among the public — to the point where even Senator Byrd has to say, "I am an environmentalist."

Think of it as the silver lining behind the dark cloud.