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TODAY Tuesday 6 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
newsroom
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TODAY Tuesday 6 May 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Europe (yawn)
Chalk it up to American particularism, but I don't know anyone who is deeply interested in, or passionately informed about, the effect of European politics on the environment. I'm not counting the people paid to pay attention.
Quick: Tony Blair's landslide. What should it mean, if anything, to an American enviro? The adoption of a common currency; the revision of the Maastricht treaty; the promulgation of the Social Charter; the role of Turkey. Show of hands, please: anybody got a handle on these things?
Luckily, many of the people paid to pay attention are doing good work, and they are particularly adept in gauging the attitudes of the European Union and its member states on controversial issues of international negotiation that impact American interests. What to do about climate change, for example, or forest policies, or the global ban of a short list of particularly nasty and long-lived pollutants. (You will not be surprised that they spend more time thinking about the positions of the Danish and Dutch governments than, say, a defense analyst would.)
But there's relatively little interest, even among the pros, on environmental questions that are almost exclusively European in cause and effect. Which is roughly appropriate, for it seems that the Europeans themselves are in an apathetic phase, greenwise. There are muted discussions on the pollution of rivers, and academic debate on rural character, but not much is going on about transportation (the European growth in travel by car and truck exceeds the American rate), forest restoration, and the multiple sources of the contamination of air. In the British election, hardly anyone spoke about the environment, except in terms so vague and platitudinous as to make Bill Clinton look like a model of hard-nosed specificity. In the French elections scheduled for the end of the month, environmentalist passion is extravagant but infrequent. There are eight green parties who, combined, might win five percent of the vote; without proportional representation, they won't be able to play the role of power broker, as have the German greens, to mixed results.
Though the British spent some time arguing about fox hunting (which is, I suppose, an environmental issue, but not much of one; by the way, 64% of British voters would ban it), the one Euro/enviro issue that excites some controversy is the question of fishing rights. Like their Canadian and American counterparts, European commercial fishermen have run down the fishstocks of the North Atlantic. The prime offenders are the Spanish, whose factory trawlers barely stay ahead of the Iberian appetite for seafood. But others are almost as bad, including the Norwegians, a people exemplary in all ways except for their belief that God has chosen them to kill anything that swims. Who decides how many fish get caught by whom will be big questions in the runup to the Maastricht Treaty revision in June, and there's speculation that the Blair government might veto that revision if the fish clauses aren't to its liking. A fight about fishing is at least real, and relevant, and welcome amidst the torpor of contemporary Europe.
TODAY ON THE SITE
Let us blow the horn again and call attention to the article by J. Baldwin that was posted for the first time yesterday. "The Schyulkill Maid" tells the story of a design for a solar-heated barge that could ply its way down that Philadelphia river, detoxifying the water as it went. You'll find J. in a new feature of the Newsroom section called Works In Progress. Works In Progress is designed as an alternative to the kind of windy opinionizing that characterizes, well, this column, for example. We want more from people who are actually tackling tough ecological questions in real places. That means you. Send us an e-mail and tell us what you're doing that might turn into a story that you can write. Some big money could come your way.
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway