Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress [Hardcover]

Carl Pope (Author), Paul Rauber (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2004

Published in cloth in 2004, Strategic Ignorance revealed to countless readers the true scope of the Bush administration's assault on the environment. Midway through the second Bush term, with a Supreme Court far less likely to rein in the "wrecking crew"--as the authors describe those working to dismantle environmental protections--this book will be even more important and useful.
Strategic Ignorance sets forth not only the shocking Bush record but the stories and strategies behind it. Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and coauthor Paul Rauber brief us on the key administration figures, as well as legislators and lobbyists on the reactionary right, who strive to gut landmark laws; facilitate payback to polluters; distort, suppress, or ignore science; and invent soothing flimflam like "Clear Skies." The authors were prescient in predicting Bush's repeal of the Roadless Rule, the censoring of evidence on global warming, and the stonewalling on mercury emissions. They also foresaw the backlash now building: Congress rebelling against the EPA's "sewage blending" ploy, local opposition to coal-bed methane mining in the West, and resurgent environmental support at the polls.
Strategic Ignorance remains the indispensable guide to the Bush team's motives and tactics--and to how we can best oppose them to safeguard America's citizens, landscapes, and resources.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Americans ought to be madder than they are about the Bush administration's environmental deceit: that's the not-surprising core message of this detailed book, coauthored by Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Sierra magazine editor Rauber. That citizens aren't appalled and outraged in greater measure, they write, is thanks to what they cast as the slick rhetoric, obfuscated facts, deliberate disinformation and Orwellian way with words of Bush and his pro-growth cohorts (a Clean Air Act that adds to pollution, a Healthy Forest Initiative that encourages both more logging and more forest fires). In impassioned broad strokes, Pope and Rauber report that Bush and his environment-unfriendly cabinet (Interior, Energy, Agriculture and EPA, in particular but not exclusively) have stripped 235 million wilderness acres of protection from logging and mining interests; funneled billions of dollars in subsidies to giant agribusinesses; rewritten scientific reports to excise unwelcome findings on global warming; defunded Superfund cleanup of hundreds of toxic waste dumps; given near carte blanche to polluting industries to self-regulate; and even lied about the quality of Manhattan's air in the days after September 11. But the real energy of the book comes from its accumulation of small facts to paint the picture-of obsessive secrecy, crony capitalism and (or so the authors claim) the administration's conscious, unabashed commitment to the economic exploitation of the air America breathes, the water it drinks and the earth it walks on.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When even his staunchest allies concede that the environment is Bush's Achilles' heel, writers intent on scrutinizing the president's policies might very well stagger under a preponderance of evidence against an unabashedly antienvironment administration. So challenged, Sierra Club executives Pope and Rauber painstakingly analyze how, where, and why the Bush White House began compiling what is frequently considered the worst environmental record in presidential history. Pope and Rauber are adept at parsing Bushspeak. Unafraid of naming names, they single out specific government officials whose rhetoric does not match the reality of the administration's record of striking down legislation, rolling back regulations, and otherwise manipulating a system to favor contracts over conservation and profits over preservation. By comparing Bush's actions with his expressed environmental doctrine, the authors reveal the administration's short-term strategies and their subsequent long-term implications. Buttressed by carefully annotated and sourced references, this book present a compelling portrait of an administration with a clear-cut agenda. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 303 pages
• Publisher: Sierra Club Books; 1 edition (May 3, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578051096
• ISBN-13: 978-1578051090
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,395,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Scathing indictment of the Bush administration, August 19, 2004

By 

Paul Tognetti "The real world is so much more... (Cranston, RI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress (Hardcover)

I tend to go along with Republicans on quite a few issues but I definitely part company with them on the environment. If you listen to the likes of Rush Limbaugh there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about. Just go ahead and live your life and do whatever you want and to hell with everyone else. In "Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress" Carl Pope who is Executive Director of the Sierra Club has written a very convincing and well documented book that portrays George W. Bush as perhaps the most anti-environmental President in our history. He points out that the Bush administration will use every means available to short circuit environmental programs and regulations. Are you aware that the Superfund that was created by Congress two decades ago to clean up toxic waste sites has all but been eliminated? Perhaps you do not know that various officials in this administration are trying to privatize the National Parks! And would it upset you that the Bush administration supports policies that encourage the building of gas guzzing vehicles while at the same time cutting R&D on hybrid vehicles that if mass produced would significantly cut our dependence on foreign oil?

Carl Pope introduces us to the key players in the administration and sheds light on how they go about their business. Most of them come from the very industries they are supposed to be regulating! Given his position at the Sierra Club, Pope clearly has an agenda and ordinarily I might dismiss much of what he has to say. But I found his arguments to be for the most part quite sound and as such I would recommend "Strategic Ignorance" to anyone interested in environmental issues.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth that's Stranger Than Fiction, April 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress (Hardcover)

This detailed, and highly readable, account of the Bush administration's predation's on our nation's natural resources will leave you incredulous -- until you see the pages and pages of citations at the end. It's amazing that more people don't realize what's going on, and one can only hope that this book will open some eyes.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Chronicling a return to the ethos of the robber barons, January 3, 2005

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress (Hardcover)

Carl Pope is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and his co-author Paul Rauber is a senior editor at Sierra Magazine. Their prose is direct, clear and hard-hitting, and their book is a devastating indictment of the Bush administration's environmental polices.

Exhibit #1 is the big lie. As Pope and Rauber put it, the Bush administration's strategy is to "Say one thing, do another" and "Never admit what you're up to. Rather, assert the opposite repeatedly and despite all available evidence." (p. 24) The interesting thing about this is, what could be more authoritarian and anti-democratic?

Bush's so-called "Clear Skies" proposal, which is aimed at circumventing the Clean Air Act, is an excellent example of the big lie and of the Orwellian doublethink employed by Bush's people. The authors quote Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords as saying, "The President says one thing, but does another...With a straight face he talks about protecting resources for our children--even as he abandons the federal protection of land and air and water as fast as he can. Does he think we don't notice?" (p. 78)

Actually we don't, most of us anyway. It very hard for most people to believe that the President can call for "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" while deliberately fostering the opposite. Yet, that is exactly what Bush does as this book so clearly and overwhelming demonstrates. The question might be why? Don't the people in the Bush administration love their children too?

Strange as it may seem the faith-based logic of the administration has Higher goals. It believes first that it is essential to reduce the size and effectiveness of government. Bush wants to make government less popular by making it less effective (see Chapter 13). But more than this is an underlining rationale that simultaneously desires a return to a social Darwinian ethos while believing that the Second Coming will make all of this irrelevant anyway. Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who would fit nicely into the Bush administration except for his candid expression, put it like this when asked if it might not be wise to save something for future generations: "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." (p. 25)

Meanwhile, no more "nanny state." Let's bring back the "social Darwinian notion of the struggle for existence as 'red in tooth and claw.'" Only "this time...the predators" will be "ruthless corporations, not carnivores." Let's "Stop coddling the public. Only wimps and trial lawyers worry about parts per million." (p. 23) Indeed, there is the idea that winning is its own justification, even if you cheat to win, and the devil take the hindmost.

Consequently it is not greed alone that is powering the Bush pollution machine. It is instead a kind of spiritual arrogance that allows the employment of a deliberate strategy of ignorance, as the authors see it, a strategy that allows Bush to reward polluters and others who desecrate America, without qualm, all in the name of a new sort of laissez faire mentality combined with a belief that this earth, this country and our lives are just stopping places on the way to the coming rapture. With this kind of mentality it doesn't matter what science says. The studies are really irrelevant. Junk science is as good as real science; indeed, the only science that matters is the science that agrees with the polluters.

Pope and Rauber detail in sharp focus how the Bush administration has perverted the scientific method and in effect substituted false rhetoric and lies for scientific experiment. But it is not enough to allow the contamination of our country by big corporations. It is also necessary that laws be passed that protect those corporations from being sued by people who may be harmed by their pollution. Therefore it is a top priority this year for the White House to see that laws are passed limiting the ability of citizens to sue those who pollute or otherwise harm them.

In addition to the indictment, the authors present a way to reclaim America's future as outlined in Chapter 15. Clearly at the top of the list of how to save America is to ENFORCE the Clean Air Act! The authors also want the Superfund tax restored so that polluters will have to pay for their own clean-ups instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. This is included in the "Ten Commonsense Solutions for the Next Twenty Years" that they present beginning on page 228.

To the commonsense solutions I would offer this: we need more journalists trained in environmental concerns and publishers who are not afraid to actually report what the administration is doing. If a wider public actually knew the extent of the despoiling of America being undertaken by George W. and friends, they would cry out long and loud and maybe something could be done about it. The authors offer, in an appalling Appendix beginning on page 241, a list of what Bush has done to the environment since taking office in 2001.

Messrs. Pope and Rauber are to be commended for their work in trying to counteract the horrors committed by the Bush administration, and Sierra Club Books and the University of California Press are to complimented on helping to produce such an outstanding and extremely important book.

And yes, rivers should NOT catch fire, nor should those who drop their waste on the rest of us get away with it.