Recently, in celebration of Earth Day, President Bush came to Maine to burnish his environmental image. But his environmental record is almost beyond burnishing.

He has attempted, with mixed success, to weaken basic federal policies on Clean Air Act enforcement, public drinking water, roadless areas, endangered species and wetlands.

Contrary to campaign promises, he repudiated a historic, if incomplete, commitment to join the international efforts to address carbon dioxide emissions, and has substituted for it plans too unambitious to qualify as tokenism. His policies on federal lands recall the extraction-dominated 19th century more than the necessarily conservationist 21st century. His administration has even opposed states’ efforts to take action on their own against problems the federal government has failed to address. Witness its opposition to California’s effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cars, and to downwind states’ efforts to remedy unlawful pollution from Midwestern power plants.

To put things charitably, and despite Mr. Bush’s earthy photo op in Wells, environmental protection – entirely unmentioned in his latest State of the Union – has not been a priority for this administration.

But, if recent poll results are any indication, environmental problems rank low among voters’ concerns.

Perhaps this is not surprising: Since Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism and national security issues have dwarfed environmental concerns in the national discourse.

But we cannot afford to continue on an environmental course that combines benign neglect from the public and below-the-radar retrenchment by the administration. The reasons go beyond the clear link between our resource policies and practices, which foster captivity to Middle East oil, and our current international woes.

In its most basic function, protecting human health and welfare, environmental policy is national security policy.

Indeed, the Defense Department has prepared a dire, though nonpublic, study on climate changes as a national security threat.

According to the World Health Organization, air pollution today causes 70,000 premature deaths a year in this country, and three million such deaths worldwide. Air pollution-related health problems are by no means restricted to large urban areas: more than 13 percent of Maine children have asthma, and Maine has among the country’s worst rates of adult asthma.

To be sure, environmental harms may be harder to mobilize against than a shadowy network of “evildoers.” They may not offer the same emotionally satisfying and politically rewarding target.

Environmental problems are complex, morally ambiguous and technical, and the press does a generally poor job of explaining them. But dangers to public health and welfare flowing from the unintentional by-products of productive activities, no less than those from the deliberately destructive acts of terrorists, deserve our fullest energies and attention.

The gravest environmental threats we now face – and those least addressed by current law – are global in scope: climate change, polluted oceans, declining fisheries and decimated ecosystems in poor countries.

The most damaging aspect of Mr. Bush’s environmental record is the lost opportunity to exercise global leadership on how to meet these daunting challenges. Rather than positioning the United States at the forefront of global environmental efforts – a move that, morality and prudence aside, would offer us long-term economic and political benefits – this administration has established the United States as a foot-dragger.

Its reflexive hostility to international solutions diminishes our standing abroad. Not content to withdraw our own country from the Kyoto protocol, this administration has allied us with Saudi Arabia in opposing its extension to others.

Mr. Bush has no mandate from the American public to make the United States an environmental slacker. Only a false assumption by Congress, the press and the public that the environment must take a back seat has allowed the administration to pursue policies that would never survive the light of sustained public attention.

In the early 1970s, a new public awareness of the value and fragility of natural resources spurred leaders from Edmund Muskie to Richard Nixon to produce, within just a few years, laws and institutions that established this country as a leader at pursuing environmental protection in the context of a productive modern economy. Almost two generations later, new and unaddressed environmental problems threaten to overshadow those pioneering efforts.

Yet our national leadership is quietly charting a backward course.

We cannot afford to downgrade the environment until some uncertain day when terrorist threats to national security have faded away. We need to revive our passionate national environmental commitment, and we need to do it now.

Sean H. Donahue, who is from Hebron, teaches environmental and natural resources law at Washington & Lee University in Virginia. He was an attorney in the Justice Department’s environment and natural resources division from 1997 to 2001. He may be reached at donahues@wlu.edu.

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