Remember acid rain?

Every once in awhile I will put up a comment on another blog that I feel would stand in its own right as a post.

And that is the case here. On Ann Althouse's blog (one of several I frequent where there are a range of views represented) she took some pictures of the forest and posted them in a post entitled, the view from the forest floor.

I thought about how great it is that liberals and environmentalists won a big battle a generation ago. The comment I posted was this:

I am reminded of how back in the late 1970's and early 1980's, many northern and especially Canadian forests were being destroyed by acid rain. So a campaign was launched to put in scrubbers in the smokestacks of power plants to sharply curtail emissions of sulfuric and nitric acid caused by the burning of sulfur-containing coal.

And opponents of the plan howled about how doing that would ruin the economy, and how all the power plants would go out of business, and how electricity would become so expensive that nobody could turn on their lights for more than a couple hours per day, and how America would lose out to the Soviet Union because the Russians cared nothing for the environment and somehow allowing our coal-fired plants continue to be inefficient was supposed to put us at a competitive advantage. They called it all a matter of bad science and said that it was something else that was killing the forest and reducing power plant emissions of sulfuric and nitric acid would not change that.

Well, the opponents of the plan lost. The environmentalists won that battle. The new emissions standards were passed by Congress and mandated by law, and the scrubbers were installed by the local utilities.

And let's take a moment to look back at the results. The world didn't end. The economy did quite well during the rest of the 1980's and for most of the 1990's, thank you. The power plants did not go out of business. Electricity did not become unaffordable. The Soviet Union continued to be inefficient until it died and America prospered.

And the northern U.S. and Canadian forests are much healthier today than they were then.

Success is having the vision to think about what the future could look like, and then the persistence to make it so.

There are many things that still need to be done, and many battles to be fought and won against determined opposition. But every now and then it is worth appreciating progress that has been made, if only to raise our morale and realize that today's battles too, can be won.

Another day in the Bush administration-- we learn about another whistleblower who got the ax.

Doug Parker is not an ideologue. He was, however a competent administrator who began working for the United States when Gerald Ford was the President. He worked for 29 years for the U.S. Forest Service. By 2005 he was the pesticide coordinator and assistant director of forestry health for the agency's Southwestern region.

Parker took his job seriously. So he didn't consider it acceptable when he found that pesticides were being misused, often illegally in the National Forests. So he raised the issue with his supervisors. And they fired him for bringing it up.

Parker is now suing in court to get his job back.

In June, an in-house appeals board upheld his firing. So Doug Parker has realized that he won't get anywhere appealing within the administration, and he is now in court contending that his firing was illegal and had no other basis than his pointing out that the law was not being followed.

According to the lawsuit, Parker became the subject of hostile treatment by his supervisors after complaining about what he called a "systemic problem" when it came to proper pesticide use across several forests in New Mexico and Arizona.

Parker had accused some managers of not preparing environmental risk assessments and failing to get approval from agency officials who had the authority to make decisions about pesticides.

He was concerned that not following agency policies or laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act — which serves as the basis for federal management of public lands — could have consequences for public safety and the environment.

"Responsible management officials knew and were aware that Mr. Parker considered the manner in which pesticide coordination was being carried out by others to be ethically, legally and environmentally unsound," the lawsuit reads.

This story is only the latest in a long series of retaliatory moves taken by the Bush administration against whistle blowers. But let's be clear here-- the reason they've had so many problems with whistleblowers is because there have been so many fouls to blow the whistle on. In keeping with the Bush administration's philosophy of governance however, they haven't addressed the problems that cause whistleblowers to pop up by doing a better job of complying with the law, but instead they have tried to make examples of those who do (and in Parker's case, the objections were never even raised publically until this week) in order to rule by fear, threats and intimidation. Or sometimes, as we saw in the U.S. Attorney scandal, it is a matter of removing a professional public servant who is doing a competent job in a sensitive area, and replacing him or her with some kid whose primary job qualification is being a Republican.

If there was justice in the world, next year we'd have a Democratic President, Parker would get his job back and have his recommendations acted on immediately, and maybe even get a promotion (the position of immediate supervisor of his old position would be a good one for him to be in.)