First and Foremost Bureaucrats - 12 January 2001

When I was a small boy, nine years old to be exact, my parents exchanged the muddied pavements of Manchester for the long, eight-mile stretch of sand that runs along the Irish Sea from Lytham St Anne's to Fleetwood.

And there for the only time in my life I enjoyed the companionship of a very old man - a great uncle, one of those big, shaggy Scotsmen who seemed constructed larger than life - huge head and face, huge hands and feet, but everything in balance.

He was essentially a kindly man and he moved with a boson's roll but gently, like a giant who can't help his size but hopes not to intimidate anybody.

He took me fishing in a novel way that was a delight at the time, a delight I have never repeated.

We went out at the very low tide when the sands reached out half a mile, and where the beach was still damp we laid down a large net with hooks, staked it at four corners, dug close by for juicy worms, baited the hooks and went home.

Sometimes if the full tide was at midday we strolled along the sea wall and looked at the churning water and imagined the fish being taken in by our waving dangling hooks.

Hours later, just before the tide had retreated all the way, we went out to our stake net and hurried to be there before the receding tide had exposed our catch for I am grieved to tell you that I learned at an early age even Lancashire people are not above being sneak thieves.

When finally we could wade to our ankles we'd look down and see one or two - on good days five or six or seven - flapping, thrashing fish. Always fluke or plaice, plaice mostly.

The plaice is a flat fish, probably the flattest fish in creation, with pink spots that give it the appearance of measles. It has a thin skin and a very thin layer of flesh of a watery texture.

I once knew a man who actually liked plaice but he was a born Cockney who'd set up business in Manchester and prospered exceedingly.

He made a point of enthusing about all things Lancastrian, rather like those Midwestern young men who move to California and from then on become professional Californians.

Well the tender memory of great uncle Timms was roused by an item the other morning reporting that the North Sea was falling a victim to pollution and that the Irish Sea might go the same way.

This sorry story was by coincidence or destiny bang up against a piece on Governor Christine Whitman of New Jersey, who's just been picked by Mr Bush to be in charge of the government's environmental protection agency.

The association here is that I know enough about Governor Whitman to believe that she could turn out to be a fine choice, not because of any demonstrated brilliance in the field of environmental protection but because she's handled both sides in the environmental battles.

She's moderate, level headed and patient - three qualities that are going to be tested to the hilt in her job.

Because if there's one political subject, one area of policy, which arouses instant partisanship it is the mere pronouncement of the word environment.

No other issue sparks in people such paranoia about the motives of the other side.

To the Democrats, the Republicans are well on the way to destroying the air we breathe and poisoning the human race.

To the Republicans, the Democrats are crazy people who care more for protecting the spotted owl than the jobs of men who work in a factory or at a petrol pump or in the tobacco fields.

The first obstacle Mrs Whitman will face is the obvious prejudice that she's a Republican and it has to be admitted that the Republicans as a party have a wretched record on the environment.

Which is understandable if you first appreciate that most industrialists, manufacturers - the men who make things and need coal, oil, natural gas to do it - are Republicans.

It's been only 40 years since every factory on earth spilled its wastes into rivers and lakes and city dumps as a natural process.

Since the late 18th Century and the birth of the Industrial Revolution (at Bradford, Yorkshire wasn't it?) nobody protested about the dangers to human life of industry's useless gases and liquids, it was as natural and unremarked as a flushing toilet.

But there came a date that is now a milestone in human history - a date quite unremarked at the time, 1962 - when an obscure American woman biologist put out a book which within months gave her both a famous and a notorious name and made her an object of political controversy. Her name was Rachel Carson and the book was called The Silent Spring.

It was a sort of alarm signal about the probably harmful effect of the recent spraying of insecticides and pesticides on the crops grown for human consumption.

Mrs Carson is long gone but her Silent Spring is to the modern environmental movement what Tom Payne's pamphlet Common Sense was to the American revolution of 1776.

In the beginning the protest movement was exclusively on the hazards to human life of those pesticides, especially the dreaded DDT, which had been innocently invented by a German in the 19th Century, and years later, in 1939, used with great success in Switzerland against the Colorado Beetle which was ruining the potato crop.

By the late 50s DDT was hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. The United Nations sent out teams through Indonesia, spraying from house to house and virtually wiping out malaria throughout much of the country.

Just when everyone was marvelling at the wonders of modern science there appeared that little book, The Silent Spring.

Her warnings about the hazards of DDT to animal wildlife turned DDT into a villain and a threat to human health.

A controversy which now seems ludicrously overblown, developed between fishermen and eaters of fish. The fishermen wanted more DDT sprayed on fish and the people who came to be known as greens demanded none at all.

The Food and Drug Administration stepped in and after severe testing announced that fish sold in the United States contained less than one part per million of DDT and was no conceivable threat to human life.

By that time the progressives - the animal rights advocates and the greens - were allied into a regiment which began to suspect almost any chemical that came near food.

We were still, incidentally, about 40 years away from the day today when anyone would be fearful of eating wheat, which is after all manipulated grass.

Well most listeners will have lived through the dreadful years when our rivers and lakes - not little lakes but the Great Lakes here, which together are half the size of Europe - were becoming unfishable.

That was when then the Democrats set up and embraced the better informed of the environmentalists.

I remember a great old friend of mine in Southern California, a citrus farmer, cursing this new government agency - the EPA - and an astonishingly long list of rules it had got out about the conditions under which he could grow and protect his lemons and limes.

There was, I remember, an order condemning the type of smudge pots that he used - they were little pots containing a material which spewed much smoke to drive away insects but was a necessary emergency protection against frost.

I shouldn't say he was particularly partisan in those days - he'd been an active soldier in both wars and took a weary view of politicians - but I'm sure as the new agency was bolstered with more laws, more businesses and industries and farmers and tobacco growers came under the sharp eye of the Environmental Protection Agency - companies that had for centuries gone their own way and never heard phrases like "toxic waste", "the ozone layer", "the greenhouse effect", "the cleaning of the Amazon Valley", "saving the rainforest" and so on.

Well by 1997 the whole world had learned of a situation in which human and animal life could be threatened by the emissions of two centuries of noxious carbons and other gases and liquids.

In December of that year 150 nations met in Kyoto to study the possible effects of all this stuff on the approach - the reality, if you were a sceptic - of global warming.

Well it will be no surprise if I tell you that the United States employs 80,000 people in the independent Environmental Protection Agency.

It would be a fantasy to believe that these are 80,000 environmental experts or plant and fish biologists or even just passionately ideological greens - they are first and foremost bureaucrats.

And the most dependable feature of a bureau once it's created is to go on reproducing itself. Parkinson's law is gloriously extended and all bureaucracies are great breeders of more bureaucrats.

The greens have seldom studied the practical results of their paperwork, their proliferation of rules and regulations.

On the other hand the factory owners, big and small, have grown increasingly incensed at the prodigious length and finicky detail of the latest book of EPA regulations.

The Republicans didn't really wake up until it could be disclosed that two of the Great Lakes were literally unfishable and when we on Long Island were warned that so long as the noble Hudson spawned poisoned fish we would not be able to eat the most splendid of our eating fishes, the striped bass.

Now Mrs Governor Whitman of New Jersey is in person an alert and concerned environmentalist but as the chief executive of a state with a mixed industrial and farming economy she has heard a thousand times the complaints of people whose businesses are at hazard from the strangulation of too many rules.

My citrus farmer friend, by the way, in California couldn't take it, way back there, and went out of business.

This world problem which henceforth Governor Whitman must oversee for the United States comes down to the ideological purity of the greens against the solvency of small factories everywhere.

Or better we might recall the comment that the late President Nixon made in a private aside to a friend: "If it comes down to a flat choice between smoke and jobs, tilt towards jobs."

Mrs Whitman will attempt to realise the impossible dream of jobs with no smoke.

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