Peering Through the Bushes is a running commentary on George W. Bush’s relationship to environmental issues. Rather than render a detailed documentation of the president’s performance, the book conveys a broad impressionistic picture of the causative factors, current impacts, and future implications associated with Bush’s controversial environmental policies. The author is the nation’s senior nationally syndicated environmental columnist and has been following Bush’s environmental policy-making closely enough over the years to feel comfortable making subjective judgments about the president’s character and motivation on those matters.

Not surprisingly, many of Bush’s environmental positions mirror those of his father’s. But the son strays quite a bit further from the mainstream than Bush Senior ever did. Junior is much more enamored of conservative ideology than his father, and is seemingly even less convinced of the imminence and gravity of environmental threats.

You can thus understand why George W. Bush’s takeover of the presidency has caused environmentalists to greet the 21st Century with trepidation. They have watched with dismay as their issues have been undermined by a discredited conservative ideological approach they thought had been put to rest when Ronald Reagan left office 15 years earlier.

Suddenly, states’ rights, corporate volunteerism, and marketplace incentives were in vogue. Stringent environmental regulation and primacy of federal laws over local ones were out of favor except on the rarest of occasions. Bush gravitated towards an anachronistic unilateral stance on any number of international environmental matters, despite the United States inevitably having to operate in an ever more environmentally interdependent world. His “new” environmental approach had catapulted the nation back in time to the Reagan years, with their embarrassing and sometimes alarming ventures into isolationism.

This was not an auspicious way to inaugurate a century in which humanity can be expected to either restore an ecologically stressed planet to good health or doom earth to an irreversible downward environmental spiral.

The specious rhetoric heard so often during Reagan’s reign was once again emanating from the White House. Preferential treatment in environmental controversies was granted to business interests in the guise of returning some sense of “balance” with natural resources protection. Rationalizations were concocted for opening up previously protected public conservation areas to industrial activity. Brimming with animus at his predecessor’s ideological stance, sexual dalliances, and defeat of his father, George W. Bush was obsessed with rescinding as many of Clinton’s environmental initiatives as possible.

Even after his inauguration, Bush displayed no sign of being able to broaden his environmental perspective beyond preconceived narrowly drawn ideological nostrums Those solutions might be applicable on occasion, but no more than that. Employing the politically correct methodology often appeared more important to Bush than reaching the correct result in environmental controversies. In the wake of the World Trade Center attack, he exhibited no recognition that reversing environmental degradation was a major component of any long-term solution to terrorism.

Unless there is some dramatic change, historians are certain to perceive Bush’s handling of environmental issues in public office as a tale of deception, indifference, and regulatory rollbacks.

Chapter One contains entries in a diary that this author began when the president took office. As you will see, Bush engaged in his ideological vendetta against existing environmental safeguards from the get-go. Subsequent chapters deal with his motivation, character, tactics and ideology. The final chapter speculates on what the future might hold.

Ed Flattau was born in New York City and graduated from Brown University in 1958. He left Columbia Law School after two years to begin his journalist career as a general assignment reporter in the Albany, N.Y. United Press International Bureau. In 1964, he became a political correspondent for UPI in New York State where he covered the legislature and Governor Rockefeller. Three years later, he transferred to UPI’s Washington bureau where his beat included congress, various federal agencies and on occasion, the White House. In the spring of 1972, Stewart Udall, former interior secretary under President Kennedy, was impressed enough with Flattau’s freelance environmental writing to choose Ed to succeed him as author of the country’s first nationally syndicated environmental column. Flattau is the author of Tracking the Charlatans (Global Horizons Press, 1998), which received excellent reviews and has been widely circulated in environmental and academic circles. The book rebuts ultra-conservative and Libertarian critics of mainstream environmentalism. His latest book, Evolution of a Columnist, was published in 2003 and also garnered excellent reviews.

The Washington-based Flattau’s twice-a-week column has appeared in as many as 120 daily newspapers at various times during the past three decades. He has won ten national journalism awards, reported from five different continents, and covered the key issues and principle figures associated with modern day environmentalism. Flattau is married and the father of two children. He has lived in the nation’s capital for the past 35 years.