Lee Talbot is professor of environmental science, international affairs and public policy at George Mason University. He is former head of Environmental Sciences for the Smithsonian Institution and former chief scientist on the President’s Council on Environmental Quality for presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
When President Richard Nixon asked my old boss at the Smithsonian Institution to loan me, then the institution’s head of environmental sciences, to the White House, I took on what may seem like an impossible task: write and help enact one of the country’s most important environmental laws. But I did, and the bill passed in a remarkably bipartisan way.
Now that law, the Endangered Species Act, is under vicious attack in Congress by anti-conservation zealots uninterested in working with their counterparts from the other side of the aisle.
Such is the state of our national affairs. The political climate makes it difficult to imagine a Republican president recruiting and encouraging a scientist to author progressive environmental legislation and help push it through Congress.
