THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT is facing another crisis in which its valid arguments are confronted by its false alarms.
Too bad. This time congressional Republicans in the thrall of commercial polluters are liable to ram through a rewrite of the nation's Clean Water Act along lines written by the polluters and their lawyer-lobbyists.When environmentalist leaders complain - as Carol Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency has been complaining - that the water act rewrite threatens serious harm to the nation's waterways and wetlands sensitive to the blight of pollution, there's a handy response for the polluters.
Environmentalists, including the EPA, have turned in so many false alarms, why get excited about their clean-water warnings?
Environmental groups, cursed as they are with no contradictions from other environmentalists, have warned of the approach of doom in everything from harmless food additives to global cow flatulence and have issued bogus death threats involving anything from runaway atomic radiation to ant killers. Every new crackpot theory is said to prove the sky is falling, maybe tomorrow, the next day for sure.
It turns out we haven't been killed off or even threatened by many - maybe most - of the supposedly dangerous and life-ending perils broadcast by the environmental movement.
It's like the boy who kept hollering "wolf." And it's no surprise environmentalists have doubters when they warn that Republican revision of the Clean Water Act could be disastrous.
Examples are everywhere and two persistent environmentalist outcries help explain the "wolf" reputation.
Lost in the environmental "wolf" tale about radon is the ongoing EPA failure to show any link between locations of "high" radon readings and correspondingly high lung cancer rates.
Another false environmental alarm, one that's said to have wasted billions of dollars, is revealed in findings of The American Physical Society, identified by The New York Times as the world's largest group of physicists, with 45,000 members.
The society, after years of study, has concluded that the environmental alarms and claims that power transmission lines produce magnetic fields which cause cancer are all bunk.
The strength of the magnetic field near an electric can opener is greater than that from overhead power lines, the scientists said, adding that the earth's magnetic field is hundreds of times stronger than that of suspended power lines.
The study submitted by the American Physical Society suggested that the groundless public fears had forced movement of power lines and other work costing billions of dollars, almost all of it added onto public utility bills.
What's certain is the environmental movement won't back off, not from 20,000 radon deaths with no victims, not from tales of power line cancer, not even from cow flatulence.
And the cry of "wolf" makes it all the easier to weaken the Clean Water Act.