Opinião - O presidente Bush mostra suas cores ambientais (em Inglês) Sheryl Gay Stolberg e Felicity Barringer* After six years in the Oval Office, George W. Bush may have found his inner Teddy Roosevelt. At a time when his policies on global warming are under scrutiny from environmentalists, President Bush this week cloaked himself in another environmental issue: conservation. He used his budget, and his bully pulpit, to announce a 10-year, $1 billion commitment in taxpayer money to enhance national parks, which have been limping along with limited money.

Most environmentalists would not say George W. Bush and Theodore Roosevelt in the same sentence, unless making an invidious comparison. Roosevelt, of course, created a collection of national preserves that helped form the foundation of the current park system. Mr. Bush, his detractors say, has let the national parks slide into decline — until now. “This is real,” said Bill Wade, a former park superintendent and a persistent critic of the administration’s parks policies. “There’s a lot more focus in this budget for the operational funding that parks need.” The turnaround came at the urging of Dirk Kempthorne, the former Idaho governor who is Mr. Bush’s new secretary of the interior. Two years ago, when Mr. Kempthorne was still governor, he and his wife spent two days with the president and Laura Bush, fishing, hiking and cycling in the Idaho outdoors.

“I saw up close and personal what the outdoors meant to this couple,” the secretary said in an interview Wednesday. Once he became interior secretary, he said, he told the president that the 90th anniversary of the parks system, in 2006, should prompt planning for the centennial. “Let’s not just light a candle for the one day of the 90th,” Mr. Kempthorne recalled saying. “The centennial needs to be spectacular.”

On Wednesday, the two men and Mrs. Bush traveled to Shenandoah National Park, 75 miles west of Washington, to talk to private supporters of the parks about the new twist in their initiative: a challenge to the private sector to raise an additional $1 billion for park enhancement, which the government would match dollar for dollar for a maximum $3 billion at the end of 10 years. With attendance at national parks declining, recreation companies said the initiative makes business sense.

“It’s good business and it’s good policy,” said Gary Kiedaisch, president and chief executive of The Coleman Company, a leading manufacturer of camping equipment. In an interview after appearing with Mr. Bush on Wednesday, Mr. Kiedaisch said his company had not “put actual hard dollars down” but would support the initiative. The initiative comes less than a year after Mr. Bush offered another gift to environmentalists: creating a marine reserve in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

“We’re quite enthusiastic about it,” Gene Sykes, chairman of the board of the National Parks Conservation Association, who participated in Wednesday’s event, said. That enthusiasm, however, has yet to infect critics of Mr. Bush’s environmental record. Despite the praise for its effort on parks, the administration found itself on the defensive Wednesday — so much so that the White House felt compelled to issue an “open letter on the president’s position on climate change.”

In the letter, Mr. Bush’s top science and environmental advisers challenged news media reports that suggested that his concern about climate change was new. “Beginning in June 2001,” they wrote, “President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem.” The letter cited a June 2001 statement in which Mr. Bush quoted the National Academy of Sciences saying an increase in Earth’s temperatures was “due in large part to human activity.” But it failed to finish the quotation, in which he went on to say it was unclear how much “natural fluctuations in climate” played a role, whether further climate change was inevitable and what, if anything, could be done about it.

The issue came up at the daily press briefing, where Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, insisted there was nothing new about the president’s commitment to parks or his recognition of global warming. “There’s been a lot of misreporting,” Mr. Snow said. “Perhaps folks have not taken notice of the fact that this is an administration that’s been keenly committed, both to environmentalism and conservationism from the start.”

At the suggestion that Mr. Bush was awakening to the environment, Mr. Snow said it was reporters who were waking up. “The long national slumber,” he said, “may be approaching an end.” But Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, a group that has conducted assiduous and unfriendly analyses of the administration’s environmental record, had a slightly different take.

“When presidents come to the end of their terms, they always look for great places to save,” Mr. Clapp said, adding, “As for the rest of President Bush’s environmental record, I’m still snoring.” One not snoring is Secretary Kempthorne, who has a statue of Teddy Roosevelt in his office, a constant reminder of that president’s commitment to conservation. At the Shenandoah park on Wednesday, he invoked a comparison between the first President Roosevelt and the second President Bush. Turning to his boss, he said, “I think Theodore Roosevelt would be very proud of you.”
* Jornalistas do The New York Times
(The New York Times, 08/02/2007)