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Our air, water, and wildlife are under attack. How could this have happened under the watch of a man who spoke so passionately and with such quiet eloquence to this very issue in his very first presidential Earth Day speech?

Each of us understands that our prosperity as a nation will mean little if our legacy to future generations is a world of polluted air, toxic waste, and vanished forests. . . . I encourage Americans to join me in renewing our commitment to protecting the environment and leaving our children and grandchildren with a legacy of clean water, clean air, and natural beauty.

I know I joined him in renewing my commitment. Not too many people realize how much celebrities can do to improve the environment. Remember how I’m a nut for statistics? Well, not too many people realize this, but show biz celebrities make up just .000000001 percent of the world’s population, and yet consume nearly 37 percent of its resources. For example, every day, seventeen acres of rain forest are consumed by Barbra Streisand alone.

After Bush’s speech, determined to do my part, I wasted almost twenty minutes trying to persuade my son to accept a Prius as a graduation gift, in place of the 280-horsepower Infiniti G35 coupe I had promised him in a weak moment.

So I’m pulling my weight. I wish I could say the same for J. Steven Griles, the deputy secretary of the interior. Instead of renewing his commitment, like the President told him to, Griles has opened public lands to oil, gas, and mining interests, all while still receiving money from his former employers in the oil, gas, and mining industries. Griles’s appointment has been a particular boon to a sector of the coal mining industry that is not afraid to think big: the mountaintop removal sector.

You see, when you remove the top of a mountain, you can gain ready access to what is inside, be it diamonds, molybdenum, or most commonly, bituminous (or “dirty”) coal. The thing is, a removed mountaintop doesn’t just vanish. The top of the mountain has to go somewhere. And that somewhere is usually a nearby valley.

Griles himself has had plenty of experience removing unnecessary mountaintops. As an executive at United Company, he oversaw the Dal-Tex mine in West Virginia, which occasioned one of the largest mountaintop removals since Krakatoa. The mine was not what you would call a good neighbor. When miners detonated mountain ridges, filling in valleys and burying streams with trees, rocks, and thirteen species of songbird, they also sent boulders flying into local houses. As you can imagine, neighbors complained, not just about the boulders, but also about the choking dust.

Griles’s inconsiderate behavior did not end with the boulders or the asthma-inducing debris. United Company set up huge coal-loading machines that ran twenty-four hours a day, right next to homes.

For years, a number of regulations have interfered with the ability of mining companies to remove mountaintops. For example, until recently, it’s been illegal to dump the mountaintop into a nearby stream or river. The Bush administration has changed all that, by rewriting the Clean Water Act’s rules to allow mining waste to be dumped directly into many heretofore off-limits waterways.

The President would argue that our natural resources are best managed by people intimately familiar with all the relevant regulations and statutes, and the tricks polluters use to evade them.

I agree. Such people include academics, regulators, and environmental advocacy groups. Experts all. Oh, but let’s not forget the lobbyists for the polluters themselves. In their own way, they are every bit as expert. This last group seems to be disproportionately represented in this administration. There’s people like:

I am not going to put you through a long list of horrible environmental actions taken by this administration. Instead, I refer you to what TeamFranken calls the Internet. For instance, a Google search of the terms