E-Mail Blast Seeks Data on Bush Plans For Public Lands
Group Asks Interior Workers To Identify Possible Threats

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 1, 2004

An advocacy group that opposes President Bush's environmental policies e-mailed nearly 60,000 Interior Department employees Thursday to seek help in identifying White House initiatives that could threaten national parks and wilderness areas.

Peter Altman, director of the Campaign to Protect America's Lands, said the goal of the e-mail blast was to help detect federal rule changes sought by industry that the administration might more vigorously pursue if Bush faces a tough reelection contest.

Mark Pfeifle, a spokesman at Interior, defended the administration's record of land management and environmental stewardship. He said the group was engaging in spam e-mail tactics to score political points with its supporters.

"This is the personification of the term 'junk mail,' " Pfeifle said. "They are spamming talking points from a partisan special interest group. And in their existence, they have never restored a single square foot of public land."

Pfeifle said that since Bush took office three years ago, for instance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of Interior, has restored more than 700,000 acres of prairie grasslands and uplands.

Testifying Thursday before the House Resources Committee's subcommittee on national parks, recreation and public lands, Fran P. Mainella, director of the National Park Service, said Bush's budget request of $2.4 billion for the agency represents a 4 percent increase above the current level.

"This budget proposal demonstrates a strong commitment to sustaining the National Park System," Mainella told lawmakers, according to an e-mailed statement of her testimony.

The advocacy group, however, has compiled what it calls a "dirty laundry list" of 58 policy and personnel moves by the administration that it says have "soiled and spoiled" national parks and lands. The list includes administration attempts to permit more snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, to allow coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without installing anti-pollution equipment and to allow more logging on federal lands.

Altman said the group had received a few e-mails from employees by Thursday afternoon. He said Interior's intransigence in dealing with Freedom of Information Act requests had made the mass e-mail necessary.

"If this Department of Interior was willing to be responsive . . . and provide information to groups through the normal process, we wouldn't have to resort to trying to go straight to their employees to get it," he said.

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