Over the past five years, and especially in the year leading up to the election, there has been a considerable amount of paper devoted to the "evils" of President George W. Bush and his administration. Much of the discourse has barely moved beyond the level petty partisan bickering and blind-faith support of the Democratic Party and it has been rare that a well-researched and well-written book has emerged out of this context. However, Robert S. Devine's Bush Versus the Environment is one of those rare anti-Bush books that actually provides a well-researched analysis, in this case providing considerable information about Bush's often-secretive environmental policy.

While George W. Bush has received the title "worst environmental president ever" from many Democrats and progressives, it is rare to see a detailed analysis of his policies. Due to both the corporate media's failure to report on environmental issues and the secrecy of the Bush administration, there has been a dearth of information about Bush's environmental policies. In researching his book, Devine experienced first-hand the difficulty of obtaining information from the Bush administration, calls to administration official and requests for interviews were left unanswered, leaving Devine to search through a maze of dense policy papers and regulatory texts issued by the administration in order to evaluate Bush's environmental policy. Whether or not the environmental policies of the Bush administration are the worst in history is open to debate, but after reading Bush Versus the Environment, most readers will probably believe this to be the case. Even the brief overview given of Bush's policies in the introduction--directing the Bureau of Land Management to cut back on environmental reviews to boost oil and gas development on public lands it oversees, dragging its feet on providing technological assistance to farmers to reduce pollution, failing to voluntarily put new species on the endangered species lists, making taxpayers clean up superfund sites instead of industry, weakening rules governing water pollution from hard-rock mines, reduced funding for research on energy dependency, exempting the Department of Defense from many environmental protections, and weakening and delaying efforts to reduce water pollution from livestock feeding facilities--signify a poor environmental record, and these policies are only the beginning.

The chapters in the book address the broad ways in which the Bush administration is harming the environment--rolling back regulations, using voluntary compliance programs to reduce pollution, using legal settlements to create pro-industry policies in secret, using "junk science," and using unprecedented review practices to eliminate new regulations. Throughout his first term, the Bush administration appointed former industry representatives--many of whom previously argued against regulations--to craft new environmental regulations. This has created a climate lax enforcement and the "scaling back" of regulations, with the administration adopting the position that public review and transparency "complicate" industry. Moreover, the administration has used the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to analyze proposed regulations and kill those not inline with the administrations ideology, using its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) root out "ill-advised" regulations. The information used to eliminate regulations is often dubious and frequently comes either from scientists who limit their research to support their conclusions or by the outright omission of contradictory information by the Bush administration. Each chapter contains a plethora of information on specific Bush policies, which collected together, create a scathing indictment of the Bush administration's environmental policy. Devine analyzes the Healthy Forest Initiative, the Clear Skies Act, and other Bush administration policies to come to broader conclusions about how the Bush administration decides policy.

Like many of the large number of books devoted to analyzing the policies of President Bush, Devine's narrowly focused analysis often ignores the systemic problems relating to environmental destruction. The failure to examine the systemic nature of current problems often results in a support for the Democratic Party, who, by virtue of their past reputation, is often seen as the anecdote to the policies of President Bush. While Devine's book has numerous examples of how Clinton-era environmental regulations were scaled back or repealed during the Bush presidency, both parties support a basic model of infinite growth and production that is ultimately incompatible with the environment. Nowhere is this more clear than in the introductory comments from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who states that there is "no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism," while arguing that he (and by extension Democrats) support a "true" free-market capitalism that would result in voluntary pollution controls as companies competed to create the best and most environmentally sound products. Of course, this is ridiculous--free-market capitalism and unbridled production and consumption are perhaps the most serious threat to the environment and the core issue underlying the regulatory aspects of environmental destruction.

Devine's Bush Versus the Environment is one of the more well-written books criticizing the Bush administration. Its detailed analysis of the myriad ways in which the Bush administration is contributing to the destruction of the environment is illuminating and uncovers information that even the most fervent hater of Bush has probably missed. This is the standard by which "anti-Bush" books should written and hopefully the information contained within will be a catalyst for action.