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How Bush Administration Policies Harm New Hampshire Communities
President Bush: There's a Better Way
Sign up now to help protect New Hampshire!
 New
Hampshire is well known as a state with a strong tradition of environmental
stewardship. Granite Staters have long understood that a clean environment
is essential to maintaining and improving our quality. We know that
protecting our state’s natural resources and beauty makes New
Hampshire’s economy stronger, and our families healthier.
Regardless of the season or region, New Hampshire residents enjoy
a special relationship with our state’s natural surroundings.
From the White Mountains to the seacoast, the lakes region to the
Monadnocks, protecting our air, land, and water, has always been
of special importance to our residents and civic leaders.
But during the past few years, our state’s treasured environment
has been put at risk. Current Bush administration policies that
weaken and ignore federal environmental safeguards are already harming
our communities, and threaten to only make things worse.
 Fifty
years ago, the Merrimack River was contaminated with dyes from textile
mills and raw sewage from towns along its banks. Toxins from the
Mohawk Tannery were seeping into a 30 acre tract in Nashua. And
soot and smog from local and Midwest power plants polluted New Hampshire’s
air. But with passage of federal clean air, clean water, and toxic
waste clean-up laws in the ’70s and ’80s, New Hampshire
made real and measurable progress cleaning up the state.
That progress is in peril. The Bush administration is allowing the
electric power companies, the chemical corporations, and other industries
to rewrite and weaken the laws that protect the health and safety
of New Hampshire families and communities. The administration is
allowing corporations to benefit at our expense. And it is pursuing
plans to allow electric power plants to put more mercury into our
air, shift the cost of cleaning up New Hampshire’s 18 Superfund
toxic sites from polluters to taxpayers, and cut the funds needed
to enforce clean air and water laws.
The administration’s undermining of our nation’s most
basic environmental protections leaves the people of New Hampshire
exposed and vulnerable to increased amounts of asthma-triggering
smog, growth-retarding mercury and lead, cancer-causing dioxin,
and other contaminants. This report documents the consequences of
Bush administration action — and lack of action — on the
health and safety of families in communities across New Hampshire.
This report also serves to remind us what we have learned over the
past 30 years—that there is a better way, that we have the
know-how and a successful track record cleaning up the pollution
in our air and water and the poisons in our soil.
But know-how’s clearly not enough, not when the administration
is determined to let the corporations off the hook and de-fund the
agencies responsible for enforcing environmental laws. Only public
pressure on lawmakers will ensure that three decades of progress
continue, keeping our communities safe, and protecting our children’s
legacy of clean air, clean water and still-wild lands.
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Sign
me up to help protect New Hampshire from the harmful policies
of the Bush administration. |
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Toxic drum at Mohawk Tanner, photo courtesy Nashua
Dept. of Public Works.
Chuck Mower at Merrimack River, photo courtesy James Dunfey-Ehrenberg.
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