Dixy Lee Ray Re-Opens Fire On Eco-Activists

She still doesn't waffle:

The $57 billion cleanup of radioactive waste at Hanford is unnecessary. Ditto most of the cleanup of Puget Sound.

The pesticide DDT is safe if used correctly and, if made legal again, would save lives by killing malarial mosquitoes.

Concern about asbestos, PCBs, Alar, dioxin, food pesticides, global warming and ozone depletion is overblown or just dead wrong.

Solar and wind power have proved disappointing producers of electricity, and nuclear power represents a safe, economical alternative.

Welcome back, Dixy Lee Ray.

In her slyly titled book ``Trashing the Planet'' (Regnery Gateway, $18.95), the 76-year-old scientist and ex-governor trashes environmental extremists for allegedly promoting fear over fact and doing more harm than good.

``They have lost all sense of proportion,'' she said. ``They force industry into taking measures that are expensive and do no good.''

After a slow start last summer, sales of the 206-page book aimed at lay readers, written with the help of KIRO commentator Lou Guzzo, are apparently picking up. A selection of the Conservative Book Club, its appeal is obvious to those who view environmentalists as anti-technology troglodytes.

But Ray's book deserves a look as well by those most likely to snicker at it. Ray recently read with interest ``Green Rage,'' a sympathetic portrayal of radical environmentalism; perhaps some enviros

will return the favor even while agreeing to disagree.

Few in state history have enjoyed or endured the parabolic notoriety of Washington's first woman governor. Elected in 1976, when her bright bluntness seemed a refreshing change from politics-as-usual in the post-Watergate era, by 1980 Ray had alienated much of the state's political and media establishment and lost her party's primary.

Retreating to her Fox Island

farm, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and longtime University of Washington professor became a kind of non-person in this state, partly by choice. She discouraged media interviews, avoided politics and confined her speaking largely to business and industrial groups.

Guzzo, a former Times reporter, Post-Intelligencer managing editor, and assistant to Ray during her term as governor, eventually persuaded her to put her spoken criticisms of environmentalists into a book and provided the smooth prose.

``We desperately need a balancing of the environmental movement,'' he said. ``We want to bring it back to their senses, the way it was before all the lawyers climbed on board. They're running it into the ground.''

Ray the author was relaxed, good-humored and energetic when interviewed in a hotel lobby, dressed a bit like the proverbial little old lady in polyester slacks and tennis shoes.

She and Guzzo applauded the basic environmental reforms of earlier decades, such as the basic air and water pollution control established in the 1970s. ``I think we've seen tremendous improvement,'' said Ray. ``The air is far clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Garbage and pollution then were terrible. Lake Washington was diluted sewage.''

What she takes issue with, she explained, are environmentalists who go from wanting pollution control to insisting on absolute purity regardless of cost, who oppose technology and progress, and who forecast global doomsday without convincing evidence.

``Whatever happened to common sense?'' she asks in her book. ``Progress continues, but it seems that hardly anyone enjoys it anymore. Despite all the evidence of our physical well-being . . . we seem to have become a nation of easily frightened people - the healthiest hypochondriacs in the world!''

She has little problem with mainstream groups like the Sierra Club. She doesn't criticize land conservation, makes no mention of forest issues and skirts recyling.

But some environmentalists, Ray complained, ``see the only answer as the destruction of Western civilization'' and make ecology a religion instead of a science. She cited Earth First, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund as examples.

Some of the book's strengths are also its weaknesses. It tries to be both quick and comprehensive. As such it is admirably concise and understandable, but its dismissal of environmental concerns are so rapid (Alar, asbestos, PCBs and dioxin are addressed in just 13 pages) that it is unlikely to change the minds of those embroiled in environmental issues.

Too often it seems to preach to the converted, and the reviews seem to have reflected the slant of their source: favorable in the Wall Street Journal, for example, but dismissed by the New York Times. Her publisher specializes in works by such conservatives as Barry Goldwater and Patrick Buchanan.

Nor are Ray's arguments new. Edith Efron's 1984 book ``The Apocalyptics'' is a far more detailed and closely argued attack on environmentalists and scientists who push cancer scares, for example.

Ray is at her best in discussing nuclear issues, such as explaining new reactor design or arguing for reprocessing of radioactive waste.

There is plenty here to get her enemies hopping. Ray's more shocking suggestions, such as dumping radioactive waste in the sea, may close minds to her energy arguments.

And three decades after Rachel Carson's ``Silent Spring'' won a national book award (Ray still calls it ``a terrible book'') the former governor argues the link between DDT and fragile egg shells that caused bird mortality has yet to be proved. The comeback of the bald eagle can be attributed to other factors, she said.

She also insists the radioactive waste problem has been overblown, and when interviewed called Hanford waste ``an infinitesimal fly speck'' on the desert that could just as well be fenced off and ignored.

Ray and Guzzo bring a generational perspective to their book that is interesting. In a chapter on ``The Good Old Days'' Ray discusses the world of her childhood when horse manure filled streets, farms were inefficient, food contamination was common, and fatal childhood disease was dreaded.

This chapter helps explain the book's perspective. The pair champion technology because they have lived long enough to have experienced its relative absence.

They also tend to take the conservative side in an argument as old as the environmental movement. They argue reform should wait until pollution is shown to cause harm; many environmentalists argue pollution should stop unless we're certain it is not harmful.

This is a book that will make some think, some cheer, some laugh, and some get out their old Dixy dart sets. It makes some good points, and it is fun to see a colorful, controversial and bright woman contributing to the public dialogue again.