The short-lived Carter administration gained a reputation for being sympa-
thetic to environmentalism, although this was only true in a limited sense.
Many of Carter's environmental initiatives self-destructed for lack of politi-
cal finesse or fell victim to congressional opposition, as in the case of
Carter's western water project "hit list." ¹ Carter's four years did not repre-
sent a golden age of environmental politics. In fact, the New Right political
resurgence that came to be known in 1981 as the "Reagan revolution" had
actually become quite well established in many ways by the late 1970s.
Carter's environmental initiatives, though blunted, served to galvanize a
pro-business, anti-regulatory, conservative backlash; just as the Reagan ad-
ministration in turn energized an environmental opposition. With the aid of
a slight conservative majority in a polarized Congress, the Reagan admin-
istration made an all-out effort to turn back the tide of environmental reform
that had been building for two decades and sided unabashedly with the
lobbyists for the business interests. Reasserting wildly optimistic goals for
timber production (the old figure of 20 bbf surfaced again the Reagan team
in the Agriculture Department took specific, short-term steps to block en-
vironmental protection initiatives, such as ordering the Forest Service to
increase road construction in roadless areas in order to eliminate the pos-
sibility of their being considered for wilderness at a future date, and ordering
the relaxing of environmental protection standards in forest plans. Because
of expanded requirements for public access to government information and
decision making (greatly extended by RPA and NFMA), these top-down
imposed initiatives could be easily brought into the light of day and crit-

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