When Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested this week that he would consider eliminating the California Environmental Protection Agency to cut government waste, he cemented what has emerged as a near-universal distrust of his gubernatorial candidacy among conservationists.
Schwarzenegger has made a concerted play for the environmental vote, tapping his wife's cousin, prominent conservation attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to help fashion his platform. His campaign pronouncements more closely match the environmental views of the man he wants to replace in Tuesday's recall election, Democrat Gray Davis, than those of his fellow Republican, President Bush.
Yet he has failed to sway a single major environmental organization to his side, and most conservationists continue to view the actor, famous for driving a gas-guzzling Hummer, with deep skepticism.
At the same time Schwarzenegger has pledged to strengthen environmental protections, he has also promised to reduce regulations on businesses and streamline the state bureaucracy to better mirror the federal government.
Many conservationists, who are waging war against the environmental policies of the Bush administration, see those objectives as contradictory. They fear that if Schwarzenegger is elected, he will modify the state's trend-setting environmental policies, the toughest in the nation on problems such as air pollution.
"He simply cannot be trusted to resist special-interest influence or the appeals of the Bush administration to weaken California environmental protections," said Carl Zichella, regional director of the Sierra Club.
Schwarzenegger's environmental supporters dismiss the attacks on their candidate as bald partisanship. Terry Tamminen, the executive director of the Santa Monica-based group Environment Now who helped draft the actor's environmental platform, defended Schwarzenegger, saying that Democratic groups have twisted the candidate's vague words about ending duplication in state bureaucracy into something evil.
The remark in question was made Monday in the Fresno suburb of Clovis. A farmer asked Schwarzenegger why the state needed Cal/EPA when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency already regulates many of the same things.
"What you just talked about is the waste -- overlapping agencies. They cost a fortune," Schwarzenegger said. "We have to strip that down and get rid of some of those agencies."
