On Wednesday, March 16, the Senate voted 51-49 to uphold a provision in the Senate's budget resolution that would allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The provision specifies that any future vote on ANWR can be approved by a simple majority vote--stripping away the parliamentary procedure that Democrats have used in the past to block ANWR, and making it highly likely that drilling in the refuge will finally be approved later this year.

The battle, fortunately, is not entirely over. In order for ANWR to pass, lawmakers must still agree on a final budget, something they failed to do last year. And the provision must survive a conference committee with the House, whose budget has no ANWR item.

But the Senate decision signifies that the Bush Administration has the votes necessary to make drilling in ANWR a reality, in the Senate as well as in the House. And given that, a little introspection is in order. Given that every public opinion poll shows a solid majority of Americans in favor of environmental protection, and given that environmental groups have prioritized ANWR as their central battle for the past several years, how has this come to pass?

The simplest answer, of course, is that caribou and polar bears don't make campaign contributions; oil companies do. Put another way, there is no clear perception among Congresspeople that if they vote against the environment, it will cost them their jobs, particularly for Republicans. Only seven Republican senators voted to block ANWR drilling. Combined with the three Democrats that voted for it, the upshot was that the new, larger 55-45 Republican majority in the Senate is now enough to move ANWR where a majority did not exist in the past.

Environmentalism, more than any other set of issues, finds itself closely tied to the schism between red and blue counties in America. In mostly urban, blue America, support for wild places and endangered animals is widespread--but in the rural counties where these places actually are, "environmentalist" is, often as not, used as an epithet. The moderate Republicans that voted against ANWR came from Rhode Island, Maine, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, and Arizona. With the exception of Arizona's independent-minded John McCain, each vote came from a state where environmentalists form an avid constituency. The tragedy of the environmental movement is that a schism has been allowed o develop between the people wanting to protect land, and the people living on or near the land to be protected.

That schism has been widened by a generation of rhetoric and lived experience about the evils of "big government" and intrusive environmental policies that, property rights advocates say, are often arrogant and out of touch with the realities of what small land owners can cope with. To some extent, that's an unavoidable conflict. But often the people closest to the land are themselves ardent conservationists, who at minimum have an extensive understanding of the land they take care of. Republicans have exploited what has been a lost opportunity, the opportunity for people who work the land and the people who want to save it from a distance to make common cause.

The result has been a boon o the Bush Administration, with perhaps the most dreadful environmental record of any administration in modern times. So far, most of the damage has been done through regulatory action, executive orders, and the appointment of industry shills to many of the regulatory positions where they are supposed to be overseeing the industries they regulate. But the ANWR vote heralds a possible new phase, where Republicans may be able to muster the procedural majorities needed to undo critical legislation that has been in place for a generation.

Only last week, the Senate's Environment and Public Works committee shot down by a 10-8 vote the Bush Administration's Clean Skies initiative, a horrid industry-driven bill that had been one of the administration's chief legislative priorities this season. It failed because, on a committee evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island--who also voted against ANWR drilling--became the lone Republican to cross over. With a major energy bill also in the works this spring, green activists are in the unenviable position of having to rely on such tenuous coalitions to forestall the Bush agenda. Once it gets to a floor vote, they may no longer have the votes.

All in all, the disconnect between the relative public popularity of environmental measures and their relative unpopularity on Capitol Hill owes a lot not just to the corporate corruption of the legislative process, but the lack of political capital possessed by the major environmental groups that have fought ANWR drilling. For years, they have encouraged checkbook activism among their members, and failed to reach out to parts of the country where they might have been able to make common cause with foes. Now, as the environmental Darth Vaders in the White House take advantage of a newly large Senate majority, the price for those activist failures is becoming more and more apparent.