Washington ? Several months ago I attended a conference here with the sole purpose of hearing Bill McKibben, the featured speaker. McKibben is the author of “The End of Nature,” which foretold back in the 1980s the global warming mess of today. I went to hear what the sage was going to predict for the world now and found him sharing a panel with Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt.

I didn’t know whether Leavitt was a modern snake-oil salesman or just soliciting a Washington job, but he was clearly the classic character we expect to see highly placed in the Bush administration. He gave a speech about his environmental ideology as if a Roman philosopher, dubbing it “enlibra,” which he explained means “to move toward balance.” He continued to praise the Bush administration and might just as well have put his resume up on the screen in Powerpoint.

It worked. Bush has just nominated him to replace Christine Todd Whitman, the Environmental Protection Agency chief whom we will forever remember for telling us the smoke plume from the 9-11 disaster site in New York was safe. Whitman used to talk about balance. Bush continues to. It got me wondering what these guys actually mean when they say it.

Bush gutted the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to stop global warming. His administration is allowing more pollution from power plants, more pollution in our water, more clear-cutting in our national forests, more oil and gas mining on our public lands and coastal waters, more coal burning, more nuclear waste, more loss of endangered species.

As for Leavitt, his administration has among the worst clean water enforcement in the nation, even personally taking a hand in befouling the water through his family’s fish farm, which was brought up on violations as a source of Utah’s devastating, fish-crippling “whirling disease.”

As Utah’s governor, Leavitt fought for a boondoggle highway program that would have threatened the Great Salt Lake Wetlands, a world-renowned inland shorebird breeding ground. Fortunately, his plan was thwarted by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court rejected the highway on the grounds that Leavitt’s key agencies were “arbitrary and capricious” in issuing construction permits on the project.

When citizens in Utah turned to Leavitt for protection from a 260,000 hog-raising operation that was spilling liquified manure from broken pipelines and leaking lagoons into the groundwater, he helped pass a law that prevents citizens from bringing nuisance suits against agricultural businesses.

Leavitt orchestrated two deals with the Bush administration to open up millions of acres of Utah wilderness to road building and development. Leavitt supported more extensive mining and burning of coal and gas in Utah while bragging about cleaning up the air at the still smoggy, still hazy Grand Canyon.

As for what 18,000 Environmental Protection Agency employees can expect if Leavitt is confirmed, just talk to the biologists at Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources who were purged for listing endangered species — an act that could get in the way of new water diversions from already overtaxed rivers and fancy subdivisions.

Given all of this, “enlibra” must refer to the balance sheets of corporations and their benefactors, making Leavitt a perfect fit for the Bush administration. Gov. Leavitt should come to D.C., but he should rent and not buy.

Once the public figures out what he and these other thugs are really up to, we can all borrow another phrase from the Romans — ciao — and get back to listening to Bill McKibben.

— John Passacantando is the executive director of Greenpeace USA, www.greenpeaceusa.org.