If you care about the state of the natural environment, you may be interested in finding out how your representatives in Congress voted on environmental issues in the past year.

Well, you can do just that by checking out the newly released National Environmental Scorecard, a rating of Congress members voting records compiled by the League of Conservation Voters.

The ratings are available at http://scorecard.lcv.org. The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is a bipartisan organization representing more than nine million members of national environmental and conservation groups and has been rating voting records every year since 1970. The ratings are compiled by experts from 27 respected mainstream environmental groups who selected the key votes on which Members of Congress would be graded.

According to the League of Conservation Voters, the on-line scorecard offers individualized pages for all 535 Members of Congress and the entire House and Senate. You can even use a zip code “look-up” feature to easily determine your Representatives and Senators.

According to the web site, the 1997 National Environmental Scorecard rates each member of Congress on the most important environmental votes cast during the First Session of the 105th Congress. Full descriptions of the key legislation and votes are also available on the web site.

The rating system ranges from a 100 percent score — indicating the strongest voting record in support of the environment — to a 0 percent score, which shows consistent voting against environmental protection.

I decided to check out how Iowa’s representatives scored.

Tom Harkin, our Democratic U.S. Senator, faired the best with a score of 86%. Republican Senator Charles Grassley’s voting record didn’t fair quite as well, rating an embarrassing 0%.

To find out how our senators compared to the rest of the Senate, I checked the entire Senate’s ratings average. It was 43%, almost right in the middle of our two Senators’ scores.

Next, I checked Iowa members of the House voting records. Iowa has five members in the House of Representatives: Republicans Jim Leach, Greg Ganske, Tom Latham and Jim Nussle and Democrat Leonard Boswell.

Surprisingly, the Democrat in this bunch did not have the highest voting record. In fact, he didn’t even have the second highest of the five. Boswell came in at a disappointing third with a rating of 31%.

I voted for Boswell two years ago, but I’ll be honest — he’s lost my vote. If I were in his district, I would vote for Jim Leach. He’s a moderate Republican who is willing to get things done and even co-sponsored a bill to end subsidization of logging in National Forests.

I already liked him, but I like him even more after seeing his League of Conservation Voters rating: 69%. Not bad for a Republican!

Iowa’s other Republican Representatives didn’t have such impressive ratings. Greg Ganske was rated 38% (not great, but better than Democrat Boswell) while Tom Latham and Jim Nussle were rated a mere 13%.

Just for comparison’s sake, I decided to check the scores of two well known members of Congress on each side of the political spectrum.

Senator Edward Kennedy, long known for his Democratic liberalism, rated an impressive 100%.

Representative and House Speaker Newt Gingrich rated a negative one percent. Kind of funny, but not too surprising.

Even if you don’t feel strongly about environmental issues, remember that an informed electorate is a powerful electorate. I encourage everyone to visit this site to get facts about key legislation and voting records.

And, as the web site says: Tell your representative you know their score.

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Jonquil Wegmann is a senior in community and regional planning from Bellevue.