Five years ago, the Interior
Department, which oversees one-quarter of the nation’s land,
9,000 employees and nine federal agencies, appeared to have turned
a corner. Outgoing Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had just pulled
off a remarkable conservation offensive, getting his boss, Bill
Clinton, to create and expand more than a dozen national monuments
in the West. The monuments capped the Babbitt team’s many
efforts, from trying to reform the 1872 Mining Law to implementing
habitat protection plans for imperiled species living in the path
of growth.
So thoroughly had Babbitt pushed conservation
that when Gale Norton, a former attorney general from Colorado,
took over the reins in 2001, several pundits predicted that she
would have a difficult time dismantling a “reborn” Interior
Department.
But that’s not how things worked out.
Within months, Babbitt’s mining rules were laid to
waste, the National Park Service was pressured to reverse its ban
on snowmobiles in Yellowstone, and plans were laid to open up
potential Bureau of Land Management wilderness areas in the
Rockies, as well as the Arctic Refuge, to oil and gas development.
Directives from Norton’s office made leasing and drilling on
public lands as “streamlined” as ordering a meal at a drive-through
restaurant.
Norton, the first woman to serve as Secretary
of Interior, sat at the center of this counter-revolution, yet she
was hardly noticeable. Though she showed up for the occasional
photo-op, she rarely mixed it up with Western constituencies the
way Babbitt did. Her undersecretaries, especially the now-departed
J. Steven Griles, often played more central roles in the push to
open public lands to energy companies. Even in the one area where
conservationists give her credit — pushing the states that
use Colorado River water to come up with a drought plan —
Norton played the role of catalyst more than innovator.
She adopted a language that suited her retiring nature and
counterbalanced her department’s hard-edged advocacy for
development. In her infrequent interviews with the media, she
touted the Four C’s: communication, consultation and
cooperation, all in the service of conservation. Even as she
sidestepped questions about local opposition to drilling in
sensitive areas, she pointed proudly to new monies Interior was
making available to private landowners to protect wildlife habitat.
But Norton’s record in the areas she said she cared
about the most — private lands conservation, market-based
environmentalism and local collaboration — was uneven. She
held the first-ever White House Conference on Cooperative
Conservation but passed up opportunities to foster cooperation on
the ground. Norton nixed a locally supported plan to reintroduce
grizzly bears in the Idaho wilderness, and she backed away from
allowing willing ranchers to sell their grazing permits to
conservation groups.
Under Norton’s watch, the Land
and Water Conservation Fund, the largest single source of money for
land purchases, trades and conservation easements, dried up, even
as its funding from offshore oil and gas drilling revenues
increased.
It’s fair to say that Gale Norton will
not be remembered as a visionary Interior Secretary. At the same
time, she may be remembered for her role in advancing the cause of
progressive politics in the West.
In pockets around the
region, a new coalition of conservation-minded Westerners has
emerged, especially near the red-hot gas fields of Colorado,
Wyoming, Montana, Utah and New Mexico. It includes ranchers and
farmers, realtors and retirees, hunters and environmentalists,
newcomers and oldtimers, who understand that the only way to
protect the places they love is to band together. Call it the
Quality of Life coalition.
Ironically, it is what Babbitt
assumed was already in place a dozen years ago. It’s what
surfaced in the 2004 elections in Colorado and Montana, with the
election of pro-conservation lawmakers in the state Legislatures
and Congress. It’s also what’s likely to appear in
force again at the mid-term elections in 2006.
Meanwhile,
President Bush’s nominee to replace Norton, Idaho Gov. Dirk
Kempthorne, is no friend of the environmental community. Yet the
former U.S. Senator would be wise to consider the demographic
shifts that are remaking the economic, social and political fabric
of the West. If he has any slack in that tight White House leash,
he might want to meet the Westerners who make up the Quality of
Life coalition. They’d tell him that the federal
government’s mad rush to drill for gas leaves no room for
private land values, wildlife, wilderness or just plain common
sense.
Paul Larmer is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News. He is the
paper’s publisher in Paonia,
Colorado.
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