Interior Secretaries Reflect on Legacies During CU Series

By Wendy Worrall Redal

James Watt.

The name alone is enough to evoke a visceral response among seasoned environmentalists. They remember Watt as the abrasive Reagan-era Interior Secretary in the early 1980s, bent on opening vast tracts of Western public lands for extractive use and returning their control to the states.

James Watt, Interior Secretary from 1980 to 1983 under President Reagan. (Photo courtesy of Center of the American West)

Yet one Watt successor, a Democrat deeply at odds with Watt’s arch-conservative agenda, says he is “positively nostalgic” for the Watt years when compared to the environmental record of the current Bush Administration.

Bruce Babbitt, the centrist Arizona governor who headed Interior under President Clinton from 1993-2001, told a University of Colorado audience on April 20th that Watt “awakened the American people to the need to talk back.”

Despite Watt’s tough rhetoric, though, “not a lot changed,” said Babbitt. “This administration is exactly the opposite. It’s not being done in a frontal fashion but in an incremental way, chipping, chipping, chipping…through technicalities, jargon, minutiae.”

Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton's Interior Secretary from 1993 to 2001. (Photo/Center of the American West)

Babbitt cited marginal changes in the Clean Water Act, for example, that are gradually eroding it while at the same time the administration issues press releases touting “improved administration of the Clean Water Act.” Along with Bush’s “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” initiatives, the environment is being damaged through “incredibly subtle means” that are presented in terms that mask the real intent of regulatory changes, according to Babbitt.

Both Babbitt and Watt visited the Boulder campus as part of the “Inside Interior” series hosted by CU’s Center of the American West and The Nature Conservancy. The series features interviews with former Secretaries of the Interior, whose philosophies and policies have been integral in shaping the face of public lands in the West.

Watt met with the Ted Scripps Fellows, Center for Environmental Journalism staff and graduate students on Jan. 10. He took issue with the way his administration has been characterized, contending that a hostile Washington press corps had not told the truth about his accomplishments.

“If I believed what the press said about Jim Watt, I’d hate him,” he said. Yet he claimed that “in every environmental arena the lands are being better managed” since he was in office. “We’re seeing the restoration of air, land and water values” that are in harmony with human needs.

Watt said he and President Reagan were “conservationists” in the “classic school of [former Forest Service head] Gifford Pinchot.” He defined conservation as “the proper use of the resources for the benefit of the people” both now and in the future. Watt contrasted that approach with the “new philosophy of preservation,” one he thinks tilts the balance too far away from people and their needs. When he took office after a decade of major environmental legislation moves, Watt said that balance was far askew.

“The essence of Western Civilization is that man has dignity above all,” according to Watt. It is that basic tenet, he said, which underlies his approach to environmental issues.

“I would be willing to flood a canyon in the Rocky Mountains so that you would have water in Boulder to drink, even if it killed some animals and destroyed some land,” he said.

He agreed that conservation efforts might ward off the necessity of such tradeoffs, but said they need to be “prompted through market-driven initiatives,” not coercive measures.

“The way to get people to conserve water is to get rid of the subsidies. Kentucky bluegrass in the desert is there because water is cheap,” Watt said.

Secretary Babbitt, on the other hand, argued for the importance of legal and administrative means to ensure environmental protection.

“You have to have a legislative stick to get anywhere,” Babbitt said. “Once you have the power, the legal authority, it’s then imperative…to work to reconcile competing interests in the best way that’s compatible with the legal objective we’re here to enforce.”

Bringing disparate voices together to talk about how to achieve objectives is essential for political success, according to Babbitt. He took such an approach to the Northwest Forest Plan, Clinton’s mandate to create a scientifically driven ecosystem plan to protect 200 species on public lands. To do that, Babbitt said, he insisted that jurisdictional boundaries and agency badges were “left at the door” when it came time to engage in joint planning.

On occasion, however, Babbitt encouraged the protection of special tracts of land through administrative fiat. A vivid example was the creation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, achieved through Clinton’s use of the 1906 Antiquities Act. A provision in the act grants the President the right to declare as national monuments “objects of historic or scientific interest” on federal lands.

Grand Staircase was really “a product of Dick Morris,” Babbitt revealed, the dramatic environmental initiative that the Clinton pollster said would make a big political impact. While Babbitt said “congressional legislation is vastly preferential to a presidential decree,” he acknowledged the practical value of the “creative forcing” possible through his close relationship with the president.

By Clinton’s second term, Babbitt saw that the way forward on environmental issues was to appeal to the president’s desire for a legacy. At one point he showed Clinton a tally between himself and Theodore Roosevelt comparing their records on acreage set aside for preservation.

“I put their names side by side on a card,” Babbitt recalled, suggesting to Clinton that he could outdo his storied predecessor when it came to protecting land for parks and monuments.

“That was the moment,” Babbitt said. “It was not environment, it was legacy…From that point on I had a mandate.”

It was a mandate in sync with Babbitt’s own sense of a legacy for the American people, one dedicated to “preserving ecosystems [and] protecting creation in all its glory.”

“Multiple use is not the right image for public lands,” he told a receptive audience. Currently, Babbitt said, “the primary purpose of public lands is to drill for oil and gas everywhere. It’s an outrage.

“We can’t drill our way out of this cul-de-sac,” he said, arguing that it was not worth ruining the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Colorado Plateau “for a few more weeks” of energy use. Longer-term approaches to energy are essential for a sustainable future, according to Babbitt.

“Climate change is the most ominous environmental threat we face in this century…We have to take dramatic steps to get off of fossil fuels,” he said. He contended that the U.S. must look to nuclear power to “bridge across to a future of renewable energy.”

The only alternative would be to cut our energy use by 75 percent, Babbitt said, “and that isn’t going to happen.” In terms of hard choices, “coal emissions vastly outweigh nuclear risks” in terms of environmental hazards, in his view.

But Babbitt worries the American people aren’t concerned enough about the problem of global warming to make the tough decisions required. He commended the public on mobilizing well in crises, but “short of a galvanizing crisis we’re a society of happy complacency,” a condition that isn’t well suited for responding to “slowly emerging problems like global warming.”

If we continue to do nothing, however, Babbitt suggested a vision of the near future: “There will be no glaciers left in Glacier Park in my lifetime. The Arctic will be a bluewater ocean.” When the snow pack in the Rockies disappears and there is no more “timed sequential release” into reservoirs, “it will be chaos in the watershed of the Colorado River,” and “the Colorado ski industry will have to move to Montana.

“And we can’t even muster our elected leaders to do anything about automobile efficiency,” Babbitt said with a note of despair. “Overnight we could double our fuel economy to 40 miles per gallon and cut our fossil fuel use in half…but our political system is unresponsive.”

Yet he is not without optimism. He spoke of the success of the wolf reinroduction program in Yellowstone, launched in 1995 while he was Secretary. It showed that restoring ecosystems was possible, he said.

In a region where the elk population was “out of control, the wolves just electrified the place,” said Babbitt, who also noted that riparian systems have come back, and beaver and aspen are flourishing.

The wolf, to Babbitt, is “the elegant bearer of a message I want to be heard in the West — of dominant public servitude of public lands.”

For Babbitt, protecting threatened ecosystems is paramount. “The wolf is saying, ‘I have the first right to be here.’ Ranchers will have to learn to make sacrifices.”

Two secretaries, two eras: much historical perspective.

The current Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, is expected to conclude the interview series sometime this fall. The date and time are yet to be announced but will be noted on the Center of the American West’s web site, www.centerwest.org, when they are set.

For transcripts of the previous secretaries’ CU-Boulder talks, go to www.headwatersnews.org/interior.html