As Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton oversees a sweeping range of public land in the United States, most of it in the West. Her jurisdiction includes all of America's national parks and monuments, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Much of the country's most spectacular wilderness lies within Interior's purview. One-third of the nation's coal, oil and natural gas supplies also come from Interior-managed lands, while 60 percent of U.S. produce production is grown with reclamation-project water.
How to balance the country's resource needs versus conservation is the key challenge for the future, Norton told a packed crowd at the University of Colorado at Boulder on November 23, 2004. Her visit capped the "Inside Interior" series, which featured previous interviews with former Interior secretaries on their role in shaping the West's public lands. The series was co-sponsored by CU's Center of the American West, The Nature Conservancy, and the Denver law firm of Brownstein, Hyatt and Farber, where Norton was employed as senior counsel before becoming Secretary.
The challenges for the Interior department are growing as "more and more people move closer in to our Western lands," Norton said. "We have more and more requirements that people want to see met from our Western lands." Those challenges must be met, she said, "in a way that addresses people's needs and protects those great areas.
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| Interior Secretary Gale Norton spoke at CU on Nov. 23 (Photo/DOI). |
"It's not always popular to say we have to face reality…We have to provide energy from some place. We have to provide recreation that some people love and some people don't like. We have a great puzzle trying to figure out how you can find the best spots for all of those activities to take place."
As conflict grows, so does the need to collaborate and seek consensus, according to Norton.
"We have to get people to sit down and find common ground…to find solutions. That's what I've tried to bring to the Department of the Interior." She calls her motto, aimed at that goal, the "Four Cs": "communication, consultation and cooperation, all in the service of conservation."
But the meaning of conservation is itself open to debate, observed CU history professor Patricia Limerick as she introduced Norton.
"The definition of conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's time and the definition of conservation in our time is one of the big questions we've been pursuing in this series, especially in reappraising the role of utilitarian values and preservationist values in the practice of conservation," Limerick said.
She asked Norton to respond to critics' views that the Four Cs are "a smokescreen, a way of taking our eyes off the fact that industry will probably come out ahead." Norton insisted that conservation efforts can and must take into account the complex interests of varied parties, in a manner that both protects the environment and supports society's economic needs.
"I think you can find that if you have an atmosphere that encourages people to be creative in their approaches to solving problems. If you get people to understand each other's perspectives. If you have ways of trying to meet a lot of different goals at the same time. I think you can find that best if you can get people to actually sit down and talk with each other."
Norton said she is convinced that involving local voices is essential to successful outcomes. "It gives us the ability to fine-tune things…to find ways to reconcile some of the problems," she said.
She pointed to success with farmers and ranchers in protecting prairie dogs.
"Endangered species for most farmers and ranchers is a very negative concept," Norton said. At a town hall meeting she attended in South Dakota, ranchers told her that the year prairie dogs were first considered for listing as an endangered species, the sale of prairie dog poison doubled. "Clearly that is not the result we want from endangered species protection," Norton said.
Instead, Interior programs have provided funding and technical assistance for landowners to restore or enhance habitat on their property. "It really taps into people's usual enthusiasm about wildlife, and it gets people involved in protection of endangered species in a very positive way," Norton said. "That's the kind of thing that we're trying to do."
Norton also highlighted progress on air pollution through using technical innovations to create a positive environmental outcome.
"When we originally came in with the Clean Air laws, we started mandating you have to have this kind of pollution-control technology on your smokestack. Well, if we had stuck with that approach, people would comfortably be installing 1975 pollution control equipment, and saying, 'OK, that's over. We solved that.'
"What we instead learned is that you need to have programs that encourage people to develop new technologies, to advance in a way that we find environmental solutions. So we go through things like emissions training and performance and results-based approaches; we have used American ingenuity to solve environmental problems. I think you can do that with land-based issues as well."
"There's a lot you can do to harness technology to solve problems," Norton said. People tend to think of 1920s-era oil wells when we speak of energy development, she explained, "yet when you compare that with what is being used in some of the most advanced sites today, they are using directional drilling from a place on the surface to reach miles underground so there's no effect for miles on the surface."
Norton contends such new approaches will greatly mitigate the environmental impact of drilling for oil and gas in environmentally sensitive places like Colorado's Roan Plateau and Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, projects she is solidly behind.
While President Bush's national energy plan also calls for conservation via greater automobile fuel efficiency, Norton sees drilling in ANWR as integral to the country's energy future.
"ANWR is our largest potential source of onshore oil in the country," Norton said, and "oil is part of our future at least for the near term."
While 1.5 million acres of ANWR will be focused on for energy production, according to Norton, she said only 2,000 acres will be discernibly impacted. Limiting the number of roads to serve multiple wells, grouping well heads together, and using directional drilling are among the approaches planned to reduce the environmental footprint, according to Norton.
"I believe that it can go forward in an environmentally responsible way," Norton said, eliciting vocal guffaws from a number of audience members who continued to pose tough questions on the issue to the secretary during a question-and-answer period following her interview.
The secretary was also challenged on her assertion that emissions trading is an effective market-based way to reduce air pollution and potential climate change effects.
"You can't trade emissions of mercury," remarked audience member Jack Twombly, CU professor emeritus of electrical engineering and a harsh critic of Norton and the Bush Administration's record on environmental issues.
Ultimately, however, Norton said she is committed to market approaches to solving environmental problems. "I tend to come from a fairly libertarian perspective," she said, which provides the philosophical base for the way she addresses issues as secretary. "That's a part of why I try to find approaches that are not government-coercion-based. I favor approaches that favor human freedom, human creativity."
"Market forces," Norton said, "establish…a way for people to be creative as they're making decisions about environmental protections. So it's not just top-down regulation after regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency. It is people who are given a standard they need to meet and can come up with all kinds of different ways to meet that standard.
"Similarly, it's not a question of how much. Do we want to have more or less endangered species protection? That's not the issue. The question is whether you want to have people enthusiastic about protecting endangered species or if you want to have a system that is based on a very punitive approach.
"Yes, there are people who violate environmental laws. There are people who shoot endangered species or poach endangered species. For them the punitive, criminal justice approach is the right approach. But for people of good will trying to solve problems, trying to find ways of having an alternative to a regulatory mandate coming from Washington, I think, is a very good way of protecting the environment."
Whether or not such collaborative approaches are indeed effective, or effective enough, is a matter clearly open to debate, evidenced by the at-times heated exchanges between Norton and her audience members.
Clearly, however, Norton was on target when she noted "the Department of the Interior is a microcosm for a lot of the changes that take place in our culture…a lot of the pressures that exist in the West and affect all of our lifestyles in the West.
"Different people have different ideas about what would be ideal for our millions and millions of acres that we manage. The great thing is that people care so passionately about our lands. The worst thing is for people to quit caring. We appreciate the debate because it shows how much people care about our lands."
A full transcript of Norton's interview is available on the Headwaters News web site. Transcripts of the other Interior secretaries' conversations at the University of Colorado are also available on the site.
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