Parks Project Unveils Mongolia's Natural Treasures

By Wendy Worrall Redal

Even the most well-traveled vagabonds have likely never heard of Altai Tavaan Bogd National Park. Tucked away on the far western fringe of Mongolia, near the juncture of Kazakhstan, China and Siberia, lies a one and half million-acre reserve where glaciated peaks rise more than 14,000 feet above some of the most pristine lakes in the world.

Altai Tavaan Bogd National Park (Photo/Ted Wood)

The park's forests and tundra are home to many species, some endangered or rare, including snow leopards, wolves, argali mountain sheep, ibex and elk. Golden eagles soar above the mountain valleys, where nomadic herders train and use them in hunting, as ethnic Kazahks have done for centuries.

Several outfitters in Mongolia offer visitors the chance to explore this remote backcountry on horseback, stopping to hike through flower-filled meadows and along rivers tumbling with glacial till from ice-bound slopes above. Travelers may be invited to share a cup of mare's milk tea, Mongolia's most common form of hospitality, inside a local family's yurt, the traditional round, felt-covered dwelling most herder families call home.

Traditional Kazakh eagle hunter (Photo/Ted Wood)

Few tourists, even among "adventure travelers," have been privileged to see the Tavaan Bogd peaks, or Mongolia's other magnificent national parks, including Lake Khovsgol, perhaps the clearest lake on the planet. Only a few hundred thousand visitors come to Mongolia each year. That's changing, however, as word is getting out about the country's dramatic natural gifts.

That growing awareness, translated into more tourism that focuses on Mongolia's unique landscapes, may be the key to protecting Mongolia's threatened natural ecosystems. It's the intent at the heart of a novel project launched by two journalists, both alumni of CEJ programs, who are working to provide maps, postcards and interpretive guides for Mongolia's national parks. The goal is to enhance visitors' experiences through education and information while returning profits through the sale of such materials to conservation efforts in the parks.

Writer Jeremy Schmidt and photojournalist Ted Wood, longtime friends and professional colleagues, founded Conservation Ink in 2003, a not-for-profit organization based in Jackson Hole, Wyo., as an avenue to "give back" to the world's threatened natural places they've built most of their careers covering, Wood said.

Their mission is to help developing countries protect their parks through funds made available from publications produced by Conservation Ink, not unlike the support for U.S. national parks that's provided by non-profit associations that return profits from visitor center book and gift shops back to the parks.

Wood was a Ted Scripps Fellow in 2001-02, and both Wood and Schmidt attended the 2001 Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment. It was during the Institute, in fact, that the first germ of their idea began to flower. Mongolia's then-environment minister, and D. Galbadrakh, director of the Mongolian Society for Environmental Education, were also attending the Institute. Wood and Schmidt struck up conversations with them, and learned of Mongolia's needs. Their imaginations began to take flight, and two years later, Conservation Ink was born.

Mongolia is Conservation Ink's pilot project. Like many developing countries, Mongolia's natural beauty and environmental health are threatened by a lack of financial resources. Struggling economically after the demise of the Soviet Union, the Mongolian government is looking to industrialization and resource development as paths to a vital market economy and brighter economic future. Often, however, exploiting natural resources comes at the cost of destroying natural landscapes and fragile ecosystems.

Lake Khovsgol, in northern Mongolia, is one of the clearest, cleanest lakes in the world (Photo/Ted Wood)

Wood acknowledged that while Mongolia's government has made an impressive effort so far in setting aside land for protection, about 13 percent of its total area, the economic pull to go in the other direction is strong. Parks have to be able to pay for themselves if they are to survive.

That's where Conservation Ink comes in. If the group's effort can help prove that a sustainable tourism economy is possible, much of the battle will be won. To make that happen, though, people have to know about places like Altai Tavaan Bogd and Lake Khovsgol National Parks.

Those are the first two Mongolian destinations that Conservation Ink has produced materials for. With a seed grant from National Geographic, Wood and Schmidt took several field research trips to Mongolia, horsetrekking with local guides to experience, study and photograph the parks. They also spent time in the capital, making connections that would lead to the opening of an Ulaanbaatar-based sourcing and distribution office for Conservation Ink.

They brought the first sets of map-guides and postcards back to Mongolia to distribute in the fall of 2004, where they are being sold to park visitors and in shops in Ulaanbaatar. CI is also connecting with tour operators, so they can make the materials available to their clients. The publications will help build regional tourism economies, where infrastructure is also a problem, as well as spreading the word (and images) of Mongolia worldwide through sales over the Internet.

Schmidt and Wood are actively pursuing the additional financial support CI needs to continue its Mongolia work and expand into other countries. Other donors, including USAID, have come on board as word of the non-profit's mission meets a receptive audience.

The initial maps and postcards produced by Wood and Schmidt are gorgeous. The text is enlightening and the photography stunning. Take a first-hand look at them on Conservation Ink's web site, www.conservationink.org, where you can also read in greater detail about the organization and its activities.

Look for an update in the fall edition of CEJ News/Views on Conservation Ink's continuing work in Mongolia during the summer of 2005.

Norton Seeks 'Common Ground' on Conservation Issues

By Wendy Worrall Redal

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.

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.

Ancient Ice May Be Key to Understanding Modern Climate Change

By Wendy Worrall Redal

When Ted Scripps Fellows come to Colorado to study, they don’t typically expect to be surrounded by polar ice in 40-below temperatures, even in January.

But such was the case when fellows visited the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, Colo., on a program field trip. Here, though, the ice was locked inside thousands of thin silver cylinders in a freezer unit within the vast suburban complex that is the Denver Federal Center. Inside each cylinder are data that provide scientists with records of ancient climate patterns.

Scripps Fellows & CEJ staff shiver inside the ice freezer. (Photo/John Kotlowski)

The freezer is at the center of the National Ice Core Laboratory, a facility for storing, curating and studying ice cores recovered from the polar ice sheets and high mountain glaciers of the world. The lab is jointly operated funded by the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation.

Its purpose is to get information about the climate history of the Earth, obtained by studying the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere over time. Through analyzing gases in air bubbles trapped in the layers of compressed ice, scientists can reconstruct past climate states of the Earth, including temperature changes over millennia.

The lab’s technical director, Todd Hinkley, explained that studying past climate fluctuations can help scientists better understand the factors that prompt such shifts and potentially help them predict future climate change.

Ice core samples are more thorough than other means of assessing climate history, including tree rings, coral and sediments from the ocean floor. The lab’s web site explains that “an ice core from the right site can contain an uninterrupted, detailed climate record extending back hundreds of thousands of years. This record can include temperature, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity and a variety of other climate indicators. It is the simultaneity of these properties recorded in the ice that makes ice cores such a powerful tool in paleoclimate research.”

Geoff Hargreaves, the lab’s curator, served as the fellows’ tour guide through the lab. Sporting a ponytail that reaches to the middle of his back and a long, wavy gray beard, Hargreaves looks like a modern-day biblical patriarch. The facial hair comes in handy, he acknowledged, when every bit of extra warmth is welcome for someone who spends as much time as he does in sub-zero temperatures.

National Ice Core Lab curator Geoff Hargreaves sports a rime-coated beard. (Photo/John Kotlowski)

Hargreaves helped fellows don heavy parkas for their foray into the freezer, stacked to the ceiling with shelves of cylinders containing the unique collection that Hargreaves oversees. Once inside, his beard hairs were quickly coated in white frost as he explained how the ice core samples made their way from the Earth’s most remote regions to the Lakewood warehouse.

Polar core samples are obtained from Antarctica and Greenland, drilled from deep sheets of ancient ice that has never melted. Greenland samples offer 1/4 million years of data, while Antarctic cores reveal at least 1/2 million years of information and the ability to extrapolate much farther back.

The oldest site is Vostok in Antarctica, where cores have been drilled to a depth of 3,623 meters, or 2 1/4 miles. Beneath the Vostok ice sheet lies a 1,000-meter-deep ancient lake the size of Lake Ontario, created when the weight of the ice above exerted pressure so strong that the friction melted the lowest layers.

The lab, which is the most comprehensive storage facility of its kind in the world, has more than 14,000 meters of ice available for scientists to examine. The cores, which are 3 to 5.2 inches in diameter, are obtained via a lengthy and expensive drilling process. Gas bubbles do not begin to form until the ice is 60 to 100 meters deep, and it can take three to four years to drill a very deep core at a cost of $20,000 per meter, according to Hargreaves. The deepest cores have been drilled to bedrock.

Antarctica’s severe climate allows drilling only during the southern summer from October through January. The last flight out is at the end of February, when the ice cores are loaded onto a ship bound northward.

Preserving them until they reach Colorado is an involved process. The cores are cut into 1-meter pieces, sealed in plastic bags labeled liberally with arrows to note the “up end,” put into silver tubes to reflect heat-inducing light, then placed into insulated shipping containers and stored under the snowpack until it’s time to transport them. The ice must remain at -15º C or colder once it is out of the ground or the gases within will begin to migrate.

The containers are flown aboard a ski-equipped LC130 airplane to McMurdo Station by a frigid pilot who must fly without heat in order to keep the ice cold enough. There, it is loaded into a freezer on board ship and brought to Port Hueneme, Calif., where it is moved onto freezer trucks and taken to the National Ice Core Lab in Lakewood. Each truck is accompanied by an empty truck that is kept cold, in order to transfer the ice in case of an accident or breakdown. Hargreaves explained that it’s cheaper to pay $2,000 for an extra truck than to lose a single meter of ice, which costs $3,000-$20,000 per meter to obtain.

Once the ice cores are safely ensconced in the lab’s freezer, they are available for scientists to study, either at the lab or another research site. Pieces of ice are sent out in vacuum-insulated boxes that keep the ice at -20º C for a week, in any ambient temperature.

Researchers may examine the ice in solid condition or melt it in order to do core gas analysis. In any case, they receive only a piece of the core sample, not the whole diameter, in order to leave a good portion of it as archive. An archive of the entire Vostok core is kept at the lab, Hargreaves said, since it is the coldest and safest repository in the world.

Paleoclimatologists such as Jim White, a University of Colorado geology professor and scientist with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, rely upon core samples from the National Ice Core Lab to further their knowledge of what causes climatic shifts. White spoke to the Ted Scripps Fellows about his research during a seminar leading up to the fellows’ visit to the lab.

White is particularly interested in rapid climate change. The evidence he has uncovered suggests that temperature fluctuations sometimes occur as abrupt spikes, rather than gradual trends.

White’s research team has studied ice samples from the Siple Dome core in Antarctica to deduce that air temperatures there rose up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just a few decades as the last ice age began to wane some 19,000 years ago, the largest and most abrupt warming spike ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

The timing of the warming correlates with an abrupt sea-level rise documented by researchers at Australian National University and with less dramatic warming increases seen in the Byrd and Vostok ice cores from Antarctica.

“The signal we see in the Siple Dome core is so strong, we can speculate it may have been the trigger area for the end of the glacial period,” White said. Because of its coastal location, Siple Dome would have been climatically sensitive to events like partial collapses of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would have caused seas to rise globally.

Understanding events like these can help climatologists get a better grasp on the matrix of forces that influence climate change, especially as they seek to discern the more recent role of human beings in global warming. The ancient ice samples stored at the national Ice Core Laboratory are providing some of the keys to unlock those complex mysteries.

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

Stewart Udall Inaugurates Interior Secretaries Speaker Series at CU

By Amanda Leigh Haag

“Rock Star.” “Dashing.”

Not the usual way one would describe a self-confessed farm boy with the southwestern high desert in his blood. But that’s exactly how colleagues characterized the charismatic former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall when he spoke Sept. 24 at the University of Colorado’s Glenn Miller Ballroom. Udall opened the 2003-2004 series on the role of Secretaries of the Interior in shaping the American West. The event was hosted by The Center of the American West in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.

Udall spoke to a packed auditorium about his 1961-1969 terms as secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and his role as champion of the American environmental movement. He humbly credited his vision and success to “leadership coming up from the grass roots” and “a country that was ready for it.”

Laced throughout Udall’s acknowledgement of his landmark environmental legislation was an impassioned gratitude for the “wonderful bipartisan politics” of the 1960s. Udall is known for initiating the Clean Air Act and the Wilderness Act, among other pieces of landmark environmental legislation, and for valiantly withdrawing mining and homesteading claims to protect Native American rights.

Dressed sharply with a classic bolo tie, 83-year-old Udall’s appearance and his down-to-earth demeanor reflected his Western heritage. Charles Wilkinson, co-founder of The Center of the American West, aptly quoted Udall as he introduced him by saying, “When you grow up in a small farming town and you raise your own food, you’re close to the ground and close to the animals.”

Udall later reflected on being a “Depression kid,” brought up on the principle that “the country’s better off when the community is more important than the individual.” These all-American values shaped his politics and his dedication to the environmental movement, according to Udall.

Interior Secretary Udall with President Kennedy. (Photo courtesy of the Stewart Lee Udall Collection, University of Arizona.)

Throughout the evening, Udall credited his legislative success to the political climate of the 1960s, during which he had an open slate to work with. Kennedy, preoccupied with the Cold War, handed full rein to Udall to manage natural resources.

Udall discredited the assumption that legislation must come from the “top down” in order to command action in government, at least during his terms. “Did the initiative come from the government? It came from the streets. They just burst in my door, and that was a wonderful time,” he said.

Udall’s repeated praise of the utopian bipartisan politics of the 1960s contrasted sharply with his opinion of the rise of partisan opposition that followed. In a question-and-answer session afterward, Udall reflected on the current state of polarized politics and its obstruction to environmental legislation. He asked solemnly, “Do you hear the words ‘Leave behind a legacy’ much today?”

Quoting the “Ask not” inaugural address of President Kennedy, Udall pointed out that the theme of Congress today is “What tax breaks can we get?” not “Is it good for the country, the people?”

But with character living up to his celebrated introduction, Udall ended on an optimistic note, imploring the younger generation to “just demand action” and to “ask what you can do for your community.”

Amanda Haag is a master’s student in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado and a student associate of the university’s Carbon, Climate and Society Initiative.

Lawyers say Activist Judges are Undoing Environmental Protections

By Kathleen O'Neil

Several Supreme Court judges have recently narrowed their interpretation of important environmental laws that had allowed federal agencies to protect disappearing habitats and species. One such decision has left federal agencies unable to protect wetlands, as they had for 30 years, and no new law is in sight to restore those protections.

A panel of lawyers discussed the trend Oct. 12 at the Society of Environmental Journalists 12th Annual Conference in Baltimore. They said while some states- and landowner-rights activists applaud the new interpretations, the change could have a big impact on at-risk species.

"Little-known decisions have put environmental regulatory protection of wetlands and endangered species at risk through court activism," said Eric Glitzenstein, an environmental attorney based in Washington, D.C. "Extreme conservatives who get that chance are trying to re-make the law," he said.

Judges engage in activism when they strike out in a new direction in interpreting laws passed by Congress, something liberal judges have traditionally been accused of using to broaden environmental laws, he said. But several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions are reversing that.

Steve Nickelsburg, also an attorney for a D.C. law firm, explained that many environmental protections evolved from a clause in the U.S. Constitution that grants Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce. Since pollution, habitats and animals do not recognize state boundaries, and have economic implications, the federal government's right to regulate and protect them has usually fallen under this clause, he said.

Federal protections for wetlands, for instance, were established in 1972 as part of the Army Corps of Engineers' right to control dredging and filling of navigable waters in addition to the Environmental Protection Agency's wetland protections under the Clean Water Act.

"Over the last 25 years, the Corps and the EPA expanded it to cover areas further and further upstream," Nickelsburg said. However, a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling last year invalidated the Corps's authority to protect isolated, non-navigable waters and wetlands used by migratory birds.

"The court said Congress didn't intend to protect migratory birds," Nickelsburg said. The recent decision allows the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) to fill more than 200 small ponds and lakes to create a large municipal landfill, according to a National Resources Defense Council report to which Glitzenstein contributed.

The court's decision indicates that Congress should create a specific wetlands protection statute, instead of leaving wetlands under the Clean Water Act's protection of navigatable waters, Nickelsburg said.

Glitzenstien said he and other environmentalists are very concerned about the long-lasting, permanent effects the new interpretation will have on wetlands throughout the country.

"As a result of this Supreme Court decision, we are losing thousands and thousands of acres of wetlands," he said, since no state regulations are being created to take over their protection.

The Supreme Court is also scheduled to hear a similar case this year that may indicate the court's intent to also cut back on the Clean Water Act's protections, according to Steve Quarles, an environmental attorney practicing in Washington, D.C.

"Much of our law is not specific enough to not allow extensive judicial interpretation," Quarles said, but added he doesn't think there is enough political support now to create stronger environmental laws, because landowners don't want to have to restrict development or make modifications at their own cost to protect species.

"The federal government doesn't want to coerce landowners to save habitat," Quarles said. "The only other choice you have is to pay for it, with a dedicated source of funds to protects those lands and those species."

Patrick Parenteau, professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont Law School, agrees there is little political support for a new national wetlands law or even new state laws.

"Thirty-five states have no laws protecting wetlands; 15 states do have them. The ones that don't want to pass them haven't," Parenteau said. Of the nation's 105 million acres of wetlands, 60 percent could fall under the SWANCC decision as isolated waters that are no longer protected, he said.

The best alternative, said Glitzenstein, is to educate people about judicial activism and to encourage them to participate in elections of judges.

"Judges can be from many backgrounds, but their alignment with a particular ideology - like when private property rights and maximizing profits are held more highly than other rights including community rights, or the Endangered Species Act - these are fundamental beliefs that should be debated in the open," Glizenstein said.

Kathleen O'Neil is a Master's student in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado at Boulder.