What's Gale Norton Trying to Hide?

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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What's Gale Norton Trying to Hide?

By Weston Kosova


	Illustration by Roberto Parada

George W. Bush's Secretary of the Interior keeps a low profile, keeps her mouth shut, and never picks a fight. Don't mistake her for a stiff, though. As the steward of 507 million public acres, she has deftly combined an aggressive, pro-extraction agenda and the Bush administration's wartime clout to steamroll environmentalists. With the big battle over Arctic oil drilling still to come, her fierce partisanship draws comparisons to her onetime mentor, James Watt, but there's a crucial difference: Norton knows how to win.

GALE NORTON'S PRIVATE OFFICE sits on the sixth floor of the U.S. Department of the Interior, a sprawling limestone pile a few blocks southwest of the White House. The space is almost cartoonishly ostentatious, with its soaring ceilings, paneled oak walls, and enough square feet to swallow up the Oval Office with room to spare.

In Washington, the usual way to handle overwhelming surroundings is to make them part of your act: Welcome to my power vortex—feel free to be intimidated. But Norton's style, as I learned during a recent interview, is to be underwhelming, unpretentious, very polite, and so careful about her phrasing that she can sound like she's reciting from cue cards.

It's hard to blame her for being wary. Environmentalists have vilified Norton from the moment she was nominated to be the 48th Secretary of the Interior, in January 2001, labeling her "James Watt in a skirt" and howling that her pro-extraction and anti-regulation convictions hearkened back to the darkest days of the Reagan administration, when Watt ruled Interior for three stormy years. For a while, her detractors were handcuffed by the don't-criticize-the-president mood that prevailed in Washington after September 11, but that's over now.

"The environmental community made a decision after the terrorist attacks to stand down," says Dave Alberswerth, 53, an Interior official in the Clinton administration who now handles land issues for the Washington, D.C.-based Wilderness Society, one of America's oldest conservation groups. "Then we found out the other side wasn't. The war on terrorism became a rationale for their energy goals. The push to open public lands took on new importance."

In response, Norton's political adversaries are once again on the march, and the Interior Secretary is heading into a summer of hostile scrutiny on Capitol Hill. Democrats are especially worked up over George W. Bush's most controversial goal: to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the sacrosanct swath of Alaskan tundra that shelters polar bears and caribou—and that happens to sit atop a sizable pool of precious crude. Smelling brinksmanship, the media have started piling on. Over the last few months, The New York Times has set the tone with depth-charge editorials criticizing Bush's policies on everything from allowing snowmobiles in Yellowstone to greenlighting oil exploration in Utah's red-rock wildlands. One was ominously headlined "Landscapes Under Siege."

In this semitoxic atmosphere, Norton's aides strain to protect her from any risk of pummeling. Her main media handler is Mark Pfeifle, a hip 29-year-old with the jittery aspect of someone who hears the phone ringing but dreads picking it up. He does everything he can to insert his boss into safe and picturesque Ranger Rick settings—splashing around in the Everglades, posing with the president among towering redwoods. When Norton opens her mouth in public, it usually happens at carefully controlled events where she talks about creatures, natural wonders, and her devotion to compromise with environmentalists. Pfeifle is hyperaware of the potential for PR disaster, and before I meet Norton, he asks, only half-kidding: "Am I going to like this story?"

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