What's Gale Norton Trying to Hide? (Cont.)

Outside Magazine June 2002

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What's Gale Norton Trying to Hide? (Cont.)

NORTON GREETS ME at her office door at three o'clock sharp. There's no entourage, just her, tall and fit at 48, her unruly silver-streaked hair trained into a prim coif. We take our places on two huge stuffed sofas in the center of the room. Pfeifle hovers in the background. Flashing a smile that conveys both curiosity and intense skepticism, Norton says, "So, what would you like to talk about?"

What I'd like to talk about is environmental policy, and the career path that led Norton to take over a powerful federal bureaucracy that oversees 507 million acres of wilderness, national parks, monuments, endangered-species habitats, and other public lands—in all, nearly a fifth of the country's landmass—with command and control distributed among the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and a fistful of other agencies.

Other shrink-the-government politicians attack welfare or rally to pass tax cuts. Why, I ask Norton, has she made stalking environmental regulations her life's calling? She pauses a moment,

Senator Tom Daschle intends to grill Norton about the Bush administration's quiet drive to open vast tracts of public land for energy development. "They are flying below radar," he says.

as if searching her internal briefing books for the ready-mix response that most closely matches the question. "The outdoors is something I've always enjoyed, and protecting that is something I've been interested in my whole life," she says. "Growing up in Denver, I'm sure it started with loving the Colorado mountains."

Spoken like a true Western outdoorswoman—and Norton can justifiably claim to be one. She's an accomplished skier, and she's logged as many hours hiking as her green-certified predecessor, Bruce Babbitt. But as much as Norton loves the country's wild spaces, she simply cannot abide many of the laws intended to protect them.

"Why has it seemed," she asks, slowly and carefully,"that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation?"

The usual answer is that, without those regulations, we might be a nation of mines, oil wells, and clear-cuts, but precious little wildlife and wilderness. Norton's rejoinder: Not necessarily. "I think today we recognize that economic activity needs to search for ways to protect the environment," she explains. "And environmentalists have come to recognize that they need to take economics into account."

When Norton arrived in Washington last year, President Bush gave her a clear mission on the economic front: The government controls a lot of land. There's oil and coal and natural gas under it. Get it. To that end, Norton has embarked on a radically ambitious mission to fulfill his request, one that ultimately transcends the ANWR debate. With as little fanfare as possible, she is using the internal machinery of the executive branch to quietly open great expanses of public land to oil drilling, mining, and natural-gas exploration.

Leveraging the bureaucracy is a tactic Norton first encountered during her initial stint at Interior in the mideighties, when she worked for three years as a lawyer under James Watt's successor, Don Hodel. As Norton knows, a huge amount of power resides in the vast stacks of impossibly dreary federal rules and regulations that dictate things like air-pollution standards—and that even spell out where it's okay to pitch a tent in the Grand Canyon or make a campfire in Yosemite. And since those rules are under the control of the president, he and his agency heads can often change them without rustling a leaf on Capitol Hill.

Norton's public blandness disguises the fact that she's been very busy and very effective. Under the watchful eye of the president's domestic policy staff, which sees to it that cabinet officials adhere to Bush's agenda, Norton has initiated a slew of changes, easing restrictions on vehicle use and power lines in national monuments, making it easier to dig mines on public land, reversing a hard-won plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness Area in Idaho and Montana, delaying a ban on snowmobiles in national parks, and targeting millions of federal acres for new energy exploration. All with a few strokes of a pen.

Democrats in the 51-49 Senate are miffed—but, anxiously anticipating this fall's tiebreaker election, they also sense a political opportunity. The Enron debacle reinforced the widely held view that Bush and his team are in the pocket of the energy industry. The Democrats will emphasize that line this summer, in a series of high-profile hearings—most likely in a Senate committee like Energy and Natural Resources or Environment and Public Works—intended to let voters everywhere know just what Norton is doing. Leading the charge will be Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate Majority Leader.

"On the environment, more than almost any other set of issues, the President has more leeway to make changes without having to go through Congress or consult the public," Daschle told me. "They are absolutely taking advantage of using executive powers to make serious changes, and no one is paying attention. They are flying below radar."

Norton is careful not to get into a scrum with a contact player like Daschle. When I mention the opposition's complaints, she avoids the question with a high-minded pirouette. "In Washington, there's always an effort to label people," she says. "I'm not going to turn around and criticize back." Norton is just as difficult to pin down on the similarities between her views and those of her old boss and mentor, James Watt. It's a loaded question, and she mulls a good five seconds before venturing an answer.

"There's a difference between Jim Watt the person and Jim Watt the image," she finally says. "I don't think that the reality of his views were as extreme as people now think of them as being. He also was a reflection of the time period. And that was a time period when environmental issues were thoroughly characterized by conflict, each side calling the other side evil and badly motivated."

What about that cheap, low-down nickname enviros laid on her? "Let's see," she says, counting on her fingers. "James. Watt. In. A. Skirt." She lets out a dry chuckle. "There may well be many ways in which my policies might differ from Jim Watt's policies," she says. "I haven't gone back and looked to see exactly what his views were as Secretary of the Interior. It's been over 20 years since the last time I worked for him, and I don't define myself in reference to him." Norton picks up a Diet Coke and takes a cleansing swig. Subject closed.

A few days later, I call the old warrior himself to see what he thinks. Watt, now 64, is happily retired, and with his wife, Leilani, he splits his time between Wyoming summers and Arizona winters. I catch him one afternoon while he's soaking up sunshine on his patio in Wickenburg, a town an hour northwest of Phoenix. He's pretty wary, but we soon come around to an amiable discussion of Norton's scarlet letters.

"James Watt in a skirt?" he says. "I hope she is James Watt in a skirt! I felt it was a compliment. And I hope she felt it was a compliment. When she was nominated, I had several congressmen call me and say, Jim, is that true? And I said, Well, I hope so!"

Watt calls himself "a big fan of Gale's." But then he seems to catch himself, as though he suddenly remembers that, even now, his words of support may do more harm than good. He says he no longer keeps up with politics very closely, and hasn't really paid attention to what Norton is doing. "I've just consciously not got involved," he says, his enthusiasm fading into a quiet fatigue. "I've not talked to Gale for a long time. Years, in fact. I've tried to stay out of her way."

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