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

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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

BUMPING UP AND DOWN on the elementary-school bus each morning, young Gale Norton didn't dream of growing up to become a public enemy to environmentalists. Looking out the window at the 1960s Colorado landscape, she says, all she saw was worsening air pollution. "When you came over the hill in the bus, you were able to see all of the downtown Denver area," she recalls. "But as I got older, you couldn't see the buildings anymore."

Such problems, Norton says, set her on a lifetime path of concern about nature. Her parents are conservatives—her dad, Dale, worked for Learjet and was a Goldwater Republican while her mom, Jackie, was a homemaker. But in tune with the zeitgeist, their daughter developed into a bona fide Earth Day lefty. In high school, Norton joined student groups that organized pollution protests and dabbled in anti-Vietnam protests. "I was a little too young to be a hippie," Norton recalls of the early 1970s. "But I was becoming more activist, more political. I started out as a Democrat."

At the University of Denver, where she majored in political science and minored in economics, she organized campaigns for tougher laws against air pollution and shunned automobiles altogether. "My father thought I was crazy," Norton laughs. "When I started college, they were going to give me one of the old family cars. And I said, No, I was only going to have a bicycle. Cars created air pollution and I didn't want to have one."

She graduated magna cum laude in 1975, got a perfect score on her LSATs, and enrolled in the University of Denver's law program. (She also got married, to college sweetheart Hal Reed.) In law school, Norton evolved toward a more libertarian worldview, as she studied various examples of how federal regulations interfered with market capitalism, with bad results.

By the time she graduated from law school in 1978, Norton, then 25, was reborn as a free-market crusader. (She was also divorced, a split she has attributed to marrying too young.) Norton joined the Lakewood, Colorado-based Mountain States Legal Foundation, a government-thrashing legal clinic funded by the conservative Coors family. Her boss was Watt, then a combative 41-year-old lawyer who found it offensive that politicians in Washington seemed to care so much about protecting the land and so little about the people trying to make a living working it.

Norton and Watt hit the front lines of the Sagebrush Rebellion, the defiant Western uprising against government meddling that took hold in the late 1970s. In dozens of court cases, Norton and her Mountain States colleagues challenged laws that protected the environment at the expense of commerce. "Most of the people I represented were farmers, ranchers, and small businesses who really had a hard time coping with government regulations," Norton says. But her work wasn't all about the Little Guy: She also helped represent the State of Louisiana in a fight to kill the federal windfall-profits tax on oil companies. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where she lost.

After three years at Mountain States, Norton shipped off to Stanford for a yearlong stint at the conservative Hoover Institution, where she focused on free-market solutions to problems like air pollution. By then, Watt had been chosen by President Ronald Reagan to take charge of Interior. From her perch in California, Norton watched as Watt's controversial statements brought about his downfall. Anything that Watt may have achieved in Washington will forever be lost under the weight of his infamous crack that the staff of one government advisory committee he worked with, assembled with diversity in mind, consisted of "a black...a woman, two Jews, and a cripple."

Watt resigned under pressure in October 1983. A year later, Norton herself moved to Washington to work as a lawyer for the Agriculture Department, at Watt's recommendation. She soon shifted to Interior, as solicitor in charge of the attorneys at the Fish and Wildlife and National Park Services. In 1987 she ditched the capital and went home to practice law and work for conservative causes. She also remarried, to an investor and avid skier named John Hughes. The two took their vows at the top of the chairlift in Aspen.

In 1991, Norton was elected Attorney General of Colorado. Even as the state's top cop, she was no grandstander. Local political hands say she kept almost as low a profile there as she does now in Washington. "Gale Norton was not the kind of personality that generated either heat or high visibility," says Floyd Ciruli, 55, an independent pollster and political consultant in Denver. "I was really surprised when the blowback came from Washington, with people saying she's going to be the next James Watt."

Environmentalists battled against Norton's pro-business ideas, opposing her plan to allow polluters to avoid criminal prosecution if they agreed to clean up their messes. But greens didn't get much traction. In conservative Colorado, even plenty of Democrats supported Norton's proposal. During her tenure, her reluctance to prosecute a gold-mining company that polluted Colorado's Alamosa River with cyanide and heavy metals earned her permanent pariah status among environmentalists. Yet for the most part, she came away with a reputation for being approachable and not overly ideological.

"Gale Norton doesn't have a lot of hard edges like others who had that job in the past," says Will Shafroth, 45, executive director of the Boulder-based Colorado Conservation Trust, a landscape preservation group. "She took positive steps by trying to forge partnerships between private landowners and nonprofits."

If anything, in Colorado she was considered too far to the left. When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, she got clobbered in the primary by fellow Republican Wayne Allard, who used her stance on abortion—she's pro-choice—as a way to paint her as a hopeless liberal.

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