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

Outside Magazine June 2002

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

IN DECEMBER 2000, Norton was working as a corporate lawyer and lobbyist with the powerful Denver law firm Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber when she got a call from George W. Bush. Would she be interested in coming back to Washington to run Interior? Unknown to her, Colorado Governor Bill Owens—a Republican and a longtime friend—had recommended her to Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser, who had worked on her failed Senate race four years earlier. "She was the most surprised person in the world when the White House called," says Owens. "Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever told her that I was one of the people who put her name in."

Environmentalists, many of them still bitter about Al Gore's loss in the disputed presidential election, reacted to Norton's nomination with outrage and a worm-eaten bag of political tricks that, from the start, helped ruin any chance that there could ever be a new mood of compromise between the two sides. Rodger Shlickeisen, president of D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife, remains unapologetic about the collective blood lust. Norton may have been considered a moderate in Colorado, but to national green groups, her ties to Watt and her pro-industry, anti-regulation philosophy confirmed their worst fears about the Bush environmental agenda.

"We really fought her nomination," says Shlickeisen. "Literally, in all the years I've been doing this, we have never fought someone's nomination as hard as we did hers."

In the weeks before her confirmation hearing in January, the League of Conservation Voters took out full-page ads in Washington newspapers, lopping off half of Norton's face on the margin. "So far on the fringe," the copy said, "she's off the page." Greenpeace dispatched three of its guerrillas to scale Interior's outside wall and unfurl a red, white, and blue banner that read: "Our Land, Not Oil Land!"

When Norton appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, though, she was downright charming, and slathered on just enough green sweetener to satisfy skeptical Democrats—solemnly vowing to make "conservation of America's natural resources my top priority." In the end she sailed through the Senate, 75-24. Ever courteous, Norton didn't seem interested in rubbing it in. After the hearings, a Greenpeace activist asked her to sign a picture of the banner-bedecked Interior building. She laughed, and pulled out her pen.

Norton may get points for style, but that doesn't mean greens are wrong about her ideology. In speeches, she enthusiastically details a handful of eco-friendly initiatives, like her proposal to increase funding for the National Wildlife Refuge System, the federal program that sets aside parcels of land as animal and plant habitats. But critics grouse that she uses these easy-to-love programs to deflect attention from her more controversial goals.

"What do you expect?" says Rob Perks, 32, who tracks Interior for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a D.C.-based environmental group. "The White House isn't just going to come out and announce, 'America's wilderness is open for business.' They say all the right things in public, and meanwhile, with sleight of hand, they're gutting the laws they don't like."

In the months since September 11, Norton hasn't left much doubt that energy production is her main order of business. In January, the Interior Department dispatched an internal memo to Utah land managers, ordering them to put oil and gas exploration above all else. "When an application for permission to drill comes in the door," the memo instructed, "this work is their No. 1 priority." The directive puts land managers under orders to expedite all energy applications, crunching the time they can be studied beforehand.

When I ask Norton why, given Interior's broad responsibilities, oil drilling should come first, she offers an earnest non-answer: "To a large extent, the question is how I'm personally spending my time, and I'm spending my time on a lot of conservation issues and initiatives."

Norton, of course, did not mint the concept of allowing extraction, development, and other "multiple use" activities on public land. But she is making it a lot easier for industry to get permission from the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior agency responsible for protecting some 264 million federal acres and whose holdings include most of California's vast desert and Utah's red-rock canyons. In the past, for example, if you wanted to dig a mine in such places, you first had to undergo long, tough scrutiny from BLM officials. That meant waiting, sometimes years, while bureaucrats prepared an Environmental Impact Statement to make sure your mine wasn't going to cause what the government calls "irreparable harm" to the environment.

Not anymore. Last October, Norton did away with the mine-reclamation rule, calling it "unduly burdensome" on mining companies. Now miners simply have to promise to clean up after themselves, and follow an existing requirement to put up money beforehand to guarantee it.

Norton has added another twist to the old rules: Public land managers are now required to get permission before they do anything that might interfere with drilling or mining. In a December 2001 memo, BLM employees were ordered to submit a "Statement of Adverse Energy Impact" if their "decisions or actions" could "have a direct or indirect adverse impact on energy development, production, supply and/or distribution."

Talk to Interior staffers in Western states, where energy applications are starting to stack up, and they'll tell you their bosses aren't being subtle about the push for oil. "You have to get with the program and look more toward extraction," says a BLM resource specialist in California who recently quit in disgust. "We were told, you will speed up all applications. Basically, anything that comes forward, no matter what kind of impact it will have, will be implemented. And if it's not, there's going to be hell to pay."

The upshot: An extraction land rush. According to Dan Heilig, 46, executive director for the Wyoming Outdoor Council, a conservation group, 81,000 new natural gas wells and 3,200 oil wells are slated to go into Wyoming's Powder River Basin over the next ten years. At least 3,000 new gas wells are proposed in Colorado, and 100,000 more are slated in New Mexico. These numbers will likely swell in the months ahead, as oil and gas companies flood BLM offices across the West with hundreds of new drilling applications.

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