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.)

INTERIOR SECRETARIES are often visionary types who hope to be remembered as great lovers of the natural world. Bruce Babbitt wanted his image as a true man of the West broadcast clearly, and he populated the ranks of his department with environmentalists and scientists who shared his conservationist creed.

Norton's public style is lower-key, but during her brief stint, she hasn't been shy about packing her staff with industry-friendly conservatives who drive environmentalists crazy. Several of her deputies came straight from the industries they now oversee. Norton's third in command, Associate Deputy Secretary James Cason, 48, was James Watt's foot soldier in the battle to keep the spotted owl off the endangered-species list, and later became a timber lobbyist. The Department's top lawyer,

Norton's success shows that the environmental movement's political tactics are tired—they really only work when there's a Democratic majority in the House or Senate to back them up.

47-year-old William Geary Myers III, was a lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. To keep watch over the department's budget, Norton hired Lynn Scarlett, 52, a tough-minded skeptic of government who used to run the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank.

But no appointment made environmentalists angrier than her choice for number two: J. Steven Griles, 55, who serves as Deputy Secretary. As a Watt deputy at Interior back in the eighties, Griles fought to relax strip-mining regulations. He went on to become a powerful Washington lobbyist representing the mining, oil, and electric industries.

"There is nothing in his background that suggests he has any interest in the land he oversees, except to find quick profits from it," says Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who fought Griles's nomination. "I repeatedly asked him to give me an example of how he'd like to bring people together, to take a fresh approach to protecting the environment. He couldn't do it. He clearly wasn't interested." (Griles did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

Wyden and his fellow Democrats are incensed that Norton is deliberately bypassing them by tinkering with regulations instead of laws. "They can't do it in Congress, because there is no public support for their agenda," grouses Representative Henry Waxman of California, one of the most persistent critics of the administration's environmental policies. "So they're taking a different approach. They're trying to do it by hook and crook."

Of course, greens didn't gripe so much when President Bill Clinton did pretty much the same thing. In his sleepless last days as commander in chief, Clinton cranked out executive orders creating 20 new national monuments, setting aside five million acres. To make this happen, his industrious staff lawyers dusted off the American Antiquities Act, a 1906 statute that allows presidents to create monuments without asking for a congressional OK. Theodore Roosevelt used this law to preserve the Grand Canyon, plucking it from the hands of developers.

More than a few Republicans saw Clinton's last-minute creations as a parting screw-you to Bush. Now that Norton's in charge, she's doing just what Clinton did, only in reverse. In the process, she's actually concentrating power in the hands of Washington, rather than fostering the "local control" conservatives like to preach about.

"If Norton's position is 'Why do we need a heavy hand in Washington?' then why do we need her heavy hand coming in and telling locals you will do this and won't do this?" says Daniel Patterson, 31, a desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based group that monitors Interior. "She is doing exactly what she says she doesn't like."

One example is all those national monuments Clinton left behind. Fighting to dismantle them would have been politically perilous; instead, Norton has altered them to be more industry-friendly. Clinton left her an opening to do this: In his final-days haste, he didn't lay out permanent management plans for each of the monuments, so Bruce Babbitt cobbled together interim plans. In March 2001, Norton sent letters to the governors of Utah and Arizona, two states with new monuments, and essentially asked, What don't you like about the existing regulations? She solicited suggestions about possible "vehicle use...grazing and water rights, as well as the wide spectrum of other traditional multiple uses that might be appropriately applied to these lands."

One response came whistling back from Jane Dee Hull, Arizona's Republican governor, who detailed the various changes she wanted. There are, for example, hundreds of head of cattle legally grazing in Arizona's new Sonoran Desert National Monument, and every now and then, a few of them get picked off by a hungry mountain lion. Under Clinton's interim plan, says Daniel Patterson, "it was okay to hunt down and kill the offending mountain lion. But only that one. They couldn't go around indiscriminately killing mountain lions." They can now. In her letter, Hull asked Norton to "delete" the language about "specifically targeting individual predators rather than animal populations." Norton did just that.

Norton similarly rewrote the rules to allow for easier creation of "rights of way" in the monuments (government-speak for power lines and pipelines), and to let dirt bikes and dune buggies do their thing in roadless areas. She also cut a paragraph that required land managers to report concerns about environmental damage from extraction industries.

Norton and Hull say their actions are simply the exercise of states' rights. A spokeswoman for Hull says the governor asked Norton to make changes because the interim rules interfered with long-planned Arizona development projects. "Had Interior talked to the state before the monuments were created," she says, "these issues could have been dealt with. As it was, we had to do it after the fact."

Johanna Wald, who tracks Interior for the NRDC, says she's never seen so many drilling and energy proposals flowing out of Washington. The bosses back at Interior used to give people in the field wide latitude to make decisions affecting the land they oversee. "Now," Wald says, "they're being sent a clear signal, a red flag, that says, don't do what you think is right, because we are going to look at it and you are going to have to stand up and explain it."

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