Boulder, Colo.; April 20, 2004
Introduction
Patricia Limerick: The bulk of the introduction
of the speaker is in direct correlation to the achievement
and merit of the speaker so we'll be speaking for a little
while longer up here. Charles Wilkinson will be introducing
the speaker in terms of his life before Interior. Charles
has known Bruce Babbitt for 35 years. Charles has followed
Secretary Babbitt's career closely, and he has served assignments
during Secretary Babbitt's administration including serving
as special counsel for the drafting of the presidential proclamation
creating the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.
Join me in welcoming Professor Charles Wilkinson.
Charles Wilkinson: Good evening. It's great having
Bruce Babbitt back in Boulder. He's been here a lot and a
close examination of the record will show that he's consistently
come here for support, for comfort during the crises and controversies
he was so regularly embroiled in and often created.
While it's true that a few people armed with a bullhorn offered
up some truly energetic heckling one evening when Bruce was
speaking over in Mackey, for Bruce, Boulder and the university
have been mostly the civic equivalent of a hot tub at the
end of a bad day. We hope it will be thus on this visit.
Born in Flagstaff, he went to college at Notre Dame and then
took a master's in geology at Newcastle in England and a law
degree at Harvard. He joined the Phoenix firm of Brown and
Bain and married the talented Hattie Coons, an international
lawyer who among many other things later became U.S. ambassador
to the Organization of American States.
Bruce had a diversified Arizona practice that included the
Navajo Nation as a client. He ran statewide in 1974 and was
elected Attorney General and more ominously to the office,
second in succession to the governor.
Rather than focusing entirely on
preserving what was left or worse, bemoaning what had been
lost, Secretary Babbitt shifted his department's attention
and the public's attention to putting things back together.
In 1978, he slithered unelected into the highest
elected office in Arizona after Raul Castro resigned in favor
of an ambassadorship in Argentina and Castro's successor,
Wesley Bolin, passed away while in office. Bruce then made
it on his own in two elections and really does remain a beloved
figure in his home state, in spite of the earnest young woman
at the Scottsdale Hotel front desk a year ago who asked him
if he'd ever been in Arizona before.
Bruce ran for president in 1988, but I'll move on unless there
are among us some aficionados of attractive, substantive,
but relentlessly single-digit presidential hopefuls. He then
practiced law and served as president of the League of Conservation
Voters before taking office as Secretary in January of 1993.
This is a complicated and multi-faceted person, and it's interesting
to look at some of the factors that made him the most-qualified
person ever to be appointed to the most influential office
in the American West and, history will show, one of the two
greatest Secretaries of the Interior ever, along with Stewart
Udall.
When Bruce grew up in Flagstaff in the '40s and '50s, it was
in every way an archetypal Western town. His family, one of
the leading in the state, having settled there early in 1886,
had large ranch and retail holdings, and most of his classmates
were children of loggers, miners and ranchers and Forest Service
and BLM employees. He liked and respected them and the way
of life, and he carries that with him today. At the same time,
he was a deeply intellectual person even as a boy who knew
there was more.
Wallace Stegner died just three months after Bruce took office,
and Bruce did a memorable thing. Ten days after Stegner's
death, he held a ceremony specifically for Interior Department
employees with the aim of reminding them of an important part
of the institution's history. Stewart Udall had brought Stegner
back to Washington to the administration as a writer-in-residence.
It was an emotional event celebrating Stegner's life and relationship
to the Interior Department, and after others had made remarks,
Bruce had some other deeply personal words.
Speaking without notes, he recounted growing up in Flagstaff
and one day he saw Stegner's epic book: "Beyond the Hundredth
Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the
West." The title captivated him and he took the book
home and started reading it. Then at that session, he paused
and said, "That was the rock that broke through the window."
From that point on, reading Stegner, Aldo Leopold and many
others he joined his on-the-ground knowledge of the West with
the philosophy of the West and its changes. Soon to be blended
into that mix was his passion for science. Born in the spectacular
landscape of the West, and his growing belief that science
ought to play a central role in making public policy in the
West.
The classic qualification for Secretary of the Interior is
to serve as a Western governor, and Bruce's long tenure easily
satisfied that. Further, although all Western governors deal
with natural resource issues, he did so far more than most.
He was a centrist, partly out of inclination, partly out of
the staunchly Republican Legislature.
I'll exclude from this characterization as a centrist, his
much-publicized veto of a resolution supporting the Sagebrush
Rebellion. No matter, Arizona law provides for legislative
overrides.
The Arizona Groundwater Act of 1980 is the most noteworthy
of the group decision-making process Bruce believes in. The
state's groundwater tables were dropping precipitously. He
called in all the key players ... and urged them to come up
with a system to stabilize groundwater extraction.
It took awhile, and there was plenty of contentiousness, and
the result is imperfect, but in the end they crafted an approach
that now maybe a quarter of a century later is as progressive
a water policy as any Western state has ever adopted.
As a private person, Bruce can probably be described as while
not an introvert, as shy. His public persona is very different.
As most of you know or will soon experience, the public Bruce
Babbitt is expansive and outgoing in the extreme. And, to
put it mildly, he believes to his core that humor disarms
and leavens and softens and binds us together.
Let me give you an example. A while back, I'm quite sure it
was the Spring of 1987, the Civic Club of Portland invited
Bruce up to give the monthly luncheon address — Oregon's
premier speaking engagement. It was a poorly kept secret that
this little-known governor from an arid state with designs
on Pacific Northwest water was about to announce for president.
The civic club wanted to size him up early on. It was standing
room only with lots of press when Bruce took the podium. He
thanked the club for their invitation and then described his
plane flight in. When Bruce tells a story it can get mightily
embellished and even more lengthy. But here is an abbreviated
version.
"I can't tell you," he told the audience, "what
a beautiful and moving airline flight I had up here. The skies
were completely clear in the late afternoon. I could see forever.
Out on the right was the whole Cascade range, the green Willamette
National Forest. The Willamette Valley, the destination of
the Oregon trail was spread out on the left. I studied geology
at the University of Oregon for one semester and loved it.
Then, the jet banked to the left and headed down toward Portland.
And there it was, with the sunset out beyond it, the Columbia,
the river of Lewis and Clark, one of the world's great salmon
rivers, all 160 million acre-feet of it." And with that
savior-fare, the next thing we knew, he was Mr. Secretary.
PL: Secretary Bruce Babbitt tied Secretary Stewart
Udall for second place for the longest term held by Secretary
of Interior. They came in second to Franklin Roosevelt's remarkably
durable Harold Ickes.
Bruce Babbitt's confirmation hearings had some memorable and
fun moments. There was, for instance, the occasion when the
conservative Sen. Malcolm Wallop was reading, with quite a
critical edge, a set of old quotations from earlier episodes
in Gov. Babbitt's career. This was Bruce Babbitt's response
to Sen. Wallop's persistent citing of his earlier and forcible
statements: "A friend once said," he remarked, 'Bruce,
your greatest failing in public life is that you have never
had an unwritten thought.' "
At the hearing, Sen. Larry Craig from Idaho posed this interesting
and challenging question to the nominee, "Who are you
going to be? The old or the new or a combination of them both?
The fellow who we got to know as the governor of Arizona or
the advocate we got to know as the president of the League
of Conservation Voters?"
To explain Sen. Craig's question a little, we can call to
mind a quotation written in a report of the League of Conservation
Voters by its president Bruce Babbitt, "We must identify
our enemies and drive them into oblivion." Which surely
must be its own fine testimony to the fact that even centrist
Democrats can sometimes be pushed too far.
Yet even with a peppy statement of off-the-leash polarization
every now and then, the incoming Secretary was actually the
same person as the two-term governor of Arizona, as this sentence
from the testimony at the confirmation hearing indicates:
"As governor of a state not known for political liberalism,
and mighty scarce in terms of elected Democrats, I learned
in the midst of this crossfire some things about how to rectify
these conflicts. We seem to be in some cases a nation short
on rituals and ceremonies, but there is a well-established
ritual at confirmation hearings for the Secretary of the Interior
at which the candidate must declare his devotion to balance."
And Secretary Babbitt performed this ritual in this sentence:
"My vision for the Interior Department would be to improve
the management of the nation's natural resources and to balance
needed development and with stewardship and conservation."
Although through most of the hearings, he kept his own counsel
on just what the definition of the word "balance"
might come to hold.
One of the big questions that Secretary Udall brought to our
attention at the start of this series in September involves
the degree of delegation from the president to the Secretary,
and the degree of support that the Secretary will get from
the president on particular initiatives.
With the high proportion of public lands in Western states,
Gov. Cecil Andrus of Idaho says he became Secretary so that
he could control more of his state than he could control as
governor. The smart move of being governor becomes quickly
clear since former Gov. Clinton and former Gov. Babbitt had
a background of familiarity to draw on as they started out
in federal office.
And yet Secretary Babbitt's first couple of years could be
described as demoralizing and frustrating. An effort to raise
the grazing fees for public land ranching set off a political
firestorm and the long process of forums and discussions on
rangeland reform wore at the Secretary's patience.
Some of the environmentalists who supported him for office
began to express their disapproval, a chorus of condemnation
oddly echoed by an opposite and equal chorus from the representatives
of the ranching and mining industries. Still administrative
reform of grazing did yield results and opened the door to
an ongoing experiment in addressing ecosystem health and public
lands grazing.
The first two years with a Democratic majority in Congress
were difficult and challenging, and then came 1994 and the
congressional elections. The Gingrich Revolution and along
came the Contract with America. Inspired by a memo from his
press secretary, Secretary Babbitt changed his operating mode
and got out into the nation, traveling constantly and engaging
in an extraordinary effort to engage ordinary citizens in
the work of Interior. Again, the scale of travel, the number
of people he met, the places he visited can leave you breathless.
Since there was little hope of passing new legislation, Secretary
Babbitt then undertook a number of remarkable experiments
in finding new applications and uses of existing laws, in
particular, the Endangered Species Act. Not only in the reintroduction
of wolves into Yellowstone but also in the development of
the Northwest Forest Plan and the creation of critical habitat
conservation plans in Southern California — an innovation
that had been latent in existing legislation but not really
mobilized. In those ways, he found ways to use administrative
actions to make up for the fact that there was not much to
do with Congress.
In 1996, President Clinton used the 1906 Antiquities Act to
create the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in
Utah. Secretary Babbitt convinced President Clinton that if
he took this and similar opportunities that he (President
Clinton) could match Theodore Roosevelt's achievements in
conservation.
President Clinton, though a modest and unassuming man, thought
this was a pretty appealing proposition. The result was 21
big national monuments and also a very interesting ripple
effect in the direction of improved land management, once
Secretary Babbitt's powers to persuade the president became
recognized in the West.
To a historian, one of the most engaging and appealing aspects
of Secretary Babbitt's time in office involves his adoption
of restoration as a goal and as a new conservation practice.
-- finding remedies for past injuries, a vision that
truly has been at the core of the Center's last two series
of lectures on healing the West.
Then there were the actual encounters of the Secretary with
concrete, mediated by that famous sledgehammer. A quotation
by Secretary Babbitt said that he was not going to take down
all the dams but said, "We should strike a balance between
the needs of the river and the demands of river users. There
can be no doubt that we have a long way to go toward a better
balance."
The Yellowstone Fires of 1988 had brought the matter of management
of fire on public lands to general attention, but it was Bruce
Babbitt who really took possession of the problem launching
as he said, "a conservation movement that puts prescribed
fire back on the landscape and increases the health and the
productivity of the land, and reduces the risk and destruction
of wildfires that do occur."
His personal engagement with this issue is extremely intense.
He responded rapidly to the terrible news of the deaths at
South Canyon in 1994, and we are coming up very close to the
10th anniversary of that tragic blow-up. He himself worked
repeatedly on the fire lines.
In an administrative change that carries resonance for the
whole big effort of uniting the disciplines for a better understanding
of nature, Bruce Babbitt first created a new agency, the National
Biological Service, clustering the biological scientists from
the different agencies of Interior and then watching as the
Biological Services was merged into the United States Geological
Survey, bringing life sciences and physical sciences into
a dynamic new relationship.
We have learned on other occasions in this series the burdens
of public office. We have also learned the ways in which the
Department of Interior functions as a target for frustration
and anger for partisans and advocates of many different causes.
I turned to a quotation from John Leshy, Interior Solicitor
during Babbitt's time for a summation of what this meant in
practice:
"Focus and perseverance were especially valuable because
Babbitt endured more than his share of vilification when in
office. It is something of a puzzle as to why such a generally
reasonable, open-minded and mild-mannered person provoked
such strong feelings of opposition, but he did." Lest
that seem too abstract, let's try a couple of examples.
Here's one from the left: "Babbitt appears to be affixed
to the edifice of the administration like some strange, grinning
gargoyle sporting bovine horns and hooves, a living articulation
of the latest cachet of Clintonesque kitsch." Some English
teacher really fell down.
"He is Captain Consensus. The eco-friend of the rangeworn
cowboy, the gypo logger and the pick-ax miner who endlessly
spouts the empty argot of ecosystem management at any focus
group that will listen."
And now from the right: "It will certainly be a great
relief for Americans to not have quite so many extreme environmentalists,
including Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore, kicking everyone else
around."
Patron saint of consensus. You'll hear tonight some interesting
complexities and dimensions to that but Bruce Babbitt's ability
to deal with this ongoing litany of complaint was indeed extraordinary.
As he says here: "My real audience is the 80 percent
who are on either side. That's the bottom line and that's
who I am really speaking to."
As he said on another occasion, "The environmentalists'
job is to move the goal post. When you get near the goal post,
they celebrate briefly and then they say you haven't done
enough. It's part of the job."
A final remark on this subject: "I don't take personal
offense to anything. This job is a job for grown-ups."
This quote is from a letter from Arizona Sen. John McCain
made in support during Secretary Babbitt's confirmation hearings:
"The job of the Secretary of Interior is one of the most
difficult in the government. One that can truly test a man's
faith."
Speaking of faith, in 1995 Bruce Babbitt began speaking publicly
on the subject of his own religious belief and making a case
for the ties between Christian belief and concern for the
preservation of species. "Commanding Noah to include
every living thing in the Ark, God specified the whole of
creation. Then in the words of the covenant with Noah, 'When
the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember
the everlasting covenant between me and all the living things
on earth.' Thus, we are instructed that this everlasting covenant
was made to protect the whole of creation, not just for the
exclusive use and disposition of mankind, but for the purposes
of the Creator."
The willingness to speak publicly about his faith, served
as a rallying point for a number of religious groups and leaders
who became involved in the campaign to protect the Endangered
Species Act from being repealed.
Stepping down from office in 2001, Bruce Babbitt told a reporter
that he had written a letter to his successor, Gale Norton,
and he summed up the contents this way. "The tone I tried
to convey in this letter is, 'Look, you are part of a great
American historical process. The Department of Interior has
been at the center of the conservation and use of our natural
resources. It is a fabulous organization. Good luck.' "
In that same interview, Babbitt characterized the Department
of Interior as a crucible of conflict. But then he went on
to declare his gratitude for the chance to hold the office
of Secretary. It's been a marvelous and important experience.
I wouldn't miss this opportunity for anything. For the chance
to work on these conservation issues, to serve my country,
to work for this president, I would do it all over again,
every single minute.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my honor and privilege to present
to you Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.
CW: … try to understand the Secretary's role
is how priorities are set and the ways in which you ... lay
out a broad game plan for addressing them and also do some
hands-on work. I'd like to take the Endangered Species Act
as an example because early on in your tenure, it was clear
that pressure was building to cut way back on the Endangered
Species Act. How much of a priority did you give it and what
things did you do to try to reach your objectives?
Endangered Species Act and the California
Gnatcatcher
Bruce Babbitt: Charles, that's an interesting issue,
if I can take it back just a bit. When I first met with Clinton
after the election in Little Rock, and we were talking about
possible jobs, I told him I didn't really want to do Secretary
of Interior.
I said, "Look, I've been quarreling with these same people
and these same issues all of my life and I'm sick and tired
of it and I know they're sick and tired of me. I'd like to
move on."
And I told him I'd like to be special trade representative
and he said fine. The releases went out and I went to Little
Rock two days before Christmas. I'd been vetted, I'd written
my little speech and I thought this would be really neat.
I could use the emerging global economy as a way to get at
global environmental standards.
But my friends in the environmental community, always ready
to be a hair shirt, started bombarding Clinton in Little Rock:
"Why isn't Babbitt Secretary of Interior?" Clinton
calls me up, right before Christmas, we're sitting down in
Little Rock, and said, "We changed our mind." I
said, "Are you ever going to come to a conclusion?"
He said, "Would you consider being Secretary of the Interior?"
I'm thinking that it's not a bad deal, getting a job serving
the president, so I said, "Yes." But I did say,
"The one thing that makes me most interested in this
job, that is really new, is the Endangered Species Act."
Because it's about reordering priorities on the land, not
just on public lands but everywhere in the country, and it's
almost dead because nobody ever tried to make it work. That's
a new challenge. So I'd be willing to get on an airplane,
go back and continue meeting with cowboys and miners and loggers
and going through this endless hassle that I've been going
at for 30 years. Because this job now has this new, national
dimension. It was at the top of my list the day I unpacked
my suitcase.
If I may mention just one more thing. It wasn't at the top
of my agenda just because I wanted it to be. In my first month
in office, the Fish and Wildlife Service brought me a listing
decision for a bird called the California gnatcatcher. I thought
that was really interesting. It was just routine so I signed
off the listing. What nobody told me, was that the habitat
of the California gnatcatcher, which would then be off limits
to any kind of modification or development, consisted of all
of the undeveloped land between Los Angeles and San Diego.
And I'm kind of coming up for air and the folks in the White
House are cautious. Does this bird really need 80,000 square
miles and are you aware, it is generally thought that President
Clinton might be running for re-election?
That crisis kind of dumped me into what turned out to be a
really fabulous opportunity to craft an entirely new approach.
That's a long answer for a short question but it serves you
right, I get to do the talking.
CW: You developed habitat conservation plans and took
them to a new level and without getting too technical about
that, and I'm thinking in part of bringing in Joe Sachs, how
did that proceed? To what extent did you map out that strategy
and what extent did you work with that on the ground?
Northwest Forest Plan
BB: The evolution of the Endangered Species Act I think
was driven by two issues. I described one. It was the gnatcatcher
listing, which was about private land and urban development.
That came at us from one direction. The other one, of course,
was the Northwest Forest Plan; that process was preset in
a very appropriate way. ... President Bush was in Washington
standing on the back of a logging truck saying if you re-elect
me president, we'll get people back to work and get rid of
these owls and forests. A little bit of license there but
...
Clinton was standing in the (Portland, Ore.,) backyard as
the essential Bill Clinton. He's speaking to both constituencies,
saying there's no conflict here that can't be resolved with
goodwill and affirmative leadership. He said, if I'm elected
I'll be back and we'll get on with it. He was elected and
the Northwest remembered the promise and he delivered. He
went out to Portland and set up a daylong meeting and said
we are going to resolve this and the federal agencies are
going to come together and we're going to get it done.
So he empowered me in a remarkable way to wrap my arms around
that one, and I went back to Portland about a week later and
I got all of the federal employees, state, everybody, all
of the science people in a room just like this. I stood up
in front of them and behind me was a map of the Pacific coastline
from Seattle clear down to San Francisco, the entire ecosystem.
I said to these folks, "We're going to erase these jurisdictional
lines and you out there in the audience are going to tear
off your agency badges and deposit them at the door and we
are going to create a scientifically driven ecosystem plan
based on the viability analysis of 200 species and produce
a result.
That plan, empowered by the president, went on through, the
injunction was lifted and it was an extraordinary achievement
because it was mandatory, multi-species science, put into
a public land result.
The private lands were obviously much more difficult, and
in some in California, the moratorium was the condition precedent
to getting it solved. Because you see you put all the developers
in jail and I'm the guy with the key. Because we can't lift
the moratorium until we have worked out a system of reserves
and space planned sufficient to ensure the long-term viability
of the species.
Now just to finish this, that took a different approach because
there are hundreds of thousands of landowners, county commissioners
and local governments, and I just basically had to go out
and live in Southern California and wander around. County
Supervisor Rod Roberts, when I came in in San Diego, he's
kind of star struck. His first response is, "Secretary
of Interior is in my office?" And the second response
is outrage. "What the hell is a federal official doing
here lecturing me about land-use planning?"
So it took a couple of years of living on the landscape and
bringing people together and saying, "Look, we've got
to solve this problem. I've got these scientists here and
this bird ain't going to go away." But the California
gnatcatcher is now a land-use planner.
Yet out of the crucible of all that mixture, we got a really
fabulous set of plans that became really the template for
doing this on private land.
CW: Now that was a really public negotiation but the
Northwest Forest Plan was not and gets criticized on the grounds
of being too secret and having too much science in it. Just
turning too much over to scientists not responsive to the
public and working largely in secret. Working literally in
closed rooms. Looking back on it would you do that differently?
BB: I think the wrath was essentially correct. Looking
back on it, I think part of it was that the old-growth forests
were, and are, public land. This wasn't about dealing with
thousands of public land owners in Southern California, this
was about dealing with national forest, BLM lands that are
public property. The president had campaigned on a platform,
the issue had been debated on a front end of an election,
and the people had elected a president who said I am going
to solve this by putting science out front.
As I look at it in retrospect, I think that is kind of the
sense of it. We had a mandate as a function of the political
process. If I were doing it again, would I counsel more public
participation? Yeah, I think so.
I think what I learned in eight years was that when you're
dealing with these complex issues across landscapes, whether
it's rangelands, forests, public lands or private lands, or
coastal lands in south Florida, the best way to work this,
first of all, is to understand that you have to have a legislative
stick to get anywhere. You have to come from a position with
some power to cause a result that will inflict pain.
That's the bottom line. That's what those moratoriums are
all about. It's what my use of the delegated power from the
president to use the Antiquities Act is about. It was a stick
and we'll talk about that more. But once you have the power
and the legal authority to save an Endangered Species Act,
put timber off-limits, declare a national monument, it's then
imperative to me in the process, that you then turn around
and say, "OK, folks, we're going to sit here until the
last dog is gone and talk this through and hear everybody
and work toward reconciling competing interests in the best
way that's compatible with the legal objective that we've
got the power to enforce."
And I think if there's one process that I take out of eight
years, that's it. It's really messy, it's extraordinarily
time-consuming and Pat is right, I didn't live in Washington
during eight years. I was out hanging around the landscape
until people were often sick and tired of me, saying "I
can go back and do this. We can work something out that will
meet my legal objective and it will be better for all the
participation." Some spectacular examples here in Colorado
and elsewhere. So that's kind of my bottom line.
CW: You mention the monuments and the Antiquities Act.
Let me ask you a multi-part question and have you talk about
that set of developments. Talk about your communications with
Clinton over the national monuments, about whether really
there wasn't a serious mistake made with the Grand Staircase-Escalante
in terms of complete secrecy. A policy you changed later.
Whether you think it was a mistake putting the BLM in charge
of the monument. And you have an interesting take on the role
of the condor as kind of a metaphor for some of this.
Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument
BB: First of all, the last challenge for the Grand
Staircase Monument was dismissed by a federal judge in Salt
Lake City today so I can, in public for the first time, tell
you the real story.
It's an amazing story. The president, during the first term,
didn't really hear the music of the environmental issues.
It really wasn't his thing. I didn't have a lot of luck, kind
of moving back up into the White House, with an agenda. Most
of these endangered species things and these other things
were then kind of under my own kind of initiative.
I went back to my office and
took out an index card and sat at my desk and split it in
two. In one column, I put William Jefferson Clinton and in
the right-hand column I put Theodore Roosevelt. In the right-hand
column, I tallied up all the acreage and the numbers of monuments,
a kind of matrix, if you will, that had put Theodore Roosevelt
into history. And then I did the Clinton matrix.
But then during the re-election campaign of
1996, a guy named Dick Morris – Dick Morris was this
kind of dark shadowy figure who took polls and talked to the
president about triangulation and was the subject of the episode
on the balcony of the Jefferson Hotel. He was an unknown figure
in government. A political kind of operative who had surely
never been near a national park. And his idea of a wilderness
would probably not get beyond a parking lot with no stripes.
I will know tell you for the first time publicly the Grand
Staircase is the work product of Dick Morris. How did it happen?
Morris is polling in the lead-up to the election and he has
discovered very astutely that the environmental issues are
beginning to rise back up after this long dry period beginning
'94, '95 and he goes back to us, the president's people, us,
and says we need a dramatic environmental initiative.
It can't be Congress because you can't get anything out of
Congress and it's got to be kind of an October surprise. Now,
he's never heard the word "national monument." But
everybody was now in the hands of this kind of Svengali figure.
So let's hear some dramatic proposals. So let's hear some
dramatic proposals, and the Grand Staircase jumped to the
top of the list immediately. The rest of it is all public
knowledge now. That dictated, that for political reasons,
it be done in secret. Because that was the whole Morris kind
of thing. If we're going to make the front page of the national
press in a big splash, it's got to be a surprise.
Well, we paid a terrible political price for it and understandably.
I may not get into all of that but it was really awful. Because
the president had the legal authority to do it that way, there
was no question about that at all. In fact, his predecessors
who had often thrown national monuments over the transom on
their way out of office, but in an era of higher expectation
about transparency and process, we paid an awful price.
The result of that was the talk of national monuments was
off the agenda – they were never mentioned again for
several years. It was too broad. There was too much bad blood
and rancor in Congress.
You asked a lot of questions. Let me just answer one more
in the sequence. How to get it back on track. I began in 1997
kind of moving back. I had managed to kind of bulk up my direct
relationship with the president and began kind of lobbying
saying, this is important stuff.
Presidents have always done it as they become lame ducks,
when Congress can't retaliate quite so effectively and I wasn't
getting very far. Then one afternoon I went back to my office
and took out an index card and sat at my desk and split it
in two. In one column, I put William Jefferson Clinton and
in the right-hand column I put Theodore Roosevelt. In the
right-hand column, I tallied up all the acreage and the numbers
of monuments, a kind of matrix, if you will, that had put
Theodore Roosevelt into history. And then I did the Clinton
matrix. And by then everything was pretty respectful. We had
passed the California Desert Protection Act. We'd done the
Northwest Forest Plan. The clear meaning of the card was there.
That night at a White House reception, I took the card out
of my pocket in the receiving line and I handed it to him.
He took it and he started to put it in his pocket and then
he paused and he started looking and reading every detail.
That was the moment. It wasn't the environment, it was legacy.
That's the moment that I had his mandate to use at my discretion.
He'd call up in the middle of the night and say, "Bruce,
do you got any more of those cards? How are we doing?"
The political process always doesn't work like you get it
in the civics books. It really doesn't.
PL: The fire stuff. I want to hear your fire stories
and I want from the ground level to the macro and I want to
hear the dimensions about how it permits you to resolve the
problem of agency location that had vexed previous officials.
Fighting Fire
BB: The only time in eight years that I really go nervous
about Charles Wilkinson was when I was talking to him once
about three years into my tenure and he said, "Bruce,
how did you come to run and be in charge of the Forest Service?"
And I said, "Charles, if you ever put that in writing,
you're going to ruin my plan for forest management."
What I mean by that is that most secretaries have been deeply
resentful of the fact that Gifford Pinchot stole the Forest
Service away from Interior and sent it over to the soybean
crowd and all of my predecessors have shared a common resentment
about that and in various ways tried to get it back.
Harold Ickes, who had a vast amount of power and did all sorts
of remarkable things, even Harold Ickes couldn't get it back.
God, he tried. But I'd been deeply interested in forestry
and I started looking around and said, "It's not about
the organization boxes, it's about a subversive kind of approach."
My real interest was following the ecology and so I said,
"I've got to capture the affection and the confidence
of the rank and file, of the people in all the forest agencies."
So early on in 1993, I called in the fire manager for the
Interior Department and said, "I want to go west and
join a fire crew and get out on the lines." The guy kind
of rolls his eyes skyward and said, "You know you've
got to be trained to do that."
I said, "Look, when I was in high school we went out
and fought fires all the time. I know what that's about."
And he kind of looked at me and said, "Yeah, we've changed
a little bit since then. You've got to be trained now."
I stared at him and said, "Well, what does that mean?"
He said, "You've got to have a red card." And I
said, "Well, how do you get a red card?"
He thought here awhile and said, "You have to go to fire
school in Boise for a full month," knowing that I couldn't
possibly do that. But I didn't let loose and I said, "All
right. Maybe you should think of this as the mountain coming
to Mohammed. Maybe that fire school could come to Washington."
We struck a deal that the fire trainers would come for about
a six-month period, quietly, every Saturday to the Interior
Department, and me and the trainer would go to a classroom
on the seventh floor, just the two of us, and I'd do the little
books and listen to the films and bring back my homework.
It climaxed with the fire shelter deployment test which we
couldn't do in the classroom so we climbed out on the top
of the Interior Department and he got out his stopwatch, and
I practiced ripping that fire shelter out of my pack and getting
it over me and getting flat on the ground in 25 seconds. Then
I went out and passed the running test after lots of Tylenol
and got my red card. The rest was history.
Because I started then on the fire lines with a Pulaski working
a 10-, 12-hour day, and by that fact I was in charge of fire
policy and we managed to turn fire policy all the way around
through a series of documents away from this fire suppression
towards how we're going to manage these forests back into
a fire cycle and make it work through all the complexities;
and it was a lot of fun.
Again, it's a nice story. You can beat your head bloody trying
to reorganize government but it's really a lot more fun just
to get out and capture it.
PL: Some episodes of demoralization and discouragement
and your response to that? You have a number of them so you
can take your pick.
Gingrich Revolution and National
Parks Closure Bill
BB: I think the worst was the interminable hassle over
grazing. Actually, maybe the spring of 1995, the Gingrich
crowd comes to town. They're busy getting ready to dismantle
every environmental law in sight. It's really incredible.
It's hard to remember those days. But that's when my press
secretary waited until my chief of staff and the others were
out of town, and he came to me and handed me the most blistering
memo. I couldn't believe that anybody who worked for me could
write it.
He said, "Bruce, you are on the verge of being a complete
failure. You will be remembered in history for having done
nothing in the face of this sustained assault taking place
in Congress." He said, "You can't make a difference
in Washington. You've got to pack your bags and leave town
and live on the landscape, kind of like a guerrilla. And your
job is to get out on the landscape and get people together
and for story and for metaphor and for making people, having
them live with past achievements, get some energy out there
in the country.
We started off in Cleveland where somebody had said to him
the Cuyahoga River, which was once burning, is now a splendid
success story of restoration. Nobody ever talks about it.
So we went to Cleveland and gathered the fire boats off the
lake and the developers and everybody and did this big thing
and it really kind of worked.
So I lived on the land all through that spring and the final
wonderful authentication of what Kevin Sweeney told me came
in Atlanta, Ga. The Gingrich people at the height of this
counterrevolution had been dumb enough to put together a piece
of legislation called the "Park Closure Bill."
I mean it does really seem to make them all seem crazy. But
the theory behind the bill — and Jim Hansen was one
of the originators of this — was that we have too many
national parks. In aid of government efficiency, we should
close some down. Kevin Sweeney said there's not a single American
who believes we have too many national parks. You won't find
one anywhere in America. These guys have gone too far.
Someone discovered that there is a unit of the National Park
Service called the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area
in Gingrich's district. I don't need to go any further. But
I offered the people in Atlanta to float the Chattahoochee
River with me, just one spin down, and Gingrich pulled the
bill off the floor of the House the next day. The moral of
the story is those were really the bad days, reminiscent of
what's going on today.
PL: While they're doing that [writing questions], why
don't you talk about nuclear energy?
BB: Let's talk about energy. As we deal with these
issues, we have to be centered on facts. One reason I have
been such a strong advocate of protecting public lands and
indeed have said throughout my tenure that really multiple
use is not the right image for public lands.
The right image for public lands is to say they are covered
with a public servitude which says the public demands and
wants that they be administered for the primary purpose of
conserving the ecosystem, restoring degraded rivers, bringing
back endangered species, protecting creation in all of its
glory. There's room enough and space enough to do this in
this country and that's what I believe the public mandate
for public lands is.
Nuclear Energy
So what about energy? These guys are saying the dominant purpose
of public lands is to drill for oil and gas everywhere. It's
an outrage, because the ecological values being compromised
are not offset by any significant – there's not much
out there. The total reserves of fossil fuels in the
United States are less than 3 percent in the world and we're
consuming 25 percent of total production every day, worldwide.
We can't drill our way out of this cul-de-sac and the idea
that we sacrifice the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the
great lands of the Colorado Plateau for a few more weeks of
production in the name of drilling our way out of the drilling
crisis is just a fraudulent piece of politics.
These guys are saying
the dominant purpose of public lands is to drill for oil and
gas everywhere. It's an outrage, because the ecological values
being compromised are not offset by any significant –
there's not much out there.
Now the real issue is how are we going to get
out of the fossil fuel trap? The issue of climate change and
global warming is surely, by order of magnitude, the most
ominous environmental threat that we face in this century.
Because it's not just about local damage, it's about disrupting
entire systems. It's about the snow disappearing from the
southern Rockies, the Arctic icecap melting, sea level rising,
huge threshold changes in patterns of precipitation, storms,
droughts. It's truly a scenario we just can't blindly slide
into.
We are going to have to take dramatic steps to get off of
fossil fuels. Are we doing it? No. What we're doing is building
coal-fired energy plants and pumping fossil fuels -- the carbon
dioxide, the result of this, is ramping up rapidly.
What can we realistically do to bridge across to a future
of renewable energy? We're not going to get there no matter
how hard we try and we ought to be trying. But we can't get
there quick enough and the only alternative for base load
power to run our industrial civilization is nuclear power.
That's 20 percent of our base power in this country, it's
nearly 100 percent in France, nearly 75 to 80 percent in Japan,
a huge amount in the United Kingdom. We can't walk away from
that.
We've fried this planet in terms of climate change. My plea
to my environmental audiences: Yes, we could get unhooked
from fossil fuels by cutting our energy consumption by 75
percent, but it isn't going to happen in the short run and
do you want to sit quietly by and let it happen or do you
want to safely — we've got to make a choice between
two alternatives.
One is managing the risk of a nuclear power base which we
already have and which isn't going away and use it because
it is a zero carbon dioxide scenario, or are we going to continue
the cultural opposition to all things nuclear in a Hobson's
choice which says we will continue to ramp up coal production
which is not controversial in the short run, but the long-term
consequences, damage consequences, vastly outweigh the risks
attendant to nuclear power. I urge you to think about that.
PL: On behalf of our partners here in the Nature Conservancy,
could you say a few words on the Baca Ranch, that project,
and your rule on that?
Baca Ranch
BB: The Baca Ranch is a splendid tribute to a lot of
people in Colorado, the Nature Conservancy, a lot of private
sector people. From my perspective, it's an interesting story
because the reason the Baca Ranch and the Great Sand Dunes
National Monument was expanded by congressional action into
a national park with modified boundaries encompassed the purchase
of the Baca Ranch is because in 1997, after I had sent my
card up to the president, got his mandate and went out West
and he'd signed off on a bunch of these monuments, I looked
around the Great Sand Dunes with Nighthorse-Campbell and Scott
McGinnis – there was a wonderful picture on the front
page of the Post of us standing on one of these great sand
dunes – but the story behind that was that sometimes
Republican legislators when they feel real heat, see the light.
And the heat was that I had previously been down to Great
Sand Dunes and taken a little trip and just casually mentioned
that this looked like a place where maybe I could recommend
to the president that he use the Antiquities Act and that
was kind of the stick.
By then everyone in the West understood that when I showed
up and said, "Well, maybe I'll talk to the president
about whether or not he might possibly think a little more
about a national monument …" the translation was
"That sonofabitch is going to get him to do it right
away. We'd better do something."
So again, that kind of the creative forcing mechanism and
the result of that was vastly preferable to a presidential
decree because it was congressional legislation, and it had
a lot of really wonderful boundary provisions and management
provisions that are properly the province of Congress.
And I would never be one to denigrate the efforts of Nighthorse-Campbell
and Scott McGinnis until they are now on the way out of office
and I'm not. But they are entitled to the credit. They did
it. But it was the kind of behind-the-scenes, action-forcing
mechanism that brought it about. And it was a great result,
a fabulous result.
CW: I'd like you to speak to one thing and that's the
Yellowstone wolves. What sort of personal satisfaction do
you take from that and will history look at that as a symbolic
act or one of real substance?
Wolves in Yellowstone
BB: It's a fabulous, multifaceted thing. First of all,
let me say the wolves in Yellowstone were not my singular
invention. There had been a long and courageous set of Westerners
who had been working this issue.
Jim McClure, when he was a senator from Idaho. It had been
festering for a long time and the space was opening up due
to the effort of a number of people in Congress and leaders
elsewhere. The opportunity was moving up.
What we did was recognize that the Gingrich Revolution was
shutting this all down, we had a tiny little window of opportunity
before it was going to get closed down and we, of course,
seized it very aggressively.
The recovery of the Yellowstone ecosystem, I'm sure you've
all heard this story, it's really a miraculous example of
this power of this concept called restoration, of imagining
what the landscape once was like and then turning back and
using the power of imagination in reference to say we can
bring it back.
There's no question that the elk were out of control in Yellowstone
and that the damage to the ecosystem you could see, particularly
in the riparian areas. The beaver were gone and the aspens.
Yellowstone was beginning to look like the King Ranch was
running the place with cattle, but it was elk. The wolf shows
up and those tens of thousands of elk were lounging around
in the creek bottoms, the wolf just electrified the place
and knocked the elk herds back, and the riparian systems have
come back, the beaver and aquatic components of the river
systems of the Yellowstone, the aspens. A fabulous example
of this concept called ecosystem restoration whether it's
in Yellowstone or the Everglades or wherever.
Lastly, let me say that the wolf to me has even a larger value
and it is as it now spreads across public lands, the carrier
of a message that I want to be heard in the West. And that
is about the dominant public servitude on western lands.
The wolf has priority because he is a representative of the
natural ecosystems and the landscape of the West that the
public, I believe is saying, should supplant these old ideas
of multiple use. There's a primary use, not a lot of equal
uses, and the wolf is the bearer of that message.
The wolf is not saying you've got to take all the cattle off
public lands. The wolf is saying that I have the first right
to be here and the people who run livestock are going to have
to live with the costs of intact ecosystems and the top priorities.
When my family was ranching in the West at the turn of the
century, the modern idea of the ranch was to clean out all
the competition: bobcats, mountain lions, golden eagles, anything
that imposed any cost on – they called it clean ranching.
You try to eliminate everything. Forage competitors, you slaughtered
everything and said this is the domain of livestock production.
A century later it's now different. The wolf is the carrier
of that message and it's a very elegant and beautiful –
yeah, it's a very emotional thing. I love to watch them in
Yellowstone but it's kind of an anthropologic kind of beauty:
that wolf's got my message. He's out there selling it.
Question and Answer Period
Q. What do you think of the current administration's
environmental policy?
A. When I get that question, my normal response is
this administration makes me nostalgic, positively nostalgic,
for Jim Watt. People say would you say that? And the answer
is, I really mean it. Because I am very respectful in personal
terms with all my predecessors, you know that's the American
way. But I don't think it's an injustice to say what Jim Watt
was about was getting in front of the American people and
raking his fingernails down the blackboard. And it was a style
which prompted so much opposition that there was this huge
backlash of response.
The problem with this group is,
it's the exact opposite. Beneath the
smiling facade of Clear Skies and Healthy Forests, are dirty
skies and we'll save the forests by cutting them down.
It's being done, not in a frontal fashion, it's being done
in incremental kinds of change. Chipping, chipping, chipping,
chipping. In a way that's enormously subtle.
He awakened the American people to the need
to talk back. The Sierra Club doubled its membership and the
result was that for all of the talk, not much really changed.
The problem with this group is, it's the exact opposite. Beneath
the smiling facade of Clear Skies and Healthy Forests, are
dirty skies and we'll save the forests by cutting them down.
It's being done, not in a frontal fashion, it's being done
in incremental kinds of change. Chipping, chipping, chipping,
chipping. In a way that's enormously subtle. It's very hard
to get the people of the Northwest upset about the inventory
and clear ahead of logging cuts under the Northwest Forest
Plan. Nobody even knows what it means: inventory and clearance.
It's a snoozer. It has huge implications. The marginal changes
under the Clean Water Act in terms of jurisdiction. They're
oftentimes explaining the limits of the navigability doctrine
of isolated water bodies and explaining what an ephemeral
stream is and it's just a — every Friday there will
be another press release explaining an improved administration
of the Clean Water Act which is actually a contraction of
the jurisdiction. It goes on and on and on. Washington, is
just a dead zone. It's kind of like the Chesapeake Bay —
all these nutrients being washed in, killing everything.
Let me just say, I don't want to be kind of a Jeremiah up
here. The encouraging thing as I move around the country,
getting involved in every kind of thing, salmon groups on
the Columbia River, the group to restore and protect the San
Pedro River, the Florida people, there's a lot of good stuff
going on at the grassroots level and it's an encouraging thing
about America.
When the senator is dead, there's often kind of a revival
— it's not a political revival which I lament, it doesn't
seem to translate into a big political backwash, but it has
sort of stirred up people to look a little more deeply at
what they can do in their communities and state governments.
A wonderful thing is happening in California. Schwarzenegger
is a good guy. He's got some wonderful fabulous environmental
people. California under a Republican governor has got better,
more progressive environmental law enforcement than anywhere
in the country.
Q. Mr. Secretary, who would you like to see our next
President Kerry appoint as Secretary of the Interior?
A. I am definitely out of public life, theoretically
out of public life, but I honestly believe if one strives
to lead a useful life that there is a progression and after
a big chunk of public service the most useful thing you can
do is not to try to hang around forever. The important thing
in public life is to get off the stage while the audience
is still applauding. And then to move on to kind of a different
role which says I am going to use what I've learned and the
things that we have done to try to be an advocate, and not
just a shrill screamer, but an advocate really talking up,
and using whatever convening power you have to validate the
dialogue into a kind of workable solutions.
Where does that leave us? There are a lot of great people.
There are some Western governors who would be great candidates.
The governor of Arizona, actually is one who comes to mind.
The governor of Oregon, my deputy of Interior was one of the
most talented people I have ever worked with, but I'm not
on the list. Actually, I wouldn't be on the list even if I
wanted to be on the list for the simple reason that you accumulate
so many scars that offering me to a Senate committee for confirmation
would provoke a lot of activity.
Global Warming
Q. Mr. Secretary, in 1997 you spoke at CU on the threat
of global warming. That was the most heartfelt and compelling
inspirational call to arms I have ever heard from a political
leader. Seven years later, things have only grown worse. Can
you share your current vision on what America must do to effectively
address this threat?
A. A job-related question. I didn't realize I was here
seven years ago and spoke about global warming. I remember
that now because this was one of these deals the people in
the White House were starting to get interested in this and
someone on the staff said, "Babbitt, you were great back
in 1995 roaming around the country carrying a suitcase talking.
Why don't you go do it again?" But I did, I packed my
suitcase and spent some time traveling around the country
talking about global warming, any place I could find 50 people
who were willing to sit who knew about it — generally
on university campuses or anywhere – now another seven
years have gone by.
In 20 years, in the American political process we have moved
this far. Twenty years ago, the ideologues, the anti-silence,
anti-fact, anti-government crowd were saying global warming
doesn't exist. After 20 years, we've moved to the position,
here's progress.
I really shouldn't announce this. Yes, global warming probably
is occurring but there's no need to do anything about it.
Yes, that's 20 years. And the carbon dioxide continues to
build up and up and the irreversible effects continue to accumulate.
The American people, as a political culture, we're fabulous
when we have a crisis to which to respond: A great depression,
a world war, a burgeoning civil rights movement which galvanized
the attention of the country in the streets of the South in
the 1960s.
But short of a galvanizing crisis, we are a society of happy
complacency. Most of the time it's an American strength in
an odd way. People don't want to hear from their government,
they want to go about their lives and keep things moving.
It has its admirable side. But when it comes to these slowly
emerging problems, without threshold crises, it becomes an
alarmingly difficult issue.
I can tell you all kinds of stories about what different people
have tried to do about it, all the scenarios. We can see the
declining snow packs and glaciers. In Glacier National Park,
there are these signs when you're on the trail showing were
the glacier was four years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years. There
won't be any glaciers left in Glacier National Park in my
lifetime.
The Arctic Sea will be a bluevale ocean. There are endless
examples and I will of course leave you with just one more
thought. We can't even muster our political leaders to do
anything about automobile efficiency. It's incredible. Back
in the 1970s, the Congress actually mandated efficiency standards.
You got 13 miles to the gallon then and Congress, with leadership
and a sense of responsibility, not about global warming just
about the energy transition generally, said we're going to
double auto mileage to 26.
Detroit resisted it bitterly, said we can't do it, there's
not technology. And Congress said you will do it. And, of
course, Detroit did do it. Here we are, 30 years later, the
standards have been whittled back. They've effectively dropped
back to about 20 miles per gallon, and we could overnight
double the efficiency standards to 40 miles per gallon and
cut our fossil fuel production in the transportation sector
by half. The difference this time would be that there are
no unknowns. If you want to know how to do it, all you have
to do is go down to the Toyota showroom and drive a Prius
around the block.
Our political system has become so unresponsive and so slack,
that the United States Congress cannot even muster the will
to mandate a change which has virtually no unknowns or pains
of any kind. I'm sinking into despair again. We must not.
It is our task to remember that we can rule the future. That
the essential pact of humanity is to rule the future in all
of its possibilities and to set individually about doing it,
confident that they're in American history tells us that we
walk along the edge of a precipice staring into it and finally
coming into our senses, and it is our task to get there sooner
rather than later.
Q. Mr. Secretary, what's the most grave threat in your
estimation facing Western public lands today?
A. Global warming. It really is. The Colorado River,
and you in Colorado are aware of that. When you look in the
public lands future, you're going to have to throw away all
those license plates that show snowcapped peaks. You'd better
just chuck them out. Tell the ski industry they're moving
to Montana and think of the scenarios in which the reservoirs
on the mountaintops, the snowcaps are really the biggest reservoirs
of all, and they have timed sequential release across the
growing season and throughout until autumn.
It is our task to remember
that we can rule the future. That the essential pact of humanity
is to rule the future in all of its possibilities and to set
individually about doing it, confident that they're in American
history tells us that we walk along the edge of a precipice
staring into it and finally coming into our senses, and it
is our task to get there sooner rather than later.
Now all that stuff, and there's probably going
to be less, is all coming down at once and there's going to
be chaos in the watershed of the Colorado River and to make
it worse, we're stuck with a compact, which was based on a
lot of inaccurate information and a lot of assumptions that
is going to put incredible stress on Colorado in these downstream
scenarios in which Arizona and California have a priority
call on delivery in the system. Those are all ominous threats.
Apart from that, all of these issues, all of the resource
issues, mining, grazing, timber, still have not been resolved.
It is not about driving all the users off the public lands.
That's really the reason I kept those monuments in BLM because
I wanted to make BLM a conservation agency. I never wanted
to say I wanted the West to be a national park, where there's
no hunting, no grazing, no nothing. I wanted to say we can
have communities on the land, we can have resource use, but
we've got to finish the task of subordinating them to the
restoration of the functioning ecosystems.
I just want to say to all the federal employees, I know there
are some BLM, Forest Service and Park people and GS people
here and I just want you to know that what you're doing is
really fabulous, I've believed that ever since I was a kid,
working on fire lines. I know you're under a lot of stress,
but you can outlast them. |
