Boulder, Colo.; Nov. 23, 2004
Introduction
Patricia Limerick: Let us remember the
context in which Secretary Norton, our guest tonight, in which
her confirmation hearings took place.
The California blackouts
were under way in January of 2001, when she was confirmed
to office. The prolonged western drought was launched. I think
this is understood, but I think it's worth saying, that
no secretary of the Interior controls, causes or ends drought.
Then, of course,
the 9/11 attacks in her first year, which certainly changed
the whole context and face of government in all the agencies.
The profile of our guest tonight shows her
interesting, dynamic and varied career. Many phases showing
enterprise
in spirit in taking on new challenges:
University of Denver Law School graduate in
1978; senior attorney, Mountain States Legal Foundation;
assistant to the
Deputy Secretary of Agriculture; Associate Solicitor of the
Department of the Interior; Colorado Attorney General, 1991-1999;
Senior Counsel, Brownstein Hyatt & Farber; and Secretary
of the Interior from 2001 to the present.
This has been Secretary Norton's signature
message: Her collaborative conservation
initiative, the Four C's. Communication, Consultation,
Cooperation, all in the service of Conservation.
I will linger
here for a minute on her time spent at the Mountain States
Legal Foundation and
I will read a quotation
from her confirmation hearings.
When a senator asked her
about her association with James Watt, this is Secretary
Norton's
response:
"Senator, that is difficult for me in a respect
that you might find surprising and that is, I don't
know everything that James Watt thinks about issues. I've
only really spoken with him once in the last 10 years. I
am not in constant communication with him on policy issues.
I think that we have issues in common, but in the 20 years
since I worked at Mountain States Legal Foundation at the
same time Jim did, I have had lots of different experiences.
"My experiences at Mountain States Legal Foundation were
in defending some wonderful people of the West; defending
ranchers
and farmers and small-business people, who were very earnest
about the things that they did and who in good faith really
felt strongly about their land and their ability to make
decisions.
"Since that time I have also had the opportunity as
attorney general to deal with people who did not have that
kind of regard. To deal with people who thumbed their noses
at environmental laws, who flagrantly violated those laws.
Those people, some of them are spending some time in prison
because of our prosecution of them. We recovered tens of millions
of dollars in fines and penalties against those who violated
Colorado's laws.
"I think the characterization of who I am
is different than the characterization of who Jim Watt is.
I mean him no
disrespect but I am my own person."
This is a fine passage from her confirmation hearing about
the fun of standing for public office and going through a
confirmation hearing:
"Filling out all that financial
paperwork was the first time I ever felt thankful my husband
and I don't have more assets. I had to put together
copies of every article I'd ever written and find information
on every controversial issue I was ever involved in. I still
ended up on my hands and knees in a crawl space under my house
searching through endless boxes of dusty files. I thought
at the time, the glamour of being a Cabinet member nominee
is clearly over-rated."
... Now a tour of the major issues of Secretary
Norton's four years in office: Her collaborative conservation
initiative,
the Four C's. This has been her signature message delivered
on many occasions: Communication, Consultation, Cooperation,
all in the service of Conservation. The principle behind
those
Four C's, here are a couple of quotes from her: "We are at a time when we must move beyond command
and control and punitive approaches. We will succeed in the
21st Century only if we tap into the greatest conservation
resource America has: the people who live on and love the
land they call home."
The quest for energy independence, obviously accelerated
by international questions and questions raised about our
dependence on foreign oil sources. Secretary Norton is a proponent
of drilling in ANWR but she will speak for herself on the
constraints under which she would want to see development
proceed.
There is, of course, the issue of natural gas production
in the Rockies and that is something she will speak
to, especially her reflections on the important and compelling
questions posed by surface owners who are experiencing development
of the subsurface mineral rights.
Here are some achievements of an impressive
nature: partnerships with the Nature Conservancy, partnerships
with local citizens' groups, the Los Anagos National
Conservation Area in Arizona, and most dramatically, the
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Baca National Wildlife
Refuge,
as Secretary Norton said on Sept. 13, 2004: "Today we
dedicate and proclaim a new national park to forever preserve
a landscape sculpted by wind and water and we introduce
what
now becomes the largest wildlife refuge in Colorado."
Secretary Norton, with others in the administration, has
been dealing with the vexing problem of what to do to reduce
the results of a century of fire suppression through thinning
and prescribed burns.
The concern about the maintenance backlog
in national parks has been a driving issue for her to try
to find the funding
to deal with leaking sewers and other dilemmas in the parks.
The use of the Water, Land and Conservation Fund to build
to the parks and add to their territory.
Controversies over mechanized recreation have
obviously been an important issue in her time, as well.
Water in the west is a key concern. The Klamath
River controversy over releasing water for an endangered
species – not
releasing it to farmers but keeping it in stream for the
fish or supplying it to farmers for irrigation – was a very
difficult
decision, a very difficult process and contentious, but has
led to some interesting understandings on her part on how
to deal with these issues.
She has in recent time, last winter, stood up to California
and told California to stay within its limits of the Colorado
River Compact. That was something that California was not
used to hearing. In the context of that, Secretary Norton
said on several occasions to the press, "The era of
limits is upon us."
With the drought, with the issues of allocation
of the Colorado, she's reminding us of the important need
for deliberation
as she has launched in her initiative Water 2025 providing
water for the West: "An initiative to promote conservation
and efficiency in water usage while resolving disputes among
competing users."
The Endangered Species Act. At her confirmation
hearings, she was queried repeatedly about her feelings
on the Endangered
Species Act. Here are quotations in which she says she will
certainly uphold the Endangered Species Act, but that she
will want to take into account the concerns of farmers and
ranchers and to provide incentives to engage private property
owners in habitat conservation, and indeed important parts
of her administration include the Landowner Incentive Program
for Habitat Conservation and the Private Stewardship Grant
Program.
The big issue of where privately owned lands figure into
the campaign to preserve endangered species is a big one and
she's taken it on quite directly.
The definition of conservation in Theodore Roosevelt's
time and the definition of conservation in our time is one
of the big questions we've been pursuing in this series,
especially in reappraising the role of utilitarian values
and preservationist values in the practice of conservation.
So exercise your historian license, make some effort to think
about what Theodore Roosevelt would be thinking.
At her confirmation hearings, Secretary Norton put forward
ideas that I think Theodore Roosevelt would recognize many
elements of. I quote her: "Using consultation and collaboration,
forging partnerships with interested citizens, we can succeed
in our effort to preserve America's most precious places.
What is more, we can achieve this while maintaining America's
prosperity and economic dynamic while respecting constitutional
rights and nurturing diverse traditions and cultures."
The Center for the American West is proud to
present the current Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton.
Interior Department's Historical Perspective
Gale Norton: I'd like to begin by sharing with
you a few of my thoughts on Interior and the overall historical
perspective. It's such a great service to have the Secretaries
of Interior highlighted and to have those like Stewart Udall,
with whom I've had the opportunity to talk with, share
their histories. I am a little uncomfortable with being an
historic artifact myself.
I have in my hallway leading up to my office the portraits
of the former Secretaries of the Interior. I sometimes, late
at night, wander through there and look at some of the portraits.
They go all the way back to the first Secretary of the Interior,
back in 1849. I look at these guys with the beards and the
starched collars and sometimes wonder whether things were
a lot calmer in those days.
Then I think about the issues they faced: The Gold Rush,
the homesteading of the country, the times when battles with
Indian tribes were not in courtrooms but were very real bloodshed.
I think about one of my prominent predecessors, Harold Ickes,
the longest-serving Secretary of the Interior. He was FDR's
Secretary of Interior who apparently built the building that
we occupy and reportedly went out to measure the offices of
other cabinet members to make sure his was the biggest. I
am eternally grateful to him.
Interior is so important to the West but is
often little understood in many other parts of the country.
Ronald Reagan
commented that only in Washington, D.C., that the department
in charge of everything outdoors would be called the Department
of the Interior.
I had an encounter that was fairly widely reported in the
press with Jessica Simpson at the White House. I was there
at a reception and went over and introduced myself to her
and said I was Secretary of the Interior and she said something
like, well, you've done a nice job. It was only later,
after my husband overheard the people who were standing next
to her say, "no, not that kind," that we realized
that she thought it was interior decorating that we were in
charge of.
But even Westerners don't really understand
the scope of the Department of the Interior. We control
three-fourths
of the state of Nevada, 60 percent of Alaska, half of Utah,
and a quarter of a number of other western states.
If Donald Trump owned as much land in the East as we do
in the West, he wouldn't own just a few shopping centers
and office buildings and casinos, he would own the entire
Eastern time zone.
We have national parks, wildlife refuges, not the Forest
Service – a common misperception. We have the wide open
spaces of the West, the multiple-use lands of the Bureau of
Land Management.
Our lands and the off-shore lands that we
manage produce a third of America's coal, oil and natural
gas. Our Bureau of Reclamation supplies water to 31 million
people.
Sixty percent of the produce that you find in the
grocery stores comes from water from the Bureau of Reclamation.
We have responsibility for working with our Indian tribes,
and I am essentially superintendent of schools for 50,000
Indian children.
We have responsibility for the island nations and territories
in the Pacific, many of which are closer to Japan than they
are to the West Coast of the United States.
In many ways we are custodian of the nation's
history. We work with the Indian tribes to keep ancient
cultures vibrant.
We also are responsible for our nation's patriotic icons:
the monuments in Washington, D.C., and Independence Hall
where
the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence began.
We are also a very modern organization. We do computerized
tracking of earthquakes wherever they happen anywhere in the
world. We develop high-technology energy and use things like
biomass and methane hydrates to look at energy for the future.
We even have our own satellite.
One little known bit of information about the Department
of the Interior is that fairly recently for a short period
of time because of some apparent tax problems, we even owned
the Mustang Ranch. It gives the phrase "Madame Secretary"
a whole new meaning.
To switch to a little more serious side, Patty outlined this
in her remarks. It's very important in my approach to
the Department of the Interior. Seeing the development of
environmentalism during my lifetime, and saw when I first
became conscious of environmental issues, the tremendous and
very dramatic problems. The Cuyahoga River was on fire. Smokestacks
were belching smokes in our major cities. The bald eagle was
on the verge of extinction.
We saw from that experience the passage of
landmark environmental laws: The Clean Air Act, The Clean
Water Act, the National
Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act. From
those things, we have seen tremendous progress.
We also saw development of a great deal of conflict and an
incentive for people at times to shout at each other through
the headlines. To demonize each other. We have also seen,
though, the gradual development and a few isolated spots and
then more and more frequently, people sitting down together
to address environmental problems.
Our problems have become more complex and more subtle as
we have had success with some of the more dramatic problems.
We have broader scale understanding of environmental issues
and a broader consensus in support of protecting the environment.
So getting people to sit down to find common ground, to find
solutions, to harness innovation and development of new technology
and find environmental solutions, those are things that I
believe are very important. That is what I have tried to bring
to the Department of the Interior.
I look forward to having some discussion. I
also want to say, lest I forget while we're having our
discussion, that no Secretary of the Interior manages all
of our lands alone. We have 70,000 dedicated and wonderful
employees at the Department of the Interior and 200,000 volunteers
that help us in that and millions of people who care about
our lands. It is only a small part that any one individual
as Secretary of the Interior can play.
Charles Wilkinson: Let me ask
you a question about your first moments in office in January
of 2001 and ask you sort of the human side and the policy
side. Here you are, sitting in the largest secretarial office
in Washington with 70,000 employees. You had run a major office
and run it well. Your employees at the attorney general's
office speak very highly of you and you were a good manager,
but the scale was just totally different. How did you feel
about that? Did you feel a sense of inadequacy on some level?
Just a small part of that? Who had helped you get the ideas
together to take on a job that large. And then on the policy
side: If you had one or two main objectives, what would you
say they would be?
GN: I had the good fortune
of having worked at the Department of the Interior in the
1980s, so I came in knowing some of the career people who
had been there for many years, and having a great deal of
respect for them. One of the first things I did was to have
a reception and invite all of those, the top career employees,
into my office to say how much I was going to be depending
on them as I was tackling things coming up.
I had spent time during the very rapid and condensed transition
program thinking about some of the things I wanted to get
done as Secretary and thinking about the approach I wanted
to use. I felt that really one of the most important things
was re-establishing a good relationship with the people in
the West who were affected by our programs and trying to bring
people together. In many ways, it was an attitudes approach
that I wanted to have in the department.
I knew that water issues and energy and endangered species
issues were all going to be very significant issues that we
were going to be dealing with and began working on some of
those issues.
Wilderness Study Areas
CW: Let me have you work through what I think was one
of your major decisions last year on wilderness study areas.
You privately negotiated a settlement with plaintiffs'
attorneys in a case over Utah wilderness study areas. Then
really in a summary fashion, very quickly, a matter of a few
days, the judge had signed off on the consent decree and what
it did, or one thing that it did was to lift the protections
from not just the wilderness study areas in Utah but nationwide.
I'm wondering this: You have spoken in very compelling
terms, and obviously very sincere terms about wild country.
You will often mention archaeological sites, the canyons
of
the Southwest. I'm wondering how you reconcile that
particular action with consultation and collaboration, really
pretty close to a secret process, and your love of the outdoors
while recognizing inevitably there's going to be some
wild country torn up as a result of that decision. How do
you fit all of that together?
GN: When I was with Interior
in the 1980s we were going through a process that was created
under the Federal Land Policy Management Act of surveying
all of the Bureau of Land Management Lands to determine which
ones would be appropriate to be nominated to Congress to be
wilderness areas. That process involved looking at basically
all of those lands, looking at the uses and values of those
lands. It was an extensive process. That was something that
was viewed at the time as being a one-time project. It was
a major project being undertaken to be submitted to Congress.
During the Clinton administration there was a change made
to say that should essentially be an ongoing process and new
areas should be submitted.
Let me back up for a second. In 1992, there was a submission
then of all of the work that came out of the 1980s process
to Congress of areas that were recommended for wilderness
and areas that were not recommended for wilderness but had
been studied. All of those wilderness study areas were put
into a management status of being treated as wilderness. Those
areas are still being treated as wilderness. We have not affected
any of those areas. The statutes provided protection of those
and I think that is appropriate.
CW: Those have actually been
recommended.
GN: Those were formal wilderness
study areas. During the Clinton administration, they created
new wilderness study areas administratively. Those they put
into a wilderness management area process without going through
land-use planning, without going through a collaborative approach.
That was essentially an administrative approach to that. That,
I believe, was not authorized by the Federal Land Policy Management
Act, and so the settlement of litigation was recognizing that
claim as it was raised by the State of Utah that the Department
of the Interior does not have the ability, without statutory
authorization to do that. I would still like to see Congress
act on recommendations that have been submitted which have
been sitting before Congress for a dozen years now. Very few
of those have been acted on.
I worked with Sen. Hank Brown when he was getting wilderness
legislation approved and put into place for Colorado and know
you need to have a collaborative local process to create wilderness
and I support doing that. Our administration has supported
a number of wilderness proposals. What we do have authority
to do is work through a collaborative land-use process and
to put areas into various categories for protection, for recreation,
for scenic values, for wildlife.
One thing that people often don't understand. They
seem to view it as either wilderness or very active use. There's
a lot in between. If you want to have an area that is open
for mountain biking, for example, that cannot be wilderness.
Wilderness areas are off-limits for mountain biking, at least
for Department of Interior wilderness areas. If you want to
have restroom facilities, you can't have those in a
wilderness area. So there are things that you need to do as
a land manager that may not be appropriate for the unique
category of wilderness. So we want, as we do our land-use
planning, look at the whole variety of protections that would
be appropriate.
CW: Your action applied only
because the original inventory came out in 1979 for Bureau
of Land Management wilderness and your action applied only
to areas added to that inventory later during the Clinton
years?
GN: Yes. It only applied to
areas designated as wilderness study areas during the Clinton
administration and so the areas that were designated before
that were not affected by that litigation settlement.
CW: Did you consider some sort
of collaborative process for those lands?
GN: That's exactly what
we put them into, which is our land-use planning process,
which is a very collaborative process. So we in essence put
them into an overall collaborative process.
CW: Did you consider a collaborative
process before removing them from wilderness study protections?
GN: It's a question then
of statutory interpretation which is a little bit different
than land-use planning. Statutory interpretation is not quite
so much a comment process, or an involvement process as a
question of determining what is legally appropriate and how
litigation should be settled.
Cobell Indian Trust Litigation
CW: One piece of litigation, the Cobell litigation
involving the Indian trusts, has taken a great amount of your
time. I'm sure a great deal more time than you expected
when you came into office and of your top staff, too. This
is the litigation where Indian people who held trust allotments
dating back to 1887 have sued the government claiming mismanagement
of those funds over more than a century now and seeking recovery
and alleging a very large amount of damages.
Right now, there is an ongoing mediation process. Is it a
priority of yours to attempt to resolve it through that mediation
process? Have you pushed people to try to resolve it there
and has there been an offer put on the table? I'm not
asking what it is but do you feel the department has made
a substantial offer that really would be getting into the
ballpark of attempting to settle this long-standing dispute.
GN: This is a conversation
that Bruce Babbitt and I had the first day that I took office.
He said that that litigation is going to end up taking a lot
more time than you expect. That certainly did prove to be
the reality. It is one where we have undergone massive changes
in our management of Indian trusts. We have invested more
of an increase in funding in that area than in any other part
of the Department of Interior and have undergone reorganization
to be sure that we have people on reservations who are aware
of the fiduciary responsibilities and who also can act as
essentially customer service representatives to provide information
to Indians about the status of their accounts.
The ongoing, or the mediation efforts,
have thus far not produced
results although we invested a lot of time and effort in undertaking
those mediation efforts. I would like to see that issue resolved.
That is currently on appeal, we have several parts of that
case that are on appeal to the federal court of appeals.
GN: The ongoing, or the mediation
efforts, have thus far not produced results, although we
invested
a lot of time and effort in undertaking those mediation efforts.
I would like to see that issue resolved. That is currently
on appeal, we have several parts of that case that are on
appeal to the federal court of appeals.
The most recent ruling from the District Court
judge would have required the Department of Interior to
basically
go back and find not just basically the bank ledgers, but
to go back and find external documentation for each transaction
that has gone on over the last 100 and some-odd years.
So
looking for canceled checks, and leases, and invoices and
all of those things to keep track of everything that's
in those accounts, the estimate is that of about $13 billion
went through those accounts in the entire history of those
accounts.
The judge's order was estimated to cost $6
to $12 billion dollars just to do the accounting work on
finding all of that information, so it has been a very difficult
issue
to try to resolve. I think, unfortunately, whatever the outcome
of the case it has diverted a lot of attention and resources
from other areas that are much more forward looking for Indian
country.
CW: Sometimes in settling litigation
you have to come up with a number that's ultimately
arbitrary because you can't have complete information.
Is the mediation process leaning towards that? Is the mediation
process really active where both sides are trying to take
some chances to settle it?
GN: I really can't go
into some of the aspects of the litigation. In essence, we
have been doing historical accounting work. The work that
we have done has focused on the more recent accounting. But,
so far, we have found very few discrepancies in the accounting.
We've got, on one hand, our experience which is showing
very little that would be owed to people, and assertions by
the plaintiffs that a great deal is owed. To a certain extent
there is not a base of information that would be in most litigation,
the way in which parties would have a basis for determining
what's the ballpark.
CW: Are there vast gaps in
the records so that there are just large amounts of information
that we're lacking completely and the Department has
just no supporting records either way. They've been
lost or –
GN: For the most part, we have
these ledgers that people—they're big books that
people went back and wrote by hand in pencil for decades and
decades. We tend to have the ledger books. What we don't
have as much are the canceled checks or some of the other
information.
As part of what we're doing to get this system reformed,
we have established a new repository for American Indian records.
We're doing that in conjunction with the National Archives.
We've established a program at Haskell Indian University
that is located nearby that will have students to be able
to work on those records and work in a program to train them
to keep track both of BIA and Interior records, but also their
own tribal records.
We're really working to have a better
management of our records and of the Indian tribal records
as well.
The Four C's
PL: There are critics who say the Four C's
are a cover, are a smokescreen, are a way of taking our eyes
off the fact that industry will probably come out ahead.
I
am interested in how you respond to those criticisms. I
do think there is a great tension between conservation regulation
as it has
come to exist and democracy. In the effort to address that,
cynical responses are predictable. What do you make of that?
A. I think that overall parts of the challenge of our
country for the future is finding ways of meeting needs that
we have for the economy, for jobs, for the amenities we enjoy,
and at the same time protect our environment. I think that
you can find that if you have an atmosphere that encourages
people to be creative in their approaches to solving problems.
If you get people to understand each other's perspectives.
If you have ways of trying to meet a lot of different goals
at the same time. I think you can find that best if you can
get people to actually sit down and talk with each other.
When you look at it from the pollution perspective, when
we originally came in with the Clean Air laws we started mandating
you have to have this kind of pollution-control technology
on your smokestack. Well, if we had stuck with that approach,
people would comfortably be installing 1975 pollution control
equipment, and saying, "OK, that's over. We solved
that."
What we instead learned is that you need to
have programs that encourage people to develop the new technologies.
To advance in the way that we find environmental solutions.
So we go through things like emissions training and performance
and results-based approaches, we have used American ingenuity
to solve environmental problems. I think you can do that
with
land-based issues as well.
People think, when we talk about energy development,
of the kind of technology that we used in the 1920s for oil
wells, yet when you compare that with what is being used
in
some of the most advanced sites today, they are using directional
drilling from a place on the surface to reach miles underground
so there's no effect for miles on the surface because
it's all in one spot. There's a lot you can do
to harness technology to solve problems. I think getting
people to sit down together to identify the places where
it makes
sense to go the extra mile where you can find common ground.
I think those are approaches that have benefits, whatever
the environmental issue is.
I think getting people to sit down
together to identify
the places where it makes sense to go the extra mile where
you can find common ground. I think those are approaches that
have benefits, whatever the environmental issue is.
Q. Working on energy issues, it seems like the framework
for natural gas is so often cast by the industry as the
bridge
to the renewable future, which does make a lot of sense.
I just wonder about the full construction of that bridge
so
it goes all the way to the renewable future.
You said in the confirmation hearings
that it will take long-range solutions on the energy issue.
Can you talk about how increased production in the Rockies
of natural gas would commit to a longer-range policy towards
something that is not so fossil-fuel driven in the future?
A. That takes several different things. We are working
in the Department of the Interior on renewable energy, as
well.
We have issued 10 times as many permits for renewable energy,
especially wind and geothermal, as the previous administration
did. We've been working to try to address the problems
so that we can go forward with those kinds of technologies.
We are working on the development of biomass
energy so that we might be able to take some of the brush
and the small trees
that come out of thinning high-fire-danger forest areas to
use to generate electricity or to use emissions controls
so
that can be a way of providing heat for buildings. There
are things like that, that I think are part of the future,
that
a part of that future that Interior can play.
It also is going to require development of other technologies.
A very plentiful supply of energy that we have is coal. And
using new technologies—there's a lot of research
that's going on to try to have minimal pollution come
from the use of coal.
Fuel-cell technology is something that is seen
as a way of getting beyond the internal-combustion engine
for automobiles.
That is something that President Bush feels strongly about
and we have been working to try to use that technology.
That
basically just emits water vapor as the byproduct, so it
gets past a lot of the air-pollution kinds of issues.
It's a very complex set of approaches that you need
to have. There is no one technology that is going to get us
there. There are also some other plentiful supplies of energy
that are still in the very, very initial phases of becoming
reality. Those are also going to have to be developed.
PL: Interior has grown more
by things getting added to it, by acts of legislation, than
by any kind of central thinking of what Interior should be.
If you could reorganize Interior in some way, if you could
move pieces and parts around, pick up that darn Forest Service
and –
GN: Well, actually I have joked
with Ann Veneman, the Secretary of Agriculture, that she ought
to at least send over to Interior the ski areas. I don't
really see any significant reorganizations taking place. We
do have a pretty good organizational structure, I think. We
have worked hard to see that our scientists in the U.S. Geological
Survey are working more closely with our land managers. I
think that has been one aspect that we have really worked
to overcome some divisions within the department. I think
through communication and having closer scientist and land-manager
relationships between U.S. Geological Survey and our land-use
managers that have to rely on that science for decision-making,
I think we are developing a good rapport there.
National Museum of the
American Indian
CW: We were talking about Indian issues and
I thought we would turn to a really historic and very exciting
event which was the opening of the new museum. It's
an amazing place, physically, and the way the exhibits are
presented is really different. It's different than any
other museum anybody has ever been in. When you went through
it find yourself thinking about the future of Indians? Was
there a sort of vitality there that gave you a sense of what
we can expect from Indian Country in the future? I know that
you've been out to some reservations.
Most of the museum is the display of artifacts
and of art works and wonderful objects that have been created
that span history from very ancient to very current. There
are a few areas of the display that are just wonderful and
they are going to be rotating exhibits and each of them focuses
on an individual tribe and its history.
They really show not
just the history of the tribe and the tribe as the ancient
culture but also pictures of the current members of the tribe,
their current activities and current practices, and it really
is a museum about living culture. I think that that is one
of the things that was most wonderful about the ceremony for
the opening and about the museum itself. It is about the Indian
cultures, not just as historic, but as a way of enriching
the future.
I'm very excited. I was delighted to see the museum
itself and really touched by the ceremonies and the coming
together that was a commemoration of the opening of that.
Question and Answer
Period
Q. Madam Secretary, in what way has the
Bush administration improved on environmental concerns from
what the Clinton administration did possibly involving such
areas as logging, air pollution and regulation of power plants?
A: First of all on the power
plants, although that is not really an Interior issue, it's
EPA. The president's Clear Skies proposal that has been
submitted to Congress but also is moving forward administratively
would reduce emissions from power plants for three major
pollutants
by 70 percent. That is a very significant advancement.
In the conservation area, with both Department
of Interior and Department of Agriculture, we have vastly
increased the
funding that is devoted to programs that bring people together
for conservation activities. We are really putting our money
where our mouth is on conservation through cooperation.
We are, for example, increasing the funding for the North
American Wetlands Conservation Act that is to restore wetlands
in the United States, as well as working cooperatively with
Canada and Mexico.
We have been working with farmers and ranchers on conservation
reserve program, a wetlands reserve program in their areas.
One of the things that I like the best on those programs
at Interior is a project to work with landowners on endangered
species. Endangered species for most farmers and ranchers
is a very negative concept. I went to South Dakota and had
a town hall meeting. A whole bunch of ranchers showed up and
wanted to talk about prairie dogs. They told me that the year
that they first started talking about listing prairie dogs
as endangered species, the sale of prairie dog poison doubled.
Clearly that is not the result we want from endangered species
protection.
Through some of the programs that the president
actually brought with him from Texas, we are providing funding
for
farmers or ranchers or other landowners to restore habitat
or to enhance habitat for endangered species on their property,
and we provide the technical assistance for them to do that.
It really taps into people's usual enthusiasm about
wildlife and it gets people involved in protection of endangered
species in a very positive way. That's the kind of thing
that we're trying to do.
We have programs for coastal wetlands. Something
called Partners for Fish and Wildlife that focuses on all
types of wildlife habitat. We're working more closely
with state wildlife agencies, so through a variety of ways,
we are working more closely with people in the private sector
on projects that are really going to make a difference in
environmental protection.
Q. Let me ask you this. In
a principled way, doesn't it really come down to this
or would you say no: That in your view, and in the Bush administration's
view of balance, environmental protection had just gone somewhat
too far and that in terms of balance overall it had to be
pulled back somewhat. That's not in your view being
anti-environmental, it's just a principled view that
we had gone too far.
A. I don't view it in
those terms. I think it is not a question of how much you
protect the environment but how you protect the environment.
When I was a much younger attorney, I spent a year at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford really trying to reconcile
the question of how you protect the environment and allow
people to have freedom and to make their own choices.
The issue I focused on was air pollution,
emissions trading. To use market forces to establish basically
a way for people
to be creative as they're making decisions about environmental
protections. So it's not just top-down regulation after
regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency. It is
people who are given a standard that they need to meet and
can come up with all kinds of different ways to meet that
standard.
Similarly, it's not a question of how much. Do we
want to have more or less endangered species protection? That's
not the issue. The question is whether you want to have people
enthusiastic about protecting endangered species or if you
want to have a system that is based on a very punitive approach.
Yes, there are people who violate the environmental
laws. There are people who shoot endangered species or poach
endangered species. For them the punitive, criminal justice
approach is the right approach. But for people of good will
trying to solve problems, trying to find ways of having an
alternative to a regulatory mandate coming from Washington,
I think, is a very good way of protecting the environment.
At the same time, we are meeting other human goals.
Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge
Q. Madam Secretary, why does
this administration chose to support ANWR drilling instead
of greater fuel efficiency when the latter has a far greater,
longer-lasting impact on our oil dependency?
A. The president's national
energy plan called for both. The dispute on cafe standards
is one that has tended to focus on automobile efficiency standards,
has actually been a dispute about how that decision is made
and who makes that decision. There is opposition to having
Congress set those standards because of the automobile safety
tradeoffs. Letting people make their own decisions about safety
of automobiles, to have the people who are making that decision
more from a scientific and automotive engineering perspective
and the federal agencies make that decision, rather than Congress
setting that decision.
But that is not to say that we shouldn't
be encouraging conservation of energy through automobiles
and through lots of other ways. Our administration has imposed
the cafe standards, or fuel efficiency standards on SUVs,
we've imposed standards on diesel vehicles and in a
number of other ways we have been working on those kinds of
approaches.
ANWR is, in a short phrase,
our largest potential source of onshore oil in the country and
it is a place that we look at the estimates done by the previous
administration of how much oil would be produced there.
ANWR is, in a short phrase, our largest potential
source of onshore oil in the country and it is a place that
we look at the estimates done by the previous administration
of how much oil would be produced there. It would produce
as much oil as any state, as much oil as the entire state
of Texas produces on a daily basis. As much oil as we import
from any country with the exception of Canada and Saudi Arabia.
So ANWR itself, just in one spot, would produce a very, very
significant amount of energy.
The requirement for going into that area would
be the toughest environmental standards ever applied to oil
and gas operations
anywhere. ANWR itself is about
the size of South Carolina, the area that is being focused
on for energy is about a million and a half acres, and of
that 1.5 million acres, the proposal in front of Congress
that we supported would have limited that to only 2,000 acres
that would be impacted by it. That was written into the statute
as a requirement. If you're going to have oil, which
I think is a part of our future for at least the near term,
that is the place to produce it that actually has the least
impact on the environment of almost any other place.
We did an estimate that it takes over 40 times
as many wells in Wyoming to produce as much oil as you can
get from one well in ANWR because of the concentration there.
I know there is a lot of emotion tied to that issue. I visited
ANWR, I visited there in the wintertime, I visited there in
the summertime. I've seen the measures that are being
used at other facilities that would be the kind of requirements
that would be used at ANWR, and I believe that it can go forward
in an environmentally responsible way.
Roan Plateau
Q. Madam Secretary, with all
the gas industry talk of directional drilling technology advances,
why did the BLM propose drilling from the pristine top of
the Roan Plateau in Colorado?
A: I appreciate that question
being asked so that we can clarify something about that.
There
was a draft environmental impact approach that was released
that has various scenarios outlined in it. No final decision
has been made. The preferred alternative is one that would
delay any drilling from the top of the Roan Plateau for
an
estimated at least 10 years. There would be no drilling
from the top, there would be some activities taking place
from
the base of that where there seems to be a pretty broad consensus
that that is appropriate. That would allow for development
of new technologies, for people to look at that issue as
the technology develops to see whether directional drilling
from
the base is a way to access that energy. So it is a process
that is not going to have drilling taking place in the short-term
from the top of the Roan Plateau.
It also sets aside a number of areas on the top of the plateau
that are areas of critical environmental concern where there
might be leasing of the subsurface but there would not be
any access allowed from the surface. You would not be able
to have any drilling taking place from the surface of those
areas. It is a proposal that was put together with a lot of
collaboration and involvement from the local communities.
We did listen to those local communities and we did change
the original proposal from the Bureau of Land Management that
went out for that area. That's an example of where the
collaboration has led to a result that has shifted things
more towards a more environmental result.
Q. Madam Secretary, taking
the issue of collaboration with local communities a step
further.
You stress the role of working with collaborative local processes;
however, the lands which you oversee are the heritage of
the
people of this nation as a whole. How do you propose to reconcile
issues in which the local viewpoints may substantially differ
from the viewpoint of the national majority?
A: It is a question where we,
the federal agencies, have certain responsibilities that are
very often set out in statute. We have the missions of the
various bureaus. The Fish and Wildlife Service has the responsibility
for wildlife refuges, the National Park Service has a preservation
and enjoyment set of responsibilities, so very often the national
perspective is defined by the mission of the particular area.
Anything we do, whenever we're collaborating, we have
to remain consistent with that mission.
We also have a process that while it involves local communities,
also in virtually everything we do, we have an open comment
period that allows for input from people from all over the
country.
By having more local involvement in our decisions,
we have the ability to fine-tune things. To have people who
really know an area, who can help us in tapping into their
local knowledge, who can help us in finding ways of reconciling
some of the problems. It is an approach that involves input
from people both on a local basis and also from people on
a national basis.
Global warming
Q. Madam Secretary, what is
your office doing about global warming?
A: Most of the global warming
issues are ones that really deal with the Department of
Energy
and the Environmental Protection Agency. We have been involved
in the carbon sequestration, both research and in some actual
projects. There are several utility companies, especially
American Electric Power has been actively involved with
this,
that have worked with us in some of our wildlife refuge areas
to restore areas like bottomland hardwood forests in Louisiana.
They take areas that once were great habitats and have for
a couple of decades have been farmed fields and to restore
those to a more natural setting, planting trees and restoring
water flows and things like that. By doing that, we have,
of course, our great benefit to the wildlife system but also
the capturing of carbon. Those companies then register with
the Department of Energy and if a system comes into place
that has some sort of carbon-credit system, then they would
get credit for the work that they have done.
We are also doing some additional research efforts through
our U.S. Geological Survey. We have the ice core laboratory
that is in Golden, Colo., at the federal center that has ice
cores from both the North and South Pole that go back, in
one case about 250,000 years and in another case, about 400,000
years. They basically are a lot like tree rings, they sort
of provide a record of what the climate changes were, the
weather conditions, the temperatures, at those points in time.
We have scientists within our department that have been studying
that to learn what they can about changes in climate over
that whole time period.
Q. Madam Secretary, how does
oil drilling on public lands fit in with your conservation
ideology?
A: We have to have both a supply
of energy for the country, as well as a way in which we protect
the environment. We try to work to find ways of reconciling
both. We have been working with the Western Governors Association
and the conservation fund, brought together our top officials,
some ranchers and farmers who are in the split-estate situation,
that you mentioned where we have private owners of the surface
and federally owned subsurface that has been leased out, as
well as conservation groups that talked about how you can
have best management practices that would require reclamation
of sites quickly, that would require planning so instead of
having ten different roads going to ten different wells, you
would have one road to serve all of those wells. Where we
could group wellheads together to have one pad and the wells
using directional drilling to reach other areas.
There are a whole menu of different practices
from which our land management officials could choose as they
are deciding what requirements would apply to a particular
well. We have been working with those groups on a continuing
basis to try to continue to improve those approaches.
National Parks
Q. Madam Secretary, this question
concerns our national parks. The first four years of the Bush
administration focused on the maintenance backlog for the
National Park Service. What will be the focus of the next
four years to leave as a legacy for the National Parks?
A: We still have some work
to do to finish up on the maintenance backlog. We have about
4,000 projects that are either under way or are completed.
We're still working on that. We have a program to enhance
our understanding of and to care for the ecosystems within
our national parks. Through that we are tackling, for example
one big challenge that affects a lot of our areas is invasive
species. The exotic species that are crowding out the native
vegetation or native wildlife. We are trying to address those
issues.
We have been working to do a better job for historic preservation.
We have been working through a program that the first lady
has gotten very involved in called Preserve America that is
working both with the government-owned historic areas but
also with local communities that might want to highlight work
on their own historic sites. We are trying to work through
a variety of different things.
One thing that is exciting right now is the
bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. We just
created a new
national park that is in Oregon and Washington. It is a sort
of bi-state park that includes the areas where Lewis and
Clark
camped out when they got to the Pacific. As people are coming
to that area in late 2005 for the 200th anniversary, we
will
have a new national park that will be welcoming them and
providing the historical interpretation to make that a meaningful
event.
One really exciting thing that has happened
during the Lewis and Clark Expedition Bicentennial
has been the
involvement of the Indian tribes along the way so that it
has been a history of the coming together of the cultures
and of the two sides meeting each other as opposed to just
the single perspective that we have tended to hear.
Q. Madame Secretary, what ideologies,
beliefs or religious attitudes that you hold help shape your
actions about the use of natural areas and resources?
A: I tend to come from a fairly
Libertarian perspective. In one of my early phases of my
political
life, I was very interested in the Libertarian approach.
That is why I try to find approaches that are not government-coercion-based
that are really trying to allow human freedom and human
creativity to follow along with protection of our environment.
That I think is one very significant aspect.
Another aspect is my background as a lawyer. I believe strongly
that we ought to have a rule of law. That we ought to have
policies and procedures that are appropriate so we make sure
that as we are applying the laws that we enforce the legal
mandates. That is why when we faced the situation in the Klamath
River Basin that Patty mentioned, where the biologists told
us that under the Endangered Species Act we needed to close
down irrigation to farm families, we followed that because
that was what the law requires. That is also part of my background.
PL: I would like Secretary
Norton to give us some last remark, reflections on the department,
on being here in Boulder.
GN: I appreciate the opportunity
to talk with you tonight. The Department of the Interior is
a microcosm for a lot of the changes that take place within
our culture. A lot of the pressures that exist in the West
and affect all of our lifestyles in the West. I have tremendously
enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity to be Secretary of
the Interior. My husband and I have gotten to have some fantastic
opportunities and experiences. I really love and enjoy the
outdoors and to be able to do some of the things that we've
done. We had the chance to be surrounded by about a dozen
grizzly bears, in the Katmai National Park in Alaska. We've
had the opportunity to explore places in Carlsbad Caverns
that not even the superintendent had been to. We have been
able to visit some of the most wonderful and spectacular places
in the United States. It is a great joy for the people of
the United States to have those areas.
We preserve our national parks, our wilderness areas, our
areas for our wildlife refuge system. We are learning, as
a country, how to meet the challenges. There are always going
to be pressures as there are more and more people moving closer
and closer into our Western lands. We have more and more requirements
that people want to see met from our Western lands.
We also have a great challenge ahead of us, and I think we're
making progress in figuring out how we meet those challenges
in a way that addresses people's needs and protects
those great areas. I see that as the challenge that we are
undertaking. It's not always popular to say we have
to face reality, we have to meet some of the needs, we have
to provide energy from some place. We have to provide recreation
that some people love and that some people don't like.
We have a great puzzle trying to figure out how you can find
the best spots for all of those activities to take place.
Different people have different ideas about what would be
ideal for our millions and millions of acres that we manage.
The great thing is that people care so passionately about
our lands. The worst thing is for people to quit caring. We
appreciate the debate because it shows how much people care
about our lands. |
