SALT LAKE CITY - At first glance, the wetlands stretching
out before us don't seem like a prime piece of the Earth's real estate. The
narrow corridor between the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake is dotted
with electric towers and shows the wounds of a five-year drought.
But when you look closely, through binoculars, you can see a vast number of
shorebirds - a sample of the 200 to 300 species from pintail ducks to phalaropes
that find this oasis in the Western desert every year.
As we walk along the edge on a warm fall morning, Marc Heileson of Utah's Sierra
Club tells me how he explains the importance of these wetlands to his mother's
fourth-grade students. "Imagine if you had to drive to California and there
was only one gas station in Nevada," he tells them. "That would guarantee
that everyone would stop there."
This is indeed the one giant refueling stop on the Central and Pacific flyways.
Millions of birds come here to rest, feed and nest on journeys as long as 20,000
miles.
But gas station is probably not the best analogy in this case. You see, this
is also where Mike Leavitt, the governor of Utah who has been nominated to head
the Environmental Protection Agency, has long tried to build a highway - one
football field wide and 125 miles long.
The story of wetland and highway is a Utah tale that does more than raise questions
about Leavitt's reputation as a "moderate." It challenges the redefinition
of moderate. And it worries environmentalists here that their governor would
meld too easily with the Bush administration's environmental policies.
The idea for the highway was born in the 1990s when a census projected that
5 million more people would be living along the Wasatch front by 2050. In 1996,
with little notice and less consultation, Leavitt announced the "Legacy
Highway." His idea of a legacy was to pave wetlands into highways for a
future of sprawl, cul-de-sac housing and big box stores.
In the late 1990s, the governor who would head the Bush EPA struggled with the
Clinton EPA. But in 2000, just days after the Florida recount, the Corps of
Engineers issued permits for the highway to begin. Then after weeks of nonstop
bulldozing, the conservative 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a blistering
opinion for a temporary halt. Now the highway is on hold, but Heileson says
the governor "has pursued it like a white whale."
Leavitt is a personable and popular governor who has held office for 11 years.
In the recent Senate hearings, he described himself as a collaborator who turns
his back on the extremes and seeks "the productive middle." He gets
credit for a multistate agreement among industry, environmentalists and politicians
to clean the air over the national parks.
But not everyone finds merit in the word "collaborator." On his watch,
an agreement with the Bush administration took millions of acres of wilderness
off the protected list and opened them to development. On his watch, the state's
clean water enforcement was tied for dead last. On his watch, environmentalists
say they were simply cut out of the discussion.
Leavitt has also, in a creative new age moment, spinned a pseudo-Latin word,
"enlibra," as his environmental motto. He defines it as: "to
move toward balance." But this too suggests how "balance" has
become unbalanced, how the very definitions of an "extremist" and
a "moderate" shift in an administration that weakened the Clean Air
Act, the Clean Water Act and put political science over environmental science.
"I say he'll be a good fit with the Bush administration," says Lawson
LeGate, the Sierra Club's Southwest representative. "He's used to making
deals behind closed doors while saying he believes in collaboration, not polarization.
He's an affable guy who uses his talent to mask a harsh agenda. To say he's
a fit is not a compliment."
Last week, Democrats in the Senate, angry at administration policies in a White
House that phonied the facts on the air quality near Ground Zero in New York
City, blocked a committee vote that would send Leavitt's nomination to the floor.
But in Utah they are already referring to the governor by his shorebird name:
a lame duck. One way or another he's likely to be the new EPA head.
So the question is whether Mike Leavitt's EPA will be an Environmental Protection
Agency or, as Sen. Barbara Boxer quipped, an Environmental Pollution Agency.
In a now-famous memo, Republican strategist Frank Luntz urged the Bush folks
to "greenwash" the language, to talk of "climate change"
instead of "global warming" and spin the message.
Now along comes a man who talks of "productive middle" while he wants
to pave wetlands and call the highway his "legacy." No, to say that
Leavitt will fit into this administration is indeed not a compliment.
Goodman is a syndicated columnist for The Boston Globe. You can write to
her at that newspaper, Boston, MA 02107.
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