Interior, an agency that means little to the Northeast Corridor and its cultural elite, is the very personification of government throughout much of the West. Owing to the manner in which the West was developed, the Feds control a sizable portion of the territory beyond the Continental Divide. Some 61 percent of land in California is government-owned, versus just 1.6 percent of Massachusetts. Through the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and other components, Interior is the landlord for about half of the West. And it, not the Environmental Protection Agency, administers the Endangered Species Act, which gives Interior veto power over some uses of private land.
Because federal involvement in land use can be exasperating, many Westerners began to distrust Washington long before that sentiment dispersed throughout the population: a reason the Reagan wave swept from west to east, not vice versa. The West’s love-hate relationship with Washington plays out at the Interior Department, which by political tradition is run by a Westerner. Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona, fills that bill. There the resemblance to past Interior leadership ends.
Traditionally the Interior job is seen as the property of pro-development constituencies. Recent secretaries included James Watt, who once said he found rafting through the Grand Canyon “tedious”; and Manuel Lujan, who before he left office this January attempted to rewrite some obscure regulations to make it hard for groups such as The Nature Conservancy to give land to the federal government for preservation. This was attempted for no clear reason other than as a parting kiss-off to environmentalism: the plan was blocked by outgoing EPA Administrator William Reilly in one of the Bush administration’s last bloody internal fights.
Babbitt, in contrast, is a lifelong environmentalist who, after his failed 1988 bid for the presidency, became head of the League of Conservation Voters. “For 12 years Interior has been the center of the Washington anti-environmental movement,” Babbitt says. “The department is full of people who came to Interior because they wanted to conserve the natural heritage, not attack it. They are now liberated.”
Babbitt has long been considered one of the country’s most intellectually adept public servants, a cherished favorite of opinion makers. He is conscientious, funny and, unlike all but a handful of political intellectuals, even popular with voters, having won the Arizona governorship despite the state’s Republican electorate. It can seem that Babbitt’s only known defect is an oddly out-of-character voice that can make him sound like a teenager attempting to imitate a disc jockey.
Babbitt says he wants Interior’s mission to be to teach society to “live more lightly on the land.” This is wild-eyed talk for Interior, which for years had a formal congressional mandate to promote Western resource extraction. Babbitt signaled his green shift by naming George Frampton Jr., president of the Wilderness Society; Brooks Yaeger, a lobbyist for the Audubon Society, and Thomas Lovejoy, a prominent advocate of species protection, to important Interior positions.
Babbitt has already announced sweeping proposals to shift Interior’s mission toward preservation. He wants to charge market prices for grazing cattle on federal lands; such rights now sell for about 20 percent of the market rate. He wants the Forest Service (not directly under his jurisdiction) to stop subsidizing timber sales, which would reduce logging on federal lands. Babbitt wants to tear up the 1872 law by which most mining companies working federal lands pay no royalties. He wants Endangered Species Act rules altered to emphasize protection of ecospheres generally, rather than of individual creatures. And he wants market pricing of Western water, calling most federal dam projects “dumb political deals.”
This agenda will not be easy to execute; a mining royalties bill failed in last year’s Congress, for example. And Babbitt’s halo may not last; as Arizona governor he supported the Central Arizona Project, a multibillion-dollar federally subsidized dam network widely derided as one of history’s great boondoggles. But his timing may be propitious, with voter sentiment rightly or wrongly having turned against many forms of development. “The mining, grazing and timber interests know the public verdict is in,” Babbitt says. “Their opening position is it’s time to settle. They just want a say in what the final numbers are.”
There are omissions in Babbitt’s agenda. He proposes that grazing switch to a user-fee basis but that entrance fees at national parks remain heavily subsidized. As Jane Shaw of Montana’s Political Economy Research Center points out, visitors pay only 7 percent of the cost of operating national parks; Yellowstone charges $10 per vehicle for a week while Disney World charges $35 per adult per day. Environmentalists tend to embrace true-cost pricing when it will discourage commercial activities but run from market logic at other times, and so far Babbitt reflects this dichotomy.
Babbitt’s agenda at Interior reflects the continuing sociological transition of the New West. Throughout the West’s history the conquering of land-for jobs, opportunity, agriculture, resource extraction or simply to meet a challenge-has been the region’s priority. Today Western economic power is moving from old-line development interests to the new knowledge-based industries. These industries often are not resource-intensive. And their employees, Yuppies for good or ill, don’t want the remaining pristine areas of the West torn up.
A measure of this transition is how George Bush’s owl-bashing during the presidential campaign failed to resonate even in Washington and Oregon, states where logging jobs are in decline; Bill Clinton won these states.
Timber, once the king of the Pacific Northwest, now employs only a tiny percentage of the population there, so few voters stood to lose personally from the owl controversy. Simultaneously there has developed among the sophisticated Pacific Coast Yuppie set some animosity toward timber workers. Loggers are seen as unenlightened lower-class types who despoil ancient tree stands and snarl traffic to ski areas with their tractor-trailer rigs. Many logging zones of the Northwest and northern California, once isolated, now bump up against exurban expansion. Affluent new homeowners of exurbia want views of unspoiled forest, not of clear cuts.
Thus Babbitt has told President Clinton that his plans for the Interior Department may cost the Democratic Party the Rocky Mountain states in 1996-but lock up California, Oregon and Washington, far more significant to the Electoral College.
Trends toward efficient resource use suggest that some Babbitt ideas will increase conservation without suppressing production. For instance, some northern California water districts have ended the practice of subsidizing agricultural water so extensively that farmers could waste H2O with abandon. Now in parts of California, endangered aquatic species have a guaranteed proportion of water rights, while farmers pay market rates. And the heavens have not fallen; California’s agricultural output remains robust. “We’re not going to need new dams,” Babbitt says, “because once we have true markets in water, it will turn out the West has plenty of water” as conservation technology supplants waste. Miners and ranchers may find they can become more efficient, too.
Babbitt’s actions are the opening shots of what may be the environmental battle of the late 1990s: development versus preservation for its own sake.
Since before Teddy Roosevelt, pure preservation has been among the hardest goals to advocate in American politics: “no growth” is synonymous with no votes. Often what are billed as environmental battles are really proxy fights about growth. The bitter 1992 dispute regarding whether to allow oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was not about fuel supplies or moose-mating habits but whether ANWR should be preserved for its own sake. Yet even environmentalists went to theatrical lengths to avoid the inflammatory question of whether growth itself should be challenged.
At the local level, that feeling has recently begun to shift: candidates promising “slow growth” or “reasonable growth” now sometimes do well in the West. With most pollution-control issues already in the process of being solved, and the economy probably heading up, the question of preservation for its own sake may enter the national consciousness sooner rather than later. Shouldn’t as much as possible of the remaining pristine West be preserved-if only against the day that ecological knowledge advances to the point that development can proceed in concert with nature?
The midcentury naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote of an “ethical sequence” in human affairs: how rights were extended first to the aristocracy, then to the merchant class, then to the poor, then to children, then to minorities. Leopold believed this sequence would lead inevitably to a “land ethic” that “enlarges the boundary of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals or collectively: the land.” These words may form the manifesto for a great debate soon to be triggered in American public life. Be forewarned: Leopold is one of Bruce Babbitt’s favorite authors.
