SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- May 18, 2003
THE INTERIOR
Watt's My Line
Wily sneak attacks on the wilderness
By Eric Brazil
When President Bush nominated Gale A. Norton to be Secretary of the Interior, environmentalist critics were appalled. "James Watt in a skirt," they said. "A disaster for the environment."
Sure enough, Norton, a Colorado attorney who cut her anti-environmental teeth working for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, formerly headed by Watt, has carried on in his footsteps, but much more adroitly.
Watt, secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan, was a bombastic, sanctimonious headline-grabber and a combative anti-conservationist, whose penchant for foot-in-mouth comments forced his resignation.
Norton is the soul of circumspection, a cheery backpacker who says she loves the great outdoors. Her department avoids frontal assaults on environmental policies it dislikes. Instead, it throttles them with sweetheart legal settlements that give the oil, timber and mining industries and other Bush administration pals everything they want.
Exhibit A is Norton's recent decision to withdraw her department's protection of potential wilderness areas as part of a settlement of an old, failed Utah lawsuit over rights-of-way on federal land in the southern part of the state.
The decision, taken in nearly total absence of public input, scraps a long- standing federal policy of protecting public land until its suitability as wilderness can be determined. It opens up 200 million acres of some of the most spectacular scenery in the nation for commercial development.
Norton's stealth policy has been disguised as simply a practical way of resolving longstanding legal issues. It is effective, clever -- and also dishonest, environmental critics contend.
Watt held the honest, if erroneous, belief that the public would support his policies for managing the nation's environment. National polls have repeatedly shown the American public favors strong environmental protections.
Consequently, Norton's approach to advancing the Bush administration's radical anti-environment agenda has been to implement it by bureaucratic fiat, with the connivance of advocates of what might fairly be described as industrialized wilderness.
"They believe that they can repeal laws passed by Congress by arranging to get themselves sued and then agreeing not to enforce the law," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "It's a public outrage. The word 'conspiracy' comes to mind. . . . These people know that the public is against them. They don't agree with democracy, and they don't care."
Under the Wilderness Act of 1964, undeveloped roadless federal lands can qualify for congressionally designated wilderness protection. Interior Department policy under former Secretary Bruce Babbitt was to keep lands under study for possible addition to the 100 million acre system free from development until Congress decides on their suitability.
The Utah settlement will make it much more difficult for Congress to act in the absence of factual data furnished by interior's Bureau of Land Management. Norton has renounced BLM authority to conduct wilderness inventories and establish new study areas.
In a tortured interpretation of the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Norton says she no longer has the authority to manage potential wilderness.
The settlement slamming the door on potential wilderness studies is "illegal in a whole host of respects," said Jim Angell, an attorney for Earthjustice, the Oakland environmental law firm, which has petitioned to intervene in the case in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City. "This opens the door to developing some of the most pristine areas of the country, and it's based on a completely new interpretation of the act. It's contrary to more than 20 years of interpreting the act. Even the Reagan administration had the view that you could create wilderness study areas."
The Bush administration has in the past resisted third party intervention in its environmental lawsuits, but the stench arising from the Utah settlement makes a powerful case for allowing citizen intervention to prevent the carrying out of a monumentally shortsighted decision.
Eric Brazil is a retired Chronicle reporter.
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