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A Slow Start Built to an Environmental End-Run

By William Booth
Saturday, January 13, 2001

President Clinton did not come to Washington with a beloved fly rod and a dusty knapsack. His idea of a good day in the great outdoors was chasing a dimpled ball around a golf course.

His closest aides agree, moreover, that Clinton was not initially focused on the environment, nor did he possess an appreciation of the deep passions and long history of the civil war fought over natural resources and public lands, particularly in the West.

Bruce Babbitt, Clinton's interior secretary for eight years, put it this way: "The president was not a bird watcher." The remark refers to the previous Democrat in the White House, Jimmy Carter, who was.

Still, Clinton leaves office with what may be the most substantive environmental legacy of any president since Theodore Roosevelt. His administration banned road-building and most commercial logging on almost 60 million acres of public forests, a patchwork of pristine woodlands that together would almost equal the size of Oregon.

It adopted new clean air standards for soot and smog, as well as diesel engine emissions, that are considered the toughest in a generation. It set tighter standards for tailpipe emissions for cars, trucks and sports utility vehicles.

The Clinton team also completed more than 250 "habitat conservation plans," under which the federal government permits some development and disruption on more than 20 million acres of private land, in exchange for protecting 170 threatened plants and animals living there. These conservation plans are a new way of enforcing the Endangered Species Act on private lands.

Clinton's evolution on the environment exhibited strengths that he used on a variety of issues following the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. The public may have recoiled at the perceived big-government flavor of the president's agenda in his first two years. But this did not mean people were eager for House Speaker Newt Gingrich's vision of a radically reduced government role in funding health care, subsidizing education -- or regulating pollution and protecting public spaces.

On an array of policies, Clinton's techniques were the same. Let Republicans overreach. Then tapping an arsenal of weapons -- executive orders, legislative proposals and other presidential pronouncements -- he took the offensive on issues where he knew from polling that the public was on his side. Using such tactics, Clinton built a consensus behind progressive, if limited, government that was far sturdier than when he arrived in Washington eight years ago.

"President Clinton will go down in history as one of the great defenders of the environment," said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "Not only for everything the administration accomplished, but for all the things they stopped Congress from doing."

The Wilderness Society last month declared Clinton "one of the top conservation presidents of all time." The group said that 2000 was the best year for American land protection in two decades.

This is no faint praise from the environmental community, which constantly groused that the administration was too timid. The most zealous wing of the environmental community never thought Clinton and Vice President Gore took the bold steps necessary, including a successful international climate treaty. Though Gore was a major force on the issue in the first term, tutoring Clinton on topics such as global warming, his role receded in part because of his own presidential campaign, but also because Clinton became more engaged on the environment.

White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta said it was not until after the Republicans took control of Congress and attempted to limit the reach of legislation such as the Endangered Species Act that Clinton really focused on the environment.

Podesta, whom many credit for continuously pressing the environmental case, said it was in the wake of the Gingrich revolution in 1995-96 that Clinton shifted from a defensive posture -- his seasonal vetoes of GOP environmental provisions on legislation -- and began to take the offensive, circumventing Congress through use of executive orders. Or, as Podesta put it, "Start doing the positive things."

Of course, positive and negative are in the eye of the beholder.

GOP governors and conservative members of Congress, especially from the Rocky Mountain states and Alaska, as well as mining, timber, energy and livestock interests, fought pitched battles with the administration and scored important victories, especially during Clinton's first term.

"We'd have to say that we never saw eye to eye with this administration, and that we didn't agree with their agenda, or the way they carried it out," said Lynn Cornwell, who is incoming president of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and ranches thousands of acres of private and public lands in northern Montana.

Utah's GOP governor, Mike Leavitt, is more blunt, characterizing some of the administration's moves to make federal lands off-limits to resource extractions as cynical, sneaky, extreme and a gross misuse of executive power -- an excess that he and other Republicans vow to overturn.

Monumental Additions

However controversial, what the Clinton administration accomplished on the environmental front over eight years by all measures is significant in its scope, and in some cases, audacious.

For instance, the administration created 11 new national monuments and increased the size of two others. Another five monuments may be declared before Clinton leaves office in one week.

These monuments, which have a protected status that approaches that of national parks, offer new safeguards for millions of acres owned by the federal government, managed by agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management. These are landscapes that many Americans may not even be aware of -- the Red Rock Canyons of Utah, the prehistoric ruins of Agua Fria in Arizona -- but in generations to come, they may be as popular as today's crown jewels of the National Park system, such as Yosemite and Grand Canyon.

George Frampton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the fulcrum of the administration's land and pollution policies, remembers meeting with Clinton and the president kept repeating, "'This is really big, right? We're really doing something good here.' He was very enthusiastic. He was saying, 'This is really going to last, right?' I said, 'I know, Mister President.' He was looking at me with these really wide eyes."

Frampton, a former president of the Wilderness Society, said it did not hurt his cause that the constant polling done by the White House showed these measures were enormously popular.

Nothing made Clinton happier, said Babbitt, than making voters happy by doing what he thought was the right thing.

And if he got to stick it to a couple of Republicans along the way, so be it.

Playing Defense

In many ways, the Clinton record on the environment can be seen as a drama with three acts. In the first act, the administration got clobbered.

For example, Babbitt went after ranchers in the West, who were paying fees far below market value to graze their livestock on federal property -- grazing that can damage waterways, cause erosion and displace native species.

The cattle operators and their friends in Congress beat back the challenge, calling the reforms another Washington land grab, unfair and counterproductive. They argued that the ranchers' rights were being trampled by the federal government and that the cattlemen were good stewards who had worked these ranges for generations.

One Interior official said of the grazing reform efforts: "We didn't just get beat, we got our teeth kicked in."

Clinton kept his distance from those early battles. He was rapidly spending his political capital on issues such as gays in the military and health care reform. "He wasn't interested in things like grazing," Babbitt said. "But he never reined me in. He just had other things on his plate."

Babbitt describes the first Clinton term as a collision of strong riptides. The West, he says, was undergoing a bout of strong anti-government sentiments and a resistance to federal mandates. Then came the Gingrich revolution. "We spent the better part of the first three years in a very defensive posture," Babbitt said.

The conservative think tanks were pushing ideas such as selling off some national parks to the private sector. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and, especially, the Endangered Species Act were under attack by Republicans who said the laws had far exceeded their original purpose. Some in the GOP clamored for more local and state control and a rollback of rules and regulations that opponents labeled "environmental extremism."

It was the very intensity of the GOP assault that administration officials today say turned the tide in their favor and invigorated Clinton to the possibilities of becoming the environmental president. The White House polling suggested that the public felt the Republicans were going too far, too fast. The government shutdown in late 1995 and early 1996, which closed the national parks, was very unpopular.

"It was the Gingrich revolution that put into stark relief that the environmental protections that most Americans took for granted were in danger," said Katie McGinty, a former chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "It was a call to arms."

And an opportunity that Clinton seized, as the second act unfolded, in the Grand Canyon.

A Turning Point in Utah

In 1996, a bitter battle broke out over the fate of federal lands in southern Utah. Babbitt argued that a stunning space of slick rock and grand vistas needed federal protection as part of the Grand Canyon ecosystem.

One problem was that the area holds one of the largest known coal reserves in the nation, worth as much as $1 trillion. A Dutch company, Andalex Resources, was planning a huge mining operation. The Utah congressional delegation was fighting hard to allow the mining, as was Leavitt, and they argued that the work could be undertaken in a way that preserved the environment.

As Leavitt tells the story, he first learned that Clinton planned to name the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument from a story in The Washington Post. A week before Clinton's announcement, Leavitt called the White House, and was told no decisions had been made. He contacted Interior, and was told it was a White House call. "This was done under the cover of darkness," Leavitt said.

The governor finally got a phone call from Clinton the night before the president appeared near the rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona. According to Leavitt, Clinton told the governor he was just beginning to review the matter. Leavitt did not believe him, and says he felt betrayed. Babbitt says he felt joyous.

"I took Clinton aside someplace. It was a little bit cheeky. I had this three-page memo about the monument," Babbitt recalls. "I had him read [it] right there. I told him this was important, it's something that had a lot of support, that it would mean a lot in history. It was the first time I felt I was connecting with him directly. He said fine, do it."

Using his powers under the Antiquities Act of 1906, Clinton arrived via helicopter at a podium in the middle of nowhere, a backdrop built for television, and declared the largest national monument in history.

It was the first of many to come. "The turning point was the use of the Antiquities Act. That was not about getting congressional approval," Babbitt said. "That was about the use of his authority."

Clinton, according to his advisers, had found just what he wanted in the Antiquities Act, a way to circumvent the Republican Congress and give the American people what he and his pollsters thought they wanted. The act allows the president, with a stroke of a pen, to turn federal lands into national monuments.

The Teddy Roosevelt Model

Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona who had run for president himself in 1988, was never part of the White House inner circle. He was not close to Clinton and had to gain his ear in stolen moments. But from time to time, Babbitt would press into Clinton's hand an index card. On one side, he listed Teddy Roosevelt's accomplishments on the environment. On the flip side, he would detail Clinton's actions. "I guess it was a way to keep score," Babbitt said. "A way to keep the focus directed, to keep moving forward."

And so the third act unfolds, and the action rushes forward as the curtain begins to close. One monument followed another, as did new rules and regulations on air and water, the banning of roads on almost 60 million acres of federal forest lands. Clinton's team also won, piecemeal, many of the battles it originally lost in the first term, tightening regulations on grazing and mining, for example.

The Clinton administration worked around a hostile Congress by brokering deals with state and local governments and industries; by rewriting and strengthening rules and regulations of existing laws; and by executive actions that did not require congressional involvement or approval.

Yet because so much of the work was done by executive action and agency rule-making, it could be vulnerable. The incoming Bush administration and GOP lawmakers, as well as western governors and industry groups, say they will review all of Clinton's environmental record, particularly the flurry of activity in the final months, and may attempt to undo what they can, in the courts, in Congress, and from the White House.

But it will not easy. And this is part of the plan.

"It is a lot harder to undo than to do," said a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency, who was packing up his boxes this week. "We made sure of that."

� 2001 The Washington Post