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The Environment: How an Interior Secretary Helped to Encourage a Presidential 'Legacy'

By DOUGLAS JEHL

January 19, 2001

Near the end of President Clinton's first term in office, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt presented him with a kind of environmental scorecard.

At that moment, it made plain, Mr. Clinton's achievements were scant. The White House had lost its early battles with Congress over its environmental initiatives and in reaction had shied away from the issues as if from "a childhood trauma," as one White House official put it.

But in drawing up that scorecard, Mr. Babbitt also served up a challenge. Opposite the side reserved for Mr. Clinton he had pointedly listed the accomplishments of another American president, Theodore Roosevelt, remembered by historians as perhaps the greatest conservationist in American history.

With a second term dawning, and questions about a Clinton legacy hanging in the air, Mr. Babbitt remembered this week, "I thought maybe this would pique his interest."

Indeed it did.

With the zeal of a boy learning a new game, Mr. Clinton soon began a headlong rush for the conservation record books, accomplished mostly by executive fiat. Not only did he eclipse Mr. Roosevelt's old mark in putting millions upon millions of acres of public land off limits to development, he continued to run up the score in his final days in office this week, announcing in his final public appearance at the White House the creation of six national monuments in the West, adding to more than a dozen he had already ordered be established or expanded.

As his term runs out, those conservation steps and other achievements are being cited by environmental groups as worthy enough to rank Mr. Clinton among presidents as "one of the great defenders of the environment," as Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, put it.

But in his quest, Mr. Clinton also seemed to some of his critics as so enthralled with the symbolism of his actions that he ignored substantive objections to them, perhaps to a great fault.

At a time when American oil imports have reached a record level, the dominant chord of that criticism — voiced, among others, by President-elect George W. Bush — is that Mr. Clinton was wrong to erect new barriers around so much public land that may well hold valuable energy resources.

"His greatest legacy at the end of the day really may be to leave the nation without enough energy, in part by locking up public lands that have the necessary supplies," said William L. Kovacs, vice president for environmental affairs at the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Mr. Bush, who has promised to shift the policy balance in a way that allows more latitude for development, has signaled that he may try to void or chip away at some of what Mr. Clinton will leave behind.

But polls leave little doubt that ideals like clean air and wild forests carry considerable public support, and after eight years in office, Mr. Clinton's departing environmental advisers say they are confident Mr. Bush would trample on the legacy only at his political peril.

"Environmental protection is no longer just fuzzy creatures in pretty places," said Carol M. Browner, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency throughout Mr. Clinton's term. "I think we've built a solid base of support for the steps we have taken."

Among the reasons for Mr. Clinton's slow start, his aides concede, was that he came to office with little passion for the environment. He was a golfer, not a hiker, and he came from Arkansas, where environmental protection had never registered much on his political radar.

Then, in an early fight of its own picking, the administration lost badly in a battle with Western ranchers, who beat back an attempt to raise the below-market fees they pay for grazing rights on federal land. The setback was compounded by another loss, over a proposed energy tax, and with only two real exceptions — a Congressional act protecting parts of the California desert, and an administration-brokered compromise over the spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest — environmental issues fell to the back burner.

But by late 1995, against a Republican-controlled Congress that was trying to roll back environmental regulations, Mr. Clinton's advisers began to see ways of using the issue to political advantage. A turning point, White House officials said, was the government shutdown that year, a direct result of Mr. Clinton's vetoing a bill that would have allowed oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"By the end of 1995 and 1996 with the election, there was a view that action on the environment really was very possible," said George Frampton, the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Within Mr. Clinton's cabinet, neither Mr. Babbitt nor Ms. Browner was particularly close to the president. On broad environmental issues, Mr. Clinton's single most important adviser, particularly on global warming, was Vice President Al Gore, who took the lead in hammering home the 1997 Kyoto accord on the reduction of so-called greenhouse gases, though that deal has yet to be ratified by Congress.

On one important front, clean air, the rules used by the Environmental Protection Agency required no Congressional approval, and that allowed the E.P.A. under Ms. Browner to forge ahead on a plan that environmentalists have praised as the most important pollution-control development in a generation.

With the tighter standards for tailpipe emission by cars that Mr. Clinton announced in 1999, and new standards for buses and big rigs that were made final late last year, the agency overcame industry opposition to put in place rules that experts say should make a marked difference in air quality over the next 10 years.

"In the next decade, every person in this county will breathe cleaner air,' Ms. Browner said.

Some of Mr. Clinton's most notable environmental initiatives came about only through close collaboration with Congress and the states, including a plan that secured the first down payment in an $8 billion plan to repair Florida's degraded Everglades system, and legislation that won the first financing for a Lands Legacy initiative that could ultimately deliver billions of dollars to states and communities to buy and set aside green spaces, wildlife habitats and parkland.

But ultimately, Mr. Clinton's greatest success came in outflanking his opponents. And in that process the lead fell to Mr. Babbitt, the former Arizona governor, trained geologist, one-time presidential candidate, finalist for a spot on the Supreme Court, and member of a prominent ranching family who used his plain- spoken manner and longtime knowledge of land issues to prod Mr. Clinton toward an aggressive course.

The chosen instrument was the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives a president the power to designate national monuments on his own accord, thereby giving them nearly the same protection as if Congress had declared them national parks or wilderness areas. At Mr. Babbitt's urging, Mr. Clinton first used the act in 1996 in his designation of the Grand Staircase Escalante Monument in Utah —a step that caught the state's governor by surprise.

And while the tactics were modified to include consultation, the top- down approach soon became a model for an administration that found unparalleled success in steering around Congressional and state opposition, when it came to setting aside vast areas of public land.

The tactics — including those used to put nearly one-third of the national forests off-limits to development, under a Forest Service rule made final this month — have repeatedly left Mr. Clinton's opponents sputtering about what they called his unilateralism.

"If these were good projects, why weren't they done sooner, and why haven't we seen members of Congress and governors up there saying this is a good policy, and we stand with him?" asked Dirk Kempthorne, the governor of Idaho, whose state has filed suit to block the Forest Service plan.

But Mr. Babbitt, who would periodically press copies of an updated scorecard into Mr. Clinton's hand at their encounters, said the president clearly took pride in what he was doing. "He always wanted to know, `How am I doing?' " the interior secretary said.

Along with 58 million acres of national forest protected from development, Mr. Clinton's plans have set aside more than eight million acres of land as new national monuments, and millions more underwater, as part of new protective areas. Except for Jimmy Carter, whose administration presided over Congressional action setting aside a large part of Alaska as wilderness, no other president, except for Mr. Roosevelt, has come close to that mark.

"History will put him at the summit of American conservation with one other figure, Theodore Roosevelt," Mr. Babbitt said after handing Mr. Clinton his final scorecard this week.