The Westerner's Interior Motives

By Michael Powell
Tuesday, March 13, 2001

The Department of the Interior's headquarters is a long stone slab of Official Washington, all egresses and entrances, and marble corridors that lead to foyers that lead to the small offices of the obscurely powerful. Bureaucrats who can make a mess of a governor's mind.

The sixth-floor corner office is another matter. Pass five secretaries and enter a high-ceilinged place with gold-framed paintings and magnificent views of the the Mall. On a couch, hands piled in her lap, sits Gale Norton.

The freshly minted secretary of the interior. The new ruler of the Kingdom of the American West, controlling more than half the land in 11 states.

The title comes weighted with irony. For Norton is one of the Western politicians who waged a decades-long war against the distant bureaucracies at Interior, one of those conservatives who fancy themselves guerrilla fighters against Washington's command-and-control regimens.

So the rebel occupies the palace.

She is a tall, lean woman who measures her words with the care of a laboratory scientist pouring chemicals into a beaker. "I've always been concerned by the notion that you had to protect the environment only through strong government action," she says. "I came to a realization that . . . those in Washington who make the regulations very often have no understanding of the impact."

The words land more softly on the ear than they read on the page. And yet, save for proudly ideological John Ashcroft, no Bush appointee has inspired more peaks of pique, more denunciatory showers of dismay and fear: She will slosh oil across the Arctic refuge! Sell the high desert to the lowest extractor!

Only James Watt, Reagan's first interior secretary, ranked so high in the environmentalist demonology. A Sierra Club official coined the inventive invective:

Norton is James Watt in a skirt.

A clever turn of phrase, but one that misses the mark. Norton represents the ascendancy of a more interesting and complex figure: the free-market conservationist. If Watt and his sagebrush rebels in the 1980s desired to dial back to a day when extractors and ranchers ruled the West, Norton casts herself as a reformer comfortable with a New West where environmentalists make common cause with ranchers.

To decode Norton, 47, is to understand that the shining line between environmentalist and free marketeer glows less brightly in the West than in Washington.

"There are two American dreams at play," explains historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, chairwoman of the Center of the American West in Boulder, Colo. "You have the dream of the well-trained experts who make careful choices about public resources: Teddy Roosevelt and the Forest Service. And you have the dream of the Jeffersonian agrarian, who lives through snow and floods, and has their own expertise born of life.

"To talk of good guys and bad guys is absurd. It's so much muddier close to the ground."

A New Westerner

Gale Norton is the perfectly modern Westerner. Her father was neither ranch hand nor miner. He worked in aerospace and became a Learjet executive. She grew up not in the state's vertical reaches, but in the suburban sprawl north of Denver.

And she is not, strictly speaking, from Colorado -- her family moved there from Kansas when she was 5.

Which makes her representative of a state where the totemic figure remains the high plains rancher, but where the average Coloradan lives in a condo east of the Rockies and spends hours stuck in some of the worst traffic west of the Beltway.

As a child, Norton's school bus edged the piney crest of a hill in the half-built suburb of Thornton and she watched Denver's towers rising against an azure sky. As a teenager she saw that skyline dissolve into a purple haze of smog. And as a young law student at the University of Denver, she watched the skyline reemerge.

Her coming of age tracked the ungainly growth of Denver and the evolution of air quality from the leaded gas, belching-smokestack 1960s to post-Clean Air Act America. She recognizes the progression, even if the means leave her uneasy.

"People saw a need for emergency action, and the need to jump in and make a huge impact," she says. "They didn't want to worry too much about how you made that impact."

Searching for the roots of Norton's philosophy is a curious bit of archaeology. She was, in her telling, stereotypically liberal as an undergraduate at the University of Denver, antiwar and pro-environment, and a newspaper editor to boot.

But leaf through her yearbook, through photos of bell-bottoms and Afros, handlebar mustaches and tie-dye, and you find no picture, no mention of her, save in a list of names at the end.

In law school at the University of Denver, she was by all accounts a bright woman -- she recorded a perfect score on the Law School Admissions Test -- whose life centered on her work. (She is now married to John Hughes, an investor. They have no children.) She edited a transportation law journal and penned pieces arguing for better access to buses for the disabled and for tighter enforcement of auto emission standards.

Then she found the argumentative novels of Ayn Rand, whose libertarian philosophy came to frame Norton's thinking. It was a cerebrally romantic vision: Man unfettered is man at his strongest.

"The theme of individual freedom resonated very strongly," she says. "I came to the view that choices arrived at individually can lead to a stronger society than single choices dictated from the top."

She landed at the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1979, which was not unlike putting foot to cobblestone in revolutionary Paris. This was James Watt's legal shop, ground zero in the sagebrush rebellion.

A social and demographic storm was lashing the West (Phoenix's population has grown from 250,000 in 1945 to more than 3 million today), and a new environmental ethos threatened the power of the West's traditional extractive economic powers -- timber and gas and mineral exploration.

Mountain States was one of the industry-funded think tanks that began firing back.

"Jim Watt was a complete revolutionary; he loved to throw bombs and stir up a fight," recalls Terry Anderson, a friend of Norton and a leading theorist of free market environmentalism. "It was a frontal assault, and you might say they wanted to get back to the good old days."

The sagebrush manifesto was broad: Transfer federal lands to state control. Sell parts of national parks and block the creation of new ones. Defend the large subsidies given to ranchers, miners and lumberjacks.

And don't ever tell a Westerner what to do with his property.

So was this revolution or reaction, or a bit of both? Whichever, the crucible transformed Norton's worldview. Within a year, she worked on a lawsuit challenging provisions of the Clean Air Act. She later would devise a program that allows companies that clean up their emissions to sell others the right to release some air pollutants. The federal government has since incorporated the trading into the Clean Air Act.

"Westerners tend to see the federal government as remote and out of touch," Norton says. "That is a core value of the West that I came to understand at the Mountain States Legal Foundation."

She did a stint in Washington in the 1980s, arriving at Interior several years after Watt completed his self-immolation. (Watt had taken to lampooning Indian reservations as "socialism at work" and described the composition of a congressional commission as "a black . . . a woman, two Jews and a cripple.")

Norton worked for the less incendiary Interior Secretary Donald Hodel and returned to Colorado to run a long-shot race for Colorado attorney general in 1990. She beat a seasoned Republican in the primary and an experienced Democrat in the general election.

Norton was for abortion rights and an economic conservative. As a campaigner, she was more dogged than supple; she had little of a veteran pol's bonhomie.

"Campaigning is not something that came naturally to her," says Jeannie Atkins, a friend and former campaign manager.

She was a well-regarded attorney general, albeit with a marked conservative tilt. She vigorously defended a referendum to prevent extending anti-discrimination protection to gays. And she championed a controversial if bipartisan environmental self-audit law.

This act essentially shielded companies from state prosecution if the companies self-reported their violations of pollution laws. (The federal Environmental Protection Agency argued that the law gave blanket immunity to longtime violators and eventually forced changes.)

"Her philosophy as attorney general was that if people have private ownership, they'll be much more likely to take care of the environment," says Gary Bryner, director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado. "But she seems to see a role for government to intervene if necessary."

The thrust of Norton's speeches and papers is rendered in the reasonable voice of a Western conservative, of market mechanisms and a light federal hand on the tiller. It's her asides that take one aback. Her appetite for a well-thrown stick of intellectual dynamite lingers still.

Such as when she speculates about creating a "homestead right to pollute or make noise." Or when she speaks of looking at the graves of Confederate soldiers in Virginia and lamenting that the "bad facts" of slavery obscured their sacrifice in defense of states' rights.

As if the Confederacy didn't have a larger moral and historical cross to bear.

Today, Norton locates herself in the reform phase of the Western revolution. She talks of Washington's failure to understand those who "live in wild places," but realizes, too, that more than a few modern Westerners view the wild places from the safety of the asphalt.

Or on car commercials.

"During the revolutionary phase, everyone runs and shouts slogans and says things like 'Over my dead body,' " Norton says. "Today, we recognize that there are values that many people share. Clearly you don't do a cost-benefit analysis of Yellowstone or Yosemite. Those are choices we've made no matter the cost."

She pauses a beat.

"And those are decisions I'm pleased with."

Unlikely Alliances

The road to Gunnison, Colo., arcs over mountain passes so soaring that your car descends into cloud beds. Snake alongside a willow-fringed river and it's easy enough to fall into a John Wayne reverie . . . until you notice the fin of a commercial airliner, loaded with skiers, taxiing outside this tiny town.

Or catch a bite of escargot in nearby Crested Butte.

Twenty years back, ranchers Ken Spann (an old ally of Norton) and Bill Trampe ran 4,000 head of cattle down the middle of Route 135. A few environmentalists lived up in the hills, but they and the ranchers just got on one another's nerves.

Then came the Crested Butte ski resort and the $2 million homes and SUVs tooling down the road at 70 mph. Trampe and Spann, two wind-burned and very conservative ranchers, found themselves talking to Susan Lohr of the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, a center for environmental research.

They had more in common than they'd suspected. Together they crafted a free-market program of the type that Norton hopes to champion across the West.

"We came to realize that a lot of our conflicts were about vocabulary and differences of perspective." Lohr sips coffee in Gunnison, a small town on the Tomichi River. "It's a culture where the ranchers have been stewards of the land for 120 years and they don't like to be told what to do. But none of us wanted to see ranches turn into condos."

They took state lottery proceeds and some private trust money and began paying ranchers for the development rights to their 6,000- and 7,000-acre spreads.

"We met with 75 ranchers and only one said no," Lohr says. "We have a waiting list of 41 ranchers. It's very important to them that a critical mass of ranchers remain in the valley."

The agreements are most interesting for what's not imposed. There's no requirement that ranchers turn grazing lands into bird sanctuaries. Or that they switch from cattle to emus. Ranchers have made some deals with environmental and recreation groups -- to cut a path across a ranch or allow fishing in a stream, for example -- but they're paid for their trouble.

This is the wild flower of free-market environmentalism, and it's found across the West. Up in Yellowstone, Hank Fischer of Defenders of Wildlife has eased wolves back into the ecosystem by paying ranchers to help him, an idea he borrowed from a Watt-era Park Service chief. If a wolf eats a sheep, the rancher gets $5,000. If a wolf safely raises her cubs on a rancher's spread, the rancher gets paid for that, too.

The Audubon Society pays for grazing rights. Trout Unlimited dickers for unused water rights, to prevent the degradation of rivers. In Gunnison, ranchers, environmentalists and ski resort operators are banding together to stop a pipeline that would siphon water to feed suburban expansion outside Denver.

"I don't know how many ranchers used to say: 'It's easy for you to be a wolf advocate.' And I couldn't argue with them," says Fischer. "We're not rote believers in the free market. We're just practical people."

This is not just an environmentalist's epiphany. Trampe and Spann acknowledge their own journey of understanding. Spann went to law school and worked with Norton at Mountain States Legal Foundation. Norton tried to persuade him to stay, until he showed her a photo of his ranch set beneath snow-sheathed buttes.

Now houses edge his ranch on either side and a paved road runs 80 feet from his house. Condos spread south of Trampe's 1,000-cattle spread. (Some New West math: In rural Gunnison, 400 people work in ranching; 2,000 are employed in retail.)

"When you talk about free-market environmentalism," Trampe says, "as long as you're not putting some bureaucrat in charge, I can buy it."

Spann shrugs. "Ten years ago, I gave up and said: 'Okay, okay, I'm an environmentalist. But I'm not a radical environmentalist.' "

The Wild, Wild East

Confirmation hearing theater:

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), in hot pursuit of Norton: "Will you commit to not making any changes [in a national monument designation in Washington state] unless consulting with the Northwest delegation?"

Norton (placid smile): "Well, I again look forward to learning more about that. . . . I'll look forward to learning more about it."

Cantwell (perplexed look): "So is that something we could get a comment . . . on? Because it is a project we want to know your support of."

Norton (another placid smile): "We would certainly look at providing some comments for the record on that, some written comments."

Striving, the Democrats are, to pin down the Interior nominee. They have a laundry list of worries -- antiquities, Indian reservations, water rights, endangered species -- for the woman they view as an environmental bane. And Norton listens intently and smiles that chloroform smile. And, in the end, she thanks the senators for their comments.

"I'll just let that stand. . . . Thank you, Senator. . . . That's very interesting."

No one touches her. The Democrats rumble that she's undergone a road to Damascus conversion to moderation and yet a majority join the Republicans in voting to approve her nomination.

Still, no one is sure how she'll govern at Interior. She surprised some by declining to challenge former president Clinton's decision to create several new national monuments. She could find problems enough within those football-length floors on C Street, where agency chiefs lurk with the temperament of feudal dukes.

Her former boss, Hodel, recalls the landscape of the department:

"On any given day, you're asked what to do with 4 million acres. The Bureau of Land Management wants to lease it for recreation. The parks chief wants a new national park, the Bureau of Reclamation wants to cover it with a dam. And then the Bureau of Indian Affairs comes in and says: 'Forget it folks, it all belongs to the Indians.' "

He chuckles. "Eventually, you come to the conclusion it's a can of worms, and the secretary has to offend everyone to get anything done."

Nor are Bush's intentions clear. On the campaign trail, he talked little of the environment and a lot about "understanding the Western mentality." But he hails from Texas, where Interior controls few acres outside the national parks. And he and Vice President Cheney are businessmen, men accustomed to coming upon promising oil land and fitting a bit in the drill.

"I suspect her philosophy will crash into the wall," says Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth. "It's incompatible with Bush and the senators on the energy committee who fell over themselves in praise. Their wrath would fall on her like a bolt of lightning."

Terry Anderson, the free-market theorist from Montana, poses a few hot-button tests by which to judge this new steward of 436 million acres of federal land:

Will she allow grizzly bears to be reintroduced into Bitterroot Valley if mining owners and conservationists agree? Assuming she recommends drilling in the Alaska wildlife refuge, will she push for reinvesting some oil revenues in new refuges? Will she consider cutting grazing subsidies?

"Ranchers won't like it because they view grass as put on earth for cattle to eat," Anderson says. "But a balance is very doable. When you look at both sides in a lot of these issues, we've grown up."

In the end, it's a question of definition. Who is Norton? The young ideologue from Mountain States Legal Foundation or the carefully reasonable conservative on display at her confirmation hearing? Will she prove an agent for private property ideologues and mining companies or something more intriguing?

Norton listened as environmentalists spent $1 million attacking her. Her exasperation is evident, behind the formidable emotional armor that she dons for public consumption.

"I'm not Jim Watt," she says. "I've matured. If you follow the revolutionary approach, everyone wants 100 percent and that means the other half gets nothing. Finding common ground is less exciting.

"But it's the reality of our future in the West."