Call of the Wilds : Lifelong Bruce Babbitt sees pal Bill Clinton’s election as a watershed for the global environment.

The trucker strokes his outlaw beard and stares hard at the guy in the chinos, striped shirt and loafers.

“Hey, you’re Bruce Babbitt,” he finally growls, swinging his big gut around a display of country-Western tapes at a truck stop an hour north of Phoenix. “You still the governor?”

Out here on what’s left of the Western frontier, some free-spirited folks don’t cotton much to government meddlers. It’s easy to imagine the scene getting ugly fast as Babbitt--a liberal environmentalist, a counter-revolutionary in the Sage Brush Rebellion--turns slowly.

“No,” Babbitt answers softly. “That was back when this state had good governors.”

The trucker grins like a logger who just ate a spotted owl. In an instant the two are chatting about a 550-pound bear the guy killed up in the Mazatzal mountains. When Babbitt heads back to his Chevy Suburban, the man gives him a brotherly slap on the shoulder. “I’ve always liked what you did,” he says. “I hope you’all run for President next time.”

Not likely. The former governor’s presidential bid four years ago fizzled fast. His image faded from the American consciousness even faster.

Long before Bill Clinton got elected, though, pundits playing the presidential appointment game had resurrected the name Babbitt.

Now, as he drives from Phoenix, where he works as an environmental lawyer, into the mountains of Flagstaff, where his 80-year old mother awaits, Babbitt may well be playing a mental eenie-meenie-minie-mo with the posts into which political prognosticators have plopped him: Interior, Energy, Commerce, EPA. . . .

If so, he doesn’t let on. “No comment” punctuates the 276-mile round trip whenever questions of Clinton appointments arise.

What the 54-year-old president of the nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters does talk about--sometimes swerving onto the shoulder as he gestures--is his life in the outdoors and how that shaped his views on the “radical” global environmental agenda he believes will spring from this watershed moment in world history.

As Interstate 17 winds into red-rock country, Babbitt glances to the left, where pinon and junipers push toward more serious timber high on the canyon ridge.

“In the old days, you could sit up on that rim at night and smell the perfume from the sawdust of the mills, and look out at burning slag piles, scattered everywhere, glowing in the dark,” he says.

Some environmentalists would spit out that memory like a mouthful of dioxin. But there’s a subtle appreciation in Babbitt’s voice.

His family first sunk its roots in northern Arizona’s hard-scrabble in 1886, when Babbitt’s grandfather and his brothers migrated from Cincinnati. Their ranch grew into a cattle empire, their trading posts into department stores; the Babbitts became the most powerful and influential family in the top half of the state.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Flagstaff, Bruce Babbitt’s first awareness of the landscape surrounding him came from the books of Bernard De Voto, Wallace Stegner and John Wesley Powell.

De Voto dazzled the boy with a heroic Wild West, “romantic as hell,” where mountain men and fur trappers triumphed against hostile nature.

Stegner tempered young Babbitt’s view of the mythic West by portraying “an environment where the problems of living within the capacity of the land are absolutely pervasive, and government institutions evolved of necessity to try to find that balance.”

And, Babbitt says, one-armed explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell “looms over the American West like a Biblical prophet.”

In his teens, Babbitt knew to watch the blue summer sky for the black smoke that roiled beyond the mountains. Then he and his 14- and 15-year-old friends pulled on their boots and showed up at the Forest Service offices, knowing that they had to lie about their ages to the fire crew recruiter--”who happened to be our biology teacher,” Babbitt recalls.

He studied geology at Notre Dame and in 1960 enrolled in England’s University of Newcastle to get his master’s in geophysics.

While doing summer fieldwork in Bolivia, however, he found that rocks lost their luster in the face of poverty and human suffering.

Babbitt’s life then tracked the sort of progressive path that the best and brightest wanted for their vitae in those Camelot days: Harvard Law, civil rights marches, summer volunteer work in Venezuelan and Peruvian barrios and, after graduation, in the American South.

He built a legal reputation and parlayed it into a successful bid for Arizona attorney general in 1974--the year Bill Clinton assumed that post in Arkansas. And in 1978, Babbitt became governor--the same year Clinton became Arkansas governor.

In his days as an outsider, Babbitt had sat on fire lookouts ruminating with nature writer and environmental gadfly Edward Abbey. When Babbitt became governor, though, Abbey lashed out at him as an environmental compromiser.

But it’s hard to find people in the Southwest who flat-out don’t like Babbitt. Even former governor Evan Mecham, the most controversial conservative in a state that breeds them, can muster only weak damnation for Babbitt, calling him a “classic liberal.”

A shuttle ride from the Phoenix airport, however, produced what a flurry of phone calls to Arizona politicos couldn’t: open hostility.

“That bastard,” exploded Katherine Andrade, upon hearing Babbitt’s name. A retired nurse from Monterey Park, Andrade was heading back to her hometown of Clifton, where Babbitt in 1985 sent in armed National Guard troops to break up a strike. “He didn’t see the human suffering he caused,” she says.

Babbitt’s face darkens when he hears Andrade’s remarks.

The miners’ violence had escalated into bombings and random shootings, he says. Then a stray .22-caliber bullet lodged in the forehead of a 2-year-old girl.

“I went by the hospital. The father handed the (wounded) girl to me. The mother came over, very upset, and asked, ‘What are you going to do?’ ”

He sent in the guard.

Babbitt didn’t always side with business interests, he points out. Despite the copper industry’s lament that it couldn’t compete with rivals in places where there were no pollution controls, he ordered a smelter shut down in 1986 for failure to comply with emissions laws.

Some jobs were lost, Babbitt says. But the bottom line, he adds, is that pollution was reduced and “Arizona is still an enormously profitable place to mine copper.”

Babbitt’s most complex and contentious fight, over the use of the state’s water supply, dragged in all the warring factions: miners, ranchers, farmers and thirsty city dwellers. But the Groundwater Management Act he forged is now considered the best in the nation and is perhaps his finest accomplishment.

“He offended everyone a little bit, but he held their noses to it and said we’ve got to do it for the state,” says Stewart Udall, who served as Secretary of the Interior under John Kennedy.

Arizona wasn’t alone in facing challenges during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Soon several governors from the South and West launched an informal network to figure how to run states as federal dollars dried up.

He and Clinton hit it off immediately, Babbitt says, as did Hillary Clinton and Babbitt’s wife, Hattie, a Phoenix attorney who is being urged to run for office by several women’s groups.

In 1985, the governors, along with such politicians as Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), formed the Democratic Leadership Council and brought in outside brainpower.

“We were trying to blend a progressive agenda with fiscal restraint and economic growth,” Babbitt says.

Fueled by the council’s big ideas, Babbitt entered the 1988 Democratic primary.

A policy wonk before there was such a term, he talked about the deficit with Perot-like candor and offered a tough-minded and specific plan.

Many neo-liberals were enraptured. “Of the six announced Democrats, he has the supplest mind, the most coherent and interesting set of proposals, and the most impressive record in public office,” Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Republic.

But Hertzberg also wrote that on television, Babbitt’s “lugubrious face is so twitchily active it looks as though it has a team of tiny jackhammer operators just beneath the skin. . . . The thought occurs: Is this man about to bite the head off a live chicken?”

Babbitt smiles and says: “1988 was clearly not the year, and I was clearly not the messenger.”

He now sees the DLC agenda--particularly where economy, energy and the environment intersect--advancing quickly after the election: “What Clinton did was complete the revolution 10 years ahead of when it would have occurred.”

Mary Nichols, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, sees in Gore and Babbitt different and complementary breeds of environmentalism.

She signed on as California co-chair of the Babbitt for President committee in 1988, because, she says, “I saw him at that time as the only candidate who understood the interrelationship between the environment and the economy.”

Now she calls Gore “a wonderful visionary, (who) brings global perspective to policy discussions. . . . Bruce is like Ross Perot, lifting up the hood and tinkering with the engine.”

The highway narrows and noodles toward Flagstaff, with the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks dominating the background. Babbitt gestures at the dormant volcano.

“There’s a big, wide-open meadow up there, one of my favorite campsites,” he says. “It’s covered with wild iris, surrounded by aspen, and it’s crawling with elk and bear. It’s a stiff two-hour hike. I still go there occasionally by myself, with a sleeping bag and pack, and spend the night and think things out.”

He and Hattie have done some serious cross-country ski treks along the Grand Canyon’s Kaibab Plateau. In the summer, they sometimes descend one of the desolate but awe-inspiring trails from the Canyon’s rim to the Colorado River, and then hitchhike a ride from a passing river expedition. It’s a trick that works best for former governors--or for fathers like Babbitt, whose 17-year-old son is a part-time river guide.

In an article he wrote soon after becoming president of the League of Conservation Voters in 1990, Babbitt noted the aphorism: “The Earth is not something we inherit from our ancestors; it is something we borrow from our children.”

Chugging a chocolate shake as he drives, Babbitt returns to a subject that drifted through the conversation earlier--Norman Maclean’s book “A River Runs Through It,” upon which Robert Redford based his movie.

“In that book, the Forest Service is a proud agency. The men who worked for it had a macho dignity,” he says.

But in the 12 Reagan-Bush years, “the Forest Service has been pulverized. One of the great, elite agencies of the American West has been almost destroyed. . . . An urgent task for the next Secretary of Agriculture,” he says, will be “to save that noble agency.”

On a roll now, Babbitt ticks off an assessment of other agencies.

The Environmental Protection Agency, he says, is in better shape. It’s most recent head, William Reilly, was a more effective administrator than most Bush appointees. But the Department of the Interior is “a mess,” and the Department of Energy “adrift.”

Babbitt maintains that an environmental turnaround will be neither expensive nor distract Clinton from other priorities: “The EPA can enforce the Clean Air Act and make the Superfund work. . . . We can cashier Dan Quayle’s competitiveness commission. . . . And the EPA and Bureau of Reclamation can handle the destruction of wetlands.”

Still, Babbitt sees environmental concerns as global now, and the most crucial battles will be fought across national borders and across traditional economic, political and social boundaries. So the Agency for International Development (AID), the Department of Commerce, the Treasury Department, and the Special Trade Representative will also become key environmental posts.

The North American Free Trade agreement will be a starting point for pacts that tie economic advantage to environmental responsibility, he says: “This is a model of great significance for the entire world.”

The seemingly unflappable Babbitt comes close to bristling only once: when Bush’s objections to the sort of deals that were supposed to be made at the Rio Earth Summit come up.

“The paranoid right is trying to find a new bogyman now that communism is gone, so their new threat is environmentalism,” he says. “They have this idea that all international agreements are the handiwork of the devil. That shows how vacuous they are.”

For Babbitt, global environmentalism is not abstract. He has ventured up the Amazon, and recently, he says, he ignored Brazilian authorities and hitched a ride on a single engine plane into the infamous mining camps on the Venezuelan border.

Babbitt paints a portrait of dusty camps carved into hillsides 500 miles from the nearest roads, where the local Indians die of new diseases and city prostitutes swarm while miners haul hydraulic dredges up one pristine stream bed after another to blast away the hillsides.

“Gold sets everyone on fire,” he says. “It’s an uncanny replay, in real time, of what happened in the American West, two generations, three generations ago.”

Babbitt still admires the true grit of folks who try to wrestle a living from the wilderness but says he now sees that the destruction wreaked by this frontier mentality is global.

To save themselves, South Americans must embrace the ideas of sustainable yields, Babbitt says. But they naturally resent being told to hug trees by northern nations that continue on a resource-depleting lifestyle splurge.

At the end of a long day, Babbitt wheels his truck through the darkness into the spreading urban sprawl of Phoenix.

The governor widely credited with “dragging Arizona into the 20th Century” now ponders how the Third World will make the abrupt move from the 19th Century to the 21st.

“It’s like where we were at the end of World War I and World War II,” he says. “There is infinite opportunity awaiting us in a brand new world.”

Times researcher Greg Rice contributed to this story.