Ex-Interior Boss Lujan Defends His Stewardship of Public Lands : Conservation: His job resembled being in a sack filled with clawing cats, he says, predicting that environmentalists will attack his successor too.

The man who governed the use of the nation’s public lands in the George Bush Administration says the job of interior secretary was like being in a sack full of clawing cats.

His critics say that when it came to development decisions, he was in over his head.

He says he is proud of his four-year record and likened it to being between a rock and a hard place.

“No one is satisfied,” Manuel Lujan Jr. said when he returned home to Albuquerque. “If you do something that’s pro-development, you get the environmental groups against you, and if you do something that’s pro-environmental you get the industry groups against you. No matter what you do--it’s a very controversial department.”

Lujan stresses the difficulty of running the 75,000-employee department that oversees interests often at odds with each other. Interior agencies cover mining, logging, ranching, oil drilling, the preservation of lands and species and Indian affairs.

“What I tried to do--and I think was successful in doing--was to bring a balance between the use of resources on public lands and environmental concerns,” said Lujan, who followed his boss, former President Bush, out of office on Jan. 20.

Sitting in the office of an Albuquerque insurance company his father founded in 1926, Lujan said he’s most proud of two accomplishments: improving Indian students’ national test scores by 8 percentage points and increasing the money collected from national park concessionaires from about $12 million to $100 million yearly.

He said he ran out of time to push through a 60-cent increase in livestock grazing fees and to reform a 120-year-old law that allows miners nearly free purchase of public lands. But he said he set the stage for the next Administration to act.

His forte, he says, was his role as mediator.

“I would bring in both sides together,” said Lujan, 64, who spent two decades as a New Mexico congressman before joining the Cabinet. “I tried to find a consensus rather than mandate from on high.”

But critics, who acknowledge Lujan’s door was always open, say his accomplishments were dwarfed by the damage he did.

“He maintained his demeanor as a genuinely nice, approachable guy,” said Debbie Sease of the Sierra Club, whose members at one time called for Lujan’s resignation over their fight to save northern spotted owl habitat from logging in the Pacific Northwest.

“He listened--he just didn’t do anything,” Sease said in Washington, D.C. “It was an open door that was sort of like a black hole. The damage he did is the damage that comes from not taking the opportunity to make things better.”

Environmentalists were particularly outraged by what they called Lujan’s hostility toward the Endangered Species Act.

“He was better than James Watt--but that’s not saying much,” said Jim Norton of the Wilderness Society, referring to former President Ronald Reagan’s pro-development interior secretary who was widely condemned by environmentalists.

“He was just staying the course of the Reagan and Bush years, and that course was to continue turning the clock backward in terms of our public lands,” Norton said in Santa Fe.

Lujan acknowledges that he was tough on the Endangered Species Act. It’s an attitude he says is backed by his belief in creationism and the superiority of man over beast. But he calls himself an environmentalist and points to the 60 new wildlife refuges covering a million acres established during his term.

“We were farmers--that was my dad’s occupation,” Lujan said. “My thoughts have always been, if you take care of the land it’ll take care of you. Farmers are about as good conservationists as you’ll find anywhere.”

Environmentalists don’t buy it. Many were outraged early in his term when, while noting the endangered red squirrel was blocking construction of an Arizona telescope, he said, “Nobody’s told me the difference between a red squirrel, a black one or a brown one. Do we have to save every subspecies?”

A beleaguered spokesman called the remark regrettable and an aide said his boss had a tendency to “think out loud.”

Lujan said he told the aide not to apologize for him. “I knew what I was doing. I was making a point.

“It’s not now just species that we’re protecting. It’s every hybrid. So I felt that the red squirrel and the brown squirrel or the gray squirrel--whatever it is--they’re in essence the same thing. And the whole issue was not the squirrel itself, because they were multiplying. It was the building of the telescope.”

Environmentalists also contend that Lujan didn’t understand the issues when he referred to Bureau of Land Management’s 270 million acres as “a place with a lot of grass for a bunch of cows” and when he cut into a rock bearing an ancient Indian drawing, saying, “There’s nothing like kicking the tires.”

They insist he didn’t have Bush’s ear when other Cabinet members were summoned to Alaska immediately after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. They say he was tied to business interests when he failed to stop logging in endangered spotted owl habitat.

Lujan contends environmentalists and the media often took his comments and actions out of context.

“I knew all the issues,” Lujan said. “I had been on the (House) Interior Committee for 20 years before.”

Re-enacting the petroglyph incident, Lujan demonstrated how he scratched at the boulder during a congressional fund-raising tour to protect the centuries-old art from vandals.

He said he was simply trying to demonstrate how easy it had been for ancient man to carve the volcanic rock. Besides, he said, it was a big rock--about 2 yards by 2 yards and maybe 5 feet high. He made only a quarter-inch scratch. “That was the real story. But in the paper, it was almost like I had defaced one of those petroglyphs.”

Industry representatives praise Lujan but say they wish he had done more.

Oil tycoon Robert O. Anderson, a former chairman of Atlantic Richfield Co., and other businessmen say they hope Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt will continue what they call Lujan’s balanced approach amid tough adversaries.

Lujan said he believes Babbitt, a former Arizona governor, understands Western issues and will do a good job. But he added a warning, underscoring his belief that the environmental movement prefers controversy as a means of keeping its coffers filled.

“You watch--Bruce Babbitt comes from that community,” Lujan said. “It won’t be six months before they’re after him.”