Maverick Babbitt Mending Fences on Range Reform : Land: Interior secretary travels the West, trying to reassure ranchers he hasn’t forgotten his rural roots.

Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona who grew up on one of the state’s largest cattle ranches, listened politely as yet another scowling stockman rose to question his Western sympathies.

“What I want to know is, as a rancher yourself, are you with us or are you against us?” asked Britt Lay, the hefty foreman of the White Horse ranch in southeastern Oregon who met with Babbitt last week.

It is a question asked frequently by ranchers, miners, business owners and others as the Interior secretary crisscrosses a rural West that is up in arms over some of his environmental proposals.

Like an embattled Southern politician stumping for civil rights in the 1960s, Babbitt faces his toughest challenge in building a popular base for reform on his home ground.

“I was a big believer in the New West kind of theory,” Babbitt said, referring to the idea that towns from Boise, Ida., to Albuquerque, N.M., are filling up with urban exiles who want to see the landscape restored to what it was before the pioneers began to graze cattle, mine hillsides, clear-cut forests and dam streams. “I thought this time it might be easier to get things done. The Western press, the economic community, a lot of people seemed to be in favor of it. But obviously that was not entirely the case.”

Hailed as the first pro-environment Interior secretary in 12 years, Babbitt had hoped to make his grazing plan the leading edge of a sweeping land reform policy in the West.

He had sought to raise fees for ranchers who graze their cattle on public land, to broaden federal jurisdiction over rangeland water rights, and to give environmentalists a role in deciding the fate of the Western range. In most Western communities, his plan had all the appeal of hoof-and-mouth disease.

The opposition to Babbitt’s plan is part of a larger struggle for control of a changing region. Babbitt is widely seen as a proxy for urban environmentalist groups who want to disenfranchise traditional rural interests.

In the heat of a losing congressional fight last fall over his range reform proposals, Babbitt became the target of a letter-writing campaign seeking his ouster. He was vilified as a highhanded bureaucrat and called a liberal James Watt, the first secretary of Interior under President Ronald Reagan who became the bete noire of the environmental movement.

Worst of all, Babbitt, who had grown up shooting rattlers in his back yard, hunting deer with ranch hands and fighting fires in the mountains above his home, was accused of turning his back on his neighbors.

“A traitor to my class, that sort of thing . . . ,” Babbitt said during a recent interview.

These days, Babbitt is working hard to mend fences.

From Grand Junction, Colo., to Cedar City, Utah, to Baker City, he has been conducting a goodwill tour of a region he cares deeply about, trying to persuade a skeptical public that his commitment to biodiversity includes the people as well the mountains, deserts and forests.

He has told several groups he is prepared to backtrack on controversial proposals he made earlier this year.

“There is going to be a significant number of changes,” he told a group of Oregon ranchers last week. “I’ve learned a lot by unpacking my suitcase in every significant crossroads in the West these past few months.”

Reaching out to rural audiences, Babbitt jokes about members of his own family threatening to disown him for some of his early ideas on grazing reform. He admits he overestimated the public’s appetite for stricter government oversight on the Western range.

From an environmental perspective, Babbitt’s first year leaves plenty of room for optimism. He appointed several highly regarded environmentalists to key jobs in the Interior Department. And he made it clear that even during a recession, protection of natural resources was going to be a priority--a commitment best reflected in expanded safeguards for several vulnerable species ranging from the northern spotted owl to the California gnatcatcher.

But on the issue dear to the American public’s imagination, the one evoking the enduring values and myths of the Old West, the one pitting the romance of the cowboy against the spectacle of ravaged rangelands, Babbitt stumbled.

“As a Westerner, he just didn’t come to grips with the facts of life out here. He didn’t do his homework,” said Colorado Gov. Roy Romer, who is now working closely with Babbitt as he tries to make amends.

Babbitt turned to Romer for help after his first range reform plan was stonewalled by a Senate filibuster. To Babbitt’s chagrin, the filibuster was joined by several Western Democrats who often support environmental legislation.

When the dust cleared, it was evident that the opposition wasn’t limited to the cattlemen’s associations, oil and gas lobbies, mining companies and other traditional adversaries of the environmental movement.

Fortifying the Senate’s resistance was a loose alliance of livestock operators, small-town businessmen, think tanks and college professors. Even some environmentalists broke ranks with the hard-liners who don’t believe anyone ought to be making a living off public lands.

In places like Gunnison, Colo., Sheridan, Wyo., Grants Pass, Ore., and Quincy, Calif., groups of environmentalists, ranchers, lumber mill operators and others began drafting compromises that seek to make room for grazing, logging and even some mining on public lands without endangering the most fragile river valleys, old forests and wildlife habitat.

“For us, the challenge is how to integrate the environment and the economy in ways that don’t do violence to the people or to the land,” said Bruce Baizel, an environmental consultant in Pagosa Springs, Colo. “It’s very important that environmental solutions leave local people with something more to do than change sheets for the tourists.”

For Babbitt, the new, urban West may herald a higher environmental consciousness, but for many residents it means higher taxes, new demands for water and services and more crime. Many Western environmentalists cite the hotels and second homes that transform rural communities into resorts, to the golf courses carved into the deserts, and to the 10-acre ranchettes sprouting up in winter pastures, crowding out the wildlife.

There also is a strong hint of class conflict in the backlash against Babbitt’s land reform.

“We’ve got a culture war going on in the West right now,” said Ed Quillen, a writer who lives in Salida, a community of 5,000 people in southern Colorado. “You’ve got the traditional red, white and blue redneck and you have the high-end crowd. I call them people of money. They think because they come here two weeks out of the year they ought to be able to tell us how to manage the land.

“It would be one thing if they wanted to put up with the bitter winters, the irregular services, the isolation and the schools where parents take a vote on whether evolution or creationism ought to be taught. But they’re not about to put up with any of that.

“It’s enough to turn an old hippie like me into a raving reactionary.”

As Babbitt traveled around the West recently, dodging snowstorms and ignoring cold shoulders, he paused to take stock of his own conflicted feelings about the region.

“As a Westerner, you are conditioned by your experience on the land, by the space, the distance, the loneliness. I am absolutely a Westerner to the tips of my toes when it comes to the intense relationship I have to the land I grew up on.”

But the proprietary instinct that makes so many Westerners want to build their house on a mountaintop or own everything to the far horizon did not take root in Babbitt. Content to leave the family homestead in the hands of relatives, Babbitt felt no need to etch the family’s brand any deeper on the landscape.

Years later, with the family’s cattle herd still dependent on access to public range land, Babbitt saw no problem in giving opponents of public land grazing a role in formulating grazing policies.

“After all, it is the public’s land,” Babbitt said. “There is no logic to handing over one-third of the U.S. to the private use of a single interest group. That would be like creating a new class of land barons.”

On this subject, there is a story Babbitt likes to tell about his family. It’s about an old Basque sheepherder who took him aside several years ago to show him a piece of history--a yellowed envelope that Babbitt’s grandfather used to draw the boundary line separating his pasture from the sheepherder’s.

The envelope was a pioneer’s deed of trust, its faded marks honored by the two families for more than 100 years. The only trouble, Babbitt said, was neither his grandfather nor the sheepherder owned the land their livestock was grazing on. It was, and still is, federal range, open to anyone. Yet, the two stockmen had divvied it up as if it were their property.

Old habits die hard. At a recent meeting with Babbitt in southern Utah, a rancher said he was 20 before he realized the land where his family grazed their cattle “wasn’t all ours.” The rancher’s point was that his family had taken care of the federal range as if it were their own and didn’t need the Sierra Club or their friends in the federal bureaucracy dictating environmental policy.

Babbitt held his tongue. He was looking for common ground, not confrontation. He said he’d had enough of that in Washington.

“When I deal with the Washington groups, whether it’s the National Cattlemen’s Assn. or some of the environmentalists, it’s a disaster. They are sworn antagonists. That’s why I checked out of that scene and came West, looking for a middle ground,” Babbitt said.

He has been working closest with a group of ranchers and environmentalists from Gunnison, Colo., and hopes that a new model for range reform will come out of their meetings. By his own admission, the Gunnison plan is a “step back” from the proposals that triggered the Senate filibuster.

There still would be higher grazing fees for public land ranchers, but the increases would be flexible, tied to a rancher’s stewardship of the land. On water rights, Babbitt said he was open to compromise. Likewise, he may have softened a bit on the touchy issue of jurisdiction. He still asserts the public’s right to participate in range management, but adds “you can’t just wake up in New Jersey one morning and mail in your protest and expect to be taken seriously.”

Meanwhile in the West, Babbitt’s outreach has drawn mixed reactions.

“I still don’t trust him,” one Oregan rancher said after meeting with Babbitt earlier this month.

But Clayton Atkin, who has been grazing his cattle on public lands in Northern Arizona for nearly 50 years, was more encouraged.

“I think the secretary is listening,” Atkin said. “But we have to listen too. There are more people than ever before with a stake in the West. Like it or not, we have some new partners.”