Babbitt’s Legacy of Resource Protection Angers Some in West

Bruce Babbitt nursed a chardonnay and perched uncomfortably on an ottoman, wincing occasionally as a parade of his soon-to-be former employees dredged up embarrassing stories. One after another, wildlife biologists, wolf experts, park rangers and conservation activists spun out anecdotes collected from the Interior secretary’s eight years in office.

The setting, a gathering over the weekend at Yellowstone National Park, was weighted with symbolism. Here six years ago, Babbitt cradled in his arms the first of the wolves to be successfully reintroduced into Yellowstone. Yet here too are ferocious opponents to his policies on public lands, grazing and mining.

When Babbitt leaves office at the end of the week, the 47th secretary of the Interior will leave behind twin legacies of having vastly increased the amount of public land set aside for protection but also putting in motion policies that antagonized Western ranchers, Northwestern timber companies and Rocky Mountain mining companies.

Babbitt, the former Arizona governor and a trained geologist, came to Yellowstone and other Western states for his self-titled “last lap” tour and presaged announcements this week that may further add to his record of resource protection.

By any standard, Babbitt’s two terms have been eventful. The Interior’s portfolio cuts a wide swath through several agencies, including the Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Geological Survey.

Environmentalist Hails Babbitt as ‘Heroic’

“I think of Bruce Babbitt as a genuinely heroic secretary of Interior who came in with a bold agenda and who accomplished less of it than he expected,” said Denis Hayes, an environmentalist and chairman of Earth Day 2000. “He will be remembered in a relatively short list--along with Cecil Andrus and Stewart Udall--as a person whose conservation values were clear and who managed the agency well. He afforded long-term protection to some remarkable American places.”

Babbitt lists among his proud accomplishments the restoration of the Florida Everglades and the strengthening of both the national wildlife refuge system and the Endangered Species Act.

But others see a legacy of indifference to the concerns of ranchers and recreational groups that use public land. For eight years, Babbitt has been the nation’s biggest landlord, managing 30% of the land in the United States. His stewardship has aggrieved those in the mining, oil and gas industries as well as ranching, who believed that Babbitt--himself a descendant of pioneer ranchers--sought to lock away public land from commercial use.

Nothing Babbitt has done has been more controversial than the recent rush of setting aside national monuments. With Babbitt calling the shots, President Clinton has designated 20 national monuments, 17 of them in the West. By comparison, Presidents Reagan and Bush named no new monuments.

The issue resonates more strongly in the West, where the bulk of federal land lies. Even though most of the monument lands were already in federal hands, the moves were called “the great Western land grab” by many private property-rights activists.

All of Clinton’s monument designations have utilized the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives the president the right to name monuments without congressional approval. Monument status gives the land more protected status than other federal lands but less than a national park.

The policy has been criticized as a “back-door” approach that ignores local views. Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, a Wyoming native, has said that the Clinton-Babbitt monument policy has gobbled land “willy-nilly,” and President-elect George W. Bush said recently that he’ll review every monument designation individually. (No president has ever done away with a monument, but Congress has.)

For his part, Babbitt said he doubts that Bush will reverse his work, mainly because Americans have shown they favor the conservation and restoration of public land.

“There’s enormous public support for the things we’ve done, enormous,” he said. “I don’t think it will be that easy to undo anything. It will come at enormous cost.”

Babbitt will now focus his energy on writing a book about the next 25 years in resources, energy and global environmental issues. He will, he says, become a very public private citizen.

No Speculation on Successor’s Policies

He resists speculating about future policy changes in the department, even with an increasingly clear presumption that his proposed successor, Gale A. Norton, will approach resource issues with greater attention to commercial and private interests.

“I ain’t taking that bait,” he said, seeking to deflect inquiry about Norton, with whom he says he has a “speaking acquaintance.”

Characteristically feisty to the end, Babbitt let off a final shot across a broad philosophical bow. In a statement that is sure to inflame Western ranchers, Babbitt this weekend essentially reordered the emphasis of public grazing land, placing noncommercial animals as the preeminent species.

“On public lands in the great Western ecosystem, livestock will not have priority,” Babbitt told an enthusiastic audience here. “The grazing of livestock will and must be subordinated to the natural order of the bison and the predator. The needs of the bison are first.”

That’s a highly provocative statement in the West, where ranchers graze their cattle almost exclusively on public land. The highly emotional nature of grazing issues has been among the most nettlesome for Babbitt to sort through.

His remarks are especially ominous to the ears of Montana ranchers, who have been shooting on sight bison that wander out of Yellowstone’s boundaries. Some bison in the park’s herd are carriers of brucellosis, which can cause cows to abort their calves. Although it is not scientifically clear that cattle can contract the disease from bison, ranchers in the area are nonetheless adamant that bison not mingle with cattle.

Of course, coming as it does in the last week of his term in office, Babbitt’s statement packs less of a punch than it would as a policy change coming from a sitting secretary. As the days tick down, so too does the official weight of his words. As he noted in a response to a policy question here, “Look, in seven days I’m toast.”