A Widening Fissure Between State, Feds

When it comes to placing a value on the environment, California has rarely seemed so far from Washington, D.C.

California this year added to its aggressive regulation of cars. A first-in-the-nation law will require auto makers to combat global warming by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide from their cars by 2009. Washington, which worries that aggressive regulation of cars will hurt the economy, joined auto makers to try to reduce the state’s regulations, suing to block California’s requirement for zero-emission electric vehicles.

California bought tens of thousands of acres of redwood forests and wetlands during the year to preserve as wilderness, and the state’s voters shrugged off a slumping economy to approve two bond measures totaling $6 billion to buy and protect even more.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, moved to open the mountains to more logging, the deserts to off-road vehicles and the oceans to more offshore oil drilling. At the administration’s behest, a D.C.-based federal judge lifted protections across 4 million acres in California for the imperiled red-legged frog, which was made famous as Mark Twain’s “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

The divergence in environmental visions is widening between the nation’s capital, dominated by Republicans, and the state capital, run by Democrats, said Mary Nichols, California’s secretary of resources.

“There is no question that the Bush administration has been quietly, but systematically, discarding almost every environmental policy put in place by the Clinton administration,” Nichols said.

Advocates for property rights and industries such as timber say the change has come none too soon, because environmental interests can go too far. “If left to their own devices, they would lock up the deserts completely, lock up the forests and buy huge amounts of land in the Sierras to force people out,” said Chuck Cushman, founder of the American Land Rights Assn. “I think the Bush administration is a check on the extremes of the Left Coast.”

But state officials are dismayed about the lack of agreement with federal counterparts over how to balance use and protection of watersheds, forests, deserts and other undeveloped lands.

“I don’t know if I want to say distrust,” Nichols said, “but there is a suspicion that the other side will take a situation and use it for political advantage.”

The difference owes much to politics, said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. President Bush has pretty much written off California in his reelection plans and isn’t worried about opposition from environmentally minded voters in the state, Pope said. In contrast, the administration is counting on support from states in the interior West, where many voters think of mining, logging and ranching more as sources of jobs than as causes of environmental degradation.

Public-Interest Dispute

“California is moving forward on environmental protections and, not only is Washington in an ebb tide, but this administration believes ... lots of decisions should be made without involving the public or consideration of environmental consequences,” Pope said.

Not true, said Lynn Scarlett, assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Scarlett, who is from Montecito, Calif., said she and Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton and other administration officials have devoted a great deal of time and care trying to resolve environmental issues in California.

The administration’s goal is to listen to all competing interests, she said, “juggling environmental values and community with economic values and the ability for people to pursue their livelihoods and economic dreams.”

Tensions and sometimes superheated rhetoric have flared much of the year over regulations governing offshore oil drilling, air pollution water allotments to farmers and fish and logging in the Sierra Nevada, where the U.S. Forest Service has spent much of the year reconsidering Clinton-era logging restrictions on 11.5 million acres.

The fight over water use was most dramatic in the Klamath River basin. In September, 30,000 dead, rotting salmon lined the banks of the Klamath, inflaming local Indian tribes and fishermen who said the deaths had been caused by federal officials’ diversion of too much water to farmers upstream, near the California-Oregon border.

In the deserts, the federal Bureau of Land Management has moved to open up remote areas to more mining and grazing. More recently, it has released plans to allow more off-road vehicles into areas of the Sonora Desert in Imperial and Riverside counties that had been set aside to protect the endangered California desert tortoise.

“Across the board, we are seeing the administration rolling back environmental gains of the last few years,” said Daniel Patterson, a former Bureau of Land Management employee and now a desert ecologist with the Center for Biological Diversity.

One of the most visible clashes has been over offshore oil. California has been trying to halt any new drilling in federal waters off the coast of Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.

The state won a victory when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that, before the federal government signs off on any drilling plans, it must allow the California Coastal Commission to review them.

In the interim, California’s Democratic politicians have pressured President Bush to retire offshore oil leases by buying out the oil companies, as he did earlier this year in Florida, where his brother Jeb Bush is governor.

Incensed Over Oil

So far, Bush has not offered the same deal to California. Norton pointed to oil wells that California allows in state-controlled waters under leases negotiated years ago. “Florida opposes coastal drilling, and California does not,” she said.

Her words unleashed a torrent of protests from environmental groups and California politicians.

Despite clashes with top-level federal officials, those on the lower rungs said state and federal wildlife agencies continue to work well together. Those in the field, said Hugh Vickery of the Interior Department, often share the same vision. “There is a lot of good work, hand in hand,” he said.

In the ocean, federal officials joined -- and even led -- state officials in instituting broad fishing bans to protect dwindling numbers of bottom-dwelling rockfish. Much of the continental shelf is now off-limits to bottom trawlers and other fishermen.

Officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also backed the state’s adoption of the largest network of no-fishing marine reserves in the continental United States. Clustered around the Channel Islands, these reserves were a bold step in a new approach -- protecting an entire ecosystem, rather than a species of fish, from the ravages of excessive harvesting.

State and federal officials have also cooperated on some land purchases, although the state has taken the lead on the biggest buys this year. Among the state purchases were 25,000 acres of coastal redwoods and Douglas fir in the state’s northwestern-most county of Del Norte, 10,000 acres of ruggedly beautiful hills and mountains in Big Sur, and 7,500 acres of redwood forest in Mendocino’s Big River area.

California joined private foundations and the federal government to buy 16,500 acres of salt ponds in South Francisco Bay to restore tidal marshes needed to bring back fish and shorebirds.

In Southern California, state officials purchased 1,400 acres in the hills above Tuna Canyon in Malibu and joined federal officials in buying all but the last 1.5-mile stretch needed to complete the 60-mile Backbone Trail along the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains.

“The most amazing thing,” said a California urban planning expert, William Fulton, “is that we passed two bond measures in this kind of economy to preserve more land.”

“Everyone agrees park bonds are a good thing when they have money in their pockets,” said Fulton, president of Solimar Research Group in Ventura. “But to watch this persist is surprising and says something about how people want to have nature accessible to them, rather than having to go out to wilderness.”