06-10-2000

WHITE HOUSE: Lands Legacy Gains Ground

The Clinton-Gore years sprang to life with a flurry of inaugural balls, 11
in all, and none was a more hopeful occasion for liberals than the
first-ever Environmental Ball. There, in the Sequoia Restaurant, Bill and
Hillary Clinton mingled with some 2,000 committed Greens.


"Carbon emissions is going to become an issue again," Lester R.
Brown of Worldwatch Institute predicted confidently. Newly sworn-in Vice
President Al Gore, Earth's most prominent critic of carbon emissions,
seconded that sentiment, adding, "I need your help when the choice
comes between the hard right decision and the easy wrong decision for our
country." The rapture was especially sweet for those whose passion is
protecting the wilderness and conserving public lands in the vast American
West.


Was the environmentalists' faith in Clinton and Gore well-founded? On the
issue of global warming, not much has happened that environmentalists
praise, but on the more emotional and, for millions of Americans, more
immediate issue of Western lands, President Clinton is working feverishly
to protect tracts of federal lands so vast that his efforts will put him
in the pantheon of the most ambitious conservation-minded Presidents-a
list that includes Theodore Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter.


On Feb. 17, 1993-less than a month after his inauguration-Clinton unveiled
a budget that proposed raising $1 billion over five years from royalties
made on Western land use. The grazing fee on federal lands, then $1.86 per
month per cow, would be tripled. The royalty on minerals such as gold and
silver would go from nothing to 12.5 percent, the figure for offshore oil.
As for logging on federal land, the U.S. Forest Service announced that it
would no longer subsidize logging operations that cost the government more
in road-building than it reaped in timber royalties-meaning some 58
percent of logging. "I see us as the department of the
environment," Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt explained in a speech
in his home state of Arizona.


Clinton urged Congress not to pick his economic proposal apart. But then,
following the lead of Democratic Senators from the West who were guided by
Montana's Max Baucus, the White House backed off the whole
package.


That was the wake-up call to the environmental community. "I don't
think I've ever seen a white flag get put up so fast," said Michael
Francis, the director of the Wilderness Society's forest program. A few
days later, Clinton and Gore sought a middle ground on the spotted-owl
issue. Their solution-Gore was the driving force behind it-gave the
logging companies some timber rights while preserving some of Oregon's
old-growth forests.


Still reeling from the grazing and mining capitulation, environmental
leaders were suspicious. In hindsight, they told one another, we should
have paid more attention back in December, before the Administration took
office, when Gore vowed to block the opening of a polluting, $160 million
hazardous-waste incinerator in Ohio-but was overruled by Clinton. Or they
should have listened to the grousing of some of their young staffers who
wondered why they had to pay $125 a ticket to an inaugural
"environmental" ball sponsored by such outfits as the American
Mining Congress and Waste Management.


"We heard that one loud and clear," Robert Dewey, the Defenders
of Wildlife's vice president for government relations, says of the grazing
and mining retreat. The environmental community decided it would have to
cajole and bolster this new Administration-or else be content with happy
memories of the Environmental Ball.


These days, environmentalists tend to think of Clinton's first two
years-the only time he had a Democratic majority in Congress-as the wasted
years, when initiatives that required congressional action failed because
the White House couldn't muster the support. "They had good
intentions, but failed to deliver," says Daniel J. Weiss, the
political director for the Sierra Club. "In the overall eight years,
though, what they've managed to do is rather profound. And if you put it
into a political environment-they've been dealing with a hostile
Congress-what they've managed to accomplish is a stunning
achievement."


That hostility only increased after the 1994 GOP takeover of Congress. But
then came phase two of Clinton's record on Western lands.


Instead of pushing for new initiatives, the Clinton White House began
playing defense, primarily against unwelcome riders attached to
appropriations bills. Here, too, it took Clinton a while to learn the
game. In the summer of 1995, he signed an appropriations bill that
contained a rider inserted by Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. The rider was
advertised as allowing loggers to salvage trees already damaged by fire or
bug infestations. In reality, the measure reopened old-growth forests to
aggressive logging, even of healthy trees, in tracts that the
Administration itself had set aside for protection. Clinton knew what the
measure would lead to, but apparently hoped it would help him politically
in economically depressed towns. Instead, liberals in pro-Clinton areas
were incensed. When he visited Seattle, Clinton was met by more than a
thousand protesters infuriated over the clear-cutting of 1 million acres
of public lands.


It was a mistake Clinton never made again. In 1995, he shut down the
government rather than accept a spending bill that would have opened up
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. "He found his
stride opposing some of these environmental riders," Dewey
says.


As he did so, it became evident to White House pollsters and operatives
that Clinton's defense of the environment was a winner politically. In his
1996 campaign, Clinton made it a signature tactic. Bringing out of
mothballs a 1906 law called the Antiquities Act, the President stood on
the spectacular South Rim of the Grand Canyon and, with a stroke of a pen,
designated some 1.7 million acres of Utah land a national
monument.


The Utah land, now known as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument, is home to American Indian art carved into canyon walls, cliff
dwellings, and other artifacts. But the real prize, some cynics pointed
out, would be the electoral votes in Arizona.


If this was Clinton's strategy, it succeeded. In 1992, Clinton and
Gore-both Southerners-broke the Republicans' so-called Electoral College
lock by carrying the Western states of California, Oregon, and Washington
and by stealing Colorado, Montana, Nevada and the bellwether state of New
Mexico as well. In 1996, they held the West Coast but lost Colorado and
Montana, in part over mining and grazing. They offset that loss by adding
Arizona to their side. Something else happened that day at the Grand
Canyon, according to well-placed sources in the environmental community:
Clinton loved the feeling of setting aside that land, and relished the
fact that he didn't need to talk to any Republicans or members of Congress
to do it.


"He was using his own tools of authority instead of working through
the frustrating congressional process," says Rindy O'Brien, the vice
president for policy at the Wilderness Society. "It really geared him
to use his legacy powers."


This tactic defined phase three: legislating essentially by executive
order. Clinton has used the Antiquities Act to set aside 328,000 acres of
sensitive land in Sequoia National Forest in California. Last week,
Babbitt sent Clinton information on four more sites, in Arizona, Colorado,
Oregon, and Washington, totaling some 550,000 acres. If Clinton goes ahead
with the preservation-and no one doubts he will-he will have used the law
to set aside nearly 4 million acres of Western land at 10 sites, including
a 1 million-acre expansion of Grand Canyon National Park itself.


Other Clinton actions praised by preservationists include:


* His support and 1994 signing of the California Desert Bill, which
designated about one-third of California's 25 million-acre Mojave Desert
as wilderness.


* A land swap in 1996 that precluded a Canadian mining conglomerate from
opening a controversial gold mine upstream from Yellowstone National
Park.


* The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in 1994.


* His support for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which Clinton
calls his Lands Legacy. It designates $900 million a year from offshore
oil royalties for environmental cleanup and protection.


* An ongoing review by the Forest Service to see which national forest
areas can be designated roadless. A draft recently recommended banning
road construction on some 43 million acres currently without roads. The 16
million-acre Tongass National Forest in Alaska was not included, however.
Gore said two weeks later that he wants the Tongass included, along with a
ban on logging there. Texas Gov. George W. Bush suggested the Clinton plan
went too far; his criticism put Clinton in the middle and highlighted the
fact that Clinton has managed to ensure his relevance right up until
Election Day-or maybe beyond.


"There's a lot of mischief they can do before they shut out the
lights and close the doors," says Melinda Pierce, a Sierra Club
lobbyist. She laughs as she says it. She believes she knows what is
coming: The President plans to designate the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge as a national monument under the Antiquities Act. That just might
solidify his reputation. Four years ago, when the President went to the
Grand Canyon, Robert Redford was there to watch him. Redford had mentioned
Grand Staircase to Clinton three years earlier and then never heard a word
about it until a few days before the event at the South Rim.


A reporter at the event asked Redford if he considered Clinton a good
environmentalist. The famous actor smiled and replied, "He is
today."


Carl M. Cannon

National Journal