Monday, Mar. 08, 1993
The Land Lord Outdoorsman
By TED GUP WASHINGTON
Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt scans his vast office, then gazes down at the blue Republican carpet. He intends to tear the rug out, for it conceals a fine walnut floor installed during New Deal days by his conservationist hero, Harold Ickes. Not even the floor covering is beyond the scrutiny of Babbitt as he carries out vast changes in the Interior Department and in the government's philosophy toward its public lands. Where conservatives James Watt and Manuel Lujan once presided, Babbitt now speaks as if he were in a vanguard of liberators. "There has been an ideological war going on for the past 12 years," says Babbitt, "and this department has been staff headquarters -- the battle post in Washington for an unrelenting war against the land and the conservation ethic. They said they were after balance, but they really weren't."
The changes Babbitt seeks may touch 500 million acres of federal property, or about one-fifth of the U.S., encompassing national parks, wilderness areas, forests and grazing lands. With the blessing of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the Interior chief plans to revitalize the National Park Service and increase the protection of endangered species. But his most politically complex mission is to scale back once sacred subsidies for those who use federal lands: miners, the timber industry, and cattle and sheep ranchers.
The Interior Department, long viewed as a captive of commodity interests, & has until now carried out a 19th century mandate to encourage resource exploitation in order to stimulate development of the West. Babbitt wants to emphasize protection of those lands and to demand that those who profit from them pay a fair share. All told, the fee increases he proposes would produce an estimated $1 billion over five years, which would help reduce the budget deficit as well as maintain the lands. Among the measures:
-- Babbitt wants grazing fees raised across 16 Western states, which would affect 29,000 ranchers whose cattle and sheep graze on about 280 million federal acres. The current fee, $1.86 per month to graze one cow and her calf, is well below market value. But any raise is tempered by concern for small ranchers. An estimated 45% of ranchers using federal lands have fewer than 100 cattle. Babbitt's idea: a two-tier fee structure that charges the small rancher less and offers a credit to those who improve the land. In May he will hold hearings on the issue throughout the Rocky Mountain region.
-- Babbitt will try to persuade Congress to amend the mining law of 1872, under which miners may purchase mineral rights for as little as $2.50 an acre. Babbitt will ask for a royalty on the value of the extracted minerals, with a fee schedule favoring small operators. "We ought to have progressive fees to make a populist statement that it's good public policy to make sure the small guys stay on the land. We're not trying to just lock the West up and turn the whole thing into a national park," says Babbitt. Mining interests know they will have to give ground, up to a point. Says John Knebel, president of the American Mining Congress: "We're going to have to make some adjustments."
-- Also likely to come under scrutiny are below-cost timber sales at Babbitt's sister agency, the Agriculture Department. The government is currently losing money on logging operations in more than half of its 155 national forests. The U.S. spends money to build roads and make the timber accessible but then often sells it cheap. Over the past 14 years, the U.S. has subsidized logging companies to the tune of $8.5 billion, according to Robert Wolf, a forestry economist.
Babbitt's most ambitious long-term goal is a broad reinterpretation of the Endangered Species Act. "I think it is absolutely the overarching issue," says Babbitt. He proposes to focus less on rescuing individual species already on the brink of extinction, taking instead a multispecies approach in which ecosystems will be examined as a whole. This will require government scientists and researchers to integrate their efforts across agency lines and produce comprehensive biological surveys. As a case in point, Babbitt cites the feuding among federal agencies in the fight over the northern spotted owl of the Pacific Northwest forests.
Babbitt has declared his agency the "Department of the Environment," but he has tried to reassure anxious Western miners, ranchers and loggers that he will not pursue radical policies. Few are better suited to carry that message. Babbitt is the face of the New West, a former Arizona attorney general and Governor who comes from a cattle-ranching family and holds a master's degree in geophysics and a Harvard law degree. He preaches change through consensus. "I don't regard this as a great adversarial crusade," says Babbitt. "I think these issues are going to be worked out with a lot less confrontation than is generally assumed."
Babbitt often looks to history for inspiration. During the early days of World War II, he recalls, the generals came to Harold Ickes, saying it was necessary to sacrifice the Sitka spruces in Olympic National Park to make airplanes. "You're not going to invade this park until we have exhausted every other alternative," said Ickes. A month later, Ickes returned to the generals and told them Canada could supply the spruces -- but by then the generals' interest had turned from wood to metal for airplanes. Says Babbitt: "I take that story as a metaphor for my job."
With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and David Seideman/New York