‘I’m not Jim Watt’ Or is she? Interior secretary has two sides
By Michael Powell
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Interior Secretary Gale Norton is the new ruler of the kingdom of the American West, controlling more than half the land in 11 states. The title comes weighted with irony.
For Norton is one of the Western politicians who waged a decades-long war against the distant bureaucracies at Interior, one of those conservatives who fancy themselves guerrilla fighters against Washington.
The rebel occupies the palace.
“I’ve always been concerned by the notion that you had to protect the environment only through strong government action,” she says. “I came to a realization that ... those in Washington who make the regulations very often have no understanding of the impact.”
Only James Watt, Reagan’s first Interior secretary, ranks so high in environmentalist demonology. A Sierra Club official coined the inventive invective:
Norton is James Watt in a skirt.
Clever, but it misses the mark. Norton represents the ascendancy of a more interesting and complex figure: the free-market conservationist.
‘Two American dreams at play’
If Watt and his sagebrush rebels in the 1980s desired to dial back to a day when extractors and ranchers ruled the West, Norton casts herself as a reformer from a New West, where environmentalists make common cause with ranchers.
To decode Norton, 47, is to understand that the shining line between environmentalist and free marketeer glows less brightly in the West than in Washington.
“There are two American dreams at play,” says historian Patricia Nelson Limerick, chairwoman of the Center of the American West in Boulder, Colo. “You have the dream of the well-trained experts who make careful choices about public resources: Teddy Roosevelt and the Forest Service. And you have the dream of the Jeffersonian agrarian, who lives through snow and floods, and has their own expertise born of life.
“To talk of good guys and bad guys is absurd. It’s so much muddier close to the ground.”
A modern Coloradan
Norton is the perfectly modern Westerner. Her father was neither ranch hand nor miner. He worked in aerospace and became a Learjet executive. She grew up not in the state’s vertical reaches, but in Denver’s suburban sprawl.
And that makes her representative of a state where the totemic figure remains the high-plains rancher, but where the average Coloradan lives in a condo and spends hours in traffic.
Her coming of age tracked the ungainly growth of notoriously smoggy Denver and the evolution of air quality from the leaded-gas, belching-smokestack 1960s to post-Clean Air Act America. She recognizes the progression, even if the means leave her uneasy.
“People saw a need for emergency action, and the need to jump in and make a huge impact,” she says. “They didn’t want to worry too much about how you made that impact.”
She was, in her telling, stereotypically liberal as an undergraduate at the University of Denver: antiwar, pro-environment and a student-newspaper editor.
In law school, she was by all accounts bright - she recorded a perfect score on the Law School Admissions Test. She penned pieces arguing for better access to buses for the disabled and for tighter enforcement of auto-emission standards.
Ayn Rand and James Watt
Then she found the argumentative novels of Ayn Rand, whose libertarian philosophy came to frame Norton’s thinking: Man unfettered is man at his strongest.
“The theme of individual freedom resonated very strongly,” she says. “I came to the view that choices arrived at individually can lead to a stronger society than single choices dictated from the top.”
In 1979 she landed at the Mountain States Legal Foundation: James Watt’s legal shop, ground zero in the sagebrush rebellion. A new environmental ethos threatened the West’s traditional extractive economic powers: timber and gas and mineral exploration.
Mountain States, an industry-funded think tank, fired back.
“Jim Watt was a complete revolutionary; he loved to throw bombs and stir up a fight,” recalls Terry Anderson, a Norton friend and leading theorist of free-market environmentalism.
The sagebrush manifesto was broad: Transfer federal lands to state control. Sell parts of national parks and block the creation of new ones. Defend the large subsidies given to ranchers, miners and lumberjacks.
And don’t ever tell a Westerner what to do with his property.
Norton’s world view was transformed. Within a year, she worked on a lawsuit challenging provisions of the Clean Air Act. She later devised a program that allows companies that clean their emissions to sell others the right to release pollutants. The federal government has since incorporated the trading into the Clean Air Act.
Conservative attorney general
She did a stint in Washington in the 1980s, arriving at Interior several years after Watt’s departure. She worked for Donald Hodel, a less-incendiary Interior secretary, then won a long-shot 1990 race for Colorado attorney general.
She was a well-regarded attorney general, with a marked conservative tilt. She championed a controversial if bipartisan law that essentially shielded companies from state prosecution if they self-reported their violations of pollution laws. (The federal Environmental Protection Agency argued that the law gave blanket immunity to longtime violators, and eventually forced changes in it.)
“Her philosophy as attorney general was that if people have private ownership, they’ll be much more likely to take care of the environment,” says Gary Bryner, head of the University of Colorado’s Natural Resources Law Center. “But she seems to see a role for government to intervene if necessary.”
A ‘homestead right to pollute’
The thrust of Norton’s speeches and papers is rendered in a reasonable voice, of market mechanisms and a light federal hand on the tiller. It’s her asides that take one aback. Her appetite for a well-thrown stick of intellectual dynamite lingers still.
Such as when she speculates about creating a “homestead right to pollute or make noise.” Or when she speaks of looking at the graves of Confederate soldiers in Virginia and lamenting that the “bad facts” of slavery obscured their sacrifice in defense of states’ rights.
Today, Norton locates herself squarely in the reform phase of the Western revolution.
“During the revolutionary phase, everyone runs and shouts slogans and says things like, `Over my dead body,’ “ Norton says. “Today, we recognize that there are values that many people share. Clearly you don’t do a cost-benefit analysis of Yellowstone or Yosemite. Those are choices we’ve made no matter the cost.”
She pauses a beat.
“And those are decisions I’m pleased with.”
‘I’m not Jim Watt’
No one is sure how she’ll govern. She surprised some by declining to challenge former President Clinton’s decision to create several new national monuments.
Nor are Bush’s intentions clear. On the campaign trail, he talked little of the environment and a lot about “understanding the Western mentality.” He and Vice President Cheney are businessmen, accustomed to coming upon promising oil land and fitting a bit in the drill.
Who is Norton? The young ideologue from Mountain States Legal Foundation or the carefully reasonable conservative at her confirmation hearing?
Norton listened as environmentalists spent $1 million attacking her. Her exasperation is evident behind the formidable emotional armor that she dons in public.
“I’m not Jim Watt,” she says. “I’ve matured. If you follow the revolutionary approach, everyone wants 100 percent and that means the other half gets nothing. Finding common ground is less exciting.
“But it’s the reality of our future in the West.”
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