Babbitt Seeks to Balance Land Use, Conservation : Politics: Pro-environment Interior secretary is trying to redirect priorities during an era of profound change.

By MAURA DOLAN

April 27, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES ENVIRONMENTAL WRITER

WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is headed to Capitol Hill for a hearing on a mining bill, explaining why he told reporters in 1988 that he would love to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“I have always been interested in foreign policy,” the former Arizona governor is saying, seated in the back seat of his government-chauffeured car. “And I saw the end of the Cold War coming and talked about the end of Marxism. I said to myself: ‘The CIA is going to undergo a profound change and become the economic and political analyst for the post-Cold War era. And that really is an incredible job. The agency is going to have to be reinvented.’ ”

The CIA never came up when President Clinton and Babbitt talked about Administration jobs last fall, but Babbitt got what he wanted: an agency undergoing profound change, a department he could reinvent.

As the new secretary, Babbitt is trying to turn around 12 years of Interior Department policies that tended to favor rural industries over conservation. He wants to raise fees on miners and ranchers who use public lands, charge farmers more for water from federal water projects and manage public lands so that wildlife is protected before becoming endangered.

He is pushing for these changes when millions of people are out of work, when the environment is pitted against the economy and in an Administration that was elected on a pledge to create jobs.

Already, western senators are mounting a strong campaign against the changes, and Babbitt’s boss, Clinton, has shown what some say is a disturbing willingness to back down under fire. On top of this, the Interior agencies that implement the secretary’s policies have a history of clashing with one another rather than cooperating.

Enter Babbitt, a 54-year-old former governor with a record as a pragmatic problem-solver and skillful arbitrator. The son of an Arizona family that made its money in cattle and Indian trading posts, Babbitt holds strong pro-environment views that stem in part from his love of the outdoors and his reading of environmental literature.

Although he calls himself an environmentalist and was until recently president of the League of Conservation Voters, Babbitt is not an ideologue. He is described by those who know him as more interested in results than in maintaining a hard line and losing, a secretary who will “push the envelope” to protect the environment but also work to accommodate economic interests at odds with his policies.

Unlike many politicians, Babbitt does not believe that charging industry more for using public lands will hurt Clinton significantly in the Rocky Mountain West. To Babbitt, the image of the West as a region propelled by rural industries such as mining and cattle is “50 years out of date.”

“The West has changed,” he is saying as the car nears the Capitol. “The West has become an urban place full of people who see a different kind of future, who really care about the wise use of natural resources. . . . Do the people in Arizona support mining reform? Yeah, they do. The mining industry doesn’t but the other 98% do.”

A few minutes later, Babbitt is seated at a witness table before a congressional committee, listening and taking notes as some western members of Congress decry a proposal to change an 1872 mining law that has allowed miners to acquire federal land for just a few dollars an acre. Babbitt is courteous and respectful, but he repeatedly reminds the committee that he worked closely with the mining industry as Arizona’s governor from 1978 to 1987 and understands their problems.

Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), an opponent of the bill, apparently thinks he has an ace to play. Tell me, he challenges Babbitt knowingly, whether the proposed mining changes will lead to more jobs or fewer jobs.

Without a pause, Babbitt replies that the changes will create jobs. People will be hired to restore mined lands, he says, and government will save money in the end because mining sites will not wind up as Superfund cleanup projects.

Young insists that reclamation jobs will not create “new wealth,” but he is impressed by the new secretary.

“I frankly have more faith in yourself than I do in this committee,” Young commends him.

The hearing concluded, Babbitt and his press secretary are surrounded. A Clinton campaign worker wants a job at Interior, and reporters are clamoring for interviews.

Babbitt has become one of the Administration’s most sought-after figures by the news media, an environmental star who has long been popular with reporters. During the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, journalists considered him the most accessible of the candidates.

But the media also played a role in his downfall in the campaign. Calm and confident in person, he came across as an over-earnest schoolboy in televised appearances. A media coach advised him to be more animated, but “he was kindly compared to those little things you put on your dashboard, with their heads bouncing up and down,” recalls a former aide.

That campaign is long behind Babbitt--he insists he will never run for President again--and he has turned his full attention to the Interior Department. He reads the texts of the laws he enforces, instead of leaving it to staff, and as a former environmental attorney in Phoenix he is intimately familiar with their impact on industry.

Like a good trial attorney, he likes to be well-prepared, and he questions as much as he opines. When asked during an interview whether he would provide California with Mojave Desert land needed for a nuclear dump, he earnestly replied: “Should I?”

He can hold his own in a roomful of intellectuals and still blend into a group of rugged cattlemen. Tall, fit and energetic, the sandy-haired, blue-eyed Babbitt is an experienced hiker whose rigorous forays up and down the Grand Canyon can challenge his less vigorous companions.

As an administrator, Babbitt spends considerable time listening to different points of view before making a decision. Industry lobbyists appear to be as welcome in his office as the environmental activists who count him as a personal friend.

“He stayed somewhere in the middle” as Arizona’s governor, said Cecil Miller, who was president of the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation for 21 years.

Babbitt’s current agenda closely parallels that of environmental groups. He says he wants to move Interior from an agency that helps people exploit the land--whose message, he says, has been, “ ‘Yeah, come and get it, the West is open,’ “--to one that also protects the land.

“Our mission . . . is to strike the right balance,” he recently told a group of department employees. “I am an environmentalist, in case you haven’t heard, but I am not a scary green devil. I am an ex-governor, a person who has geological training and believes we can find a balance between urbanization, expansion of the needs for resources and protection of the environment.”

“Balance” also was the cry of Interior officials under former President George Bush, but Babbitt has something different in mind.

He once called for abolishing the Bureau of Reclamation, an Interior agency that historically has been a dam builder, and now says he will turn it into a water management and conservation agency. He wants to encourage the Bureau of Land Management, which has catered to industry in the past, to be more recreation-oriented. New or higher fees at parks, wildlife refuges and other public lands also are being examined.

Clinton and Babbitt initially elated environmentalists by pledging to charge high royalties on hard-rock minerals mined on public lands and promising to sharply raise grazing fees. Recently, under pressure from western senators, the White House agreed to drop the proposals from the Administration’s budget package--without consulting Babbitt.

Babbitt never favored overhauling the mining law through the budget process, but he believed that it was a mistake for the Administration to back off after proposing it, said a source close to Babbitt. As unhappy as he was over the episode, the source said, Babbitt saw it more as a political blunder than a retreat from environmental commitment or an attempt to undermine him.

In any case, the Administration still favors overhauling the mining law, and Babbitt has scheduled four hearings in the West over the next several weeks on grazing fees, which he can raise without congressional approval.

The sun is not yet up, and Babbitt, dressed casually in khaki slacks, is at Washington National Airport, embarking on a two-day trip to Texas. His staff has scheduled news interviews on the flight, and Babbitt has little time to rest.

Before a change of planes in Dallas, Babbitt proceeds to a telephone booth to make calls. Then he is in flight, destined for San Antonio, talking about his attempts to assure Congress and conservatives that he is not “some sort of avenging extremist.”

Indeed, Babbitt is not a knee-jerk environmentalist. He believes, for instance, that offshore oil drilling should remain an “open question” because advancing technology may soon overcome environmental objections.

He also insists that newly named high-level Interior officials, including the former president of the Wilderness Society, will consider industry’s concerns in enacting new policies. “Those are the marching orders,” Babbitt said.

But his heart clearly lies with Interior’s most conservationist-oriented agencies, especially the National Park Service. Since Babbitt was named to head the department, morale has climbed “to the heights of the rims of the Grand Canyon,” one elated parks official said.

During the past 12 years, small national parks without aggressive superintendents were starved for funds. A parks official from Washington tells of visiting a small park recently to take pictures for an employee newsletter. The superintendent implored him to take the film back to Washington to be developed so the cost would not come out of the park’s budget.

In Babbitt, officials believe they have a powerful advocate. “The term sea change mean anything to you?” another parks official asked. “I think that is what we are seeing around here.”

Babbitt knows that parks staff is happy, and it delights him. “I have always had this secret desire to be director of the National Park Service,” he says, smiling.

An hour and a half after the plane lands in San Antonio, Babbitt is aboard a glass-bottomed boat touring natural springs that are home to five endangered species threatened by ground-water pumping.

Peering through the glass, Babbitt listens to scientists tell him of the species’ plight as the boat moves over dark, reed-filled waters, brightened by the occasional flash of a fat, white catfish and the rising bubbles of the erupting springs.

The secretary, who holds degrees in geology and geophysics as well as a law degree from Harvard University, is filled with questions that reflect an understanding of biological conservation.

He wants to know whether anything has been done to control an alien species that is imperiling an endangered one, and he speculates that one of the endangered species, a Texas wild rice, might be important to food production someday.

Later, during a tour of another lake with Democratic Sen. Robert Krueger, a Texas reporter pointedly asks Babbitt whether he would have bothered to visit Texas at all if Krueger were not running for election.

“I certainly would have,” Babbitt replied. And then, grinning: “My mother-in-law’s 80th birthday party is being held tomorrow night in Austin.”

Babbitt strongly supports the Endangered Species Act, and he believes conflicts, or what he calls “train wrecks,” can be headed off by better planning. He is creating a biological survey, modeled after the U.S. Geological Survey, to inventory lands and the wildlife on them so government can act preemptively before species become endangered.

“My take on the Endangered Species Act,” he has told Interior employees, “is that we haven’t even come close to working with the authority, the concepts and the flexibility that are in it right now.”

On his first day as Interior secretary, Babbitt stood in the lobby of the department’s offices and shook hands with employees arriving for work. He also held meetings with hundreds of them in the auditorium, regaling them with stories and jokes.

“In my way of looking at it, he didn’t say anything too much different than earlier secretaries had,” a longtime Interior employee said, “but he said it much better. . . . He was entertaining and dynamic.”

Babbitt gave employees a code word--”campfire”--for corresponding with him privately. All they had to do, he said, was write “campfire” on the outside of the envelope and he alone would open it. Some employees have received handwritten replies.

“It’s just been such a dreary period for Interior for the last 12 years,” Babbitt said. The Environmental Protection Agency “had Bill Reilly,” a conservationist who headed the agency under Bush. “But Interior didn’t even have four years” of someone like that.

Babbitt repeatedly tells the story of the manager of a wildlife refuge in Florida who left Washington for Florida when Ronald Reagan was elected President. The manager spent 12 years watching birds disappear on the refuge and the water grow increasingly filthy. Finally, depressed and discouraged, he sent in his retirement notice.

He met Babbitt recently and told him that he had changed his mind about retiring, all because he believes things will change for the better.

Indeed, the expectations for Babbitt are enormous, which some people might find intimidating. But not Babbitt.

“It’s OK,” he says, smiling widely. “It’s OK.”

His day on the road nearing its end, Babbitt climbs inside a van with a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official and heads back to Austin, where he will meet with combatants in yet another conflict over the Endangered Species Act, and yes, attend his mother-in-law’s birthday party.