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© Michael Furtman, 2001 -- originally appeared in Midwest Fly Fishing

Wise Use in the White House?
By Michael Furtman

Like most American’s who endured the endless Presidential election this past year, I am willing to give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt, and sincerely hope that he can be a good president. Yet at the time of this writing, his first presidential steps – the naming of his cabinet level positions – doesn’t bode well for those of us who value a clean environment or progressive conservation.

By the time you read this, his nominations for these positions will likely either have withered beneath the glare of Congress or been successfully appointed. The issue isn’t whether they survived, but that he nominated them at all. The selections he has made to lead the country’s most important resource agencies makes one wonder if we don’t have a wise-use White House.

Take, for instance, Bush’s appointment for Secretary of the Interior. This position is especially important to anglers, for the secretary oversees the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who in turn oversees implementation of the Endangered Species Act, which may determine the fate of the Atlantic and several species of Pacific salmon, not to mention bull trout, the rare greenback trout, and some subspecies of cutthroat trout. This same secretary will also guide the National Park Service, which manages some of our finest trout fisheries, the Bureau of Land Management, which has been working hard to get cows out of streams across the American West, and the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees dams and water allotments.

With so much at stake for fish and wildlife, who did Bush tap for this position? A relatively unknown politician from Colorado by the name of Gale Norton. No one could blame you for not knowing this person, unless, of course, who are an advocate of “wise-use” – the disarming name given to the anti-environment forces that have arisen around the country.

These people are pleased as punch that she’s been proposed as Secretary of the Interior because they know that she is a staunch advocate of property rights, and was a protégée of James G. Watt, one of the founders of the wise-use movement (then known as the “Sage Brush Rebellion”) and who was the Secretary of Interior under Ronald Reagan (Watt, for reasons of political symbolism, reversed the buffalo on the Interior Department seal, which had always faced to the left, so that it faced right). As a young lawyer in Watt’s Interior Department, Gale Norton was part of an unsuccessful effort to open Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. Norton also worked for Watt while he was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative organization that strongly supports "takings" legislation and logging and mining on the nation’s public lands.

If many of you remember Watt, you are probably less familiar with the MSLF. You shouldn’t let the nice sounding name of Norton’s former employer fool you, or consider this a western-only organization. It has, and continues to, cooperate with Midwestern wise-use groups to confound progressive conservation and frighten rural residents. And its policies could hardly be considered mainstream or lead to the kind of vision George W. Bush proclaimed when he said repeatedly during the election campaign that he wants to be a uniter instead of a divider. Consider the words from this MSLF article:

“For the environmental extremists' vision of the West is of a land nearly devoid of people and economic activity, a land devoted almost entirely to the preservation of scenery and wildlife habitat. In their vision, everything from the 100th meridian to the Cascade Range becomes a vast park through which they might drive, drinking their Perrier and munching their organic chips, staying occasionally in the bed-and-breakfast operations into which the homes of Westerners have been turned, with those Westerners who remain fluffing duvets and pouring cappuccino.”

One can only assume that the MSLF lumps visiting anglers into their twisted scenario. And as you might guess, Ms. Norton’s MSLF also opposes efforts to restore watersheds or guarantee that streams have adequate water flow to support viable wild trout populations and have decried, in the same article:

“Now federal officials, using federal laws like the Endangered Species Act, are coming into the region and declaring that Westerners are not fit to control their own water. From now on the hand on the faucet will be a bureaucratic hand, which responds not to the call of Westerners ‘upon the river,’ but to the call of environmental extremists.”

Norton is also on the board of the Independence Institute, a Colorado-based organization that describes itself as a champion of the free market and which introduced her in 1996 as a "hero of devolution." For those of you unfamiliar with that term, devolution – as it applies to natural resources – is wise-use language for turning federal lands over to private management, the counties, or, at the very least, state governments. She is also a former co-chair of the Coalition of Republican Environmental Advocates (CREA), an industry-funded front group whose members include such anti-environment heroes as Representative Chenoweth-Hage, and which even Republican environmentalists have denounced as a fraud. Anne Callison, a Colorado resident and a board member of the group Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP), called CREA "the original greenscam. From my perspective, CREA was a front for a 'wise-use' group."

Chuck Cushman, Executive Director of the American Land Rights Association, who Paul de Armond of Public Good (an organization that tracks the wise-use movement) called “a carpetbagger who makes his living tearing communities apart with hatred, fear and rancor,” immediately proclaimed Bush’s choice as a good one and said "Gale Norton cares about private property, access to federal lands and multiple use of those lands for the benefit of all Americans.”

As swiftly as Cushman and other wise-use groups sprung forward to support Norton, green groups sprung into action to oppose her nomination. Said the Natural Resources Defense Council “the appointment of Gale Norton as Interior Secretary is a slap in the face to the great majority of Americans who, time and time again, have said they want our parks and public lands protected from exploitation. This appointment shows just how out of touch Mr. Bush is when it comes to Americans' love of their natural heritage.”

More bluntly, Allen Mattison, the national spokesman for the Sierra Club called Norton “ James Watt in a skirt.”

So do angler have much to worry about? What are mainstream conservation groups thinking about Bush’s appointments or what they reveal about his commitment to the environment? Trout Unlimited Vice President for Conservation, Steve Moyer, reflects the concerns of many:

“Although her record isn’t all that extensive, there is a lot of cause for concern in what we do see,” said Moyer. “Water is our biggest interest, and her rhetoric has been quite bad on keeping water in streams for fish. Her time with the MSLF also worries us – they have been very bad on conservation, and have been involved on the wrong side of every issue.”

“On first blush, she doesn’t seem to fit the ‘uniter not a divider” standard,” said Moyer. “She also doesn’t have the conservation credentials to be secretary of the interior. Trout and salmon have a big stake in Interior. I would say that there were other people more qualified than her and it says to me that fish and wildlife aren’t a high priority to him (Bush).”

Although Bush’s other environmental appointments – New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman as head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Ann Veneman as head of the Department of Agriculture (of which the Forest Service is a part) may seem better, only time will tell if they too reflect wise-use dogma. Veneman’s record on the environment is spartan, but Whitman did cut New Jersey's environmental protection budget by about 30 percent, relaxed enforcement of pollution regulations, promoted voluntary compliance and cooperation instead of corporate fines, and abolished her state's environmental prosecutor's office, replacing its public advocate with a business ombudsman. The appointment of Norton, however, sends the most chilling message.

During a campaign stop in Spokane, Washington on September 25, then-Governor Bush had this to say of the effort to save salmon from extinction through the removal of dams on the Snake River: "People have been able to make a living off rivers and at the same time coexist with nature. If George W. Bush becomes president, the dams will not be breached."

Bush was wrong about this imaginary mutual co-existence. The salmon are going extinct because of how we’ve used the rivers, and the removal of those dams is crucial to their survival. And just as he was wrong to listen to the wise-users on that issue, he seems to have made an early and serious mistake in listening to them on his key environmental appointments.

These individuals may not survive the confirmation process. But either way, it appears that George W. Bush has stuck a deal with the wise-use movement. Unless he changes direction soon, we will indeed have a wise-use White House.

If so, his promise of uniting people will be one of the first casualties of his administration. Conservation could shortly follow.

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