Bruce
BabbittBruce
BabbittBruce Babbitt (1938 - ) received the Pugsley Medal in 2000. He is the son of a northern Arizona ranching family and was exposed to Arizona’s cultural and natural heritage from an early age. His father regularly took his son hiking and out to explore local ruins.
He graduated from Notre Dame with a BA in geology, acquired an MS in geophysics from the University of Newcastle, England, and earned an L.L.B. from Harvard Law School. He was elected to statewide office on his first foray into elective politics in Arizona at the age of 36, serving as the state’s attorney general for nearly four years. In 1978 he became governor, was twice reelected to that office and served nine years in all.
Babbitt represented a new type of governor for Arizona: visible, active, assertive, dynamic, and driven enough to make sure his goals took place. This approach naturally made enemies. Cattle interests had little sympathy for someone, even a native son, who seemed so determined to ignore or even oppose their interests. Babbitt did not seem, at least in public, to be especially concerned. As Arizona’s youngest governor, Babbitt had bigger ambitions, even running for the presidency in 1986. Although, governor, national constituencies were probably never far from his mind.
Arizona State Parks and its many activities became a natural outlet for Babbitt’s interests. Here was an agency that dealt with the environment, with historical issues, and with archeology all at once. In addition, park endeavors helped establish and reinforce his reputation as an activist on the environmental and historical fronts. Babbitt’s patronage made the late 1970s and the 1980s a time of growth and expansion for Arizona State Parks – at a time when state park systems elsewhere in the interior West struggled under budget crises.
When he became governor following the death of Wesley Bolin in 1978, Babbitt inherited one of the smallest state park systems in the country. A New York Times article lamented that “despite Arizona’s size and reputation as a top attraction for vacationers, parks lag far behind the state’s neighbors in both number and size. Nationally, only Delaware, a fraction of the size of Arizona, has fewer state parks.” Babbitt felt this was an embarrassing reputation for the state and sought to change it. By the end of his tenure Arizona’s situation had improved to the point where they were comparable with other states that had high percentages of federal land such as Nevada and Idaho.
Babbitt stepped down as governor in early 1987 and after a run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States in 1988, practiced law and served as head of the League of Conservation Voters before President Clinton named him the forty-seventh secretary of the Interior Department in 1993.
He came to the job with a set of talents and experiences that made him perhaps the best-qualified person ever to become secretary of the Interior. He combined experience, enthusiasm, and a commitment to environmental protection and restoration to pursue a goal of radically improving public land management. He willingly tackled some of the most complex, controversial, and problematic issues in public land management resulting in long overdue reforms to mining, grazing, and endangered species law, and protection of millions of acres of federal land from development through the designation of several national monuments. He used his skills as an effective public advocate and teacher to counter the inevitable criticism from political opponents, and he was instrumental in defeating the environmental rollback propositions of the Republican’s 1994 manifesto, Contract with America.
He grew up amidst one of the nation’s highest concentrations of public lands and Indian reservations. His family had long been in the ranching business on federal lands and had operated trading posts on Indian reservations and concessions in national parks. His backyard was almost literally the Grand Canyon, one of the most outstanding features in the natural world. He had been schooled in the natural sciences, including graduate work in geology, before becoming a lawyer. He had headed large executive branch governmental institutions–three years as attorney general and nine years as governor of Arizona–and a national conservation organization. He was intimately familiar with the history of the West, with Indian policy, with the natural world and with the political process. Many of his predecessors had come to office with some of this background, but no one arrived with such a complete package.
The theme of his tenure as secretary was restoration. In his words:
Restoration is about having the power to visualize, to say that we can imagine a landscape that we don’t see today, that we can create, or recreate, a landscape that was seen by Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson, and our forebears. We can look to the past, and by understanding the past, visualize the future. And then engage communities and conservationists in the act of restoration. That has a lot of magic and power.
It is unusual for such a high profile political figure to display the focus and unequivocal commitment to the environment, which was a hallmark of Babbitt’s career. Much of this stems from a personal enthusiasm for the outdoors since he has been an avid outdoorsman all of his life.
He served the full eight years of the Clinton presidency, tying Stuart Udall (Pugsley Medal 2007, who served the entire Kennedy-Johnson term) as the second-longest serving Secretary of the Interior in history, outdistanced only by Harold Ickes (Pugsley Medal 1942) who served as secretary for more than thirteen years. Although quite different in personality and style, the three shared many characteristics–enthusiasm, energy, an activist bent, and a belief in the ability of government to improve the quality of American life. Length of tenure is not always a guide to performance and impact, but there seems little question that history will regard these three as the outstanding Secretaries of Interior in the agency’s 150 years of existence.
In contrast to Ickes and Udall who served their entire tenure in unified governments where the legislature and executive branches were both under Democratic control, for much of Babbitt’s tenure both Houses of Congress were under Republican control. This mean he had to play more defense than offense and that he was subjected to a much higher level of congressional scrutiny and opposition. When the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, their Contract with America manifesto envisioned rolling back environmental gains of the previous three decades. Babbitt responded by mobilizing the grassroots and embarking on a series of high visibility National Heritage Tours, visiting 67 cities in 100 days, meeting with local officials, the press and ordinary citizens at each stop. These tours were instrumental in turning the tide against these anti-environmental initiatives.
During his tenure, Secretary Babbitt initiated a new direction in American conservation history – the development of large scale, consensus-based environmental restoration projects. Babbitt expressed his philosophy in the following terms:
I believe the time has come for an armistice [in the battle between ranchers, miners and loggers on one side and conservationists on the other] followed by a peace conference to which not just westerners, but all Americans, are invited. The outcome should be a new constitution for public lands, in the form of federal legislation that subordinates (but does not eliminate) mining, grazing, and logging to an overriding public mandate for long-term biological diversity, abundant wildlife and fisheries, and the ecological integrity of our streams and watersheds.
With his consensus-based approach, Babbitt brought peace to California’s water wars with the historic Bay Delta accord; shaped the old growth forest plan in the Pacific Northwest; drafted interagency plans to restore the ecosystem of South Florida, the Everglades and Florida Bay; helped enact the massive California Desert Protection Act, the largest land protection bill ever enacted in the lower 48 states; forged new legislation for protection of the National Wildlife Refuges; returned entrance fees and concessions back into the parks that generated them; helped preserve the incomparable old growth Headwaters Forest; and negotiated the largest state-federal land swap in the history of the lower 48 states in order to create the 2 million acre new Grand Staircase -- Escalante Monument and other parks in Utah.
His other restoration actions included tearing down dams restoring rivers flowing into the Atlantic and the Pacific. There are more than 75,000 dams blocking U.S. rivers, which amounts to one dam erected each day since Thomas Jefferson took office as president. As the first secretary of interior to tear down substantial dams, Babbitt recognized that many of these dams had either outlived their usefulness, or time and improved ecological science has shown that their benefits are exceeded by the costs of the economic opportunities they have thwarted. He changed a mind set that believed dams were invariably the way to maximize economic gains that had prevailed in the US for over 200 years. In a series of staged, highly publicized media events, he wielded the first symbolic blow with a sledgehammer destroying dams.
He was quickly rewarded in these pioneering actions by evidence of revitalized fisheries; rejuvenation of industries associated with them; resuscitation of species dependent on the fisheries for their own survival; and enhanced tourism business to the area. Babbitt was personally involved in demonstrating catch and release programs for endangered trout and salmon to highlight how restoring native fish habitats restores economies. By demonstrating that ecological gains translated into economic gains, Babbitt established dam removal on the list of viable conservation actions.
Perhaps his most ambitious accomplishment was launching the restoration of the Everglades. For a hundred years conservation had been about preservation – setting aside and protecting land before it was lost to development. In contrast, Babbitt’s proposal involved reversing development and taking land back from development. The odds against him were daunting. Congress would be required to pass authorizing legislation and commit to financing the work at a cost of eight billion dollars, at a time when the political tides were turning in the opposite direction as Congress was considering proposals to close national parks, weaken the Clean Water Act, and to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act. Property-rights activists opposing federal creation of parks and open space were in the ascendancy. Further, to restore the Everglades meant reforming the Army Corps of Engineers, who for two centuries had been the institutional embodiment of the American idea that progress was synonymous with the axe and the plow. As secretary of the interior, Babbitt did not have jurisdiction over the Corps. Finally, he had to overcome the substantial political influence of sugar growers who were polluting the Everglades with pesticide run-off and developers who were building in the Everglades ecosystem.
Despite all of these obstacles, Babbitt prevailed. Just before leaving office the bill to restore the Everglades passed the senate by a vote of 85 to 1 and President Clinton signed the Everglades restoration legislation into law in December 2000. Babbitt observed, “There was no question that Everglades restoration was the most important legislative accomplishment for the environment during the Clinton administration.” He transformed Florida’s “river of grass” in eight years from a nightmare of failed policies, polarization and litigation into the largest environmental restoration project in history.
Traditionally, fire policies were the prerogative of the Forest Service which is in the Department of Agriculture and, thus, was outside Babbitt’s formal scope of authority. Nevertheless, he was centrally involved in revising the federal government’s policies relating to wild fires, being the first secretary to restore fire to its natural role in the wild. He had first-hand experience with them as a young man, since he helped put himself through college by fighting fires. He established his credibility and leadership role in this area by the imaginative strategy of going to fire school while Interior secretary, earning his “red card” which requalified him to fight fires, and spending time each summer out on the fire lines with a hot shot crew. He reveled in such experiences remarking at one site, “A hard day out here is better than any day in Washington.”
As a result of these actions, no one in Washington ever challenged Babbitt’s leadership role in fire policy. He stressed the importance of prescribed fires and advocated the merit of; “Small fires set deliberately to clear out dry brush that can allow the quick spread of uncontrolled fires.” He observed, “We’re going to have to make much bigger efforts at prescribed fires.”
His leadership was central to the establishment of the Federal Wildland and Fire Management Policy in 1996 by which all federal land management agencies joined forces under a universal, umbrella fire fighting policy which applied to all their lands. At its core was the principle that natural blazes should be a tool in fire prevention.
Babbitt pioneered the innovative use of “habitat conservation plans” which breathed new life into the Endangered Species Act when it was in danger of being terminated as being unreasonably restrictive. There was a clause in the Endangered Species Act which authorized plans that would give landowners permission to develop land, even though it would mean some incidental destruction of species, provided that enough space was set aside and preserved to give the affected species a fair chance of survival. This mechanism could reconcile the competing interests of landowners and developers with those of environmentalists. The potential of these plans had been ignored, but Babbitt demonstrated their potency through his personal negotiation of habitat conservation plans in southern California. These served as examples as to what could be accomplished for conservation using this mechanism and by the end of his tenure as secretary of the Interior more than 200 such plans had been negotiated. One of their consequences was a de-listing of the peregrine falcon, the Aleutian Canada goose, the bald eagle and the gray wolf. He personally brought the first wolf back to Yellowstone where she later gave birth to pups.
His major tools in negotiating habitat conservation plans were the leverage provided by the Antiquities Act and the Endangered Species Act. If development interests proved to be too recalcitrant, then Babbitt could threaten to persuade President Clinton to issue an executive order under the Antiquities Act to declare an area a national monument, or if a small scale area was involved could search diligently for an endangered species of flora or fauna, no matter how insignificant, and use its presence to declare a moratorium on development. In most situations, there is no incentive for landowners and developers to incorporate conservation areas into their plans. They can perpetuate the status quo of unfettered development merely by refusing to negotiate. These two weapons enabled Babbitt to establish a default position – in the absence of consensus the land would be protected, thereby reversing the normal presumption that in the absence of consensus development goes forward. This created a real incentive for developers and landowners to find a workable alternative.
Babbitt’s legacy was immense. His inspired leadership resulted in President Clinton creating 21 new monuments protected under the Antiquities Act. This resulted in several million acres of spectacular resources on federal land coming under new conservation management. Indeed, President Clinton issued more national monument proclamations than even Theodore Roosevelt, who was the greatest conservation president, and by some measures more acres of land and water were protected in the lower 48 states than in any previous administrations.
Babbitt’s style was a highly personal, engage-the-details type of diplomacy on tough issues. Many public officials skate over the fine points of complex issues of public policy but Babbitt was immersed in these. He did his homework thoroughly and was prepared to take calculated risks. He was typically the most knowledgeable person in the room, no matter how complicated the issues. His intelligence, savvy, and generally sure instincts in quickly reaching solutions to look for common ground invariably brought difficult negotiations to a successful conclusion. His achievements added up to a fundamental reorientation of federal land management from a general policy of resource extraction enjoyed by a few, to one of resource conservation for the use and enjoyment of all.
Secretary Babbitt left an enduring conservation legacy to the nation. His highly productive term of office, and his breadth and depth of engagement, as well as his accomplishments, set the standards against which future, secretaries of interior will be measured.
Sources:
John D. Leshy (2000) The Babbitt Legacy at the Department of the Interior: A Preliminary View. Environmental Law 31, 199-227.
Jay M. Price (2004) Gateways to the Southwest: The story of Arizona State Parks. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press.
Bruce Bubbitt (2005) Cities in the wilderness: A new vision of land use in American. Washington: Island Press.
