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Leading the environmental charge

By Daily Bruin Staff

Oct. 16, 1996 9:00 p.m.

Thursday, October 17, 1996INTERVIEW:

Realizing the need for a conservation ethic at the heart of
issueBy Scott Lunceford

Since his appointment as secretary of the Department of the
Interior in 1992, Bruce Babbitt has raised plenty of hackles on
both sides of the environmental fence; on one side, ranchers and
industrialists accuse him of denying them the natural products of
the land; on the other, environmentalists, who initially hailed his
appointment as secretary, note that he often appears too ready to
take urban planning concerns into consideration.

What is certain, however, is that Babbitt has taken his
considerable knowledge of the political system (before his
appointment as secretary of the interior he served as governor of
Arizona) and applied it to the complex problems facing his
department.

Confronted with the problems of global extinction for many
species, water pollution and conflicting property rights, Babbitt,
in a recent interview, discussed his goals in a manner which belied
his position as a focal point for the pressures facing him as
secretary of the interior.

You are faced with the difficult task of mediating between
groups which have fiercely conflicting interests. How has the
constancy of the struggle altered your vision for environmental
reform?

Well, it has strengthened my feeling that there is no other way
to reach equilibrium in the landscape, and the reason for that is
the environmental problems we face now speak of complexity.

The easy problems have been solved ­ the sort of
cyanide-coming-out-of-a-pipe-from-a-factory problem. Water
pollution, for example, is really a function of non-point-source
pollution, in which everyone and everything we do is implicated in
the way, from the way we manage agriculture, forestry, development
practices to the kinds of solvents we use in our daily lives.
Ultimately, we have to find ways of getting all of the contending
forces together and to try and reach a consensus about change that
will involve change in our laws.

Florida Everglades is probably the biggest and best known
example of this method. The restoration of the Everglades
demonstrates that you can’t protect a national park by building a
fence around it. The park dies because of something that’s happened
200 miles upstream, namely, the diversion of water that used to
nourish the park. We’ve been working on restoring the Florida
landscape, from the outskirts of Orlando, clear down past Fort
Lauderdale, Miami, Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades and on out into
Florida Bay.

When you begin looking at the environment in that kind of scale,
you’ve got to deal with all the components, because you can’t put a
fence around it and take people away from it. You’ve got to
recognize that ecosystems are extremely complex, and you have to
deal with it holistically. And that’s really the idea behind the
President’s Forest plan, which affects everything from Puget Sound
to the San Francisco Bay. It’s the idea behind the bay delta
process, which is now moving forward.

We can’t possibly solve the water supply problem in California
until we have gotten some kind of consensus and found some common
space for agriculture, urban planning and environmentalists.
Sometimes it fails. Sometimes you have to use both sticks and
carrots, but there isn’t any other way.

Now that fully a quarter of all the world’s wild mammals are
considered threatened with extinction, what rescue efforts are
being implemented or accelerated worldwide?

First of all, there’s trade sanctions. The first year I was in
office, I levied trade sanctions against Taiwan for trafficking in
tiger bone and rhino horn. A lot of mammals are going extinct
because they’ve become articles of commerce. Tigers are almost gone
from this earth because tiger bones, in the medicinal trade in Asia
sell for up to $5,000 or $10,000 per pound.

They then make their way into medicinal facilities, and
therefore into the world of trade sanctions.

We have contributed in Africa, too. We have obtained funding
from congress to train and staff wildlife protection agencies in
African countries. We have had for some time a serious program
underway in Botswana to actually train, staff, partner and
cross-train the wildlife management officials. We now have some of
those programs operating in South Africa.

Supporting non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is a terribly
important part of this because they can often make land
acquisitions through the private sector.

So, the support of the big international NGOs are an important
part of this.

I have personally spent time in Europe and elsewhere and in the
Convention on International Trading of Endangered Species. Some of
it just consists of offering technical assistance to countries. An
example that comes to mind is the so-called HydroVilla Project in
South America. They’re talking about dredging the Paraguay and
Parana River through Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. That would be
potentially very destructive, but we have, through the State
Department, offered a great deal of consulting and, I think, have
had some impact.

Also, the promotion of ecotourism in Costa Rica is a great
success story. The government of Costa Rica now has what may be a
set of the most progressive biodiversity and land-management
policies in the world, because the President of Costa Rica has
managed to demonstrate that there are economic benefits deriving
from Costa Rica’s reputation as a center of biodiversity.

How would you describe the current relations between the Bureau
of Indian Affairs and key Native American groups such as the
American Indian Movement?

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has been, for 150 years,
everybody’s favorite target. Congress hates the Bureau of Indian
Affairs; Native Americans hate the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It has
a difficult time, because it’s undergoing a transition from being
what was originally a more paternalistic place with a set of "we
know best" policies. That, naturally, drew the resentment of Native
Americans. It is now adopting a new role in which it provides
technical assistance and acts as a source of assistance.

And that transition’s underway. It hasn’t been entirely smooth,
but that’s at the core of it. The tribes are saying, with absolute
right, that they want recognition as sovereign governments, just
like a state government or a municipal government. In this way, the
Bureau of Indian Affairs should be seen as the way station to
enhance our ability to achieve our destiny and to invoke the
assistance of the U.S. government.

How was the National Biological Service previously corrupted by
political influence, and what has been done to prevent further
trouble?

The organization wasn’t corrupted by political influence. The
problem was that, when we organized the National Biological
Service, we were trying to power up biology. Trying to do land and
ecosystem management without biological science is sort of like
trying to drive to Yosemite in the middle of the night with no
headlights.

The idea was to gather this up as a strong biological research
agency. Congress went out of its way to try to thwart that because
what the conservatives wanted to do was shoot the messenger. But I
think that it has now been worked out, because the merger with the
U.S. Geological Survey now has a solid consensus of support in
Congress.

It’s a pretty good approach. It says that we’re going to work
across land-management boundaries and across disciplinary
boundaries.

If you look around your own university, you’ll see that the same
thing has probably happened with the old geology department. It
ain’t quite what it used to be. It’s sort of been infiltrated by
biology, computer sciences, physics and chemistry. And that’s my
idea of a science agency.

You have suggested that the condition of U.S. land is a
reflection of our national soul. What does the Department of the
Interior see as our No. 1 environmental shortcoming, and how can it
be improved?

It’s easy to have a laundry list of problems. I think that we
are going to have to learn to live more in harmony with the
landscape and our resources.

That involves living a conservation ethic which is conscious of
the sacred nature of our natural landscape. It all comes back to
how it is we as individuals begin to think out our own lifestyles,
our own consumption habits and our own personal ethics. That’s
really at the core of this. Ultimately, it’s about an attitude of
reverence for the land which results from an ethical or religious
conclusion that the land is not simply a material thing to be used
or misused as we please. We have an ethical obligation to be
careful and nurturing of that relationship.

Despite your emphasis on a strong wilderness ethic, you’ve still
come under attack from environmentalists. What is required from the
Department of the Interior to better fulfill the role?

I’m not going to give you the long list. Among other things, if
I were writing up a wish list, I suppose I would ask that we do it
would be that somehow within government, we could do the same thing
that I’m asking that we do as individuals. I’m saying we must do as
individuals.

I would ask for a government in which all institutions and
actors made their decisions in an environmentally conscious way.
That’s really what’s behind the National Environmental Policy Act.
That type of thinking needs to be transported into the thinking of
everyone in government ­ the road builders, the urban
planners, the education establishment ­ in order to provide a
more integrated sort of view how it is we live with our
surroundings and how we should adapt all of our policies.

Do you think that, in turn, would help your relationship with
environmentalists?

I’m kind of philosophical about the contention, because that’s
reflective of the essence of this democracy of ours; we, as the
condition of progress, sharpen our differences and resort to
lawyers and courts.

What it means is that it is the fate of people like Bruce
Babbitt to attract a certain amount of dissatisfaction at all
levels, from all sides and at all times.

And I’m not unhappy about that. I guess the only thing I worry
about is if nobody were unhappy, that would probably mean that I
had spent my time in the tradition of many of my predecessors, who
spent four years sleeping at their desks.

Any inside scoop on when Southern California will get its next
big quake?

(Laughs) Well, we are working with the people at Cal Tech at our
joint station on some really interesting seismology. We’re putting
up a monitoring system which will give us slight real-time notice
of earthquakes ­ enough time to start shutting down gas and
utility systems because of the difference in the arrival time
between the P- and the S-waves. A very modest kind of thing, but,
if we use good science, we’re ultimately going to have a handle on
this earthquake issue. Not anytime soon, but in bits and
pieces.

DAILY BRUIN

Bruce Babbitt provides the inside scoop on current efforts to
further environmental reform.

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