It’s a tough
job, but someone’s got to do it. That someone is the U.S.
interior secretary—DU’s own Gale Norton.
Managing America’s Public Lands
Try
on this job description for size: Provide oversight to more than
70,000 employees and 200,000 volunteers. Manage a $13.4-billion
annual budget. Act as a steward for 507 million acres of land—roughly
one-fifth of the land in the United States.
It’s a job fit for a giant, and Gale Norton—BA political
science ’75, JD ’78—is up to the task. After all,
she considers being the U.S. interior secretary a dream job.
“There’s a tremendous amount of variety,” she
says. “I never get bored.” So what is life like for
a member of the U.S. presidential cabinet? Long days and a lot of
meetings, Norton says.
There’s not much time to relax between cabinet meetings,
ceremonial activities at the White House and visits to the lands
she’s charged with managing. When asked what she does with
her down time, Norton laughs. “Usually, I collapse.”
“My husband and I bought a house on a golf course when we
moved to the D.C. area,” Norton adds. “After living
there two years, I’ve been able to play there three times.”
Still, the job has its moments. “Today I held a beautiful
red-tailed hawk on my arm. I’ve gotten to release condors
into the wild,” says the soft-spoken Norton, her face lighting
up. “I’ve camped out at Big Bend National Park and gone
scuba diving at the Virgin Islands National Park. It’s wonderful.”
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Gale Norton might have become a journalist.
She started out as a mass communications major at DU and worked
for the Clarion. In her journalism classes, she learned the importance
of writing well. “That was something that came in handy later
when I was practicing law. That I had a journalistic approach to
writing instead of the usual legalese approach was helpful,”
Norton says. “I drive everybody on my staff crazy because
I still edit everything.”
Although she’d long been intrigued by how policy was formed,
Norton never envisioned herself as a political candidate. And though
she was interested in political campaigns, she thought she would
cover them as a reporter. But after working on a campaign as an
intern, she became hooked on politics and soon changed her major
to political science.
Business Prof. JJ Johnston remembers having Norton in his undergraduate
course Introduction to Contract and Legal Studies. “She was
a bright star from the beginning,” recalls Johnston, who still
stays in touch with the former pupil he remembers as shy, quiet
and a good listener. “In class, she never raised her hand
and never tried to trump anyone. She never gave an off-the-cuff
answer.
“I knew Gale was a real winner,” he adds. “She
had class.” It was Johnston who gave Norton her first job
in law. While she was in law school at DU, he offered her a six-month
clerkship in his law firm. “She used to say, ‘If there’s
law out there, I’ll find it,” Johnston recalls.
Norton first tried her hand at politics when she ran for Colorado
attorney general with a tough-on-crime platform. She won, becoming
the state’s first woman attorney general. In her two terms
(1991–99), she helped negotiate the $206-billion national
tobacco settlement—the largest lawsuit settlement in U.S.
history—and drew praise for demanding a full cleanup of the
wickedly polluted Rocky Mountain Arsenal. But her tenure was not
without controversy. Norton suggested that industry could police
itself and supported “self-audit” laws; the Environmental
Protection Agency charged that Norton was giving polluters a “free
pass.”
She made an unsuccessful bid in 1996 for Colorado’s Republican
Senate nomination, and then did a stint as senior counsel at the
Denver law firm Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber, P.C., before heading
to Capitol Hill.
Johnston never expected Norton would become secretary of the interior
(nor did she), but he’s not surprised.
“What impresses me most is her competency and integrity.
Gale is so honest and competent, I can’t believe she’d
make any mistakes,” Johnston says. “She wouldn’t
say something she doesn’t believe.”
FORGING A PATH
Norton’s interest in the environment started early. She grew
up in Thornton, Colo., and each morning as she crested a hill on
the school bus, she could see all of Denver spread out before her.
“When I was very young, you could see the downtown buildings
clearly. When I was in high school, they were all covered by a thick
brown cloud,” she recalls. “That smog was something
that stirred my interest in environmental issues.”
That interest stuck and has followed Norton throughout her career.
Shortly after she finished law school, Norton landed a job as a
senior attorney specializing in water rights at the Mountain States
Legal Foundation, a conservative organization that fights for increased
development access on public lands and against federal land takings.
There, she worked for James Watt, who became interior secretary
under Ronald Reagan.
From 1983–84, Norton was a fellow at Stanford University’s
Hoover Institute. She worked as assistant to the deputy secretary
of agriculture in 1984–85 and then served two years as an
Interior Department solicitor general, responsible for overseeing
endangered species and public lands legal issues for the National
Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Norton’s early association with Watt has proved to be something
of a white elephant for the interior secretary, who has been called
“James Watt in a skirt.” While Norton prefers to employ
the carrot over the stick approach when dealing with environmental
issues, Watt is known for taking the stick and whacking environmentalists
with it.
Though she’s reputedly more moderate than Watt, and certainly
more gentle and diplomatic when dealing with her foes, Norton did
oppose the Endangered Species Act and has advocated for increased
mining, logging and oil drilling on public lands. So, it’s
no wonder that her confirmation as interior secretary was among
the most controversial of Bush’s appointments. Environmental
organizations launched “anti- Norton” campaigns to stymie
her confirmation, while industry practically jumped for joy at the
prospect of having a champion in Interior.
Johnston says he has oft admonished, “‘Gale, you’re
a tough lady, and tough cookies don’t crumble.’”
She hasn’t, and she virtually sailed through the confirmation
hearings to become the first female interior secretary in the department’s
154-year history.
When Norton is asked who her heroes are, she mentions JJ Johnston
and former economics professor Doris Drury among those people she
most admires.
“I was greatly influenced by the economics classes that I
took,” Norton says. “Those helped me understand that
there are forces that guide the effects of government policies.
And just because government passes a law doesn’t mean that
real people will respond the way government expects.
“Economics can help policy makers understand how things are
going to play out in the real world.”
That philosophy, instilled at DU, is obvious in Norton’s
approach to managing America’s public lands.
Norton directs the Interior Department with what she calls the
“Four Cs” in mind: communication, consultation and cooperation,
all in the service of conservation.
All along, changing the top-down way in which her department had
approached environmental issues—from forest-fire control measures
to oil and gas development—has been her biggest challenge,
Norton says, noting that such issues are often fraught with confrontation
and conflict.
“I encourage people throughout my department to solve problems
by working with the people whose lives are affected by our decisions,”
she says. “As I have been preaching that for over two years
now, I’m beginning to see that attitude take hold. All across
the country are wonderful successes that have happened because people
sit down with their neighbors and find common ground.
“We can accomplish a lot more that way than by just shouting
at each other.”
Such a middle-of-the-road approach is not surprising coming from
Libertarian-turned-Republican Norton, who long has been a fierce
states-rights advocate.
So is it working? Norton thinks so. While some environmental groups—the
Wilderness Society for one—continue to rail against the Bush
administration’s environmental policies, others are sitting
down at the table with Interior.
“Last week I was at Long Island, New York, at a project where
the Nature Conservancy was playing a central role working with five
communities to protect the nests of piping plovers,” Norton
recalls. “We gave them a grant so they can do more of that
activity.
“On the other hand, there are those groups that make money
by generating headlines, and those groups really can’t afford
to be satisfied with things going well,” she adds. “They
always have to have the attention that comes from highlighting problems.”
Norton is a self-described conservationist, and she bristles at
the suggestion that she’s a better friend to industry than
to the spotted owl. Her job, after all, is balancing the needs of
both.
“I think we can employ 21st-century technology to tackle
our problems,” she says. “In the past, we sometimes
had to choose between advancing our economy or protecting the environment.
In the future, I think we can find ways to do both.
“I see that as a great accomplishment—to find ways
that we can have a thriving economy and a spectacular natural environment
at the same time,” she continues. “In order to do that,
you have to work with industry as well as with the environmental
and scientific professionals.”
The 49-year-old Norton doesn’t know what the future holds
for her, but she says it’s likely she’ll leave politics
behind for good once her time is up in the Interior Department.
After all, she says, “I’ve already had the best job
in politics.” Norton would like to return to the West—the
closer to her favorite extreme runs at Colorado’s Beaver Creek
ski area, the better. She also misses Rocky Mountain National Park,
where she enjoyed outings as a child. “I love seeing the mountains
from Trail Ridge Road,” she says.
But for now, Norton has her work cut out for her. She’s contending
with a decades-old administrative imbroglio in the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. There are the fires in the West, and drought, and oil drilling
in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The list goes on.
Norton keeps her eye on the prize, however: America’s impressive
natural capital.
“We can work with businesses and enhance the environment
at the same time,” Norton says. And she believes it.
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