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.