JoseCuervo
New member
2008 can't get here soon enough for hunters and fishermen in the West. Hillary in '08 
Transfixed by the demons of Iraq, terrorism and the economy, the national media has paid little attention to the Bush administration's record on the environment. That's just the way the administration likes it: Major policy shifts involving the opening of formerly pristine areas to energy exploration or the weakening of pollution laws tend to be announced late on Friday afternoons or right before major holidays, when they attract as little coverage as possible.
Not since the days of James Watt, Ronald Reagan's famously combative Secretary of the Interior, have so many industry foxes been appointed as stewards of the federal henhouse. But Secretary Norton, who long ago served as lead attorney for Watt's Mountain States Legal Foundation in Denver before becoming Colorado's attorney general, has advantages that her mentor did not, including a much more compliant Congress. With lawmakers' help, she's managed to open up public lands to development interests on a scale that Watt could never have hoped for.
In the Norton era, the staunch political opposition to drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a freeze-out that lasted 25 years, melts away in a matter of weeks. That's great news, the secretary proclaims -- even though the decision will have no effect on today's soaring gas prices, since commercial production is still at least a decade away and there's no guarantee that the oil companies will sell their spoils in this country, anyway.
In the Norton era, decades of federal protection for wild mustangs get wiped out by an obscure provision in a 3,000-page spending bill that effectively turns thousands of the animals into horseburgers. Now wild horses and burros that are more than ten years old or have struck out on three adoption attempts can be sold "without limitation" to the highest bidder at auction; those bidders are generally dealers representing one of three foreign-owned slaughterhouses in the U.S. that prepare horsemeat for human consumption abroad. It's a win-win deal for everybody but the horses: Grazing interests get thinner herds of the pesky ponies to compete with, and Belgians get a slice of the American West on their breakfast table.
In the Norton era, buzzwords such as "consultation" and "cooperation" mask a top-down approach to partnering with industry, and even seemingly innocuous references to a "cleaner" and "healthier" environment conceal Orwellian doublespeak. Thus, the Healthy Forests Restoration Act gives a giant boost to commercial logging in national forests, all in the name of fighting wildfires. The Clear Skies Initiative vows to reduce smokestack emissions but actually allows twice as much crud in the air as Bill Clinton's plan.
Major policy moves that open up public lands to commercial use are supposed to be based in sound science, not politics. But in the Norton era, staff scientists find that their non-partisan research -- on, say, how many off-road vehicles it takes to squash the desert tortoise population, or the true extent of the Florida panther habitat -- is routinely ignored.
In fact, it is now possible to stroll into a National Park Service bookstore and purchase a work of Bible-based "natural history," explaining that the Grand Canyon is merely 6,000 years old. Religious symbols and Bible verses are receiving more prominent display in the parks, over the protests of local managers and apparently at the instigation of political appointees within the DOI.
The tilt toward industry and "faith-based parks" has been a difficult adjustment for many of the department's field personnel, particularly those engaged in resource protection and public land management. A recent report by the Office of the Inspector General, based on a survey sent to more than 25,000 DOI employees, concluded that there was a "culture of fear" within the department; more than one-quarter of respondents stated that they feared retaliation if they reported problems.
"The grade level of our intake is way up," says PEER's Ruch, referring to the type of whistleblowers within the DOI who contact his organization. "It's gone from range conservationists to field office managers and state directors."
The solicitor's office is one of the most politically charged components of the Department of the Interior, since it offers more political-appointee positions than any other -- including the solicitor, deputy solicitor and six associate solicitors. Under Myers, it became a hotbed of former lobbyists and litigators accustomed to challenging the government's regulatory "excesses" on behalf of grazing associations and mining and energy companies -- the same regulations that they were now sworn to uphold.
One of the stars of the new regime was Robert Comer, associate solicitor for the Division of Land and Water -- a post that oversaw legal matters dealing with the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Reclamation, among other agencies. A Denver attorney who'd worked as a field ecologist, done a previous stint in the regional solicitor's office in Lakewood, represented mining giant Asarco as in-house counsel and served on the board of the Colorado Mining Association, Comer came to Washington with impeccable credentials as a warrior for the cause. There was talk around the office that he was "pretty tight" with then-Deputy Secretary Steven Griles (another former energy lobbyist, now back in the private sector); that he was "going places"; even a rumor that he could be the next director of the BLM.
But judging from the comments of staffers who worked with Comer in Washington and in the regional solicitor's office in Lakewood, he was also disliked in some quarters -- and feared. "He was thought of as someone who could send you to Nebraska," says one insider, who requested anonymity out of concerns about retaliation. "The agenda was clear -- to de-emphasize protection of public lands. People learned to back off rather than push the law."
"He would tell attorneys what conclusion he wanted them to reach, rather than asking their legal opinion," says another. "That's not the way it's supposed to work. His biases were very apparent. They weren't based in the law, and he didn't represent the positions of the agencies he was supposed to represent. Usually, if it was something that favored the feds, it was automatically bad."
Comer was known as a hard worker who often put in long hours. He was also frequently out of the office, observers say -- visiting his family, speaking at conferences or otherwise engaged. But then, Myers was often absent, too. In contrast to the DOI solicitor in the Clinton years, John Leshy, a high-profile scholar who'd literally written the book on public-land regulations (Coggin, Wilkinson and Leshy's Federal Public Land and Resources Law), Myers was an elusive boss.
"It wasn't like Bill was a strong figure, and Bob was carrying out his business," says one source. "There was no one leading the office, and Bob had free rein. He was acting on his own judgment a lot of the time, in my opinion."
Comer was a key player in one of the DOI's most startling policy turnabouts: the decision to settle a dispute with the State of Utah over whether the BLM could continue to make recommendations for wilderness designation of any of its lands. The deal threw out years of wilderness studies and opened up millions of acres of BLM land across the West to possible development -- including Colorado's wildlife-rich Roan Plateau, now targeted for hundreds of natural-gas wells ("Raiding the Roan," January 1, 2004).
The Utah deal outraged environmentalists, since it signaled the end of a process that dated back to the days of Jimmy Carter and had survived the administrations of both Reagan and George Bush the First. But among advocates of greater commercial use of BLM lands, it was hailed as an unequivocal triumph.
