On Saturday, September 21, Dave Foreman related to his fellow Sierra Club board members an amazing dream he had allegedly experienced the preceding night. Dramatically, the former eco-warrior told how the shade of Edward Abbey had appeared to him as he slept. Abbey, according to Foreman, had been reincarnated as a vulture. The spectral bird told Foreman that he had flown over the Kaiparowits Plateau in southern Utah in the wake of President Clinton's proclamation that 1.8 million acres on the north side of the Colorado River would be designated as a National Monument.
"Dave," croaked Abbey, "this is a good thing."
Foreman paused. "If it's good enough for Ed Abbey, it's good enough for me. I'll vote for the Club to endorse Bill Clinton." For the past two months, Foreman had been a fierce opponent of a Clinton endorsement by the Club. Soon after Foreman recounted his vision, the Sierra Club board ended a bitter schism and voted to grant Clinton their unqualified support, with Foreman providing the vital vote.
The Sierra Club endorsement was a prize the White House had been pursuing hotly for several months. So seriously was it taken that Al Gore himself placed no less than four telephone calls to one board member who had been leaning against the endorsement in the week prior to the vote.
With the administration expanding its lead in the polls and Bob Dole's campaign turning more environmentally hostile by the day, one might ask why the administration devoted such time to securing the Sierra Club's public support. Two reasons stand out. The administration's prime objective was to extinguish any emerging threat from the Green Party's Ralph Nader and his running mate Winona LaDuke. Nader, running an almost invisible campaign, was polling at close to 10 percent in the West, enough to put those otherwise safe states at risk should a new scandal, or explosive Whitewater indictment, break close to election day.
Equally important, however, was the need to update the green credentials of Al Gore, who is using this campaign as a prelude to his inevitable run at the White House in 2000. At best, Gore has been AWOL on the environment for the past four years, remaining silent as the administration collapsed on promised timber, mining and grazing reforms. At worst, Gore has been an effective opponent of progressive environmentalists on issues ranging from NAFTA and GATT to dolphin safety and whaling to pesticides, incineration and nuclear power.
It was Al Gore who two months ago approached the Sierra Club's new president, 23-year- old Adam Werbach (who was recently quoted as saying, "I don't understand why people feel so passionately about trees"). Reportedly, Gore asked what actions the administration could take to secure the organization's public support. Werbach huddled with the Club's executive director Carl Pope, lobbyist Debbie Sease (Foreman's ex-wife) and public lands director Bruce Hamilton to develop a pre-election wish-list for Gore's appraisal. Among the topics transmitted to the Vice President: Yellowstone, Utah wilderness, old-growth timber sales and the fate of the Headwaters Grove.
Using this same Sierra Club list as an itinerary, the administration embarked on a dizzying migration across the country, with Bill Clinton acting like the ecological equivalent of faith healer Benny Hinn. At every stop, an ecosystem on the brink of destruction was pronounced saved.
It's been a month now since Bill Clinton visited Yellowstone to affirm his commitment to nature. Mark his fateful progress since that time. As far as the environment is concerned, it contrasts unfavorably with General Sherman's march on the sea.
*In Yellowstone, be it recalled, Clinton announced that the oldest park in the nation had been saved from predations on its northern border by the Canadian mining giant, Noranda. In exchange for quitting its plan to gouge out a square-mile hole in the Beartooth Mountains in search of flecks of gold, Clinton offered the company $65 million worth of federal properties--probably real estate--elsewhere. The national press faithfully depicted Clinton as the savior of Yellowstone.
*The intrepid president sped from a Barbara Streisand-anchored fundraiser in Los Angeles to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, there to announce that 1.8 million acres of federal lands in Utah would now be designated a national monument, supposedly saving them from being strip-mined for coal. TV news clips and subsequent news stories signaled this as an event as momentous in significance as the finest preservationist acts of Teddy Roosevelt.
*Then it was off to the Pacific Northwest for the White House team, boarding Greyhound One in Seattle and heading south down Interstate 5 to Portland. There under the alpenglow of Mt. Hood, Clinton declared that he was saving the region's old- growth forests, by working out a deal whereby timber companies would desist from logging in ancient groves inhabited by marbled murrelets in exchange for permits to log equivalent volumes of timber on other national forest lands in Washington and Oregon.
*Finally came a strong White House push for a deal whereby Clinton will be able to announce before the election that he has protected the Headwaters Grove in northern California, the last privately owned stand of virgin redwoods in America. With the exception of the ever-vigilant Business Week, the national press raised no awkward questions about this impending pay-off to corporate raider Charles Hurwitz, a man accused by the government of looting a savings and loan in Texas at a cost of $1.6 billion to the taxpayer, now to be given fabulously valuable properties in the San Francisco Bay Area, such as Treasure Island or the Presidio.
In presidential campaigns the press bus rarely returns to the scene of the crime. So let us quickly review what Paul Harvey would call "the rest of the story."
As far as the salvation of Yellowstone is concerned, it's far from a done deal. It turns out that Noranda has veto power over any of the properties on federal lands offered in exchange for its mining claims near Yellowstone. Moreover, according to the agreement, the deal has to be finalized by December 31, 1996 or Noranda can back out of it. One of the White House's problems is that the feds cannot find enough land to Noranda's taste in Montana. If the search is to be extended outside the state, it will require congressional approval, which--given the secrecy and furtive speed with which the deal was hatched--is unlikely to happen soon, if ever. Indeed, Montana's Republican Senator Conrad Burns has already vowed to kill any such maneuver.
Second, the proposed exchange has blazed a green light to anyone holding mining claims on the circumference of Yellowstone or any other national park: Line up the bulldozers in front of the park gates and wait for the White House to phone with a lucrative buy-out offer. The new incentive to take national parks hostage has already attracted the attention of a Wyoming company which, only days after the presidential ceremony, filed 175 mining claims along the ecologically pristine Rocky Mountain Front east of Glacier National Park.
But even if the deal finally goes through, claims of having saved Yellowstone are preposterous. Noranda's planned mining sites account for but a handful of more than 6,000 gold mining claims in the Yellowstone ecosystem alone, any one of which could pose an equal threat to the region's rivers, mountains and trout.
The Noranda fix is the consequence of an earlier collapse by Clinton in his first two years in the White House, when the Democrats controlled Congress. If he'd backed fellow Arkansan Senator Dale Bumpers' effort to overturn the 1872 Mining Act--which gives away mineral-rich public lands for as little as $2.50 an acre, levies no royalties on the exhumed metals, and imposes no responsibilities to reclaim the land--Yellowstone could have been protected without these grotesque hand-outs. Most of the other mining claims could have also been turned aside.
Even as late as this summer there were other ways to stop Noranda: through a sober interpretation of existing federal environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act, federal regulators could have simply denied the company permits for the mine. But in the full ecstasy of his Republican conversion, Clinton ignored these powerful weapons, declaring that he wanted to protect Noranda's property rights. In this way Clinton succeeded where Bob Dole had tried and failed. The President legitimized the issue of regulatory takings, by requiring corporations to be paid not to violate federal laws.
Robert Redford introduced Clinton on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, calling the President's impending proclamation declaring the Escalante Canyon a national monument a great act of spiritual and moral courage. As the president preened before the cameras, some environmentalists pinched themselves in amazement. Surely their position had long been that no less than 5.7 million acres should be designated as wilderness or national park. In fact, the southern Utah wilderness campaign had been lavishly funded to this end.
The final fallback position of the coal mining companies and ranchers had been introduced by Utah conservative Rep. James Hansen. His bill would have designated no more than two-million acres as wilderness. Redford and other environmentalists fought tigerishly and apparently with success earlier this year to beat back the two-million-acre deal.
There were a couple of tenacious press interrogators that day beside the Grand Canyon, though it appears their perceptive probings never saw print, drowned out by the wild cheers for Clinton from the leaders of the big environmental organizations. Michael Maatz, of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, exclaimed that the national monument designation catapults Clinton "to the ranks of the greatest conservationists ever."
But Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt confessed later that afternoon that the designation of the Escalante Canyon was "mainly a name thing" and that National Monument status (unlike park or wilderness status) does not preclude cattle grazing, off-road vehicle use, hunting and kindred activities. When pressed, Babbitt also admitted that nothing in the proclamation prevented the coal mining companies from pressing forward with their claims, although he said he hoped they would be willing to work a Noranda-type deal elsewhere on public lands in Utah.
But there's a big problem here. The largest coal claim on the Kaiparowits Plateau is owned by the Andalex Company, a Dutch consortium. Andalex's coal reserves have an estimated value of nearly a trillion dollars. Babbitt blithely said that might seem like a staggering amount, but he was confident that the company could get land of equivalent value elsewhere in the state: "There's a lot of federal land in Utah and there are a lot of minerals on those lands." A trillion dollars worth? At that rate a Dutch company could end up owning nearly half the federal land in the Beehive State. Moreover, the whole land-swap scenario (in tandem with the administration's anemic energy policy) ignores one of the biggest threats to the Grand Canyon: the coal-fired power plants whose endless plumes of acidic smoke now make it nearly impossible to see across the mighty sandstone chasm.
In any event, if the Interior Department tries to offer up lands outside the state of Utah it will again require congressional approval. But the Utah delegation, like Montana's, is livid about the high-handed behavior of the White House. In a display of political cowardice that has become typical of this administration, Utah's lone Democrat, Representative Bill Orton, received a Clinton call about the impending proclamation at 1:30 am the night before it happened. It will be noted that Clinton made his announcement about creating a national monument in Utah from the safe haven of northern Arizona.
The environmentalists have rationalized the proclamation by saying Clinton in his second term will come back and shift the designation from National Monument to wilderness or park and also include the missing 4 million acres. But Babbitt dashed those hopes by telling reporters that "this won't happen for generations."
Every time Clinton comes to Portland he promises to save the old-growth forests, but more ancient trees always fall in his wake. Usually, a Clinton visit prompts at least a token demonstration from the timber industry. But this time the timber companies were ecstatic over the deal they had just brokered with the administration. In exchange for giving back their contracts to log ancient forests in nesting habitat of the marbled murrelet, the timber industry was given the rights to cut an equivalent amount of volume from less-controversial tracts of forest. As a result, the timber companies get the logs they want without pesky contentions over the murrelet, and with the active support and encouragement of the White House. The timber will still be old growth, but because it will be on less-productive sites it will require perhaps twice as many acres of forest to be clearcut to get the "equivalent volume" promised the timber companies.
Clinton claimed to have saved the old growth from the chainsaws, but he failed to mention the reason for their plight: a bill he signed into law last July called the salvage logging rider, which doomed old growth on the national forests and exempted the timber companies from compliance with federal environmental laws. This extraordinary duplicity prompted Michael Donnelly, an environmentalist from Salem, Oregon, to proclaim, "Clinton saved the old growth the way Reagan balanced the budget."
As exultant as the timber companies in Oregon is Maxxam's CEO Charles Hurwitz, owner of Headwaters. On the eve of the splendid anti-Hurwitz demonstration in the northern California mill town of Carlotta, the speculator holed up in a San Francisco office building with Senator Dianne Feinstein and deputy Interior Secretary John Garamendi, who assured the corporate raider that a favorable deal would go forward after a tactful moratorium designed to deflate the protest in Carlotta. Indeed, Feinstein emerged from her meeting with Hurwitz to tell the protesters to stay at home. "Threats and intimidation and that kind of thing isn't going to solve this problem," Feinstein declared.
Nearly 8,000 people ignored Feinstein's advice, showing up in Carlotta to demand that all 60,000 acres of the Headwaters forest complex be taken into public ownership; more than 1,000 were arrested, including singers Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley, and former Representative Dan Hamburg.
It looks like the administration is prepared to offer Hurwitz the Presidio and a settlement of the claims pending against him for looting the United Savings of Texas. In exchange, Hurwitz would turn over only the core Headwaters Grove and a small buffer area, probably no more than 5,200 acres. But Hurwitz, emboldened by the spinelessness of the Clinton crowd, is now asking for even more, including Treasure Island and hundreds of acres of state lands. He'll probably get what he wants--he always has. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club certainly isn't ready to stand up to Hurwitz. Pope is ready to sign off on the Presidio and more federal properties: "We would be delighted to see some of those assets which are truly surplus traded for something as precious and wonderful as the Headwaters."
Most of this dealmaking shares a common feature: The right to loot high-profile public assets is being exchanged for the right to loot other less-visible public assets. But the right to pollute or destroy natural areas remains unchallenged. In fact, it is memorialized.
All this makes David Brower, the arch-druid of American environmentalism, cringe. Brower knows all about such dealmaking. He once signed off on a deal to stop dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon by approving the construction of one in exquisite Glen Canyon. In the wake of that disaster, Brower instructed environmentalists to "never trade a place you know for one you don't."
Then again, it was Brower who urged the Sierra Club's board to endorse Clinton two months ago, arguing that the Club, being a mainstream group, needed to maintain its political leverage by supporting Clinton/Gore. But he said the endorsement should be a qualified one, noting in strong terms the serious retreats on NAFTA, forests, dolphin protection, energy, pesticides and toxics.
A couple of weeks after making his pitch to the Sierra Club, Brower--much to his credit-- sat down and wrote an excoriating attack on Clinton's environmental record for the LA Times. In that piece, he said that Clinton had done more damage to the environment than Reagan or Bush and urged all true greens to back Ralph Nader's presidential campaign.
Now, Brower is deeply discouraged by the Sierra Club's unapologetic greenwashing of Clinton on the eve of the election. "This is a sad case of fiddling, while the environment is being burned."