OpinionAugust 16, 1993

Larry Swisher

Some 15 years after the last Democratic president tried to reform federal land management and water policy and inflamed the Sagebrush Rebellion Bill Clinton is trying again.

There is a feeling of deja vu about the new administration's tough environmental agenda for the West, which bears a close resemblance to Jimmy Carter's.

So, the question arises: Will Clinton also create a powerful backlash and lose

much of his Western political base? Or will the fading Old West finally succumb to the demands across the nation and in the New West for change?

When Jimmy Carter took office, one of his early blunders was to put out a hit-list of water projects he planned to kill as environmental and economic boondoggles. That deliberate slap in the face caused an uproar in Congress and Western states from which the Carter administration never recovered.

Like Carter, Clinton appointed a Westerner as his main agent of change, but this president is taking more of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt's advice and being less confrontational.

Carter's man, Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, argued with the White House against issuing the water project hit-list, even though he agreed with the objectives of making water development programs cost-effective and less damaging to the environment.

Nowadays, these standards are accepted, but at the time, Carter's high-handed move and strong advocacy of the many new environmental laws enacted in the 1970s alienated the West and ignited the already mounting industry discontent with Washington, D.C., control of public lands.

In contrast, after Western Democratic senators objected, Clinton quickly backed off his first budget proposals for steep increases in grazing, reclamation and mining fees and an end to below-cost timber sales in some 60 national forests.

Now that Congress has passed the deficit-reduction package, Babbitt, who opposed the use of budget mandates in the first place, is ready to push the reform proposals his way. That means carefully but steadfastly pursuing reasonable proposals, while consulting Congress, Western states, industry and the public.

Last week Babbitt unveiled a grazing fee increase along with a new ecosystem approach to rangeland management that will slowly be put into place over the next year. Environmentalists praised it as a step in the right direction. He plans to make passage of mining law reform a priority this fall. Next on tap is a policy to curb money-losing timber sales by the Forest Service.

Although the Forest Service is part of the Agriculture Department, Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy looks to Babbitt for leadership in the public land arena. Babbitt has settled environmental controversies involving the southern California gnat-catcher and Florida's Everglades, and was a leading architect of Clinton's Northwest forest plan and its strategy for bypassing Congress and resolving the issue in court.

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''1993 will continue to be the year of reform for public land issues,'' Babbitt said last week.

Until now, the mining, grazing and timber industries have stuck their heads in the sand and have fought any serious reform in Congress, as their economic importance declined and the West changed around them. Republicans have joined in the stonewalling, while Western Democrats have urged industry to compromise with environmental interests.

But the heyday of the Sagebrush Rebellion, which was epitomized by Western states' attempts to gain ownership of the federal lands, is long past. The movement peaked during the first term of Ronald Reagan, who appointed one of its leaders, James Watt, as Interior Secretary.

Can the Sagebrush Rebellion happen again? The evidence runs to the contrary.

The Western rebels never did succeed in changing any major federal environmental laws or selling off the public lands, because in fact, most of the public, even in the West, didn't support it. Since then, opposition to weakening the Endangered Species Act and other measures has grown.

But for 12 years, two Republican administrations maintained the status quo and for the most part ignored growing environmental problems like over-harvesting of old-growth forests and destruction of stream habitat by livestock.

Now the country has elected a president who believes the government can help solve problems without becoming big government.

Also, the West has changed. It has become the most urbanized region of the country, with 85 percent to 90 percent of the people living in cities and suburbs. They tend to work in service, manufacturing or technology industries, not resource extraction, and want a clean environment and good outdoor recreation.

A milder vestige of the Sagebrush Rebellion lives on in the so-called Wise Use movement, which is based in the declining traditional resource-dependent rural areas.

More and more political leaders from the region are open to change or even demand it. In the 1992 election, Clinton swept the West Coast and won Colorado, Montana and Nevada. In 1976, Carter did not carry a single Western state except Hawaii.

Babbitt and other officials won't get all of the Clinton reforms through, but there's little question they will make solid progress.

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