Gale Norton Rouses Congress

The Bush administration, in particular its interior secretary, Gale Norton, has always wanted to transfer more control of America's public lands to state and local governments and to open them to a wider range of commercial and recreational uses. But Congressional Democrats and some moderate Republicans are only now realizing that what Ms. Norton is trying to engineer is not just a rebalancing of the scales but a revolution in public policy deeply at odds with a long bipartisan tradition of environmental stewardship and more threatening than anything attempted by James Watt, Ronald Reagan's reactionary interior secretary and Ms. Norton's onetime mentor.

Their displeasure, however, has gone largely unnoticed. The Democrats do not control the committee chairmanships, which in turn means that they have no real power to summon cabinet members like Ms. Norton for cross-examination. The two conservative committee chairmen who do have oversight authority, Pete Domenici in the Senate and Richard Pombo in the House, think Ms. Norton can do no wrong. Still, the discontent is growing, in angry letters and speeches. It has several major sources, two involving back-room deals Ms. Norton recently negotiated with the State of Utah with broad implications for public lands everywhere.

In one deal, discussed at length in this space last month, Ms. Norton removed interim protections for 2.6 million acres of federal land in Utah designated as potential wilderness by her predecessor Bruce Babbitt. At the same time, in a novel and astonishingly cramped interpretation of federal law, she renounced her indisputable authority to seek and recommend to Congress additional lands for wilderness protection. In effect, the interior secretary was saying: There will be no new wilderness on my watch.

The second deal was more complicated, but it, too, involved a retreat from responsibility. At issue were longstanding disputes about who has authority, Utah or the federal government, over thousands of miles of primitive rights of way that cross federal land — old mining and livestock trails, footpaths, even streambeds. Western states have long wanted to turn these ancient pathways into real roads in order to promote development and, effectively, pre-empt future wilderness designation.

Ms. Norton insists that the agreement involves only "process" and does not resolve specific claims, in Utah or anywhere else. But Democrats argue that it tilts the rules in favor of the states while denying the public and Congress any meaningful say in the outcomes. The states themselves seem to see things going their way. Colorado recently wrote Ms. Norton asking for immediate jurisdiction over "roads" crisscrossing huge swaths of public land, including wildlife refuges and national parkland.

The latest provocation is Ms. Norton's apparent decision to challenge a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit that she had failed to protect three million acres of public land in Utah threatened by off-road vehicles. The administration conceded in court that the vehicles were tearing up the land. But it took the bizarre position that the public, and in effect the courts, had no real standing in the matter, that when and how to protect wilderness were questions best left to the department itself.

It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court makes of this line of reasoning. To us the implications are pretty clear. It says that Ms. Norton is indifferent not only to new wilderness but also to protecting what she already has. It also tells us that her Congressional critics cannot rest.