Interior's Norton had big impact on West

Perhaps no one person has done more in the past five years to alter the landscape of the rural West than Gale Norton, who resigned Friday as Interior secretary.

She opened the Rocky Mountains and much of the North Slope of Alaska to oil and gas development. She all but banned new protected wilderness areas on the federal land under her control. And she urged the Bureau of Land Management to seek more logging on 2.5 million acres in Western Oregon.

Norton, who leaves office at month's end, personally oversaw a messy water war in Oregon's Klamath River basin in 2002 that eventually resulted in irrigation for farmers while more than 60,000 fish died. The river is still in such ill health that chinook fishing may be shut down along vast stretches of the West Coast.

Her Interior Department gave millions of dollars to landowners to deal with endangered species. But her agency also frequently overruled scientists — dramatically paring back Northwest land recommended for habitat for troubled bull trout, and dismissing advice on protecting marbled murrelets.

Timber-industry and oil officials loved her. Many conservationists feel like Rodger Schlickeisen, president of the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife: "Good riddance."

But in the end, Norton's legacy in the West is more complicated than that.

When Seattle environmentalists sued because the Environmental Protection Agency wasn't consulting experts about the harm pesticides might cause salmon, Norton changed the rules so EPA no longer had to. "There's been very little progress, and plenty of harm done," said Patti Goldman, a Seattle attorney with Earthjustice, another environmental group.

Yet some conservation groups, notably The Nature Conservancy, say Norton did a good job giving landowners financial incentives to preserve property and fostered a lot of investment in land preservation.

Some of her longtime supporters say she failed to satisfy them.

"She was doomed from the start," said Terry Anderson, a friend of Norton's who heads the Montana-based Political Economy Research Center (PERC), a libertarian think tank where Norton studied in the 1980s. "I can't imagine Gale isn't tremendously disappointed."

Norton, the first woman to head the Interior Department — a mammoth bureaucracy that oversees the BLM and national parks, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Reclamation and management of endangered species — had been a protégé of James Watt, the controversial Interior secretary scorned by environmentalists during the Reagan administration.

But she was smoother. She spoke frequently of "the 4C's: communication, consultation and cooperation, in the name of conservation."

"She's personable, and I think she genuinely loves the outdoors," said Patty Foulk, a former Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman who worked closely with Norton during the Klamath water crisis.

Environmentalists had campaigned to stop Norton's appointment in 2001, arguing that she cloaked anti-environmental policy in pro-environment rhetoric. At the time, Daniel Kemmis, a former mayor of Missoula, Mont., said the case against Norton was "overstated."

Today, he views things differently. Kemmis, who runs the University of Montana's Center for the Rocky Mountain West, echoes staff members at Interior who have repeatedly complained that Norton let the White House and some of her strong-willed deputies dictate policy for her.

Foulk, for example, left the agency in anger after Norton's deputies urged Foulk not to acknowledge the department's missteps.

Anderson, of PERC, who served as an environmental adviser to President Bush during the 2000 campaign, had urged Norton to persuade the White House to deal more with environmentalists.

But "the political strategists in the White House never got on board," Anderson said.

Still, Anderson thinks Norton should be proud of opening the West to oil and gas.

Others think that march of resource extraction may backfire. It not only infuriated environmentalists, it upset many conservative ranchers.

Some Interior staffers have even dubbed the West "the OPEC states."

"I think it strained what had traditionally been a solid GOP base," Kemmis said.

He points out that since Norton took over, New Mexico, Wyoming and Montana all have elected Democratic governors.

Craig Welch: 206-464-2093 or cwelch@seattletimes.com. The Los Angeles Times contributed to this report.