Babbitt's blunder - Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt forces resignation of Jim Baca

Sierra, May-June, 1994 by Joan Hamilton

The rousing pep talk about a new, environmentally enlightened West was vintage Bruce Babbitt. But the assembled dozens of Interior Department staff greeted the Secretary's words with eerie silence. No one could raise a head, much less a hand, because they were still in shock: Babbitt had just forced the resignation of Jim Baca, the outspoken director of the Bureau of Land Management.

For many of these political appointees, it was a day of disappointment and confusion. A year earlier, when they signed on to help revolutionize the Interior Department, Babbitt was a cabinet superstar, the darling of the media for his bold commitment to public-land protection. Now he appeared to be groveling at the feet of a small group of western governors and senators whose campaign coffers are filled by the same rapacious miners, ranchers, and loggers Babbitt once dismissed as "the lords of yesterday."

Baca had taken Babbitt's save-the-earth sermons seriously. In his first few months at the BLM, presiding over 270 million acres of land in the West and Alaska, Baca ordered a crackdown on potentially dangerous Alaska pipeline operations, blocked a proposed copper mine in Nevada, and balked at expanding an Air Force bombing range in bighorn-sheep habitat in Idaho. "You have to stick your neck out to get things done," he told Sierra last spring ("A Bolder BLM," July/August 1993). "I'm not afraid to do that."

But then his head got chopped off. First Babbitt offered to kick him upstairs and out of the action to a deputy-assistant-secretary position. He politely declined. Then enviromentalists flooded the Interior Department and the White House with horrified phone calls and faxes, and Babbitt said that Baca could keep his job, at least temporarily.

A day later Cecil Andrus of Idaho, Roy Romer of Colorado, and other western governors dined with Babbitt. Then Andrus led a chorus of powerful westerners who aired their gripes about Baca in the nation's newspapers. Baca had snubbed western governors, they complained. For one thing, he refused to meet with Andrus before holding a press conference in which he criticized the Air Force expansion in Idaho. (When Baca turned down the promotion, Andrus fumed,"I'd have fired him on the spot.") Egos were still smarting from Baca's blunt talk, too, like the time he called Colorado's senators, Hank Brown (R) and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (D), "Marlboro macho" for their opposition to Interior's proposed grazing reforms.

By Thursday, February 3, Baca had gotten the pointy-toed boot, and Babbitt was left fumbling for words. It was a personnel decision, he said, not a course change. "What I learned as governor in Arizona in a very conservative, tough western environment, was that if you draw a line in the sand, it often doesn't work," Babbitt told Sierra. "You have to engage in a more complex process of consensus-building to work your way out of these conflicts."

At first, Baca took the criticism in stoic silence. After returning to his home state of New Mexico, however, he told High Country News, "It happened because they wouldn't stand up for their principles. This whole thing about me being abrasive and arrogant-- it's just a bum rap. I come from a political background. I know how to treat people or I wouldn't have gotten elected [state land commissioner] twice by over 60 percent."

Environmentalists were livid. "Whatever his reasons for firing Baca," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, "Babbitt made a big mistake. He sent a signal to opponents of reform that will encourage them to resist further changes. He made his job--and our job--more difficult."

Washington Post political columnist Al Kamen understatedly declared February 3 and the tumultuous days that preceded it a "bad week" for Babbitt. "[He] enraged the environmental community that was very high on Baca, left an indelible impression that the administration is all too willing to cave in to western grazing and mining interests and their political allies, and sent a demoralizing shiver through [his] own department."

Ironically, the human sacrifice didn't satisfy the West's land barons either. Unless Interior abandons its land-reform goals, says Myron Ebell of the American Land Rights Association (whose members include miners and ranchers), his organization intends to take aim next at Babbitt himself. Equally insatiable was the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, whose field coordinator, Mike Fusco, told reporters, "One down and 99 to go."