Leader of the pack - environmental policies of Alaska Representative Don Young - includes related article on Alaska's congressional delegation

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1995 by B.J. Bergman

Republicans were still savoring the ambrosia of congressional rule when the House Resources Committee sent for Bruce Babbitt, the Clinton administration's point man on public-lands protection. A former governor and presidential candidate, the erudite interior secretary took his seat, settled his gaze upon the bristly, bearded man at the head of the dais, and signaled his submission. "Mr. Chairman," Babbitt cooed, "I have no doubt about who the alpha wolf is in this room."

Don Young scarcely have been more pleased. For two decades the burly Alaskan had done his aggressive best to establish dominance over environmentalists. He had made a career in Congress as an attack dog for development interests, fiercely denouncing every effort by "outsiders" to protect his state's sprawling wilderness. Yet conservationist have been equally stubborn, and the aging warrior, frustrated and marginalized, had been flirting with retirement for years.

But what a difference an election day can make. The 1994 GOP congressional sweep rejuvenated Young; when the dust cleared, he found himself in charge of the influential Resources Committee, long a wellspring of forward-looking public-lands legislation. Chairman Young has other plans for the panel. His own vision is reflected in his Rayburn Building office: decked out in classic Early Machismo, it features such homey touches as a giant Kodiak bearskin, a small armory of hunting rifles, and a discarded chunk of the Alaska pipeline. The gentleman from Alaska, who ignored repeated requests from Sierra for an interview, has made it a point to host strategically selected reporters and photographers here sources--the better to spread his legend beyond the Beltway, the great state of Alaska, and the widening circle of hapless souls who have provoked his rage.

Rage is a recurring theme in the Don Young saga. There was, for example, the time he waved a knife while haranguing green-leaning New York Congressman Robert Mrazek on the floor of the House. Or the time he angrily brandished a walrus oosik, or penis bone, during testimony by Mollie Beattie, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ("You won't believe this," Representative Gerry Studds told Beattie, "but this is one of his relatively mellow days.") The list goes on. In the course of one difficult re-election campaign, he took out newspaper ads to ask Alaskans to forgive his behavioral lapses. They did. Besides the candidate himself, no one was more relieved than the state's political cartoonists, for whom Young is a wholly renewable source of satiric inspiration.

Representative George Miller (D -Calif ), the man Young displaced as Resources chair, has witnessed much of the Sturm und Drang up close. "Sitting next to this guy for 18 years is like sitting next to Vesuvius," he says. "I'm never quite sure when he's gonna go off, I'm never quite sure if he's gonna pull a knife, I don't know if he's gonna stick it in my leg, or what."

"Don Young," deadpans Maryland Republican Representative Wayne Gilchrest, "does not mind confrontation."

The 62-year-old Young, a perennial underdog since his arrival in Congress in 1973, has only been emboldened by his abrupt rise to the top of the congressional food chain. Soon after November's elections, he howled his outrage at "the high, elite environmental community ... the self-centered bunch, the waffle-stomping, intellectual bunch of idiots that don't understand that they're leading this country into environmental disaster."

There was more. The federal government, Young charged, has been "infiltrated by the preservationists. This is a socialist movement. That's all it is." And he barked a warning to tree-hugging fifth-columnists everywhere: "I'm the one that's in charge now," he bragged. Environmentalists "are going to have to compromise. If not, I'm just going to ram it down their throats." His bill of fare, a Christmas feast for polluters, includes rollbacks of the Endangered Species Act and wetlands protections, new rules to make "property rights" safe from the reach of regulators, auctions of public lands, and that hundred-pound fruitcake of anti-wilderness proposals, oil-and-gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

"He says without any hesitation, without any equivocation, without any parenthetical statements, that he is changing the priorities and the role of this committee," says Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), one of Resources' strongest voices for wilderness. "He says that at every opportunity. And he also says things about his longevity, how he plans on being here for a long time and continuing to do these kinds of things long into the future. That's the rhetoric. We're waiting for the ocular proof, as they say."

For Miller, though, two decades of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations with the new chairman are proof enough. "He is a very serious threat to the environmental agenda," declares Miller soberly. "A very serious threat."

The 1951 Sutter Union High School yearbook contains a valedictory prediction for Donald Edwin Young, then a pompadoured 18-year-old letterman on the Northern California school's football team, the Huskies. It foretells that "Rabbit" Young--nicknamed for the Lepus-like set of his front teeth--will one day be a Democratic senator. His classmates weren't in the dark about his political leanings. "We put that in just to get his goat," says one fellow Sutter alum.