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President Barack Obama has been a "timid" defender of the environment, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said Wednesday, and he should assert himself the same way the last Democratic president did.
National "monuments should be established at presidential initiative," Babbitt said, "with local input."
Except for that last part about input, that's how Babbitt's former boss, Bill Clinton, got Republicans' attention — by designating a broad swath of southern Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument during his 1996 re-election campaign. Clinton also threatened to veto budget riders that would have scarred landscapes — the kind of amendments that Babbitt alleged Obama too readily accepted this year.
Using the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect areas of natural or cultural significance would force Republicans to back off their piece-by-piece "chipping away" of environmental law and instead negotiate appropriate, politically palatable wilderness designations and other protections, Babbitt said in a news teleconference from Washington.
"This threat is like nothing we've seen before," Babbitt said, "and we've got to talk back."
Babbitt is a trustee for the National Conservation Lands Foundation, whose board complained of environmental setbacks at a recent meeting, foundation spokesman Gary Kozel said. Babbitt chose to give voice to those frustrations and did so Wednesday at the National Press Club.
Babbitt singled out budget riders forced into law by House Republican leaders this spring to remove legal protections for wolves in the northern Rockies and funding for a wild-lands program to protect areas administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
The former Arizona governor's remarks put him at odds with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who this spring authorized a lawsuit challenging the Interior's now-shelved wild-lands policy as an unlawful bypassing of Congress' authority to designate wilderness.
Babbitt's views also clashed with Rep. Rob Bishop, who rejected the characterization of the budget riders as "radical." Rather, the Utah Republican said, the administration's proposals have been radical.
Last year, Bishop released a leaked Interior Department document showing the administration was considering 14 areas for monuments, including Utah's San Rafael Swell and Cedar Mesa. He said he since has received BLM assurances that such a move wouldn't happen without a public process.
Obama hasn't stood up to behind-the-scenes manipulation of the budget, Babbitt said, likely because of a "political calculation among the munchkins in the White House" that controversy is to be avoided. He said Clinton made this mistake when he accepted a budget rider increasing salvage logging on forests, but that he later recognized most Americans favor conservation and promised to veto further environmental riders.
Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance attorney Heidi McIntosh shares Babbitt's frustration. "Without the administration [standing up]," she said, "there's a vacuum."
The White House on Wednesday referred questions to the Interior Department. Interior spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff issued a statement noting that one of the first bills Obama signed protected new wilderness areas and wild and scenic rivers, while his America's Great Outdoors Initiative contains plans for conservation and outdoor recreation upgrades.
"We have made remarkable progress in the first 2 1/2 years of the administration," Barkoff said, "and — together with local communities, states, tribes and members of Congress — we will remain focused on the work that lies ahead."
Babbitt accused Congress of failing to add needed wilderness areas around the country and argued the president could jump-start that effort by using the Antiquities Act to protect some areas as monuments. It was just such a designation — of Utah's Grand Staircase — that enraged and continues to rankle the state's conservatives.
Grand Staircase and other monuments, Babbitt said, have propelled local economies.
Escalante Outfitters owner Steve Roberts agreed. After all, he said in a phone interview, he wouldn't be there without the monument.
"It's a gateway community now," Roberts said. "That's the reason I came: this beautiful spot of land protected by a national monument."
Bishop scoffed at the notion that the monument helped, especially since it put off-limits a major coal deposit on the Kaiparowits Plateau.
"It's really a stretch," he said, adding that the monument's designation heightened mistrust between Western congressional delegations and the Interior.
Babbitt said Grand Staircase was the last monument designated without significant public input, and he suggested Obama instead designate monuments that have faced such vetting and have local support. He mentioned New Mexico's Organ Mountains and Rio Grande River and Alaska's Bristol Bay.
Twitter: @brandonloomis