Copyright 2004 Environment and Energy Publishing, LLC Greenwire

June 11, 2004 Friday

SECTION: SPOTLIGHT Vol. 10 No. 9

LENGTH: 3890 words

HEADLINE: OBITUARY: RONALD REAGAN -- AN ENVIRONMENTAL AND NATURAL RESOURCE LEGACY

BODY:


Darren Samuelsohn, Marty Coyne, Dan Berman and Alex Kaplun,Greenwire reporters

For a president who cut a rugged outdoorsman's image, Ronald Reagan's legacy to the natural environment may be best depicted in the surface mines of northern Utah or the vast network of oil and gas rigs pumping petroleum from the Louisiana and Texas coasts.

Reagan, who died last Saturday at 93, was often cast in the likeness of Theodore Roosevelt, the nation's most conservation-minded president. But the nation's 40th president was in fact an industrialist in cowboy's clothing.
He believed that for the United States to remain a vibrant and prosperous democracy, it must not pile its abundant natural resources into a regulatory lockbox.

Reagan's presidency -- often bookended by historians with the rise of "Reaganomics" and the close of the Cold War -- was in fact equally defined by a leveling of the playing field between those who saw the federal government as a protector of the environment and those who saw it as an enabler of resource extraction.

To overlook Reagan's environmental legacy, with its bold strokes and sometimes rough edges, would leave an important part of the story about the '80s decade untold. Just as important is the fact that Reagan's convictions about the government's role in the environment, and the battles that ensued as a result of his policies, remain deeply ingrained in the policy and political debates of today.

WATT AND GORSUCH CONTROVERSIES

To view Reagan's legacy as simply railing against environmental priorities, while tempting to his critics, would be to oversimplify his administration's goals as well as its accomplishments. As with other aspects of Reagan's legacy, it does not lend itself well to simple characterization, but rather remains subject to changing interpretation as the years pass.

Nevertheless, from the earliest days of the administration, when Reagan appointed two polarizing figures to his Cabinet in Interior Secretary James Watt and U.S. EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch, environmentalists and Capitol Hill Democrats began resisting the president's environmental direction.
Controversial and in some ways inexperienced, the two figures would establish reputations as uncompromising revolutionaries.

Reagan himself also provided ammunition for critics through his sometimes controversial statements, such as citing carbon-emitting trees as a greater contributor to air pollution than industrial plants and declawing nuclear power critics by surmising that a year's worth of radioactive waste from a single plant could fit inside a desk drawer.

But Reagan also led an administration that tripled the National Park Service budget, added 10 million acres of wilderness to the nation's cache, removed lead from gasoline and implemented a Superfund law passed by a lame-duck Congress right before his inauguration. As such, Reagan's supporters say, his accomplishments are too often overlooked and misinterpreted.

"I don't think it's fair to say Ronald Reagan was an opponent to environmental protection," said Phil Angell, chief of staff to former EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus from 1983 to 1985. "I think they saw that there might be a better way to achieve the goals."

Washington-based industry lobbyist Marc Himmelstein said Reagan took the environmental issue and established his own approach. Recalling a quote from former Republican National Committee Chairman and current Mississippi Gov.
Haley Babour, Himmelstein said: "You didn't need an environmental lobbyist when Ronald Reagan was president. He was the best one in town. He knew what he was for. He knew what he was against. And he didn't want to hear political diatribes."

With that confidence of vision, Reagan left much of the policymaking to his Cabinet secretaries and their chiefs, reflecting a hands-off approach that came to define his broader management style. Beyond his own administration, however, Reagan championed the cause of state autonomy over regulatory matters, resulting in a broad shifting of federal environmental responsibility to state agencies, many of which were ill equipped to receive it.

The "Reagan Revolution," as it came to be known, coincided with an uneasy public, however, one that had endured the environmental insults of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. The nation also had grown increasingly aware of toxic chemicals and their threat to the environment through the publication of "Silent Spring," the 1962 book by former Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Rachel Carson.

The public had strongly backed environmental policy initiatives during the early 1970s, including the passage of the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and National Environmental Policy Act. But Reagan saw his landslide victory in the 1980 election as a mandate for a different approach, one that often flew in the face of an emerging environmental movement that had supported his opponent during that campaign, President Jimmy Carter.

If the public doubted a seachange in environmental policymaking, Reagan made his intentions clear with the appointments of his two top environmental aides, Watt and Gorsuch. Not long after taking office, some career EPA officials feared for their job as word leaked that Gorsuch and some of her political appointees had drafted a list of staff unsympathetic to the new Republican administration, presumably to push them out of the agency.

But Gorsuch had her own problems, resigning in 1983 after receiving a contempt citation from Congress for failing to cooperate with an investigation. Her assistant administrator for solid waste issues, Rita Lavelle, was then sentenced to six months in prison for lying to lawmakers.
Phil Shabecoff, a former New York Times reporter and the founder of Greenwire, noted in his 1993 history of American environmentalism, "A Fierce Green Fire," that the EPA scandal "proved to be the most serious political threat" for the Reagan administration during its first term.

Watt was no less controversial, pushing early in the Reagan presidency for a general shift of public lands management from strict conservation to greater commercial and recreational use. Watt also argued that states, not the federal government, should have primary authority over land, water and other natural resources, something environmentalists strongly resisted. Moreover, Watt sought to reconcile the conflicting mandates that Congress gave to public lands management -- "preserve and develop."

Environmentalists, long supportive of the government's role in preservation, now worried about the new administration's push in the other direction, and they leveled their sights on the Interior secretary.

Sources who have followed environmental policy since the Reagan years say Gorsuch and Watt, who also resigned in 1983 after describing his department's racial, ethnic and religious diversity in a way that offended some people, took the environmental debate in a direction that destroyed nearly two decades of bipartisanship on the issue.

"The Gorsuch-Watt years were so caustic and damaging to the agenda that the Reagan administration had," said Jerry Dodson, former counsel to then-House Health and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). "Those that followed learned from that."

Ruckelshaus, the founding EPA administrator under President Nixon, was recruited back to his former agency in large part to boost agency morale and restore trust among the public and media, which had grown increasingly critical of the Reagan administration's environmental stance. "I think it's fair to say the mood swung from despair to jubilation," Ruckelshaus recounted in a 1993 interview with EPA's history department. "The people felt their long nightmare was over, and it was a nightmare."

A nascent environmental movement, meanwhile, rallied to draw new members to its cause, an effort aided by the vilification of Gorsuch and Watt. While new environmental groups sprouted nationwide to rally support for everything from habitat protection to nuclear nonproliferation, older, more established groups such as the Sierra Club and National Wildlife Federation saw major infusions of both members and money. Their rise in strength and sophistication resulted in what is now one of the dominant lobbying sectors in Washington today.

A REGULATION BREAKER, NOT A LAWMAKER

Unlike his immediate predecessors, Carter, Ford and Nixon, Reagan's environmental legacy is rooted not in the drafting of laws and regulations -- a function of government he found abhorrent -- but rather in the use of his immense charisma and stumping ability to shift the terms of debate on policy issues. This was especially true of debates on natural resources, where Reagan chipped away at the notion of an America spoiled by excessive resource extraction and consumption. Rather, he linked the tapping of resources -- for energy, for agriculture and for recreation -- to the pursuit of the American ideal.

"What Ronald Reagan did was say there's all these resources there, there's no reason to turn down our heat and wear sweaters like Jimmy Carter," said Brant Short, a speech communication professor at Northern Arizona University and author of a chapter on Reagan's environmental legacy to be published in an upcoming book from Texas A&M University Press.

With his presidential endorsement of increased development of oil, gas and coal on public lands, Reagan effectively placed the environmental movement outside the sphere of White House policymaking. For their voices to be heard, environmentalists had to build their membership base and then seek out sympathetic allies in Congress, where for reasons both political and practical Democrats became the party of choice for environmental groups.

Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth and a lobbyist on environmental issues for more than 30 years, noted that Reagan was highly effective at shifting Americans' view of government from that of a benign institution to one bent on squelching American enterprise. "There was a dramatic contrast to the idea that government was there as a protector, but instead [that] 'regulations are evil, government is evil' -- that was given new currency, which is now taken to the extreme," Blackwelder said.

Reagan's brand of antiregulation conservatism also helped steer the larger Republican Party toward a laissez faire philosophy with respect to business activity, state regulation of local matters, and the use of public lands for commercial enterprise.

"He questioned federal land policies, especially as it relates to economic impact on Westerners," noted William Perry Pendley, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a private property advocacy group founded in 1976 by Watt, the former Interior secretary. "He was the first president who came in and started going in the other direction and say, 'Maybe we've gone too far on some of these issues'" from a regulatory standpoint.

As Reagan's ideas took greater hold over the GOP, including many in Congress, the environmental community's tilt toward the Democratic Party strengthened, a trend that came to full fruition by the end of the 1980s and has held through three subsequent administrations.

"I look back on the Reagan presidency as the beginning of the erosion of the bipartisan agreement on the environment," said Debbie Sease, national legislative director for the Sierra Club. "Up to that point, there was not a huge distinction on environmental records between the Democratic and Republican administrations."

Particularly for Westerners, whose environmentalism was measured by a deep awareness that the land was inextricably linked to economic activity, Reagan seemed to understand that there was more at stake than clean air and clean water. If the nation was to power its homes, to eat meat, to maintain its high quality of life, the West and its industries could not be tied up in regulatory red tape.

"I think Reagan was unique insofar as he was a Western governor and first president who had an understanding of the interrelationship between the federal government and the West," Pendley said.

Other Western governors and state legislatures were already at odds with the federal government over control and use of public lands in their states.

The Sagebrush Rebellion -- named for the plant that covers much of the interior West -- arose in part to resist environmental laws passed during the Nixon and Carter administrations that required "multiple use" management on Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands. No longer charged simply with growing the nation's food or fueling its industries, Westerners became saddled with endangered species management and forest ecosystem health, concepts that seemed nebulous and difficult to follow.

Legislatures in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming went so far as to pass bills providing for state control of certain public lands administered by BLM and the Forest Service out of fear they would be declared off limits by the federal government.

As Reagan's first Interior secretary, Watt, a native of Wyoming, knew he was riding a revolutionary idea. Among other things, he was charged with spearheading dramatic increases in oil, gas and coal development on public lands.

"I was probably the first secretary of Interior who ever worked for a president that understood the department," Watt said earlier this year at a seminar sponsored by the University of Colorado and Center of the American West. "I was given clear charges by the president. I was to bring about massive change in the way our federal lands and Western waters were being managed so that all of Americans could benefit and enjoy them. ... Not an elite group, but all Americans.

"We never, of the Reagan team, never thought of these battles as environmental battles," Watt added. "There was the type of government we were going to have."

Jim DiPeso, policy director with Republicans for Environmental Policy, said that for all Watt's problems as a political figure, his virtue was "that you knew exactly what his opinion was" on matters of policy. But, DiPeso added, "He had a uniquely inept way of pushing his agenda forward from a public relations standpoint."

Even after Watt left Interior in 1983, the department's pro-development policy continued, said J. Steven Griles, who served under Reagan as Interior assistant secretary for lands and minerals management.

"In terms of the energy industry, we had efforts in the '80s to make energy available to the American people to insure we were using as much domestic energy as possible," said Griles, now the Interior Department's second-in-command behind Secretary Gale Norton.

"The energy that we're using today that's fueling a lot of the clean coal plants is a result of President Reagan's coal leasing program that went into effect," Griles said. "That program is not only producing a lot of coal in the West, but it's also producing low sulfur coal that meets environmental standards."

But Reagan also saw some defeats on the public lands front, including a congressional moratorium on some offshore oil and gas leasing and the refusal of Congress to sanction oil development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. More than two decades later, ANWR development remains one of Congress' most politically charged energy debates between Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the administration.

"If that had occurred in 1987 when President Reagan asked for it, it would be online today, and in the opinion of experts, it would be producing 1 million barrels a day -- right now," Griles said.

RISE OF WHITE HOUSE OVERSIGHT

Another of Reagan's lasting legacies on environmental policy -- though perhaps less known to the public -- centered on his call for White House review of all rules by the executive branch's Office of Management and Budget. This practice, still in place today though amended by the Clinton administration, requires extensive analysis of the costs and public benefits that rules pose to industry and consumers.

As evidence of how much Reagan worried about regulatory gridlock, he instituted the OMB reviews by executive order only weeks after taking office in 1981. Part of that order called on OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to serve as a kind of clearinghouse for proposed rules.

Reagan's order expanded the role of the new executive level agency by authorizing OIRA review of any agency action "designed to implement, interpret or prescribe law or policy or describing the procedure, practice or requirements of an agency." Just as significantly, the order stated "regulatory action shall not be undertaken unless the potential benefits to society from the regulation outweigh the potential costs to society."

While seemingly more bureaucratic than political, Reagan's directive had great significance for environmental agencies like EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service and BLM because it shifted rulemaking authority away from career government employees -- many of whom had served under Nixon, Ford and Carter -- and placed it more squarely under White House political appointees.

John D. Graham, who serves as administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under the current Bush administration, said the directive reflected a major ramping up of White House influence over the government's large and disparate regulatory agencies.

"There was some White House regulatory analysis under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter, but it was President Reagan who mandated cost-benefit analysis, established the formal OMB review process and expanded the scope of White House review to include virtually all significant federal regulations,"
Graham said in an e-mail correspondence with Greenwire.

"Ronald Reagan realized that presidential leadership of economic policy required centralized oversight of federal regulation," Graham added, "thereby assuring that the impact of regulation on the overall welfare of consumers, workers and investors was considered."

Rep. Doug Ose (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee, said Reagan "very accurately understood where the rubber meets the road" on federal regulation. Consequently, Reagan "put some focus on this and said, 'We're going to have some accountability in this process.'"

Reagan also created a Cabinet-level regulatory relief task force overseen by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, and from that committee emerged a number of figures who became influential on their own, including Jim Tozzi, executive director of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, and former Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.), who chaired the House Energy, Natural Resources and Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee.

While many inside government championed the tightened regulatory review process initiated by Reagan, some interest groups maintain the policy amounted to a shackling of experienced regulators who had more extensive knowledge and understanding of the issues than the White House's budget officials.

"We recognized that a great deal was at stake no matter what side [of the debate] you were on," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a group that formed in 1983 in response to Reagan's efforts to tighten the circle of those who had the final say on policy decisions.

Bass called Reagan's OMB directive "an incredible new intervention" because it disposed of traditional interagency review of rules in favor of centralized review by the White House. "His intent from day one was to undo the regulatory system as we knew it," Bass said.

In one of the many parallels drawn between Reagan and President George W.
Bush, observers note that today's OMB has strictly adhered to the cost-benefit analysis approach, though today's reviews of environmental rules tend to focus as much on sound science as on economic issues. The debate over reviews has grown more contentious as well as environmental issues become more complex. Global climate change, for example, an issue largely nonexistent during the Reagan years, now threatens to drive a wedge between those in the government's scientific and regulatory communities and those charged with protecting industry and consumers against costly regulation.

But some Republicans and industry officials maintain that OMB's influence over federal rules has been scaled back in recent years, particularly after the Clinton administration amended the policy to require reviews only for rules that result in an economic burden of $100 million or more for a particular industry sector.

Marlo Lewis, a senior policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted that the number of "return letters" from OMB asking agencies to make substantial changes to rules "dropped to almost zero during the Clinton administration," and has increased moderately under the Bush administration with 22 letters since 2001.

REAGAN'S LEGACY AND GEORGE W. BUSH

For many, Reagan's environmental legacy is easy to find in modern-day governance. One only needs to look at the record and instincts of President George W. Bush. Like Reagan, Bush is a former governor who embodies a folksy style and management approach that emphasizes broad policy direction over the minutia of government. Bush also parallels Reagan with his appeals to Americans' sense of self-reliance and the desire to minimize regulation. In matters of energy policy and commercial use of natural resources, the two presidents share similar scripts.

"If you compare Reagan and Bush, they have similar philosophies about the proper role of government, a pro-business bent and an inclination to have less regulation than more," said DiPeso of Republicans for Environmental Policy.

Even in personal habits and hobbies, the two men share commonalities. Like Reagan, Bush retreats from Washington to a sprawling ranch in a remote part of his home state. Bush prefers a pickup truck to Reagan's horseback rides, but both men cherish ranch work, building fences and clearing brush to get their minds off the business of government.

Political fence-building is also a shared trait among the two Republican presidents. Both have been accused of serving the interests of big energy and industrial interests while effectively locking environmental activists out of the Oval Office. Not surprisingly, Reagan and Bush are viewed with similar measures of disdain, and outright dislike, by those who have been spurned.

"It's interesting to reflect [on how] the harshness of the environmental groups' rhetoric ... against President George W. Bush is the same [as that] heard against President Reagan during his administration," said Pendley of the Mountain States Legal Foundation. "It hasn't changed in tone and intensity."

But DiPeso believes Reagan was more pragmatic in his approach than Bush. He noted that after the controversies leading to the resignation of Watt, "Reagan had a sense of when to back off, when to compromise, when to reach for mainstream solutions for different public policy questions."

"In contrast, the current Bush administration doesn't seem to have that sense of 'you've gone far enough' and look for common ground," he said.

DiPeso pointed to Reagan's endorsement of adding 10 million acres of wilderness. "He signed the bills, said something nice about them and got on with other things."