The Scream Of A Wounded Babbitt

by Alexander Cockburn

My denunciation of Babbitt as a profile in ignominy received wide circulation, and now Babbitt has felt it necessary to respond. I quote salient sentences and respond to them.

Babbitt starts by saying my diatribe "alleges that Bruce Babbitt has become a wicked, greedy capitalist. That's news to me. I am doing the same work today for the same ideals that I pursued in public service in Arizona and as secretary of the Interior."

Actually Babbitt is telling the truth here. He is indeed pursuing the same work he has always done. Babbitt hails from a wealthy ranching family, and there has never been a day when he has not been serving the interests of big landowners, mining companies, utilities and real estate czars. He has been consistent.

Babbitt: "I am trying to find practical conservation solutions to preserve America's landscape."

Translation: The word to watch here is "practical." In other words, Babbitt seeks "solutions" that appeal to those who are restricted by environmental laws, whether the water barons of the southwest or the real estate developers like Donald Bren, who want to annihilate the habitat of the gnatcatcher, or the sugar lords of south Florida who want to drain and poison the Everglades.

Babbitt: "The acquisition of the Headwaters Forest in northern California was a major environmental achievement of the Clinton administration. We acquired more than 7,000 acres of ancient coastal redwoods for posterity at a price that was determined by independent appraisal and approved by Congress."

Translation: I allowed both the federal government and the state of California to be blackmailed out of almost half a billion dollars by Charles Hurwitz. If buying 7,000 acres of land is a major environmental accomplishment, then the millions of acres protected under the 1984 wilderness bills make Ronald Reagan a titan among greens.

Babbitt: "Cockburn disparages the use of easements for the protection of open space. Conservation easements, however, are being promoted by all environmental organizations as an innovative and cost-effective means of preserving open space."

Conservation easements are neither cost-effective nor do they preserve open space. Indeed, the phrase "open space" is the giveaway here. In Babbitt's world, open space has been twisted to mean cloverleafs on interstate highways, cemeteries, golf courses, landfills and other useless lands that corporations have gotten credit or cash for not destroying. What hasn't been protected is habitat, those big, unwieldy and contentious tracts of land that are dwindling daily and are needed to protect the wolf, the grizzly, the owl and the salmon.

Babbitt: "And that requires bringing together conservationists and landowners to find common ground, to establish land values and to negotiate provisions that meet the needs of the landowner while preserving the natural landscape for the enjoyment of future generations.

Here we get to Babbitt's real legacy, the coercive harmony party, where he strong-armed environmentalists to form consensus groups with industrialists, all in the name of the win-win solution. Of course, it took Babbitt, with his phony green credentials (garnered as former head of the League of Conservation Voters) to make this work. No one would have swallowed it during Reagan/Bush time. All militant enviros were banished from the consensus table. If an enviro said "no" to a deal, they were given the boot. If a corporado said no, then the bar was inevitably lowered. That's the way it worked. Babbitt has a lot to own up to, but the green groups that went along with him are even more to blame.

Babbitt: "Now on to Southern California. The Ahmanson Ranch is an award-winning planned community on the northern edge of Los Angeles. The owner of the property has already made a gift of more than 10,000 acres of the ranch and nearby lands to the Santa Monica Mountains Land Conservancy for permanent preservation as open space."

Translation: The 10,000 acres couldn't be developed in any event. So, in a typical Babbitt two-step, the developers (a Seattle banking house/real estate conglomerate) are getting credit (and awards, no less) for not destroying lands that they couldn't build on in the first place. Only in Babbitt-land could this "gift" somehow make up for the fact that they are destroying the habitat for not one but two endangered species.

Babbitt: "The owner is now preparing to develop the planned community on less than 2,000 acres of the remaining land. I have been retained to work with environmental organizations and the surrounding communities to hear their remaining concerns and to assure that the developers are meeting the highest standards relating to traffic management, storm drainage, endangered species and other land-use issues."

Translation: The key phrase here is "work with environmental organizations." The local groups working to protect the lowly spineflower and red-legged frog rightly despise Babbitt. So do the local wise use groups, who see him as a two-faced con artist. The only people Babbitt can influence these days are the big environmental groups he has used so shamefully in the past, groups like the Planning and Conservation League, the Environmental Defense fund and the NRDC.