Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein often vote together on the issues. Their political teamwork on subjects such as gun control and budget items has made the two senators known as California's one-two punch.

John Ashcroft had been on the receiving end of the Boxer-Feinstein one-two punch during his confirmation bid, but the duo was split on the question of Gale Norton and her qualifications to head up the Department of the Interior. Dianne Feinstein approved of Norton and even stated that she looked forward to working with her on California water issues.

Senator Boxer, on the other hand, enthusiastically grasped the environmentalist banner to lead the Senate opposition against the former Colorado Attorney General. She was first out the gate with the talking points. According to Boxer, Norton was too pro-business and too much of an advocate of states rights to be trusted with the stewardship of a half a billion acres of public land. Norton, according to Boxer, was "out of the mainstream."

"Out of the mainstream," the vapid quasi-indictment, a phrase pulled right out of this year's standard issue Democrat bag of tricks. Joe Biden and Charles Schumer used the phrase against John Ashcroft, too, when they couldn't muster the courage to look their former colleague in the eye and call him a racist. They did so, even as they managed the gall to plant the seed of the idea that John Ashcroft was, indeed, a racist in every sound bite and interview they could get their faces into during the course of the confirmation hearings.

Incredibly, Norton was also accused of being a racist during her hearings, as well. Because of her pro states rights sentiments, as stated in a 1997 speech regarding her lamentation of what the Civil War had done by way of setting back states rights, she was labeled pro-slavery by some of her opponents in the environmentalist camp. A ridiculous allegation on the face of it, considering the speech, in which Gale Norton made it crystal clear that there was nothing right about slavery.

She was accused of being ultra-right wing because of her previous work for such organizations as the Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF), an group which fosters the causes of private parties who have been frustrated by government bureaucracies, mostly in the area of property rights. While MSLF has represented mining operations, it also represents average -- dare I say it -- mainstream people, like the recreational users of public lands. In a recent case it successfully fought the closing of public roads within the Utah National Parks system, making those areas more accessible for public enjoyment.

Mountain States Legal Foundation also fought a decade long case on behalf of a Montana sheep rancher, John Schuler, who was fined $7000 for having shot a grizzly bear in self-defense. When the case was appealed to the Department of Interior for review, it contended that, while Schuler's life was in danger, he was at fault for the bear's threatening behavior for having brought his dog out with him on the night he went to check on his sheep and was accosted by the grizzly. After six years of appeals for Mr. Schuler, MSLF successfully defended him before a federal district court in Montana where the judge rejected the US Fish and Wildlife Department's claim that grizzly bears, because of their incapacity to reason, deserve a greater degree of self-protection than humans.

This is the organization that is depicted as so extreme by Ms. Norton's opponents? So out of the mainstream? An organization that contends, in the face of pure fur-hugging neurosis, that a man should, indeed, be able to defend himself from an attacking grizzly bear on his own property without having his life sent into turmoil and his fortune gutted by accusations of animal cruelty and destruction of natural resources?

Gale Norton was also criticized for her association with the US Libertarian Party. In 1980 she was second in the wings for the position of Libertarian Party National Director. This association with the Libertarians could be construed as lending some insight into the sensible application of private enterprise upon public problems such as pollution and land use dilemmas, but once again, she was tagged as extreme by her critics and they were notably concerned that she could have at one time been associated with such an out of the mainstream organization as the Libertarian Party.

Now a long time member of the Republican Party, Ms. Norton characterizes herself as a conservative conservationist and she maintains close ties to the Political Economy Research Center (PERC), a libertarian think tank dedicated to working out free market solutions to environmental problems.

As stated in a PERC opinion page, "Where government bureaucracy has created roadblocks, individual entrepreneurs have generated innovative approaches to environmental problems. PERC calls these entrepreneurs 'enviro-capitalists.'"

According to PERC director Terry Anderson, "Inside Gale's head is a flashing sign that says, 'incentives matter,' that's the essence of free-market environmentalism."

Gale Norton's brand of free-market environmentalism is likely to recognize that an innovative approach would not pit environmentalists against private enterprise. It would, in fact, encourage one on one incentives for a landowner or land user to conserve or preserve the natural state or resource on his property. It would recognize the benefits of government acting in a peripheral role, rather than enacting mandates or being the sole provider of funds. In short, it's standing back and letting private enterprise work to the advantage, instead of just to the detriment, of the environment.

For example, near Yellowstone, sheep ranchers plagued by wolves had no incentive to want the wolf population preserved there, not until an agreement was untaken between the ranchers and conservationists. Once environmentalists were convinced that compelling the ranchers to refrain from killing the wolves was neither fair nor, in the long term, effective in maintaining the wolf population, they embarked upon a compensation program. A mutual agreement that in return for ranchers tolerating the presence of the wolves on their property, they would receive compensation from the environmentalists for attrition of their flocks due to wolf kill.

This same incentive/compensation principle can and has been applied across the board in everything from water and grazing rights to pollution control on public and private lands.

This is the direction Gale Norton's Interior Department will take. Instead of being James Watt in a skirt, a characterization that betrays an outmoded understanding of the environmental big picture among her critics, Secretary Norton is likely to seek effective free market solutions over the commodity management approach that her former boss James Watt used nearly twenty years ago.

Last Friday a New York Times editorial advised its readers to watch Gale Norton with a wary eye. It warned us that in spite of her charm and polished demeanor, she's a tool of big business and dastardly property rights advocates. Perhaps in the post-Clinton era, the New York Times can't help but to mistake Ms. Norton's confidence and honesty for a slick charade. The editorial said to watch what she does, not what she says. Sound advice, which I hope will be applied across the board to all the new civil servants who've been sent to Washington this year.

Time is something the Bush administration isn't known to waste. Therefore, we're likely to know sooner rather than later whether Gale Norton is speaking from the heart when she says, "Over time my strong support of the environment is something that people will come to know."

© Lynette Warren 2001 All rights reserved


Previously by Lynette Warren...

The Parting Shot (01/26/01)

Faith vs. Blind Faith (12/27/00)

Under the Mistletoe with Sinn Fein (12/15/00)

Mrs. Clinton Goes to Washington (12/08/00)

It's the Outrage (12/01/00)

The Great Florida Vote Hunt (11/24/00)