WILD BILL

Please, Not Kempthorne

By Bill Schneider, 3-16-06

Some things never seem to sink in, such as the reasons people live in states like Montana, which I’m sure are akin to reasons people live in all New West states. Many people, probably the majority, don’t live here for economic reasons. They live here for the natural beauty, for the clean environment, for access to public lands, for outdoor recreational opportunities—all coupled with a moderately low cost of living compared to most places, low crime rates compared to most places, being better for raising children compared to most places, and that impossible-to-define concept, quality of life. You know what they say, if you don’t like Montana, you haven’t been to enough other places.

None of this is news. Both native Montanans and NewWesters see this every day. Hence the runaway growth occurring in western Montana.

Most such claims come from green groups, but not all. Some come from corporate America. A recent survey by Pennsylvania Power and Light, the utility who bought Montana Power’s dams during that scandalous corporate yard sale five or six years ago, indicates Montanans, both new and native, live here because of all those nebulous, non-economic quality of life and clean environment reasons.

That brings me to Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne. It’s still advanced speculation at this point, but apparently, he’s packing his bags for a three-year detail in Washington, D.C. to replace retiring Interior Secretary Gale Norton. Assuming this rumor is only a premature fact, the Bush administration is squandering a huge opportunity to get on the right track.

Everybody agrees, in seems, that the Secretary of the Interior should hail from the West. After all, we have most public lands and national parks and wildlife managed by the Interior Department. But our new Interior Secretary really needs to reflect the prevailing sentiment of the people he or she serves, not special interests viewing our public lands as reserves of unmined natural resources. Instead, the Interior Secretary should view public lands as the basic fabric that makes the New West a desirable place to live. Protecting these public lands—not selling them or mining them or drilling them—is what most people want to see happen. We need a sense of confidence that the person in charge of most of our lands shares our interest in protecting them for future generations.

Most enviros I talk to think Dirk Kempthorne is a reasonable guy and a good politician. He isn’t another James Watt, the icon man of the seventies who single-handedly doubled the membership of the Sierra Club, but Kempthorne has hardly been a champion for protecting our public lands. He has not, for example, come out against the Bush administration’s current plan to sell of public lands, even though most governors have opposed it. Conversely, he has close ties to industry and has even been called a “faithful mouthpiece for polluting industries.”

That’s probably an overstatement, but the fact is, Kempthorne, a former U.S. Senator who decided to run for governor instead a second term in the Senate, has consistently received a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters—except once, when he soared up to a 6 percent rating, getting one vote correct, something about funding a rocket for the space program that nobody remembers. But he has always received a 100 percent rating from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

We need a Secretary of the Interior who has close ties to nature, to wildlife, to efforts to manage our public lands for outdoor recreation. We need somebody who smells like fish, not fertilizer. We need somebody who conservationists can form a bond with and progressively move forward instead of continuing with their full-court-press defense of the past five years.

Recently, Kempthorne created quite a stir with Idaho’s contentious wolf-killing plan, and he opposed the Roadless Rule, even sued in an attempt to stop its implementation. He considers the rule a “federal edict,” forgetting that these are public lands belonging to all people in all states, not some people in Idaho.

Kempthorne prides himself as a consensus builder, but a few years ago, an amazing committee of timber companies and environmentalists reached a consensus and hatched a plan to restore grizzly bears in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, but Kempthorne was primarily responsible for influencing Norton to kill it, even though her own scientists in her own agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, favored it.

Gale Norton has been oft criticized as the fox guarding the henhouse. We really need to get out from under this cloud, but Kempthorne will be viewed in the same light.

Probably more than any other president, George W. Bush has been considered an enemy of a quality environment and public lands. Here is a golden opportunity to counter these critics and make some political hay by appointing an Interior Secretary who will protect wild lands, spike the current sales proposal, stop trying to gut the Endangered Species Act, halt efforts to open fragile landscapes such as the Rocky Mountain Front and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to fossil fuel drilling—all moves widely opposed, but still moving forward.

Based on national polls giving the president his lowest ever ratings around 35 percent, he could use a political boost. Appointing Dirk Kempthorne would be the status quo at best, sort or like rotating bald tires on your vehicle—no improvement with a good chance of a blow out.

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