The Second Century

In California, waterfowl habitat in the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges is being leased to farmers in gross violation of the Refuge Improvement Act of 1997, which gave the system its wildlife-first mission and defined compatible uses, such as hunting. Whenever there's a shortage of water, it goes to farmers instead of ducks and eagles, and farmers are killing marshes with fertilizers and pesticides. Under Clinton, Interior pushed to end farming. Under Bush, it claims that farming is "compatible" with wildlife.

The main problem at Interior is its director, Gale Norton, who, as a former colleague and protégé of James Watt, dedicated herself to assisting states and extractive industries to seize control of federal land and federal water rights. In a 2001 ruling in keeping with state notions, the Idaho Supreme Court nullified the 92-year-old water right of Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge, this despite the fact that the refuge had been established for waterfowl. The refuge includes 101 islands along 113 miles of the Snake River; now that the area is being desiccated, back channels important to waterfowl are filling in with terrestrial plants. Some islands—important to neotropical birds—are now accessible to mainland predators, ATVs, and cattle. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desperately wanted to appeal the Idaho ruling. Norton said no.

Even James Watt opposed the two giant jetties the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dreams of building at Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge and Cape Hatteras National Seashore on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for the convenience of 215 charter and commercial fishing boats. This ancient, $108 million proposal—harder to kill than Rasputin and which would destroy wetlands, fish, sea turtles, and shorebirds—has drawn spirited condemnation from the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Park Service, and the General Accounting Office. When a federal project threatens resources under Interior’s jurisdiction and a fix can’t be negotiated, the department sends a referral to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. In this case, the 27-page document reported that the department “has concluded that [the project] would result in substantial and unmitigatable environmental harm to lands of national importance.” But the referral was never sent; Norton converted it to a one-page memo in which the conclusions became concern that the project “might” impair resources.

It is important for refuges to coordinate with state game and fish departments. In fact, the Refuge Improvement Act requires it. But nothing in the act suggests that states should assume management authority on refuge land. States, funded largely by revenue from hunting and fishing licenses, tend to have diminished ecological perspectives. Former Fish and Wildlife Service director Jamie Clark understood this. “If states take too much control, you ultimately lose the integrity of the system as a whole,” she told me. “It’s America’s refuge system, not Arkansas’s or Mississippi’s. Otherwise you have decentralization; you don’t have a commonality of theme or governance. What if counties wanted to run state wildlife-management areas?”

Current director Steve Williams has a different perspective. Last December 23 he issued an order that allows states to “elevate decisions within the hierarchy of the service.” The Refuge Improvement Act requires policies for the refuge system. Some of the policies got finalized under President Clinton. One that didn’t was the policy on wilderness, and it doesn’t look as if it’s going to be finalized anytime soon under President Bush. Federal wilderness inconveniences motorized sportsmen, so some states wish it would go away. Director Williams has engaged (and is paying travel expenses for) five representatives from state game and fish departments to help the agency write policies, including one for wilderness. Negotiations are in chaos. States are even questioning core concepts, clearly delineated in the Wilderness Act, such as the prohibition of permanent buildings. What’s more, Williams has publicly stated that—for the benefit of the states, which imagine that the refuge act doesn’t go far enough in involving them in refuge doings—he’ll consider changing policies finalized under Clinton.

Last year Hugh Durham, then director of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, decided he’d like trophy-deer management on eight refuges. Refuge managers were horrified when he tried to force a regulation whereby whitetails couldn’t be taken unless their antlers were under two inches or had three points or more. Such a regulation would increase pressure on healthy young bucks that had been passing on the best genes, and skew the natural buck-to-doe ration.

In its July 2002 newsletter, the normally staid Wildlife Management Institute—a nonprofit staffed by professional wildlife managers—called the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s power play “reverse carpetbagging” and reported that “Commission officials privately acknowledged a weak biological basis for the action, but defended the need to correct decades of actual and perceived ‘wrongs’ perpetrated by the feds, as well as to assert the state’s right to manage resident wildlife.” The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional director stood behind his people, rejecting the commission’s demand; director Williams reversed his decision. The precedent has emboldened local farmers who lease their land for hunting, lodge owners, and Arkansas duck guides (who have been banned from state-managed hunting areas) to pressure refuges for more access. Duck hunting is huge business in Arkansas, and hunting interests—especially the guides, who earn as much as $500 per day, per client—fantasize that the refuges are spoiling the shooting by providing so much natural food that the ducks spend all their time eating instead of flying over blinds. The guides are represented by attorney Bill Horn, who, as former assistant to James Watt, headed Watt’s crusade to privatize refuges and purge the Fish and Wildlife Service of those opposed to Arctic drilling, and who, in 1996, designed a bill that would have turned current refuge uses such as grazing and mining into congressionally mandated purposes. Horn has been chosen by Secretary Norton to chair the Refuge Centennial Commission.

The best refuges have strong citizen support groups, and none is stronger than the Pelican Island Preservation Society. When refuges get ringed by development, wildlife corridors are cut off; for many species this can lead to extirpation. Five years ago—when four citrus growers decided to sell off their property, thereby exposing 300 acres adjacent to Pelican Island to development—the society mounted a successful campaign to acquire the land as a buffer. Without this intervention the land would now be growing condos.

The president of the Pelican Island Preservation Society, Walt Stieglitz, is cofounder of a statewide group called Friends of Florida National Wildlife Refuges. You don’t mess with this outfit, as Congress discovered in 2002 when Representative Dan Miller (R-FL) introduced a bill to turn Egmont Key National Wildlife Refuge (along with $5 million) over to the state on behalf of motorboaters and history buffs who fancied that the refuge’s concern about sea turtles, royal terns, Sandwich terns, and laughing gulls might limit access to beaches and archaeological sites. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s Washington office quietly went along with the scheme. But Friends members started making phone calls. Within hours, Pelican Island Audubon, Florida Audubon, and the National Wildlife Refuge Association were in the faces of congressmen and senators, and Miller withdrew the bill.

“Such raids are common,” remarks Stieglitz, who worked for 34 years with the Fish and Wildlife Service, most recently as regional director in Alaska. He cites the perennial bills by Representative Don Young (R-AK), including one in 2002 to turn management of some of Alaska’s national wildlife refuges over to native corporations. If Young succeeds, I wondered if he’d be invited to tear the planks out of the centennial boardwalk.