WildEarth Guardians

Thursday, September 29, 2005
Bruce Babbitt visits Santa Fe for a conversation about his new book, Cities in the Wilderness

John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians Welcomes Bruce Babbitt to Santa Fe for a conversation about his new book, Cities in the Wilderness
Contact: WildEarth Guardians

Thank you, Karen. It’s great to see both familiar and new faces gathered here tonight. It was our intention to bring together long-time members and supporters of WildEarth Guardians as well as others less familiar with our work.

The first thing I want to do is to thank Letty and Doyne for welcoming us into your home and for your incredible commitment to WildEarth Guardians and environmental protection in the Southwest. Doyne has been the WildEarth Guardians’ board president for the last five years and in that role has helped WildEarth Guardians to expand our breadth and depth. Letty was one of the co-founders of WildEarth Guardians and since then has become a tremendous asset to environmental groups and causes all across the Southwest. So thank you both.

We really are extremely privileged tonight to have the opportunity to listen to and converse with Secretary Babbitt. I really want to underscore the conversation piece. When I spoke to Bruce last week about his new book, Cities in the Wilderness, and this evening he urged me to frame the evening as an opportunity for conversation and dialogue-so let’s be certain to take him up on that offer at the conclusion of his remarks.

When you think about the environmental legacy of President Clinton the first person you think of is Secretary Babbitt.

And what a legacy …. The millions of acres of public lands designated as National Monuments across the West- each of them an important step in the slow evolution of a a new ethic of preservation for our public lands. Taking down dams in New England, the Southeast and the Pacific Northwest-each act restoring spawn fishing on rivers re-born for the first time in a century and reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone and our very own Gila Wilderness.

But as I reflect upon about Secretary Babbitt’s legacy, I think about other, less high profile acts and initiatives that - to me - are equally significant. In January 1992, at the same time that Secretary Babbitt was first getting settled in DC so to was I, an excited, young intern at the National Wildlife Federation working on public lands issues…and I remember fondly the pervasive optimism and hope that we could change the world for the better.

As a way of introducing Secretary Babbitt, I’d like to share two of my recollections from my time in Washington.

The first was a ceremony in the late Spring of 1993 for Wallace Stegner, who had died weeks before here at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Santa Fe - the unfortunate victim of a car accident. It was Wallace Stegner - one of the great creative writers of the 20th century and a native westerner-who said and wrote that the remaining western wilderness was “the geography of hope” and who inspired many of us who care about the West to “create a society to match the scenery.” I remember well the gathering in one of those great halls at the Department of Interior in Washington DC - the same place where today the timber, mining, ranching and oil and gas industry representatives now call the shots - and listening to the soothing words of Terry Tempest Williams who urged each of us to defend our heartland. By choosing to honor Stegner’s legacy Secretary Babbitt reconnected the Interior Department with a tradition of Interior Secretaries who recognized the role of art and literature to inspire us and to affirm our deepest held values about how we want to relate to one another, to the land and the creatures that inhabit it.

The second initiative-Rangeland Reform-might not make Secretary Babbitt’s career highlight film because of many of the political challenges he faced in seeking to reign in the 19th century mentality that elevates grazing above other public values on public lands. But I respected your courage and conviction to confront the oftentimes ugly face of livestock grazing on public lands.

I’ve selected these two parts of the Babbitt legacy because, for me, they embody the full spectrum of values that we attempt to uphold in our work at WildEarth Guardians. On the one hand, we are inspired by beauty…whether it be the beauty of a well-crafted Wallace Stegner’s essay or the beauty of desert river. And on the other hand we are inspired to confront the ugliness of practices like public lands grazing in the deserts of the American Southwest that so often sacrifices the wildlands and wildlife that we care so deeply about.

But to make these legacies even more secure there is much unfinished work that needs to be done and that is the business of WildEarth Guardians and the conservation movement. I want to touch on four pieces of Secretary Babbitt’s legacy that relate directly to our work.

The Endangered Species Act, and its moral promise that we have an obligation to protect the diversity of life, needs to be affirmed and strengthened. WildEarth Guardians ESA work seeks to ensure that whole eocystems are protected by focusing on species that serve as umbrellas, indicators and keystones for their ecosystems. As Secretary Babbitt says in his new book… “We should begin to think of the Endangered Species Act, not in bits and pieces, but as an effective mandate to conserve the ecosystems upon which all of life, including human life, depends.” Unfortunately, just today the House passed the Richard Pombo’s “extinction act,” so we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Our Southwestern Rivers-each an endangered ecosystem in its own right-need to have rights to their own waters. We are working with cities and farmers to establish new policies to establish these water rights on the Rio Grande.

The Mexican wolf needs to have a safezone where it is not persecuted by the livestock industry. We are just beginning work with Gila grazing permit holders and other conservation groups to promote federal legislation to buy-out and permanently retire grazing permits in the heart of the Mexican wolf recovery zone.

More wildlands need to be preserved not sacrificed to short-term financial demands of the oil and gas industry. There are places like Otero Mesa, the Valle Vidal, and many others that we believe are simply too precious-too valuable for the water, their wildlife and their inherent wildness-to sacrifice for a few days of additional consumption of fossil fuels.

So, I want to thank you Bruce, not only for putting each of these issues-and many, many others-on the conservation landscape but for also elevating them on the political landscape. WildEarth Guardians will do our part to ensure that at least these parts of your legacy continue to be a vibrant one. Please join me in thanking Secretary Babbitt for his incredible, lifetime commitment to the American West and for coming here this evening to share his reflections on the past and his visions for the future.

Visit the Executive Director's Corner