A History of the U.S. Department of the Interior During the Clinton Administration, 1993-2001
Prewitt J and Voytko V. 2000. A History of the U.S. Department of the Interior During the Clinton Administration, 1993-2001. Washington, D.C.
For most of the 20th century, polar visions competed at the Department of the Interior: the older vision, of America’s vast resources as commodities to be exploited, competed with the newer vision, of an America with a deep ethical obligation to preserve and care for its natural heritage. During the Clinton Administration, Bruce Babbitt sought to reconcile this dichotomy, to nurture an American passage into a holistic way of looking at, caring for and using the American landscape, and to rally support for a new era of partnerships across old boundaries that would make the merger of competing visions possible. “Everything’s related,” he insisted. He dismissed seeming contradictions, including the central one at work in Interior’s history—economy versus environment—as anachronistic and selfdefeating, a lack of imagination as well as a failure to embrace good science. Babbitt’s experience as geologist, politician and conservation advocate, and his on-the-job training as Interior’s executive led him to a vision of America’s future that defied yet incorporated Interior’s history: “We can’t segment nature into a few preserves and then proceed to decimate the rest of the landscape. At the threshold of the 21st century we’ve come to understand that the natural world cannot survive that way. We’re on the verge of a new movement, an integrated view of the American landscape.” Bruce Babbitt’s Department of the Interior identified and accelerated a third wave in conservation history, the American Restoration. This new American era, Babbitt proposed, is economic and ecological, temporal and spiritual, mainstream and unconventional. In several momentous Interior-led projects, the concept of restoring an ecosystem to its natural balance has had the power, the magic, to encompass these apparent opposites. As environmental laws passed in the 1970s succeeded in rescuing species and cleaning air and water, Americans came to believe in the possibility of restoring the balance between life’s material and existential needs. New attitudes, based on better understanding of the interdependence of the quality of American life and health of the environment, have created new partnerships, and fresh ways for the Department of the Interior to add value to those partnerships, enabling it to move beyond conservation and preservation to the far more complex challenges of restoration.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Prewitt, Jana; Voytko, Victoria
- Date of Issue
- 2000
- Units
- HIST
- Keywords
- activism, Administration, Administrative, Alaska, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau Of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Clinton, Conservation, ecosystem approach, ehistory, Federal Aid, Fire policy, Fish, Habitat, Hatcheries, History, Indian Trust, Interior, Land Management, Landscapes, leadership, legacy, mineral management, Minerals Management Service, Mining, Mission, monument, National Park Service, National Wildlife Refuge System, Office of Special Trustee for American Indians, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, Operational Budget, Organization, Parks, partnerships, Policy, president, Program, Reclamation, Recovery, Restoration, Science, Surface Mining, U.S. Department of Interior, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, U.S. Geological Survey, wars, Water, Water, Wildlife