I share with many New Mexicans a feeling of immense pride in the appointment and confirmation of our Congresswoman Deb Haaland from Laguna Pueblo to be America’s 54th Secretary of the Interior. She joins former New Mexico Congressman Manuel Luján, Jr., who served as Interior Secretary from 1989 to 1993, in holding that most powerful and influential office that affects the well-being and quality of life of people across the United States and particularly in the water-starved American West.
Haaland and Luján, Jr. have many sterling qualities in common, not in policy and politics, but in style and affability. Both represented Albuquerque’s 1st Congressional District. Both had a bipartisan temperament while being highly partisan, a quality that endeared them to many and helped make them effective congressional players. Both were master practitioners of the art of constituent service, blessed with personal political skills.
Even though I disagreed with Republican Luján, Jr. on almost every issue, I considered him a friend. So now to have an environmental conservationist and climate change warrior such as Deb Haaland, a person with whom I agree about so many crucial issues in the West, as Interior Secretary fills me with a sense of relief and a sense of optimism.
Haaland’s influence on energy generation, Native American rights and water planning in the West is potentially tremendous. The Colorado Compact, which delivers Colorado river water to 40 million Westerners in seven states, will be renegotiated during her tenure and completed in 2026. The fate of urban growth and agricultural sustainability will depend on how equitable the new Compact turns out to be. And hovering over the process will be water hedge fund managers and investors looking to privatize as much water in the West as they can.
As an example of the power of the Secretary of Interior over Western water issues, consider arch libertarian and oil and gas champion Gale Norton, secretary from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush, and her historic action to cut off a vast amount of Colorado River water — nearly 650,000 acre feet (or over 75 percent of what the whole state of New Mexico gets a year) — to Southern California’s cities of Los Angeles and San Diego and to farmers in the Imperial Valley.
The story is complicated, but it boils down to this: blue state California was using water that belonged to red state Arizona under the Colorado Compact. California had to give up using that water when the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, was completed. The Department of Interior was willing to wean California off Arizona’s water over a 15-year period if Southern California cities could work a deal with Imperial Valley farmers to buy more water. If they couldn’t, the water would be turned off all at once in two years on January 1, 2003. And they couldn’t.
As the New York Times reported, “Three of the eight pumps that tap into the glistening reservoir of Colorado River water (at Lake Havasu)…are sitting idle, by order of the federal government. With the pumps switched off since 8 a.m New Year’s Day, less water is churning down the 242-mile aqueduct toward coastal Southern California, where 17 million people rely on snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains for washing dishes, flushing toilets and watering lawns.” It was Interior Secretary Gail Norton who turned off the spigots in a historic move that had been threatened, in one way or another, for nearly 40 years.
Deb Haaland will have that kind of potential power. Her actions could determine not only how much Colorado River water New Mexico and other western states get in a protracted and worsening drought but also the momentum of growth in Denver, southern Utah, and other burgeoning cities and states in the West.
The Department of Interior manages one-fifth of the land in the country, along with 476 dams, 348 reservoirs, 410 national parks and monuments and 544 wildlife refuges. It oversees water storage and distribution, along with hydroelectric power, through the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau of Land Management controls permits for oil and gas drilling and is in charge of all federal lands not controlled by the U.S. Forest Service. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is the federal government’s principal point of contact with 574 sovereign Native American tribes, which includes two disastrous centuries of negotiating and breaking treaties. Interior also has the Environmental Protection Agency under its administrative umbrella. Only the Departments of Energy and Defense have even marginally comparable influence in New Mexico and the West.
Haaland will have the opportunity to do an immense amount of good for western states and their people, protecting tourist economies around national parks and monuments and supporting the creation of alternative energy industries, among many other initiatives. She might even be able to make significant inroads fixing the intractable problem of cleaning up groundwater pollution on federal lands, which has become not only a health risk but economic poison all over the West.
The Department of Interior will also have much to say about how successful President Biden is in dealing with what he considers to be four major domestic challenges — COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change. It will be a leader in what is being called a clean energy revolution to wean the country from fossil fuels and their pollution by 2035.
It will take all of Deb Haaland’s interpersonal skills, political savvy and devotion to sound environmental planning to squeeze the most out of the massive bureaucracy at Interior. And she’ll have to clean out the nest of Trumpian holdovers that have infiltrated the establishment there over the last four years.
As we’ve seen — with the appointment of conservative Secretaries like President Reagan’s James Watt, President Bush’s Gail Norton and President Trump’s Ryan Zinke — the damage inflicted on the environment by the Department of Interior is all about policy and expectations, about setting a course and a destination, about fundamental values and dispositions, about knowing how to get along with people to avoid unnecessary and destructive friction.
Deb Haaland is a legitimate Green New Deal advocate with unbending environmental and social justice values. But she is not an all-or-nothing, dismissive, hate-driven partisan zealot, like those politicians who call her a “radical.” She is willing to listen meaningfully and respectfully to those who oppose her, and, if possible, make accommodations. But her record tells us that she’ll never roll over either. If there’s anyone we can trust to do the right thing in the next four years, it’s her.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Beautiful tribute to our own Deb Haaland!