Norton Has Testy Crowd on Earth Day

Official peppered with questions on court order for park

by Carl Nolte
San Francisco Chronicle - April 23, 2004

It seemed like a great idea at the time: Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton would celebrate Earth Day in Yosemite, praising the Bush administration's environmental policies with the crown jewel of the national park system as a backdrop.

The National Park Service was also planning to hail the start of work on $10 million worth of projects to rebuild facilities at the Yosemite Lodge. The park service wanted to show that progress was finally being made on a plan that had been nothing but talk for more than 30 years.

Instead, a federal court in San Francisco halted the work cold Tuesday, and Norton was peppered with questions at her Earth Day appearance in Yosemite on Thursday about the government's intentions and the future of the park.

Norton spoke so softly at a news conference that her words were nearly drowned out by the thunder of nearby Yosemite Falls, and her Earth Day message about conservation was eclipsed by sharp questions from reporters and environmentalists asking whether years of planning had been thrown in the recycling bin by a court order.

Even worse, the plaintiff in the lawsuit that stopped the project was able to hold court in a field of stumps of recently cut pine and fir trees and say that the park service was increasing development instead of slowing it down. The plan, said Greg Adair, co-founder of the Friends of Yosemite Valley, "is a development plan masquerading as a plan to protect Yosemite."

The park service was removing trees to build new facilities at the lodge. Yosemite Superintendent Michael Tollefson said the net result would be fewer rooms at the lodge and would enable the park to reroute a road and transform a large parking lot into a pedestrian promenade.

Overall, Norton and Tollefson said, the changes will cut down on traffic jams, especially on busy weekends, reduce pollution and produce "a better visitor experience." "We are doing the opposite of development," Norton said.

However, Adair was able to undercut the message Thursday, even before Norton delivered it. Before Norton's news conference, he held interviews of his own and waved his hand around the stumps and said, "Don't believe the hype. By their fruits, you shall know them."

Adair's group had opposed the changes for years and challenged them in court. Until this week, when a federal appeals court in San Francisco issued an injunction stopping the work, its legal efforts had been unsuccessful.

The injunction that halted the work also produced splits among environmentalists. Jay Watson, of the Wilderness Society, which had pushed hard for a management plan to cut car use in Yosemite and reduce development, was dismayed by the court action.

Stopping the plan just as it was getting started, he said, meant there was "a dark cloud looming over the incomparable valley."

He and other mainline environmentalists think that now the plan itself may have to be redrawn. "Yosemite has a cursed history of tortured decision- making and administrative gridlock," Watson said. "Finally, the park was moving ahead." Glaciers created Yosemite, he said, and "change only comes here at a glacial pace."

George Whitmore, of the Sierra Club's Yosemite Task Force, said dropping the plan was the biggest danger. "The danger is that if the (Bush) administration intervenes in a new planning process, we could expect to end up with a worse plan than the one we have now."

Most large environmental groups have supported elements of the plan over the years, hoping to cut car traffic and curb development, but they found it hard to defend the park service's cutting down trees.

"Look at those stumps," Whitmore said. "They call that renewal?"

Norton said the government was consulting its legal staff to see what the next step would be. She was asked several times whether the Bush administration would continue to implement the plan, which was completed in the Clinton years and was supported vigorously by former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. "It seems to me a very good plan," Norton said.

Norton had high praise for another project: a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the approach to Yosemite Falls, which will be completed in the fall. The project is paid for in part by the nonprofit Yosemite Fund.