A public lands legacy

The summer before my freshman year of college, I spent three weeks on a Student Conservation Association national crew. I was placed in Wind Cave National Park and had a life-changing experience, but that's a different story for another day. Long story short, I fell in love with national parks and over the next few years I grew immensely appreciative of the value of public lands in general.

Fast forward to this year, when I spent the winter living at home in D.C. Now if you live in New York or L.A., being starstruck probably means you saw a famous movie star. In D.C. however, starstruck takes on a political form. 'I-just-saw-someone-famous freak outs' are justified for:
-the V.P. or Presidential motorcade
-any motorcade
-D.C. mayoral candidates
-D.C. mayors
-city council members
-recognizable hill folks
-basically anyone in a position of power in the federal government
-probably a lot more people

This blog post is about my adventures in almost debilitating sightings of D.C.,'s most important peeps. Each time I meet an important person, I revert to being a middle schooler and agonize over if I should go up and say a thing to them, or ask them a question, or just introduce myself and hope that they'll take pity on me and engage me in conversation about something other than the weather. No sighting has been more agonizing than seeing current Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, and then seeing former S.O.I. Bruce Babbitt only a couple of months later (the shock of the first sighting still hadn't worn off).

Here's my friend Caroline actually talking with Jewell. What the what!

I got up the courage to talk with Babbitt after the screening of a film about dams, in which he was an opening speaker. I snuck up to him as he was about to leave, and asked him about his relationship with Floyd Dominy (of the Bureau of Reclamation). I coasted on this conversation for days, let me tell you. Chatting about dams with the former Secretary of the Interior, could things get any better??

Turns out, hearing Babbitt speak at the Ansel Adams Gallery of the Wilderness Society about Obama's public lands legacy was even better. He wrote a op-ed for High Country News after his talk, but in it he didn't include my favorite anecdote from his remarks. Ready for it? Here's the gist of what Babbitt said:

Basically, Obama is in the same place as Clinton was at this point of his second term in office. That is, Obama still has not carved out an environmental legacy for himself whatsoever. Babbitt spoke about the tactic that he used to convince Clinton to create a legacy for himself. Babbitt sat down one day and pulled out two index cards. On one he wrote: 'FDR' and then a list of all the public land reserves he had created in office, and other environmentally conscious acts. He wrote 'Clinton' on the other card, and then wrote a much shorter list of Clinton's environmental accomplishments. Then all Babbitt did was give Clinton those two cards, and that was all the push that was necessary. He spoke of the following months, where Clinton apparently called up Babbitt regularly to ask if he had any other big tracts of land that he could make into a national monument. Because of this small push at the end of Clinton's time in office, we now have protected areas such as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument-- an almost 2 million acre tract of land in southern Utah-- larger than the land area of any other U.S. national monument. Here is hoping that Obama will get the same idea.

My promise to you, dear readers: Next time I write about public lands I will try to be more coherent, and next time I write in general it will be about life at CAMP!