who gives A hoot? 263
in Canada and asked, ‘Ya got any wood, eh?’ Then our government is-
sued an edict: ‘Thou shalt not create jobs and prosperity by adding value
to raw lumber imported from the Crown.’ And to back it up they slapped
on a tariff—not your little garden variety either. It was a dandy. I should
have quit right then and there. However, my northern European heri-
tage reared its ugly head and prevented such a logical step. The rest is
history.”^27
Kellie Carlson, thinking hard about what she wanted to be when she
grew up, watched what was happening to her dad and her friends’ dads,
brothers and uncles. “People were being laid off, losing their jobs. It was
frightening. But Slade cared enough to come to our community and said
he’d do everything in his power to help. The armchair environmentalists
called it cruel demagoguery. I could tell that he really cared. I knew right
at that moment that I wanted to work for that man.”
When she graduated from Washington State University in 1994, she
had a “Slade Gorton Works for Me” sticker on her mortar board. A few
weeks later, she became Gorton’s western Washington campaign field
director.^28
goAdonRt n the enviRonMentALists were at odds for the rest of the
’90s. They fought about birds and fish, dams and mines. Gorton intro-
duced a 120-page bill to dramatically weaken the Endangered Species Act.
In considering whether a species should be saved, the Secretary of the
Interior would become a biodiversity czar. The secretary would weigh the
overall cost, including the economic impact on a community, and take
into consideration whether the species existed elsewhere. “That might
work under an environmentally savvy leader like Bruce Babbitt,” Bill
Clinton’s appointee, “but one shudders at the thought of placing the fate
of the American bald eagle in the hands of a reactionary secretary such as
James Watt,” one editorial worried. Babbitt and Gorton, in fact, were old
friends from their days as attorneys general.^29
Under Gorton’s plan, the administration in power, be it Democrat or
Republican, would have broad discretion and the last word. It could pull
out all the stops to save a species, even if that spelled disaster for an Aber-
deen or an Albany, or it could ignore the biologists and do little or noth-
ing. “Never has a piece of legislation been introduced that has such po-
tential to destroy wildlife,” said the president of the Audubon Society.
“Senator Gorton’s bill should be rightly called the ‘Endangered Species
Extinction Act.’” Poppycock, said Gorton. All his bill did was bring people
into the process. “That’s not radical. That’s common sense.”^30