COLUMN ONE : A Species No Longer in Danger : Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. has survived controversial gaffes and a host of skeptics. Now, he must confront a thorny environmental agenda.

WASHINGTON —  Over the past two years, Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan Jr. may have amassed the most interesting job-performance record in the Cabinet:

Early in his term, he jolted staff aides by reacting with shock and indignation to news that off-road recreational vehicle racing in the California desert at Barstow was damaging the habitat of the endangered desert tortoise--only realizing later that ORVs actually were motorcycles, not full-sized Winnebago trailers and campers.

On two or three occasions, he has set environmentalists’ blood boiling by wondering aloud why the United States must protect every subspecies of endangered species. Many are leery as well because they believe that he almost unfailingly will side against the majority of environmentalists on issues such as offshore oil drilling policies, old-growth timber, mining claims, irrigation contracts or grazing fees.

And knowledgeable sources confirm informally that an alert park ranger once caught him about to scratch his initials blithely in some of the ancient Indian carvings in one of the treasured petroglyphs areas outside Albuquerque.

Now, Lujan is heading into his third year of running the federal bureaucracy that controls a third of all the land in America, protects its wildlife, provides services for a million American Indians and hosts 265 million visitors a year to national parks, landmarks and monuments--and he is finding himself the Rodney Dangerfield of the Bush Administration: He don’t get no respect.

His only salvation has been comparison with former Interior Secretary James G. Watt, whom some environmentalists regard as the worst secretary of the Interior in memory.

Even after he had been in office only a few months, Washington pundits began laying odds that Lujan would be the first Cabinet member to pack his bags. Rumors wafted about that he would be replaced by Sen. James A. McClure (R-Ida.).

Despite all the furor, however, Lujan--a highly visible Latino who is a close friend of President Bush--is still serving as Interior secretary for the self-described “environmental President” and indications are that he likely will continue in the post for as long as he wants.

What’s more, environmentalists are not rocking the boat. Lujan, they say, is probably as good an Interior secretary as they can expect in a Republican Administration, where senators of the Mountain West often seem to perform as shadow Interior secretaries, looking after the interests of cattlemen, loggers, miners and irrigators.

Despite Lujan’s seeming confusion at first, the once-raucous Barstow motorcycle race is closer to extinction than the lumbering tortoise. And critics say that they have felt more welcome at the Interior Department than at any time in the past decade. Some would hate to see Lujan depart.

“He truly believes that he is trying to find a middle ground,” says Wilderness Society President George Frampton. “Although his idea of a balance is not what we think of as a balance, he is quite sincere in that.”

Moreover, just last December, Lujan scored a major public relations coup by buffaloing Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., whose purchase of MCA gave it control of the park concession at Yosemite National Park, into reselling the enterprise to an American firm--contending that so precious a natural resource should not be in foreign hands. His position enraged the State Department and top U.S. economic officials but it brought Lujan thousands of supporting letters from ordinary Americans.

Steven Goldstein, Lujan’s long-time press secretary, contends that Lujan’s earlier gaffes were just part of making the transition from being a congressman--which he was for a full 20 years before taking the Interior job--to being a Cabinet officer.

“It took time to change from the congressional mode to one where you are eighth in line to be President of the United States,” Goldstein says. “It took some time before people started to debate the issues, as opposed to style.”

Indeed, Lujan will not lack for issues over the next few years. With budget pressures becoming more excruciating by the month, reformers in Congress are taking increasingly sharp aim at long-time federal subsidies for enterprises that use or exploit public resources--lured by the prospect of reaping several billion dollars a year by overhauling federal timber, grazing, irrigation and mining policies.

House Democrats, led by Rep. Mike Synar of Oklahoma, soon will launch another effort to raise dramatically the grazing fees now being paid by thousands of ranchers who run cattle on the 174 million acres of public rangeland in the West.

In the Senate, Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-Ark.) will renew a drive to rewrite the federal mining law--enacted during the tenure of President Ulysses S. Grant--which still requires the government to sell mining rights on public lands for no more than $5 an acre and provides no royalties for minerals that may be taken out.

And next year, Congress must tackle the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act, as threats to species such as the Pacific salmon pose the possibility of clashes dwarfing this past year’s battle over the spotted owl.

To be sure, critics can make a good case that Manuel Lujan has not always been well-equipped to be the guardian of the nation’s natural resources.

During 20 years in Congress--most of it as a member of the House Interior Committee--Lujan compiled an average score of 25 out of 100 in the League of Conservation Voters’ ratings on environmental issues and a reputation more for congeniality than for legislative initiative. He hosted a regular Tuesday night poker game for so long that friends pitched in and bought him a set of chips engraved with the seal of the House of Representatives.

Resigned to being in the House minority with no chance of succeeding his friend Rep. Morris K. Udall (D-Ariz) as chairman of the Interior Committee, Lujan gave up his ranking position and took the second spot on Science and Technology, where he quickly became a space buff.

Twice when the Ronald Reagan Administration was searching for a new Interior secretary, Lujan was a rumored candidate for the job. But he never was tapped--partly, friends believe, because he had been too close to then-Vice President George Bush, with whom he had served in the House when they both were junior congressmen. (Reagan and Bush were rivals in the 1980 Republican presidential primary and some members of their staffs maintained their original loyalties.)

When Bush ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.) in 1970, Lujan vigorously campaigned for him in the Rio Grande Valley. In 1973, when Spiro T. Agnew resigned from the vice presidency in disgrace, Lujan went to then President Richard M. Nixon and urged him to select Bush as the new vice president. He was an early supporter of Bush in the Republican primaries of 1980.

By the time Bush was elected in 1988, Lujan had suffered a heart attack, undergone bypass surgery and announced that he was going home to New Mexico.

In 1988, when an emissary for President-elect Bush offered Lujan the Interior job, the New Mexico lawmaker brushed it aside and continued packing for the trip back to Albuquerque. But then Bush called personally and Lujan’s resistance crumbled. A few weeks later, he was moving instead into the spacious secretary’s suite on the seventh floor of the Interior Department.

The issues came up quickly, even at the start--including a full-bore review ordered by the White House of a Reagan Administration proposal to resume lease sales for oil exploration off the coast of California.

But while Bush eventually banned development of federal property off California at least for the rest of the decade, Lujan repeatedly has made clear that he has little sympathy for sweeping congressional embargoes against offshore drilling. And he called for exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge. Lujan believes that drilling ought to be permitted wherever it is deemed environmentally safe. Some environmentalists contend that developing the outer continental shelf and the Arctic refuge is inherently threatening to the environment.

Scion of a wealthy, old-line Spanish-descended family in Santa Fe that has been billed locally as New Mexico’s Kennedys, Lujan and his brother, Edward, carried on the family insurance agency until Lujan got the political bug.

Following his father--who served as mayor of Santa Fe for three terms--into politics, Lujan won a seat in Congress in 1968 and stayed for two decades. An insatiable fisherman and an expert woodworker, he also acquired a reputation as a party-goer. He’s “a great guy,” says a friend who had worked with him over most of the years on the Hill--”the kind of guy you’d like to have for a neighbor but never miss if he moved away.”

In recent weeks, Lujan also has had his share of tragedy, as his eldest son, Robert, was convicted in a suburban Alexandria, Va., circuit court of rape, sodomy and burglary.

Although the secretary’s style has gotten much of the attention, it is his policies that have made critics most fearful. Lujan’s positions on oil and the other big issues like mining, grazing and timber cutting look more and more like those of his predecessors, they say.

“Lujan is in the mold of every Republican secretary of the Interior since the time of Eisenhower,” says Brock Evans, a vice president of the National Audubon Society. “He is about 20% better than Watt but he is basically subservient to the extractive interests.”

Lujan has supported subsidized grazing fees, low fees for mining on public lands and increased access by timber-cutters to long-standing forests.

Still, friends contend that his personal faux pas aside, Lujan’s problems at Interior are much more the doing of George Bush than of Manuel Lujan.

“The agenda for the Interior Department is not set in the secretary’s suite,” says Rep. Synar, who is chairman of the Government Operations subcommittee on environment, energy, and natural resources. “It is set in the White House and what we have is not a Department of the Interior but a bureau of livestock and mining.”

Moreover, they say that Lujan apparently has not suffered as much from comparisons to Watt as to William K. Reilly, the dashing Conservation Foundation president whom Bush appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Lujan-watchers say that the appointments have turned out happily for the White House. In Reilly, Bush found a big-name environmentalist to go after toxic waste dumps and urban air pollution. In Lujan, whose role in environmental protection is even more sweeping, he found a conservative, solidly at home with Western Republicans on the issues of land use and resource management close to the party’s ideological heart.

Still, they contend, by announcing his ambition to go down in history as the environmental President--and naming Reilly to head the EPA--Bush put Lujan on the spot from the first day.

To give him his due, Lujan has searched hard for opportunities where he could strike a balance between polarized constituents. A Republican pollster told some of Lujan’s lieutenants last year that what the secretary needed most was a “common enemy” that would unite the environmentalists and the cattlemen and loggers. But for months, there seemed to be none in sight.

Then, one morning in December, Lujan called his man Goldstein and told him that he had decided to seize on the issue of foreign ownership of park concessions.

Raising the specter of foreign control of one of the crown jewels of America’s natural resources, he generated an avalanche of support and a deal for MCA to sell its Yosemite Park & Curry Co. to the nonprofit National Park Foundation three years from now. The National Park Service will then enter into a new concession contract expected to produce $107 million for improvements in the popular Yosemite Valley area.

Although waving a bloody shirt about foreign ownership made Lujan vulnerable to charges of Japan-bashing--and even racism--Paul Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn., credits him with having engineered a coup. He set out a new principle prohibiting concessionaires in national parks from owning hotels, restaurants and other facilities--forcing them to sell their properties back to the government.

And concessionaires no longer will enjoy a preferential right of renewal. Under the deal with MCA, the famed Ahwahnee Hotel, restaurants, stores, lodgings and ski operations now belonging to its subsidiary, the Yosemite Park & Curry Co., will be sold to the foundation, which is expected to turn them over to the Park Service. The concession will be awarded to a new bidder when the current contract expires in three years.

“Lujan has taken on that issue when nobody else would take it on,” Pritchard says. “That is going to be the bellwether of the multimillion-dollar concessions industry.”

Having put some big points on the scoreboard, Lujan is looking at two new opportunities to deal with problems that have dogged him from his first days as secretary.

The Bush Administration’s new national energy strategy, to be sent to Congress within the next few days, is expected to encourage increased domestic oil production. That, in turn, will be followed by the Interior Department’s five-year plan for development of the outer continental shelf.

President Bush already has taken nearly all of the outer continental shelf out of consideration--from the portion just off California, much of Oregon and Washington, the Georges Bank region off New England to the rich deposits off southern Florida. Thus, Lujan’s options are severely limited.

But the plan for development of the remaining areas along the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico will reflect the view that the Interior secretary has been promoting for months--lease sales that are sharply defined in efforts to extract the oil without undue hazard to the environment.

The limitations that the Administration already has imposed on development in the federally owned outer continental shelf means that any new effort to spur more production will focus more sharply than ever on Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“When, it is released, it will be clear in everybody’s mind that this Administration is moving to very site-specific leasing, where it can be done in an environmentally sound manner,” Goldstein asserts. “We have said from the beginning that there will be no offshore leasing unless it can be done in an environmentally safe manner.”

Whether Lujan can control his public relations gaffes is another question. Even more than the criticism over his advocacy of exploring for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Lujan’s comments about the Endangered Species Act and his suggestion that somehow its economic consequences need to be taken into account have gotten him into trouble with environmentalists.

What particularly stirred them was a newspaper interview in Denver last year in which the secretary questioned whether he should be required to protect every subspecies of an animal on the endangered list.

Tim Glidden, Lujan’s counselor and a former minority staff director for the House Interior Committee, says that the interview produced a misunderstanding: The secretary had only meant to question whether every subspecies of animal must be protected everywhere they occur--even if established populations exist nearby. “What he was asking was whether we have to save every group of squawfish in every segment of a river, even if we have 25 fish below a dam somewhere, and thousands more elsewhere upstream,” Glidden declares.

Anticipating more endangered species crises ahead, not to mention a major debate over renewal of the act next year, Lujan told environmental leaders recently that he will offer a major biodiversity initiative later this year--a broad-based program to preserve the habitats necessary to sustain a diversity of wildlife, not just those species that are threatened or endangered.

If he goes through with such an initiative, Lujan will be taking up what is expected to be one of the hot environmental topics of the coming decade.