Report Card for William Clark

By Natalie Angler

Two groups grade Watt's successor and nearly flunk him

When James Watt was Secretary of the Interior, his style was so abrasive and his handling of the environment so aggressively controversial that conservation groups gave him an overall grade of F and demanded his ouster. In an effort to mend fences with environmentalists and to restore peace at the Department of the Interior, the Reagan Administration brought in former National Security Adviser William Clark last October as Watt's replacement. Now, on the first anniversary of Clark's succession, two activist organizations, the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, see only a small improvement over the Watt regime. In a report released last week, the groups have measured Clark's performance and found it wanting. Says the study: "We would give him a D."

The environmentalists agree that Clark has effected a change in Interior's style. Says John McComb, conservation director of the Sierra Club: "Clark doesn't have the confrontational, arrogant attitude of Watt." But that adjustment, McComb says, is a "public relations game." The report maintains that "Watt's basic policies remain substantially unchanged." Among the points covered:

Offshore Oil Drilling. Watt had offered to lease up to a billion acres of continental shelf over five years for oil drilling in multimillion-acre tracts. The report charges that Clark continues to parcel the shelf in enormous chunks, overriding warnings of an undesirable environmental impact. Clark has postponed a decision on a critical 37 million-acre patch of land off the California coast until after the election, which the environmentalists interpret as a sign that he plans to lease the parcel when it is politically safe. (Clark insists that he is bound by a congressional moratorium until at least 1986.)

Wilderness Protection. Almost 24 million acres of public land operated by the Bureau of Land Management, a division of Interior, are being considered for possible wilderness preservation. Watt steadfastly opposed the designations and managed to drop 1.5 million acres from the review. Although Clark could move to restore the lost acreage, he has refused to do so. (According to an Interior spokesman, Clark cannot make a decision because the issue is now before the California courts.)

Wildlife. Under Secretary Watt, Interior had almost stopped adding threatened fauna and flora to the federal endangered-species list. By the end of 1984, Clark will have added about 20 species to the roster, an improvement over his predecessor but not nearly good enough, say the environmentalists. Some 4,000 plants and annuals are now seriously imperiled; at the current rate it will take about a century to classify them.

Not all environmental groups agree with the report's gloomy assessment. One of the most conservative of the organizations, the National Wildlife Federation, which had joined in the chorus against Watt, sees Clark as a plus. "He has defused the tension," says Lynn Greenwalt, a vice president of the N.W.F. "Mr. Clark is approachable, and he listens." Clark has yet to make major substantive changes in Interior, says Greenwalt, but compared with Watt in the areas of diplomacy and personality, "Mr. Clark has to get an A+ with summa cum laude."

Interior officials dismiss the latest assessment of the environmentalists. One spokesman says that Clark is a lawyer and approaches problems on a case-by-case basis. "He did not set out to make a clean sweep, and he did not get rid of everyone that Sierra and Friends of the Earth would like us to get rid of," says Kallman. "He is required under law to consider all constituencies and it is, accordingly, a thankless job." Interior officials say they hope to be able to sit down with representatives of the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth "to talk constructively about differences." That dialogue may be burdened by an additional problem, though: the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth have endorsed Walter Mondale.

-By Natalie Angler. Reported by Melissa August/Washington

With reporting by Melissa August