Word: interior
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...political compromises, it is part of a real shift in federal policy that shows a new respect for nature. Throughout most of U.S. history, government actions have encouraged human exploitation of natural resources: logging, mining, drilling, grazing, damming rivers. That philosophy reached its height during the Reagan years, when Interior Secretary James Watt favored mining in wilderness areas...
...environmentalist sidekick, Al Gore, took office, they were already well aware that America's ecology was in crisis. From the spotted owls and salmon in the Northwest to woodpeckers and salamanders in the Southeast, many species were on the brink of extinction, and the implications were ominous. Says Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, architect of the Administration's natural-resource policy: "This really isn't about just preserving strange species with incomprehensible names. In every single case, that species is the warning light about the decline in productivity of an ecosystem." In the past, the debate was framed in terms...
...They were just pumping the place dry," says Interior Secretary Babbitt. Last month, under threat of increasing federal intervention, the Texas legislature passed a bill empowering the state to regulate and manage the withdrawal of groundwater in Edwards Aquifer. The state will now devise a plan for equitable water distribution that will enable the springs to flow even in times of drought, while protecting the delicate ecosystem that provides that water. "This is a spectacular success," says Babbitt, "a really remarkable evolution in which a small fish facing extinction triggered a lawsuit, which triggered a legislative response that...
Perhaps previous ages suffered from a lack of self-examination. The Age of Oprah does not. One of the defining features of modernity is self- consciousness: psychological self-consciousness as popularized by Freud; historical self-consciousness as introduced by Hegel and Marx; literary self- consciousness as practiced in the interior, self-referential, self-absorbed world of modern fiction...
...failure." But there are also signs that Clinton is increasingly spooked by opposition of almost any size. Last week he backed away from a widely leaked plan to name Bruce Babbitt to the Supreme Court when environmentalists complained that they would be losing their key ally at the Interior Department. When Robert Dole of Kansas and Orrin Hatch of Utah objected to Babbitt's lack of courtroom experience, it was more flak than Clinton could bear...