Secretary Norton speaks with Interior employees at the
Main Interior Building at Feb. 15 meeting. Most of the
session was a question and answer format.
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Gale Norton was born on March 11, 1954, in Kansas, living in Wichita until her family moved to the Denver suburb of
Thorton in 1960. At Merritt Hutton High School, she was a studious, socially concerned, and politically aware student,
campaigning in 1972 for presidential candidate George McGovern.
She graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Denver in 1975, having completed her
bachelor's degree in three years. She earned
her law degree with honors from the same university in 1978.
Growing up amid the grandeur of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, Norton developed into an outdoor enthusiast,
an avid hiker and, most importantly, a native Westerner seeking alternative solutions to the critical natural resource issues
facing the region.
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Colorado typifies the West, experiencing rapid population and economic growth in the second half of the 20th century.
Water, power, agricultural, mineral, timber, and tourism development fueled this expansion, which was accompanied by
the usual environmental problems--air and water pollution, loss of wildlife habitat, and degraded ecosystems. And as
federal legislation reached out of Washington, D.C., to address these environmental problems across the West, it soon
became clear that this top-down solution created yet another set of problems.
The Denver metropolitan area, a major communications hub of the region, also is a vortex of contending ideas about
western life and issues. Coming of age in this regional center, Secretary Norton learned, early in life, the critical importance
of natural resources--and public policy decisionmaking on their use and conservation--to communities west of the 100th
meridian.
During her student years, Norton was introduced to a spectrum of ideas and philosophies, classical and contemporary, that
influenced her thinking on personal freedom and responsibility, individual effort, the entrepreneurial spirit, the beauty of
the natural world, conservation, and the role of government in securing and furthering these traditional, if sometimes
conflicting, American values.
After law school, she worked with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative public interest group, as a senior
attorney, from 1979 to 1983. During her first year with the foundation, it was led by James Watt, a Denver lawyer who later
because Secretary of the Interior in the Reagan Administration. From 1983 to 1984, Norton was a National Fellow at
Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where she researched innovative, market-based ways to control air pollution.
In 1984, she joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an assistant to the deputy secretary. A year later, she was named
an associate solicitor at the Department of the Interior under then-Secretary Donald P. Hodel, overseeing endangered
species and public land issues for the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In that capacity, Norton played an important role in land exchanges that added thousands of acres to national preserves and
monuments. She advanced conservation efforts for the California condor, worked to acquire land for the Appalachian Trail,
and played a key role in the original agreement to restrict overflights in Grand Canyon National Park.
Steve Robinson, a former FWS employee, recalled working with Norton. As a deputy director and interim director of the
Service from 1986 to 1989 (under Presidents Reagan and Bush), Robinson had to make a difficult decision about whether
to add the desert tortoise to the federal endangered species list.
"Gale was there to provide even-handed legal advice, tempered with common-sense personal advice," Robinson said in an
unsolicited letter to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "Essentially, Gale said, 'Do what's right under the
law.' We did. The tortoise was listed, and the species was improved; growth has been accommodated, and Nevada is the
fastest growing state in the nation." Robinson remembered Norton as a moderate who focused on legal interpretations, not
political opinions.
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