Ken Rait, one of the nation’s leading environmentalists, is talking on his cell phone as he steps into a city bus in Portland, Oregon. He’s describing what it was like to sit powerless on the sidelines and watch George W. Bush wrest the White House from Al Gore.

“It was agonizing,” Rait says of the five-week drama that was decided only when the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and, by a single vote, gave Bush the presidency.

Of course, few if any environmentalists were pleased with the outcome. Bush, after all, appears to be as hostile to environmental protections as Ronald Reagan was. But Gore’s defeat was particularly hard for Rait to swallow. That’s because it has put in peril the greatest accomplishment of his career: persuading the Clinton administration to protect 58 million acres of roadless national forest land.

Rait’s position is familiar to environmentalists who suffered through the twelve years Reagan and the new president’s father were in power: that of outsiders, even pariahs.

“We’ll be as welcome in George W. Bush’s White House as the Christian Right was in Bill Clinton’s,” one environmentalist joked half-heartedly.

While there is such a thing as self-fulfilling prophecy, there appears to be good reason for environmentalists to feel left out. Consider these developments, all of which occurred in Bush’s first ten days in office:

• He made opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling a key element in a plan to boost the nation’s energy supplies.

• He offered to waive Clean Air Act restrictions to allow older power plants in California to come on line in peak periods to ease the state’s electricity crisis.

• He vowed to scale back environmental reviews to speed up the construction of new airport runways.

• His nominee for the Interior Department secretary, Gale Norton, was comfortably approved by the U.S. Senate, despite fierce opposition from conservation groups.

Norton drew fire from environmentalists for two reasons: she was a protégé of James Watt, who as Reagan’s first interior secretary was openly hostile to environmental concerns; and as Colorado’s attorney general from 1991 to 1999, she consistently championed state control and private property rights over federal environmental regulations.

For a while it appeared that the anti-Norton campaign might succeed because of several blots on her record. They included:

A POSSIBLE CONFLICT OF INTEREST.

In 1998, Norton helped found the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a group that gets its funding from mining, chemical and coal concerns—the same interests that covet the lands administered by the Interior Department.

A CHALLENGE TO A TOP ENVIRONMENTAL LAW THAT THE INTERIOR SECRETARY IS LEGALLY BOUND TO ENFORCE.

As Colorado attorney general in 1995, Norton took part in a legal effort to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn broad protections that had been extended to imperiled animals by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. At issue was whether the Endangered Species Act protected the habitat of an animal or just the animal itself. The court ruled in Babbitt’s favor, and natural resource experts say it was the most important environmental ruling issued by the court in two decades. Had the court ruled differently, the Endangered Species Act would have been severely weakened. While it would have remained illegal, say, for a property owner to shoot a bald eagle on his land, it would have become legal for the property owner to chop down a tree containing a bald eagle’s nest.

AN AGGRESSIVE STANCE AGAINST THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

In 1995, Norton sought to undercut a fishing outfit that was trying to persuade the U.S. Forest Service to prevent a Colorado water utility from diverting a mountain stream. In letters to the Agriculture Department, Norton argued that any federal attempt to block the diversion could harm nearby private property owners and would be “unjustified legally and factually.” The case is still not resolved. But Norton’s argument evoked head scratching from government lawyers in the Clinton administration because it seemed to boil down to the clearly false claim that national forests don’t have legal jurisdiction over water on their own land.

HANDS-OFF APPROACH TO CORPORATE POLLUTERS.

As Colorado attorney general, Norton rarely used sticks against big polluters. She offered carrots—in particular, a 1994 self-audit law that protected companies from penalties if they disclosed environmental violations. The law has been less than successful because industries in Colorado rarely use it. Environmental groups complain that the law has made it more difficult to take polluters to court.

A spectacular example of the need for regulation occurred under Norton’s watch when a spill of cyanide and acidic water from a gold mining operation sterilized a seventeen-mile stretch of the Alamosa River in southern Colorado. Although Norton’s office made a solid effort to win compensation from the mining company following the disaster, the letting-polluters-police-themselves philosophy espoused by Norton then—and still favored by her—was widely blamed for allowing the spill to happen. Colorado’s regulation of the mine, called Summitville, was so weak that state laws were later strengthened.

A LOBBYIST FOR A “BAD ACTOR.”

For the past two years, Norton has been a registered lobbyist for NL Industries, a Houston-based lead manufacturing company. The company has been named as a defendant in suits involving seventy-five Superfund or other toxic waste sites and in a dozen other lawsuits alleging that children had been poisoned by lead paint.

Sensing that Norton was vulnerable, a coalition of eighteen environmental groups mounted an assault that included television spots and a newspaper advertisement in the Washington Post and other papers that showed half of her face and declared, “Gale Norton is so far on the fringe, she’s off the page.” Greenpeace hung a giant poster near the Capitol that read, “Bush and Norton: Our Land, Not Oil Land.”

It proved all for naught. Unlike U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Norton charmed Democratic senators. She presented herself as a conservationist and disavowed many of her earlier stands on behalf of timber, grazing and mining interests. “Americans are proud of the many exquisite natural treasures we have within our shores,” Norton told the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “President Bush believes, as I do, that the top priority of the [Interior] department must be to conserve those natural treasures.”

Senator Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat from New Mexico who earlier had expressed serious doubts about Norton, after the hearings said, “I take her at her word” when she pledged to enforce environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act. Other Democrats apparently also decided to give Norton the benefit of the doubt: she sailed through the committee by a vote of 18 to 2. The floor vote was less of a rout㭆 to 25—but still a comfortable margin of victory. The anti-Norton campaign was a bust.

“Gale Norton is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and she pulled the wool over the eyes of the committee,” said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth, summing up the outcome. Perhaps. But Norton’s easy victory may have had more to do with other factors. She was cool under pressure at the hearings, and there’s no evidence of unethical behavior in her professional and personal life. In addition, Congress traditionally gives the green light to cabinet-level nominees of incoming presidents. With the exception of John Ashcroft, Bush’s nominees moved smoothly through the Senate, including Ann Veneman, the new secretary of agriculture. She will have jurisdiction over the Forest Service, but as has happened in the past, questions senators hurled at Veneman were almost all about farming rather than national forest issues.

What may end up being more telling are the lesser appointments, the people who will be Norton’s and Veneman’s lieutenants. Insiders say two former timber industry lobbyists—Mark Rey and Doug Crandall—who now work for powerful anti-environment legislators, could fill key posts. Sources say Rey covets the position as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, which sets White House policy on environmental matters. Crandall could land the powerful position of undersecretary of agriculture, giving him direct oversight of Forest Service operations. If that happens, conservationists can expect four years of hostile relations with the Bush administration.

“The real question is whether the Republican leadership will allow the party to be hijacked by the extreme conservative flank,” Rait says, referring to Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Utah Representative Jim Hansen, the chairman of the powerful House Resources Committee. “If that’s the case, we’re in for a battle.”