THIS LAND IS WHOSE LAND?

By Richard Lacayo

IF REPRESENTATIVE DON YOUNG OF Alaska ever decides to raise some extra income, he can always lease out his Capitol Hill office as a wildlife museum. A former trapper and riverboat captain, he works surrounded by his trophies: the heads of a ram and a wild boar, mounted moose horns and the prime exhibit, a towering Kodiak bear that he bagged on a hunting trip back home. You could say he was a man with a hands-on appreciation of nature. Or you could say he's a guy who prefers his wildlife dead.

Which description better suits him is a hot issue in Washington these days. Young, who once angrily flourished an oosik--that's the penis bone of a walrus--at Mollie Beattie, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, is among the most powerful of a group of environmentally unfriendly lawmakers from Western states. As chairman of the House Resources Committee, he has decisive say over a controversial rewrite--or gutting, as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt has put it--of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Last week Young and his allies rolled over Democrats and even a few moderate Republicans on the committee to move a step closer to a less expansive version of the law. In one of its most controversial provisions, it would eliminate a requirement that the entire habitats of endangered species, not just the individual creatures, must be protected. Young says the change will protect property owners; environmentalists say it will doom animals. Even in his gentler moments, Young's distaste for elitist environmentalists is clear: he once called them a ''waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual bunch of idiots.''

In case you didn't recognize it, that's the sound of the Western-state rebellion as it rumbles into the Beltway. With it comes the region's ancient resentment of Washington's rule, the same discontent that has gone national in recent years. It also brings to Capitol Hill the West's most abiding issue, the land: who owns it, how to use it and who decides. Translated into Washington terms, that means ever more heated politics of the environment, as Western lawmakers tear through two decades of regulations. They are doing it with such success that many moderate Republicans--and even House Speaker Newt Gingrich--fear they are handing the Democrats a powerful issue. Democrats, including the President, couldn't agree more.

The Endangered Species Act is only part of it. The Wild Westerners have set their sights on the clean air and water laws, wetlands protection and the further acquisition of federal lands. They want to increase logging in parts of Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the nation's largest temperate rain forest and home of grizzlies, eagles and 800-year-old Sitka spruce. The Republican lawmakers envision victory in a 15-year battle to open part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the 19-million-acre wilderness area that is a breeding ground for the porcupine caribou, to gas and oil drilling.

While Bill Clinton has threatened to veto some issues, last year's Republican sweep has put the Western lawmakers, many of whom are longtime members of Congress, into a position to make good on their agenda. In the Senate, for example, Alaska's Frank Murkowski heads the counterpart panel to Young's House committee on resources. Between them, the two ferociously prodevelopment Alaskans oversee most of the natural-resources legislation that comes before Congress. Alaska's other Republican Senator, Ted Stevens, runs the Governmental Affairs Committee. That gives him a line of fire on the U.S. Forest Service, which oversees federal woodlands.

From Utah, there's Representative Jim Hansen, compared by his detractors to James Watt, Ronald Reagan's steel-eyed Interior Secretary. Some of Hansen's proposals in Congress, like opening up lands near Bryce Canyon National Park, have gone nowhere at all. But as the new chairman of the National Parks, Forests and Lands Subcommittee, the eight-term Congressman, who has been trying for years to reduce federal lands, has thwarted environmentalists hoping to designate 5.7 million acres of Utah as wilderness. A Hansen-sponsored bill that was adopted by his committee in August would limit the new wilderness to 1.8 million acres. It would keep much of that land open to dams and pipelines, Jet Skis and off-road vehicles.

The western-led attack on environmental law proceeded quietly for much of this year, in part because, in a tactic that Democrats long ago raised to an art form, many of the changes were attached as riders to appropriations bills that fund federal activities, rather than stand-alone bills debated openly on the floor of Congress. And many more are tucked away in budget reconciliation bills that will whiz through Congress in the next several weeks. The riders include directives to the Environmental Protection Agency forbidding it to issue standards for measuring arsenic in tap water or to list new hazardous waste sites for cleanup. Hansen has sponsored a rider that sets up a commission to consider closing some of the 368 parks and other sites run by the National Park Service. He has said as many as 150 of them could go.

But with the spending bills heading for Clinton's desk, the quiet is ending. After months of searching for issues that will cut their way, battered Democrats have awakened to the political advantage of forming a Praetorian Guard around Mother Earth. Though Clinton has been accused of being just pale green, especially after he retreated in 1993 from imposing new grazing fees on federal lands, the White House has got the message. Al Gore, a best-selling conservationist, two weeks ago denounced Republicans on the Hill for a "jihad against the environment'' that had allowed lobbyists from "the biggest polluters in America'' to rewrite environmental law. And Clinton has threatened to veto any provisions to permit oil drilling in the Arctic refuge.

Why the change? Democrats are looking at opinion polls that consistently show bipartisan majorities in favor of strong protections for the environment. In a recent TIME/CNN poll, 63% of those questioned opposed any reduction in protection for endangered species. Fifty-nine percent opposed the expansion of logging, mining or ranching on public lands. And 67% were against opening up the Arctic refuge to gas and oil exploration. One of the President's pollsters, Stan Greenberg, is advising Clinton that defense of the environment plays well with many Perot supporters, who are inclined to see any attack on environmental law as one more case of special interests getting their way in Washington.

When Democrats see opportunity, Republicans see danger. Fearful of losing the pro-green suburban voters who are crucial to their future, moderate Republicans, many of them from East Coast states, are voicing frustration with the rush on environmental regulations. "I think it's going to be a huge issue against some Republicans in '96,'' says Representative Sherwood Boehlert of New York, who five years ago helped amend the Clean Air Act to discourage acid rain. "[Voters in '94] damn sure didn't vote to dismantle the agencies that protect our water, our air, our land."

Hoping to keep his party from being pegged as Earth bashers, Newt Gingrich, who once interrupted a day of foreign-aid budget cutting in the House to ask his fellow Republicans to restore money to protect the African elephant, has established a Republican Task Force on the Environment, manned by moderates like Boehlert and Maryland's Wayne Gilchrest. The group has yet to meet.

Then again, Republican pollsters know that while voters usually say they favor conservation, the environment is not one of their top concerns, particularly if the damage doesn't occur in their own backyard. And the Westerners are framing their attack in the terms of the Republican agenda that voters went for last year: smaller government, regulatory reform, budget cutting and property rights. In resource-dependent economies like Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, they are also stressing job creation. "Eventually,'' says Young, "the working class, the poorer people, will realize that [the Endangered Species Act] is saving crickets over saving babies."

Young helped win his committee victory on the revised version of the act, which must still pass both full houses of Congress, by making sure that hearings showcased the hardships of property owners and "ordinary people.'' Another successful tactic was to make an end run around the subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans, which is headed by Jim Saxton of New Jersey, a moderate Republican who favors the law. Instead Young formed an endangered-species task force and turned it over to Representative Richard Pombo, a fourth-generation rancher from California's Central Valley who is at war with the Federal Government over land-use regulations. At Young's direction, Pombo scheduled hearings in rural Western counties. Environmentalists complained that speakers sympathetic to the law were squeezed out. What Pombo heard in abundance were stories of local landowners who didn't see why they should lose the right to develop their property because an endangered species like the San Joaquin kit fox had made itself at home.

So whose West is it anyway? Critics of the rebellious Westerners in Congress say they really represent longtime monied interests. Records of the Federal Election Commission show that many of them are heavily financed by campaign money from oil and gas companies, mining and logging interests, developers and growers. A proposed Senate version of the Endangered Species Act, sponsored by Slade Gorton of Washington, was written with the help of timber lobbyists. According to the Western States Center, a campaign-finance research enterprise, Senator Conrad Burns of Montana got more than a fourth of his campaign funding last year from such sources, an unusually high percentage. The League of Conservation voters gave him a score of zero for his votes in the last Congress.

There are 17 million acres of national forest lands in Montana. Last year Burns introduced a wilderness-protection bill for his state that called for safeguarding 800,000 acres and easing commercial activity restrictions on 5 million acres. Fourteen energy companies worked to win exclusion of a key part of this acreage, a 100-mile-long strip of remote terrain in northwestern Montana, known as the Rocky Mountain Front, that could allow them to stake drilling claims. "The matchup was exact. His big campaign contributors got precisely the acreage that they wanted,'' insists John Gatchell, conservation director of the Montana Wilderness Association. But Burns' eagerness to return federal land to state authority has also run afoul of sportsmen in his own state and party who support preservation of federal lands for hunting and fishing. "If the state gets the lands,'' predicts Republican state senator Al Bishop, "they will go on the sales block.''

Burns says he's merely doing what his constituents want. In the last election, he points out, "I got 62% of the vote." The constituencies of the West have been changing, however. Out-of-staters looking for a better life have flowed into places like Colorado and New Mexico, bringing concerns over development. Even as Utah's Hansen was pushing his bare-bones wilderness proposal, polls showed that a majority of his constituents wanted more wilderness set aside. Says Ken Rait of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance: "He calls what he's doing 'The will of the West.' But which West is he talking about?'' For now, it's Hansen's idea of the West that is winning.

--Reported by Michael Riley/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by MICHAEL RILEY/WASHINGTON AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER