Family Values: Environmental Pioneer - Stewart Udall’s impact on the Southwest is immeasurable, and, at 85, he is still fighting for the land.
Tania Soussan
Albuquerque Journal
January 15, 2006

SANTA FE — The wooden chair at the head of Stewart Udall’s long dining room table is turned to face large glass doors and an unfolding view of the foothills stretching to the West.

Udall spends his evenings here watching the sun set over northern New Mexico. The former Interior secretary and icon of the modern conservation movement, who turns 86 on Jan. 31, has lost most of his eyesight but still devotes his days to quietly soaking in his beloved Southwest and writing on big issues of the day.

He keeps a low profile and his public appearances are rare, but Udall is far from forgotten. He’s been getting lots of recognition these days, in an Interior Department museum exhibit, in newspaper articles and as the new namesake of the Center for Museum Resources in Santa Fe.

Udall says he doesn’t need all the attention and is quick to point out that a recent headline crediting him with saving the West is a “wild exaggeration.”

But ask people about him, and the accolades flow like swollen rivers. As Interior secretary under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Udall made a lasting mark on the Southwest and on public lands around the country. He helped shepherd the Wilderness Act and a national trails bill to passage and oversaw the creation of 10 national parks and monuments, several national sea shores, 20 historic sites and dozens of wildlife refuges.

His work in government and his seminal book, “The Quiet Crisis,” had a profound effect on the nation in the 1960s.  “Stewart Udall, more than any other single person, was responsible for reviving the national commitment to conservation and environmental preservation,” said Bruce Babbitt, who calls Udall one of his heroes and followed in his footsteps by adding significantly to the nation’s protected public lands as Interior secretary under President Clin- ton.

Charles J. Brown, president of the national group Citizens for Global Solutions, calls Udall “one of the great environmental visionaries in American history.”

“I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that Stewart belongs in a very select company of great environmental leaders like Audubon and Thoreau and Muir and his good friend Rachel Carson, Americans who changed the way we think about the natural world,” said Brown, whose group honored Udall at a Santa Fe reception in November.

Lifelong devotion
Udall, dressed in corduroy slacks, a button-down shirt and cardigan on a chilly winter afternoon, greets visitors to his Santa Fe home with a warm embrace.  The hiking shoes he wears evidence his love of being active in the outdoors. He has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Fuji and often included rafting, camping and hiking on family vacations. At 84, he hiked up from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and he still walks three miles twice a week.

Friends and colleagues describe him as open, compassionate, generous and steadfast. He has a wry sense of humor, a brilliant mind and persuasive powers, they say. That mind still is hard at work, crafting articles and speeches about global warming, the energy crisis and other critical issues.

 “I’m trying to live not a normal life because my vision is affecting me, but to keep my mind working and keep my imagination flourishing and producing new ideas,” Udall said in his deep, gravely voice.  He’s tried his hand at a screenplay and received four pages of script notes from good friend Robert Redford.

Udall regularly reads the New Yorker and other publications with the help of a machine that magnifies text and he spends an hour or two a day listening to audio books.  “He’s an intellectual,” said Udall’s son, Tom, the congressman from New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District. “He studies issues in a great deal of depth, but when he conveys the issues to the public, he does it in a very powerful way.”

Udall’s current labor is an article with what he says is a pompous title: “Humankind at a Tipping Point, a Night Letter to Posterity.” The piece focuses on energy issues, something Udall knows a fair bit about. “It’s kind of a message of an old man to your grandchildren, future generations,” he said.

The U.S. has shifted away from the low-energy lifestyle Udall grew up with and now is using 25 percent of the world’s petroleum, he said. Paying the price — at the pump and in the broader context — is going to be a huge adjustment, Udall said.  “That’s going to change our way of life,” he said. “We’ve already seen it, haven’t we, this big jump in prices? What if it goes up to $5 a gallon? What’s that going to do to our mobility, our culture, our lifestyle?”

He champions solar power and worries about global warming, saying it’s a crime the U.S. is not listening to scientists. The U.S. government should be leading efforts to address the problem, he said.

Modest innovator
Udall apologizes for dropping names when he tells stories, but he can’t help it. He has a lot of names to drop. He’s dined with Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev, strolled with poet Robert Frost, been knighted by King Juan Carlos of Spain and, of course, worked closely with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

Sparked by talk about the Southwest and its history, he recounts the story of joining the Heard Museum advisory board in Arizona in the early 1980s and writing to then board president and Arizona Judge Sandra Day O’Connor. He suggested a museum-sponsored trip following the trail of Coronado, the first European to explore the region.  Great, O’Connor replied, and asked him to lead the trip.

The Coronado trip led to an article in Arizona Highways, which Udall sent to friend and then Doubleday editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She came to visit the Southwest and later published Udall’s book, “To the Inland Empire: Coronado and Our Spanish Legacy.”

Despite the big names and major accomplishments that pepper his career, Udall remains modest.  He calls the late Sen. Clinton Anderson of New Mexico his mentor and gives him most of the credit for the passage of the Wilderness Act.  “I had a part in it,” he said. “I’m one of the few people alive who was there in the beginning.”

He points with pride to the creation of the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which has used money from offshore oil royalties for conservation projects ranging from small-town park projects to the purchase of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

F. Ross Peterson, president of Deep Springs College in California, is writing a biography of Udall and calls him “a senior statesman who deserves to be heard.”  “In some ways, he’s modest but in some ways, I think he’s someone who has not got his full due,” Peterson said.

Conservation optimist
Tom Udall said his father had a modest upbringing. “He grew up on a farm in a very hardscrabble small community right on the Arizona-New Mexico border.”  Stewart Udall’s grandfather was a Mormon pioneer who led a group of settlers in covered wagons to that small community of Saint Johns. His father became an Arizona Supreme Court justice.

Udall served as an Air Force gunner in Italy during World War II, played basketball for the University of Arizona and spent two years as a Mormon missionary in the eastern U.S.

He was elected to Congress from Arizona, helped Kennedy win the presidency and then became Interior secretary. Once out of office, Udall returned to work as a lawyer and won compensation for Navajo uranium workers and their families for health problems related to the Cold War-era mining in the Southwest.

He and his late wife, Lee, a champion of Native American arts, raised six children. Udall now spends a lot of time with his eight grandchildren, Tom Udall said.

As a resident of New Mexico, he has been active in local issues, opposing the extension of Paseo del Norte and successfully fighting Shirley MacLaine’s plan to build a house atop Atalaya Mountain.  Recently, he has been a leader in the fight against a new Wal-Mart Supercenter on the south side of Santa Fe.  Through it all, he remains optimistic. “He doesn’t let much get him down,” Tom Udall said.

Stewart Udall, who remembers times of bipartisan cooperation in Washington, calls the current rivalry and animosity there “just hideous.”   “These things go in cycles,” he said. “I’m distressed by some things that have happened, but there’ll be another day when there’ll be major conservation initiatives.”

A man of inspiration
“He’s a guy that is probably one of the most important figures in lands protection in the Western U.S. … It’s something that was visionary at the time and now we’re all better for it.”
-- Jim Baca, former Bureau of Land Management director and Albuquerque mayor

“He’s one of the most amazingly creative minds that’s been produced out of the Southwest or maybe the whole country.” 
-- F. Ross Peterson, Udall biographer and president, Deep Springs (Calif.) College

“He is absolutely remarkable. It’s a pity we can’t clone him. People like Stewart are so needed in these times.” 
-- Sally Rodgers, longtime Santa Fe environmentalist