InsightMag.com - The Babbitt Pits   America’s most outspoken defender of the environment – Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt – seems to have a double standard for destruction of Arizona landscape. Critics and residents want to know why. As if gazing upon some scene conjured by Dante, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood in April on the lip of the White Vulcan pumice mine a few miles outside his hometown of Flagstaff, Ariz., and declared what he saw there a desecration and profanation. “As I look over this landscape, I must tell you that I had no idea that such a sacrilege had been perpetrated on this landscape,” Babbitt told a group of American Indian and environmental activists who accompanied him to the site and are protesting its proposed expansion. “I can’t believe what’s happening here.”       The secretary continued: “I met this morning with Native American leaders and every one of them said to me that this is a sacred mountain.” He noted that the ancient volcano looming to the west in what was called the San Francisco Peaks by 16th-century missionaries was “the center of Hopi cosmology” and one of four sacred mountains anchoring the Navaho universe. As one who learned in a nearby Catholic school that “the landscape is a direct manifestation of the creator,” a lesson that obviously stuck and has helped put the secretary among the nation’s most prominent environmentalists, Babbitt vowed that the desecration would not continue. He would do all in his power, he claimed, during the waning days of this administration, to end mining near the peaks and change the law that allows it.       True to his word, Babbitt helped jump-start secret negotiations that soon may have the U.S. taxpayers buying out White Vulcan’s parent company, Phoenix-based Tufflite Inc. and close the mine, according to reports published in the Arizona Daily Sun. And by late last month the Coconino National Forest, at Babbitt’s urging, was recommending that all mining on more than 74,000 acres of public land near the peaks be discontinued, while the legacy-building secretary was busy plotting the creation of a third new national monument in his home state, forever banning mining claims on the Paria Plateau.       Yet in all of this eleventh-hour anti-mining frenzy, not a single plan was proffered and not a single word was spoken by the secretary about what should be done about the Babbitt pits — two sand and gravel mines, both sited on Babbitt-owned lands in northern Arizona that are comparable in size and ecological destructiveness to all that the secretary beheld, and condemned, on that April day near Flagstaff.       Just 100 miles to the east of the White Vulcan, at a place called Indian Wells, men and machinery, working on a privately owned reserve within the Navaho Nation leased to them by the same Bruce Babbitt, and his brother, Paul, were blasting, crushing and hauling away untold tons of a basalt butte. This land also was considered sacred by some Navahos, at a place where the area’s two dominant tribes, the Hopi and Navaho, once collected eagles for ceremonial purposes.       That quarry, along with another sand and gravel pit operating on Babbitt land just 25 miles north of the reviled White Vulcan mine, at a place called Gray Mountain, make the secretary and his kin landlords to some of the largest sand and gravel pits in northeastern Arizona. They also have made the Babbitts a bane to locals living near both facilities, who say an interior secretary who presumes to lecture others about ecological correctness should apply some of those lessons much, much closer to home.       “He’s a major hypocrite,” one Arizona state mine inspector says in response to Babbitt’s attack on the White Vulcan mine, which this source called a “good, safe and conscientious operation,” whereas Babbitt lands nearby host mines “relatively the same size, or maybe larger.” Says the inspector: “The guys running the pumice mine are probably a lot more responsible than the guys running the Babbitt mines, but the Babbitts get away with it because of their relatively isolated location.”       Arizona Republican Rep. J.D. Hayworth says he’s not particularly surprised to learn that Babbitt and family have two strip mines operating within 100 miles of the White Vulcan. “That certainly fits with the M.O. of the left — of making pious pronouncements against mining while at the same time having two mines operating right nearby,” says Hayworth, pointing to recent reports, in Insight and the Wall Street Journal, concerning a zinc mine in the backyard of Vice President Al Gore’s Tennessee estate, which is polluting the Caney Fork River. http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200002257.shtml