A Disaster for Public Lands, Wildlife
Zinke is a terrible choice for Secretary of the Interior
The U.S. Senate this week will begin hearings on President-elect Trump’s selection of Rep. Ryan Zinke to run the federal Department of the Interior. It’s a high stakes job overseeing most of America’s public lands, oceans and endangered species.
If you love to hike, camp, float, and climb peaks, if you are worried about climate change, and if you love wildlife — from majestic wolves and grizzlies to beautiful and unique birds like sage grouse, tortoises and all critters — you definitely need to pay attention to this cabinet post.
The Interior secretary is in charge of a half-billion acres of America’s public lands, and 1.7 billion acres of oceans in the Outer Continental Shelf, as well as our national parks, wildlife refuges, big open high deserts and Sagebrush Sea, and the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The department also houses the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency in charge of deciding which species are protected under the Endangered Species Act and ensuring the recovery of the more than 1,500 threatened and endangered species.
This office also oversees oil and gas drilling and fracking on public and in our oceans, mining including for coal and uranium, as well as other minerals.
Although Zinke, a first-term congressman from Montana, has said a few decent things about public lands, his actual record is abysmal. Here is where he stands on the issues:
· He has voted against the environment — including dismantling, degrading public land and harming threatened and endangered species — 97 percent of the time since he has been in Congress.
· While he says he doesn’t support giving away or selling public lands, he champions handing over power to manage these lands to states and corporations. Under that scheme, states and corporate interests would get to frack, drill, mine, log and graze, with little to no public input or protective rules, while the land title nominally stays in federal hands. Disturbingly in 2012 Zinke signed the extremist “Montana Constitutional Governance Pledge” promising to “legally and administratively oppose the multitude of bureaucracies that have sprung up to enforce the unlawful seizure of our native land and its resources including, but not limited to: the Bureau of Land Management, the United States Park Service, the various bureaus of Wildlife and Fisheries, etc., and restore the rightful powers over the land to the State and private ownership.”
If Zinke is confirmed he would be in charge of most of the very agencies that this pledge promises to eviscerate. The Senate needs to thoroughly question Zinke on his stated intentions to hand over federal authority to the state and private interests.
Zinke voted for two bills in Congress this past session that would turn control of public land over to industry-dominated panels appointed by state governors while dispensing with federal environmental laws and public involvement in order to ramp up unsustainable logging levels.
· The coal, oil and gas industries have heavily funded Zinke’s congressional campaigns. Since 2011, he has taken $312,536 from the oil and gas industries. Zinke’s public comments have touted public lands, but his votes have pushed dirty fuels. The Obama administration has placed a moratorium on most new coal leases while it reviews the federal coal program for the first time in 30 years. The review will disclose the health, environmental and financial costs to taxpayers as well as the climate change impacts of mining and burning publicly owned coal. Federal coal contributes significantly to U.S. carbon pollution and has been a glaring contradiction with U.S. climate goals. Zinke introduced a bill that would overturn the moratorium. He has also voted to allow some of the world’s biggest coal companies to continue to dodge royalty payments owed to the U.S. treasury. Zinke has changed his public position on climate change and now says that it is “not proven science.” If Zinke is confirmed, will he try and overturn the moratorium?
· Zinke voted against protecting imperiled wildlife, casting 21 votes against endangered species protections during his two-year tenure in Congress. He voted to strip Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves and Mexican wolves (there are only an estimated 100 in the Southwest), defund the unprecedented stakeholder-developed, multi-state conservation plans for greater sage grouse, and voted against regulations designed to crackdown on the black market ivory trade from poaching and trafficking African elephants. He also voted to block rules that would have prevented cruel and biologically indefensible “predator” hunting of wolves and bears and their young on national preserves and wildlife refuges in Alaska, including aerial gunning of wolves and spotlighting denning bears and their cubs as they hibernate to boost populations of game species like moose and caribou.
By any measure, the next secretary of the Interior will have a profound effect on our public lands and wildlife for years to come. Unfortunately, if Zinke is put in charge, those effects could be disastrous.
