Flora, Fauna & The Great Forgetting
What the Trump-centric media get wrong about the biggest environmental stories of our time.
By Christopher Ketcham
One of the effects of our Trump-All-The-Time media cycle has been a deepening of America’s historical amnesia. Coverage of the current White House and its various scandals leaves little room for wider discussions of the nation’s many political, economic and social ills. When they are remembered and discussed at all, the roles of previous administrations are often forgotten or downplayed to such an extent as to amount to a falsifying of history.
This corrosive dynamic can be seen with clarity in the area to which I have devoted much of my professional life: covering the Department of the Interior and its ecologically malevolent oversight of the hundreds of millions of acres that comprise the nation’s public lands system.
The policies of Trump’s Department of the Interior are a departure from the recent past only to the extent that the administration has shed any comforting semblance of environmental concern. Under the current administration, the coddling of extractive industry and the hostility to landscape health, to wild flora and fauna, to endangered and threatened species, is naked and unabashed. This is, perversely, a breath of fresh air, insofar as the department’s intentions are finally out in the open. What president in recent years has called for a complete halt to the plunder of the public lands? The answer is not one. Not Barack Obama, not George W. Bush, not Bill Clinton.
Democrats and Republicans alike have oiled the relentless machine driving the destruction of the public lands. This machine only gets modulated and modified in petty ways by those turning the screws to satisfy their hypocritical pretensions of protection and preservation. As one stymied regulator of oil and gas drilling in Utah for the DOI’s Bureau of Land Management told me, “I was there from George Bush Sr. through George Bush Jr., through Clinton and Obama, and I saw no difference in operations. The priority was always the same. To permit wells.”
Too many journalists covering the public lands beat, alas, have spread by implicit or explicit suggestion the falsity that the policies of the Trump DOI amount to something extraordinary, indeed unprecedented. Why is this happening? It’s an easy narrative to iconize a widely perceived villain, to reduce stories of vastly greater complexity to what the villain has done, said, or threatens to do and say. The last two years have again proved that documenting in stadium lighting the villain’s every move boosts viewership, readership, ratings, and advertising revenue, and also serves partisan positioning against Trump to favor the alleged reformists on the Democratic side of a Manichean world order. This is the cynical and opportunistic logic of Trump-All-The-Time.
Consider the recent blinkered coverage of the latest turn in one of the most important 21st-century land-use controversies of the American West, hinging on the fate of a small ground-nesting bird called the greater sage grouse. In the wake of a series of lawsuits filed by conservation groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees and enforces the Endangered Species Act, determined in 2010 that the sage grouse was now a prime candidate for protection under the Act, as the bird’s population was plummeting due to overdevelopment of the public lands. Sage grouse habitat encompasses a huge portion of the public domain in the Intermountain West, and therefore listing it under the ESA, with all the law’s many strictures, imperiled extractive commodity use across hundreds of millions of acres of steppe, desert, grassland, wetland, and riparian corridors.
The Department of the Interior under Obama did everything it could to avoid listing the grouse, as it folded under titanic pressure from the very economic interests — energy companies and livestock grazers, primarily — that are the driving forces in the bird’s race toward extinction. Investing hundreds of millions of dollars studying and implementing plans ostensibly to help the sage grouse, the Obama DOI in 2015 cobbled together mere half-measures, designed more to collaborate with and protect oilmen and cattle ranchers than help the grouse in a manner that would stave off long-term devastation and extinction. The Obama protections, product of what was said to be the largest and most expensive land-use conservation collaboration in American history, were indeed so weak that enviro activists at the time declared the compromise with industry would ultimately doom the grouse. Yet the half-measures were ballyhooed, in the words of then DOI Secretary Sally Jewell, as an “epic” victory for conservation and conservationists.
Behold Trump last month stepping into the sage grouse fray with the announcement that key parts of the 2015 conservation plan would be junked. How did my colleagues cover this news? By not telling the broad history, which included most notably the failure of the Obama administration to act decisively and courageously when it had the opportunity to force ESA listing over the howls of protest from industry.
“Trump Administration Moves to Open Sage-Grouse Strongholds to Oil and Gas,” was the headline at Audubon.org, whose writer helpfully explained that the “pro-industry provisions” now “deepen concerns about the stability of sage-grouse populations.” As if previously there existed sage-grouse strongholds in the first place, and as if concerns under the miserably inadequate Obama-era protections weren’t already roiling the conservation community. The New York Times, along this same vein, informed us in its headline that the “Trump Drilling Plan” — and by implication only the Trump drilling plan — “Threatens 9 Million Acres of Sage Grouse Habitat.”
Or consider the typical media coverage of Trump’s actions in southern Utah over the matter of two national monuments there. In the case of one of them, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Trump issued an executive order in December 2017 to fragment it into three mini-monuments, reducing the total area of the Grand Staircase from 1.9 million acres to roughly a million acres. Journos on the enviro beat went into fits of agony over the decision, decrying, as one writer did in The Hill, that “a national monument managed for science, recreation, and conservation will be transformed into a gigantic playground for industry.”
Immediately following Trump’s executive order, Patagonia, the clothing company, transformed its web page (for a brief moment before returning to sales pitches) into a banner on a black background that stated Trump “stole your land.” It was later reported that Patagonia’s stand against Trump was “massively good for business.”
Not a word was heard about the decades-long evisceration of science and research at the Grand Staircase, beginning under George W. Bush and continuing under Obama, both administrations overseeing widespread budget cuts and firings of ecologists, biologists and other conservation-minded staff at the Staircase. Nor anywhere in the orgy of coverage of the Staircase controversy were we informed that for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the monument landscape had been overgrazed and denuded by excessive livestock grazing — one of the chief factors, in Utah and West-wide, of ecological impoverishment and biodiversity collapse on the public lands. Which is to say that long before Trump showed up on the scene, the land had effectively already been ceded to private livestock interests.
The agonized mantra among my fellows on the public lands beat is always the same: Trump, Trump, Trump. Nothing about the ideology in which the management of public lands is embedded, the ideology of constant economic expansion that reduces our shared commons to a money-making enterprise. Andrew Bacevich analyzes adroitly the problem in a recent piece at Counterpunch. Since Trump’s ascent to the White House, he writes, “never in the history of journalism have so many reporters, editors, and pundits expended so much energy fixating on one particular target, while other larger prey frolic unmolested within sight.”
The larger prey of which Bacevich speaks demands our attention. The largest of them all is the very system of unceasing growth, acquisition and extraction, approved and directed through bipartisan consensus, that reduces humanity to a force of annihilation of the last wild things and last wild places on earth.
Christopher Ketcham covers the American west for Harper’s and Counterpunch, among other publications. His first book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, will be published by Penguin this summer.
Production DetailsV. 1.0.1
Last edited: April 5, 2019
Author: Christopher Ketcham
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Artwork: Mesa Arch, Utah / Photo by Michael Louie on Unsplash
