Sally Jewell on climate change, extremism, and the power of listening
Highlights from the latest episode of the Center for Western Priorities’ “The Landscape” podcast
We were joined by former Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on CWP’s The Landscape podcast for a conversation about President Biden’s executive order on climate change, the threat of anti-public lands extremists, and how to build coalitions and consensus through listening. Prior to serving as the 51st Secretary of the Interior during Obama’s second term, Sally Jewell was the CEO of outdoor retailer REI. She began her career as a petroleum engineer and spent several years as a commercial banker.
During her tenure at Interior she directed the department to employ a science-based, landscape-level, collaborative approach to natural resources management, including the pursuit of the development of commercial-scale renewable energy on public lands and waters. She dedicated herself and the department to rebuilding a trusting, nation-to-nation relationship with indigenous communities in the U.S. She has pursued a life-long commitment to connecting people to nature, particularly young people. At Interior, she championed efforts to encourage tens of millions of young people to play, learn, serve and work on public lands. Some of the highlights of our conversation with Sally Jewell are shared below.
The following excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity.
Reaction to the Biden administration’s sweeping Executive Order on climate change that includes pausing oil and gas leasing on public lands and the outer continental shelf, a directive to pursue the 30x30 goal of protecting 30 percent of America’s land and waters by 2030, and an overarching commitment to putting environmental justice front and center across the entire administration:
“The ambition they have identified right out of the chute is extraordinarily helpful. I applaud this administration for its swift action in putting in place a pause [on new oil and gas leasing] while we take our breath and take stock of what has been done over the last four years and what needs to happen going forward. I’m hugely appreciative of their swift action and the efforts that they have identified in their press release to listen to different points of view — I think that’s really smart.”
Her thoughts on how to bring people together around a common goal while recognizing divergent points of view:
“When I think back over the just under four years I spent as Secretary of the Interior and the things we were able to accomplish, what I am most proud of were the efforts that required what we talked about as ‘epic collaboration.’ It was bringing people of vastly different points of view together in an authentic way to get to know each other as individuals, not just as assumed ideologies, to listen, and to shape policies and programs that respected different points of view.”
“There is a phrase I’ve used in business that I used as Secretary as well, that sometimes you have to slow down before you can speed up; you have to slow down and listen and ask, what is the common ground that the oil and gas industry, and the environmental community, and the communities who have jobs that are dependent on fossil fuels, and Indian tribes in the regions, the outdoor recreationists, you name it — what is that they have in common, and is there a pathway forward where we can listen to those points of view and craft that pathway.”
Reflections on the “epic collaboration” that led to the 2015 decision by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service not to list the greater sage-grouse as an endangered species, and the disappointment when those land management plans were undermined during the Trump administration:
“Most people said that couldn’t be done, but because of the hard work of nonprofit organizations, and states, and ranchers, and oil companies, and the BLM, the Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the USGS, all coming together, the FWS said the species did not warrant a listing because of collaborative efforts on protecting key habitat in the sagebrush sea. When the Trump administration said, ‘we’re going to revisit that,’ I heard from a very conservative western state’s governor who said, ‘I really miss you,’ and I said, “Really? Why is that?” and he said, “it’s because the oil companies are coming to me saying, ‘why is this being revisited? We thought we had a deal.’”
An example of what finding common ground looks like from her tenure as Interior Secretary:
“It starts by moving beyond sides and gets to human interactions with each other, where inevitably, when you begin to build relationships between people the ideologies and the assumptions about each other and the biases fall away to where you really begin to understand where they’re coming from.”
“I’m going to give you an example of something that the Obama administration tried to do, and it was called Power Plus. In Appalachia, where coal mining has been declining in its economic value for many years, communities are dealing with dramatic challenges with pollution where the water is toxic because of toxic mine drainage, and people have no economic opportunities because they were dependent on that coal mining, and it becomes an equity issue in terms of the communities that were damaged, and the coal miners don’t have other work…Power Plus said, let’s unlock the money sitting in the U.S. Treasury that’s already there for mine reclamation and put these miners to work in reclaiming these lands, taking those coal refuse piles that are both steep and sloughing off and causing landslides, but also leaching toxins in some places just 100, 200 feet from a person’s back yard, and take those coal refuse piles and move them into the pits where they came from and layer them with lyme to neutralize the acid and allow the soils to do their natural filtration while putting the miners to work. That’s one small illustration of a project that would align the interests of miners with the interests of environmentalists, and with the long-term economic prospects of a community that by cleaning itself up can open itself up to other forms of economic activity, whether that’s development, or outdoor recreation tourism, and so on.”
“The same can be true for oil and gas where you’ve got potentially millions, but certainly documented tens of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells. We don’t even know where they all are, but we do know they’re leaking methane, we do know they’re polluting water, we do know they’re causing spills, and we’ve not even begun to clean them up. You need a rig to plug and abandon a well, but you’ve got to plug and abandon it, you can’t just leave it leaking oil and gas into the atmosphere and potentially salt water into the water supply systems, but that’s happening throughout oil and gas country, no matter where it is.”
The severity of the problem of attrition of career civil servants and scientific experts in the federal workforce, and what to do about it:
“Well there’s been a problem for some time, which is the aging of the federal workforce, and the inevitable ‘brain drain’ that comes with retirements of people who are really exceptionally knowledgeable in their areas of work, whether that is science, energy policy, biodiversity sciences, natural park service interpretation, you name it. Huge percentages of the federal workforce are eligible for retirement now, and I think if they did not feel supported by the prior administration it is awfully tough to try and spend four years with your head down if you don’t feel valued for the work that you do. I think it’s fair to say that many of the career staffers did not feel valued. It’s difficult to re-energize a workforce and convince them you really have their back as a political appointee where they have seen the pendulum swing back and forth, so we have a problem.”
“What we really need in the federal workforce is the next generation. It’s young people to recognize that there is no better place to have an impact throughout your career than in public service because the influence that you have to make a difference in people’s lives, not just now but for future generations is profound. There is nothing — and this is coming from a business person, 40 years of my career have been in business — there is nothing as impactful as what you can do through government and service to the public. I think what we need to do is take those who remain and perhaps some who have left who are willing to come back to accelerate the mentorship of a young generation and also lean into their skills around technology, and artificial intelligence, and the further knowledge we have around climate and our planet, and put that to good work in service of where we need to go, not just for now but for future generations.”
Her concern about the threat of extremism on public lands following the riot at the U.S. Capitol and the ongoing threat of the groups behind the Bunkerville, Nevada standoff and the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon:
“These are extremely dangerous people with a mystifying ideology, frankly. My experience began with one of the worst times of my tenure as Secretary of the Interior and that was the standoff in Bunkerville, Nevada when the BLM was attempting to round up Cliven Bundy’s cattle because he had been grazing illegally on federal lands and not paying any grazing fees for over twenty years. I can’t tell you how many ranchers have come to me and said, “He does not represent us.” The BLM went to round up the cattle and Cliven Bundy and his sons basically called out the militias that we’re now familiar with, and had a standoff, and if we had not backed down, which was not a popular decisions with our own law enforcement people, but if we had not backed down I feared that we would have had tremendous bloodshed on the order of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, from years ago, or Waco, Texas, because they’re itching for a fight. To have that circumstance result in very few consequences, followed by the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge takeover, I mean, who thinks you can just take over a federal property for 44 days and it’s okay? And yet the laws are weak in terms of punishments, and certainly, in retrospect, I think there were errors made in the prosecution of that case, but it emboldened these groups, and until we dish out the consequences that they deserve for this kind of activity we are just emboldening a group of well-armed, ideologically extreme people that will continue to provide a domestic terrorism problem until they are brought to justice and hopefully given an opportunity to learn about the error in the assumptions that they are making. This is a very, very risky time for the United States, and what we all witnessed on January 6th is just a small taste of what this group, I think, is interested in dishing out.”
[After the Malheur occupation] “I got a call from Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon, saying, “Sally, what could I do as a lawmaker to strengthen laws so that this is not ok?” and I think that that is the right question to ask. We have got to be aggressive in prosecution, and if the laws are inadequate to prosecute then we have to change those laws so that people are held accountable. That was one of my lessons, I would say, from both Bunkerville and Malheur, is yes, you have laws but if you can’t enforce them, what good are they? And in some cases the laws aren’t good enough. So if Cliven Bundy who is continuing to graze his cattle on federal lands without paying a dime can continue to get away with it, then what good are those laws? We have got to be willing to enforce them and stand behind them and the penalties have to match the kinds of egregious behaviors I have witnessed.”
Her thoughts on reviewing decades-old laws governing grazing on public lands and other extractive activities:
“If you have a great piece of federal property that has water, that has strong capacity to support livestock, you’re probably paying in some cases 1/20 what you would pay on private lands, and maybe 1/10 of what you would pay if it was state land. That is land owned by the public, and the public taxpayer is getting screwed. And the same is true with the Mining Act of 1872 where there basically is no royalty going back to the public, and it’s true with a lot of the oil and gas leasing programs where the royalties are low, and not reflective of what you’d be paying on private land or state land, so yes, I think it needs to be reviewed.”
Her reflections on the significance of Congresswoman Deb Haaland’s nomination to lead the Interior Department as the first Native American in that role:
“It’s very, very meaningful for tribes in particular to know that there’s someone overseeing a department which, for more than a century has been viewed by tribes as being the main agency that was not upholding the trust and treaty obligations to them. It’s beyond symbolic, it’s someone with the lived experience who knows the consequences of those early actions and how important it is to reverse them, so I am fully supportive of Congresswoman Haaland’s nomination and doing everything I can to be helpful to her and others in the department as she gets up to speed, because it is an extraordinarily steep learning curve as I learned coming from the business community and having to get up to speed myself.”
The importance of meaningful engagement with tribal nations:
“Let me say that the times that I spent with tribal leaders were some of the most rewarding times I had at Interior, and what my team would tell you is that I said early on, ‘Please do not over-schedule me so that I can get to know the people I am visiting with, whether that is career staff at the Department of the Interior, or visiting a public lands sight, or going and visiting a tribe,’ and I said, ‘Particularly with tribes, I need to be respectful and I need to have time to listen.’ And even though the schedule was always very full and didn’t lend itself to spending as much time as I would have liked, the time that I did spend was moving and powerful. What I came to begin to appreciate was the deep connections to the land and the landscapes, and as it’s now been pretty well documented by people in academia and others, the best managed landscapes in the world in terms of biodiversity and sustainability are those that continue to be overseen by the indigenous communities.”
“I would love in this next chapter to see deeper engagement in public land management with tribal communities in their homelands, or public lands that are in their ancestral homelands to help us understand through their thousands of years of observation what needs to be done in order to make those landscapes sustainable, and not just for now, but for generations to come, especially at this time of climate change and biodiversity loss, we need to listen. I think the Biden administration will work hard to say, “how do we do more in terms of engaging with tribes on the lands that are under federal government stewardship?”
Reflections on her travels as Secretary and some of the most impactful experiences that come to mind:
“Certainly the opportunity to visit landscapes with tribes were incredibly moving and powerful. Bears Ears National Monument, which of course Trump shrunk dramatically, was an opportunity to visit with tribal leaders actually out between the Bears Ears butte in an area that was sacred to five different tribes who have not always gotten along and their uses of the landscape differed. Their ancestors may well have disliked each other. To be there with them together, to feel the reverence that they had for the lands, to sit in a tipi around a circle and listen to them talk about their connections to this place was incredibly powerful and that sense will never leave me.”
“I’d say that the announcement that we made around the decision not to list the greater sage-grouse on the Endangered Species Act with four governors, two Democrats, two Republicans, with the Audubon Society, with ranchers, was also really powerful. One rancher, Duane Coombs from Nevada got up and talked about three generations of ten-year-olds: one was his dad, who developed a deep distrust of the federal government when he rounded up cattle to be paid for by the federal government during the Great Depression and the cattle were slaughtered in front of his eyes. This is a ten-year-old. His son, Duane, grew up with that profound distrust of government because of his father, and yet had seen the cooperative relationships form with land managers on how he could be a better steward through his practices, and then his ten-year-old daughter who would say at that time that her best friend was a scientist from the USGS who had taught her how to prevent the sage-grouse from getting tangled up in their fences and how to do a better job on the land. So it’s those personal stories, those personal connections that you get that were really moving”
“Those were just a handful of many, many experiences that will never leave me, and the common thread is that it is about listening to each other, it’s about paying attention to our landscapes, it’s about sharing knowledge, and thinking about the future. If I can leave you with my favorite quote that I’ve thought of often, it is that we don’t inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children, so if we’re borrowing it from our children, what is it they’re going to face and what can we do about it today, and there’s nothing like public service to have an impact and to catalyze discussions in that direction and I just profoundly hope that we will listen to different points of view and bring people to appreciate each other and develop a shared set of folks and a shared understanding of where we need to go.”
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