Wayne O'Leary

The Rhinestone Cowboy

Treading water quietly in the backwash of the disastrous flood of Trump cabinet secretaries is someone half of Americans have probably never heard of and couldn’t recognize. That would be Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke.

While most of the administration’s cabinet appointments have been distinguished by either incompetence or compromised ethics, Zinke has slid by largely unnoticed. That’s because, except in the nation’s sparsely populated Western states, where most federal lands are located, people just don’t care about the Department of the Interior — out of sight, out of mind, as far as the Eastern population centers are concerned.

There are important exceptions, of course. Public-spirited conservationists and environmentalists nationwide are well aware of Interior and who runs it. So are the self-serving economic interests that use the public lands: the mining, lumber, and fossil-fuel industries, and the cattlemen interested in expanded grazing rights. So, too, the right-wing militias and states’-rights extremists, who are annoyed by the long-standing federal presence in their part of the country and question its legitimacy.

These groups all know former Congressman Zinke, with his negative lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, and have harbored either feelings of foreboding or eager anticipation toward his stewardship since his selection for Interior. It’s now obvious which of these will have their expectations realized, and it won’t be the modern successors to wilderness guru John Muir.

Zinke was appointed by the most anti-environment president of modern times. Donald Trump favors opening public lands to large-scale extraction of oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium; supports unlimited petroleum exploration along all contiguous coasts of the US, including those previously off limits; and totally rejects climate change as a factor impacting the natural domain.

He would reverse national monument designations designed to protect unique federal landscapes from commercial development and has also proposed a steep budget cut for the Interior Department, Zinke’s personal bailiwick. The new secretary, charged with implementing all this, has expressed no qualms about any of it.

That wasn’t supposed to be Zinke’s role — at least in keeping with his self-image as a “conservative conservationist.” Zinke, you see, regards himself as another Theodore Roosevelt, modelling his contrived public persona after the great progressive conservation president of the early 20th century.

When he looks in the mirror, the secretary sees a reflection of his hero TR: He is a Westerner, a native of Montana; Roosevelt was an adopted son of the West, who owned and ran a North Dakota ranch. He was a Navy SEAL; Roosevelt was a Rough Rider. He is an avid outdoorsman; Roosevelt advocated “the strenuous life.”

With intentional symbolism, Zinke started out mimicking TR the horseman, galloping about for the cameras on park tours and ostentatiously arriving at Interior on horseback his first day on the job. “I’m a Teddy Roosevelt guy,” he said at one point. “No one loves public lands more than I do.” He even affected the broad-brimmed hat TR sometimes wore on the range. But there, the similarity ends.

Roosevelt was anything but a “conservative” conservationist. As president, he created or enlarged 150 national forests and designated 138 wildlife refuges, 51 bird reservations, four federal game preserves, 18 national monuments, and six national parks. In the process, he tripled the nation’s forest system, setting aside 172 million acres for the public while fighting private exploiters every step of the way. He was the first to use executive powers granted under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish national monuments, safeguarding such irreplaceable landscapes as the Grand Canyon.

Other environmental presidents followed suit. TR’s cousin Franklin quadrupled average annual purchases of forest land for parks and refuges, and added seven million acres to the national park system. A generation later, in 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the historic Alaska Lands Act that equaled the national park patrimony bequeathed by the New Dealers. Almost as impressive, fellow Democrat Barack Obama secured 553 million pristine acres as national monuments during his tenure, more than any other chief executive.

Against this record of accomplishment, how do Ryan Zinke, the self-proclaimed lover of public lands, and his boss Donald Trump stack up? So far, it’s an ugly picture, starting last year with the leasing of federal lands to coal companies and the rescinding of national safety regulations on hydraulic fracking, and going downhill from there. New national parks or monuments? None. Expanded protection for vulnerable forest lands and wildlife? Hardly.

But there have been commercially inspired attacks launched against the environment: (1) a jaundiced review of any national-monument designations under the Antiquities Act liable to frustrate accelerated Trumpian mining and drilling projects; (2) affirmative action to speed up regulatory rollbacks of rules impeding energy development on federal lands and waters; and (3) revisions to the 1973 Endangered Species Act aimed at limiting inclusions, weakening protections, and introducing cost-benefit analyses.

All of these initiatives are advancing under the rubric of “regulatory reform,” misleading shorthand for freeing up developers, land speculators, ranchers, loggers, mine operators, and oil and gas interests to make immediate profits here and now, regardless of the future impact.

Concerning offshore drilling, the comprehensive Obama-era ban on oil and gas exploration in Atlantic and Pacific coastal waters, including California and Alaska, has been revoked by an oil-drenched Interior Department at the behest of the White House — with a partisan exemption for Republican-run Florida. The East Coast will soon know Mr. Zinke, who calls this ecological gamble “a new path for energy dominance in America.”

Finally, in a decision of his own making that at once snubbed Presidents Clinton and Obama (who created them) and Native American tribes (who lobbied for them), Zinke set in motion radical acreage reductions for two archaeologically significant national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, as a sop to Utah’s mining industry. He thereby set a shocking (and legally tenuous) precedent, since no established monument has ever been essentially nullified in over a century; he then compounded the action by recommending future rollbacks for several other sites blocking commercial expansion.

TR would be aghast. His own Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, once wrote, “Life is something more than a matter of business. … There are things higher than business.” That’s a concept far beyond the understanding of either Ryan Zinke or his patron Donald Trump.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018

Populist.com