President Trump brandished executive pen and fresh hyperbole last week in blessing the coal industry’s decades-old practice of freely dumping tons of debris into the streams and mountain hollows of America’s mining communities.
“Another terrible job-killing rule,” Mr. Trump declared at a signing ceremony that struck down the Obama administration’s attempt to regulate surface mining wastes. He insisted he was saving “many thousands of American jobs” in sparing coal companies the expense of cleaning up their environmental messes.
The signing ceremony was not just an insult to the benighted coal hamlets of Appalachia, where the industry’s dumping of debris down the mountainsides has created a wasteland. It also ignored two truths. One is that by official estimates the rules, while helping the environment, would in fact cost very few jobs — 260 on average a year offset by almost the same number of jobs for people hired to comply with the rules. What’s been costing jobs in the industry for years — and this is the second and larger truth — is a shifting global market in which power plants have turned to cleaner natural gas. In cynically promising the resurgence of King Coal, Mr. Trump might as well have been signing a decree that the whaling industry was being restored to Nantucket.
Americans can expect more such delusional signing ceremonies in the days ahead as Congress avails itself of a little-used statute known as the Congressional Review Act to strike down environmental rules that are vulnerable to reversal because they were enacted in the waning months of the Obama administration. Any such rule labeled “job killing” or “executive overreach” seems doomed, especially if seen as a threat to campaign donors in the fossil fuel industry. It matters little that the rule may be widely supported by the public.
A case in point is a rule that seeks to reduce wasteful emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, at thousands of oil and gas wells across the West. Though the industry cries bankruptcy, the Interior Department calculates the cost of the rule at less than 1 percent of revenues. Another target is an Interior Department rule that would invite greater public input in designing resource management plans across the West to achieve a fair balance between conservation and commercial development. Representatives Rob Bishop of Utah and Liz Cheney of Wyoming — two reliable industry supporters — have managed to persuade their colleagues that this would undercut state authority, which is nonsense.
Picking off these easy targets is only the beginning of the administration’s retreat from environmental sanity, using fantasy claims of job creation to cater to the Tea Party’s resentment of federal regulation. One leader of this retreat will be the new boss of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general and aggressive skeptic of climate change who made his political career out of suing the agency he now leads. Within days of his swearing-in, demoralized E.P.A. workers were reminded of Mr. Pruitt’s close working ties to the fossil fuel industry as thousands of his emails were released showing his office dealing hand in glove with industry lobbyists.
Mr. Pruitt quickly riled critics by daring to quote John Muir, the patriarch of the environmental movement and founder of the Sierra Club: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in.” Left unmentioned were his orders from Mr. Trump to rewrite, rescind or at least challenge any important environmental rules left standing when Congress has finished with its current demolition job.
Ron Garan, a former NASA astronaut, believes we should not be abandoning hope for continued life on planet Earth in favor of rubbing shoulders with Martians. He has spent time on the International Space Station (ISS), done four spacewalks, and has been awarded both the NASA Exceptional Service medal and the NASA Space Flight medial. Back on land, Garan spends his time focusing on bettering the home we already have. “Being so far away from Earth makes you see how similar and interconnected everything is,” he says, “rather than us compartmentalizing home.”
To be clear, Garan isn’t opposed to exploring the notion of colonizing Mars: It’s just that we should be using the innovative technologies we’re developing to live up there to make life better down here. Human curiosity is one of the biggest drivers for space exploration, and it “keeps us hungry to continuing wanting to innovate and solve these problems,” he says.
It may be a moonshoot, but perhaps if we aim for the moon, we’ll land on the stars.
This conversation has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
Considering you are one of the few people who have left Earth, how have you come to form the opinion that we shouldn’t colonize Mars?
I think we should explore other planets, but I don’t think we should abandon this planet to go live on Mars. It just doesn’t make any logical sense that we would leave this planet for an inhospitable one like Mars. First of all, if we can’t even “terraform”—which is to control our climate and environment—our own planet, what makes us think that we can go to another planet and control the environment there? If we developed the capability to terraform and create atmospheres and climates on other planets, then we should apply that capability to benefit our home planet.
From Elon Musk to Richard Branson, private entrepreneurs are sending a lot of money up into space. Would it be best to redirect that capital toward solving the problems that already exist on Earth?
I think funding should go to both. Space is our future; we need to devote resources and time and effort toward further exploration of our solar system, including human exploration. The primary reason for doing this is not so that we can have a plan B, via having another planet we can go live on, but instead so that we can use the technology that’s developed through those efforts to help us here on Earth.
Carl Sagan basically said that for the foreseeable future, Earth is where we make our stand. So if there is nowhere else we can go right now, we need to take this really seriously.
STS-124 Mission Specialist Ronald J. Garan. (NASA)
Have you always felt this way, or was there a moment when you realized the importance of focusing on the Earth instead of the stars?
I’ve always had the idea that everyone has a responsibility to leave this place a little bit better than how they found it. But going to space broadened, reinforced, and amplified that opinion.
The Earth is just incredibly beautiful when viewed from space, and all those buzzwords you’ve heard astronaut after astronaut say about how beautiful and tranquil and peaceful and fragile this planet looks from space—those are all true. It really does look like this jewel in the blackness of space; a fragile oasis. I try to use this perspective of our planet to inspire people to make a difference, mind the ship, and take care of our fellow crewmates on Spaceship Earth.
Why are so many people obsessed with getting off planet Earth?
I wanted to be an astronaut ever since July 20, 1969. That was the day when I, along with millions and millions of people all around the world, watched those first footsteps on the moon on TV. I wouldn’t have been able to put it in these words at the time, but even as a young boy, on some level I realized that we had just become a different species. We had become a species that was no longer confined to this planet, and that was really exciting to me.
I wanted to become a part of that group of explorers that got to step off the planet and look back upon ourselves. I think continuing that exploration out into the solar system and beyond is part of human nature. We are explorers by nature. We want to expand our knowledge and expand our understanding of our universe.
Is it common among astronauts that once you finally leave Earth and can look back upon it from space, you have an urge to go straight back to protect it?
I don’t want to speak for other astronauts, cosmonauts, or taikonauts, but most of the people I know who’ve had this experience have come back with a deeper appreciation for the planet that we live on. And it’s not just an appreciation for the planet—it’s appreciation for the living things on the planet, too.
One of the things I experienced in space is what I can only describe as a sobering contradiction: a contradiction between the beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life for a significant number of its inhabitants. It’s obvious from space that life on our planet is not always as beautiful as it looks from space.
The other thing I’ve experienced was a profound sense of gratitude: gratitude for the opportunity to see the planet from that perspective, and gratitude for the planet that we’ve been given. Being physically detached from the Earth made me feel deeply interconnected with everyone on it in some way that I really can’t fully explain. It’s very obvious from that vantage point that we are all not only deeply connected, but also deeply interdependent as well.
What new discoveries have we uncovered in our exploration of the universe that have been particularly revolutionary back on Earth?
There’s the technology side, and there’s then there’s perspective. Perspective is very powerful. That first time that we looked back and saw this planet from space—Earthrise—was incredibly revolutionary. That photograph of Earthrise is certainly the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. It was credited for inspiring the first Earth Day in 1970, and it’s helped launch the modern environmental movement. It really shows the truth, the reality of the world we live in; that we’re on this oasis, and it’s all we have.
So there’s that aspect of it, but there’s also all the technology that comes from the space program, whether it’s computing technology, energy production through things like solar energy, or all of the implications for medicine and medical diagnostics. We do a tremendous amount of Earth observation from space that gives us a profound increase in understanding of our planet and its life-support systems that we would not have insight into if we didn’t have a space program.
Earthrise, 1968. (NASA)
Why do you think there are so many conversations about Martian colonization? Have we lost hope for Earth?
This idea that we are going to abandon Earth and go live on Mars is utter nonsense. It’s illogical. It makes perfect sense to expand human presence to Mars, but we’re not going to abandon Earth. If we had the capability to colonize and terraform Mars to make it habitable for humans, then we certainly could control what’s happening on our own planet, which has a head start of millions of years.
What conversation should we be having instead?
The first place we should establish a permanent human presence in our solar system is the moon, our closest neighbor. And then from there, establish transportation infrastructure to allow regular flights between the Earth and the moon. Then from there, we could use it as a jump-off point and have that be a transportation hub to the rest of the solar system. That makes perfect sense to me.
We need to basically take parallel paths: We need to be exploring the solar system because of all the benefits to humanity that that will incur, while also devoting as much effort to being able to control the life-support systems of Spaceship Earth.
If we expand milestones such as the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and having complete decarbonization by 2050 out to 2068—which is the 100-year anniversary of Earthrise—I believe we should have complete control of the life-support systems on our planet by then. If we had complete control of the chemical constituents of our atmosphere, soil, land, and oceans, we’d be able to monitor it and adjust it—and optimize it for life.
Why are we having more conversations about living on Mars than the potential of being able to control our own atmosphere on Earth? Learning how to counteract climate change and other environmental factors here instead of establishing colonies elsewhere seems far more beneficial.
Well, it’s a moon shot, right? It’s something that’s going to take a lot of effort and a lot of time to accomplish, but we started this conversation off with terraforming Mars. It’s a lot easier to control our own atmosphere and our own oceans than it is to create an entirely new atmosphere.
What are you currently trying to achieve back on Earth?
I’m also involved with an effort called Constellation, which is bringing together a coalition of international astronauts, visionaries, and futurists to put out a call to the world to crowdsource and co-imagine a vision of our future. We’re not going to be able to get to the vision of our future we want if we don’t learn how to work together on a planetary level, not just a local level.
My primary day job is working as the chief pilot for a company called World View, which is trying to launch all kinds of things—including people—to the edge of space in high-altitude balloons. This project has tremendous environmental capabilities as far as being able to hover these platforms over a specific area of interest to do things like monitor the oceans, coral reefs, or how much CO2 is in the atmosphere. From it, we might be able to develop better ways to do climate modeling, weather predictions, and agricultural optimization.
For those who would still want to go live on Mars, what kinds of over-romantic notions do people have about living in space?
You can’t be claustrophobic, because if you’re going to Mars, you’re gonna be in a can for six to eight months. And once you get there, you’re still gonna be living in a tin can. There are a lot of things that define the beauty of life on our planet, like the breeze in your face, mist on a lake, and the sound of the birds. If you’re going to live on Mars, you’re not gonna have that for the rest of your life. That’s not so romantic to me.
What is romantic is expanding the body of human knowledge and expanding human presence. It’s not going to be all fun. Those pioneers who will eventually be exploring Mars are going have to deal with hardships. I’m sure there will be a lot of people who get homesick, which is an interesting thought: When you get that far away from the planet, your definition of home changes radically. Home simply becomes Earth.
Deforestation was essential for the construction of all local industries. But how ruthless is deforestation in Indonesia? How bad is its contribution to global climate change? The simple answer is: it is not just bad; it is dreadful.
The Pan-Asian independent news network, Coconuts TV, reported in 2015: “Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, adding more carbon pollution to the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships, trains and airplanes combined each year. It’s also pushing many animal species to the brink of extinction, including the Sumatran rhinoceros, Sumatran tiger, Sumatran elephant, and the orangutan due to the destruction of their habitats.”
Indonesia has become the global leader in deforestation, and the reason is the world’s thirst for palm oil. Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil on the planet. It can be found in over half of all packaged products at the supermarket, including everything from cooking oil to lipstick.”
As early as in 2007, Greenpeace Philippines snapped at Indonesia’s unwillingness to deal with the disaster: “Indonesia destroys about 51 square kilometers of forests every day, equivalent to 300 football fields every hour — a figure, which should earn the country a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s fastest destroyer of forests… These figures demonstrate a lack of political will and power by the Indonesian government to stop runaway deforestation rates. A series of natural disasters in recent years, floods, forest fires, landslides, droughts, massive erosion are all linked to the unprecedented destruction of our forests. Forest fires from concessions and plantations have already made Indonesia the world’s third biggest contributor of greenhouse gases,” Mr. Hapsoro (Greenpeace Southeast Asia Forest campaigner) said.”
Since 2007, not much has changed. The country has already lost well over 70 percent of its intact ancient forests, and commercial logging, forest fires and new clearances for palm oil plantations threaten half of what is left. The greed seems to know no boundaries.
According to ScienceDirect: “Between 1970 and the mid-1990s, export-oriented log production and global demand were the primary pressures underlying deforestation. Cultivation of rice and other crops was also found to be associated with a growing population and transmigration policy. Moreover, deregulation of foreign investment in the 1980s appears to have led to the expansion of an export-oriented industry, including commercial crop and log production. Between the mid-1990s and 2015, the imbalance between global demand and production of Indonesian timber and oil palm led to illegal or non-sustainable timber harvest and expansion of permanent agricultural areas…”
The result: Sumatra and Kalimantan islands are now choking on their own pollution, although the agony spreads far into neighboring Malaysia and Singapore. Year after year, millions of people get affected, classes are cancelled, airplanes grounded, and regular activities averted. Hundreds of thousands of people are suffering from acute respiratory infections. Hundreds lose their lives.
Some even call the unbridled ‘export of pollution’ a ‘crime against humanity.’ Emotions are running high, and many citizens of Malaysia and Singapore protest by boycotting Indonesian products.
On several occasions, I witnessed thick smog covering the skyscrapers of the leading Malaysian cities, and of Singapore. In 2015, during the ‘big fires’ of Sumatra, life in Kuala Lumpur almost came to a standstill.
This time, landing in Palembang, the haze had been covering almost the entire runway. “Visibility six kilometers,” the captain of Indonesian flagship carrier, Garuda, informed us, not long before the touchdown. In fact, the visibility appeared to be no more than 200 meters. But in Indonesia, many ‘uncomfortable facts’ are denied outright.
Throughout the following days, my eyes became watery and my joints were aching. I kept coughing uncontrollably. When I was asked by the Italian ‘5 Star Movement’ to record my political message (I did it in a local slum), I could hardly speak.
The trouble didn’t just come from the forest fires: everything here seemed to be polluting the environment: the burning of garbage, traffic jams, emissions from unregulated factories, even cigarette smoking in almost all public places.
Along the Musi River, the original forests are gone, replaced by rice fields, palm oil, and rubber plantations.
The column you’re reading began its life last week with an unsavory, if relatively straightforward, goal: Explore the disastrous environmental ramifications of president-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Oklahoma’s attorney general—and oil-and-gas industry bestie—Scott Pruitt as the next head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
No sooner had I gotten started when news broke of another Trump pick: Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, for secretary of state, the government’s top diplomatic post. This Cabinet selection was so mind-blowing in its utter wrongness, on almost every imaginable level, that I instantly rethought the original structure of my piece. These two peas in a petrochemical pod definitely needed to be sharing the spotlight.
Then rumors began filtering in that Trump was nearing his final decision on our nation’s next secretary of energy. I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t misreading the headlines. Alas, it really was true: Trump was picking former Texas governor Rick Perry—late of one of the most woebegone presidential campaigns in modern history, not to mention Dancing with the Stars. That our next president wants his energy secretary to be the guy who once bragged about how he’d abolish the agency (or would have bragged about it, if he’d remembered its name) says a lot about the future of our national energy policy. Once again, my column was thrown into structural turmoil.
Just this morning, I was back on track, cruising right along, ready to frame these three picks as a new high-water mark in Cabinet-making depravity, the trifecta of environmental nihilism. And then I heard that sources were reporting Trump had settled on U.S. Representative Ryan Zinke for secretary of the interior. In support of the nomination, a Trump spokesperson had this to say: “Congressman Zinke believes we need to find a way to cut through bureaucracy to ensure our nation’s parks, forests, and other public areas are properly maintained and used effectively.” (The italics are mine. The nervousness they elicit, on the other hand, is—or ought to be—everyone’s.)
Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Four Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse.
That I kept having to rework this column—three do-overs in less than a week!—is itself a bone-chilling sign of just how eager president-elect Trump is to give the oil and gas industry everything it could ever ask for, and more. Taken together, these appointments constitute a preinaugural Christmas present to all those climate deniers and fossil fuel dead-enders who helped nudge him over the electoral finish line. He may be willing to take the occasional meeting with Al Gore, and his high-profile daughter may even publicly flirt with reasonableness on climate change from time to time, but make no mistake: These appointments are the signal buried within any semi-hopeful noise that you may have heard.
And here’s the signal’s message: The lands and waters of the United States of America are once again open for business, assuming your business happens to be sucking massive amounts of hydrocarbon out of the ground for the purposes of burning and emitting our way toward an uninhabitable planet.
As I type, more rumors are circulating—although these reports, I’m happy to say, offer some small glimmer of hope. One of them is that a number of Republican senators are privately grumbling about the Tillerson appointment, citing his bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his acceptance of the Russian Order of Friendship award in 2013. In case you haven’t heard, the incoming administration isn’t exactly looking for more coverage of the many, um, surprising links between the Kremlin and the newly ascendant GOP. The mere fact that Tillerson is experiencing any intraparty turbulence at all, as opposed to a perfectly smooth ride into Foggy Bottom, may be a sign that he’s not a shoo-in.
The other rumor is that President Obama is preparing, as in right now, to wield his executive power in order to permanently ban drilling in U.S. waters off the Atlantic and Arctic coasts. Thanks to a somewhat obscure clause embedded deep within the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act—you are familiar with the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, aren’t you?—a sitting president has the authority to prohibit the leasing of offshore areas in such a way that future presidents cannot rescind it. If he chooses to avail himself of this option, it will be the best thing—and perhaps the only thing—that Obama can do to save these vulnerable areas from the rapaciousness of the Four Horsemen and their oil industry minions.
Were that to happen—and were the Senate to also say nyet to a Russia-backed oil executive becoming our top diplomat—it just might buy environmentalists enough time to take a deep breath, collect our energy, and gear up for the next fight. Because rest assured, there will be a next fight. And a next one. And a next one.
These four men could make for a very busy four years.
onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
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by Tom Murphy
Now that the nightmare of a Trump presidency is a reality, bold action must be taken to protect our most valued institutions and freedoms. To do this, it must be acknowledged that Trump’s victory was not legitimate. Civil rights icon John Lewis was correct in stating this truth, and we must stand with him and the 60 Democratic members of Congress who boycotted the inauguration to underscore this fact. Hillary Clinton received 3 million more popular votes than Trump and would have also won the electoral vote had not the Russians and the FBI intervened on behalf of Trump.
Trump is an unstable, dangerous thug whose positions on many issues parallel those of the Nazis in the 1930’s and 40’s. We must recognize that he means what he said, and that he and his cronies will work tirelessly to implement his alt right agenda. A clear indication of this are his cabinet picks. A cabinet comprised of generals, greedy billionaires, Putin supporters, and individuals set to destroy the agencies they lead should be of grave concern to all Americans. Also, his “America First” inaugural address was chilling in the extreme to those who believe in diversity and freedom. After Obama’s election in 2008, those opposed to him formed the Tea Party to counter his progressive policies. And, it worked. The alt right policies of the Republican Congress and Trump go far beyond the wildest dreams of those early Tea Party members.
Like the Tea Party in 2008, Progressives must now work to start a movement that I call the Progressive Peoples Party that must be much stronger than the Tea Party ever was.First, we must work with Congressional Democrats to block, by any means possible, Trump’s legislative agenda, and, of course, work with Senate Democrats to block Trump’s nominees for the Supreme Court. More important, Progressives must unite to increase the number of Democrats elected to Congress in 2018. This will require hard work, new strategies and massive fund raising to fuel this effort. It is doubtful that current Democratic leaders are up to this task. Thus, new leaders must be identified and supported to carry this movement forward.
Progressives must also work to ensure that Trump has only one term. It is probable that Trump’s Presidency will implode long before his term is up. Nevertheless, the damage he can inflict on the nation while he is in office has the potential to be catastrophic. A strong Progressive Peoples Party can do much to minimize this damage, but it will take dedication and courage to make it happen.
As Martin Luther King said “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Let’s let trump know that we will not be silent and that we will prevail starting now.
There is a place where wolves and bears spend time together. It is a land that still holds in its heart wildness. It is a large protected landscape, where rivers flow strong and thermal features boil and bubble to the surface and geysers send their scalding fury skyward. This is a land of grizzlies, wolves, bighorn sheep and bison. It is a place overrun by tourism in the heat of summer and a vast wilderness surveyed in the stark cold of a December morning. It is managed by humans and its history, not surprisingly, is pockmarked by some very serious collective failings.
But in these days before we begin the Trump Administration, it is perhaps important to remember what good people, with character and foresight can give to a nation, to the world. Yellowstone was and remains that vision, that gift; and if you have ever had the privilege to spend a cold winter day in the heart of the Lamar Valley watching wolves race across the open landscape or skiing through the heart of the geyser basin, then you understand the majesty, the guttural joy that land, wildlife and wilderness can bring to the soul.
Yellowstone this time of year is marked by short days and often bitter cold nights. Snow can be deep in places, windswept in others. The heat of the geysers and thermal features creates an open air sauna for wildlife, and keeps the ice at bay along portions of rivers, streams and lakes. Bison sway their heads back and forth in the deep snow, digging down like a steam shovel to find precious grasses for survival. Trumpeter swans lend their grace to the silent lands of winter and radiate the beauty that is all things wild.
The New Year will bring a new President, one that has never tasted wildness. Likely never hiked or camped or skied in this place called Yellowstone. His ideas, his morals do not seem to seek out good or shared inheritance, rather they are pulled like gravity towards self-fulfillment, delusion and enrichment. He has none of the strength or confidence of the wolf, none of the wisdom of the bear. He has not learned the patience or mutual enrichment of the White bark or Lodge pole pines. He could never understand the courage of the men who decided that this land was not designed for profit, but rather preserved for the wealth its wildness would give to generations to come.
National Parks remain for many our greatest idea. They were created in an era when wealth meant privilege and a park like Yellowstone, while still very hard to access, was open to any and all. Like Yosemite, which was created a few years earlier, they indeed did all come. Men and woman, young and old, fewer of color, but they did come and today are coming in record numbers.
Today with this President and this congress, ideas like our National Parks are viewed with disdain; somehow to many of these men and sadly woman, the power and money of big oil, Koch Brothers, and pipeline kings are transforming our landscapes, our air and waters. The sanctity of our National Parks are being eroded as never before by the very greed, that the men who sat by a campfire more than 146 years ago tossed aside, because they knew it was wrong. They saw in America, a chance to get it right and break free from the very European model that so many had fled. Because of such moral bearings, we now have parks from coast to coast that are shared by all Americans and the peoples of the world.
Yet in the incoming Administration, such moral bearings appear lost with each new cabinet choice, by the fractured nature of our country and bombastic social and contrived media that bears no semblance to truth. Our National Parks in such a battlefield have no medics and we, citizens of America, are the only foot soldiers.
They will come for oil or gold or water. They will look to shoot our bears or desecrate the parks’ borders with mines, gun ranges, or refineries. These concepts are designed not just to break up the land, but more importantly- Our spirit.
In the raw morning that is winter in Yellowstone, we are witness to the magic that is our National Parks, to their strength for our nation and the wisdom they impart to those who care to listen. If you ask me we could double or triple the size of Yellowstone, that much more to share with future generations. That much more safe room for grizzlies, wolves and swans to live and thrive, that much more for people to learn and explore and share with animals that leave in us simply wonder.
But first we must confront the disease, the blight on the horizon. To do this, we must channel the energy that comes from the heart of 2.2 million acres of rare, protected lands, where the bones of bison mix with fiery waters and the primordial muds that define beauty and spirit in perfect balance. That energy source is the fuel for our souls in these times of uncertainty and danger for our lands and wildlife.
It can and will make us warriors!
When they come, for they will come for our lands, we will be ready to fight. In their retreat we will understand the power of land, of animals and wildness to prevail over of the iniquity of greed and the barren promise of money.
But it will take courage, the courage taught by time spent in the heart of wild nature and the spirit of those who came before us, who made sure these lands were to be protected for all generations, not to be exploited by one.
Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) was tapped, just yesterday, to head up the Department of the Interior. Zinke is a fervent supporter of coal, oil and gas exploration. He’s voted for Congressional measures that would gut the Endangered Species Act and is a strong backer of building the Keystone XL pipeline.
Rick Perry, chosen to run the Department of Energy – an agency he once stated he would like to eliminate. Perry, yet another climate change denier, also serves on the board of directors of Energy Transfer Partners, the company developing the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon Mobile has been nominated to lead the State Department. Tillerson has used his leadership at Exxon Mobil, the firm at fault for the devastating Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska, to promote fossil fuel development here and around the world.
Scott Pruitt, known climate change denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt is well known for suing the agency he is now set to lead and has worked to dismantle basic protections for our nation’s air and water.
Get ready for more drilling, mining, and logging on public lands and an agenda that values preserving wildlife—for hunters.
A 1,400-pound male coastal brown bear fishes while a one-year-old gray wolf waits for scraps in Alaska’s Katmai National Park. (Photo: Christopher Dodds/Barcroft Media/Getty Images)
NOV 11, 2016·
Richard Conniff is the author of House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth and other books.
For people who worry about the nation’s (and the world’s) rapidly dwindling wildlife, the only vaguely good news about Donald Trump’s election might just be that he doesn’t care. This is a guy whose ideas about nature stop at “water hazard” and “sand trap.” Look up his public statements about animals and wildlife on votesmart.com, and the answer that bounces back is “no matching public statements found.” It’s not one of those things he has promised to ban, deport, dismantle, or just plain “schlong.”
More good news (and you may sense that I am stretching here): Trump is not likely to appoint renegade rancher and grazing-fee deadbeat Cliven Bundy to head the Bureau of Land Management. When Field and Stream magazineasked Trump early this year if he endorsed the Western movement to transfer federal lands to state control (a plank in the Republican platform), he replied: “I don’t like the idea because I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do. I mean, are they going to sell if they get into a little bit of trouble? And I don’t think it’s something that should be sold.”
This was no doubt the real estate developer in him talking, but his gut instinct against letting go of land will surely outweigh the party platform. “We have to be great stewards of this land,” Trump added. “This is magnificent land.” Asked if he would continue the long downward trend in budgets for managing public lands, Trump said he’d heard from friends and family that public lands “are not maintained the way they were by any stretch of the imagination. And we’re going to get that changed; we’re going to reverse that.”
This was apparently enough, in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s upset election, for Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife, to suggest that “we share common interests in the protection of America’s wildlife and our great systems of public lands, which provide endless opportunities for outdoor recreation, wildlife observation, and other pursuits that all Americans value.”
Meanwhile, pretty much all others active on wildlife issues were looking as if the floor had just dropped out from under them, plunging them into a pool of frenzied, ravenous Republicans. At the website for the Humane Society, where a pre-election posting warned that a Trump presidency would pose “an immense and critical threat to animals,” an apologetic notice said, “The action alert you are attempting to access is no longer active.”
They have reason to be nervous. Trump has surrounded himself with political professionals who do not think sweet thoughts about wildlife. Newt Gingrich, for instance, loves animals—but mainly in zoos rather than in inconvenient places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Reince Priebus, a likely choice for chief of staff, was part of a Tea Party revolution in Wisconsin that put Gov. Scott Walker in power. Just to give you a sense of what that could mean for a Trump administration, Walker handed over control of state parks and other lands to the hook-and-bullet set while shutting out biologists and conservationists. Chris Christie? Rudy Giuliani? Let’s just not talk about them.
Trump’s main advisers on wildlife appear to be his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and they seem to care only about hunting and fishing. Donald Jr. has publicly expressed a wish to run the Department of the Interior, though his only known qualification for the job is his family name. More likely, as he told Outdoor Life during the campaign, he will help vet the nominees for Interior, “and I will be there to make sure the people who run the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and so on know how much sportsmen do for wildlife and conservation and that, for the sake of us all, they value the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.”
You may be stumbling over that Christ-like phrase “for the sake of us all.” But you should really be worrying about the “North American Model.” It’s a code phrase for managing public lands primarily for hunting and fishing and only secondarily, if at all, for nongame species—or for hiking, bird-watching, camping, or other uses. In practice it can mean eradicating wolves because hunters consider them competition for elk or moose. (Donald Jr.: “We need to reduce wolves and rebuild those herds.”) It can mean cutting back funding for songbird habitat and spending it instead on fish stocking.
Like his father, Donald Jr. has opposed selling public lands, mostly because it “may cost sportsmen and women access to the lands.” But he believes states should help govern federal lands, calling shared governance “especially critical when we pursue our idea of energy independence in America. As has been proven in several of our Western States, energy exploration can be done without adverse affects [sic] on wildlife, fisheries or grazing.” (America has come tantalizingly close to energy independence under President Obama—without moving new drilling rigs onto public lands—and there is no evidence for the broad-brush notion that energy exploration is harmless to wildlife.)
Two other major considerations to keep in mind: If Trump goes ahead with his favorite plan to build a wall on the Mexican border, it would cut off vital migratory routes and habitat for jaguars, ocelots, desert bighorn sheep, black bears, and many other species. (It might also impede the flow of fed-up Mexicans heading south.)
The bottom line is that a Trump administration is likely to be good for mining, drilling, logging, and the hook-and-bullet set. But for wildlife and for Americans at large? We are facing four dangerous years of self-serving gut instinct and reckless indifference to science, with the damage to be measured, as climate activist Bill McKibben put it the other day, “in geologic time.”
If you are feeling as if a Trump victory is the end of the world as we know it, you may just be right.
President-elect Trump has announced his pick for head for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – Republican Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. The twist? Pruitt is currently suing the agency he’ll soon lead. He has helped lead the battle against key climate-change initiatives such as the Clean Power Plan, which 29 state attorneys-general are contesting. Pruitt and other attorneys-general are also suing the agency over a rule regulating methane emissions from oil and gas production, as well as over other rules meant to curb mercury and arsenic emissions, reduce smog, and protect streams and wetlands.
Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma speaking at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland.
Gage Skidmore
Pruitt joins Oklahoma GOP senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn in questioning the need to act on climate change. In an op-ed in The National Review earlier this year, Pruitt wrote that the debate is “far from settled” and called the Clean Power Plan an example of “advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary.” In 2014, he sent the EPA a letter claiming that the agency had greatly overestimated the air pollution produced by natural gas drilling in Oklahoma. The New York Times later reported that the letter was actually written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of the biggest energy companies in the state – and that Pruitt and a dozen other Republican attorneys general had teamed up with energy companies to push back against what they saw as regulatory excesses by Obama.
Oil wells on a rural road around sunset in Northern Oklahoma.
Clinton Steeds
Pruitt’s pro-energy stance and aggressive fights against federal regulations helped him get the nod. “You are going to want to have someone who has had state experience, who really understands the issues and has had to deal with an overreaching EPA as a federal agency,” George “David” Banks, executive vice president of the American Council for Capital Formation, told E&E News in September.
Environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife immediately denounced the “absolute wrong choice” of Pruitt to lead the 15,000-employee agency. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., wrote in a press release that “he’s bragged about suing, trashing and manipulating the agency he’s now supposed to lead.” And the American Sustainable Business Councilstated in a press release that “Pruitt’s selection signals a rollback of policies that have stimulated innovation and progress. In addition to clean energy, clean water and chemical regulation are under threat as a result of preferential treatment these regulated industries are expected to receive.”
Hello, this is emergency operator, what is your emergency?
Um, we have a real emergency, a crisis really. (Operator) Sir what is the emergency?
It’s our President, well not my President really, but a man… well a boy really….no more like a child, a spoiled one at that… Um, operator, this man is now the most powerful man in the world, yet he seemingly does not read, I have no evidence he can write, but he clearly can tweet. It’s not just me, but our country; well the majority who voted against him are simply terrified. (Operator) This really is a crisis; we are sending in our special agent, he is an older white guy, balding, sometimes a bird can be found perched near him.
Please hurry!
As I write this, the full weight and gravity of this election is sinking (and I use that term literally) into my bones. We have chosen a fool, a reckless child to be our country’s President. There will be many areas by which this man and his new found friends, the Republican Party, will begin to hash out their form of torture.
Like kids that were bullied in school, these adults will seek to “make us pay” for their misguided vision of America. Nowhere is this clearer than in the realm of the environment.
Dark Vision
Republicans like Bob Bishop and our own Steve Pearce are already buzzing about the idea of eliminating National Monuments. Pearce sees this as a means of payback for our successful campaigns to protect close to one million acres in this state, with the crown jewel being the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks. But the reality is their dark vision for conservation has no bounds: from the possibility of trying to tamper with restrictions on ivory imports, to easing restrictions on trophy hunting imports (a Trump family favorite), to the Republican agenda of selling off public lands, destroying wolf recovery, eliminating the Antiquities Act, making sure the EPA is gutted, putting gun ranges on public lands, eliminating critical Climate Change research, opening up federal lands for oil, gas, uranium, coal and cows at an unprecedented rate, to destroying America’s Serengeti: the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
We have heard the threats in the past and when I mention this to people most tell me, “It’s not going to happen. Presidents do not change our country.” Yet, statistics do not lie. Recent studies have shown going back the past hundred years or so that Presidents generally get 70% of what they run on accomplished, and that stat held true for President Obama.
What’s different here is that Trump likely has no strong positions on the environment. We have heard dismiss climate change, but how much would Trump know or care about the BLM or Wildlife Services? But he will need Republicans to push through the most controversial aspects of his Administration: the Wall, Muslim registrations, whatever War he is likely to create; the list is long and his appointments to date make clear he is vetting some extreme (some say unqualified) people, to make up his cabinet.
The picks for Interior, Energy and Agriculture will likely be damning and disastrous for the environment. In this case the President elect has been clear: “drill baby drill,” “remove regulation,” and “I love coal.” But even without his ill-informed comments, the Republican Party that spurned him will control these moves, with a zeal we have not seen since their heady Jim Watt days.
That is, if we and the Democratic Party yield to such insanity by saying ridiculous things like: “Let’s give him a chance” or “The election is over and it’s his chance to govern.” The correct answer to any of that is, BULLSHIT!
The environment is not a personal punching bag for Republicans to do with as their money lined pockets wish. Nor is the right of Democrats to simply allow such destruction. If your representative is a democrat and is saying “I am going to give the President a chance” go to his or her office and remind them the environment is no longer in a position for second chances. Demand they filibuster any appointments for these vital environmental cabinet positions.
This man lost the majority in this nation, by more than 2 million votes. He has an old school, oligarchic mentality about nature. He sees in through the lens, not of wildness, but as a means of self-enrichment. Oil, coal, steel, minerals like gold, which festoon his apartment and properties are the gilded mantra of his 19th century mentality of conquest and entitlement.
He must be stopped: our planet depends on him being defeated, wildlife depends on him being defeated, and our place in the world and the respect our nation has garnered depends on him being defeated. But from the ashes of this battle, what must be clear is that the Republican Party and its positions on the environment must not just be defeated, but forever destroyed. They and their leaders Paul Ryan, Bob Bishop and the Steve Pearces of the world must lose their power to destroy beauty, to kill the heartbeat of wildness and to do so with the smug arrogance of a serial killer.
The weeks and months ahead are crucial; battle lines have already formed on the cold plains of North Dakota with our Standing Rock Sioux brethren holding ground against all odds. But the battlegrounds and the fight will need to go town to town, city to city and must assault the halls of Congress with the message that we will never go back, as we have said with slavery, as we have said with women’s rights and gay rights; we will not go backwards, but instead we will only move forward. So too is it with our environment, so too is it with wolves and bears and sea life.
The path is only forward, we are already in triage, we must tell this newly elected President NO: NO to Coal, NO to your appointments, NO to your Presidency!
In so doing we can make clear, despite their likely angry rhetoric, that we will never surrender. That our love for Mother Earth is far stronger than their greed and ignorance and that love for all species is far stronger than their hate of all that is wild.
We will overcome this moment in time, but we all, every one of us be prepared to fight like never before. We must stop their dark vision for our lands, water and wildlife, to do so will require more than a call to 911: it will require all of us, working together.
Exposing the Big Game 