Even Trump wouldn’t undo ‘America’s best idea’ — or would he?
Ryan Zinke, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, came to work on his first day looking every inch a cowboy. He wore a black, broad-rimmed hat, blue jeans and boots. He also rode a horse called Tonto.
Zinke trotted down the National Mall to the Department of the Interior on C Street. He was escorted on horseback by members of the United States Park Police. Honoured to stand with “these professionals (who) put their lives on the line for us,” Zinke tweeted.
The metaphor is delicious. Here’s a man from Montana (a former Navy Seal and congressman) on horseback wading into “the swamp” in Washington. Zinke is no “Captain Washington upon a slapping stallion,” but he may be less a strong man on a white horse than a moderate among conservatives.
The big question is whether he sees the wilderness like Theodore Roosevelt, as Zinke says he does. Roosevelt was a hunter, naturalist and a pioneering conservationist. He is Zinke’s hero.
Can Zinke keep this country’s public lands safe from the industrial and commercial interests who see a bonanza? For years, they seethed as Barack Obama imposed regulations on development, blocked pipelines, and expanded federal lands and created national monuments. He protected more lands than any predecessor.
His 34 new monuments include the Papahanaumokuakea waters off Hawaii, Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine, and Bears Ears in Utah, twin buttes in Utah’s Elk Ridge.
To do all this, Obama used the authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906. These are not national parks — those must be created by Congress — but national monuments, which also offer protection from development.
In Montana, a rural state, national parks are a fact of life. It’s the same in neighbouring Alberta.
So Zinke talks a lot about the meaning of parks and lands, as he fills a job held by visionaries such as Harold Ickes under Franklin Roosevelt and Stewart Udall under John F. Kennedy. However honourable his intentions, Zinke may be constrained.
Republicans are cheering Trump as he rolls back restrictions on mining and logging. They also want Trump to reverse some of Obama’s national monuments, which no president has ever done, largely because it would diminish his power.
Westerners resent in particular that Obama protected 1.3 million acres of canyons, cliffs and mesa in Bears Ears in Utah. They want its protection lifted; Zinke talks about consulting local interests.
Whatever Zinke’s assurances to conservationists, his first act was reversing a regulation prohibiting the use of lead in bullets banned under Obama. Hunters howled; Zinke acted.
Will the Republicans seriously reverse Obama’s legacy on public lands? Nothing should surprise. Amid the chaos, Trump has issued executive orders reversing scores of regulations. Some will be challenged in court.
For the most part, though, this is a presidential authority seized by Stephen Bannon, Trump’s strategist, who talks about dismantling the “administrative state” (and who has forged an unlikely relationship with Gerald Butts, Justin Trudeau’s principal secretary, in meetings and telephone calls.)
Obama expected part of his environmental legacy to be rolled back on global warming and clean air, but this would hurt. National parks and monuments, as filmmaker Ken Burns put it, are “America’s best idea.” A century or more ago, access to the outdoors for all was seen as an emblem of democracy in the new world, a reaction to the private wooded estates and exclusive hunting grounds of Europe.
National parks and monuments are the jewel and joy of America. It isn’t only the iconic Yellowstone and Yosemite; it is Glacier, Acadia, Denali, Mammoth Cave, the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park and hundreds of natural, cultural and historic sites. They are as dear to Americans as Banff and Pacific Rim are to Canadians.
Trump is hard to read here; he seems to have little interest in nature (though his influential sons hunt and fish.) Going after national parks and monuments would be this president’s worst idea — and his biggest mistake.