Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Likely choice for Interior alarms environmentalists
Long before Ryan Zinke trained elite Navy SEALS, served in Congress or became Donald Trump’s likely choice for secretary of Interior, he was a boy who swam and caught crawfish in the Whitefish River in his native Montana.
When it came time to choose his Eagle Scout project, he stopped playing in the river and started studying it.
“It was the first time I ever looked at the environment with a critical eye,” he wrote in his memoir, published last month, “American Commander.”
“The project I chose was to follow the banks of the river and look at the sources of any pollution or runoff . ... I took pictures of the railroad’s oil holding ponds and looked at how the ponds of oil would overflow into the river. I looked at the storm drains dumping in the river, took soil samples, and proposed solutions to the degree a young student could.
“When an old logger downstream was mowing his lawn and caused a spark, which caused the river to catch on fire, I knew the source. The project promoted a lifetime of conservation values.”
Yet the depth of those conservation values has come into question since Zinke, a former Montana state lawmaker serving his first term in the House, entered politics.
This week, environmental groups have expressed alarm at the prospect of him presiding over Interior, an agency with powerful sway over the fate of America’s public lands, at a time when Trump has said he plans to roll back regulations in order to unleash a wave of fossil fuel energy production.
In an interview Wednesday, Zinke would not confirm that Trump had offered him the position or that he had accepted it, but he did say he expected to make an announcement Thursday, and he discussed changes he wanted to see in the management of public lands as well as his view that climate change science is “unsettled.”
“When you’re asked by the president to serve, it’s awfully hard to say no, and I’m loyal,” Zinke said.
Under the current secretary, Sally Jewell, Interior has been at the center of President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat climate change.
The agency employs 70,000 people and manages millions of acres of federal land, most of them in the West.
The role of secretary has traditionally been filled by Westerners versed in the region’s heated debates over land use.
Zinke says he believes in “multiple uses” for public lands and preserving them for posterity, yet what he has said and how he has voted have been hard to reconcile at times, according to many conservation groups.
“Congressman Ryan Zinke has been all over the map on public lands,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, wrote Tuesday.
Rokala cited a pledge Zinke signed in 2012 to “legally and administratively oppose” federal agencies and “restore the rightful powers over the land to the state and private ownership,” an idea opposed by conservationists.
This year, she noted, Zinke voted for a bill that would have transferred control of millions of acres of national forest lands to states.
However, he also resigned as a delegate to the Republican National Convention because the party platform supported transferring some public lands to states.
Zinke, who received an undergraduate degree in geology from the University of Oregon in 1984, has questioned the broad scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are largely the cause of it.
In the interview Wednesday, he said, “The climate is changing, I don’t think you can deny that. But climate has always changed.”
After college, Zinke spent 23 years in the Navy SEALs, rising to become a commander before leaving the service in 2008.