Now Available Online From Outside Magazine - The Ryan Zinke Scandal-Tracker!
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Excavation Over Mitigation
July 2018
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Secretary Zinke decided the Department of Interior should do away with a policy called “compensatory mitigation.” It was introduced to act as a give and take between extraction industries and environmentalists by asking companies to offset damage in one spot by funding conservation in another. For example, if a company wanted to expand its operation on public lands in one area where unavoidable damage to a stream was likely, the company might back a wetland restoration project in another area. Zinke's announcement came just a few days after the Trump administration said it wants to overhaul the Endangered Species Act (primarily to make it easier for companies to work in protected habitats), and environmentalists saw this as another move to hack away at protections in favor of industry. “These companies have been asked to pay for the damage they are doing to our public resources on our public lands. And now the Trump administration is saying you don’t need to pay that bill,” Tracy Stone-Manning, associate vice president of the National Wildlife Federation, told Bloomberg.
Land use is becoming an ever more volatile topic in this administration. But policies like this were actually designed to help the environmentalist and pro-extraction camps work through arguments. Now that compensatory mitigation is gone, the gridlock and frustration on both sides will probably get worse.
Rating: Angry Teddy
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Zinke Sabotages Our Best Public Lands Program
June 2018
As a Montana congressman, Zinke was an adamant supporter of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), a program that Whit Fosburgh, president of the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, called the “the single most important program for protecting threatened access and opening up new access that the government has.” Even when his Republican colleagues turned their backs on the LWCF, Zinke stood up for it. “I know what is at stake if we lose this critical resource. This isn’t about politics,” he said in 2015. Fast-forward three years, and Secretary Zinke is urging the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations to slash the LWCF to less than 1 percent of its maximum allotment, essentially disabling the program.
As Outside contributor Elliot Woods wrote, “If Zinke does not find the nerve to speak up publicly for the LWCF, or if Congress doesn’t intervene, the fund will lapse into its most meager state since its creation.”
Rating: Raging Teddy
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2327916/secretary-interior-ryan-zinke-scandal
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https://www.outsideonline.com/2327916/secretary-interior-ryan-zinke-scandal