Jane Goodall: Climate, Community, Coffee

I found a recent installment of the BBC radio program HARDtalk to be uncharacteristically uplifting. In a rebroadcast of a segment that originally aired in July 2020, Dr. Jane Goodall did discuss some hard truths, but she also offered listeners hope of a way forward in this most dismal year.

Dame Jane Goodall. Image: BBC

I am sharing this interview with students in several of my courses because she explains the importance of connecting environmental protection with human rights and she describes exactly how that connection is made: by listening to the people most directly involved. She carries out this work with communities and individuals worldwide through two organizations -- the think tank/foundation Jane Goodall Institute and the youth movement Roots and Shoots.

More specifically, I am sharing this with students in my coffee classes because one of her many projects involves a cooperative of coffee farmers near the Gombe National Park, as the site of her original field work is now known. I first learned of the project when Gombe Reserve Coffee was being sold by Green Mountain Coffee. Jane Goodall continues to work with the Kanyovu Coffee Cooperative Society, a consortium of 12 coffee collectives representing 7,600 farmers near the park. Because sustainable coffee farming is a form of agroforestry, it can provide a critical buffer in areas adjacent to protected parks such as Gombe. Since the partnership with Green Mountain Coffee ended, I have not been able to find this coffee at a retail level, but the Goodall Institute and US-AID both continue to support the work of these growers.

Farmers protecting forests near Gombe
Image: Jane Goodall Institute

I was lucky enough to be in a room with Dr. Goodall just once, when she was kind enough to accept the first Atlas Award from the American Association of Geographers in 2010. This award is given by our national organization to a person who advances the values of geography but who does not identify primarily as a geographer. The HARDtalk interview reveals an interesting connection between geography and her work as an anthropologist: at a pivotal moment early in her studies in Gombe, National Geographic decided to report on her work. In the 2010 article Being Jane Goodall, the magazine reflects on the the first half century of her remarkable career. (This link is for NatGeo members only, but the article is available through most libraries.)

January 2022 Update: Amid much sad news at the new year -- including the death of E.O. Wilson -- a BBC interview with Jane Goodall was a bright spot. Her discussion with BBC's Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt is a thorough exploration of Lessons from the forest for climate change. It is a great example of the kind of geographic thinking we need at this crossroads in the life of our planet.

Lagniappe: Gorongosa

Thinking about Jane Goodall's embrace of local communities as an integral part of her environmental work reminds me of another example of a prominent scientist who partners with local experts. In my 2017 post Good News from Gorongosa, I introduce a wonderful documentary about the relationship between Tonga Torcida, a young man in a part of Mozambique that has been inhabited for 300,000 years and the imminent biologist E.O. Wilson.

Fire Resistance

Forests have evolved with fire. Humans entered forested landscapes very late in those complicated relationships, with results that have ranged from problematic to catastrophic. In California, for example, more land burned this week in early September than in all of last year. 

Fires have been. getting more dangerous, expensive, and common. This story gives the best quick overview of how this situation has come about, why it cannot be solved easily, and which human factors can be addressed. 

Five minutes is not enough time to thoroughly explain all of this, but sharp NPR reporters found the right experts to introduce the problem and some remedies.

To learn more, please explore some of the other forest fire posts on this blog or take my Land Protection class (GEOG 332) in Fall 2021 to learn more. 

Trail Protection

In alternate autumn semesters, I enjoy a class we call Land Protection. When I started teaching it, I used a more cumbersome name that I inherited from the professor who first developed it. I think the name had been put together by a committee, and I was glad I was able to find a simpler way to describe what he and I have both endeavored to do with the course -- over what has now become something like four decades.

I took the name from a book that I continue to use each time I teach the course: Protecting the Land: Conservation Easements Past, Present, and Future, an edited collection published by Island Press in 2000. The book includes case studies about the efforts to protect land in many parts of the United States. In this case, "protect" means to put restrict the development of the land  through various legal and financial arrangements, so that it remains as open space -- fields, forests and the like -- or agricultural land. The cases include a lot of different organizations and strategies, as well as land being protected for different reasons. I really do enjoy it, and I think my students do, too.

One of the cases is of particular interest to me as a geographer, because the spatial arrangement of the case raises so many unusual considerations. The development of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail involved nonprofit organizations and several levels of government, and a linear trail raises all kinds of questions about scale, finance and property rights. Such a trail also makes accessible wild (or somewhat wild) lands available to a large number of people who might otherwise not get to visit such places.

Finally, in this particular case, the places include sites that reveal the fascinating (to me) geomorphology of glaciers. They have not been in Wisconsin for over 20,000 years, but they have shaped almost every acre of the Badger State. And even the part they missed (the Driftless Area) is fascinating to those who care about such things. In fact, when driving across Wisconsin (one of my favorite states) with my favorite librarian (who is also my spouse despite suffering through my graduate work in geomorphology), I once got way too excited when I realized I was in the Driftless Area for the first time.

All of this came to mind in recent weeks as I found a couple of interesting stories about other trails. The first was Supreme Court Pipeline Fight Could Disrupt How The Appalachian Trail Is Run, a radio story by radio journalist Becky Sullivan. I look forward to listening to it with my Land Protection students, because this is the most famous of U.S. trails, and like the Ice Age Trail, its management includes a complex mix of federal and other entities. By the time I offer the class again, the Supreme Court will have ruled on this case, and we will have plenty to discuss about both the practical questions of how pipelines cross protected areas and the technical questions of jurisdiction.

The second trail story to come to my attention is America's First Coast-To-Coast Bike Path Is Over Halfway Finished, posted in August 2019 by blogger Ryan Ford. In describing progress on the trail, he explains some of the strategies for making such long-distance connections as this ambitious, 3,700-mile path, and some of the obstacles to do so. Many partners are needed for such efforts, but the lead organization in this case is Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.

The name itself is a strong hint about one of the key strategies: use abandoned railroad rights-of-way wherever possible. In the middle of the 19th century, the United States made it ridiculously lucrative to build railroads. The result was a half century of building tracks parallel to each other all over the continent. Eventually, the redundant tracks started to be removed, and active rail mileage has declined ever since its peak in 1910. This left long, narrow strips of land that had been selected and modified to be a level as possible, often not useful for any practical development, and running continuously through land that would otherwise be costly to buy. As a result, securing the rights to use this land for walking and biking has been a priority of conservation and recreation groups for generations.

All of these issues are relevant to the Bay Circuit Trail, a very long-term project much closer to home. In fact, part of it runs within sight of our classroom (though not along the active train tracks we can see from our window), and students in the class a few years ago actually did some work to help develop local legs of the trail known as the Nunckatessett Greenway.

Lagniappe

The other book I have used since the first time I taught the course is even older by one year. David Foster's book Thoreau's Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape was published in 1999 and draws on journals written by Henry David Thoreau a century and a half before that. It is an excellent discussion of how and why the landscape of New England has changed from mostly forested to mostly deforested to mostly forested again, with plenty of suggestions about what this means for managing land in this region, where most of my students have been raised and are likely to stay. (Because as expensive and often dysfunctional as it is, New England is beautiful and diverse and fascinating.)

 I frequently consider alternatives and have sometimes added a third book (several different titles) to the mix, but these remain the constants, as long as they remain available. The combination prepares people well for paid or volunteer work in land trusts or conservation commissions -- two types of organizations that I have worked with and that are very integral to resilience and sustainability efforts at the regional or community level.

Oil: Costs and Prices

The price of the benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude oil has fallen by more than half since the beginning of the year. So many other things are out of kilter in the world that many folks have hardly noticed. To the question of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, the answer is: it depends.

Of course, that is always the answer when prices change, but it is a far more appropriate answer than usual in this case. At a minimum, the answer depends upon:

• what country is being considered
• what sector of the economy within that country
• what time frame is of interest
• whether economic or environmental factors are being considered
• whether the environmental factor is climate change or water quality
• whether one is considering solar or wind alternatives, or oil itself
• whether you believe in climate change

Just kidding about climate change: this has climate implications whether people believe it or not.

Credit for these factors goes to two excellent reports on the recent slide, which is generally attributed to a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. That is, between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Vladimir Putin -- two people who have rather unusual relationships with the current U.S. president. If this is a price war, it is no ordinary one, as each of these actors sees benefits in the geopolitical and economic consequences that are unfolding in the short term.

Rather than elaborate some of the tradeoffs to which my small list alludes, I refer readers to those excellent reports, which I am assigning to students in my Advanced Global Thinking class because there are so many complex geographical questions raised here.

I would start with the March 9 New York Times article Saudi Oil Price Cut Is a Market Shock With Wide Tremors by Clifford Krauss and then listen -- at least twice -- to Cheap Oil and the Climate, a discussion between Steve Curwood of Living on Earth (LOE) and Lorne Stockman of Oil Change International.

The transcript of the LOE discussion includes this aerial photograph of Jonah Field in Wyoming. One can easily imagine the dozens of wells reaching into this deposit, like straws in a giant scorpion bowl. It is an excellent example of the relationships among price, scarcity, and technology in the extraction of any mineral. Whether this is an oil deposit is a question of how much oil is present but also of what the price of oil is. It appears and disappears with price fluctuations. 

Tom and the Volcano

Just a few weeks ago, a hiker on Mauna Loa found this bomb. More precisely, they re-found it, leading to a retelling of its remarkable story.

Rocks that fall from the ejecta of a volcano are called bombs, but this was a bomb dropped deliberately into the volcano 85 years earlier.

The photo was not taken by the hiker; it was taken as part of a 1977 study of the bombing, which had taken place in late 1935. It was one of 40 bombs dropped in the volcano to protect the water supply of Hilo.

The rediscovery of the bomb led to the retelling of the story by the staff of the USGS Hawaii Volcano Observatory, the agency whose founder had organized the bombing. Their account -- in blog posts dated March 5 and March 12 -- provides insight into volcanology as a descriptive and occasionally prescriptive discipline.



The red icon on this map of the Island of Hawai'i marks the Wailuku River, which reaches the sea at nearby Hilo. In late 1935, lava flowing from Mauna Loa was approaching the city. If the flow reached the Wailuku River just upstream of the city, its water supply could be interrupted.

Volcanologist Thomas Jaggar asked the Army Air Corps to bomb the flow, and this succeeded in stopping it. Better put: forty bombs were dropped, the flow slowed, and the river was spared. The volcanologist claimed victory, but even the pilots were skeptical -- presumably because they could see the scale of the flow relative to the magnitude of the munitions they used.

The story reminds me of one of the first environmental geography books I read: The Control of Nature by John McPhee, a Princeton professor of English, now emeritus, who is one of the best geography writers I know. Among the three stories he tells is one of an effort to divert a lava flow in Iceland. Rather than dropping bombs, the citizenry confronted the volcano in that story with water hoses. Read McPhee's engaging account to learn why that was not as crazy as it sounds.

Lagniappe: The Gap Band

This MTV classic has been running in my mind since I first read the story. Welcome to my earworm.

Grasslands and Climate

I thought I had learned a lot about grass from my work in landscape maintenance with which I funded the last couple years of my undergraduate studies. In graduate school, I learned quite a bit more from a couple of the professors in my graduate program.

Dr. Hilary Lambert had written her dissertation on the cultural geography of monocrop lawns: specifically, she had connected the obsession with uniform green lawns in the U.S. suburbs to social constructs of the British manor house. And this was decades ahead of Downton Abbey.

Dr. John Klink was my mentor through four semesters of teaching lab sections of physical geography and taught my graduate course on soils. I took several courses that involved soil -- including an independent study -- but soil was the entire focus of a course I took with him. Since he earned his degrees in Minnesota (home of a certain prairie-themed radio program) and I was studying in a place where an entire economy of corn, soybeans and pigs was supported by the soils created by relict prairies, this biome loomed large in his lessons.

The biodiversity of prairie grass is an adaptation to the high variability of available moisture in the regions where it is found. The above-ground expression of particular grasses and other herbaceous plants fluctuates according to the conditions of a given season in terms of precipitation, temperature, fire, and mold, but a great deal more diversity is stored primarily in the roots. The roots are constantly exchanging carbon compounds with the surrounding soil.

Prairie grasses both create and rely on rich soil, with a relatively high percentage of organic matter and often exhibiting very deep upper horizons. It can be argued, in fact, that the United States enjoys a favorable balance of trade only to the extent that we are able to grow crops on the soils that were bequeathed us by the largely abandoned prairies of the Midwest and Great Plains.

So it was with more than the usual interest that I recently read Grasslands among the best landscapes to curb climate change, Bekah McBride's overview of recent research at the University of -- wait for it -- Wisconsin. I found her article a bit too late in the latest semester of teaching my Land Protection course, in which we discussed the ecology and climate-change relevance of both temperate and tropical forests in great detail, with inadequate attention to prairies. I will be including this post for use in our discussion of a land transaction that helped to create the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border, which I enjoyed briefly on a drive between the two states many years ago.

Lagniappe

A recent study in Germany found that fields of solar panels (PV or photovoltaic) are associated with relatively high biodiversity. The word "prairie" does not appear in the article, but this seems to be the vegetation type favored by managing lands for large PV installations. Mowing is very infrequent, but must take place just often enough to prevent succession to woodland. The result is a much more diverse grassland than typically found in populated areas.

Bogs and Biodiversity

From Estonia comes new research on the importance of biodiversity related to an ecosystem type that is found throughout southeastern Massachusetts -- the bog. As common as they are in the glacial outwash plains from Middleborough to Carver to Cape Cod, on a global scale these are quite rare.

Not only is the geomorphology needed to create them highly unusual, they must also have a hydrologic balance that allows organic soils to be maintained over millennia. Extended dry periods cause bog soils (highly organic types known as histosols) literally disappear.

As the article explains, adjoining fens (think Fenway) are even rarer and ecologically more important.

Why Walk

Amidst some errands Tuesday morning, I enjoyed hearing most of a conversation between WBUR journalist Meghna Chakrabarti and Norwegian author Erling Kagge, whose most recent book is Walking: One Step at a Time. Just as I was contemplating the pathetic irony of listening to their conversation -- Why We Walk -- in my car, I heard a caller describe her neuroscience research (yes, call-in shows in the Boston area are not like those in other places) about a place where I had a walk planned the very next day!

In the fall semester of alternate years, I teach a course called Land Protection (GEOG 332). It is the epitome of environmental geography class in that it examines the interface between physical and human geographies. In this case, we study forest ecology and landscape change as it relates to conservation policy and related elements of the tax code. It's a fun course, really, and many who take it go on to work as volunteers or professionals in conservation.

One of the texts in that course is Thoreau's Country, in which author David Foster compares observations from Henry David Thoreau's daily journal with his own observations of New England forests, especially those he has made as the long-time director of the Harvard Forest in Petersham. I take my students to that forest -- almost all of which would have been agricultural land in Thoreau's day -- for some close-up examination of landscape change. Over the years I've been aware of various kinds of research going on in the forest, including snow studies by a friend of mine and long-term climate studies under the auspices of the United Nations.

It is at about 22m45s into the On Point installment that the caller Susan discusses her research into the mental-health benefits of walking, particularly in the woods, and by extension a key benefit of maintaining public open space. She has been learning more about these benefits through research in the very same woods that I was visiting in order to fine-tune the forest-ecology exploration I will be repeating in the autumn.

Lagniappe

Humorist Bill Bryson has written a very different book with a similar title, which I have read with students in another context and that I highly recommend -- A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Hothouse Earth

Hearing this interview on my local NPR station today reminded me of The One Who Got Away ... the academic version.

When I was at University of Arizona during the early days of climate-change, Dr. Diana Liverman was a guest speaker a few times. I also met her -- and more importantly her graduate students -- at conferences. I almost transferred to Penn State, where she was on the faculty, even though PhD students do not really do that.

It did not work out, and she ended up coming to Arizona, too late for me to have a decent advisor, though I eventually wiggled my way through.

Hearing her cogent discussion on the radio took me way back, but I have no regrets -- I love what I do now and work with her would have kept me in the R-1 orbit.

Like many geographers, she is deeply worried but not yet resigned -- we could not continue to teach if we did not retain at least some hope. And like many geographers, her work is deeply interdisciplinary. The interview draws on a recent report -- Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene -- that she published with a global team of scientists from many disciplines.
I will be sharing this with many of my students, including those in my Environmental Regulations class this fall. In addition to her insights on the physical science, she mentions something that I will be stressing all semester: the U.S. Federal government is an important environmental actor, but it is not the only one. While it is abdicating its environmental responsibilities, other nations and our own state and local governments -- as well as individuals and private corporations -- must and will fill the void.

Fireworks and Climate Change

The geography of climate change is complicated. With the entire state located far from the oceans and thousands of feet above sea-level, Colorado is safe from the rising water that is central to so many discussions of climate change and climate justice.

This does not make Colorado -- or the rest of the western highlands of North America -- safe from climate change. As journalist Grace Hood recently reported on NPR, climate-related increases in fire hazard are causing many communities to make the difficult decision of canceling -- or greatly modifying -- traditional fireworks. In places where a carelessly discarded cigarette can ignite a blaze that burns thousands of square miles, fireworks are being reconsidered.


Note: Grace Hood speaks with an actual geography professor as part of this story! Dr. Balch is an expert in -- among other things -- landscape ecology. Although I have not have the expertise in this area that she does, I was fortunate to take one graduate course in landscape ecology. From that course in the biology department, I first learned of the counterintuitive relationship between our successes in fire suppression (think Smokey the Bear) and the increasing volatility of forest fires and wildfires.

It was only after a half-century or so of success that the danger became clear. In an extensive area that has not burned in 50 or more years, the ordinary patchwork of high- and low-fuel areas is replaced with a uniformly abundant fuel load. This means that forests or srublands that had evolved with small fires every couple decades would now face fires that were rare, but impossible to stop once started. Moreover, the relatively benign ground fires would increasingly be replaced by much hotter canopy fires.

Almost every fire season, I have added a post about the latest evidence of the increasingly complicated and dangerous outcomes of these landscape changes. In my 2015 Frontier on Fire, I discuss some of the basic ideas of fire ecology, in the context of the severe season experienced in Alaska that year. The article includes a link to a thorough exploration by environmental journalist Steve Curwood. In Fires of the Future are Here (2017), I point to a number of other excellent resources on fire ecology and possible management responses.

In Wildfire Anniversary (2010), I write about a very local example of the fire danger resulting directly from successful fire suppression. The 1964 Miles Standish fire was an early example that burned strongly, only 20 miles southeast of our Bridgewater campus. Some modern management practices have been undertaken since then, but it is not yet clear whether that forest (shown above) has the requisite landscape diversity to prevent a similar fire.

In Hot or Not (2012), I addressed the reluctance of political candidates -- regardless of ideology -- to make connections between wild fire can climate change.

Bears Ears Reversal

Photo: Tim Peterson, Grand Canyon Trust

A week after insulting Navajo veterans of World War II -- the code talkers who helped to win the war in the Pacific -- under a portrait of the odious Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States announced the unprecedented removal of National Monument status from over 1,000,000 acres of land in Utah whose protection had been sought by Navajo and other tribes. Fortunately, the United States does still have three branches of government, and it is possible that a Federal court will agree that that the Antiquities Act does not give a president this authority.

Still, as widely reported yesterday, the president is asserting just such authority in Utah, and if successful he may try to do the same in many other states, though not in Montana.

In the NPR report above, Matt Anderson argues that President Obama's naming of the Bears Ears National Monument had itself been overreach, and that reverting to BLM status would keep "the areas open and accessible to locals who depend on this land for their daily lives." The image he hopes to convey is of family farmers grazing animals on highly-regulated rangelands, but it cannot be denied that coal, oil, and natural gas leases would also be made possible if yesterday's decision is upheld.

Without sensing the irony of their own claims, some opponents argue that indigenous opponents of the rollback are located far away, and that local, non-indigenous voices should have priority. The displacement of native people from their land is thus used as an argument against their standing to discuss it.

Later on Monday, All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly spoke with Ute Indian Shaun Chapoose about Native American responses to the announcement.

The reversal of federal protection is unprecedented -- with the 1,300,000-acre Monument reduced to just 228,000.

Map: State of Utah, by way of Grand Canyon Trust

Lagniappe: It Gets Worse

Immediately after seeing to the removal of 2,000,000 acres (an area bigger than Delaware) from these the National Monuments, Secretary Zinke urged the president to reduce the size of four more protected areas: Nevada's Gold Butte, the Cascade-Siskiyou of Oregon and California, the Pacific Remote Islands, and the Rose Atoll. The last of these is an area of protected marine resources covering an area larger than Massachusetts.

Next on the secretary's agenda: Cascade-Siskiyou.

In addition to unspecified reductions in the size of each of these monuments, the secretary recommends changing the way restrictions are enforced on all national monuments. Even if this attempt to rewrite of the Antiquities Act does not survive court challenges, it will waste countless hours of time -- and millions of dollars -- that environmental organizations and federal employees could be spending on actually protecting the environment.

Without any shame, the secretary declared that his recommendations reflect the will of the people, dismissing 2.8 million public comments that he admitted were mostly counter to his recommendation. By "the people" he meant those people he prefers to listen to, some of which are not actually people at all. He further continues to associate himself with the signer of the 1906 Act, Teddy Roosevelt. Again, without shame.

The same announcement includes expanded protection in Montana itself, where his political ambitions outweigh his general preference for environmental destruction.

UPDATE: Even Worse

It is with some hesitation I add even more bad news to this post, but new information about this decision is unsettling and needs to be shared. If the courts allow the executive order to stand, Bears Ears will be open not only to grazing, but also to the mining of uranium. This has nothing whatsoever to do with public use of the land; it has to do with pleasing political donors. A map of the uranium potential accompanies the story behind the president's decision.

Map: Washington Post

July 2018 further update

It is now clear that the documents used to justify the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument were selectively censored to hide known benefits of the protection the area had been receiving. Someone should be going to jail for this, but will more likely be going to the bank.

ESRI: Envisioning the Embattled Borderlands

PLEASE CLICK MAP for a BETTER VIEW

The map (above) that ESRI geographer Krista Schlyer chose for the top of her photo-map essay response to the so-called border wall is indicative of the care she and the rest of the ESRI team have taken with this entire exhibit. As a geographer who lived in this map for seven years (1990-1994 in Tucson and 1994-1997 in Pharr), I notice a few important things that this map captures nicely.

First, the borderlands are identified by the border, but not strictly defined by it. As Oscar Martinez argues in Border People, it is a zone that extends approximately 100 miles in each direction from the line that gives the region its identity. In every sense except strict legalities, this region is neither the United States nor Mexico. It is a third entity that is both divided and united by a line that meanders through its center. In addition to Border People, I recommend Tom Miller's On the Border as an introduction to the place; I had the privilege of knowing both writers during our Tucson years.

Second, the United States of America and the United States of Mexico are both federal republics comprising a number of states (50 and 31, respectively, plus a federal district in each). For people living in the border region, connections between neighboring states are important. Residents of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas become familiar with Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas.

The cultural and environmental landscape of the border is not well understood by pundits and demagogues who make their living from caricatures of it. The misguided policies that result threaten real damage and will deliver no benefits.

ESRI's Krysta Schlyer has made an important contribution with this well-researched borderlands geography project.

The embedded version of this project condensed -- see the full Embattled Border story map here.

More about borders and The Border from this Environmental Geography blog

The threats posed to the people and environments of the border by outside demagoguery have certainly increased under the current administration, but in many ways are a continuation of a militarization of the border that was under way when I was living in Arizona. Although my own writing on the topic has become more focused in 2017, my earlier writing could also be instructive. I think that my "human sieve" metaphor is especially important, and that the wall is part of a broader effort by politicians who prefer to choose their voters, rather than to allow the opposite to transpire.

Each of these posts includes links and images to the work of many journalists, artists, and geographers.

Take Our Jobs, Please (June 2010)
The Border: A Human Sieve (June 2010)
Murder City (November 2010)
Where Are the Humans? (November 2011)
No se olviden Mexico (June 2012)
Precious Progress (November 2012)
Economic Baggage (April 2014)
Why Walls Won't Work (November 2014)
Not One Human (August 2015)
Hiring Humans (February 2016)
Borders: What's Up With That (August 2016)
Border IRL (November 2016) -- includes a map of all of my border crossings
Bridges and Habilitation (July 2017)
Through the Wall (October 2017) 

Secretary NIMBY

The most important qualification for most Cabinet-level appointments in the current administration has been hostility toward the mission of the department or agency to be led, and to the implementation of policies that the Congress has assigned.

In most respects, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has fit this mold. As the most anti-stewardship steward of public lands since James Watt, he has been good company for secretaries of State, Education, Environmental Protection who have a similar antipathy toward the programs with which they have been intrusted by an administration that values only chaos and a Senate that does not value its advisory duties.

This post, however, is not about Secretary Zinke's failures to protect Bears Ears, or whether he shares the libertarian fringe's fear of "massive federal land grabs." Rather, it is this counter-intuitive story about Sec. Zinke's support of a new National Monument that would provide added protection to federal lands in his home state of Montana.

Reporter Nate Hegyi sought further information on the various ways in which Zinke supports land protection in his home state, but could get a comment from the secretary or his spokesman. In the current administration, it seems, a cabinet secretary must be very careful to avoid seeming to support the work he or she was hired to undermine. If only we could get him interested in taking a similar position on the 96 percent of the United States that is not in Montana!

The story is an example of the well-known NIMBY phenomenon -- support for noxious facilities or damaging practices in the abstract evaporates when a proposal is close to home: "Not In My BackYard" is the hypocrite's refrain.

Despite the dubious personal ethics revealed by this story, it does provide a glimmer of hope for those who care about environmental protection. Although he will not yet say so, Secretary Zinke seems to understand that scorched-earth environmental policies -- if applied on Native American or other public lands inside Montana -- would reduce his chances of being elected governor of the Big Sky state in the future. Profiles in Courage this is not, but it does suggest that at some level, people in the West do still want land and water and sky protected.

Update: June 4

Daniel Wenk: Pushed aside

According to a June 1 Washington Post report, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park -- considered by many to be the crown jewel of the system -- is retiring early. Daniel Wenk is highly respected by those across the political spectrum for his professionalism and his commitment to wildlife and public lands.

He has served the National Park Service for 43 years, so his retirement at age 66 is not necessarily surprising, but according to journalist Darryl Fears, the timing of his retirement has to do with a punitive reassignment to Washington, D.C.

As an individual, of course, Superintendent Wenk will be alright. He is presumably retiring with full benefits. But he is just one of 37 senior officials in the Department of Interior that the new secretary has rushed to reassign or remove. This of course belies the "drain the swamp" rhetoric that brought the current administration into Washington.